regress - to return to an earlier and usually worse or less developed condition or state
(Merriam-Webster Dictionary, www.meriram-webster.com)
While those on the left politically tend to avoid any connection with the word “socialist’ or “Marxist,” they consider it safer to define themselves as “progressive.” But I would assert that the actions of the left under the Obama administration these last five years have not caused our nation to progress but to regress.
Very effective at campaigning with a carefully prepared teleprompter script, President Obama has yet to show that he has any real capability as a manager. The chief executive of the biggest bureaucracy in the world cannot manage, and this has caused our country to regress internally as well as in the eyes of the world.
Of course the regression of our country can’t all be blamed on the Obama administration. In some respects it is an acceleration of a process that has been going on for the last 60 to 100 years.
The propagandists on the left have done a very good job of convincing many Americans that our greatest enemy is a rich “ruling class” that controls everything that goes on (unless the rich are rich leftists, of course). And now those whose minds are in their grasp have been taught to hate Tea party activists even more, all because they advocate responsible government that answers to the people.
It had to have been taking place for a long time to get us to the point where a majority of voters in 2008 didn’t seem to have a problem electing and re-electing a President who openly espoused his socialist belief system with words such as the following to Joe the Plumber: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody...” Now we are five years into this belief system being institutionalized in our government.
As we have allowed government to grow into a Leviathan consuming more and more of our lives, it has now almost completely regressed into the hands of those whose rhetoric resembles those of Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, written in 1875: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
While perhaps a noble sounding goal, history has shown us time and time again that adherents to this slogan end up with a government that exists to extract as much wealth as it can from those who earn it in order to give it to those who cannot, as well as to more and more who can but will not work for it.
Instead of a free market system which operates according to the profit motive, incentives for making money regress due to taxation policies and increasing regulations. Not only that, but a government trying to meet everyone’s needs sets up incentives for people to not be productive citizens, regressing into those who just live off of what the government provides.
This is actually one of the key reasons ObamaCare needs to be stopped. The proponents of ObamaCare have publicly said you can keep your current health insurance, but behind the scenes proclaim their desire for the single-payer system of socialized medicine. Understand that single-payer is not just nationalized health
insurance, it is a fully government-run health care
industry.
Instead of health savings accounts, which promote individual responsibility in seeking the health care we need, we are regressing to increasingly higher insurance premiums paying for more and more “free” services. Instead of a system where competition drives prices down while rewarding quality service, we are regressing to “one size fits all” insurance, which takes away incentives for quality and lower costs.
The botched job done with the ObamaCare website on its recent debut is a symptom of the regression taking place. On October 27, Louisiana Governor Jindal had this to say on Fox News Sunday:
“I think this is symptomatic of a...liberal ideology that believes government should be running our health care....Once the government gets so vast, I would argue it’s almost inevitable that you’re going to have these kinds of failures, these kinds of mistakes, these kinds of problems. That’s why we as Republicans don’t think it makes sense to let the bureaucrats in Washington decide how we get our health care.”
If we want Congress to do anything about our regressing nation while Obama is President and Harry Reid is Senate majority leader, we are going to have to elect and support legislators who are willing to stand firm on principled positions. We need to elect or re-elect those Senators and Representatives who insist the President negotiate and refuse his monarchical demands.
