Editor's Note:  The following is a guest piece by a fellow conservative commentator.

Like John McCain, I attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, but our similarities pretty much end there.

I am not the son of serial admirals. I am the son of a wartime sailor who raised a family with a single used car, a black and white TV, no air conditioner in the L.A. heat, not even a dishwasher or microwave - on an always precarious low paying job. I did not marry an heiress who could, with the stroke of a pen if she so chose, finance a Presidential campaign.

But I donated the maximum amount I could to the Senator's campaign because in my view he is the best candidate still standing, damnation by faint praise though this statement may be.

I also was never held captive in Viet Nam. Those of us lucky enough to share my fate will never know the depths of the pain and horror Senator McCain plumbed. The only thing we can know for sure is that the depth of his courage demonstrably proved to be the greater.

Our paths continued to diverge after service, with Senator McCain continuing to make a living at the federal trough and me in the private sector helping to pay for it.

Which, with a little background, leads me to my questions for John McCain.

I am self-employed. I write patents to protect inventors, the lifeblood of our innovative economy, and I'm the only lawyer in my firm, although I employ two people full time at generous salaries and five others part time. It's hard work and tricky, which is why I pay upwards of $10,000 per year in malpractice premiums even though I've never been sued in almost 20 years of practice. I work for large clients who dictate my fees. They have not dictated a raise in ten years. Maybe they should be put in charge of Congressional salaries. In any case, I've done more than my share to personally combat inflation.

Last year, I paid a total in income taxes and business taxes of around $150,000.  That's a lot of golden eggs from one middle aged goose who employs people to boot. I thank God for granting me the grace to live in a country where I can live this story, and for the opportunity to help pay for a government of that country. But as to this last blessing, I have a surfeit, courtesy of the colleagues of John McCain, who apparently believe that Providence requires more than their usual assistance in this particular matter.

Because the U.S. government appears intent on busting my butt as a way of currying favor with what they surely mistake to be an unduly socialist Almighty (who took two out of ten Commandments to forbid us from envying our neighbors' possessions and whose Son told the rich young man to give up his own possessions - not his neighbors').

I will not digress that the unelectable Obama would make matters even worse. Instead, I'd like to know what John McCain will do to ensure that I can continue to employ the people I do at the wages they receive and still keep something for my heirs.  Which will be taxed to the max unless I die before 2010 unless John McCain does something about that too.

What specifically, Senator, will you tell Congress when the Bush tax cuts expire? Do you have a cogent free market argument for allowing small business people like me to keep a little more of my inflation-eroded money, or at least a principled reluctance to allow the government to confiscate more than they already do? How does your argument dovetail with your continuing support of war funding PLUS your election year obeisance to reducing greenhouse gases that will have little environmental effect but will require enormous economic sacrifice, including higher taxes to pay for the new cult of "climate change"?

Your judgment, to the extent that it has been questioned in the past, is linked to temperamental self-righteousness. You took great offense at being one of the Keating Five, and in response hung the McCain-Feingold campaign finance rules around the neck of the First Amendment of, to borrow a phrase, the "so-called" Constitution. You took offense at the businessman Mitt Romney impertinently challenging you for the Republican nomination and in response painted an entire vibrant and vitally important part of the private sector - the pharmaceutical industry - as being the "bad guys".

You take offense at "obscene" oil company profits yet are an officer of a government that confiscates far more in taxes from every gallon than what the oil companies make from it in profit, the same government that has permitted the dollar to weaken to the extent that during the period oil has doubled in terms of the Euro it has quadrupled in terms of the dollar. Do these two facts not at least suggest to you that a chief reason for crippling gas prices is the U.S. government? Do you understand that a weak dollar and the inflation that it stokes is a matter of poor monetary policy and not necessarily poor fiscal policy? Do you know the difference between the two?

Can you not muster even a little anger on my behalf against this fecklessness that  I've been paying for and that you've been part of all of your adult life? Or is an economically oppressive government, a topic that has always been at the heart of our Republic (think Boston Tea Party) too dry to stir your emotions?

Or are you willing to master your emotions and allow your better judgment to emerge?

Either path would be salutary Senator, and I will deeply appreciate your following either one even as much as I, your comrade in arms, will always appreciate your brave service.

COPYRIGHT 2008 JOHN ROGITZ