On October 13, 2008, Bob Barr held an amazing lecture at Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Below is a video recording and transcript of his speech, which gives great insight into Bob Barr’s philosophy and position on many different issues facing our country today.

Bob Barr Welcomes The Audience

I appreciate very much the opportunity to be with you all here today.

Andy McPherson, Andy is in back in the room there. Andy is with our campaign and if there is anything that we can do, either after the program today or at any point between now and the election or after, because I don’t intend to stop fighting for liberty and freedom after November 4th. Please don’t hesitate to call him or call on our campaign. The campaign website is BobBarr2008.com. Some of you all may have already gone there; we have an awful lot of information on there and you can find out a little more about yours truly.

You will note that standing here before you today I’ll probably, according to the conventional wisdom - at least all these things that seemed to be important for candidate for president and the eyes of the media under two major parties - are not the characteristics that I have. I don’t have all the lapel flag on, that seems to be one of the defining characteristics of whether or not somebody is qualified to be president nowadays; one of those issues that the other two parties argue about. “Well, why aren’t you wearing a lapel flag that I am. Why are you wearing one”, and so forth.

I also frankly don’t care how many houses anybody has. That seems to be an important issue for the candidates, you know, whether you have one house or two houses or how many cars you have, or what kind of car you drive. I drive a Dodge Magnum with a HEMI engine, I love HEMI engines.

But that has nothing whatsoever to do with why or not a person is qualified to serve as president. You’ll also note that for those of you who have been following, as I suspect everybody here has knowing Lynchburg’s reputation and concern for the community and our country. I suspect that everybody here has been following the campaign for the presidency quite avidly.

The Presidential Debates and the Vacuum of Leadership

You’ll notice that there have been, thus far, three debates for president, two for president and one for vice president, which essentially is the same thing, or at least should be the same thing.

In other words, if we’re to be voting for somebody to be vice president, that person we obviously demand that person satisfied every criteria, appropriate legitimate criteria, to serve as president. So, it’s really not appropriate to say, “Well it was a debate for vice president, so it doesn’t really matter”, it indeed does matter.

But there have been three debates so far, two between the two major party presidential nominees and one between the two major party vice presidential nominees. And the Libertarian party has not been present even though, according to a recent Zogby poll, some 55% of the American people believe that I, that is Bob Barr as Libertarian nominee for president, should be included.

But the two major parties have seen fit to assure themselves and basically to guarantee that there is nobody that is going to be on that stage with their hand-chosen candidate who might ask a tough question or pose an issue that the candidates would be forced to come outside, step outside their comfort zone for a minute. And this is something that is going to trouble a lot of us.

I want to talk today about the vacuum of leadership, of political leadership in this country. And it can be illustrated in many ways, according to many of the issues and procedures that we see in today’s world.

Now let’s just take for a minute, the debates such as they are in a useful word very loosely, they don’t really, these sessions, these hour and a half long sessions, which are preceded by endless hours of negotiation between the campaigns for the two other major parties to assure themselves that everything is being done possible to make their candidate look good, to make sure that their candidate is not forced outside his or her comfort zone.

And, that ought to bother us greatly. If we are electing a president or vice president, I say essentially the same thing, ought to be the same criteria, then we ought to be able to and we ought to insist that those men and women be judged according to not how they behave in their comfort zone, I mean it’s easy to operate properly, to appear impressive if you are in your comfort zone.

The fact of the matter is that there is probably not likely to be more than a few moments during an entire four year term of a president of the United States of this modern world that our president is going to be able to sit back and enjoy the luxury of operating within their comfort zone.

Almost by very definition a president is going to spend the four years of their term in office or the eight years if they’re honored with two terms in office, having to operate, deal with issues, deal with people that are outside their comfort zone.

And yet this notion that we have these so-called debates between the two major party candidates for president and vice president to simply allow these folks to preen and pump their chest up throw out their sound bites and once again tell us how great they are, does a tremendous disservice not just to the process what a debate ought to be, but does a tremendous disservice to the country itself.

