What Does ‘Make America Great Again’ Mean?

When Donald Trump says, “make America great again,” the proof of that will be to observe his upcoming presidency and evaluate it for yourself.

Some people claim, with little or no evidence, that Trump will be a dictator. Well, let’s look a little closer: He has stated verbally that he wants to preserve 2nd Amendment rights, cut taxes and cut down on regulations that cripple businesses and make it harder for them to employ workers. He wants to lower ridiculous insurance premiums by repealing the failed Obamacare. He wants to roll back the federal role in public education. He wants to wage a smarter war against Islamic terrorism, starting with calling Islamic terrorists by their proper name: Terrorists. He wants better trade deals with countries like China and Mexico, and he wants immigration laws that have been ignored by Obama, enforced.

These proposals do not sound like dictatorship to me.

Others, particularly on the Democratic left, claim that America is already great. They actually believe Obama’s policies of increased taxes, increased regulation, economic stagnation and general appeasement toward Islamic terrorism have made America better. There’s no point arguing with people who think this way, because whatever is important to them has little to do with freedom. Others, like the current president’s wife, for example, claim America never was great, but never really say why. All we know is they seem to despise freedom. At heart, they’re Communists, fascists or something of that nature, and even Obama was not enough for them. Their objection to Trump is NOT that they think he will be a dictator; just that he won’t be THEIR kind of dictator.

There’s only one way to make America greater: Through the restoration and expansion of freedom and individual rights. It’s as simple as that. The freer we become, the better off we’ll be. Freedom necessarily includes economic freedom. People who claim you’re not free if you don’t have guaranteed food, health care, income, education and all the rest are simply wrong. Freedom does not mean the right to force others to take care of you. Freedom does not mean a government law promising charity as a legal entitlement, simply because guaranteeing such a “right” violates the rights of others. In the process, incentives are destroyed, and economic growth is hampered or eliminated. You know: Kind of like what we see today.

More than that, the government responsible for taking care of your physical needs will, sooner or later, take charge of your intellectual needs as well. We already see it with education. Government priorities determine the way children are taught to think. If left-wing political correctness takes over the government, then all children are taught this way. If another ideology took over the government — Nazi, Islamofascist, anything else — then the government would impose those views. Government should be out of the education business, first and foremost. At the very least, government should push these priorities back to state and local governments; far from perfect but at least less control from the top than we have now.

As government takes over health care, general welfare and education, social conditions get worse. Crime goes up and we’re more vulnerable to attacks from terrorists, foreign armies or homegrown criminals. Instead of making people more free, government will naturally try to restrict our guns. From there, it goes to restrictions on what we read, say and think. Look past the hysterical crybaby media – it’s happening already.

If America ends up in a dictatorship, it will not be due to Donald Trump. Donald Trump cannot make people who don’t wish to be free become free. At the core, we have to WANT freedom. And the best way to prove we want freedom is to demand that government get out of health, education, welfare, the environment, big business, small business, and all the other areas where it does not belong.

To make America great again, we have to make ourselves great again. Individualism and freedom are the only answers.