In recent discussions with many Republicans about the continued government shut down, numbers of people have expressed fear that the United States will lose its position as world leader if our government is to stay shut down for an extended time. There is also concern that a government default would relegate our country to third-world status.

While a government shut down or default is serious and not the ideal situation, our over dependence on the government and government programs has lead us to forget a couple of things.

First, there is no doubt that some people will experience hardship because of the shutdown. But let’s not fool ourselves. Someone suffers from every government action. Every time a bill is passed or not passed there are some winners and some losers.

Secondly and most important, the government is not what makes this country successful or extraordinary. It is due to the individual citizen and the individual liberties that our government has, at least in the past, respected.

The USA does not maintain the most lethal fighting force in the world because of the government. It is able to maintain a professional military because our amazing economy funds the entire thing and also because of the strength and resolve of the individual American service members. Every other western power has a robust federal government; but they do not have the economy to support a military like the USA nor do they have citizens with the deep resolve to protect our extraordinary way of life.

Our economy is not due to our government; it is due to the extraordinary individual business owners, inventors and workers that are, by far, the most productive in the world.

The amazing amount of public charity in the USA is not a product of the government. It is a product of the generous society and standard of living that affords ordinary people the finances and time to help their fellow man at a rate for beyond the rest of the world.

The individual citizen that pays all the taxes to make this government possible and produces all the wealth is not the product of the government put a by-product of limited government.

A federal government is an absolute necessity for a prosperous and functional republic. But a limited federal government is the one thing that makes this country so much more successful and prosperous than any other country in history. Every step the government takes that expands the governmental reach beyond the constitutional limits set forth by the founding fathers, limits the very liberty that makes the whole system possible.

The one thing that separates our citizens from those in other countries is our Constitution - the same Constitution that limits our government from the infringing on the very freedoms that were “endowed by our creator”.

People come to the United States of America from failed countries with failed governments all the time. They do extraordinary things with their lives that were not possible in their home countries. In American the government does not make individual, the individual makes the government. And that my friends is what makes this country so great.