Over the past several decades, Congress has taken meticulous, carefully-planned steps towards the consolidation of power and control into the hands of select politicians who have spent the majority of their careers within the dreary halls of Congress, drunk with power and overcome with a sick sense of superiority over the American people.
Politicians of all kinds are guilty of such breeches of the public trust. Both Republicans and Democrats have taken the freest nation in the world and turned it into a mess of a system fraught with countless layers of bureaucracy, an insanely deep trough of national debt and a falling value of the dollar, not to mention high unemployment and expensive wars overseas in causes that the American people are growing more impatient with.
The Libertarian solution takes a pointedly different path to this nation’s problems: it removes the sources of the problems entirely (government) and puts the American people back in charge of their own future and prosperity. Under a truly Libertarian nation, the role of government does exist, but its existence must be continuously rationalized and recognized against the authorizations penned in the Constitution. It must not be allowed to run rampant with virtually any power that it sees fit.
The bailouts, for example, are a prime example of government run amok – a government, if you will, that thinks virtually any problem can be solved with taxpayer money. Hundreds of billions of dollars later, our unemployment has never been higher and our government has never been more broke.
“Bailouts are ALWAYS bad for the taxpayer, for the economy, and for business,” says the Libertarian Party. We are “rewarding the mismanagement of American corporations with a taxpayer-subsidized lifeline that does NOTHING to encourage reform or fix the problems that pushed the companies to the brink of failure.” Why are taxpayers being used to reward this mismanagement, the party asks?
Instead, these companies should be allowed to file for bankruptcy and enter the process of restructuring to re-gain their footing as a profitable corporation. It would allow these companies to cut off the forces that pulled them into the red to begin with and reduce entanglements with workers unions, which are extremely costly to operate.
Health care is another major issue that the administration is currently dealing with. Instead of building a hugely expensive and bureaucratic government-run health care program, the government should stay out of the business of health care and let other solutions work their course under a free market system. The Libertarian Party supports Medical Savings Accounts that allow people to deposit tax-free money into and extract from when paying medical bills. “Bureaucratic roadblocks kill sick Americans.”
And what about your rights as taxpaying citizens of the United States? The Bill of Rights exists to make sure your rights are not trampled upon, but the last several years has unveiled government encroachment into almost every facet of our lives. “Rarely a day passes where there isn’t some major media mention of Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act, the Real ID Act, secret prisons, the use of torture or domestic spying,” the LP has said.
“Under Obama, the government may still snoop into the most personal of your mail or your e-mail and you won’t even know they were there. People are arrested and held without trial or legal representation. Sometimes they are even tortured. They can now use your cellular phone as a bugging device, even if you aren’t currently talking on it at the time.”
The Libertarian Party strongly supports repealing the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act, and also keeping a very close eye on the Executive Branch, paying special attention to its sensitivity towards obeying the Bill of Rights and putting the liberties of the American people above that of their own political well being.
Immigration is another broken issue in America, and one that costs the American taxpayer millions of dollars every year to contend with. The Libertarian Party and most hard-working Americans welcomes immigrants from other nations into this country to work hard and make a better life for them and their families. But the laws need to make sense for both Americans and immigrants to work in harmony and get along with one another – not to mention to function under the guidelines of appropriate regulations. Fences do not solve problems. Sometimes, changing the law is necessary instead.
“We’ve faced this choice on immigration before. In the early 1950s, federal agents were making a million arrests a year along the Mexican border. In response, Congress ramped up enforcement, but it also dramatically increased the number of visas available through the Bracero guest worker program. As a result, apprehensions at the border dropped 95 percent.”
Libertarians want to completely end the Welfare program and instead offer tax credits for those who contribute to private charities. Charities can more effectively provide help to those who need it without the intense layers of bureaucracy that harm government efficiency and cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars to fund. Government is not here to nurture us from cradle to grave. Rather, our families, churches, charities and communities exist to provide a helping hand when times get rough.
The U.S. government spends more on America’s schools than any other country in the world, but yet America’s children consistently scored below those of other nations. Our government was never authorized to intervene into the business of education, and for good reason. Our kids are being force-fed government-approved propaganda that keeps our test scores down and motivation to succeed on our own virtually non-existent.
Parents need and deserve the privilege of sending their children to any school that they like, regardless of income. School choice is sorely needed in America and stands as the surest solution to our failing school systems that too many parents are forced to send their children to due to their income. Is anyone surprised at how many of our elite politicians send their own children to private schools, rather than the very government-funded schools that they have fought so hard to establish and support?
Our nation needs small government solutions to big government problems. Take a serious look at the Libertarian platform and judge for yourself if voting for either a Democrat or Republican is worth the effort just so you can tell yourself that you aren’t “wasting your vote”. If you want true change in our government, then you cannot keep voting for the same old politicians; that will never, ever work.
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