Illinois and its need for money

Many of the states in our country are in a tug-of-war with the federal government about money.  The federal government has unlimited resources to fund anything it pleases.  It just borrows the money with no intention of ever paying it back, or it just prints it.  How great is that!

The Sun-Times takes up the cause for Illinois in its latest editorial (The fiction of Mitch McComnell’s ‘blue state bailout’, April 28), but I find the case less than compelling. 

I don’t doubt the need for more money, but the Times seems to approve the call by a bipartisan group to “unrestricted fiscal support” from the federal government.  It’s only a half trillion dollars.  The feds shouldn’t have any say in how it’s spent.  Really?

McConnell had the audacity to express the idea that maybe states like Illinois should declare bankruptcy.  The Times didn’t find that amusing.

So really, how much longer do you think Illinois can go on like this?  It’s losing money like a broken water main.  I don’t care if you have a graduated income tax or not, Illinois is not getting out of this hole.  And our politicians don’t even care.  They passed the last budget with a billion dollar deficit.  So they waste our money on interest payments.  It doesn’t take an economics professor with a minor in math to know that Illinois’ pension program is not sustainable.  But nobody wants to deal with it or even talk about it. 

And then, of course, Illinois deserves to get more money from the federal government, because it receives less in money from it than they gave to it in the first place.  If a state is supposed to get back from the federal government what it first gave to it, then why are they giving it to them in the first place?  The answer is that it’s not the job of the federal government to give any money to the states.  When did that start, and who’s idea was that? 

Illinois has mismanaged its money for decades, being far too generous to its employees’ pay, far too generous in its benefits, and far too generous in their hiring and staffing.  The state has far more government agencies than any other state in the country. 

Yes, this virus crisis makes everyone’s financial state worse, but Illinois, and the Times, is hoping that in the hurried chaos nobody would notice how much of its financial problems is its own doing.

So what could possibly go wrong with voting at home?

You will be hearing more calls for people to be able to vote by mail the closer we get to the next election.  The Tribune itself had an article (Poll: Support up for all-mail voting) and a letter from a reader (False fears over mail-in voting) today alone (April 28). 

The virus has taken over the news media (figuratively) and the public consciousness, and fears on having to vote in person in the fall just seems to rule that out automatically for so many people now.

Is voting at home the right way to resolve this?  Ah, no!

When we go to the polls, we don’t all gather on chairs around a table when we cast our votes.  We go to individual private voting booths, so our ballots are cast in secret.  Nobody knows how we vote, and so nobody can tell us how to vote, and nobody can make us vote a certain way.

All that is lost if we vote at home.  One person can make everybody vote the same way.  Heck, one person can do all the voting.

When people vote at home, you have no idea who’s voting.  It could be your neighbor who got your mail by mistake.  That’s the single most important reason for not doing it, and the only one that’s really necessary.

The Investor’s Business Daily, August 16, 2017, said that there are 3.5 million more registered voters than live adults in the United States.  If the nation goes to all mail-in voting, as many are loudly promoting today, there will be 3.5 million ballots in existence with no rightful owner for them.  It would be a shame for that many ballots to go to waste, right?  Ever work in a print shop?  There are always more copies than ordered.  And if not, it’s not hard to make them.

While many businesses have been forced to close due to the virus, many businesses are deemed essential, remain open, and people go to them.  Voting is an essential business.  If you can buy groceries, you can vote in-person.  We have six months to plan on any new safe guards like plexiglass for election officials. 

another shameful pitch to raise taxes on the rich

The Sun-Times suggests, no, it insists, that in order to thank our ‘essential workers’, we must support a graduated Illinois income tax.  (How do we thank ‘essential workers’?  Vote for a graduated Illinois income tax, April 27)

I’m sorry, but I don’t see the connection.  The state will receive less money in revenues this year, so its unbalanced budget will become more unbalanced, and the state’s unconscionable and irresponsible debt will only balloon further. 

So the state is starving for more revenue, and it has its eyes on the people with more money.

What does this have to do with essential workers? 

For decades, the state has been far too generous in what they pay people, what they promise them after they quit (I find it hard to say somebody is retiring at 55.), in how many people they put to work.  Illinois has more distinct government agencies than any other state in the country.  They have buried themselves in a mountain of debt that only bankruptcy can remedy. 

