Then Truth Will Out

2011-01-21T16:42:00.001-08:00

"As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought in all governments, and actually will in all free governments ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs, when the people stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow mediated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice and truth, can regain their authority over the public mind? " -James Madison

2011-01-21T14:02:00.001-08:00

"If America is destroyed, it may be by Americans who salute the flag, sing the national anthem, march in patriotic parades, cheer Fourth of July speakers – normally good Americans, but Americans who fail to comprehend what is required to keep our country strong and free, Americans who have been lulled away into a false security" -- Ezra Taft Benson, Sec'y of Agriculture under Eisenhower and a FEE trustee.

2009-11-20T21:00:00.001-08:00

"The people of the united States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who prevert the Constitution." - Abraham Lincoln

2009-10-29T15:01:00.001-07:00

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
-Thomas Jefferson

2009-10-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
--- Thomas Jefferson

2009-10-08T00:13:00.001-07:00

"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."

-Campaign For Liberty

2009-10-06T14:47:00.001-07:00

"Who will govern the governors? There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government"
- Thomas Jefferson

2009-09-17T17:40:00.001-07:00

We...are not really free if we can't control our own government and its policies. And we will never do that if we remain ignorant.

– Charley Reese

2009-09-17T17:39:00.001-07:00

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

– Abraham Lincoln

2009-09-16T20:26:00.000-07:00

“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and the Republic
for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened
once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the
Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail,
there will be anarchy throughout the world.”

-Daniel Webster

2009-09-07T22:49:00.001-07:00

"You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the
Wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without
Working for, another person must work for without receiving. The
Government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does Not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the Idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to Take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does No good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work For, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You Cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

-Adrian Rogers, 1931

2009-08-26T14:09:00.001-07:00

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull, rather than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.

-Ayn Rand

2009-08-24T01:04:00.000-07:00

“The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule”; and “Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.".

-Samuel Adams

Campaign For Liberty - Our Mission

2009-08-24T00:08:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-08-18T16:41:00.001-07:00

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...

And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

-Thomas Jefferson November 13, 1787

2009-08-18T16:40:00.001-07:00

Because we have a right to tax America we must do it; risk everything, forfeit everything, take into consideration nothing but our right. O infatuated ministers! Like a silly man, full of his prerogative over the beasts of the field, who says, there is wool on the back of a wolf, and therefore he must be sheared. What! shear a wolf? Yes. But have you considered the trouble? Oh, I have considered nothing but my right. A wolf is an animal that has wool; all animals that have wool are to be sheared; and therefore I will shear the wolf.

-Edmund Burke 1781

2009-08-18T16:39:00.001-07:00

Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not. Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you begun; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found...

Emund Burke 1774

2009-08-18T16:34:00.001-07:00

All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise,
not from defects in the Constitution or confederation,
not from want of honor or virtue, as much as from downright
ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.

- John Adams Works 8:447

2009-04-17T01:56:00.000-07:00

"I am for preserving to the states the powers not yielded by them to the union; and for preventing the further encroachment of the executive branch on the rightful powers of congress. I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, and for retiring the national debt, eliminating the standing army, and relying on the militia to safeguard internal security, and keeping the navy
small, lest it drag the nation into eternal wars. I am for free commerce with all nations, political connections with none.. I am for freedom of religion, and for freedom of the press. And against all violations to the Constitution to silence our citizens" - Thomas Jefferson on his positions for the 1800 election.

2009-04-17T01:42:00.000-07:00

The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses... This little coterie...run our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen...seizes...our executive officers...legislative bodies...schools... courts...newspapers and every agency created for the public protection."
N.Y. Mayor, John Hylan

2009-04-17T01:38:00.001-07:00

"Freedom... refer[s] to a social relationship among people -- namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect." Thomas Sowell

2009-04-17T01:34:00.000-07:00

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes...Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
--Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria, "On Crimes and Punishment"

