Dr. Benjamin Carson

Doctor Benjamin Carson

I wonder how many people there are that might have appreciated as much as I did the talk given by Pediatric Neurosurgeon Doctor Benjamin Carson at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, 2/7/13.  Much of the information he was presenting was what I wrote in some of my Facebook posts.

Doctor Carson was pointing out the importance of what it means for people to be self reliant and the deteriorating affect it has on a republic for the populace to becoming more and more dependent on the government to take care of them - Dr. Benjamin  Carson.  He cited how what is happening in this country today is like what happened to Rome before it failed as a republic and dictatorial rule began.  I pointed out in previous articles that populist tactics by power hungry people seeking public office brought about the demise of every republic that ever came into existence – usually in not much more than about 200 years.  Has the Republic of the United States lived beyond its life expectancy?  Benjamin Franklin, when our Constitution was finalized in 1787, said, “We’ve given you a republic.  Now it’s up to you to keep it.”  Historian Alexis de Tocqueville said, “Republics endure till people discover they were being bribed with their own money.”

Note what the Roman Statesman Marcus Cicero said in 55 BC.  Those words could well be applied to what is happening in the United States today:

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome becomes bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."

 About the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.  From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate that promises the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by dictatorship.  The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years.”

It could be that we’re living in a country with an incurable terminal illness infested with gimmeites.  Independent people can’t be subjugated.  People living in a state of dependency can. 

47% of the populace pay no income taxes and believe they face no consequences for every reckless entitlement this administration wants to bestow on them.  I’m not talking about Social Security, Medicare and a reasonable amount of time to be providing unemployment insurance before it disincentivizes people from looking for work.  These are essential services and the recipients did pay into them to some degree.  But should the Government have had to pay over two million dollars to provide people with cell phones or provide Sandra Fluke with daily supplies of contraceptives?  Where do entitlements end and personal responsibility begin?  Congress wanted to require people who were collecting unemployment insurance to be showing that they’re looking for work.  President Obama squelched that.  There was a time when that was a requirement.

Anyone who thinks that there aren’t some people choosing to collect unemployment insurance rather than finding work should read an interesting article that appeared in the 8/10/10 issue of the Wall Street Journal - Firms struggle to hire.   The paper, appearing never to have been opened, was left on a little round coffee table for two that I sat at in a shop in Frankfurt Airport where I stopped while waiting for my flight back to Newark.  The article I opened up to couldn’t have come into my possession at a more convenient time.  I was just doing a study of how many people there were that anxiously wanted to get back to work and how many were content to just collect UI.  I personally knew of two such people.  One is a friend who is now working.  He didn’t look for work until his insurance ran out.  Another is a friend of a friend - a school teacher who lost her job when her school shut down.  Asked by my friend what she was going to do now, she responded, “Not to worry; I have 99 weeks before I’ll worry about that.”