Friday, December 30, 2011

The Question of Police

The concept of "police" is an odd one that has been with us but a mere 130 years, give or take. I call it odd because police really have no readily justifiable place in a free society. That police might exist in nations such as Great Britain, NAZI Germany, Stalin's Russia, or Mao's China should not be terribly surprising, for these are all variants of the authoritarian model to which the architects of the American system can be said to have been resolutely set against replicating in the newborn renegade republic.

One may ask why the notion is not fit for free nations. After all, this is all anyone who now lives has ever known. And long before police, we in the USA have had the local sheriffs, so what is the big deal? Police, after all, are there "to protect and serve".

The harm arises along several lines. One of the greatest causes of concern being that police are virtually unaccountable to the citizens to whom they swore an oath of service respectful of their rights. Sheriffs, on the other hand, are elected and serve at the pleasure of the electorate and may be impeached when their conduct steps beyond the bounds of their duly constituted powers.

Another of the profoundly dangerous ways in which the people have come to great harm in their liberties and rights can be found in the quantum shift in the nature of the role police play. While never quite legitimate in any event, the initial primary role of police was that ofpeace keeper rather than as law enforcer. This role, however, began changing during alcohol prohibition, took something of a breather thereafter, and then resumed in the late 1960s, taking larger strides as it steadily shifted away from its originally intended pupose. Since 9/11 the role of police as absolute and unchallengeable enforcers of arbitrary and capricious law has been growing frightfully in its degree and increasingly draconian timbre. In like manner, the penalties and risks to the citizen who asserts his inalienable rights against immoral and criminal police action now often prove potentially and sometimes immediately life threatening.

What is the difference between being a keeper of the peace and a law enforcer? Passive v. active duty. Go back in time and we find the stereotypical beat cop doing his thing and largely minding his own business until such time as an actual call for help or witnessing of a crime occurred. With the exception of large and hopelessly corrupt cities such as Chicago, there were virtually no such things as bands of cops busting down the doors of peaceable citizens. Even in places like Chicago such questionable actions were only taken with warrants issued more or less on probable cause and most often under proper service. So even if Ma Jones in Littletown USA was in fact cooking up some bathtub gin, she was almost certainly safe from police intrusion so long as she did not carelessly disclose her activities. Life went on and people enjoyed something much closer to actual freedom than do we now.

Today we have no peace officers, but rather law enforcement personnel. Their role is fundamentally different and very much at odds with human freedom in that it is not a passive role, but active. Police no longer stand vigilantly, paying attention for signs of actual wrongdoing while respecting the sanctity of their fellows to whom they swore an oath of faithful service and respect - and make no mistake, swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution is precisely an oath to one's fellow citizens. Today, police actively seek ways to intrusively observe, ferret out, and even entrap people engaging in behavior for which arrest may be affected, property confiscated, and hopefully charges made, even if those charges do not ultimately stick. 

Also note that the pretexts for arrest and even murder of citizens, which is to say "the law", are invalid at least as often as otherwise. The vast and overwhelming majority of statutes currently on the books have falsely criminalized behaviors that have no relationship to actual, demonstrable crime. The prohibition on possession of certain chemical compounds or botanical substances is not a crime, nor is possession of explosives or firearms. The employment of the services of prostitutes can in no reasonable way be established as crime. At one time, the commission of homosexual acts could earn one a prison term, as could the mere possession of gold bouillon. The list of things that people cannot do or must do is practically endless and police often make use of this vast litany of humanly untrackable prohibitions and mandates as the pretexts for establishing just cause in their furtively positive efforts to find a given individual guilty of something. 

Seeking guilt is not the same as protecting from harm. They are, in fact, diametric opposites and this radical alteration in mindset from protector to hunter-killer altered the way in which police view everyone else. In the past, police generally regarded the citizen as their fellow and as an ally to be protected and from whom he might solicit help in a time of need. Today, police view the citizen as a potentially deadly adversary to be mistrusted, feared, and dispatched if their behavior is taken as uncooperative, much less threatening. This is why today we have police shooting children and household pets with continually rising and profoundly disturbing frequency. 

Adding insult to injury, police are very rarely called to account for their actions because the standard of judging such actions requires only that they "felt" threatened. Police routinely lie to get what they want and to avoid accountability for criminal behavior. All the more worrisome, prosecutors appear to be content to accept them at their word with no further investigation.

The notion of peace-keeper is itself sufficiently fraught with problems to render it of questionable moral validity. The contemporary role of police as law enforcement hunter-killers is nothing less than the moral moral and functional equivalent of the German gestapo, and this is no exaggeration. When one analyzes the powers and actions of that infamous and scurrilous mob, comparing it with what we have today in America the only real difference is that the police today are notably more bloodthirsty than were their German forebears.

In the 1970s anyone suggesting that police would devolve as they have would have been locked in a padded cell and heavily dosed with anti-psychotic drugs. Nobody would have accepted this as even remotely possible. Today, it is widely accepted as perfectly normal, or at least as unavoidable.

The question this all raises is how to respond. Ask yourself whether this is what you want and if not, what are you prepared to do to help stop it? Make not the error of ignoring the fact that these circumstances lie very near the heart of your ability to exercise the birthright of your liberty.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Some Clarification on the Nature of Money

Money is a greatly misunderstood thing, despite the fact that people use it every day.  There are many competing theories and opinions regarding money.  I will not address these philosophical issues here, but wish only to discuss a few characteristics of money systems that people should know and understand.  In the course of my studies I have encountered many commonly held opinions about money the bases of which appear greatly mistaken.  There are those who believe, for example, that a return to so-called "honest money" is what we need to bring economies back to good health.  As far as such a statement goes I may be able to agree, but they are not sufficient as they fail to define terms.  To that some answer with calls for a return to the "gold standard" as if that alone were a sufficient remedy.    My goal here is to clarify some of the commonly held misconceptions relating to the basics of money systems.  To that end I reproduce here a response I wrote in another forum to a member calling for the collapse of the economic system.  In the course of that response I endeavored to clarify a few aspects about monetary systems that many people appear not to understand well, if at all.  My responses are the non-boxed passages of text.



