The media have made much ado about the political Tea parties, started in 2009, that have had some level of success in protesting the government expansions under the Obama administration. Unfortunately, that movement – for all its many good points and despite the clarity of its Taxed Enough Already moniker – represents a mish-mash of ideas and has been plagued by factional disputes. The most successful mini-revolutions take place when the People are unified around a simple and clearly understood theme.

One of the best recent representations of that old defiant spirit can be found in the past couple of weeks in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell, a poor mostly Latino city of about 37,000, where about 2,000 city residents showed up and forced the resignation of worthless city officials after they learned about the way they had enriched themselves at the expense of city taxpayers. As one Bell resident said after a council member gave a self-serving justification of her $100,000 part-time salary (council members typically earn about $8,000 a year): “You were a crook yesterday, you’re a crook today, and you’ll be a crook tomorrow.”

That’s a simple idea most of us can rally around! The crooks are ripping us off.

The Bell situation garnered national attention because of the level of plundering. A city manager, Robert Rizzo, earned $787,000 a year from the impoverished burb – a place that has been cutting services and where 10 percent of the budget went to Rizzo, Police Chief Randy Adams ($457,000) and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia ($357,000).

Rizzo – who lives in fancy digs in Huntington Beach and has a horse farm in Washington state – boasted that he could have easily earned as much in the private sector, which is a load of nonsense and something that all city managers claim. Yet these managers, who typically make nearly $300,000 a year in California, manage basic city tasks in a bureaucratic monopoly environment. They do not run the equivalent of private, competitive firms.

Because of the bad publicity, California officials rushed in to make declarations about the awfulness of the Bell situation. Attorney General Jerry Brown, who is almost wholly dependent on the public sector unions for his gubernatorial campaign against former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, decried the salaries and launched investigations in city contracts. Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles County district attorney and GOP attorney general candidate, vowed to look into various fraud allegations surrounding the corrupt little Bell fiefdom. But Cooley himself is a testament to the pension problem, given his expected $275,000-plus cost-of-living-adjusted pension from Los Angeles County taxpayers. And where were they before this? Where are they on the many other little fiefdoms that are ripping off the populace?

Reports suggest that Rizzo and his cohorts manipulated a bureaucratic system that they understood (and the city residents didn’t) to enrich themselves. Pending anything that the AG and DA can prove, this appears to have been legal. The problem in Bell is that the greedbags got too greedy. How can anyone justify a pension for Rizzo that is worth somewhere around $30 million and whose costs will be spread out among 140 cities that are pooled with Bell in its retirement system? It wasn’t justified — it was quietly pushed through.

The real problem is politicians of all stripes and from the federal to the state to the municipal level have created an unsustainable two-tier system – the system of haves (government employees, who can retire as early as their 50s often with six-figure salaries) and the have-nots (private workers who will work until we drop and rely on measly Social Security returns and whatever savings and 401/k plans we have). Public employee unions would have us believe that there have been excesses at the top, but that the system is otherwise fine. They point to relatively low pension averages, which are deceptive given that averages include people who worked a short time in employee retirement systems and ignore the vast pension-spiking in recent years (and the fact that public retirement averages are around three times private averages).

The government employee excesses go top to bottom. California’s $100,000 Pension Club has 15,000 members and membership is growing by about 40 percent a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, which sponsors the database. Rank-and-file police and firefighters are found throughout that list. One cop in San Francisco – not the chief, mind you – has a compensation package of $517,000 a year. Public safety officials have abused the trust the public places on them, and have often trotted out the memory of 9-11, to enrich themselves beyond belief. They abuse overtime, disability retirements and other rules to in essence make themselves millionaires who can retire as early as 50 and live a life of leisure. They overstate the dangers they face and use emotional arguments to eliminate criticism of the plundering they seek from the taxpayer – and these unions have been particularly effective at intimidating politicians at the local level. Who doesn’t want the police and fire endorsement and to pose by police cars and fire trucks in campaign literature? No candidate wants to endure the endless hit mailers depicting them as enemies of public safety.

This is a bipartisan problem, even though Democrats tend to be wholly owned subsidiaries of the unions, except in rare cases. Unfortunately, in my days a writer for the Orange County Register in rock-ribbed Republican country, I rarely saw much protest as these enrichment schemes were publicized. Yet in liberal Democratic and heavily immigrant Bell, Calif., where a large percentage of the population is thought to be here illegally, the population has taken the all-American approach to dealing with scoundrels. I applaud them.

