Response to obams` (unpresidential) state of the union address....

I will present to you an accurate, honest accounting on the actual condition of our affairs, not what I would like for you to believe they are.

First let’s go over some vocabulary we’ll be using tonight that you may not be familiar with starting with The Constitution. The Constitution Is what’s contained in this pocket sized book. Inside it you will find a plan of government, our government. It means what the men who wrote and ratified it said that it meant to them not what you would like it to mean today. If you are unhappy that this document places restrictions on what you would like our federal government to do for you or to another citizen then please read Article V of this Constitution, there you will find instructions on how to amend the document so that it rises to your expectations.



Our Second vocabulary word is Entitlement: If I have earned a sum of money and I deposit it in a safe in my home, I am ENTITLED to retrieve it and spend it as I choose. In contrast, my next door neighbor or a citizen in the next state is NOT entitled to what is contained in my safe to spend as they choose. If my neighbors aren’t entitled to my safe’s contents then why is my Congressman or my Governor or my mayor? They believe they are because they have ignored the Constitution I spoke of earlier and have created government programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP to name a few. Those that enroll in these programs are told they are entitled to what is contained in my safe to fund them, they are wrong and tonight I shall call on you to end this practice and to star calling these programs by what they actually are executing: Legal Plunder. You may also call this theft at the point of the IRS gun.

This brings us to Vocabulary words 4 and 5: Property and Plunder. Property is what is owned outright by a citizen in a free society. Governments are instituted by free men to protect their private property from those who would plunder it. Plunder is the theft of another man’s property with the intention of making it your property. Plunder will always be the preferred method of acquiring property by lazy, designing men and women. Our Constitution and the state governments created and organized by their Constitutions were designed by men who wanted to protect their private property from plunder. Today, at every level of government this formula is now exactly backwards. Governments are organized to execute the plunder safely for the ruling class that doesn’t have the courage to perform the task themselves. The great French philosopher Frederic Bastiat wrote that “men will always choose plunder over profit so long as it is safe and not dangerous to their health” well tonight I call on you to serve notice to the plunderers: plunder just became a very dangerous occupation.



Our governments have created many classes of plunderers and they aren’t all of the direct public assistance variety. They are outnumbered by those plunderers in big business who have decided that buying favor with politicians by funding their campaigns and employing their family and friends in return for subsidies and regulations that punish their competitors is preferable to earning profits the old fashioned way. Plunder also comes in the form of those now infamous bailouts which most of you think have ended…they haven’t. Plunderers can also be found working at expert centers across the country where the rules that government makes are studied to measure their impact and then recommend new rules be made that will require new institutions to study them. And then there are institutions studying institutions and you fellow citizen are paying for every paper they write, pixel they push and paper clip they buy. Plunderers have also set up camp and enlisted tens of thousands of our former military, trained at our expense and now working to keep unneeded and unnecessary weaponry cranking out 24/7. It’s nice work if you can find it and it needs to end because we are broke. In the words of Bill Clinton “It is time to make government plunder unsafe, illegal and rare.”

Tonight, we must commit to begin anew the restoration of virtue and humility in our public affairs. In doing so we will return to our republican roots and I mean to say our “little r-republican roots” and that is our final vocabulary word. Republicanism. Republicanism is the political system that our Founders organized under and can best be defined by citing an obscure statistic. In 1945, young men who returned home from World War II could have formed families and then enlisted to participate in the governing of their local schools. This young man would have had over 115,000 positions to choose from. In a mere 60 years a young woman returning from an undeclared war in Pakistan may choose to start a family and participate in governing her local school only to find it isn’t local any longer and there are less than 13,000 positions available. Republicanism has given way to what our Founders feared more mightily than any Army clad in Red coats or any Tax Act passed by parliament: Consolidation.

Here is what this consolidation of government, which was the design of last centuries “progressives”, who occupied office in both major political parties, has produced: A Federal Leviathan that consumes 24% of every dollar earned in this country. This does not include the unfunded - future liabilities- that are owed as part of the entitlements discussed earlier. In contrast, this same federal government, limited by the restraints the Constitution and fidelity to republicanism placed on it, spent on average no less than 3% of GDP. During this time, our economic liberty, lack of organized plunder and protection of private property produced improvements in the quality of life and life expectancy so unprecedented, new words had to be created to describe them as new devices and compounds were created to continue the improvements. What has truly been lost though cannot be measured in dollars and cents but can be measured in part by the faces of beautiful children who will never know what a father is. At the dawn of the Progressive’s Great Society a shocking amount of black children were born out of wedlock. That shocking number then was 38% after Tens of Trillions in direct wealth transfers and the destruction of inner city families brought on by Progressive initiatives that number is now 70% and I challenge the good people of these United States to coin a term that adequately describes this uniquely American tragedy.