The most graphic illustration of the lack of willingness of the two other major parties to deal with issues outside their comfort zones, occurred I guess it was the week before last, I think was the debate between Senator Biden and Governor Palin.

Normally, and of course we are used to seeing this, we are used to seeing the candidates just not answer the question directly or answer a question as posed to them very quickly and then say: “But I really want to talk about this.” Or, “Let me go back to that“.

But I’ve never seen anything quite so brazen in terms of a refusal to operate outside one’s comfort zone than when the vice presidential nominee during the debate, moderated, wasn’t really moderated by Gwen Ifill. It was really simple; there wasn’t really a moderator there.

But she said basically, she removed any pretense that she was not going to, that she was going to answer any questions posed to her, in other words be drawn outside of her comfort zone. She said basically “I’m not going to answer any questions, you may not like that!”. She was talking to the moderator but she was really talking to the American people saying:

“I don’t know whether you like it or not, and it really doesn’t matter to me whether you think it’s important for a candidate for the highest office in the land to answer questions posed to him or her but I’m not going to.”

I mean the arrogance of a candidate for that high office saying,

“I’m going to just stand up here and say what I want to say to make me look good and tell you what I think you are to hear about me, not what you want to hear about me. I’m not going to reveal to you how I might deal with the top issues or the top personalities or unusual situations that I might be faced with, that I inevitably will be faced with as president… I’m just going to keep all of that for a later date; I’m just going to pontificate and say those things that I think are important to you, like, ‘I’m a hockey mom’, or, you know, ‘you betcha that’s really exciting’, wink wink.”

You know, that’s fine and I don’t mean to denigrate hockey you know, or soccer. I mean I’m a father and when my boys were younger they played soccer, I guess that qualifies me as a soccer dad, but that doesn’t qualify me to run for president; I’m going to serve as president.

And being a hockey mom with or without lipstick, I don’t know what that has anything to do with anything, but that’s fine and it would have been good if we could have just gotten that all out of the way, you know? Have the candidates all up there and let them at the beginning of the campaign say that whether they are a hockey mom or a soccer dad or how many houses they have or whether they like [...] or what not. And who they might have had coffee with or had lunch with 20 years ago that might have been strange or what not and just get that out of the way.

And then get down to the real business and decide whether or not these men and women are qualified to sit across the table from the leader of an adversarial nation that clearly does not have our interests in heart or in mind, whether or no they are equipped, at least philosophically, to understand the complex issues involving the 21st century economy that we are in, and to find out from them, to probe as to whether or not they really even understand what the job of a president is.

I mean again, it has nothing to do with the other folks you might hang out with in your community, what you might learn walking along the sidelines of the soccer game or the hockey game, you know that’s all well and good but when you sit across the table from Vladimir Putin, it really doesn’t matter whether you are hockey mom or a soccer dad.

What matters is:

• Do you understand what the Russian and the Soviet Union’s psyche is all about?
• Do you understand their history?
• Do you understand what makes them tick as a nation?
• Do you understand the power politics among nations?

These are the issues that are going to determine whether or not we will have peace or war, cold war or the hot variety in the coming decades.

These are the issues that we ought to be concerned about and we ought to be absolutely upset and not accept the fact that we have candidates who don’t want to… not only did they not want to answer those type of questions to reveal to us, how they would respond to these very important situations that they are certain to be faced with, that they were elected president, but do they even understand the basic process of what a president is supposed to do?

Now I think that many folks including those currently occupying the White House, the administration, the current administration, their view of what a President is supposed to do is very different I suspect and from what I as a Libertarian believe a president is supposed to do.

I suspect that President Bush, if he were in fact able to articulate what it is that a president is supposed to do, other than they make decisions as the “decider”…. he probably would talk about managing the economy and wielding those levers of power that the president by virtue of the office has access to.

But is that really the job of the president?

A president is entrusted with a tremendously important treasure. And it’s not a tangible treasure, it’s our very freedom. That is the heritage of America, that is the soul of America, that is the great treasure that is entrusted to the President of the United States. And their sacred duty is not to wield the levers of power and not to try and control the economy for example. Their job is to protect and defend and expand our freedom; that is what is entrusted to them.

