14 Dec Why We Fight For a World With No Government by Bill Buppert

“I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.”

-H.L. Mencken

Why does this site exist and what will you get out of it?  Every blog is something of a vanity project and a catharsis for thinking out loud and this suits both for me.  Aside from writing a book, a blog is a legacy that may last far longer than I do.  Nothing really disappears from the Internet and I am certain there are folks in the government who are always interested in maintaining a watchful eye on blogs such as mine because they represent the most direct philosophical threat to their very existence.

In an earlier phase of my intellectual development, I had been seduced by the heady siren song of limiting government which sounds like the most viable solution but on closer examination is the most silly of chimeras.  There is no historical precedent in the Western world throughout its entire history of a government birthing from calving off another or rising out of the ashes of extinction of the previous regime and containing themselves within the confines of power originally set forth at their germination. None.  There are plenty of empty promises and proclamations of purity but the usual suspects will be self-selected to seek to rule others;  most of whom are socio- or psychopathic.  Politics is nothing more than the nationalization of human transactions where the converse is the complete privatization of the planet; the latter is the charter of this blog.  Nationalization is the government seizure (there is no polite term) of a product, service or behavior.  This can happen with something as mundane as the circumference of grapefruit to something as epic in scope as the forfeiture of health care or the use of the innumerable malum prohibitum laws on the books.  For those who take a longer view of history, it becomes abundantly clear that governments in their life stages until their eventual deaths which are inevitable rarely seem to calculate second- and third-order effects of their meta-behaviors.  I always presume that while good intentions may be the standard apologia for the lion’s share of government action and behavior, this is simply an intellectual smokescreen with the same vapidity of hate crimes, hiding what is the nature of government which is the threat or use of violence against anyone or anything which either refuses to comply or pay the assessed tribute.  One should never measure a government’s behavior by its intent but the fruits of its actions.  And that is bitter fruit indeed for the totality of human history.  It is almost as if we have been in a fever-dream surrounded by inmates in a vast prison state which has effectively through indoctrination trained people to consciously think that harming others through fining, jailing, maiming and killing is the only blueprint for any possible society.  Think of that, a near consensus among thinking human beings that the only way to organize a just society is through terror.  Terrorism is the use of politically motivated violence against non-combatants or innocents in a kinder parlance.  One might say that the Global War on Terror which has exponentially increased the size of government has been pointed in the wrong direction.

We have friends and relations who enjoy boasting of law and order.  The tough guys who pronounce that the latest police beating was warranted and the prison rape the men will endure while caged for their sentence is perfectly justified for their crimes even if the offense were as banal as a paperwork violation, avoidance of taxes or an infraction against the tens of thousands of law no normal human could comprehend much less have an awareness of.  Remember that it is all about the law and not the human context because context is totally absent from government calculus.  It is part of its power.  I have mentioned before that every American is subject to indefinite detention in the alleged justice system the Federal government and its subsidiary political elements known as states have erected.  It is another tool in the arsenal of democracy that is the fancy name for mob rule subject to the kakocrats at the top of the system.  The government has been successful beyond their wildest expectations in creating a captive and occupied population from which they derive both their material succor and the sophisticated means to bully and control tens of millions of humans. The government must erect these officious and brutal means of suppression otherwise the small percentage of liberty minded folks who chafe at living on a feedlot and having their lives micromanaged would set a very bad example for the rest who would take notice of the people who elect not to abide by the system.  As with the likelihood of secession looming ever brighter, once the first person is allowed to opt out of the government confines, a stampede will commence that will be unstoppable.  This is why the IRS is invested with such formidable power to fine and cage recalcitrant taxpayers.

America has conducted a brilliant government campaign to put the state at the top tier of idolatry and the family and individual volition at the bottom.  This has been a two-tiered assault.  The government makes it very inconvenient to fight its depredations as an individual and ensures that the education system is kept in a tight orbit around government supremacism.  Most of my readers have attended some college and have seen first-hand the absolute monopoly of the government supremacist mindset among faculty, administration and student alike. When one suggests that non-violence may be a preferable building system for a peaceful society instead of the enslavement of government, one is almost universally scorned.  Is it not interesting that all the fevered anti-war rhetoric from the “left” has disappeared since the election of the latest scoundrel to the Presidency?  The collectivism permeates the American academy with very little exception and this from doyens in the humanities and social “sciences” whose jobs may belabor 8-12 hours per week unless they have paid teaching assistants available. The rest of the time certainly is not used to practice critical thinking but to sharpen the same weak-minded rationalizations of the academy to justify the ultimate goal of extinguishing every private aspect of human life.  They prettily dress the rhetoric is high-minded humanitarian goals but in the end they are the intellectual equivalents of prison guards in their moral imaginations.