Originally Posted by
[Occupy Wall Street] as a whole, is going to destroy the global economy, and [the protesters] don't even care..
Quote Originally Posted by View Post
I hope so.  The global economy is a lie as it is anyway.Verily and forsooth do you need to dispense with this opinion, for it is based in sheer and utter madness.
On the whole I would call this close enough to truth on one hand. On the other, however, the lives of billions of people depend on that lie. To hope for the sudden dissolution of this unspeakably corrupt and rigged system of economic empire is to hope for the deaths of perhaps as many has half of those people, perhaps even more. You cannot just tear down this house of cards. It must be taken down piecemeal and at a rate such that the market is sustained so that people do not starve, freeze, and die of disease and violence. Seriously, you and all who think like you had better get clued on this because your families and friends stand to be among those meeting their makers in exquisitely unpleasant ways if this system comes down in a flash-cut.

I fully agree with you that the lie must be put to rest, but in a controlled fashion and not at the velocity that only violent revolution and natural catastrophe provide.  Hoping for collapse is likely suicidal and I strongly recommend you think about that very carefully and re-task those hopes to something that is not likely to end up with yourself either dead or dying.

 What do you think re-introducing the gold standard would do?
It depends largely on how it would be reintroduced. But yes, even so someone would be taking it in the neck in some way and degree. It is a sore corner into which the money-masters have painted us all. This table could, however, be turned on them with enough determination, support, and a smart strategy backed with an incredibly well contrived plan of action. I am not very optimistic that this has much chance of occurring.

 But you know what? it'd be worth it. After the correction took place, prices would drop and the national and world economy would get back on a sure footing as the dollar came to a stable legitimate worth.
After the correction, I would give your chances of being alive not much better than 50%.

 In the long run you and your children would have less dollar bills, but each bill would be worth much more and having more buying power.
This may or may not prove the case because the truth will be predicated on how the monetary system were implemented and administered in the wake of such a correction, assuming those of us left were not living in the fifth century. But even if we assume the best happens, which is not really so very likely given a cursory peek at the human record on such matters, what you claim is still irrelevant because the key question upon which "wealth" turns is purchasing power. If I have 1/10 as many dollars but my dollars are worth 10 times more, my net position is not improved and may well be actually worse, depending on how pricing follows the changes in currency. But in the best scenario, I am as wealthy after as I was before. The ONLY way I improve my lot, all else equal (e.g. pricing is perfectly synced with the monetary correction), is if my purchasing power increases. For example, if I have 1/10 as many dollars but each is worth, say, 11 times as much, then I have experienced a ten percent gain in purchasing power in general terms.

But that is not necessarily good news because in that case presumably the same may be said for everyone else. If purchasing rises by ten percent, then prices will rise as demand outstrips supply. The factor that stands to be our salvation here is if spending does NOT rise in proportion to the nominal rise in wealth that such a correction represents. That is, the nominal rise in wealth will strengthen and stabilize the broader economy if people take that incremental rise in wealth and SAVE IT.

The true reason that our fiat currency system has failed is PRECISELY because we SPEND all the money we "print". There isNOTHING wrong with fiat money per sé. The problems arise from mismanagement of such money systems, which reduces them toMERE CURRENCY SYSTEMS. Were the dollar competently and honestly administered, it would be an utterly fabulous store of wealth, at least under nominal living conditions (asteroid doesn't strike earth and so forth). This is what people do not understand about money, even many of those in these forums. The purpose of money is to act as a wealth sink. Its precise form, e.g. coin and paper, are nothing more than mediums of exchange. So long as the amount of that medium accurately reflects the real value it is supposed to represent from one day to another, used toilet paper could serve the purpose. The reason gold has been successful is that it CANNOT BE COUNTERFEITED save by the most difficult means (e.g. tungsten salting). The reason the fiat dollar has been a failure in terms of the stated role of money as a store of value is that the ratio of money units (dollars) to the units of real value represented keeps climbing and this is due almost entirely to the endless pyramiding of newly borrowed funds that has been used to finance our unwillingness to do without. Government funds a billion different programs that produce zero or less return, not to mention endless warring which represents the ultimate example of the glazier's fallacy. Banks have borrowed endlessly to provide, propagate, and perpetuate economically unsound financial instruments (e.g. most derivatives, as well as the various "bubbles") via the conduits of the various investing operations. They provide the means to investment companies to in turn provide to end customers every manner of snake oil and other stupidity that springs forth in the wakes of market fits of spontaneous and unbridled avarice.

It is not, therefore, the fiat money system per sé, that causes the problems we see, but rather our corruption as people and as nations. Rome had a stable gold standard as was also found in Byzantium, yet those systems came crashing down in the end. Was it because gold was not a good standard? No. It was due SOLELY to human corruption that lead to the debasement of the monies until they became nothing more than hollow currencies. The ONLY difference between material standards (e.g. gold) and pure fiat monies is that the latter makes it easier to debase the store of value because there is no material manipulation required, not even a printing press today, but only a ledger entry. THAT is the root of the money problem and NOT the standard on which a given money is based. Any monetary system can be corrupted, as has been demonstrated apodictically on innumerable occasions throughout the history of human economic affairs. End corrupt and inept management and ANY money system will serve well.

 The government couldn't afford international illegal wars and expansive policing powers.
Sure they could. They would just have to work a lot harder for them. In time, however, you would perhaps prove correct because debasement is readily detected where an open and accessible material standard is used, in which case the only remaining question would be whether people would tolerate the perfidy. Sadly, the human record there provides nothing much in the way of good promise for future possibilities. I would suggest, however, that such a standard would be completely closed to the public. So here we see that a gold standard is not enough to better guarantee honest money. That money must of necessity be CONVERTIBLE ON DEMAND. It is the issue of convertibility that is is a necessary element in sound money based on precious metals. Without it, there is nothing to prevent bad things from going on behind closed doors.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

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I recently happened upon a question posed to a group of us that asked:

"What I fail to understand is that if there is no personal reincarnation, thus no Karmic retribution or reward, and without the promise of Heaven or the threat of Hell, what does it matter to me in the long run to behave ethically during this lifetime?"

A good question indeed and one I have discussed with others at some length.  What is implied by the question is the position of the nihilist, which essentially contends that there is nothing but the here and now; there is no other life for a given individual and there is nothing more to our makeup other than this apparent flesh.  If that is indeed true, what reason would there be for me not to kill my neighbor and have my way with his rather fetching daughter?

What purpose would ethics serve in such a reality?  What incentive?  None that I can see.  In the world of the pure materialist, nihilism becomes the unavoidable conclusion.  With that there is no reason I should not kill and screw my way through life, taking what I want and destroying that which gets in my way.

