A YOUNGER AMERICA
[This is the speech I would have liked to have seen Ted Cruz give]
I want to talk today to the young people of America – to Americans who are young in age, to Americans who are still young at heart, and to Americans who want to feel young again.
So much of being young is having a youthful attitude towards life.
There are twenty-five year olds who have an old attitude toward life, they’re unexcited about being alive, there’s something dying inside them. They want to be taken care of instead of being free.
There are eighty-five year olds who look upon each new day with joy and excitement, as a gift from God to learn or accomplish something they never knew or did before.
It was a youthful attitude toward life that created America. People left an Old World grown stagnant and oppressive in Europe to create a life for themselves in a New World because there they were free to choose their pursuit of happiness. That freedom enabled them to create a civilization out of a continent of wilderness, to create more prosperity for more people than history had ever seen.
Today, tragically, America does not seem to be young anymore. Far too many Americans – particularly far too many young Americans – are fearful rather than excited about their future, pessimistic rather than optimistic. Historically, this is an exceptionally un-American attitude toward life. We have always been excited, hopeful, optimistic regarding the future of our lives, of our children’s, and of our country’s.
Are you today? If so, why not? What has happened to us as a people that has caused so many to lose faith in the future? What has happened to so many of us that we are no longer a young people with a youthful fearlessness, a youthful thrill of being alive and free?
It is because the leftist political, academic, and media elite in America treat you like children. Ironic, isn’t it?
There is a name for this. It is a neurosis with which the power elite in Washington, most especially Democrats, are afflicted. The name for this neurosis is Infantilizomania. In a word, Democrats like all leftists are infantilizomaniacs.
Just as a pyromaniac is driven by a compulsion to set fires, a kleptomaniac by a compulsion to steal, and – everyone’s favorite example – a nymphomaniac by a compulsion to have sex, an infantilizomaniac is driven by a compulsion to treat adult human beings as children.
The compulsion to infantilize people is the neurotic compulsion of Democrats.
Democrats of course do not call it infantilizomania. They call it compassion. “We have to have government take care of people because they can’t take care of themselves! People are children who don’t know how to feed themselves so they must have food stamps!”
And it is a blatantly phony compassion. Compassion for the plight of others in difficult and desperate circumstances is a noble emotion. But it becomes fraudulent when you demand that your compassion be paid for with other people’s money. A liberal’s compassion is a Ponzi scheme, robbing Peter through government taxation to pay for his compassion for Paul.
Let’s be very clear about this. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama are thieves just like any mugger in an alley. Only they want the guns of the government to steal your money instead of putting a gun at your head themselves.
Worse, their phony compassion is rendered demeaning, patronizing, and un-noble by equating compassion with treating adults as if they were children. In other words, the leftist path to power is to reduce adults to children through their phony claim of compassion.
Instead of treating grown people as adults capable of being responsible for their own happiness, Hillary and Bernie encourage people to think and behave as children, as infantilized victims of “the system” or “society” or “racism” or “Wall Street” or whatever leftie boogeyman they try to scare you with.
Conning people into viewing themselves as children allows Democrats to get them hooked on their drug of OPM – yes, pronounced “opium” and standing for Other People’s Money.
OPM welfare subsidies are no less an addictive drug than cocaine or heroin (so it is no coincidence that most drug addicts are welfare addicts). Once you get on the drug of the dole, you can’t conceive how you could survive without it.
I propose to you that we regard liberal Democrat infantilizomaniacs like Hillary and Bernie as drug pushers pushing the Drug of the Dole. By building up constituencies hooked on OPM, Democrats assure themselves of votes by making people dependent upon them.
I want a younger America, not an infantilized America.
An America young in spirit like it used to be and can be again, an America of opportunity and optimism – not an America old and tired in spirit, an America of opportunism and pessimism.
An infantilized America is what Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Socialists like Bernie Sanders, and Demagogues like Donald Trump want. All three preach the politics of subservience.
Hillary and Bernie want you to be subservient to the state. Donald wants you to be subservient to him. He has no politics other than Himself, no policies other than whatever will get people to worship him like Juan Perón or any other Banana Republic Dictator.
Hillary and Bernie and Donald are old. Bernie turns 75 this year, Hillary turns 70 next year, Donald turns 70 next month. But I’m not talking about being old chronologically – we have plenty of vibrantly productive Americans of that age and far older.
I mean they are old in their thinking. Hillary and Bernie haven’t had an original idea in decades. Donald just says whatever he thinks might get him media attention at the moment.
