The results of the GOP primaries this year reveal one indisputable fact; grassroots Republicans are angry, frustrated, and disgusted; they want to restrain the power of the federal government. We will have to wait until November 2nd to see if Democrats and Independents feel the same way as GOP activists, who have sent a clear message to the GOP establishment, enough of your rhetoric, enough of your big government policies, it’s time to restore the principles of freedom, liberty and limited government.
In other words, will America’s second “Tea Party” sweep at the polls in the general election?
The first American Revolution overthrew the big government policies of the British Empire. The Declaration of Independence was the greatest statement of the natural rights of man. Our rights come from our Creator–not the government. Human beings are born free and government is supposed to protect are natural rights. That was the promise of America.
Soon the first counterrevolution occurred. The U.S. Constitution contained the seeds of its virtual demise—the general welfare and the interstate commerce clauses. These “loopholes” have been the basis for the uninterrupted growth of the federal government since 1787. Although the Bill of Rights was included in the Constitution to protect our natural rights, our rights are hanging by a thread.
The Patriot Act, for example, has decimated the Fourth Amendment. So-called hate speech laws have undermined the First Amendment. And the Second Amendment is a hollow shell. The right to bear arms—the right to defend oneself, a natural right if there ever was one—has been ignored by the courts for decades. The Fifth Amendment’s protection of private property has been weakened; in other words, the abuses of eminent domain continue.
And the Ninth and Tenth Amendments have been ignored, allowing the federal government to run roughshod over the states and the people.
The counterrevolution continued during the War Between the States as President Lincoln used brutal force, the suspension of civil liberties, massive inflation, and other unconstitutional measures to prevent southern states from seceding from the Union, even though our nation was founded when the colonies seceded from Great Britain. In short, America was “conceived in liberty.”
In the early 20th century, the counterrevolution shifted into high gear. In 1913, the 16th amendment to the U.S. Constitution allowed the federal government to tax the incomes of the people directly. Proponents of the income tax asserted that it would be a “rich” man’s tax, because 98% of the people would not have to pay it and the tax rates would be no higher than 7%.
That same year the Federal Reserve was created. Nearly 100 years later, the evidence is overwhelming: the FED has been the engine of inflation and has caused the boom bust cycles and the bubbles that have ravaged the economy.
In the 1930s, the Hoover-FDR New Deals added major layers to the big government edifice, including the beginning of the end of a gold linked dollar, when FDR confiscated the people’s gold in 1933. The passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 was supposed to be a modest program to help seniors cope in retirement. Instead it has become the largest Ponzi scheme in American history. In addition, the New Deal created more “alphabet soup” agencies that control virtually every aspect of commerce in America, so much so that the nation’s relatively free enterprise economy has been replaced by what can be best described as economic fascism.
Not to be outdone, President Johnson, an FDR protégé, used his formidable political skills to pass Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Medicare was projected to cost $3 billion in 1990. It cost $100 billion. Today, Medicare’s annual cost today is about $500 billion and will rise rapidly over the next twenty years as the first wave of baby boomers become eligible on January 1, 2011. Both Social Security and Medicare have unfunded liabilities of as much as $100 trillion.
President Nixon declared the federal government bankrupt when he severed the last link between the dollar and gold in 1971.
George W. Bush grew the welfare-warfare state exponentially with No Child Left Behind, a Medicare prescription drug benefit and preemptive war in the Middle East. President Obama upped the ante and has continued the massive intervention in the Middle East, a virtual takeover of the health care sector and more financial regulation. The national debt is approaching banana republic proportions.
The nation is still in the grips of the Great Recession, a period where the economy is trying to readjust from the housing bubble and misguided investments made during the easy money periods promoted by Fed Chairmen Greenspan and Bernanke. Trillions of dollars of federal “stimulus” spending has been wasted in an attempt to prop up the economy. The bailouts of General Motors, Wall Street firms, the banks, and other politically connected enterprises, while the unemployment rate is unofficially over 20%, have created a “tipping point.”
America’s political and financial elites have overplayed their “hands.” They have used the federal government to enrich themselves at the expense of the American people for more than 200 years. They have used the federal government to overturn the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. The welfare-warfare state and fiat money have brought us to the brink of national bankruptcy. America’s counter counterrevolution is underway. Whether it is successful at the polls in November remains to be seen.