Not surprisingly, liberals are calling for tax hikes on the rich as their way to pay for the ever-burgeoning costs of the welfare-warfare state.
Conservatives pretend to oppose tax hikes. Their preferred method of funding the welfare-warfare state is through the Federal Reserve, whose job is to provide the money and credit needed to fund excess federal spending without the need to raise income taxes.
That's what passes for philosophical debate between liberals and conservatives. The fight isn't over the legitimacy of the welfare-warfare state way of life. They both agree on that. The fight is over how to fund it (and, of course, which side gets to run it).
The controversy perfectly reflects how different we libertarians are from statists. We libertarians don't argue over whether the welfare-warfare state should be funded by income taxation or inflation. Our position is: Immediately repeal all welfare-state programs (beginning with the crown jewels of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid), repeal all interventionist and regulatory programs (beginning with the drug war), and dismantle the U.S. government's military empire, close the bases, and discharge the troops into the private sector.
Oh, and abolish the IRS and the income tax, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid taxes, and the Federal Reserve.
In other words, leave people free to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth, leave people free to do whatever they want with their own money, leave people free to make whatever choices they want in life so long as their conduct is peaceful, and depend on a well-armed, self-trained citizen soldiery that would be ready to voluntarily come to the defense of our country in the extremely unlikely event of an invasion.
With major exceptions like slavery and tariffs and many minor exceptions, the libertarian position was the position of America’s Founding Fathers. They abhorred the statist philosophy that has now held our nation in its grip for many decades.
With the exception of President Lincoln’s unconstitutional imposition of an income tax to fund his war against the seceding states, the United States had no income taxation or IRS from the nation’s founding in 1787 to the early part of the 20th century. Americans were free to keep everything they earned.
When the federal government didn’t tax income, lots of poor people became wealthy. Even more entered the ranks of the middle class.
For most of that entire time, there was no central bank, paper money, or legal-tender laws. (Again, Lincoln’s tenure was a big exception.) Americans used gold and silver coins as their official money, which is what the Constitution required. When government was unable to debase the currency, the result was the greatest buildup of productive capital that people had ever seen.
The massive buildup of capital, in turn, made workers more productive. More productivity meant higher revenues. Higher revenues brought higher wages for the workers.
For the first time in history, masses of poor people were breaking free of the chains of poverty, which is precisely why thousands of penniless immigrants were fleeing the European and Asian lands of statism to come to a land of no welfare-warfare state. (Did I mention that America had no immigration controls during most of that period as well?)
Our American ancestors also detested militarism, standing armies, conscription, and empires. After all, they had rebelled against an empire, together with the ever-burgeoning taxes, debt, and inflation needed to fund it. Many of them had immigrated to America to escape conscription and perpetual war.
Charity was entirely voluntary for more than 100 years. By and large, Americans were a religious people. The thought of using the power of Caesar to interfere with the exercise of God’s great gift of free will was anathema to our ancestors. People had the moral right to decide what to do with their own money, they firmly believed. That’s what freedom of choice is all about. They would never have tolerated mandatory government-enforced “charity” in the form of such things as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, grants, and subsidies.
Today, the federal government is mired in ever-increasing spending, debt, taxes, and inflation. How can that surprise anyone? Americans have abandoned the founding principles of their nation in favor of the statism from which our American ancestors rebelled or fled.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, subsidies, grants, income taxation, IRS, the drug war, the DEA, the Federal Reserve, a thousand foreign military bases, the CIA, the NSA, the TSA, occupations of foreign countries, undeclared wars of aggression, standby conscription, kidnapping, torture, Gitmo, secret prison camps, invasions of privacy, unreasonable searches and seizures, torture, and assassination.
It’s all part and parcel of the statism that now afflicts our land. That’s the root of America’s economic and social woes. There is only one way to restore freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony to our land, and it lies not in figuring out how to fund the welfare-warfare state way of life. It lies in rejecting the welfare-warfare state way of life in favor of the libertarian principles that guided the founding of our nation — no income tax, no IRS, no Federal Reserve, no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or other welfare, no drug war, no militarism, no empire.
