The following was originally posted on www.fiscalaccountability.org:

U.S. Senator Jim DeMint, the only U.S. Senator to receive CFA's "Prudent Steward" award for 2008 based on the Congressional ratings we will be releasing later in the week, makes an excellent point in his Greenville News Tax Day piece:

Today, the first tax day of Barack Obama's administration, it is time for conservatives to remember the one thing we most want to conserve: freedom.

Everything wrong with our economy is attributable to some misguided effort in Washington that infringed on our freedom: some tax or regulation or new, “compassionate” spending program. These things don't work.

Every time politicians grow government to solve a problem, they create three new ones. Then government must grow again to solve those three, and on and on the cycle goes. But every time Congress sets its mind to “do something,” it has to take a little bit more of our money, and a little bit more of our personal and economic freedom to do it.

And before you know it, every baby in America is born with a $34,000 share in the national debt. That is simply immoral. It is a crime, a $20 trillion theft perpetrated by politicians against our children, and if we allow it continue, we will deserve history's condemnation.

History's lessons could not be clearer: everywhere socialism has been tried, it has failed. Inevitably, jobs are lost, opportunities stifled, businesses shuttered, economies stagnated, health care rationed; government increases and freedom decreases.

We cannot spend our way out of a deficit, tax our way out of a recession, or borrow our way out of debt. The only economic system that works is one based on free people making free decisions. It was 200 years of economic freedom that made America the world's greatest superpower, not Washington control.

Obama was indeed right that America needs sweeping change, but all he's given us are “the failed policies of the past.” We don't need tax increases, but tax reform and simplification. We don't need an energy policy based on global politics, but one based on national economics. We don't need federally controlled education, we need family-controlled education. We don't need a health-care system run by politicians and bureaucrats, but one run by patients and their doctors.

Freedom can and will solve our economic problems. It did for most of our national life, and it will again.

But only if we let it.