November’s choices -- tough to support either Romney-Ryan or Obama-Biden says Judge Napolitano

We are in terrible straits this presidential election. We have a choice
between a president who has posed more of a danger to personal freedom
than any in the past 150 years and a Republican team that wants to
return to Bush-style big government.



President Obama has begun to show his hand at private fundraisers and in
unscripted comments during his campaign. And the essence of his
revelations is dark. His vision of a shared prosperity should frighten
everyone who believes in freedom, because it is obvious that the
president doesn’t. He believes the federal government somehow possesses
power from some source other than the Constitution that enables it to
take from the rich and give to the poor. He calls this “a new vision of
an America in which prosperity is shared,” and he declared, “If you've
got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”



Today in America, nearly half of all households receive either a salary
or some financial benefit from the government; the other half pay for
it. In Obama’s vision for America, no one will be permitted to become
too rich, no matter his skills and hard work. He somehow believes that
government seizures and transfers of wealth generate prosperity. We
know, of course, that the opposite occurs. Seizing wealth through
taxation removes it from the private sector for investment. That
produces job losses and government dependence on a massive scale.

The federal government has a debt of $16 trillion. We have that debt
because both political parties have chosen to spend today and put the
burden of paying for the spending onto future generations. The debt
keeps increasing, and the feds have no intention of paying it off. Every
time the government has wanted to increase its lawful power to borrow
since World War II, members of Congress and presidents from both parties
have permitted it to do so.

Last week, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the presumptive
Republican nominee for president, blasted Obama for borrowing more than
one trillion dollars in just the past year. He must have forgotten to
look at the voting record of his designated running mate, Wisconsin
Congressman Paul Ryan.

Ryan voted for nearly every request to raise the debt ceiling during
his 14 years in Congress. He voted for TARP, the GM bailout and most of
the recent stimulus giveaways. He also voted to pay for the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars on a credit card, which added another trillion dollars
to the government’s debt. And he voted to assault the Constitution by
supporting the Patriot Act and its extensions, as well as Obama’s
unconstitutional proposal to use the military to arrest Americans on
American soil and detain those arrested indefinitely.



We have a rough idea of how Obama would bring about government control
of private industry through ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank. From Ryan’s voting
record, we have a rough idea of what Romney-Ryan would bring us: more
of the Bush-era big government. In other words, Ryan is just another
big-government Republican holding himself out as a fiscal conservative.
Even his controversial budget proposals -- which the House approved, but
the Senate declined to address -- would have increased government
spending. It was less of an increase than Obama wanted, which is why the
Senate Democrats refused to consider it, but it was not a cut in
spending.



I am a firm believer that the Constitution means what it says. The
federal government can only do what the Constitution authorizes it to
do. The modern-day Republican and Democratic Parties have made a
shambles of that principle. Nevertheless, I understand the “anybody but
Obama” urge among those who fear his excesses, as do I. Obama has killed
innocents, altered laws, rejected his oath to enforce the law
faithfully, and threatened to assault the liberty and property of
Americans he hates and fears.



Even though Ryan is a smart and humble and likeable man who was once a
disciple of Ayn Rand on economics, as am I, the Republicans want to
return to the Bush days of war and spending beyond our means and
assaults on civil liberties to return. The Bush years were bad for
freedom; without them, we would not have had an Obama administration.



Which do you want?