Let Gary Johnson Debate

by
Andrew P. Napolitano

Recently
by Andrew P. Napolitano: Two
Failures

President Obama
has been a failure. On his watch, the American economy has significantly
deteriorated largely because he has stifled free market forces by
over-regulating them and because he has laden taxpayers with debt.
Those two factors alone – the federal government increasing the
cost of doing business by telling businesses from physicians to
major industries how to do their work, and the federal government
spending trillions it doesn’t have and pushing the debts onto future
generations – are enough to sink any economy.

In this arena,
Mitt Romney has it half-right. He does understand that only free
market forces can produce prosperity, but he fails to see that when
the government spends what it doesn’t have, the result is inflation
and higher taxes for future generations. Why does the federal government
now spend half a trillion a year in debt service? Because every
president, Republicans as well as Democrats, from FDR to Obama has
borrowed money in order to spend more than he collected and has
let future generations deal with repaying the debt. Because the
feds do not repay (they merely roll over) their debt, the cost of
interest payments has skyrocketed. Romney’s ability to articulate
the virtues of the free market and to dance around the issue of
debt, while the president nearly fell asleep, are the reasons he
did so well in the presidential debate last week.

In the realm
of foreign affairs, the president has unleashed a torrent of violence
in the Middle East by supporting some of the people his predecessor
was fighting a few years ago. Those folks now run the government
in Libya and Egypt, and those places are now unsafe for Americans.
What would Romney do? He’d insert the U.S. military to extend American
dominance and build a new world order. What has Obama done? He’s
bombed and killed innocents with drones. Neither has learned the
lessons of 9/11: You cannot kill people or occupy foreign lands
without moral and legal justification, lest you suffer deadly consequences.

Because Romney
and Obama are different only in degree, I wish the cabal of former
leaders of the two major political parties that runs the debates
would permit former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson to participate.
He is the Libertarian Party candidate who is on the ballot in all
50 states and the only current national candidate who if elected
would shrink the government and keep it within the confines of the
Constitution.

Don’t hold
your breath. The debates are crafted by the folks who run the Romney
and Obama campaigns. Romney is afraid of Johnson because he might
take the votes of those who are tired of unconstitutional government
and deficits and war. Obama is afraid of Johnson because he might
take the votes of those who are appalled at the government’s murderous
drug wars and its assaults on personal freedom and who also are
tired of war. Both sides fear Johnson because he is essentially
fearless when it comes to his belief that the Constitution means
what it says – meaning if it does not authorize the feds to regulate
health care, fight undeclared wars or mortgage the future, then
they simply cannot do it.

But the powers
that run the means by which we elect presidents have decided that
they can ill-afford a frontal assault on the big government they
have created, on national television much less, and four weeks before
a presidential election. You see, without Johnson in these debates,
the argument will remain how much the feds should regulate,
rather than whether they should do so.

I was disappointed
but not surprised when Romney defended the concept of the feds regulating
ordinary commercial transactions and borrowing money to spend it
on things like federal aid to education, rather than defending the
free market and the constitutional restraints on the feds. Obama
is either a Marxist who doesn’t believe in personal freedom or private
property, or a nihilist who doesn’t believe in anything except his
own ability to exercise governmental power. Romney sounds like another
big-government Republican who wants to regulate part of the economy,
fight wars on a credit card and let your grandchildren pay for it.

If you want
a real debate – one that will explore the proper constitutional
role of the federal government in our lives before it gets so big
that we cannot safely challenge it – you will be disappointed, unless
Gary Johnson is let in.

Reprinted
with the author’s permission.

October 11, 2012

Andrew P.
Napolitano [send
him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey,
is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano
has written six books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent
is It
Is Dangerous To Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case
for Personal Freedom. To find out more about Judge Napolitano
and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists,
visit creators.com.

Copyright
© 2012 Andrew P. Napolitano

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