TEA Party Speech: "Individual Rights versus Socialism"

Hello Plymouth Michigan!

It’s great to be here among so many enthusiastic fellow Patriots and TEA Partiers. 

TEA Partiers are often accused of being extremists.  The accusers intend it as an insult.  I wear it as a badge of honor. 

I embrace Barry Goldwater’s view of extremism.  He said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Goldwater outlined our path in his book, Conscience of a Conservative.  He said, “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.  I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom.  My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.  It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution.”

Likewise, we TEA Partiers are extremists who insist on a limited government constrained by the U.S. Constitution.

We TEA Partiers are extremists who insist on holding our elected officials accountable to that Constitution.

We TEA Partiers are extremists who will take back our country on behalf of ‘We the People’!

Today, our country is at war.  Unlike other wars, we are not being attacked by foreign invaders.  We are being assaulted by domestic enemies, radicals who seek to take more and more of our wealth and liberty.  We will fight these radicals at the ballot box.  

The TEA Party movement is waging a political battle with these domestic aggressors in Washington and Lansing.  Our mission is to remove them from their offices, regardless of which side of the aisle that they sit on.  It is up to us to save America.  As Ronald Reagan said, “We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.” 

We have had great successes in this war already.  In just one year, the TEA Party movement has gone from being a laughingstock, to being a force that many politicians are clearly frightened of.  The TEA Party movement has a higher favorability rating than Congress, the President, and both major political parties.  Our movement helped retake the governorship in Virginia.  Our movement helped retake the governorship in New Jersey.  And in one of the most glorious of all victories, our movement helped take Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts.  Scott Brown instantly became a hero when he reminded voters that the office he was seeking did not belong to Ted Kennedy, it did not belong to a particular party, it belonged to the people!  And the people took it!

The first three words of our sacred Constitution are “We the People”.  We the people are the masters of every single bureaucrat and politician in America.  We can hire them and fire them, and a whole bunch of them deserve to be fired. 

In the coming elections, we must assert our will.  To firm our resolve, let’s review some horrific threats to our Republic:

A)                  Our leaders are mocking us:

1. Florida Congressman Alcee Hastings said, “There ain’t no rules here.  We make ‘em up as we go along.”  Ironically, he is a member of the Rules Committee.  He apparently is not aware of the U.S. Constitution.  But we are.  And we are going to hold all of them accountable to it!
2. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of the health care bill: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.”  In November, Pelosi is going to find out that she has been fired as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
3. Barack Obama said in his state of the union address that he was concerned about reckless government spending and the soaring deficit.  One week later, he introduced the biggest budget in U.S. history, with a deficit four times bigger than any other in history!  I wonder what color the sky is on his planet…

B)   Let’s talk about the spending in Washington:

1. Obama’s new budget totals $3.6 trillion.   It is 1600 pages thick.  How many of our leaders do you think actually read it?
2. Washington just passed a government takeover of health care.  This will cost another $1 trillion over ten years, but only if you believe pigs can fly.  No new government entitlement program has ever come close to its initial cost estimates.
3. The good news is that Fidel Castro congratulated us on our government takeover of healthcare.  The bad news is that Cuba recently announced they are cutting back health care services, because they cannot afford them.  America, meet your future.

C)    Washington’s spending is causing massive debt:

1. The budget deficit in 2010 of $1.6 trillion is 44% of the total budget.  In other words, almost half of what the government is spending, it is borrowing.  Explain that to your kids carefully, because they’re the ones who are going to pay it back.  Also, remind them that their generation supported Obama.   
2. In the next decade, the government is going to add $9 trillion to the national debt.  Half of it will be just interest expense on earlier debt.  We will borrow $4.8 trillion in the next ten years just to pay interest! 
3. In ten years, our debt will be $20 trillion.  That’s $67,000 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.  For a family of five, that’s $335,000 of debt.  If you took 20 trillion one dollar bills and lined them end to end in a straight line, it would stretch from the earth to the sun – 20 times!

D)   All of this spending and debt will cause tremendous pressure to raise taxes.  Here is what is likely to happen:

1. Some or all of the Bush tax cuts will expire.
2. A Value Added Tax is actively being considered by Obama’s Deficit Commission.
3. Capital gains taxes will go up.
4. Health care taxes will be imposed, long before benefits are available.
5. Cap and trade taxes will be imposed.
6. The cap on social security taxes will be raised, and benefit eligibility dates will be moved out even more.
7. State and local governments will push for tax increases to make up for revenue lost during the recession. 
8. Everybody will be affected by some or all of these tax increases, not just the rich.

