With an increasing number of states declaring or introducing resolutions to declare sovereignty (21 according to my last check), the issue of federalism might finally start to be meaningfully discussed again. There is an air of revolution about, and the long-lost doctrine of state's rights might be a part of such a revolution.
So what is federalism anyway? Here is an extensive philosophical treatise on it, but it is more simply defined as a body of more or less self-governing entities collaborating to form a center of gravity that would have powers over areas concerning the entirety of the said bodies, such as national defense.
This was the original intent of the Founding Fathers as they set up the Constitution of the United States (though I am increasingly beginning to believe that a certain number of them, especially Alexander Hamilton, deliberately left loopholes in the Constitution to undermine this).
The federalism of the past has been replaced with a system of de facto unitary government, with the federal government being supreme and the states merely acting as its vassals. Nowhere is this more evident than in the unfunded mandates forced upon the states should they desire to get back some of the money sucked out of them by the feds. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal rejecting the stimulus handout for his state is evidence that the states may finally be ready to fight back against federal mandates tied in with such funds. Whether Jindal's rejection has more to do with politics or principal remains to be seen.
Needless to say, the states being vassals and the feds acting as feudal lord is not the system that was envisioned by most of America's founders. The case is made by Thomas Jefferson in this short letter. Contrast this notion of popular sovereignty with the centralized autocratic state of today. The National Minimum Drinking Age Act is a perfect example that the states, rather than being the self-governing entities they were in the past have been reduced to a state of vassalage. For all of American history prior to that point, the drinking age was, as it should be, a state prerogative. When you read the article I mentioned above, notice how the feds set up a system of carrots and sticks to the states, as if they were mere serfs instead of the autonomous and sovereign bodies put forth in the constitution (though lessened from the Articles of Confederation).
While the NMDA attached penalties to states that did not raise their drinking ages, in essence paying lip service to such things being the prerogative of the states and not the federal government, other bills give no heed whatsoever. Take for example a recent bill that has gun owners very concerned. H.R. 45 would essentially criminalize possession of any firearm without a novel little thing called a "Blair Holt License." (I love how politicians name bills after people who died in incidents, sensationalizing them in an attempt to create hysteria and take the moral high ground, as if their bills were not about controlling people!)
Where in the constitution do the feds get authority to issue such a license to ordinary citizens who want to exercise their right to bear arms (or issuing "Federal Firearms Licenses") to owners of gun shops? Stretching the commerce clause to the limit again?
The simple answer is that the feds for the most part are power hungry thugs. They will look for any opportunity to expand their power and then cite this as a reason why they need to be re-elected, skirting around the constitution in any possible way they can in the process.
This is the present situation, and it is here and now that some bold state legislators are finally entering the fray. The New Hampshire Sovereignty Resolution is one of the strongest out there opposing unconstitutional federal power. (Although it has since been killed, it is a step in the right direction, and ideas always advance over time, and resolutions are still pending in many other states!)
So where do state rights and prerogatives come from anyway? The most obvious examples of course are the ninth and tenth amendments, ratified in the federal (not unitary) spirit of late 18th century America. These two amendments attempted to make certain that certain rights were not denied and were reserved to the states and people. The last two amendments in the Bill of Rights were essential to some states agreeing to the federal compact.
But a deeper philosophical question ought to be asked here? Where did the federal government come from anyway? What gives the it its power and authority? The average person would probably says "the constitution." However, this is not an adequate answer and begs the question.
The answer is of course, found in the preamble, "We the People." However, now the question needs to be raised as to how We the People ratified the constitution. The constitution was ratified by the people acting through their elected representatives in the state in which they resided. Take the Virginia ratification, for example.
In essence, the people, acting through the states, created the federal government, and it was always understood that the states were to be the primary means by which the people would have their say, as that is where most of the power was supposed to reside except for the few specialized instances put into the constitution through Article 1, Section 8).
Now we must come to the conclusion that the federal government is a creature of the people and the states, not the other way around. It is not, and never was supposed to be a unitary authority that dictates people's private lives and tells state governments what to do. The created can never be more powerful than the creator.
The truth is that the people must put the federal beast back into its cage, and they must do this through the states (primarily). The states of course, are quite corrupt as well, and it will indeed be a true battle to take those back alone, but the sovereignty resolutions show that the states are on the right path.
Trying to get the feds under control through their own power system is for most purposes, a pipe dream. It is simply counter productive to hope for the feds to use their power more temperately, as we have seen recently with the election of Barack Obama. It is increasingly becoming clear through just the first few months of his administration that he will not change anything substantively and continue to feed the dangerous federal beast. People like Ron Paul are rare, and while they should always be encouraged, they will affect little change unless the people and states find the true meaning of federalism again.
Further Reading:
The 10th Amendment Center
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
The Pale Blue Dot
Two days ago, the nineteenth anniversary of the taking of an iconic photograph passed. On February 14th, 1990, Voyager 1 was turned back one last time toward the solar system it was now on course to leave.
3.6 billion miles away, the cameras photographed the Sun and visible planets (Pluto and Mars were too small to see from that distance and Mercury was lost in the glare of the Sun).
Among those visible was the Earth. It showed up as a mere blue pixel at such a huge distance. For the first time, humanity was now able to see visually what Copernicus and Galileo had proven centuries earlier: that humanity was far from the center of the universe and that for all intents and purposes, we are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
However, there is one thing that ought to hit home about this photograph. We might indeed be insignificant overall, but so far, we as humans are very unique in the universe as the only intelligent civilization on the only planet that is known so far to have life on it. Carl Sagan had some memorable words to deliver on the subject of this dichotomy:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
That passage of Sagan's instantly made me think of the state and statism as being the primary cause of all of humankind's problems. Surely, the abolition of the state will not end violence and misunderstanding among man, as man is a fallible creature. However, the biggest problem among humanity and the primary cause of our division is undoubtedly the state.
The state actively promotes this misunderstanding by violently forcing people to live in a certain way. Every individual's morals, beliefs, hopes, and dreams, are different. The state ignores this fact with its violent monopoly. It forces the individuals the it claims jurisdiction over to conform to its wishes. To solidify its power base, the ruling class that the state fosters often invokes a spirit of the greatness of a certain group to demonize outsiders or members of a different ethnic group or class. The "endless cruelties" that Sagan spoke of inevitably follows. We saw this recently in Rwanda in 1994, and more recently, in Sudan in the present day. For more historical examples, we ought to look toward the Rape of Nanking in World War II and the atrocities of the French Revolution.
There are countless other examples, but I cited these to show that the "cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner" are not just the work of Europeans and their descendants against non-Westerners as the current vogue of political correctness would have so many people believe. The problem is not one group of people, the problem is the ideology of collectivism, and the institution of a state is the ultimate expression of collectivism.
By legitimizing the initiation of violence and instituting group thinking, the inevitable result will be violence in favor of one group or another, with the perceived inferiors or outsiders suffering. Statism is responsible for every atrocity and tragic war in recorded history. It is a religion that demands constant blood sacrifice. This is all in the name of attaining some perceived good, of course. In ancient times, this was such things as bringing "civilization" to the "barbarians," or more brazenly, the glory of conquest.
Of course, these things still very much exist, only now they are disguised in more likable language, such as "freeing people from tyranny" or "spreading democracy around the globe."
The problem is, even to those that are good intentioned about such things, in essence this is telling other people how to live. Thus it falls into the same trap- collectivism. Those who disagree over how the state tells them to live must then be sacrificed in the name of the so-called majority that the state serves (in reality, in the interest of the state itself, and the of the ruling class that it fosters.) Inevitably, those whose way of life is being threatened will fight back, as we've seen from the 300 Spartans to Sitting Bull at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
The state has always- and will always, cause needless bloodshed. It will always divide people into different groups and then favor one over another. This is why the Pale Blue Dot has been tainted so red with blood over the eons.
Humanity must come to the realization that there is no right way to live, except to live nonviolently. You or me cannot tell Jane what she must value, how she must raise her children, or what she must do with her money (though we may attempt to use the power of friendly persuasion). If such a thing was attempted Jane would laugh in our face, and if we persisted and brought some guns in, she'd probably get exceedingly angry and only grudgingly accept our values because of the violence we threaten her with.
This most people would generally agree with, but why then do they accept that kings or committees can do what we ourselves cannot? This is an utter absurdity. It is this tension that results from the organized violence of the state that has proven so tragic over history.
It is long past due that humanity emphatically reject collectivism, and its extension, the state, in all its forms. We must recognize the fact that we belong to only one distinction: individual human beings who live on Planet Earth. "Only then can we deal more kindly with one another through mutual understanding rather than pointing guns in each other's faces, and preserve and cherish the Pale Blue Dot."
3.6 billion miles away, the cameras photographed the Sun and visible planets (Pluto and Mars were too small to see from that distance and Mercury was lost in the glare of the Sun).
Among those visible was the Earth. It showed up as a mere blue pixel at such a huge distance. For the first time, humanity was now able to see visually what Copernicus and Galileo had proven centuries earlier: that humanity was far from the center of the universe and that for all intents and purposes, we are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
However, there is one thing that ought to hit home about this photograph. We might indeed be insignificant overall, but so far, we as humans are very unique in the universe as the only intelligent civilization on the only planet that is known so far to have life on it. Carl Sagan had some memorable words to deliver on the subject of this dichotomy:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
That passage of Sagan's instantly made me think of the state and statism as being the primary cause of all of humankind's problems. Surely, the abolition of the state will not end violence and misunderstanding among man, as man is a fallible creature. However, the biggest problem among humanity and the primary cause of our division is undoubtedly the state.
