It is easy to get so caught up in the trials and tribulations of our daily lives that we have little energy at the end of the working day to do more than have a meal, slumping into the comfort of a recliner to be entertained by the flat screen, before retiring for the night to start the whole ritual the next day. This leaves little time - or none at all - to reflect on why things are as they are in today's world and why continued insanity (same thing done over and over) is guaranteed to produce the same results. Not thinking things through opens us up to accepting the glib suggestions bombarding us through the 'one-eyed monster' as we become brainwashed without even realizing it. These three articles from Lew Rockwell's site - while not sound-bite shorts, will surely force you to exercise your 'grey matter'.
This
talk was delivered at the Doug Casey conference, "When Money
Dies," in Phoenix on October 1, 2011.
Everyone knows
that the term fascist is a pejorative, often used to describe any
political position a speaker doesn’t like. There isn’t anyone around
who is willing to stand up and say: "I’m a fascist; I think
fascism is a great social and economic system."
But I submit
that if they were honest, the vast majority of politicians, intellectuals,
and political activists would have to say just that.
Fascism is
the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally
plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police State
as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties
to individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master
of society.
This describes
mainstream politics in America today. And not just in America. It’s
true in Europe, too. It is so much part of the mainstream that it
is hardly noticed any more.
It is true
that fascism has no overarching theoretical apparatus. There is
no grand theorist like Marx. That makes it no less real and distinct
as a social, economic, and political system. Fascism also thrives
as a distinct style of social and economic management. And
it is as much or more of a threat to civilization than full-blown
socialism.
This is because
its traits are so much a part of life – and have been for so
long – that they are nearly invisible to us.
If fascism
is invisible to us, it is truly the silent killer. It fastens a
huge, violent, lumbering State on the free market that drains its
capital and productivity like a deadly parasite on a host. This
is why the fascist State has been called The Vampire Economy. It
sucks the economic life out of a nation and brings about a slow
death of a once thriving economy.
Let me just
provide a recent example.
The
Decline
The papers
last week were filled with the first sets of data from the 2010
US Census. The headline story concerned the huge increase in the
poverty rate. It is the largest increase in 20 years, and now up
to 15%.
But most people
hear this and dismiss it, probably for good reason. The poor in
this country are not poor by any historical standard. They have
cell phones, cable TV, cars, lots of food, and plenty of disposable
income. What’s more, there is no such thing as a fixed class called
the poor. People come and go, depending on age and life circumstances.
Plus, in American politics, when you hear kvetching about the poor,
everyone knows what you’re supposed to do: hand the government your
wallet.
Buried in the
report is another fact that has much more profound significance.
It concerns median household income in real terms.
What the data
have revealed is devastating. Since 1999, median household income
has fallen 7.1 percent. Since 1989, median family income is largely
flat. And since 1973 and the end of the gold standard, it has hardly
risen at all. The great wealth generating machine that was once
America is failing.
No longer can
one generation expect to live a better life than the previous one.
The fascist economic model has killed what was once called the American
dream. And the truth is, of course, even worse than the statistic
reveals. You have to consider how many incomes exist within a single
household to make up the total income. After World War II, the single-income
family became the norm. Then the money was destroyed and American
savings were wiped out and the capital base of the economy was devastated.
It was at this
point that households began to struggle to stay above water. The
year 1985 was the turning point. This was the year that it became
more common than not for a household to have two incomes rather
than one. Mothers entered the workforce to keep family income floating.
The intellectuals
cheered this trend, as if it represented liberation, shouting hosannas
that all women everywhere are now added to the tax rolls as valuable
contributors to the State’s coffers. The real cause is the rise
of fiat money that depreciated the currency, robbed savings, and
shoved people into the workforce as taxpayers.
This story
is not told in the data alone. You have to look at the demographics
to discover it.
This huge demographic
shift essentially bought the American household another 20 years
of seeming prosperity, though it is hard to call it that since there
was no longer any choice about the matter. If you wanted to keep
living the dream, the household could no longer get by on a single
income.
