Illegal immigration, taxation, government overreach, rampant spending and borrowing, arbitrary and capricious enforcement of laws – all are grave dangers to our Republic but they all have one important commonality – they are all symptoms, not the disease.

If you consider just these recent events – the IRS targeting conservative groups, the EPA poisoning the Animas River, Hillary’s email scandal, Obama lying about the Iran deal (we know this thanks to the article on the failed novelist and former van driver turned national security expert, Ben Rhodes, who is also the brother of the head of CBS News) and then the State Department erasing Jen Psaki’s admission that they were lying about it all along, what you see is something that goes beyond arrogance. What we see is a total belief that government is supreme and those in it can have a total disrespect for the law and the citizens of this country.

And why should they? Not a single person has been fired or punished and poll after poll has indicated that Hillary’s supporters will vote for her even if she is charged with a crime due to her email server malfeasance. That says something very important about the Democrats and why a Democrat should never be close to the Oval Office again

The sum total of the aforementioned is, my friends, simply the definition of tyranny – the cruel, unreasonable, or arbitrary use of power or control. There’s the disease. There’s the real problem.

There is a not so insignificant number of people today who have decided to say to government, “Here, take my freedom so you can protect me from myself. I’m cool with you doing whatever you want as long as I can keep watching Big Brother, the NFL and shopping. I don’t care about retirement because you can just give me what I want and if you don’t have the money, there is always the evil rich to take it from.” I’ve written in the past about a former acquaintance of mine who actually said:

“… people, and I do include me, want a big brotherly government to take care of mundane matters, such as our health care, our retirement, overseeing the quality of goods and services, so we can concentrate our collective minds on American Idol and the exploding Kardashian population.”

As evidenced in this quote, the root of the issue is that those who support Democrats define freedom as “freedom from “, as in freedom from economic risk, freedom from political risk and freedom from social risk. A classical liberal defines liberty is as “freedom of “, as in freedom of opportunity, of self-determination and of choice. The former requires maximum regulation and control, the latter requires minimum regulation and control. The collectivist confuses safety, security and low risk with liberty, but as we have already proposed, this “security” comes at a cost. We pay for it by surrendering individual liberty to the collective.

In its practical realization, the security of socialism has been historically represented as the enslavement of national populations. It always begins with noble ideals (much as our little Utopian comrades often propose) but it never ends nobly. It usually ends in the oppression of people, then revolution and war…assuming the proletariat has not given away enough of its rights in exchange for the safety and security of its own enslavement.

The historically proven fact is that the only system that has ever guaranteed the individual liberty and prosperity of all of its people has been the capitalist economy and constrained government as represented in the Republic of the United States of America. In the words of Benjamin Franklin when he was queried by Dr. James McHenry as to what form of government was established at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787:

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

A Republic cannot survive when there is a leadership bent on tyranny and a public willing to acquiesce to it.