Since we are (at least nominally) a free people, the primary responsibilities of our government should be to protect us from serious external and internal threats. Our federal government -- as well as those of some states and cities -- is no longer doing that because those who control it are more interested in power and personal gain. Nearly 6 million people have come across our southern border illegally since Joe Biden took office two years ago. Not only does this administration's nonexistent border enforcement cost Americans more than $150 billion a year, it allows illegal drugs like fentanyl to pour into our country. 60% of all fake prescription pills last year contained fentanyl - a 50% increase in just one year. Two-thirds of all overdose deaths (more than 100,000 last year) were fentanyl-related, and fentanyl overdoses are now the leading cause of death in Americans aged 18-49.
Retail theft is a huge problem across the country, costing businesses more than $94 billion in 2021. How does California's legislature address it? By passing laws that resulted in the "de facto" legalization of shoplifting. Lawlessness is rampant in the Golden State generally, which now also has the largest homeless population in the country, complete with drug use and dirty needles, urination and piles of human feces in the streets of its major cities, and the infectious diseases that accompany lack of cleanliness. Other states are making yeoman efforts to increase crime. New York abolished cash bail for most crimes in 2019; the resulting increase in repeat offenses -- including violent crimes -- is unsurprising. And yet Illinois is trying to do the same thing. (The Illinois Supreme Court recently paused the bail elimination aspect of the 2022 criminal reform law.) Despite the utter failure of government to perform its most basic tasks, those in it often grow fabulously wealthy. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is perhaps the best-known example. Her net worth has been estimated at approaching $200 million -- impressive, given a $220,000 annual salary. Much of her wealth is attributable to investments by her husband Paul, who has managed to successfully invest over the years in companies affected by congressional laws, regulations and subsidies.
President Joe Biden once described himself as "one of the poorest men in Congress." He's made up for it since. He and his wife reported income of $15 million between 2017 and 2019.
And this is definitely a bipartisan phenomenon. Ousted Republican Rep. Liz Cheney (WY) entered Congress in 2017 with a net worth of $7 million and left this week with a reported net worth of between $10 million and $44 million. The same people making huge sums of money for themselves are profligate and criminally wasteful with ours. Congress now routinely passes spending bills that rack up trillions of dollars in expenditures, including hundreds of billions given to foreign countries. These bills are thousands of pages long, with only hours allowed to read them -- which means that representatives and senators who vote to pass them haven't even read them. In any other profession, that would be actionable malpractice. We have tolerated the profligacy, the waste, the irresponsibility, the greed for too long because -- at the very least -- we were permitted to speak our minds, to live our lives, to run our businesses and raise our families as we saw fit. Increasingly, we are being thwarted in our ability to do that. "Activists" -- many with evident mental illnesses -- are indoctrinating our children in schools with corrosive politics and warped sexual ideologies. Experimental drugs like the mRNA COVID-19 injections are forced on us, and we are prevented from knowing the truth about the risks they pose to our health and that of our children.
We are regularly lied to, and our government conspires with major corporations to censor those who try to tell the public the truth. Many of us already suspected this, but the "TwitterGate" files being released every few days by the company's new owner, Elon Musk, provide plenty of proof. COVID-19 lockdowns destroyed countless small businesses. New regulations (both federal and state) created in the name of "climate change" threaten entire industries. These are being imposed not to protect the population but to cripple us; to extract wealth and redistribute it according to collectivist philosophies; to destroy the prosperity that has created the middle and upper-middle classes -- as well as the liberty that prosperity strengthens; and to enslave the majority of humans on the planet to a handful of self-appointed overlords whose resulting wealth will be unimaginable -- and unshared.
Our government should be fighting against (all these threats, and others. Instead, it is facilitating them.
Our Declaration of Independence contains language justifying the decisions of the Founders to throw off the yoke of England and establish ourselves as an independent nation. A just and proper government, the Declaration's drafters wrote, should secure the inalienable rights of the people, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. "Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends," they continued, "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness ... When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Our ever-expanding government commits abuse after abuse and usurps our rights at every opportunity. It is dancing perilously close to the point of becoming the sort that the Declaration of Independence insisted is our right -- and duty -- to "throw off."