United We Stand, Divided We Fall

Our country has never been more divided than it is today.  If you look at the Constitution, the very first reason it states why our Founders decided to create the government that they did was in order to form a more perfect union. 

Now they may have been thinking more of uniting the States rather than the people, but the divided people divides states as well.  The states can’t be united if the people are not.

So one of the obvious things this means is that it is not the role of government to do something that the people don’t want, cram it down their throats, and then tell them to like it.  Or to put it a little nicer, if there are issues that are controversial (again, a sign of our division), the role of government should be to try to find a consensus through debate and dialogue before acting rather than doing something that a very large portion of the population is against.

Politically, they would call this bi-partisanship.  In the past, that was common.  Now it is rare.  Why?  Simply, the political parties are just as divided as the people are.

Looking at that a little differently, it’s we the people who are forming this government to help unite us.  It is not the place of government to decide for the people what it deems best and then force the people to live under it.

But we first need to ask why our country is so divided.  How could a country whose first stated purpose for even existing is to promote unity become so divided?  One thing you can say for sure about this division is that it is not accidental. 

So what unites people?  In one word, it’s worldview.  Worldview is a way of looking at life, what you believe about it, what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, what is important and what is not.   What are the rules?  Are there any rules? 

Now in some ways, everybody has their own worldview.  No two people think exactly alike, but there are larger, more universal worldviews, systems of belief that everybody pretty much falls into one of them.  Details may vary, but the basic framework is the same.

Our country started out with a common worldview.  Our government, primarily through the court called supreme, called promoting that worldview unconstitutional.  There are, of course, many other basic worldviews that exist, and those who believe in one often feel it their duty to try to get as many other people as possible to follow it as well. 

So while that original worldview would be challenged wherever people talk about ideas, the court called supreme essentially removed that worldview from even being discussed in our schools.  So, on the one hand, the original worldview that united our country was prohibited from public education and the public square, and then there is the push for a different worldview from the people who hold to them, and then add to that the millions of people who come to our country with no clue about the original worldview that formed and united our country and each bringing the worldview of their home country, and voila you have a divided country.

You may have guessed that I was really talking about Christianity.  Well, that’s what religions are, worldviews, a complete description of life with all the rules and values spelled out.

There are also secular worldviews, ones that don’t include God, gods, that you could essentially call a secular religion.  Defining a religion as only including a god, God, misses the whole point of worldview.  The idea is supreme value, the system of belief that you, or your country, live your life by.   

We are told that our government must be neutral when it comes to worldviews that include a god, God.  So we must replace that with a wolrldview that doesn’t? I’m sorry, but that is beyond the role of government.  We must replace one worldview with another, because the government says so?    So our country, no, our government replaced Christianity with secularism.

But you say, our country is too diverse to favor one religion, I mean, worldview, over another.  Again, that was not accidental.  That was an intentional decision of our government without asking the people of our country.

Our country was founded on Christianity.  Our country was founded as a unique country in human history.  It believed that God gave humans unalienable rights that government cannot take away.  That was Christianity.  No other country, or religion, or worldview, believed in that.  The Ten Commandments used to be our moral code.  Now it is: make it up as you go along. 

Actually, the tenets of our new national religion, worldview, moral code are: tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.   Your only responsibility as a human being is to tolerate, meaning put up with, or ignore, other people.  The government has the responsibility of seeing that everything is equal, fair, and diverse.

Add to that the myriad of worldviews that others bring to our country while we don’t teach them the worldview that started our country, and you have division, a divided country. 

Going back to the beginning, the government’s role in our country is to form a more perfect union.  It is not to force, and that is the correct word, another worldview on its people and then expect them to live by it. 

I didn’t say that the original worldview was to be forced on everybody either.  But we have to recognize the worldview that our country was founded on.  Disagree with it, if you will, but our government has essentially banned even having the discussion.  We not only not teach our children and the millions of people who come here what our country is based on; our government even forbids that we even talk about it in the public square.  I call that a government takeover, a foreign or domestic enemy that our leaders took an oath to defend our country against. 

The fact that our country is so divided is proof that our government is not governing according to what it was created to do by our Constitution.

