Rick Koster for County Commissioner

To the Allen Area Tea Party Members

Back in February you asked me where I stood on the issues you care about. Below I go into more details.

The following are the five principles of your Tea Party chapter as described at Allen Tea Party WEB site.

Limited Government:
As our founding fathers recognized restraint of government is necessary to protect the liberty of the people.

Fiscal responsibility:
Government at all levels must learn to live within its means. To saddle future generations with the crushing burden of excess spending is unconscionable

Personal Responsibility:
Liberty is unsustainable without responsibility. Each citizen must take responsibility for the consequences of his or her actions while respecting the rights and dignity of others.

The Rule of Law:
Consistent, independent and uniform application of the law is critical to a free and prosperous society.

National Sovereignty:
We must maintain a strong national defense, effective security for our borders, and sole control over our land and our laws.

I support these principles. I believe that you will find very few Americans, if any, who will disagree with these principles at face value. The question is how a citizen interprets these principles and how they fit with additional principles that the citizen may hold. My interpretation of these principles may or may not agree with yours. These principles can't be taken in isolation, and at time may be in conflict.

We should agree, however, that WE are the government. Our government is a reflection of the desires and expectations, successes, and failures of our citizens for over 230 years of our constitutional republic.

Since WE are the government, the most important principle is that of Personal Responsibility. Through our elected officials WE are responsible for how limited or interventionist the government is. WE are responsible for government programs, and WE are responsible for paying for them. WE are responsible for how the laws are interpreted. WE are responsible for our national character.

Each one of us has a definition of what limited government means. I share with my Libertarian friends the belief that the government should stay out of my personal business. What that means is that what I do in my home, with my body, or my mind is off limits to the government and anybody else.

I don't extend this principle to corporations. Corporations have one purpose: making money. Making money is a good thing, but since corporations are amoral actors in our society we need to limit their power as much or more than we limit the power of government. In our modern society, government has expanded to check the power of corporations. We do this with regulations that limit the right of corporations to pollute our communities, deceive individual consumers, manipulate the market, and commit other offenses against the public good..

Unlike my friends the Libertarians, I believe that the marketplace is unable to provide social insurance. I support Medicare and Medicaid. As a society we have chosen to provide a safety net to cushion against the ups and downs of our economy in the form of unemployment insurance and food assistance. Other insurance programs I support are crop insurance and flood insurance.

Let's talk healthcare insurance. Today, individual healthcare insurance is a game of Russian roulette where the looser dies or goes to the poor house. Unless you are fortunate enough to be covered by government healthcare insurance such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration, you better pray that you don't get seriously sick. In our current insurance market there is no way to hedge against a severe or long term illness. In the current insurance market there is no way I can take personal responsibility for healthcare risks. The current state of healthcare insurance is bankrupting our citizens and corporations, and making us uncompetitive in the world market. I support President Barrack Obama's effort to fix this problem. I am not happy with every detail of the current bills in the US Senate and US House, but I feel they are a good starting point. I encourage you to read both bills and decide for yourself what is the good bad and ugly of the legislation. This is a good opportunity to fix a problem that has dogged our nation for almost a century.

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