GioBlog

My Tea Party speech

A few people have asked for the text of the speech that I gave last night at the Denton, Texas Tea Party tax protest. So here it is.

Thank you, and thanks to all of those who have been involved in putting this great event together.

You know, this is the real thing. There are all sorts of demonstrations and actions that are artificially created echo chambers, and people paid to show up and carry signs, but this is the real thing. I’ll bet none of you are being paid to be here tonight.

My name is Tom Giovanetti, and I’m the President of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a free-market think tank in Lewisville.

Don’t you suppose there are a bunch of people at tea parties tonight who voted for change, but didn’t know they were voting for tripling the national debt! It felt all enlightened and holistic to vote for the young progressive guy who was so well spoken, instead of voting for the old guy. But did they know they were voting for “change their grandchildren will still be paying for?”

Did they know that when they voted against George Bush’s third term they’d end up with George McGovern’s first term. Did they know after they voted for change they’d end up with nothing but change left in their pockets?

(There’s a bumper sticker business in there somewhere)

Don’t you suppose the Founders have been rolling over in their graves over what’s been happening in this country for the past 9 months or so, and I don’t mean just since January 20th. But I suspect if the Founders could see what is going on this evening around the country, it would cheer them a little.

The Founders had an ornery streak. They would have made good Texans. They believed that a little rebellion every now and again was necessary to preserve freedom and restrain tyranny. Because freedom was their primary aim. And they knew the biggest threat to freedom was from government.

The Founders understood that government was necessary, but that it was a necessary evil. They knew that government was necessary to restrain evil, but they also understood that government itself had to be restrained.

Take 45 minutes sometime and read the Constitution. The Constitution is almost nothing other than a limit on government power. It says very little about things like national defense, or health care, but it goes on and on about what government cannot do. It’s a very negative document.

That’s why the Constitution mandates a divided, federalist system of government. The Founders divided up government into as many parts as possible because they didn’t trust government. Then they took all the little parts and spread them out on the ground and jumped up and down on them until they pulverized the pieces as small as possible. They didn’t trust government. And we shouldn’t, either.

A guy back in 1651 wrote a book about government called “Leviathan,” named after the sea monster. Leviathan a good image of government--greedy, growing, insatiable for control and digging its tentacles into every possible nook and cranny of the country.

When you read the Constitution, you can almost picture in your mind the Leviathan of big government getting shackled. The monster lurches to its left and the Constitution slaps a shackle on it. It lunges to the right and the Constitution shackles another tentacle.

Over and over again, our Constitution says to government “this you may do, but no more.”

Remember, for government, it’s all about control. You do know that the government is making it difficult for the banks and insurance companies to pay back the bailout money? The government doesn’t care about money, because the government cares about control. They like telling companies how much they can pay, and who gets hired, and what kinds of products companies should make, and how they should be investing their money. It’s all about control.

Please don’t fall for the idea that our problems are so big that only government spending can solve them. The other day, someone gave me this Talking Ronald Reagan as a gift, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. I just love pushing the button on the back and listening to Reagan’s voice, even though it isn’t exactly in digital surround sound.

To the youngsters in the crowd I say, please don’t get annoyed at us older folks talking about Ronald Reagan like he was some kind of saint. Because politically speaking, he was like some kind of saint.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan drove the big government liberal Keynesians into hiding under rocks, and they stayed there for almost 30 years. For 30 years a politician has not been able to win an election as a liberal. But now they are poking their heads out from under the rocks, blinking their eyes at the sunshine and thinking it’s safe now to come out of hiding. They think the election welcomed big spending liberalism back into the sunshine. Well, I think they’ve misread the election.

Things were worse than this when Ronald Reagan took office.

When Ronald Reagan took office inflation and unemployment were in the double-digits, and mortgage rates were 13.5%. The economy was in the ditch, and we were viewed very negatively internationally. We were humiliated with hostages in Iran, and historians were writing books about America’s decline.

It was in his first inaugural speech that he made the famous line “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.”

But there’s another bit from Reagan’s first inaugural speech that is perhaps even more appropriate for us at this time. Reagan said “We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around. Our Government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.”