The Most Important Issue of our Time, and Nobody is Talking about It

If you watch the evening news a lot, you might come to think that if there isn’t a cell phone video of something that happened, then nothing important happened in the world. 

The most important developments are often those that unfold over generations.  Every new generation has a new starting point for what is normal, and it often takes an older person to see how much has changed over several generations.

Our nation was founded as a unique nation in human history.  It was based on a belief in human rights unknown anywhere else in the world at that time.

Our Founders believed that our Creator gave humans unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government.  That means that government didn’t giver them and government can’t take them away or even reduce or restrict them.  They are also not from the consensus of the people such that they are subject to votes, polls, or laws.

Sorry, atheists, but our nation is based on a belief in God.  The court called supreme was wrong to say that government cannot favor or aid religion, and we are wrong to remove God from our public schools, because how can we teach our children what our nation is all about otherwise?

But wait a second.  How did our Founders know that God gave them rights, and which God are they talking about?  Every nation in the world at that time had their religions, and none of them believed in human rights like we did. 

Short answer is that our Founders believed in the Bible as telling us about God and His laws.  That is why the Ten Commandments were such a part of our country for most of our history.  The court called supreme was wrong to remove the Ten Commandments from public life.  That provided the moral framework for our country.

Now we no longer teach these to our children, because we think we can’t talk about God in public schools.  And we don’t teach them to the millions of immigrants who come to our country, because that would be culturally insensitive. 

We are told that all cultures are of equal value, except that no other culture or country in the world gave us the human rights that we have.

So in a generation or two as our children and our immigrants enter the political process, they won’t know what made us what we are.  Why would they?  And they will vote and legislate and conduct our business as a nation just like any other nation, and we will lose what it was that made us who we are. 

It’s already happening as college campuses are abridging free speech to protect people’s feelings and the right of gun ownership is infringed upon for the sake of public safety.

John Adams, our Second President, said that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  Sorry, secularists.  We are not a secular nation.  The court called supreme was wrong to say that our government cannot favor one religion over another.  Our rights came from a Christian understanding of God.

Our Constitution cannot guarantee freedom of religion unless religion was consistent with the highest values of our land.  Otherwise, secular values would be higher, and conflicts would inevitably result between the two.  And as we’ve already seen, it was only the Christian religion that showed us that we have unalienable rights from God and that gave us the moral code for our nation: the Ten Commandments.

So the biggest issue of our time is that we are losing the foundation on which our country was built, because we are not teaching it to our children and our immigrants.  Another generation or two and nobody will believe that our rights come from God.  And we will become like a blending of all the nations, and we will cease to be the unique nation we were founded to be.

We will lose the rights and the nation that our Founders fought a war in order to be able to create.  And why would we want to do that? 

The Single Most Important Thing We Can Do to Make our Economy Prosper

There is a man running for Congress in my district who I offered to help.  This is the fourth article I have written for him. 

Before I talk about the best thing to do for our economy, let me first talk about one of the worst things we do..  The only reason I mention one of the worst things is that it is something that Democrats strongly believe in, and that is government spending.

Imagine you are with your neighbors at a gathering.  There are 10 of you, and you all make around $50,000 a year.  You decide to form a small government for your block, and so you hire someone from the next block to oversee things on your block.  You pay him the same as what you make, and your pay immediately shrinks to $45,000 a year.  That’s $5,000 in taxes per person to pay for your new government. 

Add up all the taxes you pay, federal, state, property, sales, Social Security, Medicare, utility, excise, and you might well end up paying half your income in taxes.  Democrats are on a mission to increase government spending.  They don’t feel they are doing their job if they don’t constantly find more things to spend money on.  Then every few years they will try to raise taxes, because the debt is so high.  We already pay about a half trillion dollars a year in interest alone on our federal debt.  That’s money that just wasted.  Like burning it.

Democrats also like to have a lot of people receiving government assistance.  They feel like they are helping people.  If it was for a little while to help somebody get through a rough time, that would be one thing.  But they really don’t care if a person ever gets off government assistance.  They would probably be happiest if every person got a check from the government for something, unless, of course, you are very rich, in which case they feel they have the right to tell you how much or how little of your money you get to keep for yourself.

