A vote for incumbent president Barack Obama in November is a vote against the United States Constitution.  Furthermore, it is a vote for one's own enslavement.

No American president has demonstrated such contempt for the Constitution, the concept of separation of powers, and the American spirit in as small an amount of time as Obama.  His transgressions and insults are legion:

He has initiated an unprecedented expansion of executive and regulatory power to grant waivers from the law to individuals and groups for political purposes, financial gain, or both.

He has enacted rules governing pieces of legislation that are incomprehensible, leading to increased power to those in power through their interpretation of those rules.

He has overseen a deadly criminal gun-walking operation to foreign gangsters, in defiance of the law and placing our national security at risk.

His attorney general, in connection with that scheme, is officially in contempt of Congress.

He has attempted to nationalize one-sixth of the American economy in defiance of the Constitution and the principles of the free market.

He has attempted to declare when the United States Senate is in or out of session, in direct violation of the Constitution and the separation of powers.

He has sunk billions of taxpayer funds into one boondoggle after another.

He has refused, in many instances, to perform his duty-bound oath to enforce the law.

He has established commissions with sweeping mandates populated by czars that do not answer to the citizenry via the Congress.

He has attempted to foster a sneering contempt for self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and freedom.

He has increased the debt of this nation into the trillions and mortgaged the future of generations of Americans in a futile and arrogant attempt to manage economic growth by government edict.

Those are but a few of Obama's crimes and blunders. Yet the incumbent is not solely complicit in this erosion of liberty.  We, the voters, are also to blame.  For the last century, we have placed an inordinate amount of faith in government by technocrat and bureaucrat in exchange for a pittance from a benefits system built upon loose economic and moral ground.

We have been compliant and largely ambivalent as our government has fostered a loss of confidence in our own sovereignty and our right to defend ourselves; pushed an ever-increasing tax burden on the individual and the small business; produced bulky legislation spilling over hundreds or thousands of pages; contrived thousands upon thousands of regulations in The Federal Registry that follow those bills and employ battalions of lawyers to interpret; permitted swarms of compliance officers to brandish those regulations like a sword; yawned at the piling up of debt and the erosion of the credit of the United States; accepted and encouraged judicial fiat; and averted our gaze from a creeping encroachment into our private affairs and private institutions.

Such irresponsible granting and wielding of political power is not consistent with our intended form of republican government.  Our country has been slowly and silently transformed from a representative republic to an increasingly centralized and asphyxiating social democracy.

Social democracy erodes the spirit of independence nobly won by our forefathers and successfully defended by their descendents.  It erodes the spirit of self-respect, sensitivity to one's neighbors, and the proper relationship between citizen and government that is vital to liberty.  It erodes the work ethic and bolsters the false expectation that an all-encompassing state can, will, and should provide for each citizen from first breath to last.

According to author Mark Steyn, only seven percent of Americans received means-tested government benefits in 1979.  In 2009, that figure was over 30 percent.  In 2000, 17 million Americans received food stamps, compared to 46 million at this point.  Steyn states that since 2009, 2.6 million Americans have joined with new employers, yet 3.1 million Americans have registered for disability checks.  Is our new clarion call a meekly disinterested "Take my liberty and give me a check"?

We will answer fundamental questions about our country in November.  Are we for a constitutional republic or a social democracy?  Will we reject our charter and inalterably set course for unmitigated ruin in exchange for the equality of misery?  The incumbent has clearly stated his intentions.  They are impeachable and antithetical to constitutional self-government.  The alternative is not perfect, but it does offer a stark contrast. 

We have three months to decide and the answer is in our hands: will it be self-reliance and restoration, or will it be dependence and decline?

Matthew May is the author of the book Restoration. He welcomes comments at may.matthew.t@gmail.com.