But this huge
shift was merely an escape hatch. It bought 20 years of slight increases
before the income trend flattened again. Over the last decade we
are back to falling. Today median family income is only slightly
above where it was when Nixon wrecked the dollar, put on price and
wage controls, created the EPA, and the whole apparatus of the parasitic
welfare-warfare State came to be entrenched and made universal.
Yes, this is
fascism, and we are paying the price. The dream is being destroyed.
The talk in
Washington about reform, whether from Democrats or Republicans,
is like a bad joke. They talk of small changes, small cuts, commissions
they will establish, curbs they will make in ten years. It is all
white noise. None of this will fix the problem. Not even close.
The problem
is more fundamental. It is the quality of the money. It is the very
existence of 10,000 regulatory agencies. It is the whole assumption
that you have to pay the State for the privilege to work. It is
the presumption that the government must manage every aspect of
the capitalist economic order. In short, it is the total State that
is the problem, and the suffering and decline will continue so long
as the total State exists.
It’s official.
The American dystopia is here. Obama administration officials
admit that the CIA assassination program that snuffed out Anwar
al-Awlaki last Friday is guided by a secret panel that decides who
lives and dies. According to Reuters:
American
militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture
list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which
then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is
no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel,
which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council,
several current and former officials said. Neither is there any
law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which
it is supposed to operate.
Let that sink
in. The U.S. presidency, supposed leader of the free world, has
a clandestine committee that chooses American citizens to assassinate.
This from the administration that promised unprecedented transparency
and a ratcheting back of Bush-era civil liberties abuses. This from
the president who vowed to restore habeas corpus and subject executive
war powers to judicial scrutiny. This from the Nobel Peace Prize
laureate.
What’s more
striking, however, is the deafening silence. Sure, the ACLU opposes
all this, as do a smattering of public voices. Yet it seems for
everyone expressing proportional concern about this, there are a
thousand leftist protesters whining about the top one percent, and
a thousand conservatives whining about the leftist protesters.
How fitting
that the presidency that Tea Partiers accused of planning to convene
death panels to handle health care rationing has openly admitted
to having created such a panel whose declared purpose is not simply
to withhold socialized medical resources, but to direct the cold-blooded
murder of citizens who are sufficiently bothersome enemies of the
regime. Yet in a majestic irony, many of the conservatives who feared
Obama’s life-and-death bureaucracies are cheering on his most explicit
and frightening seizure of dictatorial power in all his presidency,
and perhaps one of the greatest of all presidential power grabs
in the sweep of U.S. history.
Meanwhile,
Obama’s millions of supporters still think the idea that this man
is a fascist, a tyrant, a threat to liberty, is hysterical hate
speech and itself a danger to American democracy. Yet Barack Obama
appears dedicated to out-Bushing Bush when it comes to shredding
the Bill of Rights and sticking his middle finger at the very idea
that he ought to be accountable to anything but his own power.
Make no mistake.
We are witnessing a defining moment in America’s transformation
into a totalitarian nation. Not because the murder of al-Alwaki,
or even the death panel that sealed his fate, is some sort of anomaly
in terms of morality or even presidential power. The U.S. presidency
has already sentenced millions to death with its wars, its sanctions,
its bombings, its terrorism, its covert ops, its torture chambers.
The nukings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to take a couple of famous
examples, long ago revealed the awesome and murderous power of the
Oval Office, whether or not these bombings were as "illegal"
as the offing of al-Alwaki. And the families of thousands of innocent
Afghans and Pakistanis killed in drone strikes had no doubts about
Obama’s imperial touch, even before this latest atrocity.
But the circumstances
surrounding this particular hit job, and the death panel behind
it, deserve more than a footnote. There is the brazenness of it
all – the audacity, as a younger Obama might say – of the administration
just coming clean about its mysterious council that serves as judge
and jury behind closed doors. There is the frank admission of its
existence with all else being kept secret. There is also the precision
– the fact that this program is one focused on offing political
enemies, rather than just bombing neighborhoods in an ad hoc attempt
to weaken another government in a war. There is also the open-ended
nature of this conflict, a war on terrorism that can last even longer
than the clash with the USSR, a war whose immortality seems even
more possible now that Barack the law professor is in charge, rather
than George the rancher.