In other words, their job is to maintain liberty in America, not to take it away from us, which modern presidents largely view is their role, because whenever you increase the power of the federal government, whether you do that through taking more taxes, whether you do that through invading people’s privacy by spying on them for example through the expansion, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Whenever you do that, you necessarily diminish individual liberty and freedom. Because that’s the only place the government gets power from is from the people. The government has no inherent power; they have no inherent constitutional rights, we the people do.

So every time a president either takes by fiat or takes by pushing legislation and then signing into law legislation, assuming more power, that mean necessarily that we the people have received and possess less power. Our power and our freedom is diminished every time the power of the government is increased.

Yet, I suspect that probably not just the four other folks that are running for president and vice president and the other two parties by calling back several election cycles that really is something that I suspect really doesn’t enter the equation much at all when those individuals or the media questions them in the so-called debates.

Whenever they are posing the questions or determining the answers or making their decisions and it comes down more to not so much what will that person seeking the office of the Presidency of the United States do to enhance and defend and protect freedom, but how will they manipulate the leverage of power during their term as president.

And it’s that fundamental notion that the job of the president is not to wield power but to protect and defend and expand the liberty of the people that has created this. The lack of understanding has created this huge gulf between what the president is supposed to do and what the modern view of the presidency really is, and it comes down to leadership.

Being a leader required an understanding of what it is that you are leading. What it is what you are supposed to be doing. That’s where it starts and if in fact the job of the president is to lead on the fundamental issue of liberty then we have witnessed in recent decades certainly woeful lack of leadership on the part of one president after another. And that has nothing whatsoever to do with partisanship, it isn’t that the Republican or Democrat party has a lock on leadership.

There is a vacuum of leadership on behalf of both of the two major parties and it stems from that fundamental lack of understanding and as Justice Brandeis said, Louis Brandeis, somewhere about a hundred years ago in the early 20th century, and he was talking about liberty and he said, “The greatest dangers to liberty lie in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding”, and he had it painted exactly right.

The fundamental underpainting of liberty is understanding what liberty is and understanding what the job of the president and those wielding power or exercising power on our behalf ought to do.

And therefore if that fundamental understanding is lacking, then all else that follows is going to be diminished as well.

And we see that not just procedurally and during these debates, in which such things, again, whether one wears a lapel pin or how many cars one has or how many houses one has or who one might have had breakfast or coffee with years ago, those take on an importance far out of balance from the importance of the fundamental issues or the fundamental principles or freedom in America.

And we also see that lack of leadership, that vacuum leadership in many of the issues, with which not only this administration has dealt, but succeeding congresses have had to deal, and prospective presidents will have to deal.

I think nowhere probably is this more obvious this vacuum of leadership than looking at the crisis that certainly is on the mind of virtually all of us over the last couple of weeks, and that is the financial crisis facing us and a number of other nations as well.

It’s sort of typical government, modern government, to create or cause a problem, be responsible for a problem but then not admitting that and using that as the opportunity to then increase government power.

We saw this for example right after 9/11.

The Government’s Response to 9/11

All of those steps that the hijackers, the terrorists on 9/11 and in the days preceding that day of infamy, all of the steps that they took, the things that they did and were able to accomplish that led them to the point where they could commit those murderous acts, they were all against the law.

It wasn’t that we did not have laws and regulations that we could have and should have prevented them from accomplishing all the different steps, from securing drivers licenses that they weren’t entitles to, to overstaying their visas and the government not knowing that or not knowing where they were, being able to take weapons onto aircraft, being able to gain access to secure areas of airports and so forth.

The whole laundry list of acts that they were able to accomplish the placement in those situations on those planes on 9/11 were indeed already on law book and could have, if certain steps have been taken, preventing them from accomplishing their murderous acts.