I believe the single most important thing we can do to give us the best possible economy is to bring the jobs back to America.

We used to make all of our stuff here.  Good paying full time jobs with medical insurance were standard in our country.  Middle class families were raising large families on one income, and as the population increased, so would the demand, and so would the jobs. 

Then in the 1990s, free trade became all the rage, and companies left our country like mice running out of sight when you turn on the lights.  You can always make something cheaper somewhere else in the world, so free trade sent millions of our jobs to other countries.  It’s hard to find anything made in America anymore, and most jobs here now don’t pay enough to support a family by themselves.

Our government leaders, I’m told, are trying to get other countries to buy more of our goods, so that our export industry can provide jobs for our workers.  I think that’s good, but not good policy.    Trying to build an economy on exports means that we are hoping that all the other countries prosper first so they can buy our products so that we can prosper.  We are tying the success of our economy on others having success first.  That’s just dumb.

We used to tax all imports to our country.  Taxes on imports used to pay for almost our entire federal budget.  We didn’t even have an income tax until 1913, and that was only meant for the very rich, and it was only a small amount.

Now when everything is made outside of our country and the wages for the jobs left in our country are dismal, yes, taxing imports raises the cost of a lot of products, and people are encouraged to complain about this.

But we have to bring the jobs back here.  More people will be working at better paying jobs with better benefits, like employer based medical insurance. 

But, but but . . .  then other countries will tax our imports to their countries, as if they aren’t doing that already. 

When Toyota first came into the American market, they were taxed, and they cost more than similar American cars.  And they wore that like a badge of honor.  They wouldn’t negotiate prices, and Americans flocked to buy them, because they saw themselves as getting something special. 

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

Democrats always talk about how they are for the American workers, but they never talk about bringing the jobs back.  They are content to have half the country on government assistance programs, so they are seen as the compassionate ones.  They would rather people be dependent on the government than independent, self-reliant, and prosperous. 

When people don’t have jobs, not only does the government lose their tax revenues, but it also ends up paying people for not working.  We lose twice.  And so, when people have good jobs, they pay taxes on their incomes, and everybody else doesn’t have to support them.

I should add too that after the jobs left our country, the government got short on money, so they increased taxes on the companies that were still here, and that caused a lot of other companies to leave the country.  Republicans lowered corporate taxes last year that removed some of the incentive for companies to leave our country, but the country is divided over the issue of taxing imports.

As the country is divided, it makes it harder for businesses to know what to do, because they don’t want to invest a lot of money moving their operations and then find everything going back the way it was in a few years. 

But the jobs left as we stopped taxing imports, and I don’t see another way to bring them back without taxing them again.  We should tax them all and probably at the same rate.  Exceptions could be made in special cases.  Not sure yet what those would be.

Yes, there will be some pain and adjustment for a while, because some prices will go up before the jobs come back, but when you have half a dozen appliance manufacturers making the same thing, prices will go down again with the competition. 

Many of our politicians have given up the idea of bringing the jobs back.  They say it can’t be done.  I don’t believe that.  And why in the world would we not even try?  When people are working at good paying jobs, they feel good about themselves, and the government won’t have to borrow billions of dollars from other countries just to pay its bills.

The Most Important Issue on Immigration, and Nobody is Talking About It

Yes, the United States is a nation of immigrants, but are we to understand by that that the United States is just the lowest common denominator of all those people, a harmonious blending of all the nations and cultures of the world.

Or, is there a particular culture that defines us as a nation and that we are supposed to teach this culture to our immigrants, and they are expected to assimilate to it to become an American?

The American experiment is based on a level of human rights and freedom unparalleled anywhere else in the world.  Our Founders fought a war in order to be able to establish this country with the Constitution that is currently in place. 

The basic idea for American freedom and rights is explained in our Declaration of Independence [please read this slowly]:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal (i.e. we don’t believe in kings, a ruling class), that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty,, and the pursuit of happiness – that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed  -- that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

It is a safe assumption that no immigrant understands or believes these things when they come to our country.  Why would they?  The countries they come from don’t believe in them, and how would they know what we believe?  We don’t even talk about this anymore.

