my name is neal

I’m a Libertarian. I think I have been since I was five-years-old. My fundamental value is a belief in the right to be free. Since the Great Depression, government has slowly taken more and more power and responsibility away from individuals and it did it mostly with the consent of American people.

I’m a Reagan kid. He was called the great communicator, and it makes sense to me because I could comprehend his fundamental belief in limited government even as a young child. Liking Reagan made me feel like my political home was in the Republican Party. William F. Buckley, the great Libertarian intellectual and friend of Ronald Reagan, convinced me that I was really a Libertarian more than a conservative. Buckley felt at home in the Republican Party and that was good enough for me.

Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America was yet another welcome mat that made me feel at home in the Republican Party. I even used to call myself a conservative. Not anymore though. The Reagan Revolution is over and Republicans have rejected his mission to shrink government control over our lives.

I’m a Libertarian who believes government is too big and it doesn’t serve the goal of making men free. Not one of the three candidates for president believes in Reagan’s message that government is the problem not the solution.

McCain sounds like a Democrat when he speaks against tax cuts that are “for the rich.”

Hillary fundamentally believes in tax-payer funded healthcare one group at a slippery-slope time.

Obama understands liberty the least when he says things like, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times.” He should be saying, “Yes we can!”

If we truly are in an energy crisis, isn’t it tame we roll up our sleeves and fix it? To do that, we have to strip away irrational regulation that keeps us from getting oil wherever we can find it. We need to build clean nuclear power plants that will be ready to charge our future electric cars (or whatever we end up with). We need to innovate like never before because there are solutions out there. Energy is everywhere and if America is still the great nation I grew up pledging allegiance to, we’ll capture it and improve the lives of people around the planet.

If someone starts talking like that rather than about regulating my thermostat setting, I might register to vote, but for now, I’m still politically homeless.