Yet what happened was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and I stayed in on a number of these hearings when I was up in the Congress, what happened was not that we have government agency witnesses that said:

“We apologize; we apologize to the American people. You and the Congress have given us plenty of money to have addressed these issues, we have more than enough laws on the books, there are some four thousand federal criminal laws already on the books and countless regulations that are to carry out and supplement those criminal laws. We were not using those laws effectively or consistently or interpreting them properly. We made mistakes and we will do a better job next time.”

What happened was, we had a parade of government witnesses, some of them were later given high medals, such as the Medal of Freedom to the former C.I.A director and what they said was, not that “we’re responsible, we’re sorry, we’ll do a better job” but “You and the Congress haven’t given us enough money and you haven’t given us enough laws, you haven’t given us enough power”.

And Congress, true to form - “guilt is a terrible thing”. What they did is they passed new laws, gave more money to these agencies, instead of going back and figuring out what really went wrong and what is the best way to accomplish the task that was not accomplished prior to 9/11, without increasing the power of government and conversely, necessarily reducing individual liberty.

So we wind up with laws that dramatically increase the power of the government to invade our privacy, our financial privacy for example, our communications privacy, such as we’ve seen in the recent expansion in the foreign intelligence surveillance act, as spying on American citizens in their own country.

And, we are seeing the very same thing playing itself out in a different arena, but the principle is the same with regard to the current housing crisis.

The Housing Crisis and the Financial Collapse

The current housing crisis is largely - not exclusively, but largely the result of bad government policies, going back about at least 10 years, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those government sponsored enterprises or GSEs decided, at the behest of both the Congress and two administrations, the Clinton Administration and then the succeeding Bush Administration, that it was important from a public policy standpoint to get as many people in the houses, or to get as many people into a more expensive house as possible.

So what happened is, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and some of the other federal agencies, they started buying out all this mortgage paper and that freed up the banks and mortgage companies themselves, the primary lenders, to lend out more money to more people to buy more houses.

And every time they went through that cycle of lending the money out and taking the mortgage paper and then selling that mortgage paper to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would give them more money, they would be able to let more mortgages.

Every time they did that, the risk went up and sooner or later, and this was written about 10 years ago, I remember an article and you all might have seen this, it’s sort of making the secondary round now, actually it may have been 9 years ago. In 1999 a New York Times article, this was not a secret document pinned by the Department of Justice, it was a New York Time article. It said:

“This recently enacted policy by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the behest of Congress and then administration of Bill Clinton, to get more and more people into more and more houses at a higher and higher risk is going to be problematic if we ever run into a slight dip or downturn in the economy, and you better watch out.”

Well, nobody in Washington watched out. What they did is, they just went merrily on their way, even in the face of a former director of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines back in 2004, actually it may have been a year or two leading up to his departure from Fannie Mae in 2004. There was very clear evidence that he had been overseeing a cooking of the books of Fannie Mae, that overvalued its assets and undervalued its debts. All of this paper, these mortgage based securities running to the trillions of dollars that it had amassed.

And not only was Franklin Raines not prosecuted for what apparently was fraud, but he was allowed to simply resign from Fannie Mae and for his trouble given a multi-million dollar golden parachute.

Well, so what we have is very similar to what happened after and then before 9/11. It’s, you have a problem that developed, that was largely of the governments own making, because of its bad policies and inappropriate policies and then, as we say in Georgia and you all probably say here in the Commonwealth also, it [...].

The bottom fell out of it, all of this mortgage paper, these mortgage based securities, the link between them and the value of the assets had been completely lost if not broken. The bottom fell out of it.

And that’s what’s been happening over the last several months.

Well, rather than government officials and members of the Congress and Senators, many of whom kept on taking huge sums of campaign money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Wall Street firms who we’re now bailing out, they rather than say:

“We did a really bad thing here, we pushed some policies that weren’t very sound and we’re now going to pay a hefty price for it”

No!

