I think this is a message most if not all American’s can get behind right now. Regardless of if you are on the right, left, center, Democrat or Republican, I think we can all agree the system is not working very well and all it is doing is pitting everyone against each other.
Rather there is real conviction behind Rep. Reichert or just the need for a good sound bite, I applaud the message.
I thought this worth reposting...
545 PEOPLE
By Charlie ReesePoliticians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them. Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits? Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?
You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does. You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does. You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.
One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country. I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.
I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-pickingthing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.
Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party. What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it. The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? Nancy Pelosi. She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.
It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million can not replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.
If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair. If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red . If the Army & Marines are in IRAQ , it's because they want them in IRAQ If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.
There are no insoluble government problems. Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.
Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power. They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses. Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees.
We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!
We talk so often of the struggle between the left and the right. How many of us have clarity about the core value pillars of each side? We can all rattle off policies and laws that sit on one side of the argument or the other but can we articulate the underlying values from which those policies and laws are derived? To argue about the policies and be ignorant of the principals is akin to arguing about weight loss programs without understanding nutrition and exercise.
I believe that the Right seeks to preserve Traditional American Values. I understand those values to be the ones established by our Founding Fathers and reflected on our currency. They are:
I believe the Left desires to replace these values with other values. Ones that are more secular, European, and socialist. Their replacements would be:
Liberty means preserving as much authority and agency for the individual as possible, only curtailing that liberty when the liberty of another or the nation is under attack. The Left believes that Equality, ensuring that life is fair, is more important, and they are willing to take from those that have in order to provide for those that have not.
In God We Trust means that there is a Divine Creator of man and it is from this Creator that we gain our rights, powers, and authority as individuals. This is a philosophy, not a religion. It is a principal that means governments cannot take our rights away because they are not the author of them. Without this principal the question of authority and where it comes from is suspect and ripe for infringement.
E Pluribus Unum (or Out of Many, One) means that we welcome others into our nation but expect that they will honor our American Values. It does not mean they must abandon their cultural roots. It means that they will learn of us, our history, our language, so that we may together build a common future using the values of our past as a common foundation.
Limited Government because Big Government corrupts and controls. The free market as an extension of the people and private property rights is the innovative engine of the nation, and government should be kept within clearly enumerated and restricted powers. A government not of entitlements, depts, and deficits.
The move from the traditional values of the right, to the new values of the left, represents a fundamental transformation of America. I do not want a transformed America, I always want an improved America, but there is so much to retain.
Define: Transform -- to change something dramatically: to change somebody or something completely
As a final thought you will note that I have omitted the term 'liberal' - that is because the historical meaning of the term has been hijacked. John F. Kennedy was a liberal, but not the left of today:
I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well.
-John F. Kennedy, Sept 14, 1960
This is not the language of the left today which has taken over the leadership ranks of the Democratic party. I am not saying that JFK would be a conservative, but he was far from the leftist liberals of today that speak of ‘social justice’ which is simply a euphemism for economic equality, an enemy of liberty. JFK was unlike his leftist brother Senator Edward Kennedy as he himself points out:
In another sign of lukewarm support from his own party for Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s reelection campaign, Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy today branded the Connecticut incumbent as “a J.F.K. conservative, a relic of another era. "I’m not sure we need someone in the Senate who’s still mired in the provincial, hawkish John F. Kennedy ideas about U.S. military power,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy.
The bottom line is this nation is the greatest success story the world has ever seen. It has enabled individuals to increase their standard of living and the standards of the world more than any other. It has sacrificed for the good of the world time and time again, through the sacrifice of our military strength in the face of evil and through the generosity of our citizens in the face of natural disasters, which was made possible by our prosperity. This was all made possible by the principals that our Founding Fathers put into place: Liberty, In God We Trust, E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One), and Limited Government. If we abandon these and replace them with a different foundation we will lose that which brought us to this magnificent place in human history. We will be transformed into something smaller, less hopeful, less free, less capable, and more dependant – I pray this transformation of America does not happen.
