Benjamin Montgomery

This pretty much sums it all up.

Upon leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787 the following exchange took place between Benjamin Franklin and an anxious United States Citizen.

“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

So can we keep it?

Now what are you going to do about it? Let’s get organized to take our country back.

Join The Campaign For Liberty.

I would like to take a second and introduce you to the Campaign For Liberty.  I will be serving as the Louisiana District 2 Coordinator.  My first task in this capacity will be to recruit more people to join.

What is the Campaign For Liberty, and why should you join?

The Campaign For Liberty is an organization started by Ron Paul with the funds left over from his Presidential Campaign.   The organization serves the purpose of providing an infrastructure for organization and action.

You should join if you believe in any part of the following statement from the Campaign For Liberty website.

Americans inherit from our ancestors a glorious tradition of freedom and resistance to oppression.  Our country has long been admired by the rest of the world for her great example of liberty and prosperity—a light shining in the darkness of tyranny.

But many Americans today are frustrated.  The political choices they are offered give them no real choice at all.  For all their talk of “change,” neither major political party as presently constituted challenges the status quo in any serious way.  Neither treats the Constitution with anything but contempt.  Neither offers any kind of change in monetary policy.  Neither wants to make the reductions in government that our crushing debt burden demands.  Neither talks about bringing American troops home not just from Iraq but from around the world.  Our country is going bankrupt, and none of these sensible proposals are even on the table.

This destructive bipartisan consensus has suffocated American political life for many years.  Anyone who tries to ask fundamental questions instead of cosmetic ones is ridiculed or ignored.

That is why the Campaign for Liberty was established: to highlight the neglected but common-sense principles we champion and reinsert them into the American political conversation.

The U.S. Constitution is at the heart of what the Campaign for Liberty stands for, since the very least we can demand of our government is fidelity to its own governing document.  Claims that our Constitution was meant to be a “living document” that judges may interpret as they please are fraudulent, incompatible with republican government, and without foundation in the constitutional text or the thinking of the Framers.  Thomas Jefferson spoke of binding our rulers down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution, and we are proud to follow in his distinguished lineage.

With our Founding Fathers, we also believe in a noninterventionist foreign policy.  Inspired by the old Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party, we are convinced that the American people cannot remain free and prosperous with 700 military bases around the world, troops in 130 countries, and a steady diet of war propaganda.  Our military overstretch is undermining our national defense and bankrupting our country.

We believe that the free market, reviled by people who do not understand it, is the most just and humane economic system and the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.

We believe with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F.A. Hayek that central banking distorts economic decisionmaking and misleads entrepreneurs into making unsound investments.  Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ interference with interest rates sets the stage for economic downturns.  And the central bank’s ability to create money out of thin air transfers wealth from the most vulnerable to those with political pull, since it is the latter who receive the new money before the price increases it brings in its wake have yet occurred.  For economic and moral reasons, therefore, we join the great twentieth-century economists in opposing the Federal Reserve System, which has reduced the value of the dollar by 95 percent since it began in 1913.

We oppose the dehumanizing assumption that all issues that divide us must be settled at the federal level and forced on every American community, whether by activist judges, a power-hungry executive, or a meddling Congress.  We believe in the humane alternative of local self-government, as called for in our Constitution.

We oppose the transfer of American sovereignty to supranational organizations in which the American people possess no elected representatives.  Such compromises of our country’s independence run counter to the principles of the American Revolution, which was fought on behalf of self-government and local control.  Most of these organizations have a terrible track record even on their own terms: how much poverty have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund actually alleviated, for example?  The peoples of the world can interact with each other just fine in the absence of bureaucratic intermediaries that undermine their sovereignty.

We believe that freedom is an indivisible whole, and that it includes not only economic liberty but civil liberties and privacy rights as well, all of which are historic rights that our civilization has cherished from time immemorial.

Our stances on other issues can be deduced from these general principles.

Our country is ailing.  That is the bad news.  The good news is that the remedy is so simple and attractive: a return to the principles our Founders taught us.  Respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, individual liberty, sound money, and a noninterventionist foreign policy constitute the foundation of the Campaign for Liberty.

Will you join us?

I hope you will join me and other liberty minded Americans across the country in leading the United States of America back to a path of prosperity.

At this time all I ask is that you sign up.  As we get geared up during the beginning of next year I will start to contact those that have joined.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Montgomery

Campaign For Liberty

“A Republic, If You Can Keep It.”  – Benjamin Franklin

Here is a sample catch the rest here.

Q: Who in Congress would you consider to be your closest peer(s)?

A: There are a lot of members who I work with on a variety of different issues. Walter Jones is a good friend and works with me on foreign policy. Often on spending, if there is a 432-3 vote, the other two congressmen voting with me are Jeff Flake and Paul Broun. A lot of times, I work with Democrats on civil liberties issues.

I guess my point is that people from all over the political spectrum can side with liberty and the Constitution. The goal is to get a majority to vote that way most of the time.

Q: It was mentioned you were in favor of getting rid of the Department of Education. Is this true, and if so, how do you feel this would benefit the country?

