09-23-2009
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Subject: Community Service Is Not What Made America Great
I discovered an excellent article by C. Edmund Wright at American
Thinker, entitled "Community Service Is Not What Made America
Great, which I would encourage everyone to read. Here
are a few excerpts:
"Dare we say that the planners of the 9-11 attacks understand more
about the greatness of America than our current President and some
in Congress?
[T]he 9-11 attacks had nothing to do with Medicare, the Junior
League or Earth Day or working in a soup kitchen, let alone
registering voters or pushing for sub prime lending on behalf
of ACORN.
The 9-11 masterminds understood what it is that makes America
great, and it was precisely some obvious icons of that greatness
they attacked. It is our government-limiting Constitution --
creating an environment conducive to free enterprise, innovation,
opportunity and military might, used for the good of all freedom
loving peoples -- that has made America great.
In short, it is our freedom.
In stark contrast to our president and others, I say what we need
now is a lot of self-interested financially motivated pursuits
taking place. On the anniversary week of 9-11, it's a good time
to champion that which the terrorists were trying to destroy
-- that which makes America great. And for the record, they were
not trying to destroy candle light vigils for death row inmates
or the "Adopt a Highway" program.
All of that is fine, but they were trying to destroy free economies
and opportunity. They were trying to destroy the brain trust of a
military whose history is that of conquering dictators and asking
only enough real estate in return to bury their dead. They were
trying to destroy our way of life. The American way of life. You
know, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
They were trying to destroy what made us who we were before Obama
came to save us from our own greatness. They did not succeed.
But if we can't tell the truth about what it is that made this
country great, then we will do it to ourselves.
Fantastic! Given all the problems we are dealing with these days, it
is nice to be reminded of the underlying greatness of the USA which
we are struggling to preserve—and I cannot thank Mr. Wright
enough for having done this.
Mr. Wright also make the following astute observation:
The point here is not that volunteering is bad. It is good. So
is charitable giving. True community service -- not agitating or
"organizing" -- is good also. But you cannot donate or serve or
volunteer in a vacuum. In fact, you cannot really provide
any "net volunteering" or "net giving" until you have taken care
of all of your obligations first. So by definition, pursuits
that enable you to "give back" are superior to the act of giving
back.
Exactly! It is self-interested, self-responsible adults that
get things accomplished and have created the great wealth and standard
of living that we enjoy in this country. And you have to create
something, whether it be money or free time, before you can
"redistribute" or "volunteer" any surplus to causes that reach
beyond the requirements of one's own life. This is the simple fact
that almost everyone in government fails to understand—or
willfully ignores.
Capitalism—free enterprise—is an economic system of
creation. It allows wealth to be accumulated and leveraged over time,
allowing us to continually improve our standing, generation after
generation. It is a system that works precisely because it rewards
the virtues of productivity, effort, intelligence and risk-taking.
In contrast, socialism is a system of redistribution only. It does
not understand or acknowledge the creative process. It sees our
standard of living as a fixed pie, simply to be recut in a "fairer"
manner so that all share equally. It penalizes the very virtues
that capitalism rewards, and because of this, it ultimately becomes
an engine of destruction as it drives out the good. And that is why
Mr. Wright warns that, unchecked, the current administration may yet
achieve what the terrorists were unable to do.
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