One might even accept this as a possible truth, were it not for one thing: it goes against the force of LIFE itself a force that is absolutely universal in all living things found on this world of ours.  No sane and rational man can deny the force of life - the will to continue itself against all countervailing factors.  This suggests something either beyond meat or inherent to it, though I am doubtful of the latter in the sense that that is all there is to it.  Either way, however, the universal desire of life to continue and propagate itself lies in diametric opposition to the unavoidable result of nihilism, which is the utter destruction of all human life until the last man is left standing, alone, dick in hand and thumb up butt because there is nobody left to rape, rob, beat, or murder. 

The very fact that all things want to live implies the right to defend those lives.  This right to defend one's claim to life, equal to the claims of all others, leads to the basic principles of just and proper human behavior which underpin all ethics and drive all ethical considerations.

The reason that ethics exist and are legitimate is rooted in the purest pragmatism: we all want to live and none wish to have their claims (rights) to life violated.  Most of us also hold  the means of defending those rights, i.e. the inborn ability to devise or otherwise acquire the means of destroying those who trespass against the birthright to endeavor to continue one's existence.  Because peaceable coexistence is, for the most part, the best way of  attaining the goal of passing from one day into the next unfettered by the trespasses of others, it follows that the adoption of and the adherence to a system of ethics that enables and encourages "proper" behavior is itself just and proper.  It is pragmatism itself.

That so stern a drive is placed upon the continuance of life from within one's very fabric points to something far greater than flesh alone, for it begs the question of source.  It does not seem logically consistent in even the smallest measure to conclude that life = meat and nothing beyond that.  The notion that we come into the world, grow, live, die, and were at all turns nothing more than the sum of the atoms that made up our bodies seems as ridiculous as the assumptions that the materialist/socialist mindset uses to justify vomiting forth such obviously self-contradicting nonsense. 

In fact, the very question as captioned above reveals the inherently nihilistic nature of the socialist/materialist/communist philosophies and their attendant political positions.  The inherent nihilism of those positions lies in diametric opposition to the "moral" talking points such as "class struggle" and so forth.  These are the inconsistencies that the materialist tyrant conveniently ignores as he rants and spews forth his litany of trite, tired, boring, and clapped-out one-size-fits-all drivel.  If life is so strongly inhered with the will to continue and propagate, one must ask "whence originates such single minded drive?"  Inanimate atoms?

It is the contradiction of this sort that needs to be discovered by each individual through adept analysis (with perhaps some help in some cases) and exposed by courageous hearts so that it may at least be said that the world has been offered a greater truth.  As to whether they will choose it, that is a question for another day.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

The Seemingly Paradoxical Nature of Human Freedom

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A paradox of human life is that in order to have peaceful and free living, one must be prepared for war; not just with arms but with attitude, knowledge, and the will to become a frightful enemy in the face of trespass.  This keeps people polite, hands to selves.  It is as things must be, for the passive and timid tend to become the slaves of the tyrant, or fertilizer for his next year's crop.  The twentieth century alone demonstrated this in the most stark and non-equivocating fashion.

Despite the butchery of hundreds of millions of innocents within but the handful of years we call the "twentieth century" and despite the enslavement of nearly everyone else, a great proportion of humanity (particularly in the United States where people are supposed to know better - shame on them) remains insistent upon denying the characteristics and qualities that constitute the necessary attitudes and preparations for becoming and remaining free of tyrants and all other oppressions.

Consider the massively bloodthirsty collectivists for the "greater good" under the tyrannies of the Soviet Union and China; the unapologetic and rapaciously murderous parties of the various blood feuds of Africa and even parts of Europe (!!);  the endlessly bloody and numerous "revolutions" of the countless banana republics of the tropical Americas and the Caribbean; the leaden and hopelessly grey and oppressive tyrannies of the now-openly socialistic Europe and especially Great Britain; or the far more subtle and candy-coated tyrannies of the USA and Canada.  That so large a proportion of the world's people still refuse to accept the truth of what is required to achieve and maintain their freedom begs the question of just how deep must a psychosis be to support such bald-faced denial of that which stares one unflinchingly in the eyes?  How willfully and defiantly ignorant must one choose to be in order to maintain such slavish devotion to remaining passive in the face of so-called "states", (AKA "governments") raiding, raping, and murdering their ways across their lives with apparent impunity?

While being peaceful in one's habits, endeavors, and desires, one must be prepared for, and willing to become as warlike as any power-mad dictator in order to defend what is rightfully his when the trespass of others threatens.  To reject the absolute need of proper preparedness in defense of self, family and community against the predations of others while at the same time espousing one's desire to remain free constitutes an irreconcilably irrational and self-contradicting position.  It is to flirt, dance, and ultimately invite destruction and suicide to one's door.  This is not indicative of sound intellectual processes or, more likely, of intellect at all, particularly in the face of human history, which serves up a nauseating and practically endless litany of examples of tyrants running roughshod over peaceable people, taking what they want and killing those their fancy and whim may capriciously dictate.

Why is this acceptable?  Ask yourself why is it that people do not strike down the tyrants as they rise? Why is it that in the very few cases where they do, the victors almost universally become the new tyrants?  It has happened even in the United States, with its apparently ever growing police-state aspirations.

When one steps back from the current circumstances and widens their gaze across a far broader expanse of human existence, it becomes ever more difficult to hold an opinion that the race is destined for nothing better than sheer and unvarnished doom.

What, then, is the solution?  Is there one? I am not sure, but if even one exists I suspect that it revolves around much smaller population centers where like-minded, freedom loving individuals come together in proper preparation for liberty such that the prospect for third parties of interfering with them becomes highly unattractive.  At this point I can think of no better ways to address this plague of one man presuming to master another and under which the human race has suffered at ever increasing rates for thousands of years.

I pity the children.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

A Commonly Overlooked Risk To The Willing Slave

Having just read a blog on RightsWriter.com about the looming shellacking the USA stands to take resulting from Obama's fawning and obsequious apology to Guatemala for experiments conducted on some of their citizens in the 1940s, the specter of an additional problem with the choice to be a willing slave arose.

There is no doubt that US administrations have been bad actors - very bad in many cases. To this point the moral arguments may go back and forth based in the various theoretic foundations and assumptions. So-called "hawks" on the one hand will often argue the usual claptrap of manifest destiny, often disguised under thin veils of more modern sounding rhetorical composition. The so-called "doves" respond with their typically weak-wrist reasoning of bunnies and light, thereby assassinating what credibility they may ever have held. Both sides hold elements in which they are correct and that are otherwise.

