Hello

I am Craig Bardo and I am humbled by the invitation to join Robert, Jennifer (if I may), Truth-Pain and Sam. Perfunctorily, I am a married, father of 5 and a business owner, who resides in Nashville. Who I am is what I believe. I grew up liberal blaming America first, self-absorbed, ungrateful, unmotivated but blessed beyond knowing. I went to church once, on Easter as a child and maybe one other occasion. I was an athlete and played basketball for eventual national champion, Indiana University, but was ineligible to play because of poor grades. I joined the Navy and grew up a little. I saw how truly blessed we are to be born and live in the greatest country in the history of earth and wondered why people lived the way they did elsewhere. I finished college at The Citadel and while there met a man who set me on this path to conservative thought. His name is Dr. Walter Williams of George Mason University, who was a guest speaker for the college's Greater Issues series. My economics professor took an interest in me and arranged an audience with Dr. Williams before he spoke. I asked him questions from my liberal perspective that he batted down with such ease that motivated me to learn more.

Questions I had included: Why not help poor black families with welfare? Why not have people who earn more, pay more in taxes? Why not make corporations pay more taxes and why not regulate business more? Why shouldn't affirmative action be expanded? Why with all of the (supposed) unfairness in this country do we continue to prosper? I assumed and had been taught that it was the work of evil white men, scheming, as it were, to keep a brother down. I also made the most important discovery of my life in this period of inquiry. I discovered that there is someone who always looked past my many, many faults and saw my need. He is known by many names, The Lily of the Valley, The Bright and Morning Star, The Rose of Sharon, The Way, The Truth and the Life, Redeemer, Savior, The Lion of the Tribe of Judah, A Rock in a weary land, A Balm in Gilead, The Alpha and the Omega, The Great I Am and when I can't call him anything else, I call him Jesus. I hope you don't mind if I talk about him from time to time, I'll try not to preach, I won't preach, but sometimes I get excited.

Back to the inquiry... what I discovered in my search for reasons why we prosper here in America and why there is an uneven prosperity here didn't yield simple answers but it did yield a direction and a set of unassailable principles, principles that those that established the experiment that we call America had studied, understood and had the fortitude to be willing to die for and more importantly live by. The key to our prosperity is what John Locke said. He said that a man ought to own himself and the fruit of his labor and intellect, that he should not be subject to the whims of a monarch or a tyrant. He reasoned that the role of government should be to protect a man's life, liberty and property. He argued that being able to dispose of property (real property, personal property and contract rights) as one wished (owning it) is the key to liberty. As it turns out, it is also the key to prosperity.

Another Scotsman, Frances Hutcheson, wrote later that there are certain rights that are inalienable. Thomas Jefferson, being a widely read and well educated man, combined the natural law/rights concepts of Locke, Hobbes, Hutcheson and others into what Dr. King would call on the steps of the Washington Mall, "the magnificent words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution." "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The wisdom contained in that one sentence is the key to America's unprecedented freedom and prosperity.

I have learned that all of the do gooder schemes of the uninformed do more harm to those they purport to help than had they been left alone, that the unintended consequences of social engineers and tinkerers is more detrimental to the fortunes of America than a direct assault on those the programs are designed to benefit. I look forward to sharing my observations and getting your feedback.