George Rebane

Hillsdale College is a unique and remarkable learning institution in our country.  It takes no state monies and is free to teach truth as revealed through academic study, without having to spin it according to what government likes or does not.  Hillsdale publishes Imprimis, its monthly publication of ideas that goes to 1.7 million subscribers, I am one of them.

Last month Mark Steyn, Distinguished Visiting Fellow of Journalism at the college, wrote the title article as one of the many currently ongoing attempts across the land to awaken a formerly free people now well on our way to losing our heritage and birthright.  A striking quote that should resonate with all is from a European, already resigned to his fate as a kept creature of the state – “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

In a compelling commentary Steyn outlines the five stages of the downward spiral and identifies our place on it.  In the broad sense –

Europe’s addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and a dependence on mass immigration needed to sustain it has become an existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the world.
 
And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it’s another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ’s Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that’s underway. The 44th president’s multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can’t make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it’s about 40%. In four years’ time, that number will be trending very Swede-like.

Here is the pdf of ‘Live Free or Die’.  We all need to read it before returning to our dismissive slumbers.