TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

Readers might have heard that Republican conservatives – who hope to retake control of Congress and the White House, head off/engulf TeaParty reformers, and thence to further drive the federal government into the ground – have joined together in announcing the “Mount Vernon Statement”. Daniel Larison at The American Conservative rightly notes that the Statement surely would have had Washington rolling in his grave.

As an alternative, I bring readers’ attention the more clear-sighted principles enumerated by the Campaign for Liberty. One wishes only that this statement paid a little more attention to (1) federalism and states rights as a check on the federal government, and (2) the need for states – which have been busy transferring power to the limited liability corporations that in turn desire a central pork/influence machine in Washington, DC – to start exercising their authority to limit limited liability and so to end the great moral hazard machines that corpoations have become.

Here are the Campaign for Liberty’s Principles; I hope readers will visit and register at the site:

Americans inherit from our ancestors a glorious tradition of freedom
and resistance to oppression.  Our country has long been admired by the
rest of the world for her great example of liberty and prosperity—a
light shining in the darkness of tyranny.

But many Americans today are frustrated.  The political choices they
are offered give them no real choice at all.  For all their talk of
“change,” neither major political party as presently constituted
challenges the status quo in any serious way.  Neither treats the
Constitution with anything but contempt.  Neither offers any kind of
change in monetary policy.  Neither wants to make the reductions in
government that our crushing debt burden demands.  Neither talks about
bringing American troops home not just from Iraq but from around the
world.  Our country is going bankrupt, and none of these sensible
proposals are even on the table.

This destructive bipartisan consensus has suffocated American political
life for many years.  Anyone who tries to ask fundamental questions
instead of cosmetic ones is ridiculed or ignored.

That is why the Campaign for Liberty was established: to highlight the
neglected but common-sense principles we champion and reinsert them
into the American political conversation.

The U.S. Constitution is at the heart of what the Campaign for Liberty
stands for, since the very least we can demand of our government is
fidelity to its own governing document.  Claims that our Constitution
was meant to be a “living document” that judges may interpret as they
please are fraudulent, incompatible with republican government, and
without foundation in the constitutional text or the thinking of the
Framers.  Thomas Jefferson spoke of binding our rulers down from
mischief by the chains of the Constitution, and we are proud to follow
in his distinguished lineage.

With our Founding Fathers, we also believe in a noninterventionist
foreign policy.  Inspired by the old Robert Taft wing of the Republican
Party, we are convinced that the American people cannot remain free and
prosperous with 700 military bases around the world, troops in 130
countries, and a steady diet of war propaganda.  Our military
overstretch is undermining our national defense and bankrupting our
country.

We believe that the free market, reviled by people who do not
understand it, is the most just and humane economic system and the
greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.

We believe with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F.A. Hayek that
central banking distorts economic decisionmaking and misleads
entrepreneurs into making unsound investments.  Hayek won the Nobel
Prize for showing how central banks’ interference with interest rates
sets the stage for economic downturns.  And the central bank’s ability
to create money out of thin air transfers wealth from the most
vulnerable to those with political pull, since it is the latter who
receive the new money before the price increases it brings in its wake
have yet occurred.  For economic and moral reasons, therefore, we join
the great twentieth-century economists in opposing the Federal Reserve
System, which has reduced the value of the dollar by 95 percent since
it began in 1913.

We oppose the dehumanizing assumption that all issues that divide us
must be settled at the federal level and forced on every American
community, whether by activist judges, a power-hungry executive, or a
meddling Congress.  We believe in the humane alternative of local
self-government, as called for in our Constitution.

We oppose the transfer of American sovereignty to supranational
organizations in which the American people possess no elected
representatives.  Such compromises of our country’s independence run
counter to the principles of the American Revolution, which was fought
on behalf of self-government and local control.  Most of these
organizations have a terrible track record even on their own terms: how
much poverty have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
actually alleviated, for example?  The peoples of the world can
interact with each other just fine in the absence of bureaucratic
intermediaries that undermine their sovereignty.

We believe that freedom is an indivisible whole, and that it includes
not only economic liberty but civil liberties and privacy rights as
well, all of which are historic rights that our civilization has
cherished from time immemorial.

Our stances on other issues can be deduced from these general principles.

Our country is ailing.  That is the bad news.  The good news is that
the remedy is so simple and attractive: a return to the principles our
Founders taught us.  Respect for the Constitution, the rule of law,
individual liberty, sound money, and a noninterventionist foreign
policy constitute the foundation of the Campaign for Liberty.

Will you join us? Click here to sign up!