Note:  I've posted this essay on my blog, www.jimmyboone.blogspot.com.  Comments are welcome here of course, but if you wish to further the discusson on this topic or debate it, I suggest that you comment on my blog, as you probably do not want to use up your comments here (and also, this site isn't really meant to be a debate forum).

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It’s a three legged stool of control.

They’ve taken the second leg, and they’re after the third.

They've taken our possessions.

 They know too much, and they never hate to meddle.

They know our incomes down to the penny.  It’s none of their business, but they know it anyway.  They’ve made it their business.  It’s unconstitutional – or it was, until they passed the 16th amendment.  But they haven’t stopped there.  They want to limit our paychecks too.  If I become rich, they reserve the right to take my money away.  “It’s just not fair to everyone else that you have so much,” they tell me.  They take my money away, and use it to write their welfare checks; it’s thinly disguised.  They’re buying themselves votes.  They hate the rich.  They hate the middle class.  We are independent.  We don’t need them; we don’t need their checks.  They can’t bribe us so easily to vote for them.  Their scare-tactics don’t work so well in preventing us from voting for their opponents.  But they’re determined to change that.

They will make us pay.

They will make us depend on them.  And their checks.

They will grind our economy into dust and dump economic ruin on us.  They will make us dirt-poor.  They will force us to depend on them.  They will make us come begging to Washington, pleading for mercy.  “Please,” we will say to them.  “Write us checks.  Pay our mortgages.  Buy us food.  Don’t let us starve!”

They hate our independence.  It’s so arrogant, to think that we average citizens can go about running our own lives, creating goods and services, improving our quality of life, and impacting our communities without help them.  Why don’t we ask them for help?

Perhaps it’s because they haven’t helped us enough.  They haven’t given us enough hand outs.  They haven’t forced all those greedy rich people to pay us back what they stole from us (how else could those rich people have gotten so rich?).  Perhaps, they reason, we’ve given up on them helping us; we’ve withdrawn and become bitter, clinging to our guns and our religion.

The solution’s so obvious: tax those greedy rich people some more.  Give more handouts, more government programs, more free lunches.  Encourage everyone to come and take freely!  (Vote for ME!)

One of their leaders reassured us that 95\% of us would get a tax cut.  Only the 5\% who were rich and obviously didn’t need a tax cut wouldn’t get one.  They’d still get half their income taken away; they’re rich, right?  They can afford it.

Never mind that their Marxist reasoning is wrong.  Never mind that when they tax half my profits away in the name of “fairness,” I have to raise my prices, stop hiring, hold off raises, cut wages, and lay off employees.

They claim that they are motivated by fairness and compassion.  I don’t believe them.  They’re after power.  Power and votes.  But even if they were honest, they’re motivations are irrelevant.  Look at the results: their policies are cruel!  Wealth is confiscated, poverty is subsidized.  Success is punished, failure is rewarded.  Who wants to work hard just to have his earnings taken?  Why not live on the dole and relax?

And thus, the rise of the dependent class.  Never mind helping someone to stand on his own two feet again.  Just make sure he keeps getting that check, and tell him that if he votes for the opposition, his life-line will be cut.

They have power over our money.  And they drive their tentacles ever and ever deeper in search for power, leaving behind them an abyss of debt.

 They control our possessions.

They’ve taken the second leg, and they’re after the third.

 The third leg is healthcare.

No longer content that they only control our possessions, they’ve decided to take over every aspect of our lives.  And so they bribe us.  “Those mean, rich, greedy insurance companies are ripping you off,” they tell us.  “They don’t have to charge you so much money; they do just because they can get away with it.  Doctors rip you off too – they’ll make up stuff just so they can operate on you and charge you more.”

Slander.  Lies.

It’s all slander and lies.  Yet, hoping we won’t look to deeply, they continue without pausing for a breath:  “If we were the insurance company, we could help you out so much!  We’re so compassionate – we’d never try to make a profit off of you.  We’d give you much better service at a much lower cost.  In fact, let us do that – that will force those mean private companies to compete and stop ripping you off.”

But most of us like our insurance.  We don’t want to give it up for some sort of government option.  “Don’t worry,” they tell us.  “If you like you’re insurance, you can keep it.”

