Name:   DS Realist - Subject:   Better Off? Date:   8/22/2016 6:30:56 PM

I, for one, am not better off than 4 or even 8 years ago.  More tax dollars flowing from my paycheck and no added benefit.

Also looking at America:America was once a beacon of Liberty, a symbol of hope for the oppressed peoples of the world. Ronald Reagan, who called us a “shining city on a hill,” famously declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall.” The current squatter in the Oval Office, on the other hand, has shown nothing but sympathy toward tyrannical regimes. He stood by silently as the Iranian Green Revolution, which called for democratic reforms and more freedom, was snuffed out by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s forces, which gunned down peaceful protesters in the streets. He later enabled further tyranny by the Iranian government when he facilitated the nation’s drive for nuclear weapons, handing over $150 billion that he acknowledged would be used in part to fund terrorism against us. His feckless (I love that word) “Russian reset” showed only weakness, which Vladimir Putin took advantage of as he invaded the Crimea, Georgia, and the Ukraine. No friend to freedom he.

Authoritarian regimes disguise their brutality in many candy-coated flavors; Hitler’s National Socialism, Mussolini’s fascism, Soviet communism, China’s Maoist version of Marxism, and even the soft tyranny of European-style democratic socialism, which takes an ever greater portion of the fruits of man’s labor to achieve the purposes of the state to which the people are subjects. Yet whatever the flavor, at the core lays a poison pill that kills individual liberty, prosperity, and the entrepreneurial spirit which has elevated untold millions from abject poverty.

Just ask the people of Venezuela.