Reclaim Conservatism

This is a great essay by The Old Jarhead.    It is a pretty long essay and do not want to post the whole thing here, I recommend going over there and reading the whole thing. But I will post the beginning of this great essay.

This I Believe
An essay
Robert A. Hall

I believe in limited government. Government is at best a necessary evil, which tends to drift toward tyranny if not checked, as Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party, noted. Every power that the government has is at the expense of liberty. Government is necessary to defend the nation, to provide infrastructure, and to protect us from each other. But as the repository of most force, it is also always a threat to freedom.

I believe in the separation of powers, between the branches of the federal government, and between the federal government, the states and the people. They were created by the founding fathers because they knew that no person or party could be trusted with unlimited power. The concentration of power in the hands of the federal government, especially the bureaucracy, is a great threat to freedom. I believe most people won’t realize this until it is too late.

I quaintly believe that all powers not granted to the federal government are reserved to the states or to the people, as the constitution says. That this is no longer the case is eroding freedom.

I believe that government cannot give you anything, unless it takes it from someone else. And government takes things by the threat of force—police, courts, jail.

I believe that government does not create wealth. Printing money, as President Mugabe has done in Zimbabwe, only produces inflation, where it costs a $100M to buy a loaf of bread. Private citizens, seeking to advance their own private interests, create all wealth and advancement, which give all of us good lives—and the wealth for government to do both the necessary, and the unnecessary.—The Old Jarhead