While I’m sure a Paul Ryan budget would be much better than a Barack Obama budget, Paul Ryan, in his noble efforts to get a budget all sides can agree on, showed us that he holds to the notion that government needs to grow. What we need instead of debating how fast government grows, is an opposition movement to big government that says we must begin the wholesale closing of executive branch departments and lessen the influence of Washington, D.C. on our localities, our states, and our lives.
This requires a two-front approach. Not only do we need to work to get an ever-increasing number of like-minded people representing us in Washington, we need to begin to work more closely with our state legislators to get them to join with other states in proposing and passing Constitutional amendments that reduce the power of the federal bureaucracy on our lives. Bypassing an intransigent Congress, a convention of states would bring representatives of at least 2/3 of the states’ legislators together to vote for specific Amendments that could become a part of the Constitution after ¾ of the states vote for it.
As the implementation of ObamaCare shows us on a daily basis, big-government programs are subject to massive inefficiencies, massive overspending, massive taxation, and massive corruption. And we can thank ObamaCare for bringing about the growth of a movement among young people to oppose government overreach.
While the anti-war and counterculture movements of the 1960s had many negative consequences, including the growth of Marxist organizations and the mainstreaming of the drug culture into society, those movements grew from the innate desire of all of humanity to be free - free from bondage, free from oppressive government, free from someone dictating what their every thought and every action should be. It is that innate desire that is now motivating young people to oppose ObamaCare.
Back then, voters reacted to the extreme reach of the government through President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs by putting a Republican, Nixon, in office in 1968. But the counterculture movement became galvanized in their opposition to the "system," with their enemy figureheads becoming Nixon in the White House and Ronald Reagan the California governor. They never saw that what Reagan really represented was opposition to the "system” as well - the system of bloated, intrusive government.
So they became co-opted by Big Brother and climbed on board the movement to trust the government to everything. Somehow they didn’t realize that the thing they came to support - massive growth of government - was in direct opposition to the thing that motivated them to become counterculture, antiwar, and anti-system.
In their opposition to the war and the draft, they were against a governmental mechanism that depended upon exploiting young adults to prosecute a war that they felt was not in the interest of the American people.
Similarly now, in ObamaCare, we see that young adults are opposing it because they are realizing that they are being exploited to prop up a very expensive and very expansive system of government-run health care .
As I quickly approach "senior citizen" age, I do not want my health care to be dependent upon a system that requires a massive taxation of young adults. Once again, young people are being asked to be "cannon fodder" in a "war" to make everyone become dependent on Big Brother through the "military-industrial complex" of ObamaCare. Our freedom is at stake here, folks.
Rolf Yungclas is a recently retired newspaper editor from southwest Kansas who has been speaking out on the issues of the day in newspapers and online for over 15 years