In other words, the key to our nation’s future well-being lies with no more statism.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
by Jacob G. Hornberger
To restore and uphold the sovereignty and rights of the individual States as guaranteed by the tenth amendment of the United States Constitution, which states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Showing posts with label liberals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liberals. Show all posts
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Sunday, May 9, 2010
We Now Owe Greece Because Of Their Unions - Makes Sense Don't It
I don’t share the intuition or the instinctive move that some of you do that violence is ahead(although alot of you people do), that the way – that things are going to devolve to the point where there’s going to be shooting. I just, I think that the situation, and because of the amount of people and the geographic area that is concerned here, is just too large for that. I mean, we’re aware, and don’t take this wrong, you people, you’re going to go out there and go, we’re a bunch of socialists. We’re a bunch of soviets.” We’re where the soviet republics were in the late 1980s, struggling and grappling with the end of communism and struggling and grappling with what was called “perestroika” at the time, what direction did the soviet republics, which are filled with people that are not communists, they never wanted to be communists, they were forced into being communists.
And what did the soviet republics do people? And there was no shots fired. Gorbachev didn’t try and stop them when they began seceding out of the Soviet Union, just said the heck with this, no more, we’re going to make our own laws. You don’t run us anymore. You know, point your nukes somewhere else, we’re done with you. And I think that that is really the direction that reasonable individuals in this union ought to be looking. The utility, the utility of the union that once was is an anchor around many people’s necks because the parasite class and the government class has expanded to the point to where an honest man cannot make an honest wage and get ahead in his life because so much of it is taken from him. And so many rules are put on him in that endeavor. I mean, we’re being sold to the Third World and to big global banks at some levels.
Matter of fact, I got a story here today, Senator Jim DeMint, did you know this, says that part of the Greek bailout is going to be paid by U.S. taxpayers(80 billion). Did you go to work this morning, Bart, thinking that an hour of your labor was going to be given to some Grecian hack over there who’s demanding his pension be honored? We’re where the soviets were. And the soviets – imagine this. We’re Americans. We’re supposed to be the beacons of liberty. And we’re sitting here telling people, oh, no, you’re a slave to this union forever, bucko. Get used to it. And the people that were actual slaves, military slaves to a union, the soviet republics, said no, we’re not slaves, and they got out of it. We have this backwards, don’t we?
There’s two concepts that are at war here really. One is that people are idiots. People are, by and large, lazy, shiftless fools and idiots. And because they are idiots, we must not allow the idiots to live in the conditions that they themselves create for themselves. We must do everything in our power, because we’re not idiots, to mitigate their own influence on their own lives. And so to do that, since we’ve given up on charity, we have to have these things called governments. And government has to take wealth and transfer it from the people that aren’t idiots to the idiot class.
The scam is, is that the idiots are being confiscated from, and their wealth is being transferred to the elite, to the smart class. The wealth transfers happen in reverse. We keep hearing about wealth transfers. Well, where’s the wealth going to? It’s not just going to the recipient class. It’s also going to Mr. Goldman and Mr. Sachs. It is also going to Mr. Blankfein. It is also going to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These people aren’t poor. They live in bigger houses than you do. It’s also going to people that are running around, working at these things called think tanks, working at various government agencies doing nothing other than harassing people. Do they live in Section 8 housing? No, they live in nicer houses than most of us do.
And the other, the competing, and the philosophy that ought to hold sway, that held sway for Mr. Jefferson and for the founding generation, was that that centralization is the bane of human existence. It has created war, wreaked havoc, and made people slaves for all of recorded history. We had that one little sliver in there from the founding of Jamestown all the way up until, say, the mid-1930s or so, where men and women on this continent, by and large – don’t call me up about slavery – were by and large masters of their own destinies and were free. You can argue about how free they were or what governments did or did not do. But by and large they were free.