A: I do believe in eliminating the Department of Education.

First, the Constitution does not authorize the Department of Education, and the founders never envisioned the federal government dictating those education policies.

Second, it is a huge bureaucracy that squanders our money. We send billions of dollars to Washington and get back less than we sent. The money would be much better off left in states and local communities rather than being squandered in Washington.

Finally, I think that the smallest level of government possible best performs education. Teachers, parents, and local community leaders should be making decisions about exactly how our children should be taught, not Washington bureaucrats. The Department of Education has given us No Child Left Behind, massive unfunded mandates, indoctrination, and in come cases, forced medication of our children with psychotropic drugs. We should get rid of all of that and get those choices back in the hands of the people.

The questions now being asked are: Where to go from here and who’s to blame for the downfall of the Republican Party?

Too bad the concern for the future of the Republican Party had not been seriously addressed in the year 2000 when the Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and the Presidency.

Now, in light of the election, many are asking: What is the future of the Republican Party?

But that is the wrong question. The proper question should be: Where is our country heading? There’s no doubt that a large majority of Americans believe we’re on the wrong track. That’s why the candidate demanding “change” won the election. It mattered not that the change offered was no change at all, only a change in the engineer of a runaway train.

The rest can be found here.

You have been sent to govern not rule.

Thomas Paine said it best:

“That government is best which governs least.”

It seems to me that a large number of Americans know that there is something very wrong with the direction our current political ethos is taking us.  Why then do we continue down the same path?

Ask your self why you have made a pledge to do the following 5 things:

1. Vote for the lesser of two evils.
2. Pay taxes that are not spent wisely.
3. Carry dollars that can be devalued significantly at the whim of a single Fed Chairman.
4. Buy into media generated hype that hides the truth.
5. Allow politicians to sacrifice the principles of the country for political expedience.

Now consider what would happen if you did not honor your pledge?  Its time for real work in this country, critical thinking.   Can we afford to continue as a nation of uninformed sheeple?  The government in all forms whether it is democracy, monarch or dictator is a direct reflection of the people’s will.

Note:  I still do all of these except 1, 4 and maybe 5… its a start.

If you agree with what he is saying I encourage you to join The Campaign For Liberty.

The Internet loves lists and there is no better time then now to put this one up.  I put this up earlier, but I think the lyrics are even more on point with the passage of the bailout.

1. Focus on what made you great, freedom.
2. Respect the rights of others to be free as well as yourself. (its a hard one)
3. Do not put blind faith in sound bites and slogans. Think critically.
4. Don’t spend money you don’t have.
5. Reward people for success not for failure.
6. Be guided by principles not politics or personalities.
7. Respect the individual’s right to keep the fruit of his labor.
8. Don’t let fear guide your decisions.
9. Realize that the government in all instances is a reflection of the people’s will.
10. Practice these individually and eventually we will practices them together.

I am sure there are more, but that is all I have on a Saturday morning.

This country was founded on the fact that as human beings we have certain unalienable rights endowed by our creator.  These rights as outlined by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence were, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.   It’s absurd I know…they only gave us 3.

Luckily since those dark, dark days our politicians have been able to greatly expand our rights.  We now have the right to housing, disaster aid, education, health care, and food, to name only a few.  We have come a long way indeed.

I can not even imagine a society that would ask that you produce on your own in order to trade the value you created for the value that another created (sounds almost mid-evil).  Our system of rights is far superior.  It ensures that all of our citizens will succeed regardless of how incompetent, lazy or irresponsible they are.

Our founders would surely be impressed with the ability of the American people to reduce all risk and responsibility from society.  Jefferson would be amazed at our resolve to multiply the rights that our Federal Government guarantees.

So today we have a great opportunity in front of us.  There is chance to further expand the rights of the American people.  Here is a list of some of those rights that could soon be our:

1. The right to over extend our bets with no repercussions when they turn sour.
2. The right to blindly place money into institutions with no regard for their soundness.
3. The right to print dollars when ever we need to increase government spending and save the economy.
4. The right to bailout any company no matter how fundamentally reckless there business strategy.
5. The right to let a few people sitting in the Federal Reserve decide the value of the dollars in our pocket.
6. The right to have politicians and special interests steal from taxpayers when we are too scared to stand up and fight on the basis of principle.

This is just the tip of the ice berg.  Should we not see an economic improvement we can be sure that our politicians will be able to convince us of further expanding our rights.

In fact, with the expansion of all these rights for us our government has still had time to guarantee themselves some rights. Here is a list of just a few:

1. The right to inflate the currency to pay for expansion of government power.
2. The right to promise future tax dollars for current expenditures.
3. The right to taxpayer property should they refuse to be taxpayers.

So lets hope that today is just the start of another great expansion of rights.  Senate please vote YES for the “right to government bailout” bill that will be presented tonight.

…only 3 rights…no wonder George Washington had wooden teeth, bet he could have uses a “right to an electric toothbrush” bill….hey congress I have an idea.