The state actively promotes this misunderstanding by violently forcing people to live in a certain way. Every individual's morals, beliefs, hopes, and dreams, are different. The state ignores this fact with its violent monopoly. It forces the individuals the it claims jurisdiction over to conform to its wishes. To solidify its power base, the ruling class that the state fosters often invokes a spirit of the greatness of a certain group to demonize outsiders or members of a different ethnic group or class. The "endless cruelties" that Sagan spoke of inevitably follows. We saw this recently in Rwanda in 1994, and more recently, in Sudan in the present day. For more historical examples, we ought to look toward the Rape of Nanking in World War II and the atrocities of the French Revolution.
There are countless other examples, but I cited these to show that the "cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner" are not just the work of Europeans and their descendants against non-Westerners as the current vogue of political correctness would have so many people believe. The problem is not one group of people, the problem is the ideology of collectivism, and the institution of a state is the ultimate expression of collectivism.
By legitimizing the initiation of violence and instituting group thinking, the inevitable result will be violence in favor of one group or another, with the perceived inferiors or outsiders suffering. Statism is responsible for every atrocity and tragic war in recorded history. It is a religion that demands constant blood sacrifice. This is all in the name of attaining some perceived good, of course. In ancient times, this was such things as bringing "civilization" to the "barbarians," or more brazenly, the glory of conquest.
Of course, these things still very much exist, only now they are disguised in more likable language, such as "freeing people from tyranny" or "spreading democracy around the globe."
The problem is, even to those that are good intentioned about such things, in essence this is telling other people how to live. Thus it falls into the same trap- collectivism. Those who disagree over how the state tells them to live must then be sacrificed in the name of the so-called majority that the state serves (in reality, in the interest of the state itself, and the of the ruling class that it fosters.) Inevitably, those whose way of life is being threatened will fight back, as we've seen from the 300 Spartans to Sitting Bull at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
The state has always- and will always, cause needless bloodshed. It will always divide people into different groups and then favor one over another. This is why the Pale Blue Dot has been tainted so red with blood over the eons.
Humanity must come to the realization that there is no right way to live, except to live nonviolently. You or me cannot tell Jane what she must value, how she must raise her children, or what she must do with her money (though we may attempt to use the power of friendly persuasion). If such a thing was attempted Jane would laugh in our face, and if we persisted and brought some guns in, she'd probably get exceedingly angry and only grudgingly accept our values because of the violence we threaten her with.
This most people would generally agree with, but why then do they accept that kings or committees can do what we ourselves cannot? This is an utter absurdity. It is this tension that results from the organized violence of the state that has proven so tragic over history.
It is long past due that humanity emphatically reject collectivism, and its extension, the state, in all its forms. We must recognize the fact that we belong to only one distinction: individual human beings who live on Planet Earth. "Only then can we deal more kindly with one another through mutual understanding rather than pointing guns in each other's faces, and preserve and cherish the Pale Blue Dot."
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
24: Season Seven and Non-Intervention
24 is probably one of the most controversial television shows out there. The fact that it has given popular credence to torture to prevent terrorism has drawn both praises and accusations that the show's creators are sympathetic to the heatedly-debated anti-terror initiatives of the Bush Administration. I have not looked at the politics and ethics involved in the show, as I realize that it is a work of fiction, and is surprisingly very entertaining to me, even though I am a staunch libertarian.
However this season is shaping up to be very different, as it is a radical shift from the previous seasons. CTU has been disbanded, and instead of taking place in Los Angeles, the action is now in Washington D.C. The biggest difference however, is in the terrorist threat. Instead of using external weapons of mass destruction, the terrorists hijacked a module (called a CIP device) that allows for breaches of the government's firewall systems to cause massive damage internally. The conspiracy (which includes members of the President's own staff) is led by a Colonel Ike Dubaku of the fictional country of Sangala, who in the last episode was stopped by Jack Bauer & Crew just in the nick of time before he killed tens of thousands of Americans by using the hacking module to release toxins from an insecticide plant in Ohio.
The reasons for Colonel Dubaku's aggression are very simple in this season, far from the complicated self-rightousness of the threats in previous seasons. Dubaku is angered about America's interventionism in his country of Sangala.
The events of season seven so far ought to give further credence in the argument for a non-interventionist foreign policy as advocated by America's Founding Fathers.
President Taylor has an armada on the African coast, ready to invade Sangala and forcibly evict the sitting regime, which is carrying out a genocide on hundreds of thousands of Sangalans. The armada causes Dubaku to enter the United States and bribe government officials with diamonds. He then gets ready to kill American citizens.
This is the classic example of the CIA's term of 'blowback' that Ron Paul cited so frequently in his 2007-8 campaign for the presidency. While we as Americans in no way sympathize with Dubaku (and more importantly, his real life counterparts), what ought to be the U.S. government's priorities?
The reason a government supposedly is set up is to protect the people living within its borders from aggression. This is the only reason the Founders set government up and wrote the Constitution. Even in today's age of Democratic-Socialism and pervasive dependence on the government for nearly anything imaginable, the core premise for its existence is still, fortunately, the Enlightenment ideal that it is a necessary evil to protect individuals against aggressors.
Yet in 24: Season Seven, we once again see how flimsy this notion is, and it is once again turned on its head. The United States government has again stuck its big nose where it did not belong, which fostered resentment resulting in a strike to the said nose. Unfortunately, it is the innocent American people who now must suffer because of their misguided government.
I reiterate that we should never sympathize with people like Dubaku who are causing the deaths of innocent people in a foreign land. However, the United States government is mandated to protect the American people through the Constitution, and nowhere in that document is permission given to the President to send an overseas armada to a foreign country without a congressional declaration of war.
In 24: Season Seven, war was not declared on Sangala, and I find nowhere in the events leading up to the season that it had anything to do with United States national security. What I am able to deduce so far is that the president unilaterally sent an armada to Sangala to stop Dubaku's faction from continuing to destroy innocent life.
While this is indeed, a noble purpose, it is not authorized under the Constitution, and more importantly, has nothing to do with U.S. national security. However, due to the government's foreign involvement, it becomes a matter of national security when the terrorists then come to kill Americans as a response!
To put it more simply: the government created the problem, then Dubaku reacted and actually threatened Americans. Now, the government has to solve the problems that it created!
Unfortunately, this isn't just a work of fiction. This is happening in real life, right now. This is what caused the attacks of September 11th and started the "War on Terror" (which is only adding fuel to the fire).
For too long, the United States has told the people of the world what to do and how to live. We see this perfectly in Iraq by trying to bring American "democracy" to that country. It is certainly not surprising that many people see this as a foreign invader that is occupying their country and taking control. Naturally, this is going to generate resentment, and all too often, violence to protect themselves against what they (the people in the countries America sends troops to or controls via proxy) see as aggression on their way of life.
This should not be difficult for us to understand. Americans went through the same thing. We call it the American Revolution. The colonists were unhappy with new taxes, and mounted their protests against them. The British government responded with ever-increasing authoritarianism, highlighted by the Intolerable Acts.
The most vile of these was the Massachusetts Government Act. This made self-government nearly impossible, and it is not surprising that the rest of the colonies sympathized with Massachusetts and recognized that their way of life was also under threat. The first Continental Congress met to discuss this fact in July of 1774. A mere nine months later, the first shots were exchanged at Lexington and Concord, igniting the war of independence.
The insurgency in Iraq is a modern example that ought to show that a foreign power attempting to tell a population how to live has historically gone very wrong and led to much bloodshed. The local populace is deeply resentful of the interference in their lives, and often enough will lead to radicalization, as we saw in the American Revolution with the Patriots eventually unanimously supporting independence from Britain (which was a radical measure and unthinkable even in the Continental Congress of 1774). Similarly, our invasion of Iraq has led to the radicalization of Iraqis in the insurgency in the present.
It ought to have come as no surprise that the attacks of 9/11 occurred. America's imperial presence in the Middle East since the Shah was installed in Iran in 1953 fostered radicalization that led to the deaths of innocent civilians. What's worse, instead of reassessing foreign policy after 9/11, the same imperial trend accelerated in the invasion of Iraq, leading to a greater possibility of other attacks in the future. The effort to prevent these attacks has eroded our civil liberties, all in the name of empire.
One thing that nearly made me fall out of my seat when watching 24: Season Seven was when President Taylor, on explaining her willingness to move forward with the invasion of Sangala even after Dubaku used the CIP device to cause a mid-air collision between two commercial airliners, and threatened an even greater attack, used the reasoning that she was "determined to keep America as a force for good in the world."
We must always watch out with those sorts of statements. No one can clearly define what 'good' is, as it is something very much in the eye of the beholder. This, coupled with the violent nature of government, means forceful conformity to a certain view of 'good,' in effect, telling other people how to live.
The result, as already explained, has been an endless cycle of aggression and backlash. Government cannot decide what 'good' is and then force people to conform to that view. Only an individual can decide this for himself, and then try to persuade others to that view. While most of us would agree that people like Dubaku and what he represents must not be supported, the government forcing us to that view can only create problems, as we are now seeing in the events of this season of 24.
Is it worth it to "keep America as a force for good in the world" even though the consequences may be untold destruction of American lives and the degradation of civil liberties that will surely be done in the name of preventing another such circumstance?
I think not.
However this season is shaping up to be very different, as it is a radical shift from the previous seasons. CTU has been disbanded, and instead of taking place in Los Angeles, the action is now in Washington D.C. The biggest difference however, is in the terrorist threat. Instead of using external weapons of mass destruction, the terrorists hijacked a module (called a CIP device) that allows for breaches of the government's firewall systems to cause massive damage internally. The conspiracy (which includes members of the President's own staff) is led by a Colonel Ike Dubaku of the fictional country of Sangala, who in the last episode was stopped by Jack Bauer & Crew just in the nick of time before he killed tens of thousands of Americans by using the hacking module to release toxins from an insecticide plant in Ohio.
The reasons for Colonel Dubaku's aggression are very simple in this season, far from the complicated self-rightousness of the threats in previous seasons. Dubaku is angered about America's interventionism in his country of Sangala.