I’m often asked how to fix the pension system. It’s a tough one. The rules are rigged at every level in the unions’ favor, which is no surprise given that union-backed legislators have been writing those rules for years now, with no one paying much attention to them. But imagine what would happen if city residents showed up at city halls around California and the nation and showed the level of anger that Bell residents displayed earlier in the week. Maybe things might change.

It’s time to dump greedy and self-serving council members and legislators into the harbor, figuratively speaking of course.

New Englanders, for example, boast t-shirts and bumper stickers which tell us that the “Yankees suck” — despite the 27 World Series rings for the Bronx Bombers and the seven for the Red Sox that would seem to indicate that we, in fact, are the ones who suck.

We also call Boston The Hub, as in the Hub of the Universe. That’s right. Our tiny little city’s got megalomania issues … which probably explains why 90 percent of  diversity-loving voters in Brookline and Cambridge pulled a lever for Obama in November 2008. No Bostonian worth his chowder, by the way, has ever called the city Beantown.

The intellectual elitism is so profound here that the average plumber in Boston — and I come from a long, proud line of Local 12 guys — thinks that he’s wicked smaht, smahtah even than a brain surgeon from Alabama. It’s just the way we’re raised — snobbish old blue-blood Brahminism adopted by everyone from Boston’s nouveau riche to the old Irish-Catholic working class.

So the arrival of Sarah Palin in Boston Wednesday was like a visit by an alien being from the planet of idiots in the eyes of the local so-called intelligentsia.

Naturally, with so much brain power and so many institutions of higher education here in the Hub, there’s an obvious question to ask:  What did we Bostonians learn from Sarah Palin’s romp through town Wednesday for Boston Tea Party II?

Well, here’s what we learned. We learned that nobody is more intolerant and more illiberal than the angry faux-intellectual “leftists” who still infect Boston politics, media and academia like a nasty case of herpes that won’t go away.

As noted in  a recent post here on Big Government, I stopped calling them “liberals” years ago. Today’s so-called “liberals,” especially here in Boston, are nothing but angry leftist ideologues, not true liberals in the classical sense. Their unhinged reaction to Palin is proof.

Consider our lefty friends at the former newspaper turned big-government mouthpiece called The Boston Globe: “Palin has yet to show a shred of intellectual depth, nor much capacity for anything other than superficial analysis,” wrote one Globie Thursday.

Ahh, the profound “Palin is stupid” argument.

Ironic words from a publication that a) fails to understand the basics of economics; b) beats the racially divisive drum of identity politics with the wide-eyed lunacy of Keith Moon; c) is a vapid mouthpiece for failed leftist ideology and ideologues; and d) whose one tired solution to every social ill is “more government.”

Please, Globe. Learn to balance a budget or spare us the lecture.

(By the way, my paper, the Herald, ran four homepage stories Tuesday about the upcoming Tea Party; the Globe led its Tuesday coverage with a photo essay about 40 years of gay pride in Boston. We can’t make this stuff up.)

But the attacks from the Globe were nothing like the anger we saw at The Weekly Dig, a local outlet here in Boston for crazy lefty causes. It ran artwork labeling Palin a “bitch,” a “moron” and a Nazi. Apparently, in lefty circles, you’re a Nazi when you advocate less government, individual gun rights, Zionism and Christian values – you know, a complete contradiction of Nazism.

Those clever little lefties must be too bright for me.

Then there were the over-educated and ponytailed “moonbats” (the word for “crazy lefties” that’s common in Boston vernacular). They showed up Wednesday to assault members of an otherwise peaceful Tea Party. One moonbat was wrapped in a Cuban flag with the face of Che Guevara on it. Brilliant! The flag of a socialist hellhole that’s so poor and corrupt that people risk their lives to escape to the U.S. on leaky homemade balsa-wood boats, coupled with the image of a bloodthirsty commie revolutionary.

Personally, I’m still waiting for Michael Moore to defect so that he can go to one of Cuba’s world-class hospitals and get that stomach-stapling operation he so desperately needs.

But then again, I’m probably not bright enough to comprehend the tolerant and sophisticated intellectual nuance of the Che-Cuba imagery.

