Which way America? America's legacy of freedom has meant untold wealth and prosperity for millions and made the American dream a reality. It's a legacy NAFTA could steal.

As a young mother, every morning at 4:30 a.m. Kimberly Moore would drop off her young child at her mother-in-law's home before reporting to work at McDonald's. After a full day at the fast-food chain, according to the Tallahassee Democrat, she got her books together and went to class, first at Tallahassee Community College and then at Florida State University. A single mother, she eventually earned her MBA. Keeping her nose to the grindstone, she rose through the ranks of the business world in Florida, eventually earning the title of Chief Executive Officer of Workforce Plus, a large employment firm. Starting with little more than her own initiative and drive to succeed, she reached the pinnacle of the business world, making hers an inspiring story of self-made success, a story of a woman living the American dream.

As inspiring as Kimberly Moore's story is, the really amazing thing about it is that it is only a small pan of the incredible tapestry of success that is the American dream. Generations of Americans have believed that in America they can work hard to make a better life for themselves than their parents had before them. And every day Americans head out the door to jobs where, through dedication and perseverance, they work harder, longer, and more productively than the citizens of any other nation.

Why do they do it? Why do Americans like Kimberly Moore work long hours for low pay only to leave work and put in countless additional hours pursuing education? Why do small investors struggle to find a few dollars here and there in order to invest in some possibly risky venture? The short answer--for the money--misses the essential point: Americans do these things, they work harder and longer, because the wealth they earn serves a greater purpose. To the parent who comes home from a hard day at the factory or office, the son playing basketball in the driveway or the daughter riding her new bicycle on the sidewalk provides reason for any amount of labor, any amount of sacrifice. Americans work for many reasons, but prominent among them is the unwavering desire to provide a good life, and maybe a better life than they themselves had known, to their children. It happens frequently and spectacularly in America, because Americans are uniquely free.

The Benefits of Liberty

The freedom that Americans enjoy, and that is so essential to the pursuit of a better life, comes from recognition that every person has certain God-given rights that may not be infringed. To most Americans, living from birth in a free land as their parents did before them, that idea seems self-evident. But that masks the truly revolutionary novelty of the notion of individual liberty.

The idea that all people are free and in possession of rights that may never be violated sprung up in the minds of philosophers centuries ago, but it was nowhere put into practice until America's Founding Fathers wrested the colonies from the grasp of the British crown. That heroic effort began when the founding generation of Americans, speaking with a unified and defiant voice through the words of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, told the world: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

No other nation, from the day Jefferson penned those immortal words to this, has ever been founded upon that doctrine. To this day, America stands alone as the only nation ever truly conceived for the express purpose of preserving liberty. Since then, Americans have reaped the blessings of freedom, and the resulting prosperity and achievement of the nation's citizens have been the envy of the rest of the world. Even today, more than anywhere else in the world, Americans are free to speak their minds; free to worship where, how, and when they wish; free to come and go as they please; free to work at whatever trade or craft that best suits them or interests them; and free to raise their families.

That last is perhaps the most important. It is the purpose that motivates people like Rob Ketterer. While still in high school, with little more in the way of assets other than his own business savvy and a will to succeed, Ketterer set up what amounted to a fancy lemonade stand in his parents' yard, selling snacks and drinks to golfers at a nearby golf course. His father, seeing his son's initiative and almost certainly eager to help him build a promising future, helped the boy to begin learning about investments, skills that a college-bound Ketterer would put to good use.

Looking forward to the day when he would get married and have a family of his own, Ketterer explained to Motley Fool, an investment strategy website, he scraped together a paltry $500 to start building a nest egg. "I was a starving college student," he explained, but he kept at it, working to build a secure future on which to build a family. His small investment paid off, and now out of college he is on firm financial footing, ready to buy a home and start a family.

"I plan on teaching my kids how important it is to live within your means and hope to teach them the value of a hard-earned dollar," Ketterer said, echoing sentiments held by untold generations of mothers and fathers who likewise hoped to see their kids live better, more secure and happy lives than the generations that preceded them.

For Ketterer and his wife, who do not yet have children, and for millions of other Americans, family is the final and best motivating factor in a land where men are free. In the child is the promise of the future, and what parent does not want to see his or her child live in a future where peace and freedom allow the individual the liberty to pursue happiness to the fullest possible extent? It has ever remained true, as the authors of the Constitution very adroitly recorded, that we the free people of the United States seek to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

The Future at Stake

What if that future disappeared? What if the United States of America, uniquely founded to preserve liberty, ceased to exist as a free and independent nation? What if the legal principles upon which the nation was founded, those that recognize the natural rights of man, were submerged and harmonized with the laws of other nations, laws alien to the traditions of freedom bequeathed to the nation by the brilliant wisdom of the Founding Fathers? Would individuals continue to be free to pursue their dreams? Would parents continue to be free to impart their own values to their children and to work for their future? Or would a veil of oppression slowly obscure the American dream?

It seems preposterous, but the question of the age is whether America shall remain free and independent or whether it will be subordinated to some alien bureaucracy that will prevent our great country from pursuing its own destiny. An agreement was reached in 1993 through which international legal structures might actually force the abandonment of the entire governmental framework built so carefully by the Founding Fathers. That agreement was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and upon it, as its proponents have argued, can be built the future integration of Canada and Mexico with the United States. Indeed, NAFTA alone already has had a substantially deleterious effect on the well-being of the citizens of the nation. But if left unchallenged, it poses a greater threat for the future: the potential final dissolution of the United States through the harmonization of U.S. law with that of Canada and Mexico.

The American dream is made possible by our national independence and personal freedom. But internationalists have a conflicting dream, that of an integrated hemisphere modeled after the European Union. And that integration is coming quickly if internationalists have their way. In its report entitled Building a North American Community, the influential New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) calls for "the creation by 2010 of a North American community.... Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly, and safe." It's a plan that has the support of President Bush who, at the White House on February 16, 2001, announced that the United States, with Canada and Mexico, "will strive to consolidate a North American economic community." It is NAFTA that is the basis for this planned integration. (See "From NAFTA to the NAU" by William E Jasper on page 28.)

NAFTA is not about creating jobs and prosperity, as its backers allege. Instead, NAFTA is about formulating a North American Union, the next steps of which are just over the horizon. If, for future generations, we wish to preserve the American way of life, we must keep America free and independent--and that means withdrawing from NAFTA before it's too late.

Living the dream: A single mother, Kimberly Moore worked full-time at McDonald's during the day to pay for college in the evening. Through hard work and perseverance she went on to earn an MBA and become CEO of a well-known Florida business. Like millions of other Americans, Kimberly Moore is living proof that the dream of providing a better future for oneself and for family is a reality in a free America.