America, the land of self starters.

I was listening to my buddy Craig on KFIA tonight, but did not get a chance to phone in. He was a wonderful fill in for Joe Pursch. Craig is a utility player of the first degree.

He was talking about the principals our nation was founded upon, and that started me thinking. You know that can only mean trouble.

Two issues more than any others, were the reasons people came from far and wide to live the new world. The first being Private Property rights. In Europe, if you were poor, you stayed poor. Your children stayed poor and they would never own a piece of ground, no matter how small, that they could call their own. In America, indentured servitude was a way where a poor man could come to the new world, work four, five or seven years and be free to homestead a farm in the wilderness.

It was not much of a start, many could not carve a living out of the wilderness, but those who did had the satisfaction of eating a dinner they raised, at a table they built, in a house they built, with a family they loved.

If you were a man of wealth, but little property in England, you could purchase a vast amount of good farmland, or a stand of fine timber here in America. You had to be a hard working person, devoted to your own future, but you had the chance to achieve wealth and status.

America was the land of "Self Starters'.

Europeans also came to this new world to escape the Anglican Church. It's a long story, but a King had a little disagreement with the Pope and told him to pound sand. The King started his own church, and chose those who presided over it. When England founded it's state run church, you had very little choice but to play along if you wanted to keep your land, your titles or your head. If the Bishops said you were a heretic, you had better be on the next boat to anywhere.

The freedom to worship God, in your way, without outside influence or taxation from the government, was hard to comprehend for a new settler. The protestant reformation truly received it's second wind here in the land of free. It was not freedom from religion, it was freedom to practice religion.

Sadly, these foundations of our nation are slowly being eroded by the secular left. The recent Kelo ruling is an outright trampling on the principal of private property. The good of the people, seems to have been trumped by the good of the government, for the good of the people.

The recent attempt to ban under God from the pledge only shows most Americans think the wall between church and State is in the Constitution, it is not. Instead of the keeping the government from establishing the Church of American, taxes and membership dues on the first of every month, the secular left wants to make you think that the government cannot mention God in any way.

George Washington would be loading up his musket and marching on the ACLU if he were here.