Evolution of Awareness

When I was younger, I didn't really pay much attention to politics. Right, Left, Conservative, Liberal, Republican, Democrat - none of those labels meant a whole lot to me.

Until my mid-twenties, I generally thought of myself as moderate. I followed the popular notion that it was best to vote for the best person, not the party.

Today I can't tell for certain whether that philosophy was a good one, because I was mostly ignorant about the important issues of the day.

It was when I began to be responsible for myself and my family and understood how government policies can impact my life directly that I gradually became aware. And the more I learned, the more I found myself identifying with conservatives.

Today the choices could not be more stark.

Clearly, the Democrats have slid close to the extreme left of the spectrum. Every solution they push to implement requires government intervention and control.

In the meantime, we find that a frigheningly declining proportion of producers are seeing their wealth confiscated to prop up the political class and the consumers.

We've reached the tipping point, where it appears we now don't have enough producers with wealth to raid to keep the government class and their consuming consituents solvent.

The party in power wants to take more from the producers to reduce the alarming deficits, but have no realistic plan to reverse the trend. How can they not be aware that producers will change their behavior to protect themselves to whatever extent they can?

Wherever Obama's cap settles in, defining the cutoff point for the "rich", his plan is to take everything earned by the producers in excess of that number. Producers in turn will simply cut back their income to fall just below that line. Which means more jobs lost, more businesses shutting down, and more suffering across the board.

On the other hand, I am not encouraged that the conservatives will have the will or the courage to do what must be done to reverse the trend. While November's elections might help a bit, without leadership and a clear sales job to the masses, the problems aren't likely to be solved.

When we live in a world where expression of common sense ideas means volunteering to become a target for personal destruction, totalitarian rule cannot be far behind.