They’re asking people who won’t have to pay for this increase in taxes to vote for the state to be able to tax those who will.  And then they try to bribe them by saying that maybe their taxes would go down if they did this.  I find this shameful and embarrassing.  And they should too.

the difference between the left and the right

A Tribune reader explained the difference between the left and the right (Difference in point of view, April 27).  I laughed so hard I cried.

But then when I got my sensibility back, I saw that there were some underlying issues that need to be clarified.

The left’s defiant insistence on the right to kill unborn children up to the point of delivery and even after shows a total disregard for the value of human life, in the right’s view.  Children are not seen as created in God’s image and of incalculable worth, but more like pets that actually grow up. 

The right does spend an enormous amount of their time, energy, and money on trying to stop this rampage on human life.  They find this highly disrespectful of our Creator and fear that He doesn’t take this lightly.

Because the right spends so much time, energy, and money on this one thing, some people feel that the right’s concern for people ends when the child is born.  Now I can’t speak for everybody who this reader thinks is on the right, but the right does not think it’s the role of the government to take care of people.  That’s a new concept in American history.  Once the government started taking on that role, we’ve seen that there isn’t enough money to be had to do all those things.  We just sink deeper and deeper into debt.

People on the right know that debt only makes things cost more.  Going into debt is never a good idea.

What's fair about the fair tax?

A Tribune columnist gave what he called “The top four arguments against the ‘fair tax’ and why they fail,” April 26.  I’m against it, and he didn’t even include my arguments.  I guess my arguments must not be that good.

I am against this tax, because they try to sell it as the ‘fair tax.’  To me, fair is taxing everybody at the same rate.  How can that not be fair?   When the government decides that they have a right to more of a person’s money, because these people make more, then they are deciding how much money you get to keep.  It reverses the role of government.  Instead of the government serving the people, we are serving the government.

Maybe the thing I hate most about the fair tax is that it is a tax on other people.   For this to pass, the governor is selling it by telling the public that it won’t affect most people.  Heck, we’ll even give most people a tax cut, if they will simply vote to raise taxes on other people.   That’s conniving manipulation.  Who wouldn’t vote for a tax on other people if it doesn’t affect themselves?

Progressive taxes also disincentive people from working more or harder.  I saw it all the time at work, where employees turned down overtime, because the government took too much of their money.  Don’t forget.  This isn’t the only tax people pay.  The federal government also has a progressive income tax, and when you start adding them all up, it’s just too much.

Government spending, at almost levels, is simply out of control.  Stop feeding the beast, and maybe the federal government will allow them to declare bankruptcy, and then they will have to get their act together.

Our Wishlist for the Future

We will be seeing more and more of these in coming days: calls for a “new, better normal.”

The most recent one I’ve seen is this one: “COVID-19 crisis should inspire us to create a new, better normal,” April 22.

Well, I’m inspired already.  I’m all for creating new, better normals.  I’ve been working on that for years.

The author of this article has a long list of things to change.  We need to get the conversation rolling.  It takes more space to discuss the changes than to simply name them, so we can’t discuss all of them in this short letter.

First in his list are racism and discrimination, which in his mind are the root causes of so many of our society’s ills.  Well, you can’t make people like other people, if that’s what he’s getting at.   The Bible teaches us to love our neighbors, but our society has pushed that aside in favor of secularism, which has nothing to offer in terms of promoting love and harmony.  It only teaches us to tolerate our neighbors, not actually care for them.  That takes religion.

He says that this racism and discrimination has caused disinvestment in inner city communities.  I don’t think that’s how investment works.  When people invest money, they are putting their money at risk to make more money.  If the risk is too high, they won’t take it.  If people aren’t investing in inner city communities, it’s not because of racism.  Unless you think they are overexaggerating the risk, because they are needlessly being fearful of people of color.  It’s not hard to find crime statistics by zip code.  I suspect that might have more to do with it.

And he wants us to “imagine a world where there’s plenty of incentive to work hard and even get rich, but there are some common sense measures in place to ensure that a tiny few can’t capture an obscene amount of the nation’s wealth while the majority of Americans struggle.”

Actually, we already have that.  The only things that hinder that dream are high taxes and excessive regulation.  Bill Gates making $50 billion does nothing to prevent someone else from doing that, except maybe in the computer field.  Wealth is not a zero-sum game.  There is no fixed amount of wealth such that if I have more, you have less.  Wealth can be created, like when you take raw materials and make something out of it. 

