Libertarians Offer a Better Choice
The electorate put the Republican Party on notice recently with the surprising win of Bill Foster over Jim Oberweis for Denny Hastert's Congressional seat in the 14th Congressional District. This district used to be a safe one for the Republicans.
Unfortunately for the Republican Party, the electorate has noticed that the party has lost its way. It used to stand up for limited government and personal freedom. Then the neoconservatives took over the party and have been imposing a devastatingly costly foreign policy in both human and financial capital -- a policy of American empire -- ever since. They got us into a costly, tragic and ill-founded war based on lies.
Most of the American people will have none of it. They understand that wars should be undertaken only in the most dire circumstances, when all other methods of reconciliation fail and when survival is at stake in defending an aggressive opponent. War is the health of the state and a contradiction to the principles of individual freedom and prosperity-producing free markets.
The National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee spent over $1 million to help elect Oberweis. But money didn't matter in this election. What mattered was the war-mongering rhetoric of Oberweis (and his dirty campaign tactics) and the huge price tag for that war-mongering.
The district constituents knew that for all his talk about tax cuts and limited government, the reality was that the cost of war in the Middle East far exceeds the limited amount of government reduction Oberweis advocates.
Of course Foster is promising a socialist health care system that will also cost billions and make the system even more bureaucratic and user-unfriendly. Unfortunately, the Democrats are still tied to the failed policies of socialism from the 20th century. To their credit, some of the Democrats do offer a restoration of individual rights by repealing the Patriot Act and other unconstitutional laws passed by the Bush administration.
Instead of being offered fear by the Republicans and a government-regulated and -taxed economy by the Democrats, there should be a new way out of the linear political spectrum-- that of foreign policy intervention by the Right, and economic intervention on the Left.
This new way should be a system based on freedom instead of power, one that includes a frugal non-interventionist foreign policy, free markets and significantly lower taxes, and a policy that restores our constitutional rights.
Fortunately, there is such a political party that takes liberty as its most valued tenet without exception. It is the Libertarian Party, the only political party that is consistent and principled in its application to limited government with a philosophy that advocates individual rights, personal responsibility, free markets and a non-interventionist foreign policy -- a philosophy advocated by our founding fathers. "Live and let live" is and should be the American way.
Hopefully, the Libertarian Party will come up with a viable congressional candidate who expresses freedom from all vantage points and denounces the destructive policies of government intervention at home and abroad.
Kenneth Prazak is co-founder of the Fox Valley Libertarian Party.