by Mark Luedtke

Created on: April 27, 2008   Last Updated: May 09, 2008

John Stossel's essay titled "The Sky's Not Falling" highlights the hyperbole regarding the subprime mortgage and credit "crises" politicians and talking heads are using to scare the people into giving government more power. But the very problems Stossel points out with ever-growing government threaten to make the sky fall. I can name 3 existential threats we face that are the direct result of the burden of big-government.

Thanks to out of control entitlements, government has created the looming debt crisis, putting us $58 trillion in debt - a debt we can never pay. Comptroller General David Walker resigned his job in frustration over government's inaction on this problem. Unless we dramatically reduce the size and scope of government, this debt will cause our creditors to stop lending our government money. When that happens, we could collapse as quickly, and harder, than the Soviet Union. Many say that's impossible, but almost nobody predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union either. And the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Government has systematically destroyed our schools so that 17 of the nation's 50 largest school districts graduate less than half of their students on time. We cannot stay competitive in the world market with an uneducated work force. Of course, it takes more than the destruction of schools to make student performance that bad. It takes the destruction of the institution of the family as well. Government isn't satisfied with merely destroying the institutions of family and neighborhood schools, government is also destroying the neighborhood church by usurping the role of faith and religion. Systematically undermining the the principles of freedom, self-reliance, and individual responsibility adds to the problem.

We are losing the new Cold War of Terror being waged against us by China and Russia. We often credit Ronald Reagan with winning the first Cold War, but as accurate as that acknowledgement is, it's also dangerous. It implies that government, led by Ronald Reagan, won the Cold War, but that's false. Ronald Reagan reduced the burden of government by dramatically cutting taxes, reforming the tax code, and cutting non-military discretionary spending and deregulating. Ronald Reagan dramatically reduced the burden of government on Americans, and American entrepreneurs and workers responded by out-producing the Soviets.

Dramatically reducing the burden of government, unleashing the power of free markets and free people, won the Cold War.

China and Russia learned that lesson well, but we failed to learn it. China and Russia responded by adopting free market reforms to unleash the power of their own people. But George Bush, Republicans, and Democrats responded by doubling the size and therefore the burden of government on the American people. We're losing this new Cold War of Terror because our enemies have adopted the strategy that we used to win the Cold War, and we've adopted the strategy used by the Soviets, crushing our own people under the burden of government, to lose
the Cold War. Many consider it inevitable that China will surpass the US, but it's not. It's
simply a consequence of the burden of big-government.

Unless we wrestle control of our government back from the government aristocrats who rule us as ineffectively as feudal lords, we will be surpassed by China and likely doomed to a collapse and break-up similar to the Soviet Union's. Freedom and free markets are the solution to our problems. As Stossel says at the end of his essay, "Freedom, not control, is the ticket to success."

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