The United States of America.  There was a time, before anyone alive today was born, that it was simple to explain what our country stood for, what made our country unique, and what it meant to be American.
The conclusions that our founding fathers had come to after countless hours of debating, analyzing, and contemplating was fresh enough that the confidence and the bliss that one achieves after coming to a firm resolution was felt by the united American mind.  It was this enlightenment that laid the foundations for our country to become the greatest country in the world and it was the deterioration of this enlightenment that put us into the crises that we now face.
If one were to attempt to investigate the ways in which we have deviated from our intended path as a nation one would have to understand the difference between the ideas our country was founded upon and compare and contrast them to the ideas of government today.
First, our country was not founded as a democracy: our country was founded as a constitutional republic.  To put this difference simply, our country was founded with the idea of a government body that is bound to protect the individual rights as opposed to a system where majority rules everyone and everything like the one in Athens that ruled to execute Socrates for voicing unpopular ideas.
Today, in this majority rules system, we commonly hear the idea that our right to vote is our most important right, but consider the implications.
When did our other rights such as free speech, property, and even life, take a back seat to our voting?  It seems that in today’s society when the president has the right to authorize the indefinite detention of American citizens without right to a trial or fair hearing, the right to authorize the assassination of even American citizens, the right to go to war without prior approval of the people (Congress), and the right to not inform Congress of military operations within 60 days, that voting certainly has taken precedence over our other disintegrating rights and freedoms.
Another idea that our beloved America was founded upon was a separatist approach to foreign policy. That is, the idea that we don’t want another country telling us how to run our country and we don’t get involved in other people running theirs.
There was a time when the tensions were high between our country and the Soviet Union and they had something like 60 confirmed nuclear weapons and we solved the problem without invading them.
Yet, after 9/11 we invaded Iraq based on the false reports of Iraq having one nuclear weapon under the lie that they was a serious threat.  Our involvement in other countries —  like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Iran to name a few — just simply doesn’t make sense other than when looked at from the perspective of an arms dealer or an oil tycoon.
A third idea, and the last idea that I’ll refer to, is the idea of free trade, and I mean real free trade.
Free trade has got to be the best possible economic model because it encourages competition which in turn creates competitive pricing, better quality in product, efficient means of trade, as well as financial and technological growth.
Government involvement in anything not related to the preservation of liberty should be minimized and the one example that that I will use, as it affects us as students the most, is education.
There is over a trillion dollars of debt in student loans right now in our country, which amounts to more than credit card debt, and it is going to be dumped on the taxpayer who received a poor education, costs that have sky-rocketed because of inflation, and an atrocious job market.
There is no authority in the constitution for the federal government to be dealing in education and, as you can see in this example (as well as others), the programs are complete failures.  Inflation by government is natural and normal, but when the government inflates a currency, it goes into the areas that the government gets involved in.  Some examples of this affecting Americans are housing prices going up even with demand decreasing, stock market prices sky-rocketing, medical care prices sky-rocketing, as well as education prices tripling that of the rate of inflation.  Government involvement, put simply, discourages the quality of product, the competitive pricing, as well as growth, all the things that free trade encourage.
To sum things up, there was a time before any of us were born that our country had a model, an almost perfect model, on how a government should operate.
The Framers constructed this model into a document that is our Constitution and within our Constitution lies our rights as individuals and our power as a nation.
We need to remember that with this gift of freedom and the power that it gives us comes great responsibility.  Responsibility to hold these freedoms close and responsibility for ourselves as individuals, and not reliance on a government that only has the power we give it or a sense of entitlement.
The federal government has no place in regulating our daily lives, granting aid to foreign nations, or getting involved in business.
It really is a shame that so many of us have gotten so apathetic about our lives, our freedoms, and our nation.