Finally, a lefty friend of mine summed up her side’s feelings in a post on my Facebook page: “We hate Palin because she’s stupid.”

Again, the “stupid” argument. I had to remind my lefty friend that “hate” conflicts with the alleged leftist ideals of open-mindedness, tolerance and love for our fellow man. It’d be a sad world, I said, if we shared our love only with people of a certain intellect. But as we all know, leftists are tolerant only on paper, not in practice. They’re tolerant only of those who agree with them.

And that’s the appeal of Palin to me: her very existence proves that today’s leftists are intellectual frauds.

Palin, as noted here last week, raised five children, rose from nothing and lived the role of citizen-politician. She fought corruption in both parties in her state. She battled big oil. She’s grown rich. She’s a symbol of female empowerment to millions of open-minded women. She brought home the bacon and fried it up in a pan.

Real liberals admire those qualities in a woman.

But see, Palin, as also noted here last week, didn’t go to Harvard. She hunts. She’s pro life. She deviates from the illiberal leftist dogma about the place of women in society.

So she’s ridiculed, even “hated,” by today’s intolerant leftists who merely pretend to be liberals.

The intellectual fraudulence of the left was on full display here in Boston this week, the city that once prided itself as the Cradle of Liberty, back when the city’s intelligentsia was comprised of real liberals.

In today’s Boston, the not-so-intelligentsia in the Harvard-Beacon Hill-Boston Globe moonbat alliance is comprised only of imaginary fake ”liberals.” Yes, that’s right, I said it. They’re posers and pretenders.

We know they’re fake because, this week in Boston, stupid Sarah Palin exposed each and every one of them as intellectual frauds.

At the April 15 TEA Party gathering here in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, speakers will include a hopeful candidate for Congress, a pastor, and even a law enforcement official.  What really caught my eye, though, was the announcement beforehand that “a local orthopedic surgeon will address the recently passed health care  legislation.”  This is hardly an isolated incident.

Think about it — the TEA Party is all about protesting massive, out of control government spending, and the excessive taxation that is necessary to support it.  Obamacare has been largely debated as healthcare reform.  Why should TEA Partiers care about healthcare reform?  You may think that the TEA Party is branching out into more areas than the core issue that has made it such a huge and ever-growing success.  You may find this risky and perhaps alarming.  Let me disabuse you of that notion, and assure you that Obamacare was destined to be a core TEA Party issue from the very beginning.

Liberty, Taxes and ObamaCare

Rassmussen Reports recently published an article that began:  “The number of people who say they’re part of the Tea Party Movement nationally has grown to 24%. That’s up from 16% a month ago, but the movement still defies easy description.”

The TEA Party is all about excessive taxes and our huge national debt, to be sure, but the increase in TEA Partiers grew by well over one-third in one month.  How can this be?  According to “new data” from Rasmussen Reports, among those who are part of the movement, 89% disapprove of the way that Barack Obama is handling his job as president. That figure includes 82% who Strongly Disapprove.  One cannot possibly think that this has nothing to do with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the “Obamacare” statute, that was passed in the waning days of March, concomitant with the surge in TEA Party numbers.  As Rasmussen puts it:

The rise in Tea party support is perhaps not surprising at a time when more voters than ever (58%) favor repeal of the national health care plan just passed by Democrats in Congress and signed into law by President Obama. Most voters remain convinced that the health care plan will require an increase in taxes on the middle class as a time when 66% of voters believe America is already overtaxed.

TEA: It's about the LIBERTY, folks!

I posit the theory that Obamacare has become a TEA Party issue — in fact, not just “an” issue, but perhaps the most pressing one.  Rassmussen Reports has found that ninety-six percent (96%) of those in the Tea Party movement believe America is overtaxed, not a surprising result for a movement whose acronym, TEA, is widely considered to mean “Taxed Enough Already,” and which harkens back to a tax protest that changed world history — the Boston Tea Party.  These folks know that there is no such thing as a free lunch — somebody has to pay for that hoagie.  When the hoagie is government mandated/controlled/subsidized health insurance, the people paying for it are taxpayers.

