VIDEO: What Conservatives Are For

Here is a recent speech by U.S. Senator Mike Lee at the Heritage Foundation and a few excerpts below…

Freedom doesn’t divide us. Big government does. It’s big government that turns citizens into supplicants, capitalists into cronies, and cooperative communities into competing special interests. Freedom, by contrast, unites us. It pulls us together, and aligns our interests. It draws us out of ourselves and into the lives of our friends, neighbors, and even perfect strangers. It draws us upward, toward the best version of ourselves. The free market and civil society are not things more Americans need protection from. They’re things more Americans need access to.

Liberals scoff at all this. They attack free enterprise as a failed theory that privileges the rich, exploits the poor, and threatens the middle class. But our own history proves the opposite. Free enterprise is the only economic system that does not privilege the rich. Instead, it incentivizes them to put their wealth to productive use serving other people—or eventually lose it all.

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Why should the American people trust our ideas about middle-class entitlements… when we’re still propping up big banks?

Why should they trust us to fix the tax code while we use their tax dollars to create artificial markets for uncompetitive industries?

Why should they trust our vision of a free civil society when we give special privileges to supposed non-profits like Planned Parenthood, public broadcasting, agricultural check-off programs, and the Export-Import Bank?

And perhaps most important, why should Americans trust us at all, when too often, we don’t really trust them? When we vote for major legislation… negotiated in secret… without debating it… without even reading it… deliberately excluding the American people from their own government?

Read the entire speech…