As I ponder my eight and a half decades’ journey and how gratifying and rewarding it has been for me and my family, I marvel at the tenacity of today’s young entrepreneurs who are burdened by egregious regulations and excessive tax plundering by our elite experts and rulers.

Adding to this problem, by the same incompetent leadership, is the mismanagement of COVID-19, the border, crime, foreign policy, Afganistan and they’re engaging us in endless losing wars around the world.

Our generous welfare system combined with our dwindling but amazing wealth-generating marketplace causes our country to be a giant magnet for people from failed systems around the world. Among those coming are people like U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose mission is to transform our government into a facsimile of the ones their families left. Our open borders furnish them with a following that keeps them in office.

Other obstacles to the entrepreneurial working class, who mostly come from the right, are the barring of conservative opinion on college campuses, the stifling of conservative opinion on social media and the never-ending propaganda from the leftist media. As one political observer opined, “scratch, and just beneath the surface of the well-intentioned liberal you find the markings of a fascist: authoritarian, dictatorial, autocratic, militaristic, suppressive and intolerant of any opposition.”

Today’s middle class should prepare for a much different lifestyle than I experienced as the left is on an election winning streak which defies reasonable explanation, but that is a discussion for another time.

Dale Smith, Derrick City