The inaugural address I'd give next January were I to be elected president this November

It would be heavy on freedom, and stress a government with the lightest of touches

Today, America begins the process of remembering what she is.

There was a great deal of disagreement among our Founders, but not on this nation’s essence. It was launched based on the notion that human freedom is the essential condition for human flourishing. That conviction permeates the Declaration of Independence and drives the Constitution’s vision of three coequal branches of federal government, one of which was to be a bicameral legislature, one chamber of which would represent the interests of individuals, and the other the interests of the states. It spurred the crafting of the Northwest Ordinance, which served notice that this nation sought to find a way to bring the evil of slavery to an end.

America says to the world that the individual is sovereign. Any proposed curtailing of that sovereignty must be subjected to the most intensive debate imaginable and must be kept to a bare minimum. Of the two words in the phrase “ordered liberty,” the second is the most important.

America is and always has been a nation that looks to almighty God for guidance. He is the reason we have withstood the daunting challenges to our survival and advancement. He blesses us beyond measure.

That said, an individual citizen may or may not choose to recognize the way that we have prevailed over our calamities. The sovereign individual should give himself or herself to God, but coercion has no part in that act, for freedom is our second greatest gift from our Creator, after life itself.

Freedom is elegantly simple, and the fact that we have lost sight of that fact is at the core of most of our governmental problems. We have centralized authority entirely too much. Towns, cities, counties and states have forfeited far too much of their right to self-govern to the city in which we’re now assembled. It has led to a byzantine and absurd set of circumstances in which residents of those jurisdictions have sent their money here, only to have it sent back in the form of programs that could be administered far more efficiently if the money had stayed in the places from which it was sent.

The federal government exists first and foremost to keep us safe from threats to us as individuals and to us as one nation. We must adequately fund and support those departments and agencies that carry out that function, all the while vigilantly guarding against their tendency to become unduly bloated, or beholden to anyone seeking economic advantage from supplying them with goods and services.

We have a special obligation to those who have donned the uniforms of our military branches. They have made a unique type of sacrifice to ensure that this great experiment continues.

Our foreign policy should be predicated on this: Our closest allies will be those with which we share the preponderance of our values. There will of necessity be an outer ring of allies with which we cooperate due to strategic considerations, but we will recognize that these ties are of a more transient nature. There is a class of nation-states that constitutes our adversaries. We will cooperate with these where possible, but eye them warily and be vigilant about their machinations. We will see that they respect us. History has shown us that we will also always have enemies to deal with. Their existence is the reason we must ensure that the above-mentioned departments and agencies charged with our security remain strong.

While the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, it must remain independent and free of obligation to any officeholder or political party. It must be able to administer justice with complete impartiality.

Taxation is a unique aspect of the realm of human economic activity. It is essential for maintaining government’s Constitutionally specified functions, but that is all.

Taxation is the ultimate tacit acknowledgment of government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Therefore, the type and degree of taxation must be considered with the utmost care.

The income tax does not reflect this degree of care. It is an immoral way to obtain the funds government needs.

Like any property, a person’s money is his or her own. Government should have to exhaustively justify taking the first penny of it. Taxation of income does not require government to so justify.

Therefore, I will press Congress to abolish the income tax and replace it with a national sales tax. Paying a tax on what one spends rather than what one earns will reinforce the notion that money is a type of property. An individual will only part with his or her money as a result of making certain choices.

We have passed the point of excluding discussion of what to do with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from polite conversation. The unfunded liabilities of these programs cannot remain unaddressed. Going down that path will result in the entire amount of revenue taken in by the federal government being spent on the interest on our national debt, sooner rather than later.

Let me speak plainly. We must, in the most prudent and humane way possible, put these programs on a path to privatization. The reason is not merely fiscal. We must abandon the notion we adopted in the middle of the last century that the federal government ought to be involved in addressing the two givens of the human condition: sickness and old age. Such responsibility is beyond the purview our founders envisioned.

Let me again speak plainly. It is impossible by definition for health care to be a right. Rights do not depend on any exertion of effort by one’s fellow human beings. “Health care” is an extremely broad category, a panoply of human activities that only exists because of human ingenuity. No one in the year 1300 was able to exercise a right to a triple bypass.

To those who say it isn’t possible to unwind the complexity of our health care system to a free-market basis, I would respond that this is only so because of ongoing distortions in the millions of agreements reached daily between buyers and sellers as to the value of a good or service. The free market is merely the behavior which people engage in when unencumbered by governmental interference. If particular health-care-related industries are presently leveraging Congress to bestow advantage on them, we do not have a free market.

There are myriad departments and agencies that fall decidedly outside the proper scope of the federal government.

The Department of Education should be dismantled as soon as possible. It is one of the most glaring examples of unnecessary, complex bureaucracy, as well as authority over far-flung locales unfamiliar to its bureaucrats. It reinforces a myopic view of education, stifling inquiry into approaches that are best tried on the local scale.

Education is not a common good in the way that, say, roads are. A parent’s right to strive to instill his or her values and understanding of effective and noble ways to engage the world in his or her children is foremost among a citizen’s freedoms.

The sum total of the world’s natural resources, climates and weather patterns is far too complex for humankind to assume that hard and fact conclusions can be made about how it is faring. That said, it seems fairly certain that the global climate is not in a state of crisis. Therefore, the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as regulatory bodies charged with addressing this illusory crisis in such departments as Commerce and State have outlived their usefulness. I will press Congress to work toward their dismantling.

Ultimately, I see my mission as leading the charge in getting government out of your way. The ordinary American citizen should be able to go months at a time without interfacing with the federal government.

Our most pressing problems are cultural and spiritual in nature. Government is wholly inadequate to the task of addressing them.

The most I can do as president is use this position to assert as much. In the last century, and in the last twenty years at an accelerated rate, we have distorted the basic architecture of this universe. We have so inured ourselves to the encroachment of fantastic notions of what a human being is, what a man or a woman is, what a family is, and what spiritual health looks like that we are on the precipice of a dark and vast void that makes our fiscal prospects look mildly concerning by comparison.

We must be about the project of reversing this.

Know, though, that government cannot do anything about it.

I am fortunate beyond measure to be in a position to point it out to the entirety of our population, but that is as far as my role goes.

As I said at the outset, we must recognize that our liberty has one ultimate purpose: to give ourselves back to God. That can only happen one heart at a time. All I can do is set a tone for the conversation.

Let us do what we can and ought collectively, and let us encourage each other in the more important task of that which we can only do as individual creatures.

May God find it in his mercy to continue to bestow upon us this birthright which ought to leave all and each of us spellbound with awe.