The events of season seven so far ought to give further credence in the argument for a non-interventionist foreign policy as advocated by America's Founding Fathers.
President Taylor has an armada on the African coast, ready to invade Sangala and forcibly evict the sitting regime, which is carrying out a genocide on hundreds of thousands of Sangalans. The armada causes Dubaku to enter the United States and bribe government officials with diamonds. He then gets ready to kill American citizens.
This is the classic example of the CIA's term of 'blowback' that Ron Paul cited so frequently in his 2007-8 campaign for the presidency. While we as Americans in no way sympathize with Dubaku (and more importantly, his real life counterparts), what ought to be the U.S. government's priorities?
The reason a government supposedly is set up is to protect the people living within its borders from aggression. This is the only reason the Founders set government up and wrote the Constitution. Even in today's age of Democratic-Socialism and pervasive dependence on the government for nearly anything imaginable, the core premise for its existence is still, fortunately, the Enlightenment ideal that it is a necessary evil to protect individuals against aggressors.
Yet in 24: Season Seven, we once again see how flimsy this notion is, and it is once again turned on its head. The United States government has again stuck its big nose where it did not belong, which fostered resentment resulting in a strike to the said nose. Unfortunately, it is the innocent American people who now must suffer because of their misguided government.
I reiterate that we should never sympathize with people like Dubaku who are causing the deaths of innocent people in a foreign land. However, the United States government is mandated to protect the American people through the Constitution, and nowhere in that document is permission given to the President to send an overseas armada to a foreign country without a congressional declaration of war.
In 24: Season Seven, war was not declared on Sangala, and I find nowhere in the events leading up to the season that it had anything to do with United States national security. What I am able to deduce so far is that the president unilaterally sent an armada to Sangala to stop Dubaku's faction from continuing to destroy innocent life.
While this is indeed, a noble purpose, it is not authorized under the Constitution, and more importantly, has nothing to do with U.S. national security. However, due to the government's foreign involvement, it becomes a matter of national security when the terrorists then come to kill Americans as a response!
To put it more simply: the government created the problem, then Dubaku reacted and actually threatened Americans. Now, the government has to solve the problems that it created!
Unfortunately, this isn't just a work of fiction. This is happening in real life, right now. This is what caused the attacks of September 11th and started the "War on Terror" (which is only adding fuel to the fire).
For too long, the United States has told the people of the world what to do and how to live. We see this perfectly in Iraq by trying to bring American "democracy" to that country. It is certainly not surprising that many people see this as a foreign invader that is occupying their country and taking control. Naturally, this is going to generate resentment, and all too often, violence to protect themselves against what they (the people in the countries America sends troops to or controls via proxy) see as aggression on their way of life.
This should not be difficult for us to understand. Americans went through the same thing. We call it the American Revolution. The colonists were unhappy with new taxes, and mounted their protests against them. The British government responded with ever-increasing authoritarianism, highlighted by the Intolerable Acts.
The most vile of these was the Massachusetts Government Act. This made self-government nearly impossible, and it is not surprising that the rest of the colonies sympathized with Massachusetts and recognized that their way of life was also under threat. The first Continental Congress met to discuss this fact in July of 1774. A mere nine months later, the first shots were exchanged at Lexington and Concord, igniting the war of independence.
The insurgency in Iraq is a modern example that ought to show that a foreign power attempting to tell a population how to live has historically gone very wrong and led to much bloodshed. The local populace is deeply resentful of the interference in their lives, and often enough will lead to radicalization, as we saw in the American Revolution with the Patriots eventually unanimously supporting independence from Britain (which was a radical measure and unthinkable even in the Continental Congress of 1774). Similarly, our invasion of Iraq has led to the radicalization of Iraqis in the insurgency in the present.
It ought to have come as no surprise that the attacks of 9/11 occurred. America's imperial presence in the Middle East since the Shah was installed in Iran in 1953 fostered radicalization that led to the deaths of innocent civilians. What's worse, instead of reassessing foreign policy after 9/11, the same imperial trend accelerated in the invasion of Iraq, leading to a greater possibility of other attacks in the future. The effort to prevent these attacks has eroded our civil liberties, all in the name of empire.
One thing that nearly made me fall out of my seat when watching 24: Season Seven was when President Taylor, on explaining her willingness to move forward with the invasion of Sangala even after Dubaku used the CIP device to cause a mid-air collision between two commercial airliners, and threatened an even greater attack, used the reasoning that she was "determined to keep America as a force for good in the world."
We must always watch out with those sorts of statements. No one can clearly define what 'good' is, as it is something very much in the eye of the beholder. This, coupled with the violent nature of government, means forceful conformity to a certain view of 'good,' in effect, telling other people how to live.
The result, as already explained, has been an endless cycle of aggression and backlash. Government cannot decide what 'good' is and then force people to conform to that view. Only an individual can decide this for himself, and then try to persuade others to that view. While most of us would agree that people like Dubaku and what he represents must not be supported, the government forcing us to that view can only create problems, as we are now seeing in the events of this season of 24.
Is it worth it to "keep America as a force for good in the world" even though the consequences may be untold destruction of American lives and the degradation of civil liberties that will surely be done in the name of preventing another such circumstance?
I think not.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Rome & America: Twins Bound by Fate?
There are few events in history more fascinating to the popular imagination than the fall of the Roman Empire. For one thousand years, the great empire dominated the Western World, stretching from Britain in the north to Egypt in the south, from Spain in the west to Syria in the east. Its legions were a mighty military machine, conquering all before them, its economy boomed through trade with many tribes, its language and laws bound and conformed many nations into one civilization, and its greatest names- Caesar, Augustus, Constantine- still echo throughout history.
It is no wonder why statists admire the Romans so much. They see an energetic government that brought law and order to many diverse lands under laws that are the still the general foundation of our legal system.
Nor can it be argued that the Romans brought great improvements upon civilization- the invention of the aqueduct, for example brought fresh, clean water to people all across the Empire (a far better invention than a pyramid to suit some king's ambition, great architectural splendor thought it may be. Even an anonymous Roman writer said something to this effect.). It was under the Romans that the civilization of Classical and Hellenistic Greece reached their apex. Art flourished and trade boomed. The roads that the Romans built were in general use for thousands of years and some are even still used today.
Yet at one point, Rome ceased to rise, then slowly and painfully declined, and finally fell flat on its face, ushering in the Dark Ages, a time where life was short, scary, and cruel. It is no wonder why the collapse of this spectacular empire still fascinates us some 1,500 years later.
Inevitably we ask why such a great empire could fall. How did the mightiest state to ever exist up until that time, collapse so resoundingly?
There were many reasons, but for a modern example we ought to look not in the ancient past, but to our own time, for a rough equivalent exists in today's world: the United States of America. This may sound somewhat odd at first, but the path that America is on is somewhat the same as the Romans were. The similarities between the two are so striking that they even go back to the formation of the two states.
Rome had its beginnings as a city ruled by Etruscan kings. The monarchy was overthrown in 509 BC in a revolt led by Brutus. The Romans called King Tarquin a tyrant, and established a republic to prevent one man from ever attaining too much power. How similar is this to the American Revolution? Indeed, the Founding Fathers looked to the Roman Republic as a model for what they were doing, hoping to learn the lessons of the past. They saw that their revolt against King George III was strangely similar to the Roman Revolt against King Tarquin.
Both states rose and expanded. Rome slowly, but surely, conquered the Mediterranean and Western Europe by the reign of the Emperor Claudius. Rome's only major setback in this period was the crushing defeat suffered in the Teutoburg Forest at the hands of Arminius in 9 A.D. This defeat halted Rome's expansion in Europe, and except for a brief incursion by Emperor Trajan, set the permanent European boundary of the Empire. Sir Edward Creasy in his 15 Decisive Battles of the World describes this battle as a death knell to Rome, as the Elbe-Danube frontier that the conquest of Germania was meant to establish would have been a much easier border to defend then the Rhine-Danube edge that came to be fixed. The loss was so great that Augustus is reported to have screamed in his sleep: "Varus, give me back my legions!"
Rome recovered however, and continued to remain strong. She conquered Britain 30 years later and her economy boomed. However, this battle ended the great age of Roman conquests.
Likewise, the American military machine is the strongest to ever exist. American arms are unmatched, and we as Americans take a huge amount of foolish pride in thinking that our country has "never lost a war."
It has often been noted that our humble beginnings as a constitutional republic have been transformed into an American Empire- though an empire marked more by economics and puppet states rather than outright military conquest. The American Empire has not yet met a disastrous defeat such as that of Varus in the Teutoburg wilds, but the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have begun to push forward a much needed debate that has been lacking in this country for 60 years: is all of this foreign intervention worth it? The movement for a non-interventionist foreign policy in the advice of our founders is now beginning to take shape.
It couldn't come soon enough. As of 2007, there are 737 American military bases around the world (that we know of).
Finally, this brings us into the fall of Rome. One huge reason that the Roman Empire collapsed was due to its military instability.
There were many civil wars in Rome, while America has been fortunate enough to only have been embroiled in one. This I will grant a big difference. However, the differences stop there.
The Roman legions had a huge territory to defend. The Empire extended around the entire basin of the Mediterranean Sea, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rhine, Danube, and Euphrates rivers to the east, south into the Sahara, and north into Scotland.
Rome never had more than 28 legions, of which, three were lost and never replaced in the disaster of the Teutoburg Forest. This brings us down to 25 legions of 5,240 men each. Rome also employed around the same number of auxiliary units, which combined gave a total of more or less 262,000 professional troops under arms at any given time
Impressive though this may be for the ancient world, the Roman Empire covered 2.2 million square miles. This amount of territory probably needed a million or more soldiers to defend it.
Thus, the Roman army was constantly stretched thin. It needed to guard against aggressors outside the Empire's vast boundaries, as well as guard against revolts, thus it needed to shift back and forth to different posts across thousands of miles of territory.
