Why I am running

Growing up in Minnesota, I started playing hockey when I was five years old. I went to many North Stars games as a kid, and I will never forget how I would get goosebumps from listening to Jimmy Bowers' rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Everything that America stood for - liberty, justice - made me feel so proud to be an American. That was back when you could go to bed at night with a level of certainty that you didn't need to worry about government agents grabbing you or your property without reason. It wasn't Pol Pot's Cambodia.

My love for the country motivated me to enlist in the Marine Corps. I served honorably for four years on active duty in the infantry. I felt that I was really serving to defend liberty. But I am not so certain of that anymore. When I look at what politicians are doing to us, I weep for my fellow countrymen. I have had many sleepless nights crying out of a deep concern for the future of this country.

To come up with my own "Yogism," I would say that it doesn't take a genius to figure out that something isn't right when 3/4 of the population is on the government dole and the other 1/2 works for the government. Present policy is leading us towards a humanitarian crisis. More and more Americans will find that their quality of life has diminished, as they can afford less and less. Prevailing consensus on the Hill is that we can continue to run an economy based upon inflation, and that we can substitute a printing press for income-generating investment. If we don't turn course, we will have a currency crisis and interest rates will go even higher than where they would be absent the central bank's effort to manipulate them downwards.

We have an abusive government that is no longer restrained by the Constitution. We have politicians that are inebriated with power. Sub-prime politicians running a sub-prime government have created a sub-prime economy. Washington lacks leaders who have a strong sense of their fiduciary responsibility. If somebody was trying to plan the destruction of the country, they could not do it better than the politicians in Washington.

And so it is my purpose to champion liberty, to restore the Constitution, and to remind those in Washington that they aren't our masters, but our servants.