Liberal/Progressive types constantly berate those voters who “remain convinced that the health care plan will require an increase in taxes on the middle class” a just blithering idiots who cannot hope to understand the brilliance of Obamacare.  They constantly snipe that the CBO report shows that our gargantuan budget deficit will actually be reduced by their new “healthcare” law (and if you believe that, I have some prime snow-skiing property here in Mississippi that I would like to sell you).  TEA Partiers, though, are a pretty common-sense bunch.  When they see something that costs money, they know that the money must come from somewhere.  Since the only source of income for the federal government is taxes, every non-Liberal instantly recognizes that taxes will have to be raised if the new spending is to be “budget neutral.”

Indeed, the list of “new and improved” taxes in the Obamacare law is staggering.  According to an April 13th op-ed for the Washington Examiner by Grace-Marie Turner at the Galen Institute, “The health overhaul plan just enacted represents the largest tax hike in U.S. history – $569 billion over 10 years through a dizzying array of taxes and fees that promise to frustrate taxpayers at every turn.  ObamaCare will make every day feel like April 15th.  And despite President Obama’s campaign promise that no one making $250,000 or less would see a tax increase, Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation confirms that these tax hikes will hit millions of middle- and working-class families who are struggling to make ends meet.”  (Emphasis added).  According to well-documented research by Americans for Tax Reform in Washington DC, besides the penalty tax for lawbreakers who fail to carry health insurance (which the CBO says will cost taxpayers $39 billion from 2010-2019), there is the  Medicine Cabinet Tax,   the HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike, Flexible Spending Account Cap – aka “Special Needs Kids Tax”  Tax on Medical Device Manufacturers, a tax on Indoor Tanning Services, a Blue Cross/Blue Shield tax , an excise tax on charitable hospitals,  a tax on Innovator Drug Companies,   a tax on health insurers,  the elimination of a tax deduction for employer-provided retirement prescription drug coverage in coordination with Medicare Part D, and other draconian tax-related measures, such as the Marxist $500,000 annual executive compensation limit for health insurance executives,  and red tape like employer reporting of insurance on W-2 and Corporate 1099-MISC Information Reporting, which creates enormous compliance burdens for small businesses and makes additional penalties likely.

I for one have concluded that Obamacare is not truly about healthcare.  I take Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) at his word — it’s about controlling the people.  Is there any issue nearer and dearer to the hearts of TEA Partiers than governmental control over their lives?  Out of control spending and excessive taxation can only be rationally explained as a power grab by a tiny faction who control our federal government, and want to further control us.

Like the generation that fought the Revolutionary War and gave us the Constitution, the TEA Party movement recognizes that excessive taxation is a form of tyranny in and of itself.  Obamacare is tyrannical in the way it mandates penalties, forces you to purchase insurance and commandeers state employees, to be sure, but it also constitutes a massive increase in taxation.  TEA Partiers know this, and they don’t like it.  Since 48% of voters now say the average Tea Party member is closer to their views than President Obama and 58% want Obamacare repealed, I conclude that opposition to Obamacare is not only a major issue for the Tea Party movement, it is a winning issue.

It would seem evident to many that the Tea Party movement should be the natural ally of the Republican Party.  After all, the issues that inspire most Tea Party activists should not be inimical to Republican Party leaders.  However, the fact that the Tea Party movement is at odds with certain aspects of the Republican establishment belies the greater issue as to why the Tea Party movement – and its potential to be a 3^rd Party movement – arose at all.

It is worthy, as part of this discussion, to note that the rise and fall of third party movements and candidates is directly tied to whether voters perceive the existing parties as being successful.  In this context, successful means providing effective leadership on the major issues of the day.

The Republicans should well know this lesson.  After all, the Republican Party came into being because the Whig Party of the 1850’s and 1860’s was perceived as not willing to provide effective leadership on the most divisive issue of the day – if not the most divisive issue ever: slavery.   Appearing too accomodationist to many voters, a third major party came into being under the leadership of Lincoln and others: the Republican Party – a party that, in time, took a decisive stand against slavery.

More recently, Ross Perot ran twice for President and gave life to the Reform Party.  It is more than arguable that Perot handed Bill Clinton the Presidency by drawing so many votes away from President Bush in 1992.  But did he?  As a matter of history, Perot was more of a symptom of failed leadership by Republicans than cause of Clinton’s victory.  The errors of the Bush Administration gave rise to a perception that the Republican Party was the party of higher spending and higher tax rates – a policy that led to burgeoning deficits.   Bush 41 was not perceived as a leader in the wake of breaking his “no new tax pledge” and the Democrats were not exactly considered leaders on how to handle the deficit either.  It is on such political battlefields that disgruntled voters take interest in a third voice – in that case, Ross Perot and his Reform Party.

