When your paycheck comes from crops or critters, rain is the biggest variable in your economic equation. The impact of other critical factors can be diminished through careful planning and hard work, but your final success lies outside your sphere of influence. Whenever it rains, like it is has been for the past two days, I think back to my childhood on our ranch out of Ingomar. During a cloudburst, Dad would stand on the porch quietly staring off to the western horizon giving thanks the dry plains would soon be gumbo. At first glance, you would think it odd to give thanks for gumbo, but rain brought gumbo which led to green grass; a sometimes rare commodity on the plains of eastern Montana. Of our eight years on Blacktail Creek, we droughted out twice in the early ‘60s, but I was too young to understand the significance of the cattle trucks backed up to the loading chute down at the corrals. As far as this five-year-old knew, it was just another dusty day working cows.

Fifty years later practicing veterinary medicine in the suburbs of Montana’s largest city, rain has two contradictory effects on my livelihood. In the short term, when it is pouring, people stay indoors so are not working cattle, riding their horses through the wire or driving over their neighbor’s dogs. The phone at my clinic becomes deathly quiet. However, over the long term, rain creates new wealth, so by harvest time more crops and critters means more fresh dollars to pass between veterinarians, bankers, bakers and candlestick makers. This recent moisture will generate millions of dollars across the entire country. Along with timber, mining, coal, oil and gas, this growth of agriculture represents true wealth; an economic concept liberals chose not to understand.

Collectivists view economics from the shaded reality all wealth originates with big government, so the simple infusion of newly printed money can stimulate the economies of veterinarians, bankers, bakers and candlestick makers. Artificially inflating the money supply devalues the true currency already in circulation, but this downside is hidden once the population is dumbed down so as to not understand the difference. An entire political ideology hinges on this ignorance of the electorate.

During my four terms in Montana’s House, I witnessed legislators giddy to spend federal money never realizing they were not true dollars, they were debt. This dangerous idiosyncrasy reached a crescendo this spring when I saw Montana’s State Chamber of Commerce aggressively lobbying for more federal debt in the form of Medicaid Expansion (HB623). When the business community advocates the wealth redistribution principles of Marx, America’s founding principles of limited government and free-market capitalism will soon become a tiny footnote in the new government approved history books.

Democrats have wholly embraced Marxism, so I am not surprised to see them support Medicaid Expansion; an essential step in the full implementation of Obamacare. It is the small subset on the right who claim to be “responsible Republicans” who disappoint me and here are those who joined with the Chamber and the Democrats to support HB623: Senators Brown, Buttrey, Jones, Olson, Peterson, Tutvedt, and Representatives Ankney, Bangerter, Berry, Clark, Connell, Cook, Gibson, Hagan, Hollandsworth, O’Hara, Shaw, and Wellborn. Once fully implemented, Medicaid Expansion would cost Montana taxpayers 250 million dollars annually.

Finally to my point: Compared to the effect of rain on true wealth, using government debt to stimulate the economy is like responsible Republicans whizzing down you back and convincing you it is raining. Think about it.