Santorum is a Big Government Neocon Punk

Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum was the top choice among about 150 conservative leaders who assembled in Brenham over the past couple of days to discuss who should be the Republican presidential nominee. However, Santorum has revealed himself as a big-government frontman, who is totally opposed to the Founding Fathers vision for America.

“One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a Libertarianish right. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. That is not how traditional conservatives view the world.  There is no such society that I’m aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.”

- Rick Santorum

"Santorum seems to oppose a basic American principle - the right to the pursuit of happiness. I agree with him on this, but there is something even more fundamental here than that. It has to do with the conservative philosophy itself. One of the statements that Santorum makes is true. "That is not how traditional conservatives view the world."

There is a great disconnect between average Americans who refer to themselves as "conservatives" and the small group of politicians and politically-connected businessman who likewise refer to themselves. The members of the former group believe in the founding principles of the United States, including the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They believe that these rights are endowed by their Creator. In other words, they preexist the government. They are not created by the government. It is the government's one and only job to protect those rights and when the government fails to protect them and instead violates them, it is the duty of the people to alter or abolish the government.

These inalienable rights are also referred to as "natural rights," meaning that man possesses them even in the state of nature (the state without government). For Jefferson, whose philosophy was inspired by Locke, the reason that men formed governments was to protect these rights better than they could be protected otherwise.

Contrary to Rick Santorum's assertion that no society based upon radical individualism has ever succeeded, the libertarian, radical individualist principles upon which the United States was founded were precisely why it succeeded so spectacularly. It was libertarianism that made America different from any society before or since - what made it the "shining city on the hill" as Santorum calls it. It was the collectivist conservative philosophy that helped bring it down - with a lot of help from a third philosophical movement called Progressivism. Neither more conservatism nor more progressivism - nor any combination of the two - can solve the problems that America faces today. If Americans want to see liberty and prosperity restored in the United States, then restoring libertarianism is their only hope."

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America