It’s good to imagine a better world.  The next step is to figure out the actual things we can do to change it.

back to normal - a response to some newspapers

A Sun-Times reader (We can do better than go back to normal, April 16)

A Tribune reader (Why we can’t go back to normal, April 18)

is finding that this whole virus thing is forcing her to challenge a lot of things that people have come to accept as normal, and she demands we fix them or change them.

OK, fair enough.  But let’s look at what we would need to do.

She doesn’t like health insurance tied to jobs, yet that has given workers the best insurance they could get.  Does she want government-run insurance?  They’re so far in debt they waste hundreds of billions of dollars a year just paying the interest on that debt, and they have to borrow the money to do that.  And you want them to take on a new program?

Then she complains about companies that don’t care about people, and politician who don’t care about people, and billionaires who don’t care about people, and half a million homeless people who have lost their way plus an enormous prison population of people who have lost their way.  And a virus which we can’t do much about anyway.

Is there a pattern here? 

I certainly don’t want to simplify all the many problems of society, but it seems that an awful lot of them just boil down to people not caring for each other.

Now I submit to you that that is a religious problem. 

They tell us that we have a secular society, a secular country, but the highest virtue they can teach us is tolerance.  That doesn’t cause anyone to care for another human being.

They teach our kids evolution, that people are little more than animals that can talk and who wear clothes.

The Bible taught us that we are created in God’s image and so we are all of incalculable worth.  We are worthy of being loved, and love is the highest virtue.  It taught us to love our neighbor as ourselves. 

What the reader is looking for, though she probably doesn’t realize it, is a nation that is again grounded in religion and the Bible, like we used to be.

Returning to Normal Part 3

When all this is over, there will be a lot of people, or should I say, a lot of people who have a public audience, who will be clamoring for major changes to our medical care/health insurance system.

The most common change they will want is guaranteed medical coverage with a government-run insurance plan, like Medicare is now for seniors. 

What could possibly go wrong with that? 

As noted in a previous article, private businesses have an incentive to keep costs down, government does not.  Our government is so far in debt, they have given up even trying to pay it down.  They just pay the interest on the debt, and they borrow money to do that.  Who does that?  You wouldn’t do that, but you give your money to someone else who spends your money like that, and then you want him to do more things where he will do more of the same?

And, of course, when they do that, everything costs more, because paying interest is like burning your money, and the value of your money decreases almost in proportion to that debt due to government-induced inflation.

But at least everybody is covered. 

That sounds noble and caring, but it destroys personal incentive and responsibility.  A while back, I was thinking about Bernie Sanders and his plan for free college.  Hey, I don’t have to pay for it.  Somebody else will.  So I don’t have to work at all. 

That’s what will happen nationwide.  I don’t need to worry about getting a better job, working harder, going back to school, the government will take care of this for me.  And when we say government, we mean other people. 

But if everybody has the mentality that other people will pay for it, then who will do the work that pays for it?  You can’t keep taxing the rich, because they’re the ones who work 80 hours a week to start the business, to run the business, who invest the money for that new project.  After a point, they will say it’s just not worth it.

I’ve seen it at work where people didn’t want to work overtime, because they say the government takes all their money.  We have a doctor shortage in our country now.  Why?  I can’t speak for everyone, but if you want people to spend that kind of time and money to go to school and then work those kinds of hours when they get out, then let them make all the money they can.  But when the government runs the insurance, that doesn’t happen, and doctors don’t think it’s worth it anymore.

Are there risks with private insurance?  Of course, there are risks.  Life has risks.  They want to remove all risks in life and have the government make it all nice. 

It’s the risks that cause us to go back to school, to work more hours, to try harder, to keep looking for work.  Starting a business is risky. 

There are basically two kinds of private medical insurance: individual and group. 

The best private insurance plans are group plans.  Individual plans are more expensive, though under Obamacare, a lot of people get subsidized insurance coverage.  Which means, other people pay for it.  Individual plans, actually all plans, cost more, because the government told the insurance companies to cover a lot of things they didn’t cover before.  But group plans will still give better coverage at a lower cost.  But let the company and the customer decide what they want covered.  That will lower the costs substantially.