What each side of the moral argument aisle appear to miss is one of the practical risks of our little intrigues: popular culpability. The United States is, at least technically speaking, a representative government. That means that everything our elected officials and their agents do is technically representative of our wishes. Forget about repudiations, because in courts of law those have a long history of failure where very serious supporting evidence is absent. Bear also in mind that courts are run by nothing better than other, utterly fallible human beings whose integrity cannot always be counted upon to prevail when one may need and want it most.

The result of Obama's ill-considered apology has been threats of litigation by Guatemalans who have caught the scent of an opportunity for a free ride on the gravy train. In such a case the only immediate danger might appear to be that the taxpayer will be called upon once again to pay for the sins of administrations past. However, further consideration reveals how this somewhat innocuous appearing result opens doors to risks of a far greater magnitude and gravity.

Because we are a representative government, one of the stipulations of the implied contract between the people and that government is that the latter acts with the consent of the former. This, of course, may be effectively argued against when a government acts extraordinarily and beyond the limits of its delegated powers and moral rectitude, or covertly. But what about when it does so on an ongoing basis, the people being generally aware of such behavior, yet taking no substantive action to put an end to it? Where this can be established, so can be demonstrated the consent of the governed and with it the establishment of equal partnership in the actions of those directly involved. In other words, we share equal culpability for the illegal, immoral, and criminal actions undertaken by those elected official and the agents we directly or otherwise employ when they act with our knowledge and tolerance. In this case, tolerance is minimally tantamount to acceptance and in some cases may even be established as outright agreement.

By knowingly tolerating the criminal activity of government officials, employees, and agents, in the international arena, we assume equal responsibility for the results of their actions as if they were our own because, in fact, they are. Those agents act on our behalves and we know about it. We may be able to claim innocence for the crimes committed in the 1940s where awareness of the utterly criminal our government was in so many facets was generally and very effectively kept from the people. That justification becomes vanishingly thin when we consider the contemporary situation. 

Ever since the truth about Watergate broke, public awareness of the corrupt nature of government in general, and the US government in particular, has grown with every passing day. This has become especially so as the internet has grown ubiquitous. 

The scandals have been endless, implicating presidents, cabinets members, congressmen, captains of industry, and position holders at just about any level and office of government one may care to name. Unless one has been living in a cave atop a wilderness mountain, there is precious little credible basis for claiming ignorance of the truth. Given this, the question that most prominently arises is: "if you knew, why did you not act to stop it?" This was the essence of many of the questions posed to the defendants at Nurnberg - the questions that, having not been adequately answered in most cases, lead to multiple executions for "crimes against humanity". Indeed, an entire nation had its feet held to the fire for many decades thereafter and to this very day bears the marks of those times upon itself and shall continue to do so for a good time to come.

If the great superpower that was Germany could be held as a nation to account for its general complicity in the actions and policies that lead to the nearly universal destruction of an entire continent and the murder of tens of millions of people, what in principle precludes the same circumstance from befalling the good people of the United States? 

We now live in a time of ever increasing "globalization", which translates into ever decreasing levels of national sovereignty, further implying an ever weakening ability to defend against charges brought by international tribunals. Thus far the only thing that has saved us from being held accountable has been our superior military strength. That notwithstanding and the questions of right and wrong aside, the facts are that with every new administration since Bill Clinton (at the very least), we have seen our sovereignty whittled away as each successive president has been more than happy to put his signature to agreements that further dissolve and dilute the meaning of "The United States Of America" and that place us further under the rule of foreign powers. This is REALITY. It is fact that cannot be controverted by mere verbal claims to the contrary. Piecemeal are we being dissolved in the concentrated acidic solution of globalist "unification" and hegemony.

This slow, yet now accelerating sublimation of our nation into the fabric of the greater whole opens vistas of possibilities that most people have failed to so much as imagine, much less consider with care. As our sovereignty dissolves, so goes our power as a nation, and with that our ability to stand alone, freely, and immune to the results of the crimes that we have tolerated in our elected representatives and their hired agents. As that ability and power falls below a threshold, there is nothing in principle that prevents foreign parties from raising the issues of the "sins" of our past, real or contrived, and holding us accountable. 

If perchance this can be done successfully, the American people as a whole may then be held accountable for the actions of our manifold administrations; many of those actions being heinously criminal in nature, often involving acts of mass murder on scales that would have brought proud tears to the eyes of the likes of Stalin and Mao. It would be an "international" body calling the shots in such cases, thereby rendering the ways in which we might be held to account potentially limitless. The international "community" has demonstrated in spades that its rules and regulations are formulated not on the basis of a sound and principled moral foundation, but rather on the bankrupt and capricious emotionalism so very reminiscent of the great socialist movements of the twentieth century. 

It is clear that the rest of the world does not share the principled view of governance held in the USA. Europe has been long- and well-trained to accept the capricious and arbitrary changes of the rules of the games, so long as they are labeled as being "for the greater good". Who, other than Americans, routinely question the actions of government? Few, if any.

Americans do not, however, do enough to check the actions of their government, most particularly and significantly in the arena of foreign affairs where administrations have indulged in all manner of intrigue and outright criminal action including murder by the millions, the destruction of national economies, "scientific research" on the unwitting subjects of foreign nations, and a whole litany of other equally heinous criminal enterprises. We can legitimately claim ignorance of those undertaken in decades far past, but of the past forty years our excuses become precariously untenable, most especially those of the past twenty and the torrents of information with which the internet has provided us.


We as individuals and as a nation in America have no viable excuses for the tolerance of governmental corruption that we display in 2011.  This truth poses particular threats to our sovereignty and liberty where our foreign policy is concerned. We can no longer naively claim that government is warring here or stealing there without our knowledge or that it is morally justifiable for the good of the nation. Such claims are wholly non-credible at every level and in every manner imaginable.

We know all too well what is going on, yet we sit idly back and let is all happen, most often justifying it under the similarly bankrupt claim that there is nothing we can do - that there is no choice. There is always a choice. That we choose by default is not just a shame upon us - it is a threat and a risk that we now face very directly and imminently as the world around us solidifies into a single, universal political mass. As our government continues to rob, plunder, and murder its way across the face of the planet in the context of an ever strengthening trend toward a world government and the dissolution of nations as sovereign entities, our knowing complicity through the consent implicit in our tolerance heaps equal measures of guilt upon us in the eyes of the world.

