May You Live in Interesting Times
I just returned from a meeting among some like-minded folk discussing victories and defeats in the past election and plans to help rebuild the party so that we can win some elections in 2010 with some real liberty-minded candidates. I was reminded of this letter-to-the-editor I wrote prior to the February 2008 caucuses and which was printed in the January 30th edition of the Osseo Press. It is interesting to re-read now, over a year later. Here it is, for what it’s worth.
“May you live in interesting times” is a curse the ancient Chinese reserved for their most despised enemies. Increasingly, we are undeniably living in interesting times.
By all indications we are entering a recession the size and scope of which has not been seen in generations. The value of our dollar is crashing to historic lows and is being abandoned worldwide. People are losing their homes at unprecedented rates. Health care costs are becoming unmanageable. Gas prices, grocery prices, and tax rates continue to rise every year while wages stagnate, work becomes scarce, and our mainstreets get boarded up.
We are failing to take care of the poor, the sick, the disabled, and the elderly. The quality of our children’s education continues to get worse with each passing year.
Thousands of our brave young men and women are killing and dying in an aggressive, misbegotten, unproductive, unpopular, expensive war that has now lasted longer than World War II. We are being taxed to bomb bridges overseas and taxed to rebuild those bridges while our bridges here are falling down and our aging infrastructure continues to deteriorate.
We have over 700 military bases in 135 of the world’s 192 countries at an annual cost of almost 1 trillion dollars while we borrow billions daily from foreign countries and our national debt races towards 10 trillion.
And on top of it all, the government to which we pay so much of the fruits of our labor, the government that we the people set up to protect our rights and preserve our liberty, continues to ramp up its efforts to regulate, control, and spy on us.
In less than a week we will have a chance to exercise our right, our duty, to make our voice heard. On February 5th, the Minnesota Democratic and Republican parties will hold caucuses to send delegates ultimately to the national conventions to choose which candidate will represent their party in the election to determine our next president.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Most of the candidates from both parties are nothing but more of the same. They promise “change.” They appeal to our desire to be told things will be fine–if only we elect them. They are touted by the media as being the ones who will take care of us and save us from our troubles. But retrospect has shown us that we can not fix problems caused by too much government by applying more government.
There is one candidate who understands the root causes of the many challenging problems we face today. His positions are not just empty political rhetoric, but are backed by history, experience, and intensive research. He understands that government bureaucrats can’t effectively run the world, run the economy, or run our lives. It’s time this country was returned to we the people and government was put back in its place. It’s time we return this country to one of freedom, prosperity, and peace.
Google Ron Paul and please come out to the Republican caucuses on Tuesday, February 5th at 7:00 pm and vote for delegates who support Ron Paul.