Skip to main content

Gary Johnson speech at Freedom Fest: America's freedom threatened more by our own government and politicians than our "enemies"


This caps a great 24 hours for the campaign:  a $1 million contribution; polling at 5.3% nationally, and an upcoming protest at CNN headquarters:
“We have reached a sad point in history at which Americans’ freedom is not being threatened from outside, but rather from our own government and the politicians who run it. Yes, there are many around the world, whether they be terrorists or nations who harbor them, who would do us harm if given the opportunity, and who would love to rob us of our liberties. But with a national defense that represents almost half the entire world’s military spending, we are well-equipped to deal with those external threats.
“What we are failing to deal with is the fact that Congress and the past several Presidents have systematically done to freedom and liberty what no foreign enemy could do. If another nation robbed us of hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth, it would be an outrage we would not tolerate. Yet, we have watched helplessly as the politicians and the Federal Reserve have done precisely the same thing by racking up trillions in debt, devaluing our currency with wrong-headed monetary policies, and placed our dollars on the verge of collapse.

“If a foreign aggressor threatened to take away our rights to privacy, due process under the Constitution, or the fundamental liberties granted in the Bill of Rights, it would be an act of war. Yet, we need the government’s permission and must endure its probing to board an airplane, we can be stopped and frisked for simply walking down the street in New York, and we have government drones flying over farms in the Midwest to make sure manure is being disposed of legally.
“We can be detained indefinitely by our own government under the guise of protecting us. Our cell phones and internet can be monitored. And even our reading habits can be examined at our public libraries.
“If Iran actually acted to do those things to us, we would be launching missiles in an instant. But, in reality, Iran nor any other foreign aggressor has done anything to us – and probably can’t – to rival the loss of freedom and rights we are suffering at the hands of Washington, D.C.
“To a former Republican, the sad irony of these realities is that it is impossible to lay the blame for the destruction of our liberties on one of the two major parties more than the other. They are equally guilty, and equally willing to continue to spend, tax and legislate freedom into oblivion.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?