We Need To Remember the 3R’s

The formula for getting our nation back on course involves the three R’s

This column presents a concerned, conservative viewpoint about items of interest in our community and our lives. Focus is on items impacting your pocket book, your personal freedoms, and your rights. I hope you will read the column regularly and it occasionally influences your opinions and actions.


Last week I heard a commentator spelling out a blueprint for our nation’s voters and leaders to follow in a quest to return our nation to a moral nation, with humanitarian principles and wise economic management. The commentator emphasized that as a nation we must first get back to “basics”. Just as sound educational systems are founded in the basic three R’s, the commentator proposed that the blueprint for us to follow involves use of the “Three R’s”, …Replace, Repeal, & Restore.
Step One – Replace:
The first step which must be accomplished is to replace the people, systems, philosophies, and culture in governments which has led our nation to the brink of destruction. Those politicians and leading bureaucrats who have entrenched themselves in the halls of Washington and State legislatures across the land must first be routed out. They all share in the responsibility of decades of poor, corrupt, self serving management philosophies which now threaten the future of our nation. They exist in both parties, and must all be held accountable. The process of purging the government of these responsible, irresponsible leaders must begin this fall in the 2010 November elections, and must continue in the 2012 elections. We must clean the way for a new generation of patriotic, fiscally conservative leaders who will put the needs of the nation ahead of the desires of their own interest, their parties, or their local area and its constituents. We must have leaders who can see past the narrow vein of self serving interest, and are willing to put the good of the good old USA before anything else. We must gain control of the legislative process. The ballot is about the only constitutional right we have left….we need to use it before it too is lost.

Step Two – Repeal:
Once the transformation of our elected leadership has occurred, the roadway will be open to begin to identify and repeal all legislation which serves special interests at the expense of others, all legislation which infringes on basic constitutional rights and freedoms, all legislation which invalidates the basic concepts upon which our founding fathers designed our government, and all legislation which creates waste and unnecessary bureaucracies. This transformation should occur at both the federal and state levels. Included in this transformation would be a meaningful return to state and local rights and a diminishing of federal influences. Our national work ethic and moral character must be restored. Personal worth, contribution to the total good, and acceptance of personal responsibilities within our society must replace the “entitlement” philosophy. These new, fresh leaders must lead the way in removing all of the years of accumulated legislation which has pulled our economic and social worth into the gutter. The list of legislative acts which need removal and or rewriting goes far beyond the current issues related to the Obama administration. This purging must include all of the special deals, vote influencing programs, unnecessary regulations, unnecessary programs, and the entire structure which has steadily infringed on personal and property rights in the name of some liberal cause.

Step Three- Restore:
The final portion of this “Three R” program involves restoring America. It involves rebuilding our national framework on a new body of law rooted in the principles proclaimed in our constitution. It involves restoring our nation’s moral structure, free capitalistic economic system, belief in the rule of the majority, expectation of personal responsibility for actions, removal of a culture of welfare and entitlements instead of a culture of productivity and contribution to national worth, restoration of states rights authority over federal demands, immediately developing solutions to the illegal immigration situation and restoring the security of our borders, removal of the influences of lobbyist from the political processes, enforcement of fiscal policies that begins to reduce our national debt, install “government in the sunshine” legislation which prevents the “back room” political deals, force reinterpretation of the “interstate commerce” clause in the constitution, repeal of the costly Davis-Bacon Act and thousands of other special interest serving pieces of legislation, enacting a body of law which reaches a reasonable definition of the real needs for environmental protection, redesign of our oppressive and politically conceived income tax legislation, and many, many more elements of existing law which is restricting our industry’s ability to compete, our people to live freely and enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Once we have Washington and state governments staffed with right minded representatives they will then have the arduous task of rewriting a huge body of law which has accumulated as a product of the corruption and mismanagement of the past forty years. It will take time and hard work…but it must be done if we are to really change and revitalize our nation. The morality of a nation is reflected by the morality of its government. The reduction of the role of family, the acceptance of the fact that almost half of our nation’s children are born out of wedlock, without a father or a family to help shape their values marks the destruction of a cornerstone element of society which must be restored. We must all discontinue the practice of casually accepting this situation. We must restore a presence of religion in our government. The process must afford ALL religions equal access and presence within our governments, but should not allow the exclusion of all religions. That was not the intent of our founding fathers. They wanted to be sure our nation did not follow the course taken by England in creating a national religion, (ie. the Church of England), but they in no way intended for our nation and its leaders to ignore the presence of God. 

Rudiments- Odds and Ends Worth Mentioning:
● For your information, Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi has introduced a bill into Congress (H.R. 4759) which would give Mexico and Canada a 60 day notice that NAFTA is null and void. The bill already has 27 sponsors. NAFTA was one of the original free trade bills passed in 1993 and marked driving the first nail into the coffin of U.S. industry.
● “Beginning in two years, 78 million people will retire, discontinue paying into social security, stop paying into retirement programs, and will begin to draw social security benefits. The problem is neither Social Security nor Medicare is ready for them. The government has made explicit and implicit promises to millions of people, but has put no money aside to keep those promises. Bernie Madoff must have been studying the federal entitlement policy when he developed his infamous Ponzi scheme.” - John Goodman speaking at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar.
● Those two young lads I interviewed about their experiences of being legislative pages for a week are testament to the fact that the youth of our nation are still bright, studious, and wonderful. They and the millions like them are the real future of our nation. (This meets my requirements for saying something nice each week.)
● However, I can not pass up the opportunity to make the statement that since they have now worked for the State a full week, they are well on their way to qualifying for the DROP program.

“An act of bravery is taking the first step when you can not see the entire staircase” – Martin Luther King

Note: The opinions stated in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Hatcher Publications.