The Pursuit of Happiness

While listening to NPR during my morning commute there was an article regarding today's Iowa caucus. During the article, Hillary Clinton had a sound bite the went like this:

"I wake up each day thinking about how Government can help people better their lives."

Most modern-day liberals believe this and pursue this ideal with a passion. This sounds great, but let's dig a bit deeper into this. It is this attitude that brings health care to everyone, childcare for everyone, social security and essentially cradle to grave coverage of anything a human can need or want provided for by the government. It is the ideal that protects us from ourselves such as gun control and environmentalism. It is this ideal that brings us tax regulations that acts to control our behavior such as tax breaks if are this type of person, marry and have x number of kids, etc.

In a nutshell, it is this ideal that acts to guarantee our happiness. Of course, 'happiness' is not defined by us individuals but what these politicians think will make us happy.

It is this public policy that brought us Communism, Marxism, Socialism, and yes, the Third Reich. It is this public policy that brings the world each and every tin-pot dictator because each one believes he knows best what the people will need to make them happy. It was this same exact attitude of politicians that led this great country to our American Revolution and caused the phrase

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

to be written into the Declaration of Independence.

This phrase tells us that while there is no guarantee of happiness, you have the unalienable right to pursue it in any way that doesn't impede others from doing the same. Each person derives happiness in his/her own way that cannot be government defined. This is the American ideal that has made this country great and is the cornerstone of America's democracy.

This is why modern-day Liberals are so wrong, because they believe government can provide a guarantee of happiness, when in fact, they actually impede our individual rights to pursue it. John F. Kennedy had it exactly right when he said:

"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country"

What happened to the democratic party that now has them essentially saying:

"Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what can your country do for you"