The liberty end of the conservative movement is alive and well.

here’s what I would hope is going to come out of this cpac conference here. Not just a bunch of glad-handing, patting on shoulders and, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s great, oh, and I got paid a speaking fee.....

The liberty end of the conservative movement is alive and well. The liberty end of the conservative movement is where the action is.

The rest of you people are dead weight. We tried it your way. It doesn’t work. You lay down with the wolves, acting as if they wouldn’t eat you, you could make buddies with them, you could make friends with them, you could talk like Democrats, you could legislate and act like Democrats, like liberal pinko commies, and everything would be all right. We tried it your way. You’re fired. You had your chance. Now get the hell out of the way.

So what I hope happened is that more people went to see the Judge, and less people went to the other ones. I hope that more people went to the liberty event, to go watch former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson speak, and watch Mike Church. Tim Carney is also going to speak. He’s got a book out called “Obamanomics,” which is an oxymoron in and of itself. Well, it is an oxymoron. And I hope that the liberty events are the ones that are the highest attended and inspire the most learning. There’s a learning curve here. And the more educated people get and the more educated you become about actual little “r” republicanism and what I hold is Jeffersonian conservatism, I think the better the chances of finding remedies and solutions.

The old guard, though, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve got to tell you, is not going anywhere peacefully. They’ve defended and staked their turf out. As a matter of fact, it’s contained in the Mount Vernon Statement which has been all over Fox News on friday. Oh, look at these guys. Man, they went and met right down the street from where Washington lived. And look at this, they produced this thing that’s called the Mount Vernon Statement(see one of my earlier blogs) that’s just filled with conservatism (not). And [laughing], As soon as I read the Mount Vernon Statement I went, oh, God. The more things change the more they stay the same....

This is old news. There’s nothing new here. The perpetuation, I mean, listen to this. First of all, anytime anyone invokes the Declaration of Independence to you, you should be like the robot in “Lost in Space.” Warning, warning, Will Robinson. Warning, warning, liberal approaching.
when people start hearkening back to the Declaration, you’re in trouble. The declaratory parts of the Declaration are all about the rights of self-government and of the states, or the colonies then, to secede. Ask yourself the question, what are they declaring? They’re not declaring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That already existed. They are declaring that they are new, sovereign states, 13 of them. And in some manners they will act as one union in repelling the British invasion.

So any time you read these statements, and when someone starts invoking the Declaration, you ought to be on guard.

But anyways, you get to the principles of the Mount Vernon Statement, and this is where it gets hairy, and this is where it gets, shall we say, not focused. When you start promoting capitalism, or when you start promoting free enterprise, what is free enterprise? Can someone define for me what free enterprise is? I can define for you what a free market is. I don’t know what free enterprise is. Is free enterprise where you have businesses that are still run and ordered about by the government, and just because the government’s run by Republicans, that makes it better?

So many people run around and are so, what’s the word, enamored with, awash with the idea that the best that it’s ever gotten, or the best economic conditions that had ever been experienced were experienced from 1983 to 1988. It has never been better before. It’ll never be better since unless we get back to cutting taxes. When in fact the proper view ought to be that taxes were the problem to start with.

If you’re going to get into the business of admitting that the slashing of the tax rates is what led to the economic activity and what led to all the prosperity, well, then it ought to follow that there is something wrong with the tax rates. And it ought to follow that there’s something wrong with the idea of taxing productivity, something wrong with the idea of taxing success, of taxing wealth, of taxing capital. But instead, why, the one-size-fits-all solution for almost all our ills is just cut taxes. I got a better idea. Why don’t we just eliminate the ability of the federal government to tax? Why don’t we snip them and get them back on their constitutional heels where they ought to be, where they can only raise revenues through duties and imposts and what have you there. Why don’t we get back to that, instead of taxing the people that are productive and taxing the people’s productivity?

Anyways, you get to the Mount Vernon Statement, and you read to the end here, and this is where you find the real nuts and bolts of the problem. “A constitutional conservatism based on first principles provides the framework for a consistent and meaningful policy agenda.” And here’s the policy agenda. “It applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal.” Eh, all right. I would have worded it different, but I can live with that. “It honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life.” I can kind of live with that. “It encourages free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions.”

What does that mean? Here, again, here we are. We’re going to fix the economy because we’re going to have Republicans design the tax policies, and we’re going to have Republicans design the way out, and we’re going to have Republicans design the government that’s going to regulate it and make it all good. That’s what that means. The best medicine, like one of my fav authors Tom Woods says, is to get the hell out of the way. This is not laissez-faire. This is anything but. This is command-and-control with a different set of people doing the commanding.
Then we get to the real heart of the matter. “A constitutional conservatism based on first principles provides the framework for a consistent and meaningful policy agenda. It supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end.” I’m sorry. You can count me out. I should have just read ahead to the end and went, oh, here we go again.

So again, it’s our job, my job when I wake up in the morning, I knew that a significant portion of what I was going to make today was going to be taken, confiscated from me at the point of the IRS’s gun, and it’s going to be used to go support freedom and democracy around the world. Screw you. This is the damn problem, again.