Taken together,
this is just the kind of creepy atmosphere befitting of a total
state, a Communist or fascist government or a nightmarish bureaucracy
contrived in the mind of a Cold War-era novelist imagining what
America would look like in the 21st century after taking
one too many wrong turns. It is almost as if the administration
is trying to preempt the conspiracy-minded by giving them something
that would be unbelievable only fifteen years ago, but is today
easily taken for granted because of course the president has
a secret death panel that deliberates on the secret, unchecked executions
of American citizens, to be conducted by robots flying in the sky.
Needless to
say, anyone who defends this, especially if given the opportunity
to think through the implications, is surely no friend of liberty,
whether they be fair-weather "civil libertarian" liberals
who would rather cheer for their president than wake up and smell
the fascism, or conservatives who claim to distrust government except
when it exercises the most lethal powers in the most lawless way
imaginable. We must recognize that the movement for freedom and
against true oppression is clearly no majority, regardless of what
Tea Party Republicans and Wall Street occupiers might say.
There is a
more fundamental lesson to be learned, however, and one to remember
for the ages: This is the nature of the state. It is, by its institutional
nature, always and everywhere seeking to expand power in any way
it can. To claim and practice the power to kill on its own unreviewable
prerogative is simply the fulfillment of its very design. At times
of crisis, especially concerning national security, states almost
always tend toward aggrandizement toward their realization as totalitarian
entities.
For all who
find Obama’s death panel frightening – and all of us should – let
us remember that this is simply what governments do when they can
get away with it. We are only now seeing the American state achieving
its maturity. At the founding of the Federal Government, the Framers
unleashed a monster that could never easily be restrained, even
creating a presidency with all too much power over military affairs.
Then came Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, LBJ,
Nixon, Bush and Obama, each one building on the horrible precedents
of past American despots, each reaching further toward the ideal
of a completely unencumbered presidential hand, one that could snap
its fingers and order death to anyone anywhere on the globe.
There is a
silver lining, however, albeit one circumscribing a large and dark
cloud indeed. A government can develop and come of age, but it is
a mortal institution. As it grows it puts strain on the public ideology
it requires to live, wrecks the economy it feeds on, and alienates
the allies that allow it to be a global empire. To be a total state
is the dream of all regimes, but it is an unsustainable reality,
and certainly so at the size the U.S. government has become. The
more the U.S. presidency and American nation-state morph into an
Orwellian version of themselves, the closer they will come to finally
expose themselves as being no different from the tyrannies that
have enslaved mankind for millennia. For generations much of the
world has been under the spell of the lie of American democracy,
the propaganda that the brutality of power politics can be tempered
through elections and an eloquent piece of parchment. We can hope
that the day this great lie is universally seen as a tragic joke,
the true significance of Obama’s CIA death panel will be remembered.
October
7, 2011
by
Andrew P. Napolitano
Where Do
Our Rights Come From?
After a trip
to the American Midwest in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev, then the ruler
of the Soviet Union, became convinced that corn could solve many
of the USSR’s economic woes. Russia had long struggled with miserably
inadequate food supplies, the result of years of inept Communist
agricultural policies. Having witnessed the wild success of corn
production in America, Khrushchev reasoned that the grain could
be equally successful in Russia, and thus support increased meat
and dairy production necessary to feed the population. He therefore
commanded that vast swaths of land, including the frigid tundra
of Siberia, be converted to corn crops. As it turned out, corn was
entirely unsuitable to the Russian climate, and the plan was a complete
disaster.