Likewise, the American military is stretched all over the world. As the Roman army was stretched to the breaking point due to the vast amount of territory it had to defend, the American military is constantly being reported as being stretched to the breaking point to fill all of these unnecessary military bases on foreign shores.
To counteract this, military spending in America has gone way up, from $333 billion in 2001, when the War in Afghanistan began, to an expected $700 billion + for the coming year.
This is not at all different from Rome. To defend its massive border, the Roman Empire had to spend hugely on its military. This drain on the economy left many disillusioned and unwilling to support the army or the state. Eventually, the amount of money coming into the Empire from taxation was simply not enough to sustain the massive Roman government.
Then, as now, to counteract this, Rome and America have turned to the same course: devaluing the currency. From here, we come to the second major reason for Rome's fall: economic.
The main currency of Rome was the Denarius, which comprised a certain amount of silver in the coinage. The other mainline currency was the gold-based Aureus, with the rate of exchange between the two being 25:1 during the empire's glory years.
For hundreds of years, this worked fantastically. But as the glory of conquest faded (and the complementary plunder that came with it), and the price of empire rose, the Roman state found itself in a very sticky situation.
This was a big problem for Rome. As the Empire shifted to a defensive policy in the second century, it couldn't rely on the constant income that came with newly conquered territory. Eventually, taxation could no longer pay for the Empire's gargantuan expenditures, furthermore, no new discoveries of any precious metals had been made to mint new coins, and the result was that Roman emperors and bureaucrats desperately needed to find ways to plug the holes. The only option available to them was to debase the currency. (See the section entitled Rome in this source.)
As previously stated, since the beginning of Rome, the ratio of silver Denarii to the gold Aureus was 25:1. However, starting in the third century, the amount of silver content in the Denarius was greatly lowered. The Denarius (later replaced by the silver Antonius), which started out as nearly pure silver, contained only one part silver for twenty parts copper by the end of the 3rd century.
While the emperors Diocletian and Constantine tried to introduce stable monetary reforms, the expenditures of empire continued to grow and the staple silver currency of the Empire continued to be devalued.
This of course, resulted in inflation and then hyperinflation. It got so bad that what had originally started out as a 25:1 ratio of the silver Roman monetary unit to the gold rose and rose. By the time of Diocletian's reforms, one Aureus was worth 833 Denarii. Twenty years later, the ratio was 4,350:1. When Constantine converted the Aureus to the Solidus, one gold unit was worth 275,000 silver units. Only twenty years later, the ratio became 4.6 million:1!
Who did this inflation hit the hardest? Then, as now, it was the poor, as the poor could hardly afford to trade in their silver monetary unit for the gold one. To further complicate matters, Diocletian tried to institute price controls. This hope to counteract inflation failed miserably.
The Roman economy, once a juggernaut of envy, was thoroughly destroyed by the central planning of emperors and bureaucrats who couldn't resist spending lavishly. Does all of this sound familiar to you?
In 2009, America is in the midst of a grand economic crisis. Predictably, we hear politicians ranting and raving about the need to "solve" the problem. As always, they blame the "greed and corruption" of the so-called free market (of which this country has not had for many decades) for the economic instability.
In reality, for the proper place to assign blame they need only look into a mirror. This country too, has spent beyond its means for a very long time. Like the Romans, the expenditures of government have greatly overwhelmed the amount of revenue coming in from taxation.
Inevitably, the U.S. government is doing as the Romans have done before them: it is debasing the currency. And it has a marvelous little tool from which to do so that goes above and beyond the Romans ever dreamed (at least they actually still had some silver in the Denarius, with the gold Aureus/Solidus to back up their money!).
We call this method of currency debasement the Federal Reserve System. I could write an entire article on the fraud of this privately-owned central bank, but that is not what we are here to discuss. The article sourced above is a good place to start for the beginner.
The Federal Reserve allows for the creation of money out of thin air. This allows the government to fight two wars at once and still call for tax cuts. Politicians love this system because it gives them an unlimited amount of money at the ready to spend on their pet projects. When we look at this system, it ought to come as no surprise that this access to cheap money-for-nothing and the removal of the dollar from the gold standard which it fostered, has robbed the dollar of 95% of its purchasing power since the Fed's inception.
The "free market" is not at fault for this economic crisis, it is the all-too-predictable result of government intervention in keeping interest rates artificially low (an effort in housing price control that is like Diocletian's failed Edict on Prices), and the so-called business cycle that takes place as a result of the inflation-creating fiat money system imposed on us by government recognition of the Federal Reserve.
America is following down a dangerous path. It is almost exactly mirroring the policies that brought economic calamity to the Roman Empire and once more, has a much more powerful tool than the Romans had to do so.
What really gets me is that many of these expenditures are totally unnecessary. While the Romans somewhat had a reason for their military spending (to defend the people in the provinces that became dependent on the Empire), there is simply no need for many of these government bureaucracies and programs in a constitutional republic, the massive overseas spending that soaks many hundreds of billions of dollars a year being the best example of this. The continual creation of money by the Federal Reserve System that is required for this is set to bring massive amounts of inflation to these shores. Hyperinflation may indeed be a possibility.
The fall of Rome was a combination of many factors, but I would put economic reasons at the top of that list. When the currency goes, massive instability in a society is sure to follow. The government needs to wise up and wise up fast, for they are following down the agonizing road of decline that the Romans paved before- and dragging we the people down with them.
The third major reason for the collapse of Rome was demographic change.
When we examine the roots of this, we see that even the climate turned against Rome. The climate began to cool in around the 4th century AD. This triggered a vast migration and is termed the "Migration Period." These are the famed barbarian "invasions" of the Roman Empire that we popularly think as bringing about its downfall.
When the climate got colder, nomadic tribes on the Asian Steppe, including the Huns, migrated westward, displacing the already settled Germanic tribes in their wake. This caused pressure on Rome's frontiers, which as we know, were already very difficult to defend due to there not being enough manpower.
Due to the pressure exerted on them by the Huns, the Goths begged the Eastern Roman Emperor (by this time the Empire was officially split in two) Valens to give them refuge. The Romans assented, but imposed humiliating conditions on the Goths. These included disarmament (though this was not very successful, as Rome would soon see!) and conditions that brought them to the brink of starvation. Many Gothic children had to be sold into slavery in order to obtain food.
Not surprisingly, the Goths began an insurrection against the Eastern Roman Empire. Emperor Valens called his army and marched north to break the rebellion. He was not successful. Instead, he was crushed by the Goths at Adrianople, losing his own life in the battle.
In response, the new Emperor Theodosius formed a special treaty with the Goths, giving them land in exchange for military service when he called upon them (essentially a proto-vassalage that would later form the backbone of feudalism).
The Romans never truly accepted the Goths however, and it was only the results of Adrianople that accorded them such a special status. Gothic soldiers were subsequently used as cannon fodder for later Roman wars. In response, their new king, Alaric, did the unthinkable. He marched into Italy and sacked Rome itself.
After reading about all of this chaos, it is important to know that the "barbarians" did not want to destroy the Roman Empire. On the contrary, the Germanic tribes wanted to settle there and try their hand at success. For centuries, the Empire was where the prosperity was, and they wanted their own piece of the action. However, the continual migration did have very negative side effects: whereas previous immigration into the Empire was a steady stream, the mass of humanity that the Huns pushed into the Empire's borders caused dramatic upheavals in the demographic makeup of Rome. This caused civil strife, and the authoritarian actions of the Roman state only further increased the tension.
Does this sound familiar to you? Immigration has been a hot-button issue in recent years, almost as forbidden a fruit in politics as talking about social security reform or revising abortion laws. In 2006 and 2007, attempts to pass immigration bills failed miserably.
Likewise as the Romans became more and more fragmented due to huge demographic changes, America is beginning to see the same rumblings in its own borders. While it is impossible to know for sure, the numbers of illegals in the U.S. is probably over 20 million by now. The shift in the southwest is such that we see the newcomers telling Americans that the southwest belongs to them. Not surprisingly, many of the American citizens there have begun to leave, leaving the future very much uncertain.
I realize that most of the illegal immigrants coming to America, like the Germanic tribes immigrating to Rome before them, simply want a piece of the action, a part of the American prosperity, and given my strong free market, anti-state principles, I only wish them the best in that pursuit. Indeed, if the state would simply let the marketplace work and foster a strong economy, I think many of these immigration controversies would cease.
However, there is an eery similarity here to the immigration problems of the Romans. If the state's job is to defend its "citizens" (transformed into serfs now) from outside invasion, it has failed its very reason for existence by leaps and bounds. The demographic shift in the southwest may very possibly lead to massive instability in the future that mirrors the shift in society which saw the final evaporation of the Roman state.
Let us remember that it is NAFTA (a very much anti-free market treaty) that has been acting as the modern day economic Hun, displacing Mexicans from their homes and forcing them into the United States to survive.
It is hard of course, hard to tell how this will all turn out in the end, as a vast array of factors need to be considered. I find myself sturggling to reconcile my free market principles with my desire to avoid the civil strife that I see happening if illegal immigration continues to go unchecked. I hold that I have no immediate solution to the problem, as many of the possibilities require more state involvment (amnesty, deportation, etc.).
Repealing NAFTA would be an excellent start in solving these problems, as it would give Mexicans an actual opportunity to earn a living in their own country. Ending coercive state welfare benefits that many illegals take advantage of would also be a good impetus to prevent a further flood of migrants (and would still be logically consisten libertarianism to boot!). From there, the market ought to work itself out in the end (if the government would let it).
In 476 A.D., the last Roman Emperor in the west abdicated, thus formally ending the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire would continue on for one thousand years more, and still called itself Roman until the Medieval period. But never again would there be the glorious empire of old. Never again would the Western World be so thoroughly dominated by a single power.
