Given an infinite amount of time to fail all good things will come to an end. Our republic is a good thing and we are loosing it. The question naturally becomes one of “when”, not “if”, but we can reverse course and ensure that we needn’t loose our Republic just yet. We can so fortify our Republic that it can last much longer then it’s present course suggests. We can push back the gradual abandonment of those principles that guided our nation through all the slings, arrows, and obstacles we have faced these past two and a half centuries. 

Fundamental ideas of freedom and liberty. The idea that any given individual is the best judge of his own prosperity. That a man is capable of governing his own life, be responsible for his own self, come what may. There are people who fancy themselves to be the betters of everyone else, who would point to a man who has fallen and decry that the system has failed. They miss the point. Here in America it is better to be free then to be ‘right’.  

A good man fallen on hard times though on the rocky shores of life is still the captain of his own destiny. Through hard work and perseverance man is capable of overcoming any obstacle he may face and be stronger for it.  A man must be free to fail if he is to be free to succeed. Whether in success or failure, a mans actions and achievements are his own. Deny him the opportunity to fail and you deny him the opportunity to succeed. 

Give a man every material want and desire and you have robbed him of the opportunity to prove his worth. A man’s own worth is something that only he can set for himself through the triumphs and tragedies of his own life. No man can live a another life for him, nor can any government. 

In order to maximize the freedom of it’s citizens a government must necessarily take advantage of every opportunity to stand out their way, but increasingly this past century we Americans turn to the government to govern our lives. Somewhere along the line many of us have lost sight of the simple fact that each one of us is a government of one capable of our own domestic and foreign policy. Each one of us is part of a social compact with nearby foreign entities, our fellow citizens, to abide by the same laws and to respect one another’s freedoms. We construct artificial governments between us because the proper amount of extra-individual government makes everyone freer. 

The only natural government is a person governing himself. We are so long accustomed to government that we take it as a given, as inevitable and constant as the rising sun, but it is an artificial construction. People expect a government to be care for them as mother, father, and god all in one, but a government cannot care. A government has no heart, it has no soul, and it can provide no meaning. Government and is hollow and empty when it comes to these things and no expansion of it will change that fundamental truth. A free man finds government is only as tolerable as it maximizes his freedom.

The more power a government is allowed to have over it’s citizens the the less power the citizens have and the less freedom. Power corrupts, which is why our founders sought to scatter it, putting it in as many hands as possible, because when power comes to rest in the hands of the few it inevitably leads to tyranny. 

Which is why I think our nation risks ending sooner then later. More and more power has been appropriated by our governments, local, state and federal. More and more power concentrates not in the localities, not in the state capitals, but in Washington. This has been the trend for over a hundred years.

We have a number of structural brakes on our governments and we have a powerful cultural tendencies that have kept us from being as far down the road to socialism as the European Union, but make no mistake, we are on that road. Rome didn’t fall in a day, and the seeds were planted centuries before it did. 

Another way of putting it is that America is not a mom and pop shop. Mom and pop shops can close at the drop of a hat. Huge corporations take years to decline before they suddenly fall. We are not speed boat that can run circles around icebergs with ease. Fools steer us towards icebergs and endanger us all. The course must be set some time before in order to hit the iceberg that will sink the ship. Though our nation is a very large ocean liner we can avoid icebergs with ease so long as it is not steered towards one. Fools who steer a nation into waters conductive to tyranny are often long dead by the time their nation is fully rent asunder by their course. 

But if the past century of missteps has concentrated power in the Federal government then the cure is to disperse power again as our Founding Fathers had intended. We need to reform our republic to the principles of Federalism as our founding fathers understood them. We will need a Federalist Reformation.

We have had over the past few decades various levels of talk of a Balanced Budget Amendment, a Line Item Veto, repealing the 16th and 17th Amendments, Term-Limits, proper implementation of the 10th Amendment, and so forth. These need to be not viewed as separate issues but rather they should each be viewed as different aspects of the over arcing concept of reforming the Federal government.

We effect such a solution and our great county will have many more great days ahead of it. If we fail to do so then we will continue our slide into Socialism and our good thing will come to an end.