What they said is:

“Wow, we have a problem here, none of us anticipated this. It’s certainly a surprise to every one of us sitting here. What we’ll do about it, well, let’s put the tax payers even at greater risk than they already are, let’s buy up all of this bad paper, all of these bad assets. Yeah, that made sense, let’s do that. And let’s draft some legislation; we don’t want it to be drafted by folks who are accountable to the people, let’s have the Secretary to Treasury, an unaccountable unelected individual, and the Head of the Federal Reserve, another unelected unaccountable individual and the Head of the SEC, which was not enforcing the laws and regulations that could very well and should have been used to bring to light these problems long before it became a crisis. Let’s have them draft some legislation.”

They might want to get some ideas from some foreign banks, also which would make sense in this global economy. So they all got together behind closed doors, not a single public hearing on any of this, they got together two weeks ago and drafted a 3-piece page of legislation.

Now in this rare instance, in which you have to give them credit for efficiency a 3-page piece of legislation that would have given the Secretary of the Treasury absolute, unfettered, unreviewable power to decide, what to do with, in excess of 700 billion dollars, because the legislation didn’t say “only 700 billion”, it said “up to 700 billion at any particular time”.

So accumulatively it could be much and almost certainly be much more then that. The Secretary of Treasury unaccountable, unelected to the people would be granted under this 3- page piece of legislation, the power to decide what to do with upwards of 700 billion dollars of tax paid money, to buy up pretty much whatever he decided he wanted to buy up, and we’re put a risk, it’s our money.

Well, the Congress, the House of Representatives again, evincing the tremendous leadership that has become as hallmark, said:

“No, that’s irresponsible to do that. Let’s pass a 110-page piece of legislation, because we need some checks and balances here. We need an oversight board. Let’s have an oversight board, and let’s put the Secretary of the Treasury, yeah that’s it, let’s put the Secretary of the Treasury as head of that oversight board, so that we can make sure it’s all properly monitored and so forth”.

Well, even though the House then took a 3-page piece of legislation, beefed it up to a 110-page, give or take, piece of legislation, there were a number of members in the house wouldn’t go along with it, and I guess the end of that week and a half ago, the House rejected it.

It wasn’t really an exercise in leadership that forced them to do that, as we’ll see of course, four days later, they got back, not a 3-page piece of legislation, not a 110-page piece of legislation, but about a 440-page piece of legislation, and the 110-page piece of legislation was “irresponsible”, the 440-page piece of legislation looked “just right”. Not like red riding hood, you know? It’s just right.

So they took this 440-page piece of legislation which was beefed up with about a 150 billion dollars of addition sweeteners, to make it palatable to their colleagues in the Senate and many of their colleagues of the House, who had voted against the original 110-page piece of legislation four days earlier, and the House passed it.

Then of course the president signed it before the ink was even dry on it.

And, so we now have the Congress of the United States and the President of the United States, who collectively are responsible by large for having created the environment in which this massive problem took hold, festered, grew and then burst, passing legislation that puts them in charge of spending upwards of, it would be more than a trillion dollars, in addition to all of those other bailouts, each of which was designed to and was supposed to have corrected the problem earlier - the Bear Sterns one, the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac one, the AIG and so forth. Each one of them didn’t.

But the thinking in Washington, if something fails to solve a problem, then the reason is, it wasn’t big enough. So, each one of these is bigger then the last one, and already they’re talking about additional bailouts.

Senator McCain, who, if he were here today he would probably by this time if he had been talking to you for about 20 or 25 minutes would have mentioned the word “maverick” about a dozen times and have reminded us that he is against earmarks.

When the administration needed a point person, a point man in the Senate after the House rejected the 110-page bailout, they went to Senator McCain and Senator McCain rounded up folks and one of the ways he was able to round up folks in the Senate for this 110-page piece of legislation was to add a whole bunch of those “squeakers” to it. And so much for Senator McCain being the maverick against spending and against the way things happen in Washington.

This is very much business as usual, this is standard operating procedure; what we wound up with.

But even that wasn’t enough because they [McCain] were already talking about additional money so that the government not only uses this up to a trillion dollars to purchase these bundles of mortgage-based securities, but can actually go into individual communities, individual neighborhoods and buy up individual mortgages and renegotiate those mortgages, not based on any notion of anything other than the government believes it’s really good to do this, to have the federal government now involved directly in the mortgage business.