When contemplating the fall of Rome, we must understand that it was a failure of government that caused the collapse. I reject wholeheartedly the premise that a "decline in morality among the people" was part of the problem, and likewise, I reject that same premise today. Adultery, drunkenness, and sex orgies do not cause an overreach in power, or inflation, or authoritarian measures that antagonize the public and increase instability in society. In fact, we need more people who take part in such wild parties rather than more "public servants" that weild power over their fellow men.
Rome's problems started when the state overreached and conquered more than it could afford to, causing the need to inflate the currency to finance its military machine. Although great benefits eventually came to the provinces (such as the advance in technology), we must remember that it was by the sword that these things came. The first generations of conquered peoples were stripped of their freedom to live as they chose, and many were sold into slavery. As always, the sword always creates more problems than it solves, and hence the decline of the Empire was as sure a thing as the premise that water is wet.
It is not surprising that as power began to slip through the Empire's fingers, the fist of Rome began to tighten, some examples being Diocletian's edict on prices as well as his empire-wide persecution of Christians (due to them not paying homage to the Roman state and the divinity of the emperor, of course).
It was such authoritarian measures that triggered the Goths to rebel and Alaric to sack Rome. Had the Roman state treated them more kindly, I am sure that the market would have eventually worked out any issues among the populace, just as I am sure it will today. It is both an angering and amusing piece of news to me that people have been arrested on planes under the misnamed "Patriot Act" for arguing with flight attendants. The reasons for my anger ought to be obvious, but the news also somewhat amuses me because such authoritarian actions are an easy sign to see that America is declining just as the Romans did before.
In the end, these signs are very alarming as to the future of the country, not because I am attached to the state, but because I am concerned that the government is dragging me and my fellow men down a path of chaos and woe. It was excessive government that killed Rome, and it is excessive government that is killing America.
President Obama campaigned on the words "change" and "hope." However, there can be neither if the government does not come to its senses and steer off the path first paved by Rome. Unfortunately, I see no signs of this happening.
It will be up to We the People to prevent a new collapse. We must pump the blood of liberty into the heart of a country poisoned by collectivism and a false image of national greatness to stop this madness and learn the lessons of history.
It is no wonder why statists admire the Romans so much. They see an energetic government that brought law and order to many diverse lands under laws that are the still the general foundation of our legal system.
Nor can it be argued that the Romans brought great improvements upon civilization- the invention of the aqueduct, for example brought fresh, clean water to people all across the Empire (a far better invention than a pyramid to suit some king's ambition, great architectural splendor thought it may be. Even an anonymous Roman writer said something to this effect.). It was under the Romans that the civilization of Classical and Hellenistic Greece reached their apex. Art flourished and trade boomed. The roads that the Romans built were in general use for thousands of years and some are even still used today.
Yet at one point, Rome ceased to rise, then slowly and painfully declined, and finally fell flat on its face, ushering in the Dark Ages, a time where life was short, scary, and cruel. It is no wonder why the collapse of this spectacular empire still fascinates us some 1,500 years later.
Inevitably we ask why such a great empire could fall. How did the mightiest state to ever exist up until that time, collapse so resoundingly?
There were many reasons, but for a modern example we ought to look not in the ancient past, but to our own time, for a rough equivalent exists in today's world: the United States of America. This may sound somewhat odd at first, but the path that America is on is somewhat the same as the Romans were. The similarities between the two are so striking that they even go back to the formation of the two states.
Rome had its beginnings as a city ruled by Etruscan kings. The monarchy was overthrown in 509 BC in a revolt led by Brutus. The Romans called King Tarquin a tyrant, and established a republic to prevent one man from ever attaining too much power. How similar is this to the American Revolution? Indeed, the Founding Fathers looked to the Roman Republic as a model for what they were doing, hoping to learn the lessons of the past. They saw that their revolt against King George III was strangely similar to the Roman Revolt against King Tarquin.
Both states rose and expanded. Rome slowly, but surely, conquered the Mediterranean and Western Europe by the reign of the Emperor Claudius. Rome's only major setback in this period was the crushing defeat suffered in the Teutoburg Forest at the hands of Arminius in 9 A.D. This defeat halted Rome's expansion in Europe, and except for a brief incursion by Emperor Trajan, set the permanent European boundary of the Empire. Sir Edward Creasy in his 15 Decisive Battles of the World describes this battle as a death knell to Rome, as the Elbe-Danube frontier that the conquest of Germania was meant to establish would have been a much easier border to defend then the Rhine-Danube edge that came to be fixed. The loss was so great that Augustus is reported to have screamed in his sleep: "Varus, give me back my legions!"
Rome recovered however, and continued to remain strong. She conquered Britain 30 years later and her economy boomed. However, this battle ended the great age of Roman conquests.
Likewise, the American military machine is the strongest to ever exist. American arms are unmatched, and we as Americans take a huge amount of foolish pride in thinking that our country has "never lost a war."
It has often been noted that our humble beginnings as a constitutional republic have been transformed into an American Empire- though an empire marked more by economics and puppet states rather than outright military conquest. The American Empire has not yet met a disastrous defeat such as that of Varus in the Teutoburg wilds, but the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have begun to push forward a much needed debate that has been lacking in this country for 60 years: is all of this foreign intervention worth it? The movement for a non-interventionist foreign policy in the advice of our founders is now beginning to take shape.
It couldn't come soon enough. As of 2007, there are 737 American military bases around the world (that we know of).
Finally, this brings us into the fall of Rome. One huge reason that the Roman Empire collapsed was due to its military instability.
There were many civil wars in Rome, while America has been fortunate enough to only have been embroiled in one. This I will grant a big difference. However, the differences stop there.
The Roman legions had a huge territory to defend. The Empire extended around the entire basin of the Mediterranean Sea, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rhine, Danube, and Euphrates rivers to the east, south into the Sahara, and north into Scotland.
Rome never had more than 28 legions, of which, three were lost and never replaced in the disaster of the Teutoburg Forest. This brings us down to 25 legions of 5,240 men each. Rome also employed around the same number of auxiliary units, which combined gave a total of more or less 262,000 professional troops under arms at any given time
Impressive though this may be for the ancient world, the Roman Empire covered 2.2 million square miles. This amount of territory probably needed a million or more soldiers to defend it.
Thus, the Roman army was constantly stretched thin. It needed to guard against aggressors outside the Empire's vast boundaries, as well as guard against revolts, thus it needed to shift back and forth to different posts across thousands of miles of territory.
Likewise, the American military is stretched all over the world. As the Roman army was stretched to the breaking point due to the vast amount of territory it had to defend, the American military is constantly being reported as being stretched to the breaking point to fill all of these unnecessary military bases on foreign shores.
To counteract this, military spending in America has gone way up, from $333 billion in 2001, when the War in Afghanistan began, to an expected $700 billion + for the coming year.
This is not at all different from Rome. To defend its massive border, the Roman Empire had to spend hugely on its military. This drain on the economy left many disillusioned and unwilling to support the army or the state. Eventually, the amount of money coming into the Empire from taxation was simply not enough to sustain the massive Roman government.
Then, as now, to counteract this, Rome and America have turned to the same course: devaluing the currency. From here, we come to the second major reason for Rome's fall: economic.
The main currency of Rome was the Denarius, which comprised a certain amount of silver in the coinage. The other mainline currency was the gold-based Aureus, with the rate of exchange between the two being 25:1 during the empire's glory years.
For hundreds of years, this worked fantastically. But as the glory of conquest faded (and the complementary plunder that came with it), and the price of empire rose, the Roman state found itself in a very sticky situation.
This was a big problem for Rome. As the Empire shifted to a defensive policy in the second century, it couldn't rely on the constant income that came with newly conquered territory. Eventually, taxation could no longer pay for the Empire's gargantuan expenditures, furthermore, no new discoveries of any precious metals had been made to mint new coins, and the result was that Roman emperors and bureaucrats desperately needed to find ways to plug the holes. The only option available to them was to debase the currency. (See the section entitled Rome in this source.)
As previously stated, since the beginning of Rome, the ratio of silver Denarii to the gold Aureus was 25:1. However, starting in the third century, the amount of silver content in the Denarius was greatly lowered. The Denarius (later replaced by the silver Antonius), which started out as nearly pure silver, contained only one part silver for twenty parts copper by the end of the 3rd century.
While the emperors Diocletian and Constantine tried to introduce stable monetary reforms, the expenditures of empire continued to grow and the staple silver currency of the Empire continued to be devalued.
This of course, resulted in inflation and then hyperinflation. It got so bad that what had originally started out as a 25:1 ratio of the silver Roman monetary unit to the gold rose and rose. By the time of Diocletian's reforms, one Aureus was worth 833 Denarii. Twenty years later, the ratio was 4,350:1. When Constantine converted the Aureus to the Solidus, one gold unit was worth 275,000 silver units. Only twenty years later, the ratio became 4.6 million:1!
Who did this inflation hit the hardest? Then, as now, it was the poor, as the poor could hardly afford to trade in their silver monetary unit for the gold one. To further complicate matters, Diocletian tried to institute price controls. This hope to counteract inflation failed miserably.
The Roman economy, once a juggernaut of envy, was thoroughly destroyed by the central planning of emperors and bureaucrats who couldn't resist spending lavishly. Does all of this sound familiar to you?
In 2009, America is in the midst of a grand economic crisis. Predictably, we hear politicians ranting and raving about the need to "solve" the problem. As always, they blame the "greed and corruption" of the so-called free market (of which this country has not had for many decades) for the economic instability.
In reality, for the proper place to assign blame they need only look into a mirror. This country too, has spent beyond its means for a very long time. Like the Romans, the expenditures of government have greatly overwhelmed the amount of revenue coming in from taxation.
Inevitably, the U.S. government is doing as the Romans have done before them: it is debasing the currency. And it has a marvelous little tool from which to do so that goes above and beyond the Romans ever dreamed (at least they actually still had some silver in the Denarius, with the gold Aureus/Solidus to back up their money!).
