Sometimes people who know me pretty well, ask, "Jeremy, you care about the environment and genuinely care about people, why are you a Republican?" The answer is both simple and complicated at the same time. But a little education about the how and why of forms of government and then you'll be a Republican too and help us restore the Republican party of Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr all of whom were Republicans who supported the republic to defend individual liberty. The easiest way to understand why Republicanism is the best form of government is to really understand what the different forms of government are and how they compare to each other. While my campaign is intending to produce videos about such subjects, there is a fairly decent one that explains how a little bit of government improves freedom, but no government and too much government both remove freedom. So please, spend 10 minutes to watch it. Republicanism is the rule of law to protect individual liberty. Democracy is the tyranny of the majority (or often what is popular), where 51% of your neighbors can vote to take away your house or kids. The founders knew the dangers of democracy. That is why it is not mentioned anywhere in our founding documents or within any of the 50 state constitutions! "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty." - President John Adams, in letter to John Taylor, 1814. What many people do not understand, however, is how economic freedom and individual liberty are linked. You cannot have one without the other. Democrats, in general, seem to be laboring under the delusion that it is possible to have individual liberty while having very little in the way of economic freedom. But if you cannot keep the fruits of your labors and your property, do you really have any freedom at all? I hear the idea often from fairly well educated liberals, that we could have communism and still maintain individual liberty. Unfortunately, their explanations stop there and just go into defense that communism doesn't always have to be the kind that Stalin instituted. Ultimately, all government can only exist without tyranny through voluntarism. If you do not voluntarily agree to participate, yet someone forces you to do so, then you are no better than a slave to whomever it is who is forcing you to participate. In our form of government, the republic, we all have universally agreed that we were willing to work together to protect some of our rights as a nation. However, we only gave our national sheriff (the federal government) the right to do a few things. Those things are listed in the US Constitution. Did you know that only four crimes are listed in the Constitution? The Federal Government only has permission to punish four crimes. If they do any more than that, then they have exceeded their mandate and are acting in tyranny. "But Jeremy, what about the planet?" We only have one earth. We do need to take care of it. However, it needs to be done so in a symbiotic relationship with property owners. The current "environmental" protections are almost entirely written by special interests who only desire a better economic environment for whatever they are trying to sell. Yes, if someone is polluting our air and water to a degree where it is harming others then we have a moral right to stop them from using their own property in that matter. However, this needs to be done in a careful matter, and almost exclusively within the state or local jurisdictions (except when it crosses state lines and then rightfully comes under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government should the two states involved not agree on a solution.) This does NOT need to come from the United Nations in the form of Agenda 21 or from overbearing corrupt Environmental Protection Agency that acts outside of Congressional control making its own laws and regulations at will. "But Jeremy, what about the poor?" America has had a half a century of continual loss of standard of living. We have 1 in 6 North Carolinians with food insecurities now (News & Record), but half a century back we had almost zero. Why? We give more money than ever before to the government to take care of this problem, but it keeps increasing? The answer is because government is not the solution. Someone spending someone else's money is never going to be as efficient as someone spending their own money. For every tax dollar collected from the American people, that is one less dollar that is being productive actually creating the goods and services that raise our standard of living. For every dollar collected by the government for programs for the poor, only 25% actually ever get paid in benefits. So what does that mean? It means we are losing 75% of the production that that dollar would have created in the private sector. That means that dollar is paying for 75% less food that would have been able to be sold and thus 75% less food is being produced. Instead we have a government who is actually paying farmers not to grow food while children go to sleep hungry. The only way to actually raise the standard of living for all North Carolinians, is to make sure that we are actually producing all the goods and services that North Carolinians need! The better the technology, the least amount of people needed, and the cheaper that these basic items are to create, then the more people are freed up to create more technology, do research to improve the quality of our lives, and to make the pursuits of art that are only available once your basic needs are met. The only economic system that allows this to happen is in a free market system. Economic public policy decisions that hinder production or try to introduce a price control ALWAYS end up creating a lower standard of living for everyone, including eventually the alleged protected party. Studying how policy decisions make secondary effects is absolutely required for one to understand why the market place must be free to produce dependent on a price system that is market driven and not controlled by central planning. While a free market does not guarantee equal distribution, it does guarantee max standard of living for everyone involved. In a free market, true charity from those who rise above their minimum basic needs can exist at a level that no other economic system can produce. Because those goods and services are actually being produced and thus able to be bought, sold and given away charitably by those who choose to do so. The Republican Party The Republican party has not always acted up to the republican values of individual and economic liberty. Some democratic (tyranny of what is popular, or tyranny of the majority) ideas have snuck in among some of the leadership and also some authoritarian ideas that limit individual liberty and sovereignty. But ultimately, this is only a corruption of republicanism and republicanism can still be saved. Thus, the Republican party needs to be populated by people who truly support the republican form of government and support the ideals upon which this party was founded upon. One of the co-founders of the Republican party was a constructionist constitutionalist, Frederick Douglass. He believed that following Thomas Jefferson's Republicanism required that we follow the Constitution as the founders wrote it and intended it. If it was to be changed, then it had to be done so the proper way, by amendment, and not by just "re-interpeting" it to mean whatever you would like it to mean. I would like to restore the Republican party to the party that Frederick Douglass helped to create. The party can be a powerful voice against human injustice and slavery! Today slavery exists, although now it is more subtle, we have a constant assault on our liberties and we are economically enslaved to a monetary system that consistently steals our wealth right in front of our faces. It is about time we do something about it. I am a member of the Republican Liberty Caucus, an organization designed to help keep the Republican party moving back towards liberty. Please support me and the RLC in making the Republican party the party of true liberty! Tweet *J.D. Adams is a member of the NC Army National Guard. Depictions in uniform are from prior service to this campaign and are not an endorsement by the Department of Defense nor the NCARNG. "The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." -Thomas Jefferson