Wearing bell bottoms with two inch cuffs and platform shoes, I played the dating circuit in the 1970s. Using the phrase “dating circuit” makes it sound like I was with a new girl each weekend. Actually, I asked one girl out, she said yes, so I stuck with that one. I took my trophy girlfriend to the movies weekly and chummed her with popcorn and Pepsi to convince her she would benefit by hitching her wagon to mine. She resisted. She knew I was cursed with the delusional optimism common in ranch kids and she did not want to spend her life hearing, “it will be a boomer next year.” After seven years and with no other options, she finally married me just to get rid of me. Persistence pays.

Whoops, I rambled a little there, so I’ll get back to my point for mentioning movies. We watched a Mel Brooks movie where Mel, playing Moses, descends Mount Sinai and proclaims, “I give you the Fifteen Command…” Moses then fumbles one of the three stone tablets and it shatters on the rocky ground. The assembled Israelites were silent as a sheepish Moses stammers before loudly re-announcing, “I give you the Ten Commandments!” The crowd cheered. I tell you this because recent political events gave me an idea as to what might have been on Moses’s third tablet. Granted, it was just a movie, but you get the point. Politicians do not view the Ten Commandments as commandments at all. Instead, they are mere suggestions which can be morphed and misinterpreted to gain favor with misinformed voters; a technique the left also uses masterfully on the Constitution. I better explain.

With 92 million Americans purposely and permanently purged from the work force, President Obama recently announced his new plan to extend federal unemployment benefits for 99 weeks at a cost of 6.5 billion dollars. Resembling a Jerry Lewis sob-a-thon, major networks dutifully flooded the airwaves with winter scenes of shivering single mothers cultivating the illusion not supporting the president’s generous plan would be kicking these poor folks out into the snow. Democrats crowded to the microphones supporting the plan, while Main Street Republicans wrestled to be the first one on the compromise bandwagon. (We are $17 trillion in debt, so it is a fairly large wagon.) Let’s jump back to my opening point regarding the Ten Commandments; specifically, “thou shall not steal.”

Moses’s broken tablet must have contained verbiage either giving government a theft exemption, or nullifying the commandment if a simple majority feels entitled to your property. Reread the aforementioned sentence because its final point reveals why our founders established a republic and not a democracy. In our American constitutional republic, the primary function of government is to secure the rights of the minority; protect your property from others. Democracy is mob rule where the majority can use the power of government to redistribute the property of the minority. Are you with me?

The government does not have an extra 6.5 billion dollars buried in a coffee can in the back yard, so to fund this give-away it must dump the debt on a generation not yet conceived. If you and I have not earned the money, nor have the self-discipline to feed, clothe and house ourselves, how can we possibly expect our descendants to care for themselves plus pay for our frivolous generosity. The Mel Brooks movie was a satire; it was make-believe. There was no third tablet and theft is theft, even when the government steals.

If the government did have an extra 6.5 billion in the checking account, the end result is equally evil. The redistribution of money from someone who has earned it to someone deemed worthy per an extended federal unemployment program is pure, 100 percent Marxism. “From each according to their deeds; to each according to their needs,” is how Uncle Karl poetically put it.

Now let me really scare you. Today, after a century of indoctrination, most Americans and nearly all politicians refuse to follow the logic in my previous two points. Giving away or receiving the free stuff is too mesmerizing to consider whose stuff it truly is. The wealth redistribution principles advocated by Marx are considered charitable and ideal, while Madison’s idea of liberty through limited government is dismissed as extreme. I am an extremist, and I fear another piece of America is lost.