America is the land of the free and the home of the brave!  We are freedom-seekers and abhor intrusions into our privacy and liberty.  "Give me liberty or give me death!", said Patrick Henry, and a birthing nation rallied behind him! 

And yet, today things are different.

We now permit ourselves, our women and our children to be virtually strip-searched in airports.  We permit our Orwellian "Internal Revenue Service" to confiscate our PCs without a warrant so they can evaluate whether or not we have paid our proper tributes.  We have turned every employee in the financial services industry into an army of financial police who are responsible for reporting broadly defined "suspicious behavior".  We allow our nation to be one of only a few in the world to tax our citizens on earned income, regardless of where on Earth we earn it.  As of 2008, we confiscate the wealth of Americans who renounce thier citizenship, just like NAZI Germany confiscated 90% of the wealth of fleeing Jews in the times leading up to WWII.  Now, we even have a smartphone app that will allow us to turn in our neighbors to the FBI, the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, the FAA, the EPA and more!

On 9-11-01, I sat with my wife, a month after our oldest daughter was born, eating lunch in a Boston Market, and I exclaimed that this would mark the day that everything in our nation we change.  I told her on that very day, and I remember it like yesterday, that our citizens would sacrifice liberty for the perceived notion of safety.  Yet, not even I could have imagined the transformation that would occur in less than ten years.

Adolf Hitler was able to achieve the complicit sacrifice of freedoms through the use of fear and Patriotism.  Hitler even had neighbors turning in neighbors to the Gestapo for both of these reasons.  Citizens complied with the state because they feared arrest and potential death.  In addition to the use of fear, Hitler instilled NAZI German pride into his subjects.  He promised his citizens greatness, and that he would solve inflation and unemployment, and protect his country from the greatest threat at the time, communism.  In exchange for these commitments, and combined with threats for non-compliance with the state, the German people became complicit and even co-conspirators.  We conquered Hitler and crushed his evil regime.  And now we're taking some plays out of his playbook.

Today, Americans are promised solutions to unemployment.  We're promised protection from today's greatest threat, terrorism.  We're promised greatness.  We're promised the best health care in the world.  We're promised solutions to the greatest financial calamity since the Great Depression. We're fed a big plate of horrible fears and then told that government has the solutions.  In exchange for the government solving our greatest problems, we're sacrificing our freedom and our privacy.  I am not suggesting that our administration is going to begin sending US citizens to detention camps, but I am absolutely making the observation that our govenment is using the same tools as NAZI Germany to obtain compliance from you and me.

It's not completely our fault.  Every program has a great name.  Every solution sounds fantastic on the surface!  However, the "Affordable Health Care for America Act" is the act that is driving up health care costs.  The "Patriot Act" is the act that has given our government a legal right to spy on its citizens and turned every financial services employee into a money-cop.  The "Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax act of 2008" is the law that confiscates the wealth of every American who chooses to leave America, like the NAZIs did to the Jews.  We allow the Transportation "Security" Administration to intrude into our lives in the name of protection.  And now, you can even download the "Patriot App" to report your neighbors, employers, co-workers, and others of suspicious behavior.  Yikes!  Heroes.  Patriots.  Security.  Affordable.  All lies.

The titles should be the "Government takeover, IRS expansion and Expensive Health Care Act", the "Anti-privacy and traitor act", and the "Confiscation of assets act of 2008".  The TSA should stand for "Take and Search Authority".  And this new "Patriot App" should just be called the "Turn in your neighbor app".  These evolutions are frightful and pose a direct threat to our future way of life.

What made our nation great was opportunity and freedom.  We need to restore these notions into our populace.  We need to be proud of our history, our republican form of government, and our capitalist economic system.  We must reject the growth of facism and socialism in America and return to the ideals that foster prosperity.  We must not trade freedom and opportunity for safety and equality.  In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”  Unless we change course, we will lose all that we have loved about our nation.