2009-04-17T01:29:00.000-07:00

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
~~~~~ Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931

2008-05-14T13:09:00.001-07:00

"The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is... legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay ... If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system."
-- Frederic Bastiat

2006-09-18T18:53:00.000-07:00

For forty years the American ship of state has been lunging erratically toward economic disaster, with no awareness of its direction, guided only by a "pretense of knowledge", by intellectual fraud.

-F. A. Hayek

The Liberal ideology -

2006-09-18T18:44:00.000-07:00

A Maze of Preconceived Notions -A hash of statism, collectivism, egalitarianism, and anti-capitalism, mixed with the desire for the results of capitalism.

This murky conceptual mess renders even the most innately brilliant of men stupid.

These trends constitute a broad socialist political-economic pattern, minus outright confiscation of the means of production. It is, more precisely, a set of quasi-socialist attitudes that have been integrated into the American economy, representing that quest for "a middle ground between communism and capitalism.

-William Simon

Slavery has been the general lot of the human race..

2006-05-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

"Although all men are born free, slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant--they have been cheated; asleep--they have been surprised; divided--the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson?…the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it....It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently free."

-James Madison

2004-10-20T02:38:00.007-07:00

"A person who graduated yesterday and stops studying today is uneducated tomorrow."

True Patriots

2004-10-20T02:38:00.006-07:00

"True patriots protect their country from its government." -thomas paine

An excuse for enhancing power...

2004-10-20T02:38:00.005-07:00

The government turns every contingency into an excuse for enhancing power in itself.
-John Adams

Times that try men's souls...

2004-10-20T02:38:00.004-07:00

These are times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country. But he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of men and women! Tyranny like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation among us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

-thomas paine

May your chains set lightly...

2004-10-20T02:38:00.003-07:00

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
-Samuel Adams

Brush Fires

2004-10-20T02:38:00.002-07:00

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds
-Samuel Adams

Thinking

2004-10-20T02:38:00.001-07:00

When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
-Thomas Paine

Political Questions

2004-10-20T02:38:00.000-07:00

NORMALLY THE GREAT POLITICAL QUESTIONS TAKE THEIR PLACE IN THE PSYCHIC ECONOMY OF THE TYPICAL CITIZEN WITH THOSE LEISURE-HOUR INTERESTS THAT HAVE NOT ATTAINED THE RANK OF HOBBIES, AND WITH THE SUBJECTS OF IRRESPONSIBLE CONVERSATION.

THESE THINGS SEEM SO FOR OFF; THEY ARE NOT AT ALL LIKE A BUSINESS PROPOSITION; DANGERS MAY NOT MATERIALIZE AT ALL AND IF THEY SHOULD THEY MAY NOT PROVE SO VERY SERIOUS; ONE FEELS ONESELF TO BE MOVING IN A FICTICIOUS WORLD....

WITHOUT THE INTITIATIVE THAT COMES FROM IMMEDIATE RESPONSIBILITY, IGNORANCE WILL PERSIST IN THE FACE OF MASSES OF INFORMATION HOWEVER COMPLETE AND CORRECT. THUS THE TYPICAL CITIZEN DROPS DOWN TO A LOWER LEVEL OF MENTAL PERFORMANCE AS SOON AS HE ENTERS THE POLITICAL FIELD.

HE ARGUES AND ANALYZES IN A WAY WHICH HE WOULD READILY RECOGNIZE AS INFANTILE WITHIN THE SPHERE OF HIS REAL INTERESTS.

-JOSEPH SCHUMPETER Political Economist

Truth

2004-10-20T02:31:00.000-07:00

"Truth is incontrovertible. Ignorance can deride it; panic may resent it; malice may destroy it, but in the end - there it is." - Winston Churchill

2004-10-20T01:53:00.000-07:00

THE CREED OF FREEDOM

INTRINSIC NATURE OF RIGHTS I believe that only individuals have rights, not the collective group; that these rights are intrinsic to each individual, not granted by the state; for if the state has the power to grant them, it also has the power to deny them, and that is incompatible with personal liberty. I believe that a just government derives its power solely from the governed. Therefore, the state must never presume to do anything beyond what individual citizens also have the right to do. Otherwise, the state is a power unto itself and becomes the master instead of the servant of society.

SUPREMACY OF THE INDIVIDUAL I believe that one of the greatest threats to freedom is to allow any group, no matter its numeric superiority, to deny the rights of the minority; and that one of the primary functions of just government is to protect each individual from the greed and passion of the majority.

FREEDOM-OF-CHOICE I believe that desirable social and economic objectives are better achieved by voluntary action than by coercion of law. I believe that social tranquility and brotherhood are better achieved by tolerance, persuasion, and the power of good example than by coercion of law. I believe that those in need are better served by charity, which is the giving of one's own money, than by welfare, which is the giving of other people's money through coercion of law.

EQUALITY UNDER LAW I believe that all citizens should be equal under law, regardless of their national origin, race, religion, gender, education, economic status, life style, or political opinion. Likewise, no class should be given preferential treatment, regardless of the merit or popularity of its cause. To favor one class over another is not equality under law.

PROPER ROLE OF GOVERNMENT I believe that the proper role of government is negative, not positive; defensive, not aggressive. It is to protect, not to provide; for if the state is granted the power to provide for some, it must also be able to take from others, and once that power is granted, there are those who will seek it for their advantage. It always leads to legalized plunder and loss of freedom. If government is powerful enough to give us everything we want, it is also powerful enough to take from us everything we have. Therefore, the proper function of government is to protect the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens; nothing more. That government is best which governs least.

What I Want For Our Country

2004-10-20T01:28:00.000-07:00

I want for our country enough laws to restrain me from injuring others, so that these laws will also restrain others from injuring me. I want enough government, with enough constitutional safeguards, so that this necessary minimum of laws will be applied equitably to everybody, and will be binding on the rulers as well as those ruled. Beyond that I want neither laws nor government to be imposed on our people as a means or with the excuse of protecting us from catching cold, or of seeing that we raise the right kind of crops, or of forcing us to live in the right kind of houses or neighborhoods,or of compelling us to save money or to spend it, or of telling us when or whether we can pray. I do not want government or laws designed for any other form of welfarism or paternalism, based on the premise that government knows best and can run our lives better than we can run them ourselves. And my concept of freedom, and of its overwhelming importance, is implicit in these aspirations and ideals. -Robt. Welch