By the time Ted Cruz was 13, he was winning speech contests sponsored by a Houston free-enterprise group that gave contestants assigned readings by Frederic Bastiat, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. In his early teens he traveled around Texas and out of state giving speeches. At Princeton, he finished first in the 1992 U.S. National Debate Championship and North American Debate Championship.
As Texas’s solicitor general from 2003 to 2008, Cruz submitted 70 briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has, so far, argued nine cases there. He favors school choice and personal investment accounts for a portion of individuals’ Social Security taxes. He supports the latter idea with a bow to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said such accounts enable the doorman to build wealth the way the people in the penthouse do.
He embodies the ambitious spirit that drives Americans in their quest for success. That’s an emancipatory mindset that threatens the Democratic dependency agenda, and the narrative their allies in the liberal media are pushing daily. The latest salvo against Cruz came from the New York Times, which went “birther” on the freshman senator.
Pelosi, Reid, Obama, and to a lesser degree Bush drove scads of Americans from seeking success in the back benches of American hard work to the moral filth of government, bureaucracy, and manufactured despair. One can only hope this new crop of leaders can defend liberty from government and media filth.