We call this method of currency debasement the Federal Reserve System. I could write an entire article on the fraud of this privately-owned central bank, but that is not what we are here to discuss. The article sourced above is a good place to start for the beginner.
The Federal Reserve allows for the creation of money out of thin air. This allows the government to fight two wars at once and still call for tax cuts. Politicians love this system because it gives them an unlimited amount of money at the ready to spend on their pet projects. When we look at this system, it ought to come as no surprise that this access to cheap money-for-nothing and the removal of the dollar from the gold standard which it fostered, has robbed the dollar of 95% of its purchasing power since the Fed's inception.
The "free market" is not at fault for this economic crisis, it is the all-too-predictable result of government intervention in keeping interest rates artificially low (an effort in housing price control that is like Diocletian's failed Edict on Prices), and the so-called business cycle that takes place as a result of the inflation-creating fiat money system imposed on us by government recognition of the Federal Reserve.
America is following down a dangerous path. It is almost exactly mirroring the policies that brought economic calamity to the Roman Empire and once more, has a much more powerful tool than the Romans had to do so.
What really gets me is that many of these expenditures are totally unnecessary. While the Romans somewhat had a reason for their military spending (to defend the people in the provinces that became dependent on the Empire), there is simply no need for many of these government bureaucracies and programs in a constitutional republic, the massive overseas spending that soaks many hundreds of billions of dollars a year being the best example of this. The continual creation of money by the Federal Reserve System that is required for this is set to bring massive amounts of inflation to these shores. Hyperinflation may indeed be a possibility.
The fall of Rome was a combination of many factors, but I would put economic reasons at the top of that list. When the currency goes, massive instability in a society is sure to follow. The government needs to wise up and wise up fast, for they are following down the agonizing road of decline that the Romans paved before- and dragging we the people down with them.
The third major reason for the collapse of Rome was demographic change.
When we examine the roots of this, we see that even the climate turned against Rome. The climate began to cool in around the 4th century AD. This triggered a vast migration and is termed the "Migration Period." These are the famed barbarian "invasions" of the Roman Empire that we popularly think as bringing about its downfall.
When the climate got colder, nomadic tribes on the Asian Steppe, including the Huns, migrated westward, displacing the already settled Germanic tribes in their wake. This caused pressure on Rome's frontiers, which as we know, were already very difficult to defend due to there not being enough manpower.
Due to the pressure exerted on them by the Huns, the Goths begged the Eastern Roman Emperor (by this time the Empire was officially split in two) Valens to give them refuge. The Romans assented, but imposed humiliating conditions on the Goths. These included disarmament (though this was not very successful, as Rome would soon see!) and conditions that brought them to the brink of starvation. Many Gothic children had to be sold into slavery in order to obtain food.
Not surprisingly, the Goths began an insurrection against the Eastern Roman Empire. Emperor Valens called his army and marched north to break the rebellion. He was not successful. Instead, he was crushed by the Goths at Adrianople, losing his own life in the battle.
In response, the new Emperor Theodosius formed a special treaty with the Goths, giving them land in exchange for military service when he called upon them (essentially a proto-vassalage that would later form the backbone of feudalism).
The Romans never truly accepted the Goths however, and it was only the results of Adrianople that accorded them such a special status. Gothic soldiers were subsequently used as cannon fodder for later Roman wars. In response, their new king, Alaric, did the unthinkable. He marched into Italy and sacked Rome itself.
After reading about all of this chaos, it is important to know that the "barbarians" did not want to destroy the Roman Empire. On the contrary, the Germanic tribes wanted to settle there and try their hand at success. For centuries, the Empire was where the prosperity was, and they wanted their own piece of the action. However, the continual migration did have very negative side effects: whereas previous immigration into the Empire was a steady stream, the mass of humanity that the Huns pushed into the Empire's borders caused dramatic upheavals in the demographic makeup of Rome. This caused civil strife, and the authoritarian actions of the Roman state only further increased the tension.
Does this sound familiar to you? Immigration has been a hot-button issue in recent years, almost as forbidden a fruit in politics as talking about social security reform or revising abortion laws. In 2006 and 2007, attempts to pass immigration bills failed miserably.
Likewise as the Romans became more and more fragmented due to huge demographic changes, America is beginning to see the same rumblings in its own borders. While it is impossible to know for sure, the numbers of illegals in the U.S. is probably over 20 million by now. The shift in the southwest is such that we see the newcomers telling Americans that the southwest belongs to them. Not surprisingly, many of the American citizens there have begun to leave, leaving the future very much uncertain.
I realize that most of the illegal immigrants coming to America, like the Germanic tribes immigrating to Rome before them, simply want a piece of the action, a part of the American prosperity, and given my strong free market, anti-state principles, I only wish them the best in that pursuit. Indeed, if the state would simply let the marketplace work and foster a strong economy, I think many of these immigration controversies would cease.
However, there is an eery similarity here to the immigration problems of the Romans. If the state's job is to defend its "citizens" (transformed into serfs now) from outside invasion, it has failed its very reason for existence by leaps and bounds. The demographic shift in the southwest may very possibly lead to massive instability in the future that mirrors the shift in society which saw the final evaporation of the Roman state.
Let us remember that it is NAFTA (a very much anti-free market treaty) that has been acting as the modern day economic Hun, displacing Mexicans from their homes and forcing them into the United States to survive.
It is hard of course, hard to tell how this will all turn out in the end, as a vast array of factors need to be considered. I find myself sturggling to reconcile my free market principles with my desire to avoid the civil strife that I see happening if illegal immigration continues to go unchecked. I hold that I have no immediate solution to the problem, as many of the possibilities require more state involvment (amnesty, deportation, etc.).
Repealing NAFTA would be an excellent start in solving these problems, as it would give Mexicans an actual opportunity to earn a living in their own country. Ending coercive state welfare benefits that many illegals take advantage of would also be a good impetus to prevent a further flood of migrants (and would still be logically consisten libertarianism to boot!). From there, the market ought to work itself out in the end (if the government would let it).
In 476 A.D., the last Roman Emperor in the west abdicated, thus formally ending the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire would continue on for one thousand years more, and still called itself Roman until the Medieval period. But never again would there be the glorious empire of old. Never again would the Western World be so thoroughly dominated by a single power.
When contemplating the fall of Rome, we must understand that it was a failure of government that caused the collapse. I reject wholeheartedly the premise that a "decline in morality among the people" was part of the problem, and likewise, I reject that same premise today. Adultery, drunkenness, and sex orgies do not cause an overreach in power, or inflation, or authoritarian measures that antagonize the public and increase instability in society. In fact, we need more people who take part in such wild parties rather than more "public servants" that weild power over their fellow men.
Rome's problems started when the state overreached and conquered more than it could afford to, causing the need to inflate the currency to finance its military machine. Although great benefits eventually came to the provinces (such as the advance in technology), we must remember that it was by the sword that these things came. The first generations of conquered peoples were stripped of their freedom to live as they chose, and many were sold into slavery. As always, the sword always creates more problems than it solves, and hence the decline of the Empire was as sure a thing as the premise that water is wet.
It is not surprising that as power began to slip through the Empire's fingers, the fist of Rome began to tighten, some examples being Diocletian's edict on prices as well as his empire-wide persecution of Christians (due to them not paying homage to the Roman state and the divinity of the emperor, of course).
It was such authoritarian measures that triggered the Goths to rebel and Alaric to sack Rome. Had the Roman state treated them more kindly, I am sure that the market would have eventually worked out any issues among the populace, just as I am sure it will today. It is both an angering and amusing piece of news to me that people have been arrested on planes under the misnamed "Patriot Act" for arguing with flight attendants. The reasons for my anger ought to be obvious, but the news also somewhat amuses me because such authoritarian actions are an easy sign to see that America is declining just as the Romans did before.
In the end, these signs are very alarming as to the future of the country, not because I am attached to the state, but because I am concerned that the government is dragging me and my fellow men down a path of chaos and woe. It was excessive government that killed Rome, and it is excessive government that is killing America.
President Obama campaigned on the words "change" and "hope." However, there can be neither if the government does not come to its senses and steer off the path first paved by Rome. Unfortunately, I see no signs of this happening.
It will be up to We the People to prevent a new collapse. We must pump the blood of liberty into the heart of a country poisoned by collectivism and a false image of national greatness to stop this madness and learn the lessons of history.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
The Emperor's Acceptance Speech
Two days ago, I got out of school early and went over to my friend's house nearby to watch the inauguration. As I sat there watching the gathering, parade, pomp, and ceremony, I felt as if I was watching the coronation of a Roman Emperor rather than the inauguration of a chief magistrate of a Constitutional Republic. (This goes to show the utter corruption that comes with the institutionalization of violence that follows the establishment of any state, but that is a different topic entirely.)
At any rate, Obama's inauguration speech was short, and as usual with him, open-ended. It sounds good to the cult-like following that he has attained, but if you apply simple logic to what he was saying, you would find that his plans are not too different from the policies of the previous President.
Let us now turn our attention to that speech and apply logic to his words, and see where it goes. I will put his text in red while my response will remain in the current font color.
My fellow citizens:
So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.
This is an utter falsehood. It truly shows that the new President has either not read the documents as well as the correspondences of our Founding Fathers or just doesn't care and wants to sound good. If you would truly study the American Revolution and its Enlightenment philosophical underpinnings, you would see that they have almost been completely wiped out in favor of collectivism and social engineering, helped along by the doctrine of "Positive liberty." (A true misnomer, for it is neither positive nor is it liberty, but that is a topic for a later discussion.)
