Government should get out of the way

Richard McCord, Henderson

Thursday, Oct. 13, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.

As Winston Churchill famously said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.” So it will be with our economic policies.

President Barack Obama and Democrats who ruled Congress through his first two years in office used the financial crisis, created by Congress, as a pretext to spend unprecedented amounts of taxpayer money, including $850 billion for “economic stimulus.” They promised that unemployment would not rise above 8 percent if the money was spent. Now we’re told we need to spend (immediately!) another $450 billion to get unemployment below 9 percent.

If Obama and the Democrats knew how to solve our economic problems, they would have succeeded by now, and the economy would be sailing along. But they want us to believe that problems left to them by evil Republicans were worse than they thought, so we should let them pour more of our money down the same drain.

Democrats dogmatically plow ahead to impose their liberal (“progressive”) vision on the rest of us, even as reality proves them spectacularly wrong. Americans are rightly questioning Democrats’ claim to know how to fix America.

The reality is that Americans don’t need politicians, of any party, to fix America. All they need from government is to protect their freedom to do it themselves.

Americans voted for hope and change in the last presidential election, and now they plan to do less hoping and more changing — they’ve tried everything else.