The Daily Plunge

What's more likely? This makeshift truck boat is headed from Cuba to the U.S. to escape an oppressive regime, or it's headed from the U.S. to Cuba with refugees clamoring for universal health care?

What motivates someone to build a boat out of a Cadillac and brave 90 miles of open ocean to leave Cuba for America’s shores? What motivates someone to risk life and limb and trek across vast desert wastes to leave Mexico and other Central American countries for America?

On the other hand, what motivates America’s citizens to stay put, excepting crazies like Lee Harvey Oswald, and spend all their time on Facebook? Could it have something to do with American exceptionalism, driven by its foundations in liberty and freedom?

The simple fact that people the world over are willing to die to get to America tells me all I need to know about which system is best. America, in short, is fantastic. But it’s not fantastic because our government has forced some utopian notion of equality on its citizens or provided “rights” like health care, housing and a comfortable standard of living. Our comfortable standard of living exists because government never provided it in the first place.

America was founded on the notion that governments are instituted to protect our rights to pursue such things with very little or no government intervention. In fact, government intervention was seen as a threat to liberty and freedom. This philosophy is the only sane and logical approach to good government in an imperfect world. The evidence that this is true is overwhelming.

The evidence that a giant centralized government that meddles in and plans every aspect of a citizen’s life is destructive is also overwhelming. While the likes of Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and Danny Glover return from worker paradises like Cuba and Venezuela with glowing reports of utopian equality, the citizens of those nations languish in widespread poverty and oppression.

No one who believes in American exceptionalism believes America is perfect, but America is the closest model to perfection we have and are likely to have. Again, this is not because our government has made everything perfectly safe and wonderful for each and every citizen; it’s because a person free to pursue happiness is more likely to find it on their own than through someone a thousand miles away who thinks they know what’s best for them.

The left in America, meanwhile, is constantly advocating for “social justice,” and other euphemisms to control the individual. In practice, this supposed social justice leads to a concentration of wealth and power in the ruling class. Those of us who believe the world is imperfect and that there’s no such thing as Utopia, other than the small town in Texas of that name, understand how dangerous it is to cede our responsibilities, and ultimately our liberties, to a powerful minority.

Just ask any Cuban who’s not with one of their Party handlers if they’ve found Utopia. Sure, they have “free” health care and I’m sure gun violence is practically non-existent, but at what price? I don’t know about you, but I’m much more willing to take my chances in a free society and all the risks that come with it than to be controlled within an inch of my life by the state.

I have a feeling that most people agree with me since I don’t see a lot of people in Miami building makeshift boats to escape America and take advantage of Cuba’s health care system and high “literacy” rates. What I see instead are Canadians coming to America for health care because they have to wait months, if not years, for treatment.

Nor do America’s progressives head for the supposedly greener pastures in more “progressive” nations. Maybe that’s because deep down they understand that America is not the racist, imperialistic devil they’ve been taught it is, but actually is the land of opportunity. I suppose progressives don’t understand that our opportunity is, as the founders put it, derived from our Creator and not a central planning authority, a.k.a., the Federal government. They must think it appeared out of thin air.

When a society’s philosophy shifts from “endowed by the Creator” to “endowed by a centralized bureaucracy,” you can kiss freedom goodbye. Even atheists who understand human nature and have an inkling of history know that it’s far better to be endowed by what they consider to be a mere sociological illusion than it is by their fellow man, who has a long and storied history of doing everything he can to oppress and control others to benefit himself.

Why else do they riot in Greece when their benefits are going to be cut so that the government remains at least nominally solvent? Why else do America’s senior citizens, supported by the AARP, fight tooth and claw for the unsustainable entitlements that will bathe their descendents in debt and, ultimately, economic calamity?

Do they really care about their fellow citizens, particularly those who will follow them? They can cry and whine about the “children” all day long, but until they make actual sacrifices for said “children” you can bet that the “children” are being used as human shields to ensure they get all the goodies the taxpayer can provide them.

America’s unfunded liabilities – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – currently stand at more than $110 trillion. That’s a “t” followed by “rillion,” and it’s not a typo. That works out to about $350,000 for every man, woman and child in America. Who’s going to pay for that? Will it be the senior citizens currently receiving benefits, or will it be Yours Truly and my children and grandchildren?

Tell a senior citizen that their benefits will need to be cut to ease the burden on future generations and observe the wrath that follows. So, if you hear a senior citizen say something weepy about the “children” and how we have to secure health care or whatnot for them, know that they’re really looking out for themselves. You can safely substitute “me” for “children” whenever you hear a Democrat defend the latest unsustainable program, as in, “We’re doing this for [me].”

Something tells me that future generations will be building rafts out of used compact fluorescent light bulbs and heading for China. If we continue on this “progressive” path, America will no longer be that “city upon a hill” that brought the oppressed to its shores.

Imagine if America’s founding had been based on “social justice” and providing creature comforts (health care, unemployment insurance, etc., etc.), rather than the individual’s freedom to pursue those things through their own ingenuity and industry. If based on the former, would we have the same standard of living we do now? What would the world look like now if America had been founded as a nanny state? I’m not sure, but there’s a good chance we’d all be speaking German.