Libertarians are prepared to confront unpopular truths

The Day's June 17 editorial, "Political paralysis, fall of the middle-class," approached our economic problems and our political atmosphere from a reality that does not exist. Once we acknowledge the true extent of what ails our economy and who aided and abetted the circumstances, both the solution and why no action is being taken become apparent.

The net worth of your average, hypothetical middle-class family has fallen exactly because Congress, the president and the Federal Reserve actively supported the policy of borrowing and inflating our way out of every single problem facing this country: education, jobs, foreign policy, health care and everything else.

Now that accounting fraud and the creation of loans designed to fail brought the 2008 crash to fruition, the usual bipartisan suspects took the same approach. They actively created money and credit out of nothing to prevent the inevitable collapse of the very banks who earned it. Now you pay for it at the pump.

Just the same, there is no bipartisan or partisan call to prosecute attorneys, banks and fraud-closure mills using forged documents to illegally foreclose on mortgages they have no legal claim to. There is no call in Washington to repeal the alleged "free trade" agreements that were designed to offshore both our manufacturing jobs and result in high prescription drug prices. No one in Washington is calling for an end to a labyrinthine tax code that no one can reasonably understand or comply with.

Most unfortunately, the mainstream consensus is that we risk a "double dip" recession when we haven't even left the first one, and the 2001 crash itself never truly ended. The labor participation rate, that is the actual percentage of the population in the labor force, has fallen consistently since 2001. This, my friends, is not the product of political gridlock. It is the product of wishful thinking and the most noise directed toward the issues that matter the least. It is the work of one party pretending to be two.

Libertarians oppose these frauds. We reject the idea that it's impossible to speak plainly about the problem. And we're willing to take action to oppose this fraud whether the victim is a family in a wrongful foreclosure or someone in the 1 percent who donated to the two party-system for an exception to the rules that hurt us all.

Dan Reale is a Libertarian candidate for Congress in Connecticut's 2nd District and chairman of the Libertarian Party of Connecticut. You can email him at dan.reale@lpct.org.