As we become more deeply mired in the sewer-like pit of economic 'quicksand' - the call by a former US President to his Soviet counterpart to remove the barriers to freedom & prosperity dividing a once strong country now echoes with crystal clarity over the 24 years since. Ironically it is the state from which the call emanated that is now imperiled by not heeding its own advice. The sad reality is that until the artificial 'walls' that have denied the citizenry the freedom to breathe - economically and in every other way are torn down, the 'quicksand' will continue to stifle initiative without which escape from the 'sand-trap' becomes impossible and demise a matter of time. As the article clearly shows, between the moralists and the socialists society is being sucked deeper into the hole of no return!
It appears
that ex-Soviet ruler Mikhail Gorbachev has come out of the woodwork
again. This time Gorby treats us with more
"global governance" nonsense, calling for more
centralization of power and more central planning. But more
central planning means more imprisonment of the people by
the State. Contrary to Gorbachev’s fantasy of world communism/fascism,
what we need is more freedom!
When Ronald
Reagan called
out, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" the wall
might as well have referred to the U.S. government’s imprisonment
of the American people via the police state, regulatory intrusions
and government’s always-increasing confiscation of private wealth.
But the reality is that we need to go the other way, away
from central planning and toward decentralization.
On the talk
shows and in the news, and on YouTube videos and in public forums,
there is an epidemic in America of denial and fantasy. Each election
cycle, we have statist candidate A vs. statist candidate B, especially
with the national elections, and there do not seem to be any candidates
or voters who are willing to face the music and deal with the reality
of the inherent destructiveness of central
planning.
The denial
amongst the American population in particular is characterized by
people who know their candidates have a questionable background
or record, openly engage in doubletalk and/or outright lies, and
who just do not understand what actual liberty is. Yet the
people support these candidates anyway, still hoping that the candidate
of their choosing will get a clue after being elected and make the
appropriate changes for better governance.
Deep down,
those unrealistically hopeful voters know full well that such candidates
will not
be any better than the office-holders they replaced. The entire
process has been a continually-degrading rearranging
of deck chairs.
Central planning
statism is a system that is doomed to fail, doomed to kill economic
growth and doomed to destroy a society, right from the get-go. Just
look at the Soviet Union, the European Union, and, of course, our
United States. But when voting, the people look the other way, hold
their noses and hope for the best.
Such denial
over many decades has led to the crash of the American (and world)
economy, the destruction of the work ethic and a nearly full shutdown
of productivity. Contrary to what the populist pundits and the Occupy
Wall Street crowd have been asserting, the situation we are now
facing was not mainly because of the irresponsible actions of banks
and other financial institutions, but by, as Doug Casey pointed
out, the U.S. government (and its pathologically incompetent
central planners). The crisis has been a direct result of the government
bureaucrats in charge, including Alan Greenspan, Barney Frank, George
W. Bush, Barack Obama, and, especially more recently, Ben
Bernanke. The irresponsible actions of the banks and financial
institutions were enabled by the decisions and recklessness of those
government hacks.
In addition
to the price-fixing,
fiat-money-printing,
economy-busting
Federal Reserve and banking policies, the Washington hacks destroyed
America’s growth and progress with their police-state regulations,
mandates and taxes, and other intrusions that have done nothing
but stifle the incentive of businesses to invest and take risks
with capital, expand their businesses and create real jobs. Besides
the Fed policies’ subsequent price inflation, Washington has thus
stimulated unemployment, and even pushed many American businesses
to move overseas.
Ron
Paul has proposed
to drastically reduce the size and powers of the federal government,
cut out entire departments and agencies, and reduce taxes. Additionally,
Dr. Paul has said he wants to gradually wean Americans off Social
Security and Medicare, and eventually
end or privatize Social Security, if he "can get
the people to agree and the Congress to agree." The reality
is that you’re just not going to get political hacks who are symbiotically
enmeshed with that statist
agency of aggression
and criminality, the U.S. federal government, to agree to reduce
their power and control over then people.
Once
you recognize that the government’s central planning intrusions
are immoral violations of the people’s lives and liberty, then you
must get rid of those intrusions, for both moral and practical reasons.
For example,
ending Social Security and other programs immediately is actually
better than gradual withdrawal. But at the same time, the government
thefts and trespasses of the people via taxation and regulatory
intrusions must also be ended.
Murray Rothbard
addressed the question
of gradual vs. immediate desocializing in the context of the collapse
of the Soviet Union. Rothbard stressed that phasing in freedom gradually
would do more harm than an immediate withdrawal of statist intrusions.
During the Soviet collapse, Gorbachev was the ever-devoted, clinging
communist, as economist Yuri Maltzev noted.