And then we have the mooing from certain sections of the feedlot about the sacred Constitution and returning to our roots to regain our liberties.  Fat chance since the germination of that document gave us the leviathan we labor under today.

Here is a thought experiment for you:  the next time you have a convivial discussion of politics or society with your friends and family, tell them to see if they are capable of conducting the discussion without advocating the initiation of violence on their fellow humans.  See if the conversation about politics will in any fashion examine alternatives to inherent violence and compulsion.  While I despise the false front of Left and Right which are simply degrees of collectivism, you will notice that even the “peace” advocates tend to embrace the use of force domestically and the “hawks” tend to glory in the killing of humans around the globe.  Yet, it is hard to distinguish between them anymore especially since the latest occupant of the White House, despite a rather elegant Leftish pedigree, is indistinguishable in his actions from his neoconservative/socialist predecessor.  The government program of indoctrination has been so thorough that most will be speechless and unable to communicate because government is not about the noble ideas of securing rights or ensuring liberty but the cardinal opposite.  In its most naked and unadorned form, it is simply a cop.  Invested with all we have come to expect from that particular class: a base viciousness with no limit whatsoever in the ability to cage, maim and kill for crimes that would not exist within the realm of common sense or decency.  Killing in the name of love, indeed.

I plan on embarking on a quixotic and scintillating quest in the near future to explicate why cooperation and non-violence (except in response to initiated violence) are the preferable and virtuous way to order a society.  This may be a Sisyphean task but a necessary one.  We owe it to our children to offer a better future and not a more comfortable (for now) prison cell.

“A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases. The result — and a natural one — has been that we have had governments, State and national, devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth. And these crimes have been committed, and this war waged, by men, and the descendants of men, who, less than a hundred years ago, said that all men were equal, and could owe neither service to individuals, nor allegiance to governments, except with their own consent.”

– Lysander Spooner

Notes in the Margin: I am looking for original essays that explain why roads, law and a myriad of other “public” goods and services must be privatized.  Please note that my use of the word privatized does not mean the contracting out of a service by a government entity but the complete divorce from any government grasp or reach.  It will be published under your name and I reserve the right to edit for grammar and spelling but not content.

Scott Horton interviewed me for antiwar.com recently.  You will find it here:    https://antiwar.com/radio/2010/12/13/william-buppert/ Please be sure to add comments if you please.

Copyright © 2010 by zerogov.com

10 Dec ZeroGov Rising by Bill Buppert

Row, Citizen!

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

– H.L. Mencken

My friend, Skip, and I have known each other over a decade and he is one of the smartest technical weapons minds around.  We have often shared a tactical symbiosis between his gunsmithing skills and my gun handling aplomb.  I have mentioned him several times and he is the honorary Weapons/Kit Technical Editor for Hezekiah Wyman which has now been reflagged as ZeroGov and he is the inspiration for the occasional Village Praxis Series we run which will make a more frequent appearance in the realm in the near future.

He is fond of penning annotated and comprehensive equipment lists for the Village as we adapt to the emerging needs predicated by the mischief Mordor offers us every day.  Frequent readers of this site are aware that the economic perfect storm and fiat currency collapse is inevitable which makes any self-respecting man reflect on what he needs to do to provide for the family in grid-up or grid-down doomsday scenario.  We all know that there is a storm on the horizon and there is NO remedy for the current cavalcade of calamities that is running down the tracks toward us.

So sometime in the next week I will publish Skip’s latest opus on basic kit especially in light of the recent local Village refit for the AR platform.

Don’t panic, just get ready.  Fear is the mind-killer and we simply have to assume that the political and physical landscape of America is going to change in a big way.  In ten years, you will not recognize what is below the Canadian border and what is above the Mexican border.  It will be brand new.  There will be pockets of every political stripe throughout the land.  The Northeast will most likely to devolve into a Sovietized totalitarian economic basket-case and the Inland Western states will form confederations that will experiment in a variety of smaller and non-government polities and the remainder of the nation will fill in everything in between.  For the first time since the dark day that the Constitution smothered the land in 1791 with unlimited taxation and central planning, genuine unfettered economic opportunity and freedom will emerge in fragile seedbeds around the country.