Then that didn’t immediately solve the problem, so over the weekend, they’ve actually started this even before the weekend, that they come up with another scheme, they’ve gotten together with central bankers from the other G8 countries, and they’ve decided that the best thing to do is to follow the example, the US should follow the example for example of other socialized economies and start directly buying up banks!

So the Federal Government is going to start. They don’t say “buying up”, they don’t say “nationalizing” for the same reason they didn’t call the bailout a “bailout”, they called it a “rescue”.

As Ross Perot said, the devil is in the detail; actually the devil is in the title.

And what they’ll do is they’ll take a piece of legislation and attach a title to it that makes it sound much more benign than it is. If they for example had taken the piece of legislation that the administration sent to the Congress right after 9/11 and had called it the “Government Power Grab of 2001″ it probably wouldn’t have passed, but they called it the “Patriot Act”, the “USA Patriot Act” and it passed.

They knew, that even after a couple of weeks with this problem being on the front page that the term “bailout” was not a particularly good one, even though it was entirely accurate, so they called it “rescue” and sure enough, that worked.

Well, they’ve learned their lesson. They’re not talking about “nationalizing” banks, they’re not talking about the Federal Government “buying” banks, shares in banks, but what they’re talking about is that the Federal Government is “capitalizing” the banks.

But fact of the matter is, here again, without a single hearing, with virtually no input form the American people, the Federal Government is dramatically changing the entire way our economy is being run and the way it is structured.

And they’re doing it the same way that they have changed the way our privacy has been shattered since 9/11, that is by playing on fear.

The War on Privacy

They go to the American people and say:

“You certainly don’t want to have another terrorist attack! You certainly want the Federal Government to be listening in to Al Qaeda”.

And people nod.

The fact of the matter is that when the government with Senator McCain’s and Senator Obama’s support three months ago, passed an expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. it had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, it had nothing to do with a terrorist attack. It had to do with empowering the government of the United Sates to be able to listen in surreptitiously, without court order to virtually any email or telephone communication of the US citizens in their own country.

Every time a person picks up the phone or sends an email, if some bureaucrat in the federal government reasonably believes that you’re communicating with somebody outside the United States, that’s enough now for the Federal Government to be able to listen in to that phone call or that email. Any electronic communication to which the government reasonably believes one party is located outside the United States is now fair game for the government to listen in to without ever going to a court.

And the reason the government was able to get that legislation passed, was fear.

Fear of a terrorist attack, fear of what Al Qaeda might be doing. Similarly and building on, that notion what the government has done with regard to dramatically moving into the direction of a centrally planned, centrally controlled economy, through nationalizing banks and getting the Federal Government involved in the most personal of financial decisions, that is one’s mortgage.

They’re doing it based on this notion of fear. “You don’t want the slide to fall, the economy will collapse, if in fact the government does not do this. And you certainly don’t want the economy to collapse, well therefore this is the solution.”

They don’t present a variety of solutions, they don’t have hearings on the hill with different view points, all of those economists for example that have a record of saying reminding us that no economy in modern times or I suspect probably in non modern times, in which the central government controlled the economy, it was a central and plain economy, has succeeded; they all fail.

And all of those economists and professors for example and business leaders, who have told the government there are much better ways to do this, you don’t need to have the Federal Government bailing out the economy and purchasing banks, in order to solve these problems here.

There is a role for the Federal Government. They could try doing something like prosecuting fraud; you have 4000 federal criminal laws, how about using some of them?

How about investigating, the not only cozy but criminal relationship, between some of these regulators and the financial geniuses that are running these financial institutions: these banks, these mortgage companies, these investment houses.

We have a number of companies out there, Wells Fargo for example, that actually understand that there are opportunities, and if you lead the marketplace to the marketplace and those who have a stake in it, so that they can in fact sift through all of the clouds of the weather that are coming out at Washington and look in and see the assets and the deposits, the assets and the debts out there; they will in fact see economic opportunity.

