Free Give Us Liberty by Dick Armey

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi hoped to ram the bailout through Congress left us pessimistic that opponents had time to mount an effective opposition.
    But then our phones started lighting up with calls from outraged activists across the country. Delay was our immediate goal, as it would allow for more transparency and clarity about the proposed actions contained in the evolving—and murky—legislation. The Treasury Department and the Democratic leadership in Congress were moving quickly, before grassroots opposition could potentially kill the bailout.
    At FreedomWorks, our online team worked overtime to build a new grassroots protest site at NoWallStreetBailout.com to channel taxpayer anger back to politicians inside the Beltway. In just a few days, the Web site’s petition gathered more than sixty thousand activists—a ready and willing Internet army set to mobilize against the Paulson bailout. Our full network of hundreds of thousands of activists had kicked into gear as well. Hundreds of volunteer team leaders across the country set up meetings with their local congresspeople and senators and started phone trees with their local grassroots networks.
    Inside the Beltway, we were working with our allies on the Hill to come up with constructive alternatives and amendments, but we needed more time. The political process is at best a blunt instrument for use in healing an ailing economy, and it is typically true that good public policy will be ignored until absolutely every other option is taken off the table. Our goal was to kill the bad idea first—an indiscriminate bailout that rewarded risky, sometimes dishonest, and immoral behavior—to force government to prudently address the real threats faced by capital markets, the banking industry, and the entire economy.
    A few stalwart fiscal conservatives in Congress also bravely stepped up and stood against the plan to socialize major Wall Street investment banks, led by Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana. Pence had come out against the plan early, arguing that “economic freedom means the freedom to succeed 26 and the freedom to fail. The decision to give the federal government the ability to nationalize almost every bad mortgage in America interrupts this basic truth of our free market economy.” At the time he stood nearly alone among his colleagues, and he took tremendous heat for his principled stand, but he was quickly joined by other principled members including Jeb Hensarling, Marsha Blackburn, Jeff Flake, and Tom Price in the House; and Jim DeMint and Jim Bunning in the Senate.
    The Friday before the first House vote, the Wall Street Journal reported that “lawmakers say they have received hundreds of calls 27 and e-mails in recent days, almost uniformly against the idea of giving the government the power to buy billions of dollars in distressed assets to keep the financial system afloat.” Before the first vote in the House on Monday, FreedomWorks staff had delivered tens of thousands of petitions to congressional offices. Members reported that phones were ringing off the hook, and opposition was virtually unanimous.
    All of this was encouraging, but as involved as we were, we had no idea just how big, and how visceral, opposition to the bailout actually was in America. Grassroots activism was beginning to take on a life of its own. People were getting up off the couch, pushing away from the dinner table. It was time to stop yelling at the TV. It was time to do something.
    On the Monday morning before the first House vote, Dick Armey delivered a long, thoughtful letter to each House member. It read, in part:
    The difficult question each of you faces today is simply this: Do you believe that the political process, having produced many of the perverse incentives that resulted in our economy’s current predicament, can solve these underlying distortions by essentially doing more of the same? I believe the answer to this question is