Rand Paul is not Happy

Donald TeelDonald Teel is the Founder and Editor of iVoteAmerica® and the Editor for iVoteArizona.com. He has been an Arizona resident since 1960. He is a commercial real estate broker, private pilot, photographer and avid reader of America's history.

Look at his face. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) is not a happy Senator today. And when Rand is not happy, most true conservatives are not happy. Certainly, the lovers of liberty ought to be frightened into action over the 2018 Omnibus Bill, scheduled for a vote within 48 hours. Senator Paul claimed in his post, the source of the article’s photo,

The 2200+ page, budget-busting Omnibus has been printing for two hours in my office and still isn’t done.  – Senator Rand Paul

This Tweet caught my attention:

Our fact-checking Tom Garrett’s calculations indicate that for the average reader the bill can’t be read before it’s voted on!  Now I understand Rand Paul’s sour face.

Liberty is at Risk

Liberty is never more at risk than when the government engages in the practice of unrestrained spending. The federal bureaucracy’s appetite is never satiated. Campaign lies notwithstanding, the power to take, the power to indebt the citizenry is the cause of our Declaration of Independence.

Government spending requires confiscation, also known as taxation. Call it what you will, but at the end of the day, taxation is itself the seizing of our property with the intent to redistribute it in accordance with the priorities of the government. Can the government give if it does not first take?

Speed, secrecy, largesse, and the inability and lack of opportunity for the electorate to respond is simply criminal, in my mind. Overwhelming us, hiding ugly details, secrecy, and ramming it through Congress keeps us from knowing what our government is doing with our money until it’s too late.

It was Montesquieu who wrote in Spirit of the Laws,

The public revenues are a portion that each subject gives of his property in order to secure or enjoy the remainder. To fix their revenues in a proper manner, regard should be had both to the necessities of the state and to those of the subject. The real wants of the people ought never to give way to the imaginary wants of the state (my emphasis).  – Montesquieu

A sizable portion of the American electorate already feels oppressed by the Washington cartel. As demonstrated by the 2016 Presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, this sense of oppression is not limited to conservatives.

Such an oppression will produce the roots of distrust, which are fertilized and watered by the unkept promises of politicians. Deception is a sensation at work in the Ameican psyche and in order to satiate its ugly effects, it must by its nature find a way to escape.

Liberty cannot be bottled up, not for long. The confiscation of personal property is bad enough in and of itself. The misappropriation of our personal property should be a matter of national alarm. Suppression of the common man and the taking of his reward leads eventually to open rebellion. Ask the Brits.

Bitter men are not pleased with the suppression of taxes. Not daring to condemn the measure, they attack the motive; and too disingenuous to ascribe it to the honest one of freeing our citizens from unnecessary burthens and unnecessary systems of office, they ascribe it to a desire of popularity.   – Thomas Jefferson, note to Benjamin Rush

I’m not convinced that Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, and Representatives Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi are tuned in to the resultant outcome of the bitterness they continue to create.

Desperate people will ultimately do desperate things. Out of desperation, the creative forces of the citizenry must and will find the proper solution to their better existence, “institute new government,” as urged by our Declaration of Independence.

The nature of man contains a design that cannot always and forever suppress liberty. The cork in a heated bottle eventually extricates itself by the sheer force of expanding pressure, and the need to avoid an explosion. The same is true of the human spirit and the soul of man, for God has designed and destined us to Liberty.

When We Can No Longer Feed the State

It was none other than Ronald Reagan who reminded us, “Status quo, you know, is Latin for ‘the mess we’re in.”

We are, without our consent, being plunged deeper into the abyss of an insurmountable mess, most of it created in accordance with the subtle notion that we need to maintain the status quo as defined by the government.

This mess we’re in keeps enlarging itself with every progressive notion that government can and should solve our everyday problems. Most Americans do not think of themselves as Welfare recipients, yet that is what we have become. When any nation is $21,000,000,000,000 in debt, certainly it is a Welfare nation. We feed the state and it, in turn, feeds us in the form of policies, promises and provisions it claims we need.

It’s important that we remind ourselves that the government can only give us that which it first took from us. Taking and giving is what they do in Washington.

We are engaged in a grand progressive design, not to feed ourselves but to feed the government. What happens to us when we can no longer feed the State? Look no further than to Venezuela, where the people are now eating the animals in their zoos.

The natural human restraints that once marked the Venezuelan culture have given way to open barbarism, tyranny, and sheer anarchy. The cork did not come out of Venezuela’s bottle, the bottle gave way to the cork…and exploded, flooding society with uncontrolled desperation.

We can no longer afford to feed the State. We no longer have the resources to care for the caretaker. Yet, Washington seems willfully blinded by its own ego, its own grand notions that it alone can deliver life to the country, that its ideas, experiments, and designs are better than our own individual and collective capacities.

Washington is wrong because the government is seldom ever right. Politicians are misleading us.

The monstrous 2,200-page Omnibus bill is right up there with Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the tens of thousands of federal regulations that have the nation in the grip of a deadly stranglehold. We are desperate for principled leadership, sensibility, and relief. We’re feeling the pressure like never before.

In the end, there will only be one of two outcomes: Either the cork pops or the bottle breaks.