We have to channel the Flinter.

The planet Flint was an imaginary planet in F. Paul Wilson’s magnificent LaNague Federation books.  It was a non-aligned member in a broad system of Earth-like planets that refused to cooperate in the ordinary extortion scheme that passes for governance on the off-worlds.  What distinguished it from other worlds was the insistence that while the Rothbardian Non-Aggression Axiom was observed, the planet bristled with a population that was schooled in the open hand and weaponized arts to such a huge extent that they were a tremendous deterrent to both invasion and the emergence of government on the planet; quite literally an anarchist Sparta (unlike the near communist Sparta of old).  Switzerland, although rapidly devolving its defensive sensibilities is a near-analog for the philosophical structure to include the cantonment for political decentralization.

It is time to become a Flinter nation even if it is simply your family or close friends or community. It is time to unlearn all the foul and evil propaganda drilled into us since childhood to accept that elections can authorize the jailing of your neighbors as long as 51% agree, that the theft of that same neighbor’s wages to transfer to someone else through force is righteous and that, ultimately, the maiming and killing of hundreds of thousands of your planetary neighbors will make you safer (what?).

It is time to understand that violence has a place only in self-defense, for pacifism is a sure recipe for enslavement and worse.

So teach your children well and salute the flag they are flying for the end is nigh.

Assange is a canary and the knives are out because the government is on its last legs even though it intends on going out in style at other people’s expense.  But then again government is always at other people’s expense.

Notes in the Margin:  ZeroGov is up and many thanks to Kaiser L for his extraordinary efforts in inaugurating this new chapter in the blog.  We are still tweaking the look and should be complete in the next week.  I do think the reflagging makes the intent of the blog rather unambiguous.  I will be accepting contributions if they fit the mood and mission of the blog so I am putting out the call for writing talent.  I retain all rights to edit for grammar and spelling but will never alter a contribution’s content.  The mission is simple:  initiate a sea change in people’s view of government;  in the inimitable words of Marc Stevens :  “Should a service or product be provided at the barrel of a gun?” This is the new abolition project; we seek to abolish ALL slavery.  William Wilberforce sets the tone:

“So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the Trade’s wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for Abolition. Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition.”

Copyright zerogov.com 2010

06 Dec Freedom Summit 2010 Initial After Action Review by Bill Buppert

Bill at the Sierra Vista Anti-War Rally (Armed, Of Course)

I just got back from the Freedom Summit and the Small Arms Review (SAR) Gun Show in Phoenix over the weekend.  We spent the entire day SAT at the SAR show and it was huge.  We got to lay hands on dozens of new weapons and kit.  Wonderful.  A good time was had by all and my speech on Sunday appeared to be well-received but I paled in performance when Stefan Molyneux took the stage at noon.  He may the new libertarian/anarchist rock star of the twenty-teens and his podcasts are apparently the most distributed of their type in the world.  All of these speeches will be available on freedoms-phoenix in the near future and I will post them as soon as they become available.

The non-statist/anarchist/abolitionist/voluntaryist meme is the major trend in the conference.  The limited government advocates are becoming as rare as hen’s teeth.  Four of the speakers on Sunday (including myself) were self-professed “zero government” advocates.  Much as secession was a four letter word ten years ago, the anarchist trend in thinking is gaining traction in the liberty community and may be the mainstream in the next ten years.

Marc Stevens was a speaker who really drove the point home with the rather simple but elegant observation that services rendered at the point of a gun may not be as virtuous as we suppose.  The cattle in the feedlot are starting to realize that their very purpose is the fulfillment of material sustenance and labor for the parasite/looter classes that provide the entire foundational support for a system that robs from Peter to pay Paul for no better reason than that they can get away with it.  I am fond of saying that macroeconomics is nothing more than the sophisticated academic rationalization of government intervention in the economy and the same applies for the entire academic field of political science which, in the end, is nothing more than a sophisticated philosophical apologia for the use or threat of violence against non-compliant individuals in a society.