So long as out military might enables us to continue, we might choose to do so. But when that might is no longer sufficient to ward off the judgments of foreign powers, whether they be right or wrong, we then stand to be called to account for that which have tolerated. Innocence becomes irrelevant if the authorities and powers over us judge otherwise. It should also be noted that while the "international community" may be wholly antagonistic to the notion of national sovereignty, there is precious little doubt that they will use the issue as a lever to accomplish their ends against the American people if it proves useful.

In short order we shall see the end result of this Guatemalan attempt at shaking us down. If it meets with success for the plaintiffs, you may rest your money on the expectation that more will follow, particularly if there shall be left a wake of apologies from our esteemed leaders moving forward upon which other such parties might use to good advantage.

If we continue on this death march toward the utter dissolution of our nation, the sky will become the limit for foreign looters of every stripe. As Americans continue to resist, those limits will rise arbitrarily until either we capitulate into a new status as bald-faced chattel, or we take up our arms and fight these invasions to the bitter end. Either way the results stand to be terrible. Is this what we want? Why allow things to come to such a pass when today there still remains abundant opportunity to reverse this deplorable situation? Do not, however, conflate abundance of opportunity with that of time, for the latter is in short supply as the former rapidly evaporates before our eyes.

What shall we think if international suits against the American people for the crimes of its government become an accepted standard of remedy by not only the so-called "international community", but our own government? If we hand that much of ourselves over the the global authority, what does anyone think will be the result when we lose in those courts of questionable character and with whom no appeals shall be forthcoming? What will befall us when the amounts of the arbitrarily determined reparations far outstrip our ability as a nation to pony up? The answer is abundantly clear to any student of history and of human nature: the pound of flesh will be taken through collateral means. Perhaps they will "forgive" a crushing debt incurred as the result of international litigation if the people of the United States agree that they never really held any right to keep and bear arms and to surrender all their holdings.

Or perhaps we will be offered forgiveness in exchange for the acknowledgement that the concept of private property is invalid and always has been. Perhaps it will be offered in exchange for some other fundamental right with the explicitly expressed agreement that such a right never really existed in the first place. Desperate people will often make poor decisions when finding themselves between a rock and a hard place.

If perchance the Americans were to demonstrate an unfortunate level of pluck in response to these formally legitimized extortions, there are always military options on the table. Let it not come to anyone's surprise if the first waves of troops turned out to be wearing the uniforms of the American armed forces, including police. The enemy is inside the gates and we put many of them there via the ballot box. Let there be no illusions in our minds about that.

We are being very purposely painted into a corner and the avenues of escape shrink with every passing day. Given all of this, we may then see the nature of the threats posed to us - of the likely results of the more fundamental problem of our tolerance of a criminal cadre in government and of the devolution of our sovereignty as individuals and as a nation to the status of modern day serfdom.

What, then, is the solution?

The practical solution is to remove ourselves from all international intrigues and treaties, bar none, and as a people begin to clean the American house and keep it that way, making our displeasure and intolerance unequivocally clear to all who assume the mantle of the public trust. This is most critically important on the international front. Our foreign policy is an unmitigated disaster of criminal activity that has exposed each and every American citizen to potentially grave harms that threaten our posterity far beyond the foreseeable future.

Culturally and practically speaking, our salvation requires we become a warrior nation where our politics are concerned - ever vigilant and active in the battle between what is right and decent and those who seek to betray the trust of the people, usurp and arrogate to themselves power to which they have no moral claim, trespass upon our sacred liberties and their attendant rights, and dissolve our nation into the undifferentiated mass of the globalist mob.

The time is upon us - right here and right now - to choose. What are we to be? A nation of willing slaves placing ourselves squarely in the cross hairs of the international looters, or one of warriors for our personal liberties, national sovereignty, and principled morality in how we live amongst each other and with other nations? Bear in mind that as the willing slaves of our masters we share in the guilt of those who trespass against our international neighbors and we thereby expose ourselves to the dangers that such trespass risks. As our sovereignty piecemeal fails, we may be called upon to bear the selfsame accountability for the direct actions of those in command and would therefore be in no way immune to the consequences. Is this not enough to spur us to choose the life of the warrior over that of the willing, lazy, and cowardly boot licker?

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Forewarned is fore-armed

What is the greatest danger, the greatest threat to liberty?

We, the human race, are the most dangerous threat to our liberty. We are the only threat to it. Nothing else threatens it. Nothing else can protect it. In this, humanity is its own worst enemy and, barring materially superior third party intervention, we are our only saviors. 

Very few people want liberty - real freedom. What they call "freedom" I call slavery. Pretty slavery - the slavery of the gilt cage - the slavery falsely or ignorantly accepted as freedom by the man too timid, too lazy, or too frightened to go for the real thing. The slavery accepted by the grasping poltroon who wants something for nothing , feeling he is owed this and that and is willing to sell his soul to have it. The willing slave who all the while fools himself into believing it is all somehow just and proper to live at the expense of others. The slavery of the man too dishonest to acknowledge his own status as a thief, all the while happy to have someone else do his stealing for him, most often in the name of phony baloney ideals with noble sounding names such as "social justice", "the greater good" and "equality".

But there are those who want real freedom - a tiny cadre of mainly like-minded individuals who not only understand what it is to be truly free without turning one's back on civility and moral principle, but are willing to do what it takes to achieve it and keep it. How can such people survive the mindless, lumbering juggernaut of rank, unvarnished and small-minded mediocrity, of legitimized theft, force, and violence? What do they do? That is the $64 question for which certainty appears to evade many on a grand scale. One thing, however, is certain: at the bottom of it all, at the level of brass tacks, lies brute force. The ability and the willingness to destroy all comers who would violate our sacred and inborn freedom. This must be the underpinning, the very cornerstone of existence for all freedom loving individuals, regardless of their personal feelings on the matter. The reason for this is eminently practical: without the power and the will to visit grievous harm and utter destruction upon those who would subdue you, their slaves shall you become. 

It is in the nature of men, whether nobly intended or maliciously so, to subdue those whose behaviors and beliefs are not sufficiently aligned with their own notions of a proper order of things; to force their compliance; to command them for the sake of command. It is an age-old saw that has never changed in all of the history of human empire, nor is it likely to change in even the distant future. 

We are what we are, and we behave as we tend to. The statistical approach is the only sound one where such issues concern themselves - judging humanity based on the general tendencies of the greater populations. In this, humanity is uncommonly predictable and presents the intelligent man with everything he needs to know about the nature of the beast. 

