Rodent Regatta

My diminished patriotism this July 4th

By Craig J. Cantoni

This former Army captain recently buried his W.W.II veteran father in a veteran’s cemetery. Although he had died a patriot, my father’s patriotism had diminished considerably over the years. Regrettably, his son feels the same way.

The United States was founded on the noble idea of limited government and individual rights. That was something to feel patriotic about and even die for.

Now the nation is operating on the ignoble notion of limitless government and group rights. That is not something to feel patriotic about and die for.

When my father was born, taxes were about a third of today’s. As a result, his poor immigrant parents could keep most of the fruits of their labor from marauding government agents, unlike the old country, where socialists considered the fruits of one’s labor to belong to the collective. My dad and my grandparents felt patriotic about that.

They also felt patriotic over the fact that even low-income, working-class people like themselves could build a sizable retirement nest egg over their working lives if they saved money, lived below their means, and invested sweat equity in their very modest homes. They were proud of not becoming a burden on society or on their families in their old age, and they wanted to leave their hard-earned money to their families when they died.

How times have changed! It is very difficult to feel patriotic when my father had to pay an estate attorney to put his money in trust, where the money would be kept from the greedy claws of the tax man, who would otherwise give it to other citizens who have no right to it and are nothing but common thieves.

Now my aging mother is dealing with the same issue. She was raised in a four-flat by a poor aunt who was married to a waiter. The aunt had the foresight to invest in blue chip stocks and to reinvest the dividends in more stock. Those investments have ballooned over the decades to a very sizable nest egg, which makes the return on socialized Social Security look like the bad deal that all socialism is.

Instead of spending the money on a new house, fancy cars, exotic vacations and frequent trips to the casino, my mom wants to do only one thing with it: pass it on to my son. But the government, our government, wants to take a big chunk of it for other people who have no right to it. Where does a supposedly free society get the moral authority to tell a grandmother what she can give to her grandson? Why is that anyone else’s business?

One of the politicians who believes in government theft, Dick Gephardt, owns commercial real estate a few blocks from the humble bungalow that my mom has lived in for over a half-century. He calls himself a patriot. I call him a thief.

Politicians of his ilk—and most Democrats and Republicans are like him—no longer represent people who work hard and save money. Instead, they use the tax code to punish frugality and to reward those who spend every penny they earn and who clamor for ever-increasing entitlements to compensate for their spendthrift ways.

A majority of Americans now get more back in entitlements and government services than they pay in taxes. That is a nice way of saying that they are mooching off of other people. Many of them call themselves patriots but do not pay enough federal income taxes to even support their share of the military.

The next time you sing the National Anthem at a sporting event or recite the Pledge of Allegiance at a public meeting, look around at your fellow citizens. Brimming with patriotism, half of them use the power of the government to take their neighbor’s money.

The Pledge contains the words, ”and to the republic for which it stands.” The words mean that the nation is supposed to be constitutional republic, not an unconstitutional democracy governed by majority rule, which is the same thing as mob rule. The words do not mean that politicians can violate the supreme law of the land for the benefit of the majority at the expense of the minority.

I certainly would not feel patriotic and sing La Marseillaise at a French soccer game, for I detest the socialism of France. Since the United States is now half-socialist, I wonder if I should sing only half of the Star Spangled Banner.

Granted, Americans are very fortunate not to have police breaking down their doors in the middle of the night—unless they are doing something that does not harm anyone else but is illegal, such as smoking pot, or, like my grandfather during Prohibition, making wine in the cellar.

And sure, we have the right to vote, a right that does not exist in much of the world. But do we really have any choices? Voting for a Republican president results in double-digit increases for the Department of Education and unconstitutional federal education standards. And having a Republican controlled congress results in a spending increase that rivals the spending increase under Lyndon Johnson. Worse, because the Supreme Court departed from its constitutional mandate long ago, there is nothing to stop the Founders’ vision of limited government from morphing into the nightmare of unlimited government.

We also have the right of free speech. Unfortunately, to fully exercise that right, I have had to become a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Arizona’s clean elections law, a law that restricts what private citizens can say before an election but gives the media carte blanche authority to say whatever it wants.

I will still put up a flag on July 4th, but with diminished patriotism.

Mr. Cantoni is an author and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.