For more simplistic purposes look at the American military bases in over three-quarters of the world's countries, the Federal Communications Commission, "Free Speech Zones," the Interstate Commerce Commission, NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, the Federal Trade Commission, the Departments of Labor, Education, Transportation (and more), etc. etc. and of course above all, the Internal Revenue "Service" and the Federal Reserve, and you would see that we have abandoned our founding ideals of minimal government, individualism and the rights that come with it, federalism, keeping decision-making relatively local, free markets, sound money, and anti-imperialism to statist interventionism and regulation, to big government, to the tyranny that our forefathers (and my own ancestors) fought and bled to free themselves from.
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.
A "war" caused by our own arrogant interventionism in other people's affairs. Furthermore, it is a war against a tactic (sorry, but that's what terrorism is), and therefore, cannot be won, because tactics do not exist in the physical universe. The whole point of the war is for it to be open-ended and unwinnable. As the old saying goes, "war is the health of the state."
Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some,
The greed and irresponsibility of politicians who wanted to look good by touting high home-ownership rates, bankers who wanted to make ill-gotten money by inflation-causing funny money, and artificially-low interest rates, as well as the failure of central economic planning in general that crumbled the USSR.
but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.
This is absolutely frightening. What is this "new age" that our great leader wishes to bring us into? Can you go into detail please, President Obama?
Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many;
All a result of big government, central economic planning, and fiat money.
and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.
Again, a falsehood. To say that "the debate is over" on this subject shows me that it is being taken advantage of by the government and big business to exercise more control over people's lives and make cheap profits, respectively. Here can be found one good, relatively easy to understand study on the subject that show humans only emit around 3% of greenhouse gases, the rest can be explained by volcanoes and dead plants (let's start banning, taxing and regulating those). I'd also suggest watching the Penn & Teller Bullshit episode entitled "Being Green," that will lead you to a number of other studies on this.
These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Empires do not last. This is why the Founders gave us a constitutional republic. (A state, true, but a not as damaging state as the others throughout history). Sorry to say, but America's decline as it is now is inevitable, and our monetary crisis will force us to live and spend within our means.
Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met.
On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
I'll actually agree with him there. Unfortunately, the road he is leading us down will not allow for the pursuit of our happiness, due to the ever-increasing burden of big government.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
Yes, but government has never been a friend to these people, and instead snatches the fruits of their labor away.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.
In search of freedom from kings and princes and priests that hid behind guns. Unfortunately, government was still in their schelling points, and allowed for all of this to present themselves once again, although in a new and less obvious form: the modern social-democratic "soft" police state. (Look at the fact that there were more security personnel on hand for this party than the number of troops in Afghanistan for the simple truth.)
As far as slavery goes, there was no more clear violation of the most sacred rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness through the fruits of a man's or woman's labor. (This is not an argument for the Civil War! Which if you've looked past what you were taught in the government education camps...errr public schools, you'd find that the slavery issue was just a popular excuse for northern and European banks and capitalists to make a quick buck and eliminate their competition.)
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
Sorry, but this absolutely screams collectivism and national greatness at the expense of the individual. The reason America was established was for the government to serve the individual, not the other way around.
This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth.
But for how long? The path we are on is unsustainable (and no, this statement has nothing to do with the Church of Environmentalism and "sustainable living"). Don't expect this guy to do anything to reverse the trends of Empire. He will try to prop it up and the funny money system that supports it for as long as possible, prolonging the pain for the rest of the population.
Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished.
Another falsehood. Our industrial capacity has been gutted due to so-called free trade policies (more like government regulated trade for the betterment of big business to skirt around the free market and their smaller competitors).
But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
Another extremely scary, collectivist-screaming statement. What unpleasant decisions does he mean? Higher taxes? He surely doesn't mean ending the Federal Reserve System (which will cause pain, but is a necessary decision that must be made).
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.
Sorry, but government cannot do any of this. Whenever the government "acts" it causes destruction. It benefits some people at the expense of the majority or causes unintentional destruction to everyone (like our current healthcare system). Government cannot do any of this because governments are an inherently destructive institution. That's what they were created to do. That's what violence does. All a government is is institutionalized, collective violence. The only way to do those things (and do them for the long term) is through the free market, the true free market, not the bastardized, socialized/state capitalist economy that we are currently living in that only has a smattering of free market principles left.
Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.
Again, the men and women who built this country were doing so in a true free market system (slavery being the big, huge exception). It was not done through government.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. Those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
This is the biggest falsehood of the entire speech, and ought to refute itself. The bigger a government is, with the inherent contradictions of a state, the more damage it will do. The only way to "restore the vital trust" is for the government to return to its constitutional boundaries. (From there we ought to seriously look at eliminating the state entirely). Ron Paul said it best: that Obama is saying he will expand the government in this way or that way to do all of these lofty goals, but these will all inevitably fail, because government has never worked. Still, it will cause even more damage.
And saying that government officials will be held to account to spend wisely is completely absurd. They will do what all other statists of all stripes have done: hide behind their so-called authority and costumed enforcers. Because they control a monopoly on violence, they will never or only very rarely be held to account.
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched,
Wow, is he finally making sense?
but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control — and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.
Guess not! What is this "watchful eye?" Does he mean that the government and the Federal Reserve, which caused the problems in the first place will now "watch" to make sure the market "doesn't spin out of control?" Of course not! Because they were the ones who caused its downward spiral in the first place! I cannot stress this enough. Further, government intervention through its funny money (fiat) system, only favors the prosperous, because they get to it before prices inflate. This is an institutional problem that this man does not talk of and will not fix.
The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
AKA: more government interference and welfare, which, for all of its noble-sounding purposes only either A) confiscates wealth and then redistributes it to a certain segment of the population it favors, or B) goes to the banking cartel (Federal Reserve) to print more money out of thin air and cause more inflation, which affects the poor more than anyone else.
As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers ... our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.
Sounds like more empire, which can only infringe on our ideals and weaken our constitution and common defense. Further, in the age of Democratic-Socialism, Enlightenment ideals of individualism are pushed to the fringe of discussion. As for us being a "friend," tell that to the 1000+ dead Palestinians in the recent Gaza War, who were killed by the American-supplied weapons used by Israel. This is surely a far cry from Thomas Jefferson's ethos of "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nation's entangling alliances with none."
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.
If you call having troops in over three-quarters of the world's countries, a massive welfare state, an income tax, and a banking cartel that constantly devalues money, which in turn robs the poor and middle class of their purchasing power "restraint," I must differ from you, Mr. President.
We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort — even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people,
Unfortunately, I think that Mr. Obama will go back on his promise (as so many politicians have done before him), and it is increasingly becoming clear that Obama will keep troops in Iraq.
and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet.
I seriously doubt there will be long-term peace by American standards. No one has ever conquered Afghanistan. Not even Alexander the Great, probably the greatest military genius of all time. As far as this "warming planet" goes, the winter of 2008-9 is generally acknowledged to be the coldest of the decade, and many scientists are breaking from the global warming pack and predicting global cooling for the next decade. Man-made, or is it the fact that the climate throughout the history of planet Earth has always CHANGED? ;)
We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
Never mind the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis that have been slaughtered in America's unconstitutional imperial war of conquest. And we seriously wonder what pisses the Middle East off about the United States?
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
This sounds like globalism in all its facets, and sounds even more like a desire for global government. And, with the inherent contradictions and problems of a state in whatever form, a worldwide government would be nothing short of ultimate tyranny and inescapable destruction. If you take the state and its violent monopoly out of things, I am certain that humanity will interact in peaceful trade and friendship with one another. It is the state that causes problems by telling others how to live through force.
To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West — know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.
Peace, commerce and honest friendship with the Muslim world? I doubt it! As for the latter part, corruption is the child of power, and to say that America and the West is not in some way responsible for their society's ills is extremely foolish, given predatory lending through abhorrent institutions like the World Bank and IMF.
To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
This implies more globalism through institutions like the UN as well as more confiscation and redistribution of wealth. That is the problem here. Give people the chance, and they will be charitable. Please, no more unconstitutional foreign aid!
As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment — a moment that will define a generation — it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
Is it just me, or does Barack Obama fanatically believe in collectivism? What is greater than the individual? Only an individual can make that choice for himself or herself, not through the coercive actions of government.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
I'll give him this one, minus the statement about government. Individual kindness is what giving back is all about, as that example is about voluntary choice and action, and is true charity, not coercive taxation or wealth redistribution.
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
While I may disagree with how the Civil Rights Movement was achieved, as it led to the expansion of the Federal government and killed off much of what remained of federalism, as a believer in individual liberty, I cannot argue with this statement.
So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:
"Let it be told to the future world ... that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it."
Let me remind you, Mr. President, that if the father of our nation, who's seat you now occupy were alive today, he would be greatly alarmed by you and your cult of personality. He would lament at the expansion of government power and implore you to reduce its size and scope, for a government can only destroy, and a super-sized government can only destroy more.
America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
To conclude, let us turn back to the father of our nation:
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
Generation after generation of humankind has suffered as a result of a failure to heed this warning.
At any rate, Obama's inauguration speech was short, and as usual with him, open-ended. It sounds good to the cult-like following that he has attained, but if you apply simple logic to what he was saying, you would find that his plans are not too different from the policies of the previous President.
Let us now turn our attention to that speech and apply logic to his words, and see where it goes. I will put his text in red while my response will remain in the current font color.
My fellow citizens:
I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.
Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we the people have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents.So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.
This is an utter falsehood. It truly shows that the new President has either not read the documents as well as the correspondences of our Founding Fathers or just doesn't care and wants to sound good. If you would truly study the American Revolution and its Enlightenment philosophical underpinnings, you would see that they have almost been completely wiped out in favor of collectivism and social engineering, helped along by the doctrine of "Positive liberty." (A true misnomer, for it is neither positive nor is it liberty, but that is a topic for a later discussion.)