Many people
think that such an immediate ending of those government programs,
on which so many are unfortunately dependent, would be too "painful."
But our current situation has been causing a lot of pain, and will
continue to cause more pain as long as the centralized structure
remains in place.
When that Berlin
Wall came down and those formerly enslaved captives of the Eastern
Bloc were given their freedom back, they did not seem to be in much
pain. (See here.)
When Americans have been made slaves of their government, forced
to work for four or five months until Tax
Freedom Day, and when American businesspeople are restrained
by nonsensical reactionary regulations passed by imbeciles in Washington,
enforced by the State’s S.W.A.T. team raids, and when the people
are forced at gunpoint to participate in a government-run retirement
scheme while the government Ponzis siphon away the people’s IRAs
and life savings, tearing down that damn wall immediately
will not be too painful.
With immediate
decentralization and restoration of our freedom, businesses would
expand and invest in other enterprises, and real jobs would be created.
Unemployment rates would crash. Millions of people would be free
to keep what they earn and then be able to afford to care for their
elderly family members once again.
People need
to know the truth that the current welfare structure is there to
take care of the political class – the politicians, the cartel
of banksters, the neocon bureaucrats and their military-industrial-complex
leeches. Please, let us throw their status of privilege into the
dustbin of history! (And some people even think that we could do
it in 30
days, in fact.)
The most crucial
ingredient that makes a prosperous society – as America had experienced
in the past – is liberty. Note how, throughout the 20th
Century to the present time, America’s dwindling personal and economic
freedom has coincided with more severe economic downturns and stagnation.
When asked
if the end goal of libertarianism is liberty or prosperity, Austrian
school economist Richard Ebeling replied, in this
lecture on economic liberty (at about 1:10:48),
As Lord Acton
said, liberty is the highest political good. It is the right of
the individual to control and manage his own life guided by his
own inclinations and beliefs concerning good, bad, right and wrong…The
benefit of the market is that it is the institutional arrangement
in which people have that liberty, and has the positive and originally
unintended consequences…that it also generates prosperity. As
Adam Smith clearly understood, each man knows his interests and
opportunities far better than a statesman far away in a state
capitol who has the hubris and the arrogance to believe that he
can manage other people’s affairs…The lack of freedom invariably
involves diminished prosperity, or even the loss of prosperity
if the heavy hand of the State is rigid enough.
To avoid a
complete collapse of our entire system and economy, and subsequent
riots and violence, the people are just going to have to face the
fact that there is nothing anyone can do to reform the federal government.
What our present generations of Americans must do is overcome the
denial of that truth and, yes, cut our losses and move on in a decentralized
society. If we don’t do this, our keeping the structure of centralized
control in Washington will give us the impending chaos, impoverishment
and civil unrest and violence that some people have been predicting
will happen.
One of the
most critical actions that we need to take is decentralizing money
and the entire banking system. People have a God-given right to
use whatever medium of exchange they so desire, and it is immoral
for a band of bureaucrats to gang together and make a law forcing
everyone to use a single government-issued currency. Such a top-down,
authoritarian central planning scheme is intrusive into the people’s
right of voluntary exchange and right to control their wealth. And
it is the centralized, government-controlled
banking cartel that has enabled the elites amongst us to seize
control over the nation’s wealth. I wish the Occupy Wall Street
crowd could understand this. (Why there are so many Gorbachev-like
thinkers all across America is anybody’s guess.)
The Anti-Federalists
wisely and intuitively knew that such centralization of power and
control could not work, and would lead to a tyranny from which no
Constitution and no Supreme Court (sic) could possibly protect
the people. (And see here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
and here.)
The other day
Sean Hannity interviewed Pat Buchanan on the radio. I try not to
listen to Hannity if I can avoid it, but there was a game on the
other talk station. Oh, well. But when discussing his new book Suicide
of a Superpower: Will American Survive to 2025?, Buchanan
mentioned America’s huge cultural shift over the past 50 years or
so. This cultural degradation is relevant here.
Our culture
has degenerated to the depths of primitivism – despite the technological
advances – exemplified by how much of a police
state America has become, how much police
brutality is sweeping the country, and how our government officials
have engaged in atrocities overseas, crimes that many of our fellow
citizens have cheered on enthusiastically.
Our culture
has degraded to one of sheer barbarism, as Justin
Raimondo observed, and it directly coincides with the growth
of centralization of government power and the decline of personal
responsibility. Hans-Hermann Hoppe explained this in great detail
in his book, Democracy,
The God That Failed.
We must reverse
that trend if our society can survive and call itself "civilized,"
and for that end, tearing down the wall of centralized tyranny is
a must. We must free ourselves from the prison of the State.
October 26, 2011
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