Barack Obama and his liberal comrades want Americans to survive.

Conservatives want us to live.

These two statements, so similar on the surface show how diametrically opposed our visions for America are. We need leaders who believe in, live by and who can clearly articulate these simple concepts and differences. Its really not complicated.

As we can see from the unwillingness of congressional democrats to agree to any real budget cut, liberals see the old cradle to grave, nanny state vision for the American people. They envision a society where risk and reward are removed; where humanity is stripped of its will to succeed in the name of social justice; “fairness.” They encourage, not individual achievement in our lives, but a “shared sacrifice.” They see our lives sacrificed to the state or to Obama’s vision. That my friends, is not living.

One of our founding fathers’ greatest principles of “all men are created equal” by their God has been subverted to mean “all men exist equally” by the edicts of their government. We see this in the unconstitutionally government mandated ObamaCare, increased regulation and tax on some of our greatest industries like coal, oil, automobiles, aeronautics, Financial Services and the desire confirmed during the current deficit crisis to increase the punitive tax on society’s greatest economic contributors though it would have no impact on reducing the deficit.

Conservatives, Tea Party members, want Americans to live; as Sammy Davis Jr. said, “not merely survive.”

We want Americans to regain the spirit of success and failure; which by the way is a great motivator. We want to once again feel the knot of anticipation and dread of failure in our stomachs we felt as kids when the training wheels finally came off. The fire in our bellies as our fathers ran alongside our bikes, encouraging our success as we peddled faster and faster. We want all of us to experience that awesome sense of pride, that feeling of exhilaration, of pure freedom when we out raced fathers and felt their last push as they ultimately let go. We were finally on our own.

Americans also need to remember and learn from that feeling when we crashed our Schwinn Sting Rays into the neighbor’s bushes. We may have been bruised from our fall but we got back on our bikes and overcame our fall. No one bailed us out from our failure, instead the consequences of our failures motivated us to succeed. Like success, failure is part of life.

Like our fore-fathers who set the groundwork of freedoms for country’s success, it was our fathers who pushed us to our freedom as individuals. I don’t know anyone who recalls their nannies running alongside their two wheelers pushing them to succeed.

The biggest threat to our freedoms in our nation’s history is economic, is happening now and is coming from within. If we do not make this stand against the nanny state now we will cease to exist as the nation our fathers and fore-fathers knew. And it will be our fault.

We as a people need to make the choice between living and surviving by making our voices heard right now. Our lives depend on it.