Romney's Acceptance Speech: Opinion
Thank you delegates, thank you Governor Scott, and thank you Senator Rubio. I am proud to accept your nomination for president as the candidate of The Republican Party.
I am running for president on a simple proposition: Liberty. In various stages over the last 100 years, the liberty we acquired in 1776 and 1789 has been eroded, bit by bit. We have a runaway government that taxes us by spending record amounts of money, and regulates almost everything that moves.
Indeed, this has been the governing philosophy of much of the government of the last 100 years, including the last four years in particular: If it moves, regulate it. If it continues to move, tax it. And if it ceases to move, subsidize it.
It should come as no surprise that as a result, we are now so deep in debt that a return in interest rates to historical levels would mean a dramatic economic collapse for our country. We have arrived at this point as a consequence of massive overspending by government at all levels, in combination with millions of pages of byzantine red tape.
Economic growth, which should be humming at 10% or more, is stuck at stall speed close to 1%. The only things that are growing in our society are government spending and untold pages of red tape. These phenomena are of course two sides of the same coin.
History is of course rife with examples over the last two thousand years of regimes that have spent themselves out of existence. Sometimes it happens because of the destructive effects of inflation. You see, the last thing a government often does before it goes bankrupt, is to print massive quantities of money, effectively taxing away all private wealth in cash and bank accounts alike.
We are seeing the collapse of one of these ancient civilizations in front of our eyes right now. Greece spent the last 30 years applying the Democrat recipe for economic growth: Massive government spending, a never-ending payroll of useless government bureaucrats and a maze of red tape that prevents people from building and running any productive activity.
Here is the question Obama needs to answer: How do your policies differ from Greece?