And when I say it’s a sliver, I mean, we have 8,000 years of recorded history, so 300 years is a sliver. Small fraction of it. In the last 70 years we have lived under the opposite of the way that our forefathers lived. And there are some people that are content with that. And yet they parade themselves around as conservatives. And I always want to ask them the question, what exactly are you trying to conserve? And is it those big alabaster-clad pillared buildings in Washington, D.C.? You know how many people think that it’s a great tourist destination to go see the pillars and the monuments that government has erected to itself in Washington? Do you realize how sick that is? Think about that for, oh, I want to go to D.C. for vacation this year. I want to go see this. Other than the Jefferson Memorial, there’s really not much to see, than the museum that was erected by, oh, what was his name, oh, I’ve got a brain spasm. He was the treasury secretary for three presidents. Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie. Not Andrew Carnegie. Oh, man. It’ll come to me in a minute. Anyways, there’s a – he built a museum to compete with Roosevelt’s government-funded museum. And I can’t think of his name to save my life. But that museum is still there.
But think about that concept. Do you think George Washington would want that obelisk at the end of the Mall there in his honor? He’d puke on it. He’d retch. He’d go, like, you need to tear that – first thing we’re going to do is tear that down. So we have a view that government is good instead of a view that government is necessary. There’s a difference. Government is necessary. But is it good? Well, our founders didn’t believe that it was good, and they did everything in their power to mitigate what it could do to you and what it could do to me. This is why you’ll see throughout the writings of the founding generation, just look at the Preamble. We the People, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, provide for the common defense, ensure domestic tranquility, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and who? – our posterity – do ordain and establish this Constitution. They looked forward and future.
And the reason there is a written Constitution was because – is and was because it was an attempt to limit what government could do because history demonstrated, all history, that’s Helvetic history, that’s Roman history, that’s Greek history, that’s Egyptian history, that’s all the history of the Middle Ages, that’s European history, all history demonstrated governments were not to be trusted. And only when people were free to make their own decisions and to interact among themselves in an ordered society with a limited government was there true freedom and liberty. And yet today we sit here and we think that, oh, we can manage our government, though. Yeah, we can send Gingrich up there, and Romney, and they’ll manage it for us [raspberry]. Your friends and neighbors believe this, ladies and gentlemen. And as long as they do, then you will always go to work, and you will always slave at their behest. I say take the founders’ red pill and reject the whole damn thing. “Oh, we’re going to have a fair and balanced debate. This guy’s a conservative, and that girl’s a liberal.” What the hell is a liberal anymore? How do we even know?
And what did the soviet republics do people? And there was no shots fired. Gorbachev didn’t try and stop them when they began seceding out of the Soviet Union, just said the heck with this, no more, we’re going to make our own laws. You don’t run us anymore. You know, point your nukes somewhere else, we’re done with you. And I think that that is really the direction that reasonable individuals in this union ought to be looking. The utility, the utility of the union that once was is an anchor around many people’s necks because the parasite class and the government class has expanded to the point to where an honest man cannot make an honest wage and get ahead in his life because so much of it is taken from him. And so many rules are put on him in that endeavor. I mean, we’re being sold to the Third World and to big global banks at some levels.
Matter of fact, I got a story here today, Senator Jim DeMint, did you know this, says that part of the Greek bailout is going to be paid by U.S. taxpayers(80 billion). Did you go to work this morning, Bart, thinking that an hour of your labor was going to be given to some Grecian hack over there who’s demanding his pension be honored? We’re where the soviets were. And the soviets – imagine this. We’re Americans. We’re supposed to be the beacons of liberty. And we’re sitting here telling people, oh, no, you’re a slave to this union forever, bucko. Get used to it. And the people that were actual slaves, military slaves to a union, the soviet republics, said no, we’re not slaves, and they got out of it. We have this backwards, don’t we?
There’s two concepts that are at war here really. One is that people are idiots. People are, by and large, lazy, shiftless fools and idiots. And because they are idiots, we must not allow the idiots to live in the conditions that they themselves create for themselves. We must do everything in our power, because we’re not idiots, to mitigate their own influence on their own lives. And so to do that, since we’ve given up on charity, we have to have these things called governments. And government has to take wealth and transfer it from the people that aren’t idiots to the idiot class.
