We are citizens who are governed by consent; we are not subjects who are ruled by force. At least that is what our founders thought. They wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. No longer would we submit to a king or to the concept of noble birth. All men were recognized as created equal in the image of God. And in His image, we have been endowed “with certain unalienable rights”. It is not our government, our citizenship nor our birth that grant us rights; rather it is our very humanity. The role of government, according to our founders, is to protect these rights. They cannot grant them, they can only secure them. The power the government uses to secure our rights comes from… ourselves. In their words, “from the consent of the governed.”
Our founders, like the ancient Spartans outnumbered by the Persian army at the Battle of Thermopylae, chose liberty over life. They believed that certain principles were worth fighting for at all cost. Xerxes looked on at Leonidas and the Spartans in disbelief. He could not understand why someone would waste their life and their effort on an ideal like Liberty. In fact, according to Herodotus, he waited 4 days for the Spartans to stand down; but they never did. They were committed. They knew inherently that life without liberty was not worth living. Today many ask why one would “waste” their vote on an ideal like Liberty. Why would you fight a battle that you are doomed to fail? It is for Liberty. It is for the same reason our founders rebelled against one of the world’s greatest superpowers at the time. They fought to be free, they fought to be active and engaged in how they were governed. They refused to be ruled by tyrants and demanded a government by consent. Are we willing to do the same?
Have you considered that altogether we pay somewhere in the range of 40-50% tax? Have you considered that incumbents are re-elected 95% of the time even when Congress’ approval rating are in single digits? Are you willing to consider that you have been lied to, cheated, and abused by your chosen “leaders” for so many years, that our election system has become little more than a tyrant selection? Many would direct you to retake your party instead of thinking for yourself. Why would you believe a party that listens to you long enough to get elected and then ignores you for the duration of their term? It is a historical fact that our government has created an ever-increasing mountain of debt that has rarely done anything other than increase during terms of both parties. They have engaged our military in so many countries around the world that we have not been able to effectively keep our country safe domestically. Our state governments have continually judicially forced issues like homosexual “marriage” which has been voted down by the people every time it appears on a ballot. Elected officials do not hold themselves to the same standards they enforce on others. How much corruption, graft, greed, manipulation, theft, crime and immorality are we willing to allow our elected leaders to indulge in before we merely hold them accountable?
The question remains, are we willing to walk in the steps of our founders and of the ancient Spartans before them? It seems clear, by all that is wrong in our culture, that we are deluding ourselves by calling ourselves free and pretending we are not subjects. We have allowed ourselves to be ruled once again by a distant, unsympathetic elite who see us as a source of revenue rather than as sovereign citizens capable of self government. To be free, we must first believe that we ought to be free.
Governed, Not Ruled | 
The election of Obama created a reveille. I believe one may be able to springboard from this wake up call and realize greater success by changing the Republican Party from within, rather than splitting votes by starting another organization.
It will take time of course, but perhaps battles won’t be lost during the transformative period.