I have come to realize that Jesse Helms stands for everything in politics that is anathema to me.
Government can contribute to a shared sense of purpose on the part of the citizenry; that's its highest and best application.
I think coercive taxation is theft, and government has a moral duty to keep it to a minimum.
I think transportation and corrections are not the first two areas that I would go looking for massive change.
There are several such issues where I have departed radically from the Republican orthodoxy.
If we have major geographic areas within our continent that have a tremendous lack of economic opportunity, we found that that is going to produce instability _ economic, political and social.
Do we believe that there is equal economic opportunity out there in the real world, right now, for each and every one of these groups? If we believed in the tooth fairy, if we believed in the Easter Bunny, we might well believe that.
Opposing the free flow of goods or people is a bad idea.
I extend that to the abortion issue, I extend that to the so-called gay rights issue, I think this is a freedom principle and consistent with the analysis in the economic area as well.
It's healthy for government to be a kind of moral catalyst, using the bully pulpit of high office.
I think government has a major role to play in helping us with the pursuit of happiness.
Micro managing anything is not a great role for government.
We absolutely have to restrain concentrations of wealth in industry from spoiling the situation for everybody.
Speaking of tax fairness, it was Senator Kerry who voted to increase the income tax on senior citizens on Social Security, earning as little as $32,000 a year.
Natural resources are so vast that no single individual or business is going to protect them; they don't have an incentive to.
The unemployment rate is still twice as high for blacks as for whites.
People aren't stupid. I mean, people remember in 1990, the unemployment rate was 10 percent. Now it's 4 _ percent. We've got 1/4 million jobs that we've created.
