RON HART: An open letter of apology to my future grand-kids

Dear great-grandkids,

I am nearing mid-life now, and on my birthday I write this letter to you to apologize for what my generation has done to the country that you will inherit.

You are a direct descendant of John Hart, who with great foresight and at enormous personal risk, signed the Declaration of Independence.

It started this country on the path to greatness — greatness achieved by the hard work and self-reliance of each individual. None of my ancestors need apologize for anything; they sacrificed and did what needed to be done in order to preserve this country.
But somewhere, between the generation of my father, who was a Marine in the Pacific Theater, and mine, we lost our way.

The people of my generation were selfish and were appropriately dubbed the “Me Generation.” We fought no wars, we built up the citizenry’s dependence on government, and we spent money on ourselves for which we will leave you the tab.
For that, I am eternally apologetic.

I did my part to avoid this by working hard, paying taxes, and never asking the government for anything but to leave me alone. And I wrote a column that tried to educate people on the power of capitalism, minimal government, and prudent fiscal policies. It took our country 230 years to rack up $7 trillion in debt, and only two presidencies to increase that debt by 50 percent.

In George W. Bush, we elected a Republican who turned out to be a big government disaster.
Among other fiscal missteps, he and the Democrats gave you another entitlement to pay for, the Medicare Prescription Drug “Benefit.”
Congress let the drug company lobbyists write the law, so courtesy of a complaisant government, they did not have to compete for business. In a world where vilified, free-market capitalism as personified by Wal-Mart brought us $4 generic prescriptions, our government makes us pay its donors at the big pharmaceutical companies $130 for the equivalent medication.

Only government can stifle free-market competition and make us pay more. Sadly, the Republicans' fingerprints were all over this travesty.

Then, when the Republicans lost their way and became Democrats, we elected a charismatic president who promised an undefined agenda of “Hope.” A fawning media never asked him any hard questions, and they became his cheerleaders.

In 2008, journalism died.

After getting ourselves into trouble as a nation for borrowing money that we did not have to buy things that we did not need, this president's administration's only answer was to do more of the same.

In his first month in office, he put you $1 trillion more in debt with what he called a “stimulus package,” two words you do not want to hear from a politician. He parceled the money out to corrupt governors (remind me to tell you about an Illinois governor named Blagojevich), mayors, unions and teachers who supported him.

Pork was re-labeled “stimulus.”

We never had a politician after Ronald Reagan who would look the country in the eye and tell the truth. Our leaders bought votes by borrowing the money, which by your coming of age will either bankrupt the country or burden your generation with so much debt that government cannot provide the basic services such as roads and national defense. We squandered $1 trillion and our national credibility on a poorly thought out war in Iraq.

We were attacked in 2001 by religious zealots who envied our economy and our freedoms. Our leaders responded by restricting those freedoms and nationalizing more of our economy. Our government's response to the attack was to create the TSA (we called it “Thousands Standing Around”), which hurt our economy and humiliated us when we flew on airplanes by making us take our shoes off and forcing 65-year-old ladies to dispose of three ounces of shampoo. In Tom Daschle's brilliance, he made the TSA a unionized behemoth that no one could control.

And how did we reward this man, who as Senate Majority Leader, was later voted out of office by the citizens of his state?

After failing to pay more than $128,000 in taxes on a car and driver furnished him by a Democratic donor (can you say “limousine liberal”?), he was rewarded by President Obama with a cabinet nomination to be in charge of socializing the greatest health care system in the world. He later pulled himself out of the running. Otherwise, you probably would be reading this while standing in line for three hours to get a rationed flu shot.

We also let a man, who again knowingly did not pay his taxes, run the IRS and the Treasury Department.

In fact, the reason the Democrats do not mind raising taxes on the rest of us is that they do not pay them. I suggested nominating every person in America for a cabinet position so we could recover all the revenue owed to the government; only when nominated for high office do some people seem to pay the taxes they owe. If Willie Nelson had been nominated as drug czar and then paid all his back taxes, we might even have run a surplus.

I wish we could have left you a more sane, solvent and reasoned country.

A few of us tried.

Ron Hart is a Southern libertarian columnist who writes a weekly column about politics and life. His E-mail: RevRon10@aol.com