The scam is, is that the idiots are being confiscated from, and their wealth is being transferred to the elite, to the smart class. The wealth transfers happen in reverse. We keep hearing about wealth transfers. Well, where’s the wealth going to? It’s not just going to the recipient class. It’s also going to Mr. Goldman and Mr. Sachs. It is also going to Mr. Blankfein. It is also going to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These people aren’t poor. They live in bigger houses than you do. It’s also going to people that are running around, working at these things called think tanks, working at various government agencies doing nothing other than harassing people. Do they live in Section 8 housing? No, they live in nicer houses than most of us do.
And the other, the competing, and the philosophy that ought to hold sway, that held sway for Mr. Jefferson and for the founding generation, was that that centralization is the bane of human existence. It has created war, wreaked havoc, and made people slaves for all of recorded history. We had that one little sliver in there from the founding of Jamestown all the way up until, say, the mid-1930s or so, where men and women on this continent, by and large – don’t call me up about slavery – were by and large masters of their own destinies and were free. You can argue about how free they were or what governments did or did not do. But by and large they were free.
And when I say it’s a sliver, I mean, we have 8,000 years of recorded history, so 300 years is a sliver. Small fraction of it. In the last 70 years we have lived under the opposite of the way that our forefathers lived. And there are some people that are content with that. And yet they parade themselves around as conservatives. And I always want to ask them the question, what exactly are you trying to conserve? And is it those big alabaster-clad pillared buildings in Washington, D.C.? You know how many people think that it’s a great tourist destination to go see the pillars and the monuments that government has erected to itself in Washington? Do you realize how sick that is? Think about that for, oh, I want to go to D.C. for vacation this year. I want to go see this. Other than the Jefferson Memorial, there’s really not much to see, than the museum that was erected by, oh, what was his name, oh, I’ve got a brain spasm. He was the treasury secretary for three presidents. Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie. Not Andrew Carnegie. Oh, man. It’ll come to me in a minute. Anyways, there’s a – he built a museum to compete with Roosevelt’s government-funded museum. And I can’t think of his name to save my life. But that museum is still there.
But think about that concept. Do you think George Washington would want that obelisk at the end of the Mall there in his honor? He’d puke on it. He’d retch. He’d go, like, you need to tear that – first thing we’re going to do is tear that down. So we have a view that government is good instead of a view that government is necessary. There’s a difference. Government is necessary. But is it good? Well, our founders didn’t believe that it was good, and they did everything in their power to mitigate what it could do to you and what it could do to me. This is why you’ll see throughout the writings of the founding generation, just look at the Preamble. We the People, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, provide for the common defense, ensure domestic tranquility, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and who? – our posterity – do ordain and establish this Constitution. They looked forward and future.
And the reason there is a written Constitution was because – is and was because it was an attempt to limit what government could do because history demonstrated, all history, that’s Helvetic history, that’s Roman history, that’s Greek history, that’s Egyptian history, that’s all the history of the Middle Ages, that’s European history, all history demonstrated governments were not to be trusted. And only when people were free to make their own decisions and to interact among themselves in an ordered society with a limited government was there true freedom and liberty. And yet today we sit here and we think that, oh, we can manage our government, though. Yeah, we can send Gingrich up there, and Romney, and they’ll manage it for us [raspberry]. Your friends and neighbors believe this, ladies and gentlemen. And as long as they do, then you will always go to work, and you will always slave at their behest. I say take the founders’ red pill and reject the whole damn thing. “Oh, we’re going to have a fair and balanced debate. This guy’s a conservative, and that girl’s a liberal.” What the hell is a liberal anymore? How do we even know?
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
According to the washington post, Racism Is Now Worse Than Murder And Rape
Brendan Steinhauser, campaign director for FreedomWorks, a national group that helps coordinate Tea Party activists, said, “We don’t want the worst elements to take this over. If they do, the Tea Party loses independence. It loses moderates.” There’s that word again. “Oh, everything’s got to be – we must [indiscernible], all hail moderate. All hail moderate.” It loses people who don’t tolerate this. Being a racist is one of the worst things you can be in this society. No, being a rapist is one of the worst things you can be in this society. Being a murderer is one of the worst things you can be in this society. Being a criminal grand larcenist is one of the worst things you can be in this society. “Being a racist is one of the worst things.” Everything, again, there it is, everything’s about race. And these are people that are supposed to be conservatives throwing the towel in. You don’t play by the left’s rules.
