America
The Good
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America is one of the few places on earth where you can practice any religion you want (assuming that it doesnt require you to break laws), protest, hate the government and organize against its principles in short, it is one of the few places you can enjoy freedom.
But the most amazing thing of all about America is the free market. The beauty of the free market is opportunity the reason so many people immigrated to America in the first place. The opportunity to be productive and earn vast amounts of wealth in a system that places ones own personal interests directly in line with the interests of society is the reason that America is strong and the reason that America is one of the most moral societies in the history of humanity.
The founding leaders of America considered what they perceived as wrong with the world (arbitrary power - the inability of citizens to follow their own course free of government intervention, and lack of basic inalienable human rights) and they set out to create a government that was forced to serve the people, because they knew that that was the only way to keep the government in check. The founding leaders of America understood human nature well. They understood that man will always, instinctually, seek out what is in his best interest. The result of this realization about the fundamental nature of human beings is the establishment of capitalism which hones that drive into productivity of citizens, an adversarial legal structure which uses the greed of lawyers to ensure that cases are well fought, and an adversarial government structure which uses the hunger that politicians have for power to ensure that none of them get too much of it. When you step back and look the American system you really see how it takes into account human nature and exploits it in almost every possible way to ensure that freedom (and therefore prosperity) remains the underlying theme.
The Bad
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The founding leaders of America were so busy worrying about the tyranny of government that they didnt foresee the tyranny of the majority as well as they might have. The fundamental problem with America is the extent to which we are not free the extent to which we have invited our own government to relieve us of the burden of the pursuit of success so as not to risk failure.
The single biggest flaw in our current social structure, in my opinion, is our unfair income tax system a system which rewards failure and penalizes success - a system that tells the ones of us who want government help the most that they shouldnt have to pay for it a system that encourages the majority to vote away the property rights of the minority. Our tax structure is fundamentally immoral. It is legislated theft, and it undermines the principles and fabric upon which America was founded. The solution is deceptively simple - everyone pays for their fair share of the government. Everyone pulls the weight of the government equally. Then you wont have one group lobbying to increase the weight of the government, because theyll still have to pull their share of it.
The are other problems with America. Our legal structure is in bad need of repair for reasons that its originators couldnt possibly have imagined. Reasons like the fact that the common juror has no idea how much money corporations operate on. But most of these other problems are not rooted in our basic structure or philosophy, theyre simply irritations that, even though they cause much damage, can be solved with a little forward thinking.
The root of the problems with our political structure points to a social problem, which is the real cancer of American society - our belief in government.
Many Americans believe in government as a solution to all problems. They believe, fundamentally, at even a subconscious level, that the government is capable of solving all social problems if it simply passes the right laws and mandates the right solution. These same people do not understand the system upon which their country was founded. They dont understand the adversarial legal system, barely understand the adversarial government system, and dont even come close to understanding the free market.
Many Americans forget that government is force - that when you vote people into the government that will take money from the rich and give it to the poor, that you have effectively advocated theft. If the cause is just, if people are really best helped through handouts (which is so often not the case), then the moral way to help those people is by volunteering your own money not by forcing other people to volunteer theirs.
So my criticism of the modern American system is aimed at government meddling with the freedom of its citizens, even at the insistence of some of its citizens. The American system was founded on inalienable rights, rights that cannot be voted away America would do well to remember that.
Conclusion
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I believe that America is headed for trouble. I believe that our current climate of belief in government will result in greater and greater loss of freedom, greater inequality, and an overall greater lack of productivity and competition in the American economy until something seriously breaks. Everything seems to be pointed in that direction as political attitudes do not change despite the evidence. Many American politicians promote government involvement, get their wish, spend lots of money, and make the problem worse then they cite a lack of money as the reason for failure (never the idea to begin with) and start over again with more money. The end result is a cycle of increasing government spending, increasing taxes, and decreasing economic stability and prosperity. I believe, given the evidence, that the problem will have to be large and obvious before the social climate in America changes and we get an attempt at a solution. The thing I fear the most is what that attempt will be.
America is a great place founded imperfectly on a great set of ideals. Many of us have strayed from those ideals, but they are not lost and they continue to give us the prosperity that we still enjoy. The challenge for America is to get back to those principles and understand them fully.
(///M you left a loophole for me to talk about something other than foreign policy. I figured I'd take it, but let me know if you think this is outside the scope of this thread. I intend to post a follow-up to this that ties these concepts into our foreign policy later.)
) can change that. After he serves his term, yet another Republican better be elected in 2008.
