Take away key tools from American business, its freedom to innovate and adapt and you handicap companies, industries, essentially the whole economy. Tell consumers they will not be allowed to purchase the best products and services at the best price and see how happy they are.

That sounds straightforward but Congress has been distorting that equation for decades, with more action planned.

Ask yourself which party is more likely to:

• Restrict imports of goods and services and therefore provoke trade retaliation and disrupt export revenue.
• Attack the most successful companies in any industry to use government power to restrict their competitiveness, stop their growth and prescribe line- item minimums or maximums in private company budgets to advance social agendas.
• Pass legislation restricting who can enter, operate or who are forced to exit industries.
• Use legislation and government regulation to force industries to serve activist social and economic justice goals.
• Fight to re-instate the Death Tax, crippling the ability for business and agriculture to pass intact operations on to family members of the next generation.
• Promote responsible use and development of America's natural resources (e.g. oil, gas, public lands), rural America's strengths, workforce and capital.
• Increase taxes, reducing the profitability of companies, their competitiveness and their ability to pay workers, while reducing total government revenue.
• Restrict imports of goods and services and therefore provoke trade retaliation and disrupt export revenue.
• Attack the most successful companies in any industry to use government power to restrict their competitiveness, stop their growth and prescribe line- item minimums or maximums in private company budgets to advance social agendas.
• Pass legislation restricting who can enter, operate or who are forced to exit industries.
• Use legislation and government regulation to force industries to serve activist social and economic justice goals.
• Fight to re-instate the Death Tax, crippling the ability for business and agriculture to pass intact operations on to family members of the next generation.
• Promote responsible use and development of America's natural resources (e.g. oil, gas, public lands), rural America's strengths, workforce and capital.
• Increase taxes, reducing the profitability of companies, their competitiveness and their ability to pay workers, while reducing total government revenue.

Radicals and the liberals want back the world of the ?50s and ?60s. But we are not the lone Colossus astride the post-World War II globe. The competitive pressures from other parts of the world - gaining competitive strength, utilizing their natural resources and climates, their labor forces and improving political stability - is an immutable fact. There is no going back. We must have the intelligence to use what commodities, parts and labor we can utilize from them, and maintain our business and economic freedom to continually adapt and innovate.

That is the way to serve our customers, nourish our businesses and keep our country strong. We need politicians with the economic and business understanding to protect our basic economic system, to preserve our freedoms to adapt so that the U.S. of the future is a competitor, not a cripple on the world scene.

Our best future as beef industry people is a world with increasing political freedoms and private property rights. That creates stronger economies and consumers with rising incomes. Those freedoms and incomes create customers for our beef worldwide and prosperity for rural America.

If you care about the future of the beef industry, make sure you vote and make sure those who share your views vote. Because those who want government to order the things they cannot persuade you to do voluntarily will be voting against your interests, your freedoms and increasing your tax burdens. Their job is much easier if their party controls the levers of political power.

"People who have made up their minds and don't want to be confused with the facts are a danger to the whole society," Thomas Sowell said. "Since the votes of such people count just as much as the votes of people who know what they are talking about, politicians have every incentive to pass laws and create policies that pander to ignorant notions, if those notions are widespread."

That's why your vote for business and economic freedom, plus everyone else you know who shares that regard for our freedoms, is critical in turbulent times.

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