The reason,
of course, that the policy failed was Khrushchev’s ignorance of
the immutable fact – the self-evident truth – that corn can only
be grown under certain conditions, and Russia’s climate did not
provide them. The cost of this misjudgment was wasted resources
and prolonged hunger. It is obvious that politicians must enact
laws which are in accord with such "truths." If they do
not, then the inevitable consequence is human suffering. There are
some things which humans and their constructed governments simply
cannot change; that is to say, those things transcend our human
capacities and cannot be the object of
our will. Individuals and governments are thus always secondary
and subject to these truths.
What are these
truths, but "natural laws"? What other laws are there,
with which human commands must accord? As we shall see, there are
natural rights every human possesses by virtue of being human which
protect our essential "yearnings" from government interference.
And as we shall also see, manmade laws
are only valid to the extent that they comport with and are subject
to these natural rights. This is all known as the Natural Law.
This scheme
is in contrast to the legal philosophy of Positivism, which says
that laws need not pass any kind of moral muster to be considered
valid. In other words, laws are purely "posited" by human
beings, and governments are not constrained by principles such as
human rights, fairness, and justice when making those laws. Not
only is this philosophy that "law is whatever the government
says it is" untrue, but it has facilitated mankind’s biggest
catastrophes and legitimized the most malevolent regimes in human
history. Why were Hitler and his policies "evil"? After
all, they were enacted by a popularly elected government that followed
its own procedures to acquire power and enact lawful laws. Positivists
have no answer to this question, because they cannot tell us why
killing millions of innocent civilians is wrong: For Positivists,
the Final Solution was just as valid as a law prohibiting jaywalking.
Thus, under the Positivist scheme, our rights to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness are only as safe as our government
would care to have them.
Why do we even
care whether a law must comport with the Natural Law to be considered
valid? After all, if the consequence of not obeying a law is imprisonment,
then we will obey that law regardless of whether it is valid or
not. The answer is because, like Khrushchev’s corn plan, every time
the government’s commands flout the Natural Law, evil occurs, and
we lose sight of the dream which our Founders enshrined for us in
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We must hold
the government accountable for its violations of our natural rights
if we are ever to have liberty. As Jefferson once said, "Eternal
vigilance is the price of liberty." And as St. Augustine said
and St. Thomas Aquinas taught, "An unjust law is no law at
all."
This Congress
Hereby Declares Gravity to Be Illegal: It
Is Too Much of a Downer
Before we can
discuss what precisely the Natural Law encompasses, we must examine
its basis in the Eternal Law. The Eternal Law can essentially be
thought of as those laws which govern the functioning of the universe,
such as the laws of physics, anatomy, chemistry, mathematics, and
biology. These laws are imprinted into the very order and nature
of things. As an example, molecules of water can only ever be comprised
of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Change that composition,
and you no longer have water. Moreover, the laws of chemistry also
dictate that when water is cooled to below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit,
its molecular structure shifts, and it turns into ice. Whether one
thinks of these laws as scientific rules, or the product of the
divine and infallible will of God, it cannot change the following:
These "truths" are immutable, and the universe is and
always will be subject to them.
Furthermore,
these rules are self-evident, which is to say that although we may
attempt to understand their workings, their truthfulness requires
no explanation or proof. When humans study science, they are essentially
trying to recognize and explain those rules to which we are subject,
and thus be able to predict the future outcome of an interaction
between two or more "things." The field of medicine, for
example, tries to understand how a bacterial infection will respond
to a particular antibiotic. If we do so, then we can know when and
under what circumstances a particular antibody should be prescribed
to restore the body to its normal, healthy state. We are therefore
operating within the Eternal Law; and as any scientist will tell
you, scientific rules don’t change. Only man-made theories for what
those rules are and how they
operate may change.
However, without
an explanation or understanding, those rules remain just as "true":
Penicillin will combat certain infections, and gravity will always
pull things toward the center of the earth, regardless of whether
or not we understand how. In other words, explanation and human
understanding cannot make those
truths more "true": They rely on nothing human for their
existence. If they did, then they would change along with all of
the vagaries in taste and flaws in reasoning of the human mind.