So here’s what’s happening here. You have the continued undermining, I mean, you’re sending moles in by the thousands. These groups in Washington, the National Republican Party so desperately want you people in the Tea Party, and many of you have already done this anyways, but they want the rest of you to join their ranks, hold hands, sing the Coke song. Let’s all get along. Yes. And let’s all watch that fading dream of little “r” republicanism and constitutional rule finally just go the way of the freaking Edsel. We might actually, since we can’t, it’s becoming more and more apparent, short of an Article V Convention, to amend the Constitution as I have proposed and Dr. Gutzman has proposed and Professor Barnett has proposed and Bruce Fein has proposed and Tony Blankley has proposed, they all concur. Short of a convention to amend the Constitution and actually have a discussion about federalism and little “r” republicanism actually matters and changes the way we do business, we’re cooked. We’re cooked.
You people that are out there that are subscribing to this FreedomWorks notions, though, you’re being hoodwinked. You’re being hornswoggled, in the words of, what is his name, the rooster. Oh, I’ve got a brain spasm here. Foghorn Leghorn. “No one wants to be labeled this,” Mr. Steinhauser said. “The challenge is made tougher by one of the defining elements of the Tea Party movement. No person controls it.” That doesn’t make it tougher. That’s what makes it good. Central planning is the bane of free societies.
Boy, you know what, folks, I’m just going to go hoarse here discussing this because it’s so maddening. The whole point of little “r” republicanism and federalism is not to be centrally planned unless it is in very few, very limited instances. And for very limited power exercises like border defense, rules of naturalization, how much an ounce of gold is worth. Actually the market determines that. But when it applies to currency, somebody has to regulate this. And I don’t mean the Federal Reserve. You congregate in central, or you use central planning or central government for very, very few and specific purposes. But that’s what makes it hard to be a Tea Party, because you’re not central. And that’s the whole deal. That is –that’s it in a nutshell, in one sentence.
From today’s Washington Post, “The challenge is made tougher by one of the defining elements to the Tea Party movement: No one person controls it. There is no national communications strategy. And incidents of racist slogans and derisive depictions of President Obama continue to crop up, providing fuel for critics who say the President’s skin color is a powerful reason behind the movement’s existence.” Yes, yes, yes, because we all oppose Castro because he’s brown; right? We all oppose Castro and Marxist communism because Castro is a black man; right? Did you know that, Young Sam? Did you know that Castro was black? Did you know that Hugo Chavez was black? Did you know that the tinhorn tyrant of Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il, was black? And this is why he is so despised amongst free-thinking people the world over is because he’s black. Did you know that Vladimir Putin was black? Yes, he was. He must be, because I oppose him. And I could go on and on and on and on.
“Supporters and opponents alike say the movement draws its strength from opposition to Obama’s policies, but they split deeply on the race question, according to the poll: About 61 percent of Tea Party opponents say racism has a lot to do with the movement, a view held by just 7 percent of Tea Party supporters.” So the press has been and is being very successful in convincing everyone who’s not a tea partier that those that are tea partiers are all, in the evening, meeting in someone’s basement or someone’s garage. There’s a hidden closet there. And in the hidden closet are the sheets and hoods. I don’t know where all the dry cleaning’s going on at. But, yeah, we all got sheets and hoods. Where do you get your sheet and hood dry cleaned at? Boy, I tell you, there’s some dry cleaner out there is making a mint, starching those hoods and making them stand up all pointy and tall. If this weren’t on the pages of the Washington newspaper of record, the Washington Compost, it’d be laughable.
