Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You

President Obama threw down the big-government, progressive gauntlet in yesterday’s inaugural address. This President is trying to redefine America with a collectivist narrative that empowers the government and vilifies success, ingenuity, and free enterprise.

President Obama and the Democratic Party have strayed far from the Kennedy, and even Clinton, years. His speech was a radical departure from former President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address where Kennedy emphatically declared, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Obama’s message to America and his vision forward was stated clearly at the beginning of his speech, although I think our Founding Father’s would have vehemently disagreed with him:

“But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”

-President Barack Obama – Inaugural Address, 2013

The President was right about one thing: times have changed. We have watched as President Obama has exacerbated America’s problems to historic proportions. Trillion dollar deficits for four consecutive years, hundreds of billions in stimulus that only bailed out Wall Street and the liberal elite, all while mainstream Americans suffered and were forced into foreclosure and bankruptcy.

President Obama said, “fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges.” However, we are smarter than he thinks. Historically, there is nothing new about the rapid expansion of government; there is nothing new about class warfare and increased taxes on all citizens; there is nothing new about a leader that thinks that government is the solution to all of a nation’s ailments.

To the extent President Obama is laying out, it would be new to America. However, China, the Soviet Union, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, to name a few, all tried this method to solve their problems – why don’t you ask them how it worked out? (Or at least those that still remain.)

President Obama’s address continued with:

”No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.”

America has been defined by a set of beliefs in individualism, liberty, and free enterprise. Like President Kennedy stated, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Yesterday, President Obama did not only snub the individual liberty and responsibility that President Kennedy advocated, he disregarded the unparalleled accomplishments of American entrepreneurship and innovation.

The America that our Founding Fathers envisioned is at odds with President Obama’s big-government wealth redistribution agenda, which empowers the government and diminishes the individual. Instead of talking about how we can get Americans back to work, pay down the $16 trillion in debt, and let everyone keep more of their hard-earned money, he proposes just the opposite. His idea is to increase the size of government, not the size of the workforce; his idea is to increase the debt, not cut all the unfair exemptions and tax brakes put in for his buddies; and his idea is to propose the same policies that are responsible this country’s pathetic 2% economic growth.

We must reject this paradigm shift, and we must reject the policies that have consistently bankrupted nations, restricted liberties, and impoverished citizens. This is the battle we must fight, and 2014 is right around the corner.