Thus, these laws transcend the temporal human mind and all of its
imperfections. Although this may seem abstract now, it will make
more sense when we explore other kinds of laws which do require
an explanation for their truth, and a basis for their existence.
Consider what
would happen if, based upon legislative findings that gravity was
causing too many injuries to falling senior citizens, Congress declared
that henceforth all things shall fall at a slower speed. Clearly,
this would not change the way that matter interacts with gravity,
and thus the manner in which the universe functions. Rather, it
would just distort other (man-made) calculations of the force of
gravity: Although gravitational force would no doubt be calculated
at lower numbers due to Congress’s laws, falling would hurt just
as much. Consequently, we would sadly have just as many injured
senior citizens as
we did before, but we would have the illusion that Congress was
doing something positive to protect seniors.
It would be
equally ridiculous if Congress tried to declare that 2 + 2 = 22,
or by printing money, there was more "value" in an economy
with which to purchase goods and services. As St. Thomas More’s
character states in Robert Bolt’s play A
Man for All Seasons, "Some men think the Earth is round,
others think it flat; . . . . But if it is flat, will the King’s
command make it round? And if it is round, will the King’s command
flatten it? No." Clearly, the Eternal Law is an absolute
limit on the will and power of the government. Thus, it is another
self-evident truth that humans can never alter, and are always trumped
by, the eternal and natural laws, or if you prefer, God’s laws and
nature’s laws, or as Jefferson said, "The Laws of Nature and
of Nature’s God."
The Yearnings
of Mankind
St. Thomas
Aquinas stated that the Natural Law was the role in which human
beings play in the Eternal Law. The primary distinction between
human beings and other objects of the Eternal Law is that we are
in possession of reason and free will. As stated above, human beings
are able to recognize self-evident truths about the world in which
we live through observation and the application of reason to those
observations. Thus if we go to bed at night and the ground is dry,
and we observe the next morning that the dirt has turned into mud,
we are able to reason that it rained during the night. Moreover,
we exercise reason and free will in order to realize all of our
fundamental human yearnings, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness. This inclination to reach a proper end (our yearnings)
through the application of reason is the Natural Law; it is our
human nature. Although this may all sound abstract, we experience
this process on a daily basis: Since we have a human yearning to
provide for ourselves and our loved ones, we have learned through
the exercise of reason that we can best accomplish that "proper
end" by going to work nearly
every day. Thus, it is a fundamental human inclination to exert
energy to meet one’s natural needs. If we don’t, we die.
This, of course,
begs the question of what are those "proper ends" that
God has dictated we as humans naturally strive for, or –
for our secular readers – what nature has dictated that we instinctually
strive for. Indeed, it is the perceived subjectivity of the answer
to that question which has made Natural Law an unappealing
philosophy to many. As was mentioned above, one of the traditional
answers was "all of those things which we yearn for."
To begin with, all living things strive for self-preservation. Thus,
it is a natural inclination to consume food and water, and to defend
oneself from attacks. However, as humans possess
certain traits which are peculiar to themselves, there are additional
"ends" which we do not share with other animals. For example,
it is a natural yearning to love, to acquire knowledge, and to express
oneself creatively. Those yearnings, however, do not lend themselves
to being "listed." In fact, to do so is
to tread into dangerous territory because if we only recognize those
listed yearnings, then we are in danger of disparaging others that
we leave out. As we shall discuss below, the Founders recognized
this problem and provided a solution to it with the Ninth and Fourteenth
Amendments.
Since I first
read the Declaration of Independence as a high school student, I
have been fascinated with the concept of self-evident truths. If
we agree with the generally accepted definition of self-evident
truths – those which do not require hard evidence in order to evince
acceptance – we run into two problems.
