Today my 7 year old son learned that you can’t continue to tempt fate and win every time.  Sometimes you lose, like today when he fell out of a tree and broke his wrist.  My son is like most 7 year old boys – reckless, adventurous, daredevil and laughs in the face of danger.  There is a good reason for that; he has never suffered such disastrous repercussions of his actions before today.  Prior to this accident he had a very narrow world view and saw himself at the center of the Universe and thought nothing bad could happen to him, no matter what actions he chose to take.  Now don’t get me wrong, we punish our kids for their wrong doings around the house but timeout, removing access to TV, Video Games, iPods, etc. hardly compares to fracturing a bone.  The prior punishments were temporary and lasted hours or days not weeks and months.  But this is part of the growing process for him and it will guide him on the path to thinking like a responsible adult and this won’t be the last course correction he’ll encounter.  In the Emergency Room tonight he turned to me and said “I don’t want to climb trees every again.”  This was a natural reaction to such an epic failure but I corrected his declaration and told him that if you lived in fear of getting injured you’d never experience a full life and instead he should choose his adventures wisely and prepare himself for them so he doesn’t get hurt.  When I saw that change in his daredevil attitude I thought back to a book I read and how it continues to parallel our own political and financial situation.

Ayn Rand wrote a book in 1957 called Atlas Shrugged and if you haven’t read it yet, you should do it now.  I won’t spoil it for you here but basically the plot centers around an era in America when the Government has taken over so much of private industry, implemented too much regulation and marched ever so close to Socialism that the whole economy is about to come crashing down.  As this WSJ article states, one resounding theme permeates through the book – “When profits and wealth and creativity are denigrated in society, they start to disappear – leaving everyone the poorer.”  In the book, a group of business leaders in the country make the conscious decision to ‘disappear’ and surrender to the regulation machine of the government and let America come to a grinding halt to teach it a lesson.  I wrote a post on this website last week stating that the Republicans should adopt a similar stance on the American Jobs Act (AJA) and at the time I believed this was what we needed to do politically to ensure the White House and Senate get back in Republican control in 2013.  But since that time, Obama has released a new tax plan to pay for this (instead of cutting from entitlement programs) and I must change my mind on the AJA.  Increasing taxes on Corporations and the ‘wealthy’ will not create jobs but instead that policy will push us closer to the edge of the cliff of collapse.  This is not a work of fiction we are living through so we can’t roll the dice and see what would happen if we let the ‘children’ make all the wrong decisions only to see them learn the error of their ways because the country would be destroyed in the process and contrary to the novel, America would be so crippled that it might never recover.    

We must dismiss both the AJA and the tax increases proposed this week and give reasons to the American people that they can understand (tax increases on Corporations will not incentivize them to hire people or expand in an already over regulated environment).  Then Republicans in the House should propose and vote on legislations that will improve the economy (such as the Path to Prosperity , Roadmap for America’s Future or Cut, Cap and Balance) and watch the Democrats block them in the Senate or Veto them in the White House. When Barack Obama runs on the ‘do nothing congress’ in 2012 the republicans can run on the ‘do nothing Democrats’ and let the American people decide who is right.  It should be stated that the House has already pass Cut, Cap and Balance but that bill didn’t pass in the Senate so we already have that one checked off the list.  The House should pass other smaller bills to limit regulation, limit entitlement programs and stimulate the economy through Corporate and Individual tax reform.  The American people will see these bills passed with regularity in the House only to fall on deaf ears in the Senate and then the President’s ‘do nothing congress’ meme will not resonate with most of America. 

Hopefully the American people will see the folly in Liberal policies and Keynesian Economics and say in a resounding voice in 2012 – “I don’t want to climb trees ever again.”  We had to go through Carter to get Reagan and we had to go through Obama to get……

And before you say I’m being too hard on President Obama, treating him like a child – take a look at the following photo.