Last Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office made this announcement:  “U.S. fiscal policy is unsustainable, to an extent that it can’t be solved through minor changes.  It’s a matter of arithmetic.”

Why is this happening to our country? 

There is a great moral conflict underlying this disaster.  Our society does not agree on our basic social compact.  Specifically, we do not agree on what a right is.

What really constitutes a right?  Do we all have a right to a free house?  Do we all have a right to a free car?  Do we all have a right to free food?  Do we all have a right to free health care?

Some say our rights are granted by God.  Others say our rights are inherent in nature.   Others say our rights are created by social convention, such as a constitution. 

These are all powerful arguments.  They inspired Thomas Jefferson’s famous statement in the Declaration of Independence:  “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.”

These unalienable rights not only have to be respected by individual citizens, they have to be respected by our government.  Jefferson told us, “Moral laws are as compelling on whole nations as they are on individual citizens.” 

Here is an example of what he meant.  Your right to your private property is inherent in your right to life and liberty, because it is what your life and liberty produces.  If you do not have a right to the property and wealth that your life produces, then your right to life and liberty are an illusion.  There is general agreement about this in our society, up to a certain point.  For instance, we all agree that one person stealing your property is a criminal.  Ten people stealing your property is a gang of criminals.  We all agree on that.  A thousand people stealing your property is organized crime.  We all agree on that. 

A million robbers stealing your property is socialism.  Sadly, we do not have agreement in our society about whether a million socialist robbers stealing your property is good or bad. 

Let me be clear on where I stand.  Socialism, which is nothing more than millions of robbers stealing your property with the force of government, is morally wrong.  It is as criminal as one robber stealing your property.  It doesn’t matter how many people gather together to steal your property, theft is an assault on your unalienable right to life.  It doesn’t matter if 51% of the citizens vote to steal your property.  It is still immoral. 

Would we accept 51% voting the remaining 49% into slavery?  Of course not!  The notion is morally repugnant to almost everyone.  Then why would we accept the premise of socialism?  Socialism is nothing more than theft of your life in bits and pieces, under the guise of “the greater good”.   It is a form of gradual slavery.  It is involuntary servitude in the form of a thousand bureaucratic chain links. 

The socialist philosophy is morally bankrupt.  The socialist claims, for example, that we all have a right to free health care.  But who will fulfill that right?  Is health care readily available in nature, like air or water?  It is not.  It has to be provided by doctors and nurses and ambulance drivers, along with a large supporting cast.  For someone to claim the service of these people by absolute right, is the same as staking an absolute claim to their lives and their labor, or the lives and labor of others who will be forced to pay for their services on behalf of those who won’t.  When someone stakes an absolute claim to your life and labor, they have made you a slave.       

We are appalled by slavery, and rightly so.  We are appalled because it violates a person’s unalienable right to life and liberty.  Socialism is slavery too, dressed up in fancy words and dime store semantics.  Socialism is not the slavery of whips and chains.  Rather, it is the slavery of stealing your life hour by hour, day by day.  Nationalized health care?  To pay for it, you owe the state 30 days of hard labor.  Cap and trade?  To pay for it, you owe the state another 30 days of hard labor.  Trillions for bailing out irresponsible people and failed businesses?  You owe the state 6o days of hard labor. 

We are $13 trillion dollars in debt and counting.  We are incurring unfunded liabilities in Social Security, Medicare, and now nationalized health care, the likes of which the world has never seen before.  We have allowed ourselves to be sold into slavery to this debt.  Worse yet, we have allowed our children to be sold into slavery.

The socialists will say that our servitude is necessitated by “the will of the people” or “the greater good”.  No “will of the people” can make a slave of another person!  There is no “greater good” than protecting the right to life and liberty of every single person in our society!  Our government was instituted to protect our lives and property, not to enslave us and to steal our property!  That is precisely why we have a Constitution.  It is our fundamental pact to protect individuals from the tyranny of the majority.

Once we grant everyone the “right” to health care, what will stop claims for other so-called “rights”?  What is the difference between the right to health care and the rights to housing, food, transportation, education, clothing, energy, and iPods?  There is no difference.  Once you accept being a slave to one of these so-called rights, you have accepted being a slave to them all.   This is the slippery slope that we are on right now.  There is simply no end to what the socialists will try to grab, when the concept of rights has become so diminished. 

Vice President Joe Biden actually pointed this out, in his own stupid way.  During the health care “summit”, he alleged that we all agree government has a role in health care, and that we’re just talking about how much of a role.  He clarified the issue perfectly – if we grant that the government has a moral right to take over health care, then all we are arguing about is to what degree will all be made slaves to that right.  If we grant to the government such authority, then we have ceded the whole argument to the socialists, and the game is over for our Constitution and our way of life. 

