One of the best things about living in a free country is that to a certain extent, we get to decide what sort of country we want it to be.

Through our votes, we select the people who will run the government, and at least theoretically, they will represent our general philosophy in doing so.

The wonderful thing, particularly in the past, was that this country was a land of amazing opportunity. If you couldn't succeed in one place, you could move to another place and have a chance to make it there.

You had the opportunity to be as successful as you wanted to be. All you had to do was work harder, and if you couldn't succeed working for someone, you had the opportunity to start your own business. At the time of the American Revolution, 90 percent of white men in the 13 colonies worked for themselves, most of them either farmers or artisans.

[caption id="attachment_1161" align="alignright" width="242" caption="Independence Hall"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/img-US-01.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1161" title="img-US-01" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/img-US-01-242x300.jpg" alt="" width="242" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

And of course, there was always the frontier, where cheap land and hard work could enable almost anyone to be successful.

Of course the Industrial Revolution changed all that and the end of the Second World War, when the government decided to discourage returning soldiers from returning to their farms, made things even more difficult for a lot of people. All of a sudden, there were millions of people working at laborer-type jobs with little or no control over their own work.

If they were willing to work hard, they could still support their families and see to it that their children had the opportunity to have better lives than they themselves had had.

But 30 years ago, when Ronald Reagan came to power, all of a sudden corporations started sending manufacturing jobs overseas, and most of the well-paying jobs for folks without college educations disappeared.

Republicans started attacking the social programs that had been implemented under Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson, and it often seemed that the only two priorities the government had were building up the military and cutting taxes for the rich.

In the process, they questioned what for decades had been the accepted civic wisdom, that one of the things that worked best for our country was a progressive income tax. All of a sudden right-wingers were arguing for a flat tax, and barring that,

&nbsp;