Eddie Willers Joins the Tea Party

          When I see criminals, drug addicts and those who will not work living off the labor of those who strive and earn, anger burns within me.  Those who know how to build and create are robbed of their due by politicians and bureaucrats who have never created anything but debt and red tape.  How long can those who labor pull the load of those who won’t?  I worry for my country. 

          Far too many Democrats and Republicans have forgotten their duty to the constitution and the country.  Today they willingly pander to anyone promising them their vote or money.  In the hands of these career politicians, our national treasury has become a slot machine with lobbyists and interest groups eager to pull the handle and win the jackpot of public’s gold.  All of this leads me to wonder, is Atlas shrugging? 

          Helping those who can’t work is the mark of a compassionate nation, but helping those who won’t merely enables idleness.  Democrats, and some Republicans, seem unable to tell the difference between those who can’t work and those who won’t.   As politicians shower tax money like rain on all who ask, they reproach those who object as heartless misers. 

          When reason and work were the measure of greatness, Edison was a national hero.  Today, as our government slides toward socialism, our political leaders describe the capitalism that Edison thrived as, at best, a necessary evil.  Politicians pay lip service to free enterprise while passing voluminous regulations and rising taxes.                   

          In reality, the world is held up not by Atlas, but by millions of Eddie Willers, the honest common man of Atlas Shrugged.  Such people go to work every day, obey the law and pay their taxes.  They love and have often fought for this country.  Their reward is not mansions or wealth, just a house in suburbia, two kids, a dog and a pension in their old age.  However, those in government have betrayed them.  The looters of the public trough threaten to bankrupt and destroy all they have labored to create.  However, these common Americans cannot shrug away the world.  In their frustration and anger, they have become ever more active.  Atlas may shrug, but Eddie Willers joins the Tea Party.