United Liberty

I found this video of George W. Bush speaking on foreign policy and thought we might look back ten years and see how far U.S. foreign policy has come.

Enjoy!

Way back in July of 2003 Ron Paul wrote an article entitled “We’ve Been Neo-Conned” in which he laid out facts showing that the “Neo-Con” philosophy had taken over the foreign policy of the USA (For a quick primer on the Neo-Conservative movement please click the link above). As I was reading this article one question kept repeating in my head:

“How did it come to this?”

The only place to start I believe is with the American person (notice I didn’t use the plural “people”). I will use myself as an example since I believe my story is common to many modern-day libertarians and members of the Liberty movement.

In short, I was raised a Reagan Republican, became a Neo-Con after 9/11, converted to a Goldwater conservative after the invasion of Iraq and became a full-fledged libertarian after finding the writings of Murray Rothbard(OK, maybe every libertarian didn’t become one because of Murray but I think many have a similar story).

But here is what I believe is key in my story and the reason why there aren’t more capital “L” Libertarians: I didn’t get their foreign policy. Like many I actually referred to myself as libertarian on social and monetary issues, but not when it came to our “enemies”. I hear the same from freedom loving people over and over again, especially in the wake of 9/11.

The reason the Neo-Cons were able to seize power is FEAR. I am not putting anybody down because of it. I can certainly relate, but we still have to figure out why the American person is allowing our government todrop bombs and declare war on anybody they want to while we cheer them on. When does fear translate to lunacy?

With Scott Brown’s impressive win over Martha Coakley in Massachusetts on Tuesday, Republicans are poised to make gains in both the House and Senate in the upcoming mid-term elections. Not to rain on my Republican friends’ parade, but since Tuesday I’ve noticed some over-confidence among GOP ranks. Perhaps some perspective is in order.

We should certainly take Tuesday’s election as a rebuke of the President Barack Obama’s agenda, including his health care “reform” proposal. It came in what was one of the bluer states in the country. Although pundits agree that Coakley was a terrible candidate, it’s naive to deny that Voters aren’t happy with Democrats.

It is, however, important to point out that once you look at poll numbers, they’re not too happy with Republicans either. It seems that Republicans are forgetting that.

In 2006, voters went to the polls and gave Democrats complete control of Congress for the first time since 1993 because Republicans were spending too much money and the war in Iraq had dragged on for six years with no end in sight. It wasn’t because they approved of Democrats.

We saw this again in 2008, only this time the economy was tanking and bailouts became the punchline that led Barack Obama in the White House, despite the fact that he voted for the bailouts (he played the populist anger well).

Republicans want to forget that George W. Bush existed, and that’s understandable. Unfortunately, Republicans forget that they had control of the House and near complete control of the Senate from 2001 to 2007. Whether my Republican friends want to admit it or not, Republican members of Congress were complicit in growing the size and scope of government. Many of these folks are the same people I’ve seen at Tea Party events complaining about Barack Obama.

While it’s nothing significant, considering that Barack Obama has gone on quite the spending spree since he was inaugurated one year ago this month, I thought it was interesting that he vetoed his first spending bill much earlier in his presidency than his predecessor:

George W. Bush is the biggest spending president since Lyndon B. Johnson, according to Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute (at least until Barack Obama).

Dan Mitchell points out that the deficits from FY 2009 are almost entirely on George W. Bush, not Barack Obama. According to Mitchell, spending added by Obama only increased the budget by “amounted to just a tiny percentage of the FY2009 total – about $140 billion out of a $3.5 trillion budget.”

David Boaz takes on the hubris of George W. Bush:

The president who

• expanded federal spending by more than a trillion dollars a year, before his disastrous last hundred days
• federalized education
• laid out “a smorgasbord of handouts and subsidies for virtually every energy lobby in Washington.”
• protected the steel, agriculture, and textile industries from foreign competition
• backed farm bills with lavish subsidies for producers
• created the biggest new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson
• bailed out Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, and dozens of other banks
• provided government support for mortgages, credit cards, auto loans and other consumer debt, and
• bailed out Chrysler and General Motors in direct defiance of Congress’s refusal to do so

now says that his successor is about to “replace the risk-and-reward model of the private sector” with “too much government involvement”? Shouldn’t President Bush be doing penance in a monastery somewhere, rather than embarrass the free-market cause by pretending that he wasn’t the biggest-government president in decades?

Former President George W. Bush spoke in Texas yesterday:

Former President George W. Bush on Thursday warned that Washington is in danger of taking the country away from free-market principles in the wake of the recession, as he defended his decision to approve a Wall Street bailout package in the final months of his term.

The former president, who was outlining his vision for a policy institute to bear his name at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, warned that policymakers are taking government intervention too far in the wake of the rescue package — though he specifically omitted naming policies like the $787 billion stimulus package, the appointment of a “pay czar” to monitor compensation and increased intervention in the U.S. auto industry.

“As the world recovers, we’re going to face a temptation to replace the risk-and-reward model of the private sector with the blunt instruments of government spending and control,” Bush said. “History shows that the greater threat to prosperity is not too little government involvement but too much.”

Bush called his decision to back the $700 billion bank bailout one of the “most difficult” of his presidency.

“I went against my free-market instincts,” he said, explaining that he did so to unfreeze the credit markets and avoid a depression.

Video: