Tim Pawlenty: "We cannot be free if we are a debtor nation"

Tim Pawlenty: A Modern, Not a Moderate, Party

Excerpt:

... when we talk about the national debt, it is not freedom and we are not protecting and advancing freedom when we handcuff our children and our grandchildren to wagon loads full of debt - $35,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States of America. We are choking in debt. We are swimming in debt. That's $10 trillion in debt, not including the entitlement programs. We cannot be free if we are a debtor nation. We cannot be free if our federal officials are worried about what the Chinese might do in terms of withholding and enabling our debt, if we don't bail out the banks.

And that's part of what's going on. Part of the reason that the federal government is so scared about the financial systems collapsing is because they're worried that the Chinese and others are going to stop investing and buying our debt, and if they do that, things will collapse. How did we get to this point in this country where we have the Chinese financial investments dictating or influencing our federal policy? That is not freedom. We are not free if we are in debt. The average American is $20,000 in debt in credit cards. We are not free if people who are disadvantaged cannot grab the keys to opportunity, because their school system is so bad that they don't graduate from high school, and even if they do they need remedial education and they don't have the education or the skills to access the economy of today and tomorrow, and they get marginalized into society as a ward of the state.

That is not freedom for them, and it's awful for us. It's bad economically. It's bad morally. It's bad socially. Freedom is about school choice. Freedom is about improving performance pay in schools. Freedom is about having the school system look more like an iPod than a 1940s industrial one-size-fits-all assembly line. Freedom isn't having the government take over the healthcare system, so your decisions are made by bureaucrats instead of between patients and doctors; freedom isn't having lunatics threaten the state of Israel and say they're going to wipe it out and tolerate that as some sort of a need to accommodate lunatics in foreign policy. We have lost our way.

Freedom starts with ending the culture of debt. This has been erased from our memory, but I think one of the things we should do is demand a constitutional requirement to balance the federal budget.

Comment: HT: Pawlenty Speech at Horowitz Freedom Center. A stand on fiscal responsibility is essential to the future of conservatism.