Group plans are essentially the employer-based plans.  Some people don’t like that, because people lose their plans if they lose their jobs.  As it is now, they can keep that plan for about six months after they lose their jobs, if they pay the premium themselves, which most people can’t do.  They didn’t realize how much the company was paying for it on their behalf. 

I suggest that former employees of a company be allowed to keep their group policy.  Forever if need be.   What the insurance companies would have to do is to offer scaled-down plans in addition to the company plan.  Policy holders would be able to switch plans as their ability to pay improved or worsened.  Being part of a group would still give them better rates than if they had to buy it on their own.

But, but, but

Weren’t there still be people who might fall through the cracks? 

This is where our country used to run on that old-fashioned idea of people helping people.  Our country didn’t always have government programs to rescue people.  This used to be done locally with hundreds of organizations funded with voluntary contributions and usually volunteers, people helping people. 

Most of this was religion-based, and our politicians chose to use government instead.  I’m just saying the cost of doing that outweighs the benefits.  Enormously.

Returning to Normal Part 2

Crises, especially long ones, generally change things.  Either to prevent them from happening again or it could be just a learned response from the crisis that people just continue doing.   We might find people less likely to shake hands or hug in the future.  We don’t know yet. 

The United States is experiencing one of those times, and we need to look at some of the possible changes that could take place and decide beforehand if that would be the right thing to do.

One thing you can fully expect and can see developing right now is an expanded role of government in everyday life.  We need protection, and who else better to give it than the federal government?

People need guaranteed health insurance, wage security (not necessarily job security), and ready access to essential things, whether toilet paper or medical supplies.  We need one consolidated central source of information and decision-making to ensure that all this happens.

Right?

Our country has been around for almost 250 years, and all this yearning for a massive government to protect and take care of us is a new thing in American history. 

There are too many questions to try to answer them all in one paper, so we have to go slowly.

In the 1960s, our country made a major shift in public policy.  I’m sure experts will attribute that to the Civil Rights movement which certainly changed a lot of things, but I submit we go back to just before that.  I admit, though, that it’s hard to identify all the causes for anything, but something else did happen which changed the entire course of our country.

It was in the early 60s that the Supreme Court banned the Bible and prayer from public schools.

Well, so what?  

This is where the nation shifted from being a Christian nation to being a secular nation.  And what that did for the nation was shift the public’s consciousness of God as their helper to the government. 

Our nation was created on the belief that God gave rights to human beings, rights for things they could do without government intrusion.  Remove God from our thinking, then rights become government-given rights.  And that becomes things the government owes you.  It now becomes the government’s job to take care of you, where before people relied on God and their neighbors for that.

Sound farfetched? 

Nope, the change has been too dramatic.  It can only be explained by a change at the very foundation of our country.

You can get graphs on government spending on the internet that compare the amount of money our federal government has spent year to year.

Federal spending was flat throughout our history even including the war years, compared to what it has been since.

Since the 1960s, government spending has been like climbing a mountain after having crossed a flat desert for almost 200 years.

And with the mountain of increased spending, our national debt has increased along with that at pretty much the same pace.  There were a few years around the turn of the century when we didn’t add to the national debt, but they were mere blips on an ever-growing mountain of debt.

But there’s more.  You can also get graphs of the rate of inflation during these same years, and inflation has been increasing on almost the same trajectory as government spending and debt.  So for all the years of our federal government spending trillions of dollars to take care of everybody, the value of our money has been going down at pretty much the same rate.

And then, not only has the value of our money been going down at a rapid rate, we have been paying increasing amounts of money to pay for this debt, currently hundreds of billions of dollars a year, making everything we’re getting from the government more expensive than it would be otherwise.  We’re not even paying down the debt.  We just borrow money to pay the interest on the debt.  Everything costs more when you’re always paying interest on it.

I submit that government spending has been so out of control for so long that it cannot be trusted with new responsibilities that require spending money.  When people spend their own money, they try to get the most value for their money.  Government spends other people’s money, and it has not shown any restraint in the last 60 years to justify giving it any more responsibility than it has now.

Returning to Normal

We are in the middle of a crisis unlike any we have ever known. 

I am not talking about the virus.  I am talking about the forced shutdown of our society, the forcing of millions of businesses to close and the forcing of tens of millions of people out of work.

