A Gallup

poll, just out, says that 76 percent of Americans don't

know what country the United States gained its

independence from.

How

depressing... on several levels.

It's

depressing to think that public education has failed to

that extent, but I don't feel like doing a diatribe on

education today.

It's even

more depressing to realize the extent to which Americans

have no clue about our history, our system of government

and the philosophy behind it... in short, how we got here

and why.

This means

that the conservative point of view is in deep trouble,

because it relies on logical argument and at least a

minimum level of knowledge about our republic. The

liberal point of view, on the other hand, relies almost

entirely on emotion and class envy to convince blocks of

voters that they should put people in office who will use

the tax system to shift income from those who earned it

to those who did not.

If 76

percent don't know that the U.S. was once a colony of

Great Britain, how many don't know that our way of life

was founded on the principle that people should be able

to start their own businesses and earn the profit from

that enterprise?

No wonder

voters soak up the president's constant rich-bashing

rhetoric. They have no idea how destructive to our

economy it will be if Clinton and his crowd are allowed

to rob the rich in order to toss goodies to the rest of

us.

Logic

dictates that, in a free society, anyone can become rich.

Come up with the right idea, work your ever loving behind

off, get the right advice and hire the right people, and

you too can reap the rewards.

Along with

the idea of individual home ownership, i.e. the concept

of private property, the notion that individuals can

become rich through their own ideas and labor is the

American Dream.

But we are

reaching the point at which the American dream is to

plunder the pockets of those who have already done the

thinking, come up with the ideas, done the work and

reaped the rewards. How many Americans now believe that

we should create economic equity by redistributing the

existing wealth more evenly?

How many

can actually think through what that means?

It means

that there will no longer be an incentive for people to

come up with new ideas, to push the envelope, to take the

risks... to do the things that create new wealth.

What you

will have then is a death struggle, everyone fighting to

get his or her share of the steadily shrinking total

supply of wealth.

Continue to

encourage the American Dream and you continue to build

new wealth, and that wealth does get distributed because

there is no way that anyone can keep creating new wealth

for himself without creating it for others.

If you

develop a new widget that's the most popular widget ever,

and everybody's going to want one, you have to hire

people to produce lots of widgets, to market widgets, to

build buildings to make widgets in, to move widgets from

the widget factory to the widget warehouse and then to

the widget store, and still more people to sell widgets.

In a free

society, that's how you distribute the wealth.

Those who

oppose free enterprise snicker at that scenario and refer

to it as the "trickle down" theory of

economics. "Conservatives want us to believe that if

we help their rich friends, somehow some of the money

will trickle down to everyone..." It was the

socialist mantra during the `80s. But they don't try to

refute the concept through logical discourse.

They just

count on people's natural tendency to resent the success

of others.

And,

increasingly, they count on people's ignorance of the

fact that, without free enterprise, the United States

would never have become the country that it has. In fact,

what we know as the United States probably would have

developed as numerous countries, because the economic

vitality that swept the continent never would have grown

up.

I know what

some of you are thinking. We never should have been a

nation in the first place... the Native Americans were

here first. I agree that Europeans were horribly unjust

in their treatment of the occupants of this land, but the

notions of freedom and economic independence that built

this nation would have built it anyway, even if our

forefathers had treated the indigenous peoples properly

and brought them into the process. It's a separate issue.

Hmmm... I

suppose most Americans have seen at least one old Western

TV show or movie and have some concept of the idea that

we were fighting Indians. Maybe they think the nation we

gained our independence from was India.

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