Jim DeMint: "GOP needs to be more Libertarian"

Republican Senator Jim DeMint and Senator Rand Paul.
"We are at a tipping point politically," says Sen. DeMint.

“The New Debate in the Republican Party Needs to be Between Conservatives and Libertarians”

---- Senator Jim DeMint

• DeMint  -  "When the country is going down in flames, there are still people in the street, demonstrating for more government benefits."

“A lot of the libertarian ideals that Ron Paul is talking about…should not be alien to any Republican,” Sen. Jim DeMint said during an interview at reason’s Washington, D.C., offices in late January. Encouraging words from a South Carolina Republican who has earned a reputation as one of his party’s strongest voices for fiscal conservatism during his six years in the House of Representatives and six years in the Senate.

But DeMint’s new book, Now or Never: Saving America From Economic Collapse (Center Street), is an urgent warning about fiscal, not social, issues. To write the foreword, DeMint picked Ron Paul’s son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)—a man who bridges the gap between his father’s more ideologically libertarian stance and the mainstream GOP. Now or Never calls for a new coalition in favor of radical budget cuts—including reductions in military spending—aimed at avoiding irreversible economic decline. 

Jim DeMint:  This could be our last chance to turn things around. And I know politicians: They cry wolf when there’s no wolf; we talk about crises all the time. But when the debt is bigger than your economy and the plan is to keep borrowing another trillion dollars more every year, there’s not that much money in the world to borrow; we’re going to have to print it. It means the value of our dollar is likely to go down. Interest rates will go up. We can’t pretend that this [problem will go away], like Greece did or like Europe is doing. It’s a very real problem. 

The other problem is political. Almost half of Americans are getting something from government, and the other half are paying for it. And we’re on a track where 60 percent are getting something from government and 40 percent are paying for it. You can’t sustain a democracy with that mix.

Jim DeMint:  It’s hard to win elections when you’re talking about limited government if the constituents want more from government. You see that phenomenon on display in Greece. When the country is going down in flames, there are still people in the street, demonstrating for more government benefits. We’ve got to understand we’re in trouble, that we don’t have much time. 

We are at a tipping point politically. Those folks who are normally not interested in politics—they’re working and paying taxes, raising families—we’ve got to engage them in the political process this year. We can turn things around. One of the main points of the book is that we forgot what makes America exceptional. We’re a bottom-up country, very individualistic. Every other country was top-down, where a king, or dictator, or general can shape things from the top. But we were different and we were successful, because we began at the individual level. 

(Reason Magazine)

A Constitutional Libertarian Government.
President George Washington and his cabinet. Members of Washington’s cabinet included Secretary of War Henry Knox, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. Not pictured because he was not technically a part of the Cabinet was Vice President John Adams.