Opposing Tyranny by Governor, Ron DeSantis for American Mind
A governor details how his state has resisted federal overreach.
Editors’ Note
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at the Claremont Institute Gala, held on October 23, 2021 in Huntington Beach, California.
Over the last year and a half, we’ve stood up to entrenched bureaucrats and the partisan corporate press to keep Florida open and to protect individual Floridians’ right to work to own and operate their own businesses and to make sure that every single child had the right to be in school in person. We don’t lock people down in the state of Florida, we lift people up.
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When you’re a governor and you get elected, they elect you to make the decisions. They did not elect me to subcontract out leadership to Fauci. I had to look to see what needed to be done to protect the people of my state.
In his farewell address, which is well-known for warning about the perils of the military-industrial complex—and that was obviously a very astute observation—Dwight Eisenhower also warned about the increasing prevalence of scientific research intermingling with government money and he talked about there was a danger that public policy could be held captive by a scientific elite, he said the job of a statesman is not to allow policy to be held captive by one faction of society, but to harmonize all the competing interests and to make sure that you’re leading on behalf of the entire country, or, in my case, entire state. And that’s what we’ve done and we did what was right, we looked at the data ourselves, and Florida is better for it. And it’s not just on Covid that we’ve been standing out. Many of you may appreciate this, being from California. In Florida, we have the lowest per capita tax burden in the United States.
We don’t have a state income tax, and as long as I’m in this chair, we never will. The closest state to Florida in population is the state of New York. Florida’s now got about 3 million more people than the state of New York, and yet New York state budget is over twice the size of the budget of the state of Florida. And yet, if you compare our roads and infrastructure and services, Florida is far, far superior. In K through 12 education, Florida right now is ranked number three in education quality by Education Week, and I can tell you New York isn’t even close to that. So, we empower people, we treat them well, we respect the fruits of their labor and the results are we do much more with a lean and efficient government than states like New York and California ever will be able to do.
In September, the United States reported gaining 194,000 new jobs for the entire country, and that was viewed as — and I think correctly — as something that was not that great. Of the 194,000 jobs created in the state — in the month of September, 84,500 of them came from the state of Florida, over 40 percent of the nation’s jobs for a state with 6.5 percent of the nation’s population. Since I became governor in January of 2019, I’ve appointed five constitutionalists to the Florida Supreme Court, transforming the most liberal state Supreme Court in the country into the most conservative Supreme Court in the country.