Of course, the John Anderson presidential run should be noted as well.  There was little doubt that in 1979 and in the beginning of 1980, the public’s view of both the Democrat Party and the Republican Party had dimmed considerably.  Amidst double-digit inflation and unemployment, 20+% interest rates, and little in the way of Republican Congressional leadership to contrast Jimmy Carter failings, John Anderson ran as an Independent candidate for President.  He came out of the gate with 25% in the polls – 6% higher than Perot’s highest ever finish.

Yet Anderson wound up not winning a single precinct.  Why?  Because Ronald Reagan ran a stirring campaign behind the theme that “Government is not the solution to our problems.  Government is the problem.”  And with that, Reagan and his strong leadership and policies won two terms  (three if you count Bush 41s’ first term) and there was no third party challenge until Bush Sr. ceded Reagan’s high ground of leadership as referenced above.

All of which brings us to the Tea Party movement.

The numbers of Independents voters is on the rise again.  Voters everywhere believe the Democrat Party and the Republican Party are more partisan than effective.  The Tea Party movement is an out-growth of that perception.

At its core, the Tea Party movement is a pro-liberty – limited government movement.  Its activists continue to believe in Reagan’s cogent message about government.  Beneath that over-arching theme, Tea Partiers by-in-large are motivated by four major issues. (1) excessive taxation, (2) out-of-control spending, (3) out of control Legislators who pass bills without reading them, and (4) the apparent lack of adherence/respect for our Constitution.  None of those issues should be troublesome for the Republican establishment – yet there is anything but an easy alliance between the Tea Party movement and the Republican establishment.  It is a wonder why that is so.

Excessive Taxation.  The issue of burdensome taxation has motivated Americans from the time of the Boston Tea Party to today.  Always a potent issue, many activists wonder why the Republican Establishment has lost their voice on this important issue.  Keep in mind that the issue is not just that people don’t want to pay taxes because they are stingy.  The issue is why aren’t Republican leaders making the case to the American people (1) that high tax rates defeat their own purpose (Keynes), (2) that “that our present tax system … exerts too heavy a drag on growth … siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power, [and] reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking.” (Kennedy), or (3) that through tax relief we can grow the American economy (Reagan).   Surely taking up that mantle – with clarity – is not a request that is too much for Tea Partiers to ask of Republican leaders.

Out-of-Control Spending.  The issue of government waste and spending is of major concern to many activists around the country.  Keep in mind that in 1964, the entire federal budget was roughly $130 billion and poverty was approximately 14%.  The federal budget is nearly $4 trillion a year now.  We currently make social welfare transfers of over $1 trillion per year.  Yet the federal poverty rate remains around 14%.  Disgruntled Tea Partiers (and Ron Paul supporters) know that intuitively even if they do not always know the statistics.  Should not Republican leaders be exposing the stunning level of federal waste (including $1 in every $10 of Medicare spending) at every turn – even filibustering ever growing budgets which provide little return on investment?  Is that request too much to ask? – let alone insisting they refrain from pork barreling themselves?

Reading the Bills.  Federal legislation now exceeds 1,000 pages at a time.  It is well beyond common knowledge that most politicians do not even read the bills upon which they vote. Given that so many congressmen and women are lawyers who would never expect their clients not to read the contracts they sign, is it really an exorbitant request of those same politicians to read bills before they bind us to legislation from which, incredibly, they often exempt themselves?

The Constitution.  There can be little doubt that our Constitution is not interpreted as our Founders intended.  Jefferson and Madison opined that the Constitution did not permit the Congress to tax people to build roads. Now, without so much as an amendment, we tax people to subsidize the purchase of cars that run on those roads built with tax dollars.  In that light, many activists well understand Justice Scalia’s commentary that “The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn’t say other things.”  The question is whether Republican leaders believe the same or are willing to defend the same.

