United Liberty

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:

I should preface this article by stating that I started writing it two years ago, after one of my hundreds of viewings of Fight Club.  During a recent purge of my Google Docs, I decided that what I had begun was worth keeping and completing.

During the late eighteenth century, American revolutionaries struggled to escape the oppression of a tyrannical king.  They fought taxation that stifled growth and expanded the power of a governing body far removed from representing its the people.  They sought freedoms that were only possible in their dreams. After many brilliant words were written and spoken by Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, Americans mobilized to defend their ideals from a tyrant. Currently, we face a situation similar to our Founding Fathers only now it is two hundred thirty years later. Fortunately for us, the predicament we face is not as dire… yet.

With the RIGHT solutions to the problems of taxation, education, health care, poverty, drugs, foreign policy, and many other issues, we can “right the ship” before arms and ammunition are necessary.  A liberty-focused reform will not be quick or easy, but it is most certainly the right thing to do.  Starting locally, filling city, county, and state offices with liberty-minded individuals is the key to putting the right people in the right places on a national level.  Effective and lasting change can not be achieved by electing one person, nor can it occur in one or two election cycles.  Changes for freedom will take cooperation from all levels over the course of several years, more likely over a couple decades.

“We live in a world where we have to have a balance. We can’t just say everybody can go everyplace and do anything they want.” - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on expansion of surveillance cameras

I’ve always known that government-worshiping liberals were naive, but I never thought they’d reached the level of naivety that Ezra Klein displayed in The Washington Post last week: