A call for the separation of economy and state

Excellent piece by Alex Epstein at ARC's Voices for Reason blog.

Alex identifies the reason why I have no use or patience for Sally Kern and the religious right, much less conservatives in general:

Some will say that separation of economy and state is too radical a goal. To be sure, this goal will take time—and a roadmap—to reach. But it is the only valid destination. Where liberty is concerned, “moderation” is suicide. Patrick Henry did not say “Give me a small rollback in government or give me death.” He said: give me liberty. So should we.

A radical reduction in the size of government is long overdue. Government needs to get out of the way of the freedom it was created to protect: laws need to be repealed, regulations need to be eliminated and government agencies need to be closed.

Yet, conservatives from Sally Kern to Randy Brogdon to Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe have done little more than tinker with details. The dirty little secret of the religious right is that they have a miserable track record when it comes to actually shrinking the government. They complain about a lack of "political will" to reduce the size of government while exalting "the will of the people" over individual rights. That they have done so little while government grows by leaps and bounds tells me that they are no real friends of freedom.

The spirit of the Tea Party movement is the exact opposite of what the Religious Right really wants.

Indeed, the efforts of such as Sally Kern to use government force to impose her moral values on all of us leads me to believe that theirs is a lust for power every bit the equal of the most dyed-in-the-wool communist.

What we need now are not milquetoasts such as Kern, Brogdon and Coburn, but candidates who have the guts to fight for freedom for the sake of freedom, and who know that the only way to achieve that is to uphold individual rights and cut away everything the government does to infringe those rights. If you want to know what that kind of a candidate might look like, watch Yaron Brook at the Virginia Republican Convention.