Yesterday the Federal Government grew considerably larger as 2,700 pages of new laws, taxes, and regulations were passed by the United States Congress. What many Americans fail to appreciate is that at the same time, you as citizens became considerably smaller. The United States Congress – the only place where one can have an approval rating of 19%, still get your annual salary increase, and have a 97.9% chance of keeping your job. As citizens of a nation there are two mandatory authoritative influences in our lives. One is ourselves, and the other is the government. (We can enter into other relationships that give authority to other entities, like a loan for a house gives some authority to the bank, but those are voluntary and we can choose not to enter into those relationships.) The government relationship and the authority it has is a consequence of our living in this nation, like it or not. So the question becomes, how much authority should the government have and how much should I as the individual have? Our founding fathers recognized that there were certain things that we as individuals would not be effective at doing ourselves and delegated that authority from the citizens to the government – national defense being a good example. The founders were careful to list, as enumerated powers, those things that the government could do in the U.S. Constitution. The 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was intended to serve as a protection of the peoples rights. It states that all powers and authorities that are not specifically granted to the Federal Government in the Constitution are reserved for the states and the people. This means that if the Constitution doesn’t specifically state that the Federal Government can do something, then it cannot do it.
Let’s explore an illustration. Let’s say we are like a shopper going to the grocery store. There are lots of choices to make at the grocery store. Upon entering we are given two shopping carts. One that we can fill up, and another that is already filled with all sorts of items. We must checkout with both carts. Who filled the second cart? Uncle Sam. He took about 40% of your money and filled it for you, isn’t that nice? Maybe. You go around and fill your cart with the items you need. While doing this you start looking through the cart Uncle Sam filled. There are diapers in there, but they are for a boy, not a girl like you have, so you will have to buy diapers anyway. There are frozen pizzas which is nice you wont have to buy that, but there are also frozen peas, yuck. You notice bread in the second cart, that’s nice, but Uncle Sam bought the one that is $8 a loaf, not the $2 a loaf bread you would prefer. There is a bunch of stuff down in the bottom of the cart that you can’t see and your not allowed to look through it all. It doesn’t matter anyway, you have to buy it regardless of the contents. The good news is, in four years you can vote for a different Uncle Sam that will fill your cart, hopefully more to your liking. Maybe you will get those Cheerios you wanted instead of the Frosted Flakes your current Uncle Sam put in the cart for you. Unfortunately for you, Kellogg’s gave your current Uncle Sam a lot of money to (i.e. campaign contributions, bribes, call them what you like) get that Frosted Flakes in there. And your future Uncle Sam gets his money from Post with the expectation that Raisin Brand will make it in the cart. You see where this is going.
I am not saying that it’s bad that Uncle Sam has a cart, which he gets to fill and for which you have to pay. As long as there is a government, he will have a cart. The question in my mind is how big is his cart, and should it be that big? With every new law, the size of Uncle Sam’s cart gets bigger and yours gets smaller. Your cart gets smaller for a few reasons. Every choice he gets to make is one less choice you get to make. The bigger his cart gets, the more of your money he has to take to fill it. If he crams a bunch of store brand cheddar cheese in his cart you will be less inclined to buy that Tillamook cheddar cheese you prefer. Also, because of regulation you might not be able to pick your favorite brand, the entire cheese section might be designated Uncle Sam shopping only (the FDA does this all the time with medicine that never makes it to market and you can't buy if it did.) The problem isn’t that Uncle Sam has a cart, it’s that his cart has gotten way too big and ours way too small.
The government isn’t choice, it’s force. The government doesn't innovate, control spending, increase quality, or reduce costs, just look at the Postal Service, Medicare, or Social Security. This experiment of government control has been done over and over again throughout Europe and it doesn't make things better. Competition in the free market is the only thing that does, with, of course, proper government oversight to ensure abuses are not taking place. The founding fathers would be shocked at the amount of government control we have allowed in America. There is one reason that America has prospered like no other nation in the history of the world, strict limits on government power. This allows the individual citizen to reach his or her fullest potential – it is as simple as that.
To explore this idea more, start here.
Watching this fight over health care / insurance reform has made me sad. I feel like I am watching my house burn down, while the Democrats who have the water hose are maddeningly watering the lawn to put out the fire, while the Republicans are struggling to get the hose away from them. Unfortunately, I have low confidence that once the Replublicans get the hose they would indeed save the house. I wouldn't be supprised if they started spraying the fence.
