In a few years, the biggest pair of towers will collapse: Social Security and Medicare. Even today, they're looking shaky. How many ground zeros can we as people, a nation, and a world withstand before we admit something is very wrong with our global financial systems?What will it take to wake us up?

Government Can't Fix It

Personally, I believe the biggest it's a problem that so many Americans are looking to this year's presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, to save our financial system. How did we become so financially weak that we surrender our economic independence to politicians? Where does it say in the Constitution that the government should solve our financial problems?

And why have so many people throughout the world come to expect financial life-support from their political leaders? It seems most people will vote for anyone who promises a chicken in every pot and a guaranteed mortgage payment.

We're in the midst of a problem neither candidate can solve: A lack of comprehensive financial education in our school systems. What else explains the economic blunders committed by our political and financial leaders? Or why so many consumers are in debt up to their eyeballs? Or why millions of people expect a quick government fix of some kind?

A Cynical Aside

If you want to know why the towers of American capitalism are crumbling, I recommend reading "The Creature from Jekyll Island"by G. Edward Griffin. It's not an easy book to find, but once you start reading it's to put down. In fact, in many ways it's a murder mystery about the financial "murder" of the middle class.

A very important lesson in the book is how political leaders use financial spin to deceive the public. The very, very rich use the system to legally steal from the rest of us by appealing to our sense of patriotism. When our leaders say, "We're bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because we want to protect the American people," they really mean "We're saving our rich friends."

All the bankers and politicians have to do is wave the red, white, and blue, play a few bars of "Yankee Doodle," and the masses get teary-eyed and pledge greater allegiance to legalized robbery. Yes, it's true that ignorance is bliss -- but ignorance is also expensive, and it cost us our freedom.

Freedom at Peril

A bailout can be different things. First, printing more money is a kind of bailout that leads to higher inflation. Rather than protecting people, it makes life for the poor and middle class more expensive. The other kind of bailout is protection for our rich and incompetent friends. If you or I fail at business, we fail. If we cheat and fail,we go to jail. But if you're rich and politically connected, your incompetence may be protected by a government bailout..... it saddens me to see some of the freedoms I thought I went to war to protect being stolen from us by bankers and politicians. Unfortunately, few Americans know the difference between the words "nationalize" and "socialize." Socialize means we turn more of our personal powers over to Big Brother, not free enterprise. It means we as a people grow weaker and need a higher power-- the same power that got us into this mess -- to protect us.

In short, when the towers of Fannie, Freddie, Merrill, Lehman, and AIGcame crashing down, more came down than just money. What we're losingis the very freedom this country was founded on, and what most of theworld yearns for.