A Message to Republicans

The following was shared with me recently.  I suggest Democrats, Independents, and moderate Republicans DO NOT READ THIS.

My apology to viewers looking for travel and photography.  I have a great skiing post planned for publication soon, looking at ski run tracking apps I’ve been using.  However I do like to mix it up.

I think this particular communication was only intended for radical, right-wing, extremist Republicans and tea-partiers.

I was able to extract a portion of the text, like a buried remnant of the Dead Sea Scrolls perhaps not intended for wide-spread publication.  The entire, brief two-page document can be accessed here:

http://www.aynrand.org/site/DocServer/Message_to_Republicans_TeaParty_flyer.pdf?docID=2101

You’ve been warned!

My extract, courtesy and reference the link above:

A Message to Republicans from the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights

This is the edited text of a speech given hy Yaron Brook, executive director of  the Ayn Rand Institute. Please note that this transcript retains the informal nature of an extemporaneous speech. With proper attribution to the Ayn Rand Center, ARC is permitting tea party speakers to use this text in its entirety if they wish.

Good evening,

The root of America’s greatness is summed up in the Declaration of Independence. That document named as the only proper purpose of government the protection of individual rights. The protection of our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

That document ensures our right to be left alone, our right to do what we think is the best for our lives, to pursue our happiness in the way we judge best. We have the right to start whatever businesses we want, and to keep the rewards if we succeed. And if we fail, no one has a duty to help us or to bail us out. No one has the right to take from those who’ve succeeded and give to those who haven’t.

Individual rights are about you running your own life, not the state.

But the freedom established by the Declaration is eroding. And the blame does not only rest with the Democrats. It rests with Republicans.

Democrats have never stood for individual rights. Democrats have always stood for big government. Democrats have always wanted to redistribute our wealth, to limit our freedom, to tell us how to live our lives.

Republicans, on the other hand, supposedly stood for capitalism and individual rights. But their record defies it. I don’t mean the Republican record over the last eight years but over the last one hundred.

Over that time, Republicans have moved left dramatically. They have accepted the fundamental moral premises of the left. They have accepted the idea that we are our brother’s keeper, that redistribution of wealth is moral, that the profit motive is evil, that capitalism needs to be controlled, that business needs to be regulated, and that businessmen should feel guilty about their wealth. How else can you explain the fact that Sarbanes-Oxley–the most vicious, anti-capitalist regulatory “reform” in decades-passed the Senate 97 to zero, without one Republican vote against it? How else can you explain the fact that it was signed into law by George W. Bush–a Republican president?

50 years ago, it used to be that Republicans promised to roll back FDR’s New Deal, to eliminate Social Security, and re-establish a truly limited government. 25 years ago, Republicans had made their peace with the New Deal, but they promised to roll back the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. Today’s Republicans passed the prescription drug benefits bill–the greatest increase in welfare since LBJ –and would not dare propose abolishing a single movement program or agency.

Now the Republicans have joined the Democrats in declaring that today’s crisis is a failure of capitalism. But don’t tell us capitalism has failed! What caused today’s crisis was the Federal Reserve, and Freddie and Fannie, and the Community Reinvestment Act, and dozens and dozens and dozens of other regulations placed on the mortgage business, the housing business, and the banking business. What failed was the regulatory state–the unfree market, not capitalism.

Yet, there is hope. The fact these tea parties exist shows that many people, including many Republicans, are starting to oppose the growth in government control. But there’s still a long way to go. We need to recapture the spirit of 1776–and the principle of individual rights. We need to understand what capitalism really means and why it is good.

Our Founding Fathers were incredibly courageous men, who embraced the concept of separation of church and state at a time when such an idea was unheard of. That concept is a crucial cornerstone of liberty, and I think we need to reassert that concept. (…)

[Have a nice day. -John]