Voter response to the presidential debates reveal that while foreign policy and other topics are important, fixing the economy is uppermost in their minds. This is understandable. 23 million people unemployed touches many millions of families now living in fear of perpetual unemployment and decline of their material wellbeing. Mitt Romney may well introduce new policies that will grow the economy and create new jobs, as happened under Ronald Reagan. A thriving economy, with more people paying taxes will ensure more revenue to the government and more than offsets any tax-rate reductions. Kennedy and Reagan proved this.

But these measures will only treat the symptoms of a deeper metabolic dysfunction of the body politic. And, like all quick pharmaceutical fixes, the symptoms may temporarily disappear, but the underlying disease will continue to ravish the political body. Unfortunately, the saying that the money is in the medicine and not the cure, is also true in politics. Money and power is magnified by perpetuating the causes of political dependency of the mass of the people on big socialistic government.

Just as the ‘cure is to be found in the cause’ so the cure of our economic decline should be sought in the causes of our economic collapse. On one level one can trace our present economic disease to the adoption of socialistic principles a hundred years ago during the so-called progressive era from Teddy to Franklin Roosevelt. Both parties are culpable. It is true that the progressive income tax and the Federal Reserve banking system, social security and the welfare state are all planks in the Marxist/Socialist agenda and were foreign to the letter and spirit of our Constitution; but these measures were in reality only reflections of a deeper metabolic disorder in American society.

We first strayed from the religious and  moral principles, enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and which our founding fathers established for our guidance and our prosperity, before we embarked upon the road to economic serfdom and disintegration. Trading liberty for security is never an event but always a process – often indiscernible or readily excused under exigent circumstances. Unless we experience a moral restoration, no fleeting economic quick fixes will arrest American’s slide into third world status.  That moral restoration must start with the individual.  When the individual regains moral sanity, greed will diminish, fraud will stop its march through our ranks and our sound judgment and right thinking will be regained.  May God bless America.