The reality of today is that the Tea Party movement is more than skeptical of whether the Republican establishment is willing to take a stand on those issues or whether they are more interested in playing Let’s Make a Deal with American principles.  In other words, they do not believe that they are providing effective leadership on those important issues.  Instead, they do things such as offering a Presidential candidate who wanted to buy up all the bad mortgages that government encouraged in the first place.  A government response to a government problem – Reagan would not be pleased – and neither are Tea Partiers.  If Republicans were providing effective leadership on those important issues, I would hazard a guess that there would not be a Tea Party movement today.

In the final analysis, Republicans never do so well as to defend freedom and the expense of government – when they run against City Hall instead of defending it.  Not coincidentally, Americans never do so well as when freedom is protected from government.  Reagan understood that and that is why he ran against the Washington establishment instead of encouraging it.

Unless Republicans regain that understanding, rather than winning next year with Tea Party support amidst the troubles of the Democrats, Republicans may well be alone wearing the Whigs of long ago.

[Ed Note: This is the first post to run at BigGovernment. It was published two-years ago today. It still seems relevant.]

In 1995, President Bill Clinton stood before the nation and proclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” The following year, the federal budget deficit stood at 1.4% of GDP. Thirteen years later, in 2008, the deficit had doubled, to just over 3% of GDP. This year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal budget deficit will equal 11.4% of GDP.

As George Will would say, “Well.”

This is the real source of our “summer of discontent.” Yes, millions of Americans spent the month of August holding Tea Parties, attending town halls, organizing, marching and protesting against ObamaCare, i.e. Congressional and Administration proposals to reconstruct the entire health care sector. But to suggest that health care alone is at the root of this backlash is to miss the forest for the trees. To paraphrase Democrat strategist James Carville, “It’s the big government, stupid.”

Since last September when the financial markets stumbled, we’ve seen a Wall Street bailout, government takeovers of AIG, Citigroup, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, GM, Chrysler, and numerous banks. The Federal Reserve has opened its discount window to almost all-comers and has taken the unprecedented step of aggressively buying up the federal government’s own debt. Congress rushed through a “stimulus to nowhere,” moved closer to a “cap-and-trade” remake of the energy sector and openly talked about higher taxes and more regulation.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously said that, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Ronald Reagan said, “Government isn’t the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” The administration has turned this observation upside down, proclaiming that Big Government will lead us to a better world. In August, we heard America singing, “Enough!”

The mainstream media and politicos from both parties were caught flat-footed by the push-back from average citizens. Each news-cycle brought a new theory for the protests: “astroturf,” angry “mobs,” distortions and misinformation, kooks and conspiracy nuts, and, inevitably (and perhaps most offensively) racism (MSNBC amazingly even cut the head off a black man holding a gun to make the point that white racist extremism was behind the entirety the protests).  The elites have convinced themselves that, once Congress is safely cocooned on Capitol Hill, and engaged in some Kennedy-esque legislating—a tweak here, a nip-and-tuck there—ObamaCare will be back on track and the Administration can continue its march to reshape America.

The elites are whistling past the graveyard. The ground has shifted. It could just be that deficits above 10% of GDP are the new $4 a gallon gas, i.e. the tipping point that awakens the silent majority and recalibrates political dynamics. Americans are setting aside parochial self-interest and reaching to reclaim the legacy of the Founders.

“That government is best which governs least.” This phrase, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, is our nation’s founding principle. The American colonists did not throw off the mantle of British rule because the King failed to provide health care, individual subsidies or public works projects. They rebelled because he taxed ever greater shares of their earnings and increasingly injected himself into their daily lives. They risked, and in many cases sacrificed, their lives to free themselves and future generations from the whims of rulers.

The founding fathers did not constitute a government to give them things. It’s role was confined to protecting our natural rights. Rights we have inherently, not by grant of government. These rights secured, Americans had the freedom to organize their lives as they saw best. Their energies and imagination unleashed, our predecessors built the most prosperous, secure and peaceful nation in history. It was done in spite of Big Government, not because of it.

Reagan warned that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Our generation’s moment of decision is now. How we respond will shape forever the lives of our children and grandchildren.

It is rare that a people rise up, shoulder-to-shoulder, and stand against the dictates of a ruling class. The media and most of the political elites at the federal, state and local levels have told us, “We know better than you.”

In response, countless citizens have mobilized to tell the government, “No!”

To these Americans, we dedicate this site.  Welcome.