I don’t believe we have ever been closer to losing our republic than now. Government healthcare will mark the death of our nation as envisioned by our Founding Fathers.

It will expand the role of government in our lives to levels never before imagined. The government will grow its employment roles by millions just to administer the program. The dismantling of such an unwieldy and entrenched program will become virtually impossible. And it will surely bankrupt us.

We’ve been incrementally marching down the road to socialism for decades, and it started in our school system. We’ve been teaching our children that individual responsibility is second to the welfare of the collective.

Socialism is simply unsustainable because government cannot continually take from people who have and give to people who have not. Eventually we run out of people who have and the people who have run out of the will to achieve, and what we’re left with is a country full of people who no longer have the ability to take care of themselves.

This is so self-evident to me I find it amazing that so many can’t see it.

We need to begin teaching some things in our public schools to reverse this trend. First, God is disappearing from our lives, and so I believe we need to teach the Old and New Testaments, not preach, just teach.

Even though I was raised a Jew, I understand how important this is. If we lose God in our lives, our nation can’t survive. Our founding principles are based on the idea of God, and it is from God that we derive our freedoms. Once God is gone, so go our freedoms. When the Founding Fathers wrote of separation of church and state they did not mean the separation of God and state.

Second, our public schools need to do a much better job of teaching our children about our uniquely American experience. Our youth need to understand why the peoples of so many countries look to us for leadership, progress, and answers to a myriad of questions facing our planet.

What we’ve accomplished among all nations is no accident. Rather, it is the result of our freedoms and the individual opportunities born from those freedoms.

Nowhere else on this planet do people enjoy the freedoms and opportunities we take for granted. And that’s part of the problem: taking freedom for granted. We take freedom for granted because we don’t understand the conditions from which freedom was earned, how difficult it was to win and how difficult it is to keep.

Finally, our public schools need to emphasize self-reliance and individual responsibility. Our welfare system has transformed the mindset of welfare recipients from “What do I need to do to lift myself out of this situation?” to “What do I need to do to keep myself in this situation?”

We need to wean our welfare recipients off of welfare. Some will cooperate and some won’t. There is nothing we can do for the few who are bent on self-destruction.

We can continue to cripple our citizens through our present welfare system, or we can educate them to be self-reliant through a better welfare system.

Personally, I’d give the ACLU a choice: let me help these people grow out of their circumstance while giving them benefits or don’t give them benefits at all. Some people call it tough love.

Obviously, some people require lifelong assistance, and we should provide for them. But I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about people who can and should be looking for a better life rather than depending on the good will or forced will of others.

Our republic will be lost to a nanny state that can’t come to terms with the idea that individual responsibility is the key to individual success and fulfillment and the truth that human and social resources are finite. We must soon begin dealing with these issues.

Marc Lugash

Peachtree City, Ga.