We all realize that the government cannot allow you leniency when you break the myriad laws they pass nor shirk taxes and tribute to the very organization that enslaves them.  This is far worse than chattel slavery because it is a slavery that seeks to make the chained thankful for their fetters and constantly ask for more.  Government is nothing more than the human condition in a fetal position begging to be told what to do with a total absence of initiative to do anything outside of that construct.  The idea of a total absence of the state and its attendant violence TERRIFIES most of mankind because the conditioning has succeeded beyond the wildest expectation of the socio/psychopaths that people the political ruler and bureaucrat classes.   The statist white noise that is the media and the education axis around the globe has crippled people’s abilities to think for themselves and impoverished their moral imaginations.

I am going to channel Stefan’s brilliant keynote speech on Sunday and paraphrase a keen question he posed.  Stop attempting to prove why private enforcement mechanisms in medieval Iceland were a great way to mimic how to do so today.  Stop finding odd historical examples of liberty prevailing over statism.  Turn the rhetorical device around.  Urge whomever the government supremacist is you are talking to to explain to you, a new visitor from Mars with no knowledge of how Earth works, to explicate how roads are provisioned or why wars occur with such frequency or how a war on a person’s ability to alter their own consciousness are a betterment for mankind.  Ask them to explain why freedom is not superior to central planning and government violence.  Whether a neoconservative or a communist or a socialist or an environmentalist, have them walk you through why their system of collective governance is always superior to individual volition and independence.  Tug at their moral defensibility and find out why the abolition of self-ownership is a virtuous position.

I mentioned in my speech that the number one skill to master in the coming bad times is critical thinking;  thinking about thinking to improve your thinking through better thinking.  That is all it is.  Certainly you will have to master fallacies, the fundamentals of logic, Adler’s notion of reading books and casting a skeptical eye on everything, especially authority.  Government thinking is always shallow otherwise the entire system would not simply be based on the application of brute force from caging to torture to death.  Leverage that weakness.

William Wilberforce almost single-handedly broke the slave trade in England with his unique idea that a man’s self-ownership was a critical facet of being fully human but he did not complete his Herculean task.  He managed to shame most of the Western world into abandoning chattel slavery but this was simply one factor of government.  The rulers at the time saw there was no way to stem the tide of moral indignation (there is hope for us) and had to devise newer and more subtle means of enslavement.  Chattel slavery had been a planetary institution for more than five millennia and it was accepted universally with a milder variant in serfdom.  The other forms of servitude through regulatory and taxation regimes became the substitute for the chattel form.  The dawning of the industrial age had started to shatter the efficacy of chattel slavery since the perverse incentive structures (“You pretend to pay us and we will pretend to work”) precluded any provision of labor beyond raw material extraction. Admittedly, this did not prevent the communists from trying to reinvent the idea. The rest is history as universal education for the masses became job one for industrialized nations to condition and shape the populations into cowed (pun intended) masses being milked for the benefit of their respective authoritarian systems.

And here we are.

Stefan made a funny but profound comment during his presentation.  He was talking about the silliness of the notion of aliens invading earth and making war on it because governments would not be able to master interstellar space travel because they are…governments.

I would offer a tiny sliver of evidence to speak to the government’s ability to crush individual innovation and lose a technical edge.  America led the planet in the field of automatic weapons and machine guns until 1934 and then the edge fell off never to be regained again.  No more garage tinkering or innovation in the marketplace.  What happened?  The National Firearms Act was passed in 1934 which essentially nationalized the industry and restricted possession to the “only ones” and the affluent. Innovation and technology quickly tailed off and we had to import the lion’s share of technology to compete with the rest of the world.  As a philosophical porcupine, I am always interested in the latest weapons advances to make me safer.

The whole idea of no government is an alien concept to most it takes considerable effort to digest but the idea of self-government becomes attractive over time.  I plan on spending a fair amount of 2012 exploring and teasing out the intricacies of mankind’s evolution beyond servitude to others without their consent in my writing as Nero fiddles in Mordor.

Notes in the Margin: Hezekiah Wyman will officially close as a website effective tonight this week (Kaiser’s note: delay is my fault!) and in the morning a new dawn will emerge with the birth of zerogov.com.  The site will be reflagged and slightly improved.  My wife will even smile upon me because I have finally developed a website “where everyone can spell it” and find it.  Hezekiah’s spirit of defiance and expertise in liberty’s teeth will continue to be a muse for the scribbling here.  So, essentially, while a cosmetic change will occur, the substance and tenor of the site will remain the same;  the examination and pursuit of a stateless society in which humans will be the captains of their destiny and not cattle on a feedlot posing as a tax jurisdiction.  I will also start accepting guest postings on occasion if germane to the mission at hand, if interested, email me.

