Are We the Victims?

Another 4th of July has passed, and we celebrated our freedom in any manner we wished to – that is our right – but as a republic, how are we doing?

We have a $1.6 trillion annual deficit, and some want to go deeper in a manner of spending our way out of debt. We now have 50 million citizens on food stamps, many receive unemployment benefits, and more and more people need, or want, a handout from the government.  

What’s worse is that more and more people expect a handout from the government these days. We don’t see a lot of abuse in Wyoming, but nationally there many families that don’t know any other life but living off the government.  

We have watched the European countries go broke one after another, to the extent where now they’re affecting the world’s price of precious metals, and even our stock markets. Remember – we’re in a global market these days. Europe’s huge public employee unions, low worker productivity and long vacations away from work have caused their countries much harm. However, other countries keep bailing them out. Do they ever expect to be paid back, or is their reason behind keeping them afloat to avoid taking the solvent countries down along with those that are broke?

Here in the America, some say we’re lucky because if we need money our government just prints more. Well, the money we now owe to China or some other country is the result of printing all that money, and these countries really don’t have America’s best interest at heart.

In Wyoming we really are the victims of both our government and others. Maybe we as a state ought to loan some countries some money. Some say our state legislators are conservative to a fault. So what – we have money in the bank, and most of us like it that way.  

Where we’re really victimized is by the regulations that are imposed on us by our national government. There is enough there to take up numerous columns in this publication, but the biggest culprit is the Endangered Species Act. Between the grizzly bear, wolf and sage grouse, they have us held hostage. The sage grouse isn’t even on the list – it’s just knocking on the door, and look at all the trouble it’s causing us.  

The writers of the original endangered species bill would not recognize much of it today. Sure, it has the same language, but different interpretations from all the legal opinions. If you think about it, the law may be one of the sage grouse’s biggest enemies in the long run. We may love them to death trying to protect them.  

With politics being as they are today, one wonders if our current Congress could write a Constitution or Declaration of Independence as our forefathers did. True, our founding fathers didn’t have the baggage of our current Congress, but they also didn’t have the benefit of experience, but they certainly had a vision, didn’t they? Now even that is cloudy. “Whoever doesn’t know the past must have little understanding of the present, and no vision of the future.”

Dennis