Living History

Sometimes you have a sense that you're living history -- that you're progressing down one of those timelines you see published in textbooks demonstrating what happened when, giving the reader an understanding of cause and effect.

You're sitting in your high school economics classroom when President Reagan is shot. You're a newlywed, home alone, when the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates. You're balancing a mattress on top your van driving home from the furniture store when Diana is killed in Paris. You're getting the kids ready for school when the World Trade Center collapses.

Right now I have a sense that I am living through something vaguely familiar from another time and place -- that history is, at last, repeating itself, as it always does.

Maybe I've watched too many documentaries over my lifetime, but in my mind's eye I see sepia toned footage from the Weimar Republic, a woman pushing a wheelbarrow full of cash down the street to buy a loaf of bread. Is this the Bolshevik Revolution, with the government nationalizing banks and businesses, or the French Revolution, with peasants demanding that CEOs line up at guillotines?

But we have no czars and no aristocracy. We are all peasants! Every American is free to parlay his time and talents into money and position, if that is what he wants. And money and position are relative anyway. What it takes to make me happy is not what it takes to make anyone else happy.

Let me figure out what happiness means to me and how I can attain it. I'll let the government know if someone or something is standing in my way, blocking my path, but another person's success is not a threat to me, while government intervention is.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- those are proper government concerns, but they are not given to us by government -- they come from the creator, as Thomas Jefferson said. The government cannot give life, liberty, happiness or anything else -- it can only take. If it isn't taking from you, then it's taking from someone else.

We do not have reason to fear or despise a person who seems to have more than we do (and very often that is only an illusion). We do have reason to fear a government that is powerful enough to decide that we have too much and to take from us what we have earned.