The upcoming presidential election marks the first time high school graduates of 2015 and 2016 will vote. As these millennials were only 10 years old when I launched this column, eight years of my ramblings may be insufficient to purge their minds of high school propaganda. Certainly, there are a smattering of great civic teachers across the hinterlands who actually taught America’s liberty principles, but most students only heard state sponsored spin. After graduation, those choosing college will receive indoctrination sufficient to keep them blind well into their 40s with some never regaining the ability to see a political truth. Today’s column might be my last chance to enlighten them before they embrace conservatism or progressivism. Adults who read my column strictly out of spite, should flip to the classified section because if you haven’t seen the light by now, you never will.

The right wing is home to Christian conservatives, liberty focused Republicans, constitutionalists, and tea party folks. These terms are synonymous. Patriots in this category understand American freedom, individual responsibility and limited government. They recognize free-market capitalism as the mechanism which best establishes winners and losers because whenever government manipulates a market they break it; our national health care system being the perfect example. Prior to Medicaid and Medicare in 1964 and ’65, health care traded at market prices. By government mandating services and manipulating the expense / reimbursement equation, leftists instantly established a permanent pool of dependent recipients. This cost-shifted expenses to the producing class and eventually enslaved them in debt. Freedom and free-markets are the lifeblood of conservatism.

The left wing is home to secular-progressives, socialist Democrats, Marxists, collectivists, leftist activists and the ruling class. These terms are synonymous. Comrades in this category view America as inherently evil and feel our nation should be torn apart with wealth taken from those who have earned it and given to those who haven’t, less a small handling fee for the ruling class. Mankind’s natural unequal distribution of talent, intelligence, courage, ambition, ingenuity, and initiative must be erased by government stealing the bounty produced by those working in the trenches and giving it to those sitting on the sofa. Covetousness and theft are the life blood of progressivism.

Conservatives recognize God blessed America with coal, oil, natural gas, minerals and fertile agricultural and forestry lands. In a free-market environment, industrious Americans can capitalize on this bounty to build an economy which can employ, feed, power and provide true charity to all mankind. Because personal freedom follows economic freedom, prosperous Americans are free to move about the country. This perturbs progressives who know it is easier to control an unemployed or underemployed populace, so they established the national religion of environmentalism to block all natural resource development. This false worship begins in preschool and continues throughout institutions of higher indoctrination. A national religion runs contrary to the First Amendment, so progressives simply ignore the Constitution.

As implied above, conservatives acknowledge the existence of God as the source of our natural rights as explained in America’s Declaration of Independence. The only function of government is to secure those rights and then only after receiving consent of the governed. To the contrary, progressives worship government as god with mankind’s rights being established or revoked by a decree from the ruling class.

America’s political battle is really as simple as outlined above. Chose correctly, honor God and you will live long and prosper. Chose wrong, worship government and you will live life a pauper begging government to steal to give you the stuff earned by your colleagues who chose the correct option. Be smart, chose conservatism.