Today protesters across the country are having "Tea Parties" to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the economic policies of the current administration. The fear is that the enormous spending undertaken by the Obama administration is going to strap us with debt that will only be paid by inflating the currency or raising taxes, both of which will suffocate the hopes we have for our childrens' future.
But it's not just the government's economic nostrums that have people alarmed.
Just before the election last November we noted that most conservatives and many libertarians opposed Barack Obama because they foresaw an Obama administration, supported and abetted by a Democratic congress, eager to implement a number of measures that would erode our freedoms and be detrimental to our national health. Here's the listwe posted back then:
- Remove all restrictions on abortion, including partial birth abortion.
- Alter the meaning of marriage so that it's no longer the union of one man and one woman.
- Appoint judges and Supreme Court Justices whose decisions will be based on political fashion rather than on the text of the constitution.
- Redistribute wealth from the middle and upper classes to the underclass.
- Treat terrorism as a police matter rather than as a global war on Western civilization.
- Pile onto American business onerous regulations and taxes that will make it impossible to compete in the global market and which will result in higher unemployment and higher costs. (Cap and Trade, minimum wage, capital gains tax, health insurance)
- Continue the accelerating secularization of our society.
- Open our borders to anyone who wants to take up residence in our country and give illegal aliens the right to a driver's license, health care, and welfare.
- Nationalize health care.
- Deny to parents any choice in where they send their children to school.
- Push fuel costs back up so as to force us to conserve and develop alternative energy sources.
- Quell freedom of speech, particularly when it's conservative and/or religious, through vehicles like the Fairness Doctrine or "Localism."
- Downgrade our military preparedness and end the program that would enable us to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles.
- Take away the right to own or buy most types of firearms or to acquire a license to carry them on one's person.
- Strip union workers of the right to a secret ballot in union elections by implementing card check.
We're now three months into the new administration and it's clear that the list above failed to do justice to Democrat ambitions. Already the President, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and their minions in Congress have taken steps toward implementing most, if not all, of the above goals. The Democrats are anxious to fundamentally reshape the contours of our society, and there's very little that can be done to dissuade them until the elections of 2010.
To be sure, there's much about our society that's in need of reshaping, but none of the changes listed above are among them. In my opinion, at least, achieving any of the items on the list would be at best harmful and at worst calamitous.
RLC