IT’S FINALLY OVER! I am sure the one thing that everyone will agree on is that they are glad about that. Perhaps we can finally have some news about something other than politics. Or then again, maybe not. At the time of this writing, Barack Obama has won the presidency and the Democratic Party has increased its control of both houses of Congress. So after his inauguration in January, President Obama will have a mandate to enact whatever “changes” he wants. Or then again, maybe not. Although he won the election in the Electoral College by a large margin (349-147), he only won 52%of the popular vote. That means that 48% of the populace did not buy in to the whole “change” thing or the redistribution of wealth concept. And although the Democratic Party increased its control of Congress, the change was much less than the pollsters and pundits anticipated (they are projected to only pick up about 20 seats in the House of Representatives and, depending on what happens in the remaining 4 races that are still undecided as of this writing, will likely hold less than 60 seats in the Senate needed to assure themselves of being “filibuster proof”).

The real question now is what the newly elected president will do. He will not, as some naïve people appear to believe, bring our country together in any meaningful fashion. Our country is greatly divided right now and that will not be solved by a person whose views represent the far left of the spectrum. However, the most important question is whether we will move our country in a direction in which we cross the threshold of having a majority of our citizens receiving entitlement benefits from our Treasury without paying anything for them (as our new leader proposed during his campaign).

Historians may look back on this as a major turning point in the history of the United States, if we lose our role as the world leader and turn into another European-style socialist society.  Who knows, maybe it is inevitable. When our original thirteen states adopted the new constitution in 1787, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh named Alexander Tyler wrote this about the fall of the world’s first democracy (the Athenian Republic in Greece) over

2,000 years earlier:
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence”:

1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage;
3. from courage to liberty;
4. from liberty to abundance;
5. from abundance to complacency;
6. from complacency to apathy;
7. from apathy to dependence;
8. from dependence back into bondage

Although I prefer not to subscribe to Professor Tyler’s negative view of the fate of democracy, right now it is estimated that approximately forty percent of the nation’s population are on some sort of governmental welfare or other subsidy. Should people who do not pay taxes be allowed to determine who does and does not pay taxes and how much they pay? When a person does not pay any taxes, he has no skin in the game. Accordingly, they do not care as much about the outcome. If the taxation policies of our country are changed to allow more than half of our citizens to receive benefits and not contribute, we might as well open the doors of the US Treasury and start passing out our money indiscriminately. At that point, the U.S. dollar will devalue like a banana republic currency, falling so quickly that you will have to race to the store before they can change the prices.

If you think this is being overly alarmist, look at Argentina. In spite of the country’s abundance of natural resources and its role as the breadbasket of South America, Argentina’s politicians have driven the country to the brink of disaster. The current president of Argentina is Cristina Kirchner (she is also the wife of Nestor Kirchner, who was president from 2001-2007). After years of ever-increasing government spending under the Kirchner regimes, and warnings that confiscatory tax rates were drying up sources of capital investment in the country, Argentina finds itself again in a financial disaster. In reaction, Mrs. Kirchner announced in the past couple of weeks that the government is taking control of the nation’s private pension system, with over $30 billion in assets. These funds will now be usable by Mrs. Kirchner’s administration for any purpose, with only a government promise for a pension in return. This is a perfect illustration of the risk we now face: Once a taxation system is established as a system of plunder to transfer wealth, investment capital will do what it always does- shift to more friendly environments. No capital= no jobs.

The good news is that perhaps we will all now wake up and realize that we can take back control of our country. The problems that we face can all be solved. We have the power to elect political leaders who will focus on real issues and real solutions. Not esoteric, feel good messages like “Change” and promises about creating job growth and prosperity but with no supporting details on how that will occur. Our healthcare system is broken. Social Security and Medicare will both be bankrupt in twenty years. Our tax system is unnecessarily complex and uncompetitive. Our education system is falling behind the rest of the world in producing engineers and scientists. These are real problems that need real solutions. What has failed us in the past is not the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, but rather both of them. We are missing the obvious: There are only 536 people responsible for this mess. One hundred senators, 435 congressmen and one president. That’s the whole group. Guess what? We have the power to remove all of them. Everyone believes that they are helpless to change the system, that an individual does not possess the power to invoke change. Well, it was a pretty small group of people who got this country going (56 persons signed the Declaration of Independence). And unlike some of those brave souls, we are not likely to be captured and executed for our efforts. We also have some fantastic tools for mass communication that our forefathers did not have: the internet and email. So if you are like me and are not happy with the limited choices we had in this election between the candidates fielded by the Republicans or the Democrats, let’s band together to start a grass roots effort to effect real change. We now have another four years to get it done or face the consequences.

Was Professor Tyler right? Are we on the road from abundance to apathy, from apathy to dependence? Only time will tell. (Note: you can email me at travis@travisbaugh.com. My previous articles are all posted on my website http://www.travisbaugh.com)