What Gerry Ford got right.

FILE – Betty Ford waves goodbye to her husband, President Gerald Ford, as he leaves their Alexandria, Va., home, Aug. 13, 1974, on his way to the White House. (AP Photo/Bob Daugherty, File)

Shortly after assuming office following the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974, President Gerald Ford addressed a Joint Session of Congress. His goal was to move the country past the Watergate scandal. Contained within that speech was this passage:

Whether we like it or not, the American wage earner and the American housewife are a lot better economists than most economists care to admit. They know that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

Those 50 words perfectly set up the examination of the divide between the Democratic Socialists who are quickly taking over the once semi-sane Democratic Party, and the rest of us who know better.

What we who know better understand is that freedom isn’t merely the absence of chains. It’s the ability to make choices, accept consequences, try, fail, and try again; all toward the goal of building a life through personal responsibility. I am fond of saying that personal responsibility is the ultimate expression of freedom.

That freedom so expressed is what built the most successful society in history. An appreciation of that belief, together with the resulting desire to protect those freedoms, is why conservatives (and to be fair for much of our history all but the craziest liberals) know now and knew then that grand promises of free health care, subsidized housing, free college tuition, free child care, guaranteed universal income and the rest of the socialist smorgasbord cannot withstand objective scrutiny. The reason is amazingly simple.

Nothing is free.

It’s worth looking closely at those who are on the vanguard of the Democratic Socialist movement. All of them have in common that they were either born here or have lived here long enough as to make it possible to take the abundance afforded by the American free market economy for granted. In their cossetted existences, plenty to eat, a safe place to sleep and an iPhone in the hand are just things that naturally occur. They never ask who had to put capital at risk and who had to do the work necessary to provide such things.

America has been so successful and enjoys such enormous economic wealth that minds-full-of-mush socialists look at it all and decide that there’s plenty to go around. No need for anyone to unduly exert oneself. Everyone should be free of the daily burdens of making a living so that everyone can enjoy economic freedom in its ultimate form.

What they don’t understand is that every promised benefit supplied by government must first be confiscated from the fruits of someone’s labor. The larger those promises become, the larger the confiscatory power of government must become – until one day that power becomes absolute.

When that happens, you get the blood-soaked regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro and Maduro.

The ascendant socialists in the Democratic Party are promising what they believe will be economic freedom. If they ever succeed in gaining power, they will deliver precisely the opposite.