In these essays I have explored the values of America, freedom, and prosperity. I've tried to explain why trying to fix what's broken in other lives usually doesn't work as well as letting them fix themselves. The world isn't a broken watch that will run like clockwork if only we find the right jeweler to repair it.

     I don't dispute that Barack Obama will do as good a job as John McCain at pursuing his vision of what America should be. I do dispute that his vision is a vision of what America should be. We've seen enough decades of that vision failing, often with catastrophic results, that nobody old enough to vote in this country should still believe in it.

     We get sucked in by how well-spoken a candidate is, how good he looks, how much he seems to care, and his rhetoric. As I said earlier, a well-meaning friend asked me, "Is it bad to buy a kid breakfast?" without considering the consequences of how many other people missed meals to pay for it.

     Our country is in a world of hurt. Decades of decay in our productive infrastructure have taken a terrible toll. We have a job to do and it's not going to be easy.

     Here is the Great, Big, American insight: The government isn't going to solve our problems.

     Barack Obama raises many concerns for me: He's inexperienced, he 's kept company that makes me nervous, he vacillates where he should keep a steady course, and he and his wife are from times and places with racial issues. (I went to Princeton the same time as Michelle Obama and I expect his experience at Columbia and Harvard had similar race problems.) But all of that fades for the real issue: Barack Obama believes that government is the way to fix our country. The cancer of regulation and relief will metastasize to new areas of our economy and society under a Barack Obama administration.

     95% of the world shares the belief in government as repairman, 6500 million people all over our planet. People aren't climbing over barbed-wire fences to get into those places. We're the ones with an illegal-immigration problem. America is a better place to live than other places because most of our history rejects Obama's vision.

     John McCain comes so much closer to America's true vision that he's an obvious choice. I don't believe he will give us better government, but I do believe he'll give us less of it.

     Please vote for John McCain for President of the United States on Election Day, 2008 November 4, Tuesday.