The question is about balance in our priorities as a nation.

People engage in economic activity in order to improve their material wellbeing. It’s true that wealth doesn’t buy happiness. But poverty doesn’t buy anything. Material self-sufficiency is a pre-requisite to the pursuits that actually make life worth living.

In addition, the American nation is committed to freedom. Now it serendipitously turns out that free markets produce the most wealth, and so the basic framework of American life has created the conditions under which we the people have made ourselves the richest on earth.

It also turns out that free individuals operating freely will produce different outcomes depending on a range of factors. Life turns out not to be fair. Just as the poor will always be with us, it seems also that the rich will always be with us as well.

And that’s where the question of balance comes in.

Ever since humanity awoke, people have felt stung by the success of others, and have sought to attenuate or share it. In our nation and our day, this takes the form of economic populism, or in the word used by its adherents, progressive politics.

It’s the sense of our great nation that a balance must be struck between each individual’s freedom, and (what is just as well-founded in morality) the right of each individual not to have less material wealth than any other.

And so, throughout the Twentieth Century, we have systematically (and progressively) added restrictions on the ability of businesses to operate freely and to profit from their activities.

This trend is now at a high tide, as the Democratic Party roars with one proposal after another to socialize large chunks of our economy, increase taxes on the most productive individuals, strengthen the influence of labor unions, stiffen environmental regulations, and even to export all these destructive ideas to other countries in the form of restrictions in free [sic] trade agreements.

Ladies and gentlemen, is it any wonder that the US dollar is at historic lows vis-a-vis the other currencies of the world, and bodes to fall still further, perhaps much further?

And in the meantime, the Republican Party, which we ought to support and defend here in this conservative political forum, is doing exactly nothing to counter the wild mania among the Democratic progressives to reverse the prosperity and wellbeing of this great and essential nation.

WE MUST STAND UP AND DEMAND THAT OUR SOCIETY AND OUR GOVERNMENT SHALL SET AMERICAN BUSINESS FREE.

First, absolutely and everywhere: eliminate all taxes on corporate profits and capital gains. Do this now, in every jurisdiction. Business profits should be absolutely free of taxation, with a corporate income-tax rate of not 30.5% as in Chairman Rangel’s current legislation, but zero.

The reductions on capital gains taxes now scheduled to expire in 2010 should be extended and made permanent, with a capgains tax rate of zero.

Taxes should be eliminated on the revenue from any product or service produced on American soil for export. Do this now and everywhere.

Let’s get started on this, people. The foreign-exchange value of the US dollar is falling because there is a decreasing amount of things produced by Americans in America and priced in dollars that people in other countries want to buy. Unless we fundamentally change the restrictive conditions under which American businesspeople operate, this will continue with no end in sight.

In their manic and vain attempt to produce economic fairness and social equality, the progressive Democratic Party is entirely happy to wipe out the means by which Americans compete in global markets. This is wrong, and must end.

It’s time to shift the balance that American politics seeks, away from egalitarianism and toward prosperity. This must be the job of the Republican Party, whose leaders perversely are fiddling while Rome burns. We need new faces and new forces in the Republican Party, who will say without apology that the business of America is business.

It’s now or never, people. It’s now or never.