And they will seize it, that what’s Wells Fargo did with regard to buying up Wachovia. It wasn’t that the government recommended it, the government didn’t. The government was trying to push Wachovia into selling out at a much lower rate to the CitiGroup. But Wells Fargo saw an opportunity there, the same as Warren Buffet saw an opportunity when he put 3 billion dollars or so into Goldman Sachs and bought up those assets, because they see an opportunity to move forward.

If in fact the government would simply encourage those sorts of activities, on the part of individuals of means and businesses that have the savvy and the resources to make those decisions and take those steps, and if the government would prosecute, send an important signal and prosecute the fraud, that inevitably is going on here, with regard to those institutions that had to have something done to them immediately: forced receivership or chapter 7 bankruptcy or opportunities.

Also, those were things that could be done, but we’re going to wake up, we already have, without a single bit of public input, without a single hearing even before an election, and these things and they want things to happen before the election so that the incoming administration whatever it is can say: “Well gee, our hands are tied; there is not a lot we can do about it”.

And then they just keep on going.

Big Government, the Big Power Grab and the Libertarian Alternative

What has happened to us is, the very nature of economic freedom in this country has been dramatically changed. And if we don’t wake up to it sooner rather then later and start to manage some real answers, some real options, to hear some different voices and slow this thing down, it would be probably too late at least within the foreseeable future to reverse what is a very very dangerous tramp. And it’s not a failure of economic policy we’re witnessing here; it’s a failure of leadership, of political leadership in this country.

We have folks in high positions in the administration, this administration, the last administration, the one before that and its succeeding congresses, Republican and Democrat alike, who are absolutely incapable and unwilling to address the real problems to recognize and admit their own involvement in creating these problems and to solving them within the framework of freedom in this country.

And instead we have this head long rush toward increased executive branch power, increased congressional power over the people and virtually no public input whatsoever.

And every one of these problems was not only foreseeable but was foreseen, by those in the media and a number of folks in the economic and financial arena over the last several years. And yet nothing was done and here with them, we have a crisis upon us, whether there is or is not a crisis, it becomes a crisis because enough people say it’s a crisis and therefore we have to use something valid, it does in fact become a crisis.

And the government is right there saying: “You have to give us more power in order to save you”.

And then, once that power is established, this year right before a national election and that will become the floor for additional power in succeeding administrations.

There has not been an administration in modern history anyway, in which a president enters office and used powers that he or she inherited from their predecessors as a ceiling, they look at it as a floor to be built on.

So, at least with regard to the two other major parties, Republican or Democrat, whichever one of them gets into power, takes over the reigns the presidency on January 20th.

They will look at this tremendous increases in federal power over our economy and over the lives of American citizens and small businesses. They will view these steps as a floor and not ceiling and will build on it, and that’s the insidious nature of how these things grow and grow, so long as the power is simply shared back and forth between the Republicans and Democrats.

And neither of those two major parties has and interest in limiting the power of the other, so long as they know that they enjoy a monopoly. Neither one is to diminish the power of the other when all is said and done, because that would diminish their power when they then take the reign of the other party, whether it’s four years or eight years or twelve years down the road.

Those are some of the reasons why I think it’s important for all of us to pay much closer attention than a lot of our fellow citizens are to these elections, to this election cycle and what’s going on in Washington. And really take a look at the libertarian party, which does believe and has a great deal more faith in the American people than the Republican or Democrat.

Their faith is in the government; our faith is in the people, in small businesses, in individual families to decide the educational needs of their children, the economic needs of businesses in their community, how much money they should be saving on a form of taxation, and how much taxes they should be paying through a national consumption tax for example.

All of these policies that are at the heart of the Libertarian philosophy, the Libertarian agenda and the Libertarian platform, are based on faith in the people themselves to best make and render these decisions.

And the other two parties, the Republican and Democrat, it’s not in God they trust, it’s in government they trust. Every one of the solutions that they propose has at its core the “benevolent” hand of government which to us Libertarians is an inherent contradiction.

This is the end of Bob Barr’s speech. Make sure that you also watch the Q&A session which begins in the sixth video.