Because of the nature of the vulgar mob, the free man must gird himself against the advances of the mindless, soulless, colorless wad of dull, yet eminently dangerous humanity whose constituents hold freedom with naught but the deepest hatred. The free man is the willing slave's perceived nemesis, for the free man's courage and aspiration set a standard of attitude and action toward which the volunteer-bondsman refuses to commit himself. The free man must, therefore, be eliminated as the most sore reminder of the cowardice, lassitude, and utter lack of faith in self that is so obviously engendered in the very fabric of the mind of the serf who accepts and even welcomes his bondage. 

The free man is hated by the willing drudge because of his bold willingness to embrace that which demands in return for the greatest gift of all but a single price to which the happy peon refuses to accede and assent: personal responsibility. Those reminders of his own unwillingness to be anything but the least a man might fills the slave with a raging and envy-spiked hatred for those who dare what he will not. For the willing slave there is no fate sufficiently degrading and destructive for such superior men. The superior man, the free man must be wiped from the earth as if he had never existed.

The liberty-minded man, knowing the context of the world in which he lives as such, cannot in all good reason proceed on any other basis but to make of himself the most formidable and merciless foe of the vulgar - of the eager subservient whose only goal in life is to lick the boots of his master under the self-imposed delusion that he is free, all the while resolutely cowering from the truth that he lives at the whim and deign of his superior and is , in fact, worth less than the match with which his master would light him ablaze.

Know ye then this and make thy choice in accord with that for which thou truly wisheth. Thine actions will reveal the sort of man thou art to the world and by the same shall the superior men separate themselves from, and stand above the rest.

What say ye then? What sort of man shalt thou choose to be?

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Human Comfort: Challenge And Opportunity For Liberty Advocates



People want comfort.  From a certain standpoint, it can be credibly stated that comfort drives the human animal more strongly than any other factor, though one must be careful when taking the idea to such extremes because he faces the risk of distorting the meaning of "comfort" too wildly.  Suffice it to say that comfort is one of the truly central aspects of a human being's moment to moment existence.

In the interest of knowing better that of which we shall speak, let us once again turn to the dictionary that we may have the definition at hand.  From dictionary.com:



com·fort    [kuhm-fert]

noun


4. relief in affliction; consolation; solace: Her presence was a comfort to him.

5. a feeling of relief or consolation: Her forgiveness afforded him great comfort.

6. a person or thing that gives consolation: She was a great comfort to him.

7. a cause or matter of relief or satisfaction: The patient's recovery was a comfort to the doctor.

8. a state of ease and satisfaction of bodily wants, with freedom from pain and anxiety: He is a man who enjoys his comfort.

9. something that promotes such a state: His wealth allows him to enjoy a high degree of comfort.

11. Obsolete . strengthening aid; assistance.

Origin:


1175–1225; (v.) Middle English comfortien, variant of confortien, conforten < Anglo-French, Old French conforter < Late Latin confortāre to strengthen, equivalent to con- con- + -fortāre verbal derivative of Latin fortis strong; (noun) Middle English < Anglo-French, Old French, noun derivative of the v.



Note the etymological origin of the word, meaning to strengthen, which brings us to the concept of power.  In my experience, all people seek power in one form or another.  Toddlers strive to walk, then run, and as they grow take on new and more difficult challenges, the attainment of each increasing their immediate personal power.  Once again from dictionary.com:


pow·er [pou-er]

noun

1. ability to do or act; capability of doing or accomplishing something.

Origin:

1250–1300; Middle English pouer ( e ), poer ( e ) < Anglo-French poueir, poer, noun use of infinitive: to be able < Vulgar Latin *potēre (replacing Latin posse to be able, have power).


One can clearly see the interplay between comfort and power.  To be empowered is in some manner to be comforted.

Generally speaking, people will attach themselves to whatever it may be that brings them the comfort they seek. Different people derive that comfort in different ways. Some find it in food, others in drugs and alcohol, religious devotion, love, and even anger and hatred. Paradoxically, others are comfortable often or even only while in a state of some form of discomfort.  There are many dimensions to comfort.

Emotional comfort may stem from relationships, religion, politics, etc., the latter being one of the big sources. In that context, people choose the political views that offer them the best fit for comfort in accord with their needs and desires. This often translates into truth-be-damned adherence to a set of belief, as is most often the case with religion, to cite another example. Comfort is, for many people, far and away more important to them than is truth .  This is readily verifiable by observing how their behavior comports itself with respect to their statements regarding the place that truth occupies in their lives.  One will often find that those who claim truth as ultimately significant often behave in ways that betray the claim as false to greater or lesser degrees.  It may be also observed that the greater the claim of truth's significance is, the greater that degree of falsehood. If the truth threatens their comfort, they often reject it out of hand. In many cases, they will become violent and even kill to protect themselves from truths that threaten their comfort sufficiently.

When some fundamental aspect of a person's comfort is perceived as being seriously threatened, almost anything is possible in the way of a reaction. This can be readily observed in the areas of religion and personal relationships.  The screaming believer, so thoroughly convinced that his "faith" is the absolute and only truth in existence will actively reject any evidence contradicting those beliefs, no matter how undeniably the facts may establish the falsehood of his belief system.  Press the issue with sufficient force of logic and persistence and you may find yourself sporting a radiating shiner.

Consider the housewife whose husband stands accused of molesting their children.  Perhaps as often as not the spouse will stand by her man and remain in utter, stoic denial regardless of the fact that irrefutable evidence has been presented, proving the charges without any room for reasonable doubt.  Because their comfort is so heavily vested in their relationships, to acknowledge the facts present a truth too terrible to accept, and so they hide in the comfort of their fantasies.

And so it is with political beliefs, which in many ways occupy analogous positions to those of the religious in the belief systems of people and the comfort they provide. This fact assumes particular significance when one attempts to engage in the act of altering the most closely held political beliefs of others.  It is, therefore, something that must be recognized and understood by those holding dear the truths of personal liberty.   Many, and perhaps even most, people fail to understand what freedom actually is.  They mistake what I call "pretty slavery" for freedom and regard actual freedom as a state of chaotic and dangerous insanity - of brute anarchy where there are no rules save that of the jungle such that those with the most power rule over the rest without mercy.  What they fail to see is that this precisely describes our current system to a 'T'.