23 Nov The End of America: The Coming deSovietization of These United States by Bill Buppert

Notes in the Margin: I spoke at the Freedom Summit in Phoenix, AZ on the weekend of 3-5 December 2010 and here is a précis and brief introduction to the topic.  The speech is available in Media and Interviews on the site.   I am pessimistic about the survival of the present political apparatus formally known as the United States of America.  It is crumbling by every measure and unsustainable on its present course.  I don’t write this as a hopeful missive but as a cautionary tale written before the sad event. Most of these tales are written after the devastation has occurred.  You have a unique opportunity to be ready when our Wall collapses.  You can be ready for it and not caught without warning.  The mental and spiritual preparedness is up to you; I highly recommend you consider G3 – gold, guns and groceries because you will surely need them.  Your children don’t have to say a word; you know what you owe them. -BB

The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.  No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference, in principle — but only in degree — between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man’s ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.

– Lysander Spooner

I am often accused of hyperbole when I compare the America of 1917 with the Russian Revolution starting in the same year.  While I think all governments are kakocracies, these models tend to be among the worst.  Buppert’s Corollary to Acton’s Axiom is that power attracts the corruptible and that absolute power is even worse.  I contend that Lenin and Wilson were in the virtual starting blocks to race to create the perfect Soviet state.  Lincoln also shares a great deal of credit for the direction that Wilson steered the course for he wrote the preamble to put us all on the plantation.  Both countries flirted with free markets in one fashion or another for the first years of the 1920s.  Lenin tried a market liberalization program of in the New Economic Policy in 1921 to make up for the disastrous early consequences of War Communism.  The rapid central government planning led to the problems any thinking man assumes will happen when you put the government in charge of anything – shortages skyrocket and quality plummets.

Woodrow Wilson was President from 1912-20 and his yen for government control manifested itself in the pursuit of an income tax, anti-trust policy and the entry of America into the other unnecessary war, WWI.  In addition to WWI, this Democratic President also ramped up military action in Latin America.  Wilson went on to try to strangle the competitor revolution in Russia in the AEF to Siberia but ultimately failed.

Force — Force to the utmost; Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust. —

Deranged mass murderer Woodrow Wilson explains his philosophy of government, April 6, 1917.

Deranged mass murderer Vladimir Lenin, agreeing in principle with Wilson.

One can say that the only positive thing to come out of the Wilson regime was the appointment of Supreme Court Justice James C. McReynolds.  With the end of Wilson’s reign of Presidential terror the magisterial reigns of Harding and Coolidge saw a ringing in of freedom once again and then the Hoover administration re-energized the Soviet temptation in the American Executive and it has not slowed down since.

What is a Soviet?  Soviet is the Russian word for council or harmony; it became the universal parlance for a heavily centralized state in the 20^th century.  According to the legend in US government schools, they were the main enemy but in essence, what were the differences between the governing philosophies of the two nations?  They both relied except for a brief interregnum in the US from 1920-28 on a heavily regulated and centralized bureaucratic state emanating from a capitol region (DC and Moscow respectively).  Whether under the flags of Keynesianism or Marxism, both used the government and its planners as the schwerpunkt of all above-ground economic activity.  Now mind you, the body count under the more indelicate ministrations of the USSR were quite a bit more bloody-handed but the impetus especially under the Soviet-inspired administration of ReDDR of Marxian mischief made itself manifest across the fruited plain.   His Vice President, Henry Wallace, was quite the socialist dimwit.