So let me ask you – do you want to be subservient or do you want to be free?
Do you want to be ordered to shut up and do as you’re told, or do you want to think for yourself?
Do you want to be treated as a child for the rest of your life, or as an adult?
Do you want to feel that you’re a helpless victim, that life sucks, that everything is a ripoff, that you have no future so why not just kill yourself now and get it over with as what’s the point – or do you want to greet every day with a smile on your face, bursting with excitement to be alive, to be thrilled with the possibilities of what you can do with your life?
Which is it? If you want the former – well, be my guest, be a Clinton or Sanders or Trump acolyte.
If you want the latter, I ask your support in helping me getting rid of what I think is America’s Number One Problem.
I call it simply TMG. Too Much Government.
I want to get the Federal Government out of your way, so that you are free to create your own life and your own future without 5,000 bureaucrats from 325 different agencies – all of which are unauthorized by the Constitution – saying you must live by their rules instead.
Almost every one of their hundreds of thousands of rules, by the way – the entire dog’s breakfast of “administrative law” with their own “administrative courts” and “administrative judges” – is illegal, and I propose to make them so. The Constitution clearly says only Congress can legislate and that only when the President signs that legislation does it become the law of the land.
Congress has no authority to “delegate” its constitutional responsibilities to hordes of unelected bureaucrats – period. Such “delegation” will end when I am president.
My presidency will be a 10th Amendment Presidency. It will focus exclusively on what the Federal Government is supposed to do: protect and defend our national security, and provide a constitutional rule of law within the boundaries provided by our founding legal document, the Constitution.
That is, it will confine itself to the specific enumerate powers granted to it by the Constitution, and turn over all the powers it has illegally arrogated to itself back to the states.
By doing so, we will liberate our economic system from being throttled and choked to death.
Let me ask – how many of you that I’m speaking to now don’t have a good job, or a job at all? More Americans are not working as a percentage of the workforce today than ever before. Over 90 million of us are unemployed or underemployed, while almost 50 million of us are on food stamps.
Why? It’s because of TMG. Ask an executive of just about any business what he or she spends most of their time on these days, and they’ll tell you – not on how to improve their product or better compete in the marketplace, but on compliance with an infinite amount of ever-changing government regulations.
Further, TMG is what makes “crony capitalism” possible. “Crony capitalism” is the opposite of real capitalism.
It is using government influence to get taxpayer-paid subsidies that you never would have earned in the market, and ruins competitors without the influence and subsidies. And it is using government guns to give you a monopoly and prevent by force someone from competing with you.
In fact, our economic system shouldn’t be called “capitalism” at all. What it should be called is innovationism. The freedom to innovate is the essence of a real free market system. This freedom is what drives the real engine of our economy – small business.
Big corporations rarely innovate, rarely create, and rarely hire lots more people. They spend way too much of their time trying to stifle innovation, preventing some upstart small company coming up with a new product or service that leaves theirs in the dust.
You want a job, a better job, or even your own business? Help me get the government out of the way of small business that’s responsible for almost all job creation.
My administration will be a champion of small business and a dedicated enemy of crony capitalism. I want to see under my presidency an explosion of innovation creating an explosion of more jobs and more prosperity.
What Bernie and Hillary want to see is an explosion of more government. More rules, more bureaucrats, more taxation. They want an older America, older in spirit, more subservient and less free. It’s the status quo on steroids.
I want a younger America, younger in spirit, less subservient and more free. Donald says he wants to “Make America Great Again” – without any clear idea of just what “great” means.
I want to Make America Free Again. And I know just how to do it. Take off the shackles that politicians, bureaucrats, and crony capitalists have placed on our lives, and let us be free to innovate, to create, to pursue of our dreams.
Freedom is the American Dream. It is the dream of a young America, not an old one. We can live in a younger America for the rest of our lives. If that’s what you want, I ask for your support, for together, that’s the future we can achieve.
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Note 1: The term infantilizomania originates with me in an essay published in To The Point on Sept. 23, 2005:
http://www.2thepointnews.com/2005/09/infantilizomania/
Note 2: The concept of capitalism as innovationism is that of University of Chicago Prof. Deirdre McCloskey:
http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/
Note from To The Point Admin:
We all know that this speech may be too late to mention at this point, since Senator Ted Cruz has dropped out of the race, and Jack had written it before all that transpired yesterday. Although, we think that it is an important message that everyone must read and absorb, and hopefully, we can figure out our next move in saving our beloved country moving forward.
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