The challenge, then, is to make this apparent to them, and the only way to do this with any hope of success is to discover and understand the relevant factors of comfort as they apply to those in question.  One of the fundamental requirements in the method for bringing such people around to the ways of true freedom is the need to be able to identify and understand a given individual's comfort with respect to his objections to liberty.  One must understand what makes such people tick - what it is that attracts them to whatever flavor of pretty slavery it is to which they cling.  Without this information it is at best very difficult to change anothers' point of view, given the near-religious fervor with which some hold such opinions.

Once one has the basic understanding of the others' comfort in hand, and assuming the person to be convinced is an intelligent, honest, open-minded individual of nominal mental health, addressing and assuaging the threats to his comfort regarding his attachment to slavery becomes the first step toward the elimination of this objections to real freedom.  Getting one to recognize that his version of slavery is not freedom is an uphill battle at best.  If you are going to engage in such efforts, best that you proceed as well equipped as possible because you will likely have your work cut out.

Comfort is of central importance to all humanity, regardless of the fact that it takes on such wildly varying forms between individuals.  We all have those things that "make us tick".  Comfort is very much a two-edged sword that has both helped us and harmed us.  Understanding the form comfort takes in any given person is central to understanding him and key in helping you determine what approach to take with them in your efforts to illuminate them to the beauty and virtues of freedom.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

About that "War on Cops"....

A worthwhile article about the current state of police affairs in America.

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2011/01/about-that-war-on-cops.html

Saturday, January 1, 2011

The more things change...

What follows is an excellent article by Albert Jay Nock.  There is, however, a very sad aspect to it. which is that it was written in 1936.  Setting that fact aside, along with the reference to FDR and the "imbecilities" that issued from his administration, the article could have been written about early twentyfirst century America.  It is not a terribly flattering article to the "greatest generation" and the one or two prior to it, but Nock hits the nail dead center, and hard.  Truth can be very unflattering and in this case someone beat it with the Ugly stick.  It is a read well worth the effort.

This article was found at mises.org, and excellent source of material for the liberty-minded individual.

Happy New Year, and may 2011 be safe, happy, and prosperous for all.



[This article originally appeared in the American Mercury in March 1936. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Donna Orlando, is available for download.]

I believe that when the historian looks back on the last 20 years of American life, the thing that will puzzle him most is the amount of self-inflicted punishment that Americans seem able to stand. They take it squarely on the chin at the slightest provocation and do not even wait for the count before they are back for more.
True, they have always been good at it. For instance, once on a time they were comparatively a free people, regulating a large portion of their lives to suit themselves. They had a great deal of freedom as compared with other peoples of the world.

But apparently they could not rest until they threw their freedom away. They made a present of it to their own politicians, who have made them sweat for their gullibility ever since. They put their liberties in the hands of a praetorian guard made up exactly on the old Roman model, and not only never got them back, but as long as that praetorian guard of professional politicians lives and thrives — which will be quite a while if its numbers keep on increasing at the present rate — they never will.

But though Americans have always known how to make the old-time Flagellants look like amateurs at the business of scourging themselves, it is only in the last 20 years that they have really shown what they can do. The plagues of Egypt, the flies, frogs, hail, locusts, murrain, boils, and blains are as nothing by comparison with the curses they have brought down on themselves in that time, all of their own free will and accord. They diddled themselves into a war to make the world safe for democracy — and look at democracy now!

They took on the war debts and financed the "reconstruction" of Europe — and now they are holding the bag. They fell for the "new economics" of blessed memory and took a handsome fling at jazz-and-paper in the 1920s. They went in strong for Prohibition; and then, even before they came out from under that nightmare, they threw themselves body and soul into the fantastic imbecilities of the New Deal.

What a spectacle! There is no use, none in the world, of pretending that the praetorian guard dragooned, cajoled, or humbugged the people of this country into taking up with all this appalling nonsense, and at the same time pretending that the country is a republic in which the people are sovereign. You cannot have it both ways. If the professional politicians, who are known of all men to be pliant mountebanks when they are not time-serving scoundrels, and are usually both — if these have power to herd the people headlong into such bizarre rascalities and follies against their will and judgment, then the country is not a republic but an oligarchy built on an imperial model, and its people are not citizens, but subjects.

If, on the other hand, it is a republic and the people are sovereign, then the misfeasances of the professional politicians run straight back to the people who elected them. When Golden Rule Jones was mayor of Toledo, a man wrote him for help, saying that whisky had been his ruin. Jones answered his letter, saying, "I do not believe whisky has been your ruin. I believe it was the whisky that you drank."

The reader may take his choice between these alternatives. No matter which of the two is right, the fact remains that the individual citizen, or subject, has lost the best that was in him. Whether he surrendered it or whether he let it be confiscated is not what I am so much concerned with at the moment — although the question is important enough and ought to be ventilated — as I am with the fact that it is gone.

Not only his liberty is gone but something much more valuable: his belief in liberty and his love of it, his power of quick and effective resentment against any tampering with the principle of liberty by anybody. This is as much as to say that his self-respect, dignity, his sense of what is due to him as a human being, has gone, and that is exactly what I mean to say. It has gone into the keeping of persons most notoriously unworthy of such a trust, or of any trust; persons capable of deliberately conniving — and who do connive — at the temporary ruin of their country for political purposes.

I say this with respect to no particular party or faction, for however many nominally there may be of these, there are never actually more than two. As Mr. Jefferson said,
The nest of office being too small for them all to cuddle into at once, the contest is eternal which shall crowd the other out. For this purpose they are divided into two parties, the Ins and the Outs.
In the last conversation I had with the late Brand Whitlock, a few months before his death, we spoke of the remarkably rapid dwindling of the sense of self-respect in America, and he asked me if I remembered how thoroughly the country was worked up by a little incident that took place only 25 years before. I remembered it well, because we had happened to be together at the time, and we had commented on the wholesome general resentment that the outrage provoked.

State prohibition was in force then, and somewhere down south a posse of state officials boarded a train and slashed open the suitcase of a through passenger who had stood on his rights and refused to unlock it. That incident went the length and breadth of the land, and was talked about in good plain language, not by a few doctrinaires, but by Tom, Dick, and Harry on the streets.

Yet, as Mr. Whitlock said, in the America of 25 years later, such a thing would not even be news, and nowhere would there be a breath of indignation against it. Mr. Whitlock died, as an honorable man would wish to do, before he could see the upshot of most of the policies that the people of Prohibitionist and post-Prohibitionist America have inflicted on themselves in the name of good government. Many of us, indeed, appear or pretend not to see it even now.