If we surrender our fundamental rights to the government in this manner, then we deserve the scathing words of Sam Adams, who said, “May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence are the most morally profound words ever crafted in a political document.  We have a right to our life and liberty.  We do not have a right to the life and liberty of our neighbors.   This fundamental social compact has made us the greatest society in the history of the world, and the most moral society in the history of the world.   

Losing our unalienable rights to life and liberty is a moral tragedy by itself.  But, there are other hidden moral hazards if we lose these rights.  Dr. Adrian Rogers said:  “What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.  The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from someone else.  When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they worked for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.”  

It is the end of any nation, because socialism, which is what Dr. Rogers was describing, will inevitably result in lost incentive, class warfare, generational dependency and carelessness.  We have seen a microcosm of this in action very near to us.  If you want to see where Obama’s vision of hope and change is leading us, look no further than Detroit.  Detroit is the moral hazard of socialism.

Socialists believe that government should force citizens to do the work of an altruistic god they call the state.  However, altruism forced by government can never be the work of any God, it can only be destructive of individual rights and liberty.  Transfers of wealth forced by the state are not charity, they are theft on the grandest of scales.

The beauty of our Constitution is that it allows the exercise of individual liberty, including altruistic behavior, without the evil of state compulsion and confiscation.  Our Constitution creates the opportunity for moral redemption, in whatever form each individual seeks.  Socialism, on the other hand, obliterates morality with guns and tax collectors.  Ayn Rand said “morality ends where the barrel of a gun begins.”  Force is the opposite of morality, because moral behavior is inherently an exercise of free will.

Who among us has the absolute authority to mandate how each of us should allocate our time and wealth?  For anyone to claim such authority is a moral abomination.  It is tantamount to claiming that one person’s wish is superior to another person’s, and that this superiority can be manifested forcibly.  Such claims are the source of slavery and concentration camps, of gulags and re-education programs, of dictators and tyrants.  Such claims ignore the most fundamental right in our society—our right to our lives and the results of our efforts.

We cannot go half way with the socialists.  It is not possible to be half free, at least not for long.  The state has the force of guns and the very real power to confiscate wealth.  If we allow the government to decide how much liberty we can have, it will be like a wolf having dinner with a sheep.  We all know what will be on the menu.

To be sure, we have an obligation to pay taxes to fund the legitimate functions of government, which are limited and defined by the Constitution.  We do not have a moral obligation to pay taxes just to transfer wealth from one citizen to another.

Two centuries ago, we fought a military revolution over this moral issue.  We are now engaged in a political revolution to save this moral principle.  Our unalienable right to life has been defended with the blood of patriots for over two centuries.  Millions of brave men and women have sacrificed their very lives to protect this sacred principle.  I ask you, are we now going to allow socialist politicians to legislate and tax it away?   Over my dead body!

Japanese admiral Yamamoto said after the Pearl Harbor attack, “I fear that all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”  If we can thank President Obama for one thing, it is this.  He has awakened us to the harsh reality of what our politicians have been doing to America for a long time.  He has awakened the TEA Party movement.  He has awakened a sleeping giant.  He has awakened the people of America. 

It is time for another revolution.  Not a revolution of bombs and bullets, but a revolution of leadership and moral conviction.   Revolutions can happen through the ballot box as much as they can with pitchforks.

If what is happening to America doesn’t make your blood boil, you don’t have American blood in your veins.  The elections of 2010 and 2012 will decide everything.  We American patriots need to exert our political will at every level of government and on every issue critical to restoring limited government.  If we have not removed Obama, Pelosi, and Reid from power by 2012, then may our children forgive us, and may God have mercy on our souls.  There is nothing more important during the next two years than working to remove these radicals and their cohorts from office.

Politicians across America, please understand us.  We do not care whether you are Republican, Democrat, or Independent.  We only care that you faithfully represent the Constitution of the United States.  We only care that you embrace the principle of limited government.  We only care that you stop intruding in our lives.  We only care that you keep your hands off our wallets and our families. 

Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” 

The good men and women of America have been pushed too far.  Here’s a message for all of the politicians who have pushed us too far.  We the people are coming for you in November.  We the people will be coming for you in 2012.  We the people are going to fire you.

This great country does not belong to you politicians.  It belongs to us! 

Thank you. 

(If you enjoyed reading this speech, please consider reading my new book, "We've Been Had:  How Obama and the Radicals Conned Middle Class America."  For information about the book, click on the highlighted book title in this paragraph.)  Also, click on this link to view the author's Facebook page.