7 February 2013 –
I just read an
article by Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and
National Review Online contributor. With sixteen hundred concise
words, he addressed the issues of gun violence and gun control, the different
lifestyles of the 53% who pay federal income tax and the 47% who don’t, the
no-win choices remaining in Iraq and Afghanistan and how they will influence
our Mideast policy—if we actually have one, that is—,and the conflicts any
banal attempt at reform of immigration policies will cause in our
communities. It was not a shotgun blast of ideas. Rather,
it was a rapid, single shot, well-aimed attack. He pretty much hit
everything he was aiming at.
I am aiming at one thing
today: the short list of the most important strategic threats to the
United States in the next thirty years. The fact that I have listed
them before simply means that nobody has done much to address them
effectively. A preface to the list must emphasize that the biggest
threats to the United States’ security and well-being are of our own
making. External threats become strategic in nature only when they
exploit our internal problems to further weaken us. Our downfall
will be our fault.
The first crisis
is that we have to increase our birth rate. We must begin to
replace ourselves and begin to repair the growing imbalance in our
demographics toward older, less productive citizens. It is going to
take a generation to help restore a balanced and sustainable population, a
population that will be able to produce enough wealth to pay for those who no
longer produce. This imbalance effects every other strategic concern
we have. We need to embrace the concept that having more children is
the only effective way to restore a powerful future to the United
States. It is a hard choice to make, especially for the generations
that have been weaned on the selfish hubris of the Baby Boomers.
The second crisis
is our massive government debt. We have to spend far less on
entitlements and other government programs not specifically authorized in the
Constitution. We are adding to the massive debt every day through
lazy deficit spending that would make a drunken sailor look like Scrooge McDuck. People
who hold debt control debtors. Those people will always hold
their own interests paramount. We could become a super Greece
instead remain a super power. Then, riots in our streets would have
just about as much effect ob our enemies as the riots in Greece are having on German banks. Not much. It is a hard choice to make to cut spending, especially
for the generations that have been weaned on the selfish hubris of the Baby
Boomers.
Control of a nation’s energy sources means control of a
nation’s economy and control of a nation’s foreign policy. We need
to exploit all existing technology and energy sources in order to no longer pay
money to governments and societies who support radicals who hate us and who want to
see us destroyed. Sending oil money to Moslem, Arab countries whose
leaders and societies use that money to attack us is strategically
stupid. We can use coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear power, and
eventually, when they are economical, other sources of renewable energy to not
only be energy independent, but to become energy exporters. The
environment can remain as it is now, cleaner than it has been ever in the
modern world. Climate change simply is not effected by human energy
consumption. We should be using more energy and not
less. It is not a sin to use energy to do what we want in this
world. The sin is to endanger our security as a nation by
creating such a convoluted energy business model that only subsidies and
imports make sense to the entrepreneur. Keep it clean and use it to
innovate, expand, and produce for all. In that is
security. It is a bold choice to make to increase energy production
and consumption in the United States, especially for the generations who have
been weaned on the narrow hubris of the Baby Boomers.
Living in the third world has taught more about sovereignty
and the survival of a nation than any history or government class I have ever
taken. To be sovereign, a nation has to, among other things, control
it borders. It must be consistent in the application of its
immigration laws, allowing only those people who can enter legally to do
so. I wonder if the United States is sovereign right
now? Modern immigration policy and practices, what makes some people
legal and some people illegal aliens, have been highly controversial since they
were first instituted in the late nineteenth century. They always
have been criticized by one group or another for being racist, unfair, poorly
implemented, or favoring one part of the economy over another by government
fiat. The choice must always be one that will best serve the
interests of United States citizens and the nation as a whole over anybody
else. These choices will always hurt some people who want to live
here. But, those people should not be our nation’s primary
concern. The vitality of the United States is our primary
concern. Our leaders must make bold choices. I wonder if
the generations who were weaned on the altruistic hubris of the Baby Boomers can
understand that sovereignty is an absolute necessity for the survival of a
nation and trying to “teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” is just a
sweet song.
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