Until it goes out of business – that’s what they don’t tell us.  Their “compassionate insurance” will be subsidized by our wallets, enabling them to artificially lower the rates.  Real insurance businesses won’t be able to survive – and the plans we have that we would rather not give up will disappear.  Then, we will be at their mercy.

“That’s not true,” they tell us.  “Our plan will be one that pays for itself – minimal overhead, non-profit, and no subsidies from the general fund.”  These are the same people that have put social security, Medicare, and the postal service in the red, besides giving us a twelve trillion dollar debt.  They promised us they wouldn’t, but they did.

Why believe them now?

Indeed, we will be at their mercy.  Their “compassionate affordable insurance” will be the only one left.  And that’s when they assert their control.

Now, every choice we make in life will affect the cost of their program.  They will tell us what we can and can’t eat.  They tell us where we can and can’t live.  They will regulate what we drive.  They will put red tape around everything we do.  Any of us who struggle with obesity will be ordered to report to a fitness center or pay a fine.

Eventually the whole system will be free when taxes aren’t counted.  Demand for health services will skyrocket, but supply will not increase enough.  The government can’t hire too many doctors – it costs too much.  Shortages will develop.  People will be knocked off the list, and the elderly will be first.  They’ve lived their lives; they need to get out of the way and stop draining the system of the resources it needs to treat the younger generations.

This is the third leg of the stool they want from us.  And they are so close to getting it.

They have the second leg.

 How did they ever get this kind of leverage and control over us?

The answer is both simple and tragic.

We GAVE them the first leg.

We gave them our children.

 The government controls our schools.

Not all of them, of course.  There’s private school – but that costs money.  We’re already paying for the public schools with our taxes.  Most of us can’t afford to send our kids to private schools.

There’s also homeschooling.  But most parents can’t imagine how they could teach their own kids.  Education of posterity is supposed to be outsourced to credentialed professionals, right?

Thus, the vast majority of Americans send their kids to public schools.  And while one might be able to argue for an exception here and there, these schools are being run by the same kind of people who want the government to take over everything.

In the 1960s, there were a lot of young, hot-headed Marxists running around with violent tendencies – like Bill Aires, who blew up buildings and killed innocent civilians.  He still says to this day that he’s not sorry for doing it – he wishes he’d done more.  But as these Marxists got older, they realized they were only turning people off.  So they became more sophisticated: they settled down, lived quieter lives, and infiltrated the public education system.

Government education is brainwashing generations of Americans into a very particular worldview: the idea that government can solve all our problems if only the right people are in power; an attitude that lives only for the moment and doesn’t care what the consequences down the road will be; a religion that worships the government instead of God.

When politicians argue that the rich shouldn’t get tax-cuts, and we need to “spread the wealth around” to make life better for everyone, they might as well say that you can add two negative numbers and get a positive one.  But so many people don’t get it.  Too many have been indoctrinated in our government schools.

Right now, 54\% of Americans oppose national healthcare.  In the past, that number would have been in the sixties, the seventies, the eighties…

There’s a good chance that they will fail to nationalize healthcare this time around.  But they will try again 15 years from now, just like they did 15 years ago.  And the next time, they may just succeed.  By then, there will be millions more brand-new young voters – people who are just getting out of diapers right now, people who are just learning to say their ABCs.  And the vast majority of them will have been brainwashed into believing that government needs to solve their problems.  By and large, they will support a government takeover of healthcare, and will not think critically through the issues.  When the politicians come along claiming to be compassionate and caring for poor helpless people, this new generation will not have the basic discernment to understand that they’re hearing lies.  The government will appeal to their emotions, and they will blindly follow like sheep headed for the slaughter.

Thus, as Americans, we will cease to love the freedom we once died for, and lay it down for the false promises of security.  We will become surfs to the ruling class, and lose our republic – a free society governed by laws and the constitution – gaining instead an oligarchy, a country governed by the elites in Washington.

 We gave them the first leg.  We didn’t object when they took the second leg.  Now they want the third leg, and we’re objecting.  But we are still giving them the first leg.  Every day we offer them our children’s minds… it’s only a matter of time before they’ll have the whole stool.