Many of our immigrants we already know will not agree with these beliefs.  Islam, for example, had been in existence for 1,000 years prior to the founding of our country, and there is no Muslim country then or now in the world with a Constitution anything like ours.  A Muslim would deny the whole premise of our Constitution.

We as a nation no longer talk about God-given rights, because we are told that any mention of God constitutes an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.  So when millions of immigrants vote in our elections and have no idea of or belief in what it is that makes the United States what it is, we will eventually lose the freedoms we fought a war to gain. 

This won’t happen suddenly, but gradually as more and more people vote according to their understanding of rights and not according to our Founders.  I dare say we don’t even teach these to our own children, given the hostility to anything having to do with God in our public schools.

We are losing our nation.  Without a war, without a revolution, without anyone even noticing it.

Is this really what we want to do?

Beliefs Have Consequnces

Our nation was founded on a belief in human rights unparalleled in human history.  We believe that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

We used to teach this to our children and the millions of immigrants who come to our country, but we don’t anymore.  We don’t teach it to our children, because we don’t want to talk about God.  We don’t teach it to our immigrants, because it’s culturally insensitive.

 

But if we don’t know where our rights come from, people will believe that they come from the government or are the will of the people, meaning that elections and voting and polls can change the definition and limits of those rights over time.

 

While Trump’s travel ban is aimed at more immediate security risks, it is a fact that Muslims do not believe in human rights as given in our Declaration of Independence.

 

How can I say this so categorically?  There are 50 Muslim countries in the world today, and none of them has human rights anywhere close to that of the United States.  In fact, while Christians and Jews have lived in Muslim countries from the beginning, the hostility toward them has greatly increased as more Muslim countries are now being governed by their clerics.

 

If we can’t agree on the foundation of our human rights, we should be very careful about who are our future citizens and how they will vote in future elections.  We will find our nation giving away the rights our Founders fought a war to gain.

 

What we are not talking about in our immigration discussions

The Tribune (June 10) ran a long, touching article about a friendship between a Muslim and a non-Muslim person in our country, putting a human face on an often contentious immigration issue. 

There is one matter that is left out of all our discussions on immigration that needs to be talked about.

The American experiment is based on a level of human rights and freedom unparalleled anywhere else in the world.  Our Founders fought a war in order to be able to establish this country with the Constitution that is currently in place. 

The basic idea for American freedom and rights is explained in our Declaration of Independence:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal (i.e. we don’t believe in kings, a ruling class), that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty,, and the pursuit of happiness – that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed  -- that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying tis foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

It is a safe assumption that no immigrant understands or believes these things when they come into our country.   Many of our immigrants disagree with these beliefs.  Islam, for example, had been in existence for 1,000 years prior to the founding of our country, and there is no Muslim country then or now in the world with a Constitution anything like ours.  A Muslim would deny the whole premise of our Constitution.

We as a nation no longer talk about God-given rights, because we are told that any mention of God constitutes an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.  So when millions of immigrants vote in our elections and have no idea of or belief in what it is that makes the United States what it is, we will eventually lose the freedoms we fought a war to gain. 

This won’t happen suddenly, but gradually as more and more people vote according to their understanding of rights and not according to our Founders.  I dare say we don’t even teach these to our own children, given the hostility to anything having to do with God in our public schools.

We are losing our nation.  Without a war, without a revolution, without anyone even noticing it.

Is this really what we want to do?

declining birth rate in U.S.

So the United States has the lowest birth rate in three decades.   It’s nor surprising.  Our society has been telling our daughters for a long time that careers are more important than having families and that they need a career to be equal or happy and fulfilled in life.

Our society never bothered to tell them that only women can have children and that every woman needs to have at least two children in order for a society to maintain its population.

Why is that so important? 

A big reason is that a declining population is an aging one, and that places a huge financial burden on everyone else. 

Immigration used to be touted as the answer to all this: bring in young workers who will pay taxes.

But then our immigration policy shifted to families, so the young workers were bringing in their parents and everyone else regardless of their work status, and we still have the aging population.

 

The answer?  It will require a major shift from secular to religious values.  Secularism has no answer.  Secularism is new on the world scene, and this problem is their doing essentially, and it leads to a dead end.