The American government, whether through careful planning or serendipity, started to look to Mussolini-style state corporatism as a means to milk the cow and control it at the same time. Taking a cue from the National Socialists and Benito’s Fascists, the successors to Roosevelt started to use the central state to vertically and horizontally control corporate behavior through regulation and taxation.  It appears that the heavy-handed tactics used by the Marxist-Leninists may have been a bad fit for most Americans while a plea for national security and fairness would be a clever proxy to outright nationalization. Every President since Coolidge has expanded and dwarfed their predecessors in the creation of the American Leviathan state; even the wrongly sainted Reagan failed to reduce one program and expanded the scope and size of the acknowledged Federal budget to monstrous proportions.  What Abbott and Costello are to comedy is what Marx and Keynes are to economics and so we have the political theater of the Republicans and Democrats posing as different ideologies when in reality their shared aspirations are one:  the continued expansion of central government control into every human transaction.  Both parties are certainly war-like if a glance at the 20^th century is any indication.  The current Clown Posse in the WAFL (War Against Freedom and Liberty) House may be a different party from the Busheviks but the tenor and shape of all policy is the same;  endless expansion and limitless intrusion into people’s affairs. I was going to claim ours is rather bloodless but when you see the vicious increases in cop on citizen brutality and the latest security theater antics of another Clown Posse called the TSA in addition to the countless maimed and killed in our campaigns overseas, you get an idea our innocence may be oversold.  In 1989, the other central planning model folded but thanks to the Wilsonian variation on the lunatic antics of a centrally and politically managed fiat currency, America has managed to buy some time at the bar.  The tab is starting to edge into the astronomically insufferable and economically nonviable but the party continues on the Potomac.  Keyne’s animal spirits have truly prevailed in the fifth century Rome that got a new lease on life in DC.

As I mentioned, some of the brutal aspects of the Russian regime have certainly not been entertained in the West but not for want of trying such as the American Protective League during WWI and the Bonus Marchers beat-down in 1931.  We certainly do not have an analog to the Ukrainian terror famine in the 20^th century but the aboriginal Americans could make a robust case for the 19^th century.

One curious yet ominous analog is the Gulag systems.  These were not merely for political prisoners but all manner of convictions ranging from petty theft to murder along with the odious Malum prohibitum diktats government is so fond of.  America is now home to the highest per capita prison population on Earth in the Land of the Free.  The peak prison population in the gulags in the USSR was 1.7 million in 1953 under Stalin (TIME’s Man of the Year – twice) and we have the honor of matching that or trebling that if we count probation and parole.  It has increased tremendously just in the last half century along with a commensurate rise in what is essentially the bane of every free society – professional police forces.

Mind you, it is not as if the economic system the West chose was inferior to the Russians despite the learned prognostications of the eminent economists, Robert Samuelson and others, who through the 1980s thought the Soviet system of production would outstrip America because of his hostility to free markets. To wit:  “[T]he Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.” Samuelson was not alone and the idolatry of central planning in both politics and economics was and is a majority position in academia and the chattering classes.  One sees it today with the adoration in the Obama administration of admitted Communists who even get positions of authority.  I find that in an abstract way one could be at the dawn of the twentieth century and make a case for communism and socialism since they were relatively immature systems from the perspective of being tried on a grand scale.  But to be an advocate of central planning whether socialism or communism today is tantamount to being a subscriber to a system of galactic serial killing not to mention egregious economic illiteracy. As a matter of fact, membership in the Communist Party or related activities is no longer a prohibited act to get a security clearance in the US government.

The bottom line is that the two Soviet systems ran on a parallel course for awhile but the American course veered on a more fascistic and less socialist model than our friends in the East.  The only distinction being instead of direct nationalization vis a vis British Airways or the BBC or Aeroflot, the US adopted a regulatory regime that through a combination of top-down management and confiscatory taxation gave the illusion of commercial autonomy but married big business to big government.  Armentano proved conclusively that monopolies cannot exist if the government does not erect legal barriers to competition so the big businesses use government as a proxy to bludgeon the newcomers.  Why does the US Chamber of Commerce consistently behave in a non-capitalist fashion? The powers that be determined that more productivity through regulation and taxation and the massive reeducation efforts in the government school systems would enrich the expansion of government more than the heavy-handed Russian model.  With total taxation for individuals in America approaching sixty percent plus of income when all the factors of property, sales, income, excise and corporate taxes are figured along with the myriad of regulatory regimes that distort real prices, America certainly approaches the horrific levels of tax theft imposed on our betters in Europe.  The corporate tax rate is actually paid by all the consumers as an added business expense imposed by the government; another indication that a VAT is another tax on top of other…taxes.  It is ironic that more proximate the country to Russia, the lower the tax rates and that Russia has significantly lower tax rates than the US at 24 and 13% respectively for corporate and personal income tax rates.

