A Manhattan Project to Stop Socialism and Revive the American Dream | The American Spectator

Last Tuesday’s elections were a wake-up call for the Republican Party that conservative leaders need to be doing more to address the affordability crisis decimating the American Dream — or else we risk falling victim to the seductive lies of Marxism and socialism. The scale of the problem is enormous, and our country needs an equally bold and transformative solution.
The benefits would be tangible: new small businesses, revitalized downtown storefronts, higher employment, and fewer young people forced to leave home.
What America faces today is not merely an economic crisis. It is a crisis of opportunity. When people believe that the deck is stacked against them, society begins to fray at the seams — which is precisely why we are seeing near record low business optimism, deepening political polarization, and collapsing birth rates.
But there is a flip side to this coin. When Americans believe that hard work will be rewarded, they can and will do anything. They are the most hard-working nation of people anywhere.
This has always been the root of the American Dream. The Homestead Act of 1862 embodied that spirit. For a small filing fee, settlers received 160 acres if they promised to live on the land, build a home, and farm it for five years. Every U.S. citizen — including women, freed slaves, and naturalized immigrants — was eligible.
Carving a home on the frontier was backbreaking labor through blizzards, droughts, floods, and the constant threat of Indian attack. Many settlers returned back East. Many others perished in the brutal conditions.
Despite these hardships, more than 250 million acres of land were parceled out through the Homestead Act. That simple promise — the promise of ownership — forged the greatest nation in history from a vast wilderness. It gave ordinary people a stake in their own future.
The same dynamic revived the country during the Reagan Revolution. The 1980s are remembered as a time of restored national pride after the anger and chaos of the…