Reagan said “It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government.”

It’s really important to understand what Reagan said “we are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.” All of this debate about whether or not people should want the President or the current Congress to succeed or fail need to remember that the government isn’t the country. What’s good for the government isn’t necessarily good for the country. It may very well be necessary for a particular Congress or a particular President to fail in order for the country to succeed.

Now, some people might say “you know, you’re really overdoing it with all this talk about losing our freedom. We’re all still free and you’re just inciting people.”

But are we still free? And are we heading in a direction of more freedom, or less freedom?

When you add up all the taxes we pay to government, when you add up federal income taxes, payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and even local income taxes in some places like New York City, when for some people those taxes add up to more than half of a person’s income, it’s fair to ask whether we’re still free, or whether we’re just sharecroppers working on the government’s farm.

And how about our children and grandchildren? Will they be free, when the current Congress will triple the national debt over the next ten years to $17.3 trillion dollars? Or will they just be a revenue source to feed the federal government?

Remember the Matrix movie? You don’t want to be just a power source serving the Matrix, and you don’t want to be just a revenue source serving Leviathan, either. But that’s where you’re heading.

The Obama budget deficit will total an astounding 13.1 percent of GDP. Now, just for comparison sake, under George Bush, the federal deficit for 2008 was 3.2 percent of GDP. The deficit for fiscal year 2007, in the last budget adopted when Congress was controlled by Republican majorities, was 1.2 percent of GDP.

So tonight you look around and you feel good because you say “You know, I’m not alone. There are a whole lot of people who share my frustration.” But that’s not enough. You can’t just go home and be done. You have to stay involved. You can’t stop now.

Because THEY’RE not going to stop. THEY’RE just getting started. They’re coming after your health care, and they won’t be content until they control the health care industry.

Now, you may not be thrilled about your health insurance company. But just wait until you’re been in national health care for a couple of years. Just wait until they ration care like every other national health care system does.

Just wait until you find out you’re going blind, and they tell you that you can’t have the miracle drug that prevents blindness until after you’ve already lost one eye. Because the drug is expensive and, besides, you only really need one eye. That’s a true story—it happened in England. They denied a guy who was going blind the drug that would stop his blindness, and they told him they couldn’t approve the drug for him until he was down to his last eye.

And they’re going to make the price of everything much more expensive with their cap and trade system, which is a solution for a problem that probably doesn’t exist. Every single thing that uses energy will become much more expensive under cap and trade, and that’s the express purpose of the plan—to make you buy less so you’ll consume less energy.

Can you imagine a government that PURPOSELY raises prices on Americans? The cap and trade system will raise taxes across the entire economy by $645 billion!

So what is happening tonight all around the country needs to continue. You can’t stop here, because THEY’RE not stopping. But what can you do?

Get to know your elected Representative and Senators. Write them letters, send them faxes, and call their offices. It really does matter. And you should not only rail at them when you don’t like what they’re doing, but you should praise them when they do the right thing.

Now, in Denton County, we’re blessed by the fact that most if not all of us have elected representatives and Senators who are fiscally conservative. And that’s a good thing, but when you’re frustrated about what’s going on in the country, you feel kinda powerless because you’ve already elected someone you’re generally pleased with. So what more can you do?

Well, you can adopt a candidate. Find a challenger somewhere else in the country who’s running against one of the bad guys, and support that candidate. Send them some money every once in a while, and maybe even go work for a week in their district during the campaign. Pick out a conservative challenger in some nice place like Hawaii or Lake Tahoe and go do some campaign work for them and work on your tan at the same time.

You can also support organizations that work on these kinds of issues all the time, but that’s as much of a sale pitch as I’m going to do tonight.

I’ll leave you with this: More important than whether you are a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, or whatever, is the question of whether we still believe in limited, restrained government, or whether we should essentially scrap the Constitution and support unlimited government power to do pretty much whatever it wants. In other words, do we want to become France, or do we want to remain America?

It’s time to say once again to our government, “this you may do, but no more.”

Thank you.

Posted by Tom Giovanetti at 06:03:06 PM | Add/View Comments (0)