You inherited a land of liberty because a group of learned individuals over 200 years ago were willing to put their lives, property and sacred honor on the line on behalf of liberty for individuals and and, later, through their written constitution, they placed strict limitations on the persons whom they would elect to serve them in government.
Today's citizens who loosely call themselves the Taxed Enough Already party (that's party with a little 'p') people (named for their ancestors who rebelled against the King's abusive taxation)--these brave citizens are intelligent, resourceful and have studied the ideas of liberty. They understand that America can no longer be free, if the philosophy of Mao/Marx/Lenin and Keynes is allowed to prevail over the philosophy of Washington, Adams, Madison, Jefferson and Adam Smith.
Can you cite any authority on either economics or freedom who is more eloquent than Thomas Jefferson on the question of the ideas of liberty or of the consequences of debt and deficit?
"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39
"I deem [this one of] the essential principles of our government and consequently [one] which ought to shape its administration:... The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:322
"I sincerely believe... that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23
"[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40
Your Party's control of the Congress since 2006, and of the Presidency for the last 3 years, along with any Republicans who have been coopted to go along with the Democrats' policies have brought us close to the kind of "wretchedness and oppression" spoken of by Jefferson.
Thank God for technology and the so-called TEA party movement! Else, future generations would never know that there were those in 2012 who stood for liberty, not "servitude."
Beautifully written. My sentiments exactly.