Why?

Because the money manipulators run both the government and the unions, as well as the media that backs up one or both.  Liberty was first the victim of manipulated media before it became the victim of government and the trade unions.  Deliberately created "victim" classes looked for help and looked in the wrong places, to huge capital and finding no help there, sought help from government, the last resort before slavery.

Unionization has forced massive layoffs, nearly as much as government and banking interests have forced entrepreneurs to jump through hoops of red tape and paper mills in order to be permitted to exist.  The whack environmentalists have plunged whole areas of farmers, loggers and other land users into poverty and workers into unemployment by egregious rules they pay to have our "representatives" pass into legislation.

Liberty cannot play on that stage, it can't become a part of that plot.  Liberty stands as the God-given right of man to be free of tyrants, regardless of which interests they claim to represent.  But liberty is tied to both personal responsibility and control by the people over any amount of limited government they agree upon to mint the money and maintain some form of national defense.

When the people cannot or will not build a nation around the God-ordained nucleus of all society, the family, then one has hired their home out to strangers and sent their children to the Wicked Witch to be indoctrinated in the fine art of deconstructing family, home, church and liberty, and their nation has no future other than those innumerable failures recited in our history books.

The first cry for government aid is the first nail in the coffin of a nation's liberty.  Those who cannot find their own way by cooperation, association, family ties and the community effort of neighbors with a common interest, will soon become the serfs that evil leaders seek out to exploit by multiplying their numbers through the cheese on the mousetrap called government aid or government programs.

One would think that after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, the nation would have kicked and screamed for Barry Goldwater to be elected president rather than the socialist Lyndon B. Johnson.  It was, obviously, far too late then.  The unions put their money behind Johnson, and the deconstructed family unit -- torn asunder by World Wars I and II -- had left the United States with too many people who depended on too many other people, most of them government program leaders. 

City growth also divorced people from the land and the basic unit of private property, that of land ownership. Most Americans do not own homes, they own thirty to forty year mortgages.  The houses come with hardly enough land to plant a tree and a half dozen small shrubs, much less enough land to use for growing food and living without total dependency on every form of vendor.

America had quite enough growth without turning its large cities into enclaves for the homeless and non-English speaking peoples who have come here legally or illegally. To most of these people, liberty is meaningless and there is more security in jail for some of them. How can one appreciate liberty if they have never known liberty? They will consider anything better than a cardboard box house next to an open sewer gutter as "liberty" and government never intends to educate in liberty, it intends to indoctrinate in government-run socialism.

Why?

Because Americans took their own liberty for granted, which is the fastest and most direct route to losing it.

Schoolrooms became propaganda machines for a myth about an America that never existed, about leaders who, like Lincoln, wanted the strength of the nation to reside with the federal government rather than the sovereign states.  People took it for granted that either way, we would always have our freedom because we were created a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal (under the rule of law).  Did no one consider that this could change?

Apparently not.

While the puppeteers were pulling the financial and war machine strings, the people waved their flags in patriotic obedience to the America they were taught was always right, good, honest, fair and superior to other nations.  Military men and civilians died and still are dying in foreign wars in spite of our founders' warnings that entanglements with foreign countries would present a threat to our own national security and liberty.

So every war became all about liberty, one that was being decimated continually by lawmakers, special interest groups, and academics with a Marxist agenda to bring this nation down.

Liberty cannot play on the same stage with tyrants, dictators, elitist manipulators or victim mentalities.

Perhaps that is why the show going on in Washington, D.C. is a multi-trillion dollar experiment in transferring the concept of liberty to the concept of the welfare collective with two classes:  rulers and serfs.   Since Liberty cannot play on that stage, the collective is dressed up with a tiara and a torch held high, a flagpole and a flag, all substitutes for the real thing.  It's sort of like watching the twin searchlights beaming light into the skies where the Twin Towers once stood.  It's empty of substance.

Liberty was once of great value in the American mindset.  Now it is money, whoever has it and who can get it. Yet money has no intrinsic value on its own.  Paper money is nothing more than an IOU, and even gold has no more worth than someone says it does.  Only land produces food, room for animals, trees from which housing can be constructed, and the rights of landowners to tell the government just what it may or may not do.

That's why the government owns so much land, and why it has put so many restrictions on the use of private property that one is not free to use their own land as they see fit.

John Adams declared, "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."

Perhaps that is where the first step toward socialism was taken.  Americans began to disregard God and worship money.  Where money supplants God and tyrants deceive to gain power and retain it by a system of the dole, then Liberty for that people has ceased to exist.

No nation that has once lost its liberty has regained it.  Do we care?

I came from a traditionally Democrat household. After the JKF assassination, I knew there was far more to it than just Lee Harvey Oswald, and I began to think about American politics as I had never done before. I had resented trade unions, but my dad was in one of the many unions that control Hollywood's motion picture and television industry. I began to see that they had grown large, corrupt and controlling.

By the time Lyndon B. Johnson was elected and promised a "great society" it seemed government intended to reach into every facet of our lives. Having become an Arizona resident in 1962, I studied Goldwater and his campaign for the 1964 presidential election. A member of our Republican committee told me that the party would not run Goldwater unless they knew he had no chance of winning. Excuse me? The hypocrisy stunned me, and I knew then that voting Americans were not free.

In 1992, while still working, I began to write for a small Arizona town's home-owned newspaper to fight Clinton's socialized healthcare program, and moved to internet writing in 1999 with my website The Flagship Log. And I am still a "Goldwater" Republican and an Arizonan.