Sun Valley, Nevada

This isn't your grandfather's Sun Valley.  My daughter lives here.  I drove by her house yesterday morning and she wasn't home.  Her mom is earning extra money with a paper route, which gets her up at 3:00 a.m. to make a few bucks, so she didn't hear me ring the doorbell.  It was already almost 90 degrees at 10:30 a.m.  I drove down to the strip mall which serves as "town central" to the Burger King.  The young men and women working and eating there had haunting vacant stares.  There's no American dream here.  It's dog eat dog, and these folks are begging for scraps.  I bought a paper, and as I ate my "Western Bacon Cheeseburger," read that the United States still has the highest number of millionaires, but they make up less than 2% of the population.  Every one of these young adults bought into the lie at some point that they could be one of the few people in America that benefit from our great capitalist experiment.  Good scientists give experiments up when they fail.  It's time we kiss this one goodbye.  My brother and his daughter are here as Ron Paul delegates, infiltrating the Republican party.  I'm proud of him, and I believe him when he says the only chance the United States has of pulling ourselves out of this downward slide is to end the empire, bring all of the soldiers home from the 100 plus countries they are stationed.  The part I disagree with Ron Paul about is that if we do that, conserve our resources for the people in this country, then the free market will take over and people will be taken care of.  The last thing Milton Friedman accomplished before he died was to convince the government to dismantle the New Orleans public school system during the great swindle called "reconstruction."  Go tell a black kid in New Orleans that the free market is going to take care of him/her.  Federal, State, County and Local governments were set up to protect, preserve and foster the public good.  If we invest our money wisely there, we can get back to having the kind of country our parents passed on to us.  We did it before, we can do it again.