A horse’s love of grain and a dog’s love of chocolate demonstrate where the absence of self-restraint can have fatal consequences. My most challenging horse / grain overload case involved a group of brood mares discovered to have gained access to the open door of a grain bin full of freshly harvested wheat. The key to a successful recovery is the early administration of mineral oil, activated charcoal, and anti-inflammatories, but our problem was deciding which of the twenty or so mares had actually eaten toxic levels of wheat. There was a chance the mares discovered the open door mere minutes prior to the owner spotting it, so the question became “do we feel lucky?” We didn’t. I picked up twenty gallons of mineral oil from the local veterinary supply store on my way to the wheat farm. We caught, twitched and snaked a naso-gastric tube up the nose and down into the stomach of each mare and pumped in a gallon of oil mixed with charcoal. This was not as fun as it sounds. Other than passing black, oily, horse apples for a day or two, no mare ever got sick, so we will never know if their recovery was because of us or in spite of us.

My chocolate eating dog is a horse of a different color. It was the Christmas season when the owner brought her little Cocker Spaniel to our clinic after discovering the dog had polished off four pounds of homemade fudge. The dog was vomiting, convulsing and its heart was hammering along at over 250 beats per minute. Looking back over 30 years of practice, this little dog still owns the number one slot as the sickest creature admitted to the clinic who eventually recovered enough to exit the front door. Every patient scoring higher on the sick-dog scale, left the hospital via the back door—a euphemism for assuming room temperature which is a euphemism meaning the dog died. This brings me to my point.

There is a third species continuously poisoned by this same fatal absence of self-restraint, but rather than wheat and chocolate, their addiction is dollars. Politicians have purposely built their massive empire around money; its confiscation and redistribution. As long as the ruling class steals from the few to give to the many, the masses worship them as champions of the poor. The poverty class plays along never realizing government programs are purposely planned not to help them out of the economic gutter, but to keep them there. For the ruling class to be a hero they need a victim and trinkets such as extended unemployment, food stamps, student loans and Obamacare produces a permanent supply of the downtrodden. I never will understand why free Americans chose to be played as the fool, but they always have and maybe always will.

This subject grabs my attention this week because recent reports reveal record revenues filled the US Treasury during the first five months of fiscal 2014. In the face of an administration attempting to enslave our economy in a socialist quagmire, this is testament to the power of capitalism, free-markets and limited government. Even when the ruling class tries to choke freedom, liberty ultimately prevails. Collecting 1.1 trillion dollars surpasses the previous record of 1.07 trillion set in the first five months of fiscal 2007.

Reflexively this sounds good, but it could be bad and here is why. Unlimited dollars in the hands of a politician is as dangerous as grain bins full of wheat to a horse and bowls of fudge to a dog—the ruling class will spend until you die. Even worse, the euphoria of giving away free stuff is so addictive, elected officials will not stop when they run out of money. In the face of these record revenues during these five months, Congress added .377 trillion to the national debt. In 2007 our national debt was 9 trillion dollars while today it is passing through 16.7 trillion on its way to infinity. Congress does not have a revenue problem, they have a spending problem and it will continue until voters lock the granary door or pick up the bowl of fudge. Every candidate promising free-stuff under the income inequality banner must be defeated.