For more simplistic purposes look at the American military bases in over three-quarters of the world's countries, the Federal Communications Commission, "Free Speech Zones," the Interstate Commerce Commission, NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, the Federal Trade Commission, the Departments of Labor, Education, Transportation (and more), etc. etc. and of course above all, the Internal Revenue "Service" and the Federal Reserve, and you would see that we have abandoned our founding ideals of minimal government, individualism and the rights that come with it, federalism, keeping decision-making relatively local, free markets, sound money, and anti-imperialism to statist interventionism and regulation, to big government, to the tyranny that our forefathers (and my own ancestors) fought and bled to free themselves from.
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.
A "war" caused by our own arrogant interventionism in other people's affairs. Furthermore, it is a war against a tactic (sorry, but that's what terrorism is), and therefore, cannot be won, because tactics do not exist in the physical universe. The whole point of the war is for it to be open-ended and unwinnable. As the old saying goes, "war is the health of the state."
Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some,
The greed and irresponsibility of politicians who wanted to look good by touting high home-ownership rates, bankers who wanted to make ill-gotten money by inflation-causing funny money, and artificially-low interest rates, as well as the failure of central economic planning in general that crumbled the USSR.
but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.
This is absolutely frightening. What is this "new age" that our great leader wishes to bring us into? Can you go into detail please, President Obama?
Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many;
All a result of big government, central economic planning, and fiat money.
and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.
Again, a falsehood. To say that "the debate is over" on this subject shows me that it is being taken advantage of by the government and big business to exercise more control over people's lives and make cheap profits, respectively. Here can be found one good, relatively easy to understand study on the subject that show humans only emit around 3% of greenhouse gases, the rest can be explained by volcanoes and dead plants (let's start banning, taxing and regulating those). I'd also suggest watching the Penn & Teller Bullshit episode entitled "Being Green," that will lead you to a number of other studies on this.
These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Empires do not last. This is why the Founders gave us a constitutional republic. (A state, true, but a not as damaging state as the others throughout history). Sorry to say, but America's decline as it is now is inevitable, and our monetary crisis will force us to live and spend within our means.
Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met.
On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
What unity? We should all just go along with him, no matter what? What dogmas? Is it not debate that prevents things from being done too hastily? Must we abandon our personal principles and salute our master? This is what he sounded like to me!We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
I'll actually agree with him there. Unfortunately, the road he is leading us down will not allow for the pursuit of our happiness, due to the ever-increasing burden of big government.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
Yes, but government has never been a friend to these people, and instead snatches the fruits of their labor away.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.
In search of freedom from kings and princes and priests that hid behind guns. Unfortunately, government was still in their schelling points, and allowed for all of this to present themselves once again, although in a new and less obvious form: the modern social-democratic "soft" police state. (Look at the fact that there were more security personnel on hand for this party than the number of troops in Afghanistan for the simple truth.)
For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.
Again, the same things. I'll give in to Concord, but let's not forget that the Civil War was unnecessary and World War II was caused by the mistreatment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. Japan is a harder case to argue, as America was attacked (but I also believe that could have been avoided). Let's also not forget the Genocide to the natives and the countless treaties that the US government broke as the West was "settled."As far as slavery goes, there was no more clear violation of the most sacred rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness through the fruits of a man's or woman's labor. (This is not an argument for the Civil War! Which if you've looked past what you were taught in the government education camps...errr public schools, you'd find that the slavery issue was just a popular excuse for northern and European banks and capitalists to make a quick buck and eliminate their competition.)
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
Sorry, but this absolutely screams collectivism and national greatness at the expense of the individual. The reason America was established was for the government to serve the individual, not the other way around.
This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth.
But for how long? The path we are on is unsustainable (and no, this statement has nothing to do with the Church of Environmentalism and "sustainable living"). Don't expect this guy to do anything to reverse the trends of Empire. He will try to prop it up and the funny money system that supports it for as long as possible, prolonging the pain for the rest of the population.
Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished.
Another falsehood. Our industrial capacity has been gutted due to so-called free trade policies (more like government regulated trade for the betterment of big business to skirt around the free market and their smaller competitors).
But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
Another extremely scary, collectivist-screaming statement. What unpleasant decisions does he mean? Higher taxes? He surely doesn't mean ending the Federal Reserve System (which will cause pain, but is a necessary decision that must be made).
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.
Sorry, but government cannot do any of this. Whenever the government "acts" it causes destruction. It benefits some people at the expense of the majority or causes unintentional destruction to everyone (like our current healthcare system). Government cannot do any of this because governments are an inherently destructive institution. That's what they were created to do. That's what violence does. All a government is is institutionalized, collective violence. The only way to do those things (and do them for the long term) is through the free market, the true free market, not the bastardized, socialized/state capitalist economy that we are currently living in that only has a smattering of free market principles left.
Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.
Again, the men and women who built this country were doing so in a true free market system (slavery being the big, huge exception). It was not done through government.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. Those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
This is the biggest falsehood of the entire speech, and ought to refute itself. The bigger a government is, with the inherent contradictions of a state, the more damage it will do. The only way to "restore the vital trust" is for the government to return to its constitutional boundaries. (From there we ought to seriously look at eliminating the state entirely). Ron Paul said it best: that Obama is saying he will expand the government in this way or that way to do all of these lofty goals, but these will all inevitably fail, because government has never worked. Still, it will cause even more damage.
And saying that government officials will be held to account to spend wisely is completely absurd. They will do what all other statists of all stripes have done: hide behind their so-called authority and costumed enforcers. Because they control a monopoly on violence, they will never or only very rarely be held to account.
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched,
Wow, is he finally making sense?
but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control — and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.
Guess not! What is this "watchful eye?" Does he mean that the government and the Federal Reserve, which caused the problems in the first place will now "watch" to make sure the market "doesn't spin out of control?" Of course not! Because they were the ones who caused its downward spiral in the first place! I cannot stress this enough. Further, government intervention through its funny money (fiat) system, only favors the prosperous, because they get to it before prices inflate. This is an institutional problem that this man does not talk of and will not fix.
The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
AKA: more government interference and welfare, which, for all of its noble-sounding purposes only either A) confiscates wealth and then redistributes it to a certain segment of the population it favors, or B) goes to the banking cartel (Federal Reserve) to print more money out of thin air and cause more inflation, which affects the poor more than anyone else.
As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers ... our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.
Sounds like more empire, which can only infringe on our ideals and weaken our constitution and common defense. Further, in the age of Democratic-Socialism, Enlightenment ideals of individualism are pushed to the fringe of discussion. As for us being a "friend," tell that to the 1000+ dead Palestinians in the recent Gaza War, who were killed by the American-supplied weapons used by Israel. This is surely a far cry from Thomas Jefferson's ethos of "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nation's entangling alliances with none."
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.
If you call having troops in over three-quarters of the world's countries, a massive welfare state, an income tax, and a banking cartel that constantly devalues money, which in turn robs the poor and middle class of their purchasing power "restraint," I must differ from you, Mr. President.
We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort — even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people,
Unfortunately, I think that Mr. Obama will go back on his promise (as so many politicians have done before him), and it is increasingly becoming clear that Obama will keep troops in Iraq.
and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet.
I seriously doubt there will be long-term peace by American standards. No one has ever conquered Afghanistan. Not even Alexander the Great, probably the greatest military genius of all time. As far as this "warming planet" goes, the winter of 2008-9 is generally acknowledged to be the coldest of the decade, and many scientists are breaking from the global warming pack and predicting global cooling for the next decade. Man-made, or is it the fact that the climate throughout the history of planet Earth has always CHANGED? ;)
We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
Never mind the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis that have been slaughtered in America's unconstitutional imperial war of conquest. And we seriously wonder what pisses the Middle East off about the United States?
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
This sounds like globalism in all its facets, and sounds even more like a desire for global government. And, with the inherent contradictions and problems of a state in whatever form, a worldwide government would be nothing short of ultimate tyranny and inescapable destruction. If you take the state and its violent monopoly out of things, I am certain that humanity will interact in peaceful trade and friendship with one another. It is the state that causes problems by telling others how to live through force.
To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West — know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.
Peace, commerce and honest friendship with the Muslim world? I doubt it! As for the latter part, corruption is the child of power, and to say that America and the West is not in some way responsible for their society's ills is extremely foolish, given predatory lending through abhorrent institutions like the World Bank and IMF.
To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
This implies more globalism through institutions like the UN as well as more confiscation and redistribution of wealth. That is the problem here. Give people the chance, and they will be charitable. Please, no more unconstitutional foreign aid!
As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment — a moment that will define a generation — it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
Is it just me, or does Barack Obama fanatically believe in collectivism? What is greater than the individual? Only an individual can make that choice for himself or herself, not through the coercive actions of government.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
I'll give him this one, minus the statement about government. Individual kindness is what giving back is all about, as that example is about voluntary choice and action, and is true charity, not coercive taxation or wealth redistribution.
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
This is the source of our confidence — the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.
This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed — why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent Mall,
and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
While I may disagree with how the Civil Rights Movement was achieved, as it led to the expansion of the Federal government and killed off much of what remained of federalism, as a believer in individual liberty, I cannot argue with this statement.
So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:
"Let it be told to the future world ... that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it."
Let me remind you, Mr. President, that if the father of our nation, who's seat you now occupy were alive today, he would be greatly alarmed by you and your cult of personality. He would lament at the expansion of government power and implore you to reduce its size and scope, for a government can only destroy, and a super-sized government can only destroy more.
America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.
We will deliver freedom to future generations, but government can never do this, only the people in the spirit of liberty can. Through this dark hour we are again reminded that the government is the destroyer of liberty, something which you evidently do not see or do not care about. But know this, Mr. President, the individual will always long for freedom, and the state can only exist so long as the individual is convinced that it is necessary. It is the truth of freedom and our abandonment of it that is slowly, but surely, coming out. And I warn you to not overstep your bounds: for I and countless allies will be watching you like a hawk.To conclude, let us turn back to the father of our nation:
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
Generation after generation of humankind has suffered as a result of a failure to heed this warning.
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