George Washington, known as the father of our country was born February 11, 1731 according to the then used Julian calendar.  In 1752 however, Britain and her colonies adopted the Georgian calendar which moved Washington’s birthday a year and eleven days to February 22, 1732.  Americans celebrated Washington’s Birthday, long before congress declared it a federal holiday.

The centennial of his birth prompted festivities nationally and congress established a joint committee to arrange for the occasion.  At the recommendation of the committee, chaired by Henry Clay of the senate and Philemon Thomas of the House, Congress adjourned on February 22, 1832 out of respect for Washington’s legacy and memory and in commemoration of his birth by reading aloud his Farewell address.

In a special joint session held in the House Chamber, the House and the Senate, along with several cabinet officials, justices of the Supreme Court and high ranking officers in the Army and Navy gathered to listen to the Secretary of State read the address aloud.  Eventually, the reading of George Washington’s Farewell Address became an annual evet for the Senate, a tradition that is still observed to this day.

Washington’s Birthday, however, did not become a legal holiday until January 31, 1879 when Congress added February 22nd to the list of holidays to be observed by federal employees in the District of Columbia.  One of the main purposes of singling out the birthday of George Washington to be a holiday was to keep the memory of his important role in the establishment of this republic fresh in the minds of succeeding generations of Americans.

Likewise, the Birthday of the great emancipator, Abraham Lincoln was at one time recognized and celebrated in many circles.  Currently, the Lincoln holiday is celebrated unofficially nationwide as part of what many states now dub Presidents Day during mid-February.  Only a handful of states celebrate the Lincoln Birthday which is on February 12th.  There is an official ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.   There is also a wreath ceremony at Lincoln’s Birthplace in Kentucky.  There were efforts right after Lincoln’s death to get his birthday secured as a national holiday in his honor, but none succeeded.

Now, more states celebrate Black Friday than Lincoln’s or Washington’s birthday.  In fact, 18 states have days off for state employees for Black Friday.  Another ten states give their employees the day off for Good Friday, and five states recognize December 26 as a holiday.

The historic accomplishments of both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are very significant.  As both a general and later our republic’s first president, George Washington credited Providential guidance for his accomplishments on the battlefield as well as in the government “of by and for the people.”  Lincoln’s decisions to ultimately free the slaves as well as preserve the union were both influenced by his faith.  Regarding the rights of negroes, Lincoln was also influenced by popular orator, publisher, and businessman Frederick Douglas.  His great life story, like Lincoln’s and Washington’s is both shunned and not taught to young Americans in the typical American government school classroom.

Unfortunately, the decades long evil practice of denying American school students important historic information about many of our most important historic figures is actually making it more difficult to maintain our exceptional nation.  Because of the deep understanding of unalienable rights and liberty, Washington, Lincoln, and Douglas all contributed in their time to America’s bedrock of personal freedom.  It is shameful tradition that government school students have for decades not been properly instructed on, or even taught to appreciate the United States of America.  If the truth concerning our national heroes like Washington, Lincoln and Douglas continue to be shielded from the inquisitive minds of students, disastrous outcomes will result.

No nation can remain strong and prosperous if multiple generations of the population are systematically indoctrinated against it and not instructed on the good merits of it’s founding and great historical figures, it’s great heritage or achievements.   Currently, our republic is suffering through an ongoing constitutional and moral crisis.  The bloated federal government no longer operates according to constitutional mandates.

The main reason for that is that for approximately five or six decades, the majority of American students have not been instructed on the rudiments and benefits of a constitutional republic, free market economics, America’s Christian heritage etc.  So now, generations of Americans are political, intellectual and spiritual zombies who support open borders and illegal immigration into America.  In many instances, Americans don’t even know who George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Frederick Douglas is, let alone understand or even care about their unalienable rights which come from God.  Shamefully, many are even proud of their lack of knowledge of unalienable rights and what made a nation like the United States the onetime envy of the world.

I however am of the belief, that despite the current state of affairs regarding our land of the free and home of the brave she has an upcoming renewal of her destiny of greatness.  Because of a growing groundswell of real change for the better, she will not remain in her current state of decline.  The dastardly plots and plans of the progressives will utterly fail in the mission to destroy our beloved republic.  The truth will prevail and replace the wicked indoctrination and utter lies of recent years.  In fact, America will once again be a nation under God that is both blessed and highly favored.

A recent email from a California reader, under the subject line, “The Continuing Demonization of Cash,” caused me to recollect several of my favorite paragraphs from Ayn Rand’s epic novel, Atlas Shrugged.  Published in 1960, Atlas Shrugged was a greater predictor of post-Obama America than anything ever written, and any freedom-loving American who has not read it and digested it should run, not walk, to the nearest bookstore and get a copy.  In this, the Age of Obama, it has never been more important that our children be made to understand what it was that has enriched our lives and provided unprecedented freedom for so many.  The following truths, which every parent should be imparting to their children, are excerpted from the novel:

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others.  It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money.  Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow.  Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce.  Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money.  Is this what you consider evil?

“Have you ever looked for the root of production?  Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes.  Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time.  Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions – and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak?  What strength do you mean?  It is not the strength of guns or muscles.  Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.  Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it?  Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools, by the able at the expense of the incompetent?  By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy?  Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability.  An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.

“Money is your means of survival.  The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life.  If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence.  Did you get your money by fraud?  By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity?  By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves?  By lowering your standards?  By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn?  If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy.  Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame.  Then you’ll scream that money is evil.  Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect?  Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity?  Is this the root of your hatred of money?  Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil.  That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.  So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another, their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it.  Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long.  They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth.  They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt – and of his life, as he deserves.

“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue.  In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them.  But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators’ avenger.  Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them.  But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it.  Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality.  When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.  And then that society vanishes in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming?  Watch money.  Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.  When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.  Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality.  It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good.  Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral.  Do not expect them to produce when production is punished and looting rewarded.  Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’  You are.

“To the glory of mankind there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement.  For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist.

“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose (because it contains all the others) the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’  No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor.  Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.  The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents.  Now the looters’ credo (the Obama doctrine) has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt.  The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will.

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction.  When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men.  Blood, whips, and guns… or dollars.  Take your choice; there is no other and your time is running out.”

While I have titled this column “Money: The Root of All Evil?” a more apt title might be “What Liberals and Democrats Know, but Don’t Want Anyone Else to Know.”  It is impossible to overstress the significance of what Ayn Rand was telling us in the above paragraphs.  But the question arises: are men and women of today, regardless of social or economic status, capable of understanding them and applying them in their own lives?

We have entirely too much evidence to the contrary.  Through the ruination of our public education system and the existence of a fourth estate convinced that their job is not to inform, but to propagandize, the American people have been “dumbed down” to the point where, if required to read and paraphrase the excerpts cited above, they would simply reply, “Huh?”

Those of us who were taught well in our public and parochial schools of three and four score years ago have all experienced the frustration of seeing high school and college graduates of today struggle to make change for customers in retail stores.  Without a computer to tell them that a $5.13 purchase requires $5.00 change when $10.13 is proffered, their brains quickly shift into neutral and their eyes glaze over.

Perhaps if we could sit down with small groups of people who think of themselves as liberals, and who regularly support Democratic Party principles, and translate these thoughts into language that first and second graders could readily understand, we might actually see a future for our great nation.  But that is highly problematic.  We have entirely too many Barack Obamas, Harry Reids, and Nancy Pelosis in our midst who’ve made successful political careers out of catering to the moochers and the looters of the world.