All this raises questions of what can be done to prevent this from happening again, how this will change society and culture as we know it, and what things should be changed in light of problems in our current society and culture that have now been made prominent.

I have been told numerous times to keep my writings short, so I will have to come back to this subject a number of times.

I have never been a fan of globalism.  We sent millions of jobs to China to save a few dollars on our small appliances, and we spent hundreds of millions of dollars combatting the emerald ash borer, the Asian long-horned beetle, and I think there was another one, all of which came over with the imports.  We lost 22 million ash trees in Michigan alone, and that number is probably ten years old.

We have medical companies in China that couldn’t export needed medical supplies to the United States, because China wanted them first. 

I think it is unwise for a country to be dependent on another country for anything.  Some countries have to, but we don’t. 

Companies move their production overseas, because it is cheaper.  Most of these countries do not have an Environmental Protection Agency, minimum wage laws, labor unions, company-based medical insurance, OSHA, child labor laws, labor protection laws, OT rules, and all sorts of other inconveniences companies here have to deal with. 

You can always make something cheaper somewhere else in the world. 

This is why our country for most of our history taxed imports.  We didn’t even have an income tax until 1913.  Taxes on imports paid for almost our entire federal budget.

Recently, when the government imposed some taxes on imports, the newspapers howled that this tax was hurting the American consumers.  Well, for that matter, all taxes hurt the American consumer.   At least, this was a voluntary tax.  You didn’t have to buy that foreign-made product. 

Except, of course, that we didn’t make most of those things here anymore.  When we tax imports, we should end up making these products here again.  Won’t the prices be higher?  When you have 5 American companies making that same small appliance, prices go down. 

When companies leave our country, people here lose jobs and leave the workforce in many cases.  And that costs our society enormous amounts of money in other ways.  So we think we’re saving money on that cheap appliance from China, but we pay for it a dozen times over in many subtle, unnoticed, secondary ways.

When we make our stuff in other countries, then that other country is able to have control over us to some extent.  If we don’t do something they want, they can just withhold our products, or worse.

Foreign products have always been available in our country.  They were always more expensive, and nobody cared.  But they were true foreign products, like Swiss chocolate and French wine.  They weren’t American products made somewhere else and then shipped back here.

If this experience brings a lot of our jobs back home, then some good came out of it.  We won World War 2 due in a large part to our extraordinary manufacturing capability.  We gave most of that up through globalism.  We should make all of our own stuff here period. 

Living on borrowed money

The Sun-Times is calling for the federal government to come to the rescue of the states.  (Illinois is hurting.  Red states and blue states are hurting – and desperate for a real federal rescue, April 12)  

We are forgetting that what money the federal government has is money that the same people who aren’t giving their states enough money have already given to it.

Above that, the federal government spends money that it borrows.  Right now, it is about $25 trillion in debt.  That entire stimulus package of $2 trillion is all borrowed money.  That amount of money is incomprehensible to any human being.   

So the federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on interest.  That is like burning money.  The state of Illinois gets about $40 billion a year in tax revenue.  Imagine ten or more states the size of Illinois, and all their tax revenue is just burned up.  That’s how much money is just lost in federal government spending, because that money is not used to help the American people, but to pay off that debt.

Anybody with a credit card knows that when you can’t pay off your debt in that first month, whatever you bought now costs you more.  And we are not even paying down the debt.  We are borrowing money to pay the interest on that debt.

Everybody wants the government to take care of them.  Well, there isn’t enough money in the world to do that.  It’s time we all woke up.  We spent our inheritance.  There’s no money left.  We’re just borrowing money.  Nobody cares if we ever pay it back, but it does mean that everything we buy costs more.  And like that credit card you have, you soon know all the things that you really want that you can’t get, because you’re paying the interest on your credit cards.

And, no, FDR didn’t rescue us from the Depression.  The Depression lasted almost the entire time he was in office.  If it hadn’t been for the War, who knows when it would have ended?

Should we have more government or less?

One of the major divides in our country is over the role of the government.  Should it be bigger or smaller?

The Sun-Times editorial (Slashing city spending would be inane at a time when we need government most, April 9) makes a case for increased government spending and involvement, but I think it exposes some of the problems that it is trying to solve.

If government does so much good for everybody, let’s assume the extreme case where the government runs everything, and everybody works for the government. 

