There’s an old admonition about feeding the beast: it starts to hang around and won’t leave when you try to shoo it away. Even if you scream really loud and wave your hands – or ballots – it won’t leave if the food trough is still where it always was. That’s how liberalism / progressivism is. While we weren’t looking it was building thousands of troughs and passing laws and regulations that make it illegal, or something, to NOT fill the troughs… and not with just the normal rations, but ever larger ones.

Donald Trump is a pretty canny guy and has a good eye for talent. He also can recognize problems for what they are and, better, envision a path to solutions. What he never understood was how tightly, ferociously and viciously the progressive beasts are prepared to cling to their “food” troughs.

They’ve had a good run, our progressive saviours – about a hundred years or so, constantly finding reasons that freedom was a problem, as is free-will and any religion that preaches the concept of free will and personal salvation. And they became very good at stifling freedom and when that didn’t work, stealing it.

How can politicians steal freedom? Let us count the ways. A key measure of freedom is private property. The Constitution enshrines the concepts of private property, private thoughts and beliefs, and of security within one’s private realm. That is, that one is free to live as one pleases in his or her pursuit of “happiness.” The government – the locus of political action – exists to assure your freedom from threats to your privacy.

Just saying the previous five sentences is to laugh at our precarious position in modern America. There is barely an activity left that is no longer truly “private.” Try to think of one:

• Sex? What kind of sex? Surely the federal government has nothing to say about sex, right? Except that they do. All kinds of sexual function and dysfunction have gained the status of “protected minority” with rights and enforcement.

• Business, private, owner-operated business? Should be a “piece of cake,” but, please…

• Raising your children? Punishing them? Teaching them your values? You are so suspect that every teacher and school administrator has been placed on notice to observe and report any ways you handle your child that the state disagrees with. Worse, you are often the last person to know about the mind-numbing, values-warping content of many lessons and courses. Do you know how to use a condom? Or what “gay” sex is? Your eighth grader does.

• Driving? If you pay enough, it’s a privilege. If you are deemed “suspicious,” such as driving where you – or your car – don’t belong, you can be stopped, identified, and your personal property searched on the basis of some articulable “suspicion.”

• Do you work? Earn an income? Well, it’s certainly not really yours, is it? Numerous of others’ needs must be addressed by “your” pay before you get a share. Many of these are “benefits,” so-called, but they are benefiting someone else. Things like FICA, your Social Security “contribution.” Then there is the bonus deduction for Medicare and the so-called “income tax withheld” that pays a Hell of a lot of people to do things you never heard of, probably don’t like and probably can’t afford for yourself! It must also pay interest on debts you have not incurred but which were incurred in your name, long before you were born, most likely. How free is that?

• Private property? From local “zoning” boards to the EPA, how you use your own property is abridged in, literally, hundreds of ways. God forbid you’ll be found to own a “habitat” for an “endangered” specie of gnats or centipedes. No one wants to be responsible for killing the last right-handed beige centipede, but the concept of “threatened” or “endangered” life forms carries great power to push humans around. So-called progressives love doing that. They are those who know what’s wrong with most humans and why what they tend to do is flawed. Want to build a shed for your garden tools? Better get permission from the town and all your neighbors.

• Your own health? I mean of YOUR OWN BODY? Well, you can’t buy the care you want because the doctor you want to buy it from can’t sell it to you. “Free” enterprise, indeed. Congress, that bastion of good sense and careful budgeting, is cobbling together how the last frontier of control will dictate how and, eventually, whether you will live, at all, if your life will burden the federal deficit. Ye Gods!

• And self-defense? Immigration and the world-wide movement of peoples have changed the need for personal self-defense. Add drugs to the mix of cross-cultural peoples and it is a more dangerous world – and neighborhood – today than it was a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago. Yet our progressive neighbors, who place little value on the United States’ cultural norms, or its borders, are the same who demonstrate AGAINST your inherent, inalienable right to defend yourself and your family. You are rendered more free to die for their principles.

Finally, consider that when a new American is born, he or she has a debt of $155,000! And the government, that benign behemoth we all depend upon to protect our “rights,” is adding to that debt for all 330 Million of us at the rate of $5 a day. That’s $150 a month ON TOP OF the taxes we already pay. With about half of us NOT PAYING federal taxes, it’s more like $300 a month for every family that has a worker/ breadwinner.
The problem is, rather than figuring out how to reduce that burden, congress works overtime to INCREASE it. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Let’s keep in mind that every dollar of tax is a loss of freedom; every dollar of DEBT is a growing ball-and-chain that now inhibits our collective ability to defend ourselves.

Mr. President, I haven’t heard much about this…