As if this tragedy weren’t enough to ring every fire house bell in the land consider that the rate of illegitimate children born to white, unwed mothers is now approaching the rate the Great Society purported to arrest in 1964, 40% or more. Will we be more successful at stopping this slide into broken or never formed families which we know are recipes for pervasive poverty? Will we recognize that it is the transfer of the responsibility of citizenship from citizens to their government that is the principal culprit in this? Decisions that should be made closest to the people who must live under the burden of their implementation whether that is monetary or undermining of civil liberties have been stolen, “outsourced” if you will to governments and their helpful agencies who rely on their helpful non-partisan institutions. This is government by expert and as we have already heard once tonight this is the exact opposite of what our forefathers fought a revolution for. Is this the best that we can do for our posterity? Let us pray that we can and must do better.

I started this talk tonight by promising to give you an honest accounting of the state of the union, well here it is. Entire generations of Americans have been educated to believe the contorted theories of madmen can be made to work, if we just give them enough time, surrender enough liberty and forego enough prosperity. We have accepted our ruling elites dictates that a constantly devalued paper currency is preferable to a stable one based on a stored supply of a commodity. This is how $11.79 earned by the young hero returning from World War 2 has the purchasing power of exactly $1.00 today what will happen when that number approaches .75 cents then .50?
Our state of the union must also take stock of our future economic capacity. This capacity can only be fueled by one thing: savings. Historically Americans have saved about 8.5% of their income today that number is 3%. These savings represent future capital to be invested in an economic “recovery” and looking at this number that recovery if it happens at all will be weak.

Our state of the union must take into account that more than 16 % of citizens are now relying on direct assistance from the government in the form of food stamps. Over 17% report being unemployed or under employed. Household debt ratios which had begun to decline have now begun to rise again as the average per card -credit card balance now exceeds $5,000. Now armed with these few statistics it is easy to see how a political class chosen from the same group of citizens is so susceptible to corruption and so ignorant of common sense virtues. In short, fellow citizen of these united states it is “We the People” who need to take that long, reflective look in the mirror while demanding our leaders do the same and even that isn’t enough. The tens of millions of customers this Leviathan has created for it’s own perpetuation cannot just simply revert back to a way of life with which they are unfamiliar and when the ability to borrow our way into the next iPhone expires what will they do then? I can’t answer that question but I can tell you this, it is not too late to begin to prepare the way for this inevitability.

Start by getting to know your mayor and the church leaders in your area. Your State Representatives and Senators should be on a first name basis with you too. Drag out a copy of your state constitution and read it, become familiar with it and treat it like the law of the land that it is. Begin to ask questions of these people, ask for their opinions of republicanism and where their first loyalties in government may lie. If they answer “to obey my oath to the Constitution” remind them that that requires not only following the lawful acts of Congress but also opposing with manly vigor those that are not within that bodies power. As one of the great Virginia republicans of the 1790’s, guided by Jefferson and Madison’s resolutions in Ky & VA said “If Congress can oppose state laws it deemed destructive of it’s existence then certainly sovereign states under the Constitution can do the same to preserve themselves.”

You may wonder where the rest of tonight’s State of the Union statistics are and I say to you that if I were to present you a litany of numbers and statistics on the financial and debt crisis these United States is facing it would obscure the message presented here but here’s the short version. We are broke and we are broke to the point that every spending decision we allow any elected leader to make today will have a direct, destructive influence on our posterity. This includes “spending” on national defense & “intelligence” which amounts to 48% of the entire planet’s military and intelligence spending. A great people lead by example not by use of force. George Washington went to his grave praying that his “farewell address” would have lasting impact and inform future generations that a free people only form friendships with other states and “tangling alliances with none”. This requires us to bring our troops home now, end our occupations of 139 countries around the world and eat some humble pie. I hear they are baking lots of it at Congressman Ron Paul’s house these days, why not pay him a visit and hear what he has to say.

Finally let me leave you with a positive thought that though this response was hastily cobbled together and contains a litany of problems to be addressed there remains one great thing going for us that others in our station in life didn’t have and that is a healthy love for liberty and deep abiding respect for the work of our forefathers. Those men fought a revolution meaning they were rolling the clock backwards 1 revolution to life as free people living under their English Constitution and colonies laws. That I believe is a good plan for what Thomas Paine called the “winter soldier” to set his or her sights on. and borrowing a phrase from John F Kennedy, here is something I hope you can incorporate in what Washington called “this great work”.


“Ask not what a government program can do for you, but what you can do to end a government program.” Thank you for watching and listening and my God bless these United States of America.



-Mike Church/Chris Serna , 25 January, 2011