The taxes that the government employees pay would cover only a fraction of the costs of the government’s expenses.  The government needs a source of revenue outside of itself to fund it, and that is the private sector.  So the government / the public sector of a society grows at the expense of the private sector.  The larger the government grows, the larger the tax burden on the private sector, or everybody else.

But doesn’t the government provide services just like the private sector, so that it’s really no different from somebody going to a store and buying something there?  No, because the private sector is always working to keep its costs/expenses low, because it is competing with other similar businesses to stay in business.  Governments have no motivation or incentive to keep costs low.  In fact, governments are far more generous in pay and benefits than the private sector.  Consider the public pensions in Illinois.  So anything the government does costs more than if the private sector did it.

But the government provides a safety net for the poor and disadvantaged.  Actually that concept is new in American history.  That used to be done by the private sector.  Hundreds and thousands of private groups, organizations, volunteering with private donations to relieve whatever suffering or problem existed. 

In the 1960s, we started government programs that replaced most of that, and we can’t keep up paying for these, such that governments routinely mass up enormous debt that slowly erodes the prosperity of everybody not working for the government through higher taxes and inflation.  The American spirit is also being eroded by a sense that the government is now responsible for taking care of everybody.

But isn’t larger government the result of generations of evolved thinking that the more advanced societies now see as the solution for mankind’s problems?

Actually, large government has been the normal mode for government throughout human history.   It was the American Revolution that started a new idea based on human rights given to people by God, which called for a very limited role at least for our federal government.  It was only as Western Civilization removed God from public life that the government assumed these responsibilities. 

Are we better off overall for having done so?  For now, suffice it to say that larger government burdens the public with higher taxes, debt, and inflation and fosters a people who look for help from the government rather than helping each other.

Give us the free money

April 1 was Census Day.  I can’t help thinking that April Fool’s Day is a fitting day for it.

 

Public debate and discourse in our country has eroded so much that everything has become blurred in promoting rights, being politically correct, and never agreeing with the other side lest you show weakness and appear to be showing them support by agreeing on something.

Every ten years, our country takes a census.  No, the purpose was never for that of allocating federal tax dollars to the states.  When did our federal government decide that it needed to bail out the states financially anyway?  No, that was not the reason our Founders called for a census every ten years.

Our country elects a President using an Electoral College.  They did not want a popular vote for President.  They only wanted that for your local Representative.  The states elect the President.  The number of electors a state has depends on the number of citizens in the state.

The problem here is that the Founders never imagined that we would have tens of millions of citizens of other countries living here, so they did not specifically state that the census needs to distinguish between citizen and non-citizens, though most censuses have.

So politicians are perfectly willing to let citizens from other countries affect how we elect our President by counting citizens and non-citizens as the same.  They will scream and holler because Russia spent a few hundred thousand dollars on Facebook ads during the last election cycle, but giving a state more electoral votes than it should have, because of millions of citizens of other countries living in it is no problem. 

A bigger problem here is that when we blend citizens and non-citizens together, we forget that citizens have a first loyalty to the United States of America.  With non-citizens, we have no idea where their loyalties are.  Many no doubt see America as their only home, but nobody even wants to know how many people we are talking about.  And that is a problem.

Everybody just wants the free money.

Beware of traditional liberties

The Sun-Times ran an important editorial today (We can’t allow fear to go viral and erode our civil liberties, April 2).  It noted how in certain situations, the government will try or want to restrict certain freedoms for some higher purpose.  It also rightly noted that freedoms once restricted may never go back to normal. 

One reason for this is that people accept these restrictions as the new normal and just adapt to them.  And if restrictions last over a generation, then the people never knew anything different.  Like airport security.  Does anybody remember running through an airport at the last minute to catch a flight?

But there was something else in the article that was concerning.  It made the reference to “traditional liberties.” 

This is concerning, because if you are debating whether a traditional liberty can or should be restricted, you can’t use its status as tradition as a defense.  There is no reason why something should last or be protected or be sacred just because it is a tradition.  Saying that we always did it that way is no valid argument in a debate.

We no longer teach our children that our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings, rights that precede and supersede government.  No, we are not a secular nation, because a secular nation cannot give unalienable rights to human beings. 

If we call our rights and liberties traditional rights and liberties, we will lose them.  Not suddenly, but slowly.  Over generations.  Why?  Because we won’t have good enough reasons to keep them the way they are.