I think, for instance, that no one has adequately remarked the ease and naturalness of the transition from Prohibition to the New Deal. Someone may have done it, but if so it has escaped me. There is a complete parallel between them. They are alike in their inception. They are alike in their professed intention. As for their fundamental principle, they are so far alike that the one is a mere expansion of the other. They are alike in respect of the quality of the people who support them, alike in respect of the kind of apologists they attract to their service, and, finally, they are alike in their effect upon the spirit and character of the nation.

Alike in their origin, both were brought about by a coup d'état, the work of a determined minority at a time when the country was writhing in one of its recurrent spasms of discreditable and senseless funk — or, I should rather say, when it had passed beyond its norm of imbecile apathy and gone into the stage of vociferous idiocy. Not long ago I had a letter from a French friend who remarked that "quand les Américains se mettent à être nerveux, ils dépassent tout commentaire,"[1] which is indeed true, so I imagine that what I have just said is perhaps the best one can do by way of describing the country's state of mind.

Prohibition came when we were "making a business of being nervous" about the great cause of righteousness that we were defending against the furious Goth and fiery Hun. The New Deal came when we were making a business of being nervous about the depression; that is, nervous about having to pay collectively the due and just penalty of our collective ignorance, carelessness, and culpable greed.

Prohibition and the New Deal are alike in their professed intention, if one may put it so, to "do us for our own good." Both assumed the guise of disinterested benevolence towards the body politic. In the one case we were adjudged incapable of setting up an adequate social defense against the seductions of vicious rum-sellers; in the other, of defending ourselves against injuries wrought by malefactors of great wealth; therefore the State would obligingly come forward and take the job off our hands.

"Both were brought about by a coup d'état, the work of a determined minority at a time when the country was writhing in one of its recurrent spasms of discreditable and senseless funk."  In the case of Prohibition we can now see what those professions amounted to, and we are beginning to see what they amount to in the case of the New Deal; and in either case we see nothing but what we might have seen at the outset — and what some of us did see — by a brief glance at the kind of people engaged in promoting both these nostrums, and a briefer glance at their record. We see now that the promotion of Prohibition was purely professional, and there is nothing to prevent our seeing that so was the promotion of the New Deal.
 
In 1932, the local politicians and the political hangers-on who together make up the "machine" — and of whom there are more in America than there were lice in Egypt in Moses's day — saw a great starving time ahead of them, and when the New Deal was broached, they fell upon it with yells of joy, as one who comes upon an oasis of date palms in a trackless desert. Their dearth was miraculously turned into plenty. Faced with a dead stoppage of their machine from lack of money to keep it going, they suddenly found themselves with more money in their hands than they had ever imagined there was in the world.

Prohibition and the New Deal are alike in their fundamental principle, which is the principle of coercion. Prohibition proposed to make the nation sober by force majeure, and incidentally to charge a thundering brokerage for doing the job. It said to us, "This is all for your own good, and you ought to fall in line cheerfully, but if you do not fall in, we will make you."

The New Deal proposes a redistribution of wealth and is charging a brokerage that makes the Janissaries of the Anti-Saloon League look like pickpockets at a county fair. The national headquarters of the New Deal has a slush fund of something over $4 billion to blow in between now and next November [1937], and about 700,000 devoted heelers on the job of seeing that it is spent where it will bring the best results. All this, we are told, is for our own good, and we ought to appreciate it, but whether we appreciate it or not, we must take it.
The two enterprises are alike also in respect of the quality of the people who support it. There are some statistics available on this. About four years ago — in November 1931, to be exact — Mr. Henry L.
Mencken published in this magazine the results of an elaborate statistical study that he had been making, in collaboration with Mr. Charles Angoff, in order to determine the relative cultural standing of the 48 states. He tabulated his findings in the form of a list of the states, arranged in the order of their approach to civilization, and he has stated publicly that his table has never been successfully challenged.

In 1932 Mr. Mencken compared his table with the returns of the Literary Digest's poll on Prohibition, and found that they fitted precisely. Nearly all the states that turned in heavy majorities against Prohibition stood high on his table, and nearly all that supported it stood low. In the Baltimore Evening Sun of January 13, 1936, he made a similar comparison with the Digest's poll on the New Deal, and got a similar result. The more nearly civilized states are against it, and the more uncivilized states are for it. He says,
In the five most civilized of American states, according to the Angoff-Mencken table, the percentage of voters voting for the New Deal is but 32.32; in the five least civilized states it is 67.68, or more than double… Of the states giving the New Deal less than 30% of their votes (seven in number) all are among the first twenty-two; of those giving it more than 70% (two in number) both are among the last three. Of those giving it less than 35% (thirteen in number) all are among the first twenty-eight; of those giving it more than 65% (four in number) all are clumped together at the bottom. Finally, of those giving it less than 40% (twenty-two in number) all are among the first thirty-three; and of those giving it more than 60% (eight in number) all are among the last eleven.
From this it may be seen that, precisely like Prohibition, the New Deal, as Mr. Mencken concludes,
makes its most powerful appeal, not to the intelligent and enlightened moiety of the American people, but to the ignorant and credulous. It is, in truth, demagogy pure and simple, quackery undiluted. … The states that show a majority for it, including the anomalous Utah, are exactly the states that inflicted the Eighteenth Amendment on us, and most of them are still dry. Also they are the states whose people still believe by large majorities that William Jennings Bryan was a profounder scientist than Darwin, that any man who pays his debts is an enemy to society, and that a horsehair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
As for its moral effect upon the nation, the New Deal simply carries on Prohibition's work of making corruption and hypocrisy respectable. Both enterprises are bureaucratic, both are coercive, and, as Mr. Jefferson said, the moral effect of coercion is "to make one-half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth."

And what has Prohibition had to show by way of offset? Simply nothing. What has the New Deal to show, so far? Can anybody point to a single one of its policies that has really worked? I know of none. No recovery in business is due to it. It has as many unemployed on its hands as it ever had and as many derelicts. Its agricultural policy is said to have worked, but, as the Supreme Court observed, that simply amounted to the expropriation of money from one group for the benefit of another. In other words, it amounted to larceny, and official larceny always works. The unofficial practitioners of that art who are now in Sing Sing were simply at a disadvantage.
Prohibition and the New Deal, in short, breed straight back to the incredible appetite of the American people for self-inflicted punishment. One wonders how long they can take it and how hard; and above all, one wonders, when the New Deal has gone the way of Prohibition, what more dismal and depraving form of self-torture they will turn to next.