By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-Large

A Gallup poll, just out, says that 76 percent of Americans don't know what country the United States gained its independence from.

How depressing... on several levels.

It's depressing to think that public education has failed to that extent, but I don't feel like doing a diatribe on education today.

It's even more depressing to realize the extent to which Americans have no clue about our history, our system of government and the philosophy behind it... in short, how we got here and why.

This means that the conservative point of view is in deep trouble, because it relies on logical argument and at least a minimum level of knowledge about our republic. The liberal point of view, on the other hand, relies almost entirely on emotion and class envy to convince blocks of voters that they should put people in office who will use the tax system to shift income from those who earned it to those who did not.

If 76 percent don't know that the U.S. was once a colony of Great Britain, how many don't know that our way of life was founded on the principle that people should be able to start their own businesses and earn the profit from that enterprise?

No wonder voters soak up the president's constant rich-bashing rhetoric. They have no idea how destructive to our economy it will be if Clinton and his crowd are allowed to rob the rich in order to toss goodies to the rest of us.

Logic dictates that, in a free society, anyone can become rich. Come up with the right idea, work your ever loving behind off, get the right advice and hire the right people, and you too can reap the rewards.

Along with the idea of individual home ownership, i.e. the concept of private property, the notion that individuals can become rich through their own ideas and labor is the American Dream.

But we are reaching the point at which the American dream is to plunder the pockets of those who have already done the thinking, come up with the ideas, done the work and reaped the rewards. How many Americans now believe that we should create economic equity by redistributing the existing wealth more evenly?

How many can actually think through what that means?

It means that there will no longer be an incentive for people to come up with new ideas, to push the envelope, to take the risks... to do the things that create new wealth.

What you will have then is a death struggle, everyone fighting to get his or her share of the steadily shrinking total supply of wealth.

Continue to encourage the American Dream and you continue to build new wealth, and that wealth does get distributed because there is no way that anyone can keep creating new wealth for himself without creating it for others.

If you develop a new widget that's the most popular widget ever, and everybody's going to want one, you have to hire people to produce lots of widgets, to market widgets, to build buildings to make widgets in, to move widgets from the widget factory to the widget warehouse and then to the widget store, and still more people to sell widgets.

In a free society, that's how you distribute the wealth.

Those who oppose free enterprise snicker at that scenario and refer to it as the “trickle down” theory of economics. “Conservatives want us to believe that if we help their rich friends, somehow some of the money will trickle down to everyone...” It was the socialist mantra during the `80s. But they don't try to refute the concept through logical discourse.

They just count on people's natural tendency to resent the success of others.

And, increasingly, they count on people's ignorance of the fact that, without free enterprise, the United States would never have become the country that it has. In fact, what we know as the United States probably would have developed as numerous countries, because the economic vitality that swept the continent never would have grown up.

I know what some of you are thinking. We never should have been a nation in the first place... the Native Americans were here first. I agree that Europeans were horribly unjust in their treatment of the occupants of this land, but the notions of freedom and economic independence that built this nation would have built it anyway, even if our forefathers had treated the indigenous peoples properly and brought them into the process. It's a separate issue.

Hmmm... I suppose most Americans have seen at least one old Western TV show or movie and have some concept of the idea that we were fighting Indians. Maybe they think the nation we gained our independence from was India.

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