Mac-Coleman

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.