The Free Press, Mankato, MN

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April 9, 2009

Your View: Partisan blame game doesn't help

Jonathan Kovaciny, Mankato

Leigh Pomeroy’s April 4 letter blaming the Republican Party for the current financial mess largely misses the mark. I certainly have no illusions of innocence for the Republican leadership, but they are nowhere near wholly responsible, as Pomeroy surmises. The partisan blame game distracts us from the underlying issues. The economic meltdown has been brewing for decades, not years, and while its direct causes are numerous, they’re not difficult to see once you begin to look in the right places.

The root cause is perhaps the failure of Americans to read and understand why the Founders established our republic the way they did, and our similar failure to vote for leaders who uphold the principles enshrined in our Constitution.

This venerable document is treated by most elected officials as little more than a historical curiosity, but if we want to persist as a free nation we must heed its words. It is a rule book for our government, but they haven’t been following the rules. Now we are paying the price in lost liberty and a crumbling economy.

Pomeroy is correct to be wary of our government’s actions to get us out of this mess. They are guaranteed to fail and will likely relegate the United States to an economic backwater for a decade or more.

I suggest that we look for answers to the people who saw this coming, rather than to those who proclaimed our economy to be strong right up until the moment it fell apart. Fortunately for us non-economists, the answers are not complicated

Read Tom Woods’ new bestseller “Meltdown”, search for Peter Schiff videos online, or peruse Mises.org.

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