WHAT ROAD ARE WE ABOUT TO TAKE?

Peter Huessy

Nearly 50 years ago, the Vermont poet Robert Frost spoke in the bright but frigid sunshine of the Kennedy inauguration and talked of this great land as a gift to Americans which we were just beginning to appreciate. This land was founded on a number of enduring principles: one that our government is to be limited and constrained but our people free; and two, that protecting our freedom and liberty takes the sacrifice of each generation “to provide for the common defense”. Is this gift something we are about to give away?

The election next Tuesday may result in this country taking a road we have never travelled before but which has been heavily trod by socialists and Marxists elsewhere. Senator Obama is asking us to go down the road of serfdom, where government is compelled to give us things far beyond what it does now. An arbitrary limit on our incomes is being proposed, below which we are considered saints while above which we are described as “rich” and thus deserving of punishment or theft.

In an interview just a few years ago, the Illinois Senator complained the constitution placed constraints on the courts and prevented them from “redistributive justice”. He hoped as an alternative the legislature could take up the slack. This means our taxes are not to be based on what is the most effective way to raise the revenue for necessary government purposes and still maintain a robust economy. Taxes will be raised out of some sense of fairness even if it makes no sense. For example, when asked why he would raise capital gains taxes when future revenue would probably fall as a result, Obama said it was a matter of “fairness” that such taxes should go up.

In the beautiful city of Prague this fall, I spoke at the Prague Security Institute about energy security to an international conference. When traveling the next day in the countryside, my Czech hosts explained they had to kill a million chickens, pigs and cows when they joined the European Union. Thousands of farmers were put out of business. Their then current livestock and poultry were considered excessive production and therefore in unwarranted and “unfair” competition with the leading European Union farmers in England, Germany and France. Is Senator Obama proposing as America’s new tax policy anything different than this “theft”?

It would be one thing to lower everyone’s tax burden. But Obama wants to increase income taxes on those making as little as $161,000, and then add taxes to capital gains, dividends, payrolls, and energy consumption, amounting to a net increase of around $1 trillion over a decade so he can turn around and give the money to many who pay no income taxes at all. Such a blow to the US economy would be higher by a factor of four than the tax increases of 1990 and 1993. What sense does this make? Well, no more than the killing of a million farm animals to satisfy the bureaucrats in Brussels and their notions of fairness.

Thus, we are being asked to take a road where the entire entrepreneurial basis of our society would begin to be repealed. By contrast, Ireland was long considered one of the worst economies in the world. When they cut their corporate, capital gains and income tax rates to some of the lowest in the world, their per capita GDP rose to the second highest in the world while their quality of life was recently described by the Economist magazine as “the best in the world”.

Similarly Jack Welch, the former GE CEO, noted the New York Times recently complained about the high unemployment in Rhode Island without explaining “the state has the second highest tax burden” in the country! Our Founders understood these economic principles and that is why America’s economy has historically been the best in the world. Are we prepared to throw this all away? Are we to adopt a new socialism, what Winston Churchill called “a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

If we are lucky enough to avoid a lurch into the ditch of far-left socialism, will we be able to continue to protect our liberty from our enemies? Here the danger signs are clear as well. In his speech in Europe he said the Berlin Wall had come down because the world “stood united” against the totalitarian threat from the Soviet Union. No, Senator, no such thing happened. First, within the United States itself there were major fights about whether the Soviet Union was even a threat. Your party, including your current choice for Vice President, opposed every single major action taken by President Reagan to win the Cold War. Most in your party abandoned South Vietnam and tried to take similar action with El Salvador. Over seventy five percent of your party opposed the deployment of our INF missiles in Europe in the early 1980s, voting against Reagan’s budget requests by wide margins. And the same animus fueled their opposition to missile defense. And they were joined with millions in Europe whose daily demonstrations against America were fueled by millions in secret Soviet funds.

And not all our friends were our allies either. Reagan was joined principally by British Prime Minister Thatcher, Chancellor Kohl of Germany, Pope John Paul II, and courageous groups such as Solidarity in Poland, and together they led the successful effort to defeat Soviet Communism in the face of concerted opposition from within their own countries and even within their own political parties, to say nothing of the countries and terror groups allied with and funded by Moscow. United indeed!

When President Reagan spoke at one of his early White House news conferences, he explained the Soviets reserved the right to cheat, lie and steal in order to further their totalitarian ambitions. The collective gasp among the Washington press corps no doubt was audible in the secret recesses of the Soviet embassy but a few blocks away on 16th street. “Shocked” was the common headline the next day in the nation’s dailies. But as Reagan walked back to the Oval Office he turned to one of his top advisers and asked: “It is true the Soviets will cheat, lie and steal to further their totalitarian aims, right?” They aid replied: “Of course Mr. President”. Reagan smiled and said: “That’s what I thought”.

But does Obama see America’s enemies clearly? He says that Hezbollah and Hamas have legitimate grievances. He says missile defense, combat systems and our space technology will be cut by “tens of billions”. He will take a key element of our nuclear deterrent out of business. Completely absent in these ideas is any idea that weakness invites aggression, and that “peace through strength” is what preserves our freedom. He is quick to blame America for the threats we face while associating and building alliances with people who hate America and wish to see our founders “flawed” constitution replaced.

The appeasement now on the table from Senator Obama has been tried throughout history, most memorably in Munich in 1938. As Winston Churchill said, they wanted peace and honor and got neither, ending up with both war and dishonor. When asked how the Cold War would end, President Reagan said very simply: “We win and they lose”. That has been the animating passion of the free people of America whenever she has been threatened. But that ardor apparently does not hold us up any longer in much of Mr. Obama’s party. Too often have we heard calls for retreat, defeat and appeasement. We shy away from the hard choices we face. Are we, the leader of the free peoples of the world, being asked to choose appeasement once again?

In a few days we choose a new direction for our country as we do whenever we elect a new President. But the principals that have shaped this great country from our beginnings should not be given up lightly, just in pursuit of what may well be a mirage, a hope, and some ill-defined change. We should remember the courageous Americans at Trenton, Gettysburg, Normandy, the Chosen Reservoir, Danang and Fallujah…which made possible the liberty, free entrepreneurship and creativity that gave us the Grand Coulee dam, the Panama Canal, the Apollo project, the automobile, the telephone, the electric light bulb, computers and the internet.

Wesley Pruden, the irascible editor emeritus of the Washington Times received a complaint from an Obama supporter. She argued the association with the terrorist Bill Ayers was no big deal. She, an English professor, could not understand “what precisely is the great fear?” The fear, Madame, is that we are going off a cliff toward hard-left European socialism and neutrality, which in its cowardice and incapability of protecting and defending its liberty and culture, is sliding toward an abyss of appeasement and cultural diversity where Sharia law runs parallel with the laws handed down from the Magna Carter and where the defense of what freedom and liberty remain becomes a bother and a pain. That is where Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, and myriad other friends of Barack Obama want to go. The terror masters then win, Madame Professor. And that tragically, you are obviously too stupid to understand. Let us pray America is not.

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Peter R. Huessy is currently the president of GeoStrategic Analysis, a defense and national security consulting business. In addition to writing for OpinionEditorials.com, he is also a guest lecturer, appearing at such fine institutions as the School of Advanced International Affairs, Johns Hopkins University, The Institute of World Politics, and The National War College. Mr. Huessy has spent his career working in government organizations and committees, such as the United Nations, The Environmental Fund, Department of the Interior, and the National Defense University Foundation.

geostrategicanalysis@comcast.net