The first is that at some time there surely must have been some
evidence that caused universal acceptance of these truths; as in,
it is self-evident that the Sun rises in the east every morning
because the ancients and we have seen it there; as in, every human
being has material needs to stay alive because the
ancients and we have gotten hungry and cold and awkward at nakedness;
as in, all things are subject to the laws of cause and effect, except
for the uncaused cause, whom believers call God and our secular
colleagues call Nature. These observations of the Sun and realizations
of our own self-needs are, in fact, evidence for their universal
acceptance. But the universality of these "truisms" (another
way of saying self-evident truths) allows us to dispense with the
need to provide scientific evidence in support of them whenever
we articulate them. Stated differently, no rational person can seriously
challenge truisms when we use them as building blocks for our arguments.
The second
problem we need to confront when commencing an argument with truisms
is the realization that many people are willfully blind even to
the obvious. Thus, while the truism that "all Men are created
equal" may have been self-evident to the Founders, it surely
was not self-evident to King George III or to
the millions on the planet then and now to whom the divine right
of kings provided and still provides a moral basis for tyranny.
Moreover, it was not selfevident to the Founders themselves that
"all Men are created equal" applied to all human beings,
not solely to property-owning adult white males.
From the above
we can conclude that not every person in every age is sufficiently
exposed to the truth so as to recognize it. Because we are all fallen
– that is, our human nature has inherited the imperfections of original
sin – we do not always recognize a truism. This is so because the
truth is often inconvenient, painful,
and upsetting; and it requires rational thought, acceptance of revelation,
and personal courage to pursue.
Jefferson’s
remarkable, radical insistence that "all Men are created equal"
and are "endowed by their Creator" with certain "unalienable
Rights" and that among those rights are "Life, Liberty,
and the Pursuit of Happiness," and all these principles are
"self-evident . . . Truths," was surely inconvenient,
painful, and upsetting to many and hardly self-evident to the elites
of his time. What about women, what about people of color, what
about children, what about those without property: Why wasn’t the
self-evident truth of their equality and their natural rights recognized?
And if the king didn’t morally have all the power he claimed to
have, how did the colonists come to occupy the land that he gave
them via their predecessors? Even the most enlightened of men were
blind to some truisms.
What does it
take to peel away errors of willful blindness? It takes intellect
and free will. That we all possess the free will to pursue the truth,
the intellect to recognize and accept it, and that its pursuit is
the ultimate goal of human activity, is the ultimate truism. There
are many self-evident truths that all rational persons
recognize. Some come from human reason (the Sun rising, our needs
for food, shelter, and clothing, as examples), and some come from
revelation (we have the rights to life, liberty, property, and happiness;
it is wrong to lie, cheat, steal, and murder, as examples). Some
come from reason and revelation (government is essentially the negation
of liberty; humans have free immortal souls while governments are
finite and based on coercion and force). But the concept of self-evident
truths – or truisms – is absolutely essential to freedom. Truisms
reject moral relativism, and American exceptionalism. They compel
an understanding of the laws of nature that animate and regulate
all human beings at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances.
And truisms equal freedom.
Once we recognize
those human yearnings, we can begin to understand the evil of government
commands which infringe upon those yearnings. The Third Reich provides
a case study in how governments devise policies and institutions
which trespass on just about every human yearning there is, and
the human suffering which inevitably follows from those trespasses.
It is wrong to detain, torture, and murder humans because they possess
an inherent inclination to roam the world freely, to avoid pain,
and to preserve their lives. Compulsory sterilization is wrong because
humans possess a yearning to reproduce. Proscription of free speech
is wrong because it violates the natural human urge to express oneself
and communicate ideas to others. Confiscation of property is wrong
because humans endeavor to produce things which enrich their lives
or can be traded for other things which do so. Requiring accountability
or imposing surveillance is wrong because humans desire privacy;
i.e., to be left alone. When government interferes with the natural
order of things, whether as innocently as planting corn in Siberia,
or as atrociously as exterminating persons, there are always disastrous
consequences. And even if flouting the natural law benefits a majority
(as is typically the claim), there will always be someone who pays
the price of having his human nature transgressed upon. Proponents
of Positivism and the welfare state have not been able to demonstrate
even one credible example to the contrary.
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