The basic point is this, ladies and gentlemen. Be prepared because these people, the left is not going to stop. Here’s the rallying cry of the left. Confederate racist, confederate racist, Southern slave owner racist. You do this, you’re a racist. And again, remember, the only reason that anyone in the United States or free people, free-thinking people across the globe oppose Fidel Castro is because he’s a black man.
So here’s what’s happening here. You have the continued undermining, I mean, you’re sending moles in by the thousands. These groups in Washington, the National Republican Party so desperately want you people in the Tea Party, and many of you have already done this anyways, but they want the rest of you to join their ranks, hold hands, sing the Coke song. Let’s all get along. Yes. And let’s all watch that fading dream of little “r” republicanism and constitutional rule finally just go the way of the freaking Edsel. We might actually, since we can’t, it’s becoming more and more apparent, short of an Article V Convention, to amend the Constitution as I have proposed and Dr. Gutzman has proposed and Professor Barnett has proposed and Bruce Fein has proposed and Tony Blankley has proposed, they all concur. Short of a convention to amend the Constitution and actually have a discussion about federalism and little “r” republicanism actually matters and changes the way we do business, we’re cooked. We’re cooked.
You people that are out there that are subscribing to this FreedomWorks notions, though, you’re being hoodwinked. You’re being hornswoggled, in the words of, what is his name, the rooster. Oh, I’ve got a brain spasm here. Foghorn Leghorn. “No one wants to be labeled this,” Mr. Steinhauser said. “The challenge is made tougher by one of the defining elements of the Tea Party movement. No person controls it.” That doesn’t make it tougher. That’s what makes it good. Central planning is the bane of free societies.
Boy, you know what, folks, I’m just going to go hoarse here discussing this because it’s so maddening. The whole point of little “r” republicanism and federalism is not to be centrally planned unless it is in very few, very limited instances. And for very limited power exercises like border defense, rules of naturalization, how much an ounce of gold is worth. Actually the market determines that. But when it applies to currency, somebody has to regulate this. And I don’t mean the Federal Reserve. You congregate in central, or you use central planning or central government for very, very few and specific purposes. But that’s what makes it hard to be a Tea Party, because you’re not central. And that’s the whole deal. That is –that’s it in a nutshell, in one sentence.
From today’s Washington Post, “The challenge is made tougher by one of the defining elements to the Tea Party movement: No one person controls it. There is no national communications strategy. And incidents of racist slogans and derisive depictions of President Obama continue to crop up, providing fuel for critics who say the President’s skin color is a powerful reason behind the movement’s existence.” Yes, yes, yes, because we all oppose Castro because he’s brown; right? We all oppose Castro and Marxist communism because Castro is a black man; right? Did you know that, Young Sam? Did you know that Castro was black? Did you know that Hugo Chavez was black? Did you know that the tinhorn tyrant of Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il, was black? And this is why he is so despised amongst free-thinking people the world over is because he’s black. Did you know that Vladimir Putin was black? Yes, he was. He must be, because I oppose him. And I could go on and on and on and on.
“Supporters and opponents alike say the movement draws its strength from opposition to Obama’s policies, but they split deeply on the race question, according to the poll: About 61 percent of Tea Party opponents say racism has a lot to do with the movement, a view held by just 7 percent of Tea Party supporters.” So the press has been and is being very successful in convincing everyone who’s not a tea partier that those that are tea partiers are all, in the evening, meeting in someone’s basement or someone’s garage. There’s a hidden closet there. And in the hidden closet are the sheets and hoods. I don’t know where all the dry cleaning’s going on at. But, yeah, we all got sheets and hoods. Where do you get your sheet and hood dry cleaned at? Boy, I tell you, there’s some dry cleaner out there is making a mint, starching those hoods and making them stand up all pointy and tall. If this weren’t on the pages of the Washington newspaper of record, the Washington Compost, it’d be laughable.
The basic point is this, ladies and gentlemen. Be prepared because these people, the left is not going to stop. Here’s the rallying cry of the left. Confederate racist, confederate racist, Southern slave owner racist. You do this, you’re a racist. And again, remember, the only reason that anyone in the United States or free people, free-thinking people across the globe oppose Fidel Castro is because he’s a black man.
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