Introduction: The Voiceless Majority

Something’s wrong – terribly wrong.

The Federal Government has evolved into the very thing it was never intended to be. Government intervenes in our healthcare. It meddles in the economy. It regulates the financial industry. It regulates our employers. It confiscates our money. Our showerheads have tiny ‘governors’ inside that regulate the volume of water that can flow through them. Even toilet manufacturers are required by law to engineer commodes with limits on the water volume used with each flush. Everywhere you look, you can see the fingerprints of government on society. Without question, government is pervasive in our lives.

The Founding Fathers never intended our government to grow to its present size. They were keenly aware that individual liberty decreases proportionately as the size of government increases. In fact, they were frightened, almost paranoid, about the possibility that the federal government would increase in size and scope, to the point that it would suppress liberty rather than preserve it. It was this paranoia, this fear, which ultimately led Hamilton and Madison to write the now famous Federalist Papers. The founders knew that a federal government was a necessary evil, and the Federalist Papers were written to convince a skeptical public that a central government would be limited, ultimately, to only one objective: the preservation of liberty.

Madison once scolded congress for considering a $15,000 grant to French refugees, arguing that it was not the role of the legislature to give tax dollars to charity. I wonder what he would say about the billions of dollars spent every year on welfare, the individual assistance administered domestically, as well as the international aid gifted to governments around the globe? My guess is that, should he be able to stave off fainting, he would fervently object.

When you take into consideration municipal, county, state, and federal taxes, the average American surrenders 35% - 40% plus of their income to government, and the vast majority of the money confiscated at the federal level is spent to support programs that operate far outside of government’s original intended scope of authority. Progressives are responsible for this mess -- people who believe they know how to better spend your hard-earned money than do you. Progressives believe that humans are naturally good, and that society and its institutions make them do bad things. They feel that their purpose in life is to right society’s wrongs, and their primary instrument is confiscatory taxation.

Today, progressives have spent the federal government to the precipice of bankruptcy. The national debt has soared to levels that can never be repaid without significant tax increases. Social Security constantly teeters on the brink of insolvency. Medicare spending continues to balloon exponentially. The largest expenditure in the federal budget year over year is the interest payment on the national debt. The government dishes out billions in welfare, trapping people in cycles of dependency, and consequently poverty. Unemployment is soaring. Yet, America has the second highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, and people sit around scratching their heads wondering why jobs are going overseas.

Our nation is coming apart at the seams, torn one piece at a time by the progressive ideology that emerged during the tyrannical rule of FDR in the 1930’s, which transformed our free republic into a repressive nanny state. I am your average fellow, have a middle class income, live in a middle class neighborhood, drive a ten year-old Honda, have a wonderful wife, and love my beautiful daughter. The people who claim to be for the ‘the little man’, the common guy, the average fellow like me, have done nothing for me but confiscate my money and restrict my personal liberties. The liberal-progressives who dominate the Democratic Party do not represent my values. They never have, nor will they ever.

In a day when the media has all but deified Barack Obama, lavished praise and adoration on Nancy Pelosi, and exalted Harry Reid as the savior of the middle class, millions of people like me across the country are finding themselves in the same position: frustrated and voiceless. We are average middle class people who are tired of having our money confiscated and redistributed to someone else in the name of welfare, and having our condition worsened by confiscatory taxation to better someone else’s condition. We don’t believe the government should running General Motors, nor do we believe it should be dictating the terms of any private sector employee compensation. We don’t want government meddling with our healthcare, and we don’t want our tax dollars going to pay for someone else’s healthcare. We are tired of seeing rich, egocentric liberals mortgaging our children’s future for their self-centered and short-sighted social engineering schemes like the so-called public option. We demand that our taxes be cut, the income tax abolished and replaced with a consumption (fair) tax, and that a balanced budget amendment be concomitantly ratified. We insist that only originalists be promoted to the Supreme Court, justices who view the Constitution as a legal instrument, and not a living document. We don’t want anymore hand-outs on our dime, and we want to see a substantial reduction of the federal government’s power over our affairs, our money, and our lives.

We are the common people of this nation, and we are Conservatives, the voiceless majority.