At last night’s meeting of the Los Angeles Republican Alliance (LARA), the First Vice-President of the San Fernando Valley Republican Club (SFVRC) jumped out of his seat after a few choice words for the President of the LARA and angrily stormed out of the meeting. This morning I open up the NYT and find that two potential Republican presidential candidates, John Ensign and Mark Sanford, are having extra-marital affairs. Are these incidents related – no. But they point out and endemic failure of politics in general and the Republican Party in particular – elevating men above principles is a tragic flaw Americans continues to make – see Obama.

I think we all are lazy, We look for someone to guide us rather than doing the heavy lifting required of every citizen of a vibrant society. The American people are conservative by nature but for the most part have abandoned the “fiscal” modifier. I find little evidence that the principles of fiscal conservatism are alive and well in the marketplace of ideas. However, it lies dormant in the soul of every freedom-loving American because principles are permanent – leaders are just temporary and mostly flawed.

If the Republican Party wants to resuscitate itself, it needs principles before it can elect a leader. A politician can only lead people of like-minded philosophy. Right now the Republican Party can hardly find its ass with two hands much less even pretend it has a unified philosophy - one the average American can buy into. So in my mind the only way to find its way out of the desert is to craft a philosophy so compelling that the principles, not the leader, make the day.

I propose the Republican Party concentrate its focus on fiscal conservatism as the principle to actively pursue. I don’t mean the fiscal conservative mantra that says we believe in low taxes and small government because for the last 70 years – no party has championed that – they have grown the government exponentially.

As a result the taxes needed to feed the government beast have grown so high that the nest egg of the average American doesn’t exist anymore – it was eaten away by punitive taxation, irrational and suffocating regulations and the most devastating tax of all inflation all orchestrated by politicians.

In addition, politicians of all stripes have run up a $58 trillion unfunded debt - $500,000 for every one of the 115 million households in America. The Republicans are the latest offender. George W. Bush insisted on a prescription drug add-on to Medicare that has already run up - in the short time since it was enacted - an unfunded liability of $8.3 trillion.

Politicians either are using these entitlements to buy votes or have no interest in fiscal conservatism. Clearly they haven’t even a casual familiarity with fiscal discipline. Lord knows how Republican politicians sleep at night knowing they are a party to an entitlement Ponzi scheme so immense it is almost unimaginable.

What Americans need are large groups of dedicated people to turn America away from being a welfare state and for them to re-establish the tiny central government, free of the taxation of income and wealth – the country our Founders gave us.

Unless Americans free academe, the media and Hollywood of one-party dominance, there will never be a way to turn this puppy around. That can only be done by employing the principles of our Founders. It can’t be done using vacant rhetoric. It will happen when the people want to save themselves from the confiscation of their wealth by politicians.