What Is Wrong With the Original Blueprint?


By

Bill Reid

Last night I sat through the third State of the Union Address given by President Barak Obama. It was his “blue print” to “rebuild America”. It was a painful experience.

Almost from the very beginning there were promises of more government programs that will turn our ailing economy around. One after another they came, in quick succession, from proposals for three way government, education and private partnerships to “retrain” hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers for jobs that don’t really exist, to directives to all departments of the government to “cut waste”, to “pie in the sky” dreams of new clean energy technologies that would be funded by taxpayers. Then going through the same tired rhetoric about how the rich should pay their “fair share”, and oil companies had for too long been the beneficiaries of government subsidies that should now be stopped and have that money redirected to support unproven green technologies that will produce more new jobs than we can fill.

There were so many proposals and plans being tossed about that the whole affair became “mind boggling”. At one point I was so overwhelmed with all the “good things” that Barak Obama says are going to come to the rescue of the “American Dream”, that I was afraid to get out of my chair for fear that the dizziness created by all that was swirling around in my head would cause me to lose balance and fall. And it was all about how “the government was going to fix things”.

Then, in the middle of it all he, as a Democrat, compared his vision of the role of government to that of a Republican, Abraham Lincoln, when Lincoln said “The government shouldn’t do anything for the people that the people can do for themselves.” What did he say? I found myself doing a mental double take. Did he really say that? How could he possibly think that Lincoln’s statement was even remotely consistent with anything else that he was spewing out for consumption when everything that he had brought up in his speech was related to government involvement in almost every detail of every American’s life? What a farcical comment! I am quite sure that when President Lincoln make his original comment about his view of what the government’s role should be in the lives of individual Americans, he wasn’t seeking to create a nation of people dependent on the government dole.

When, finally, after 65 minutes of loud oratory, the President ended his so called “state of the union address”, I sat almost dumbfounded, wondering “where is the blue print?” To me there was nothing more than a long series of discombobulated proposals, threats, and some of the same old promises that we have heard now since way back in the campaign of 2008. Then it occurred to me, if America is “broken”, as would be indicated by the assertion that the blue print that I couldn’t see was for the “rebuilding” of America, then why not pull out the “original blueprint” and compare what we have now, after 225 plus years of “adjustments” to the original blueprint, and see if we can determine where some of the intervening generations went wrong with those adjustments.

I think if the President wanted to be completely honest with the American People last night, he should have stood up there and said; Folks, we’ve been wondering around in the wilderness for about 3 or 4 generations now, looking for a magic potion that would take us from a solid well built and thriving America to some utopian dream that we haven’t quite been able to make a reality, and in the process we have “broken” the model that had worked for us so well until about the beginning of the 20th century. So tonight I am proposing that we go back to the “original blueprint” and start all over. I am proposing this drastic change because America is in real trouble, and I have come to the conclusion that “the Founders” must have been a lot smarter and wiser than some of us were lead to believe.

The Federal government was never meant to be the colossal, lumbering giant that it has become. The lessons are there to be seen everywhere one looks. Will someone tell me why our so called leaders can’t see them, and in doing so, come to the conclusion that the “original blueprint” was about as close to perfection as we could ever hope to come?
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Bill Reid is a blue collar retiree who has become an Internet entrepreneur. As a believer in the founding principles of our country who has become very alarmed by what he perceives as the irresponsible practices of today’s political elite, he has become a part of the loyal opposition. Establishing and promoting the blogs “Common Sense Punditry” and “Voices of Outrage”, Bill attempts to reveal the insanities that are being forced upon the American People in the hope that a younger generation will take up the cause and help to return America to “common sense” practices and solutions.
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