The big question is when will our collapse occur?  All empires fall and all fiat currency regimes fail over time.  Productivity tends to decline when perverse incentives like all government behavior in the marketplace prompts folks to ask the Russian question:  “You pretend to pay us and we’ll pretend to work.”  We are in the midst of an economic perfect storm with the debt, deficit, non-funded transfer payment obligations, massive subsidy of sloth and irrational allocation of economic resources without a price signal (that would be ALL government programs) coupled with a death-wish for the world through our refusal to mind our own national business and the growing planet-wide rage to get us out of their lives.

There were NO senior analysts in the US or NATO intelligence organs who predicted the fall of the USSR in 1989.  Save one:  Robert Conquest, but he was no intelligence analyst.  He was one of the few sober Russophiles and Kremlinologists who had not been seduced by the Communist idea (along with the millions of political dissidents and émigrés to the West during the 20^th century).  He knew that the combination of a massive and intrusive police state, central planning and intrusive control of every aspect of life would inevitably lead to spectacular collapse.  We are there and they are us.

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So, yes, these united States are Soviet-lite and it is time for a change.  And that change is coming and the elites, rulers and innumerable apparatchiks in government positions across America are in for a rude awakening.  I hope that none of them share the fate of the late ruler of Romania but, on occasion, even insulated rulers reap what they sow  There will be tough times ahead for everyone and let’s hope that the crisis temper of the collapse of the Mordor Republic on the Potomac does not spur the people to replace it with a system that is just as violent, mendacious and venal as the last one.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back.

– H.L. Mencken

Copyright © 2010 by hezekiahwyman.com

16 Nov The Terrorists Won – Long Live the TSA by Bill Buppert

Schultz - The Patron Saint Of TSA

“You, you, and you…. panic. The rest of you, come with me.”
– U.S. Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant

The revelations just won’t stop.  The TSA will be pursuing legal action against a gentleman who refused both the Porno-Scan and the sexual groping by the molesters at the TSA.  He is being subject to a civil fine and more for leaving the airport and NOT boarding his flight after refusing the aforementioned indignities.  In other news, it appears that the TSA will not subject Muslim women to anything more than a head and neck search as it violates their religious rights under sharia law.  A fatwa has even been issued by the Figh Council against the scanning technology and follow-on molestation of passengers who opt out.  This remains uncorroborated but judging from the nonstop nonsense that comes from the TSA; this would be no surprise whatsoever.

It appears also that evidence is emerging that precedents have already been set to store the image data the TSA insists will not be stored.  Why would anyone be silly enough to suppose that ANY government agency is capable of recognizing the truth much less abiding by it?  What serves their bureaucratic interests more?  Secrecy or transparency?  The former will win out every time.  The TSA is merely a microcosm of the entire sick and Sovietized system of sclerotic and vicious governance that has been the American way since the end of the War of Northern Aggression in 1865.  All the states are merely administrative departments of the central government with no sovereignty whatsoever.

The law that created the TSA allowed the airport authorities to opt out after two years and use alternative means but no airports have stepped up to initiate that action.  Maybe one should.

In the end, the terrorists who conducted the 9/11 attacks in 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have succeeded beyong their wildest dreams.  The paroxysm of spending, borrowing, tyrannizing the innocents, trashing civil liberties and launching destructive debt-funded wars on hundreds of thousands of Muslim civil populations has created the perfect storm for reducing America to the debt-ridden, prison-police state that the United Kingdom had become after 1945.  The economic self-immolation and almost suicidal attempts on the part of the American government to alienate, infuriate and mobilize 1.5 billion Muslim believers is a sight to behold.  Much like a man swimming in a pool of gasoline in the dark using a lighter to illuminate his way.

The TSA is the poster child for everything that is wrong with government.  Hiring the lame, wicked and illiterate (60,000!) to enforce idiotic policies which endanger Americans at every turn in a melodrama of security theater that consumes hundreds of millions of dollars to no good end whatsoever.  If you shredded that money and turned it in to Astroturf and gave it away, it would be a better use.  And the worst part, they will never go away until the coming currency collapse scours and devours the tyrants in DC off the face of the Earth.

TSA's Finest - Protecting America One Grope at a Time

The TSA is merely a reflection of the larger tendency on the part of governments (all of them) to use crises to fetter the citizens and rob them of every productive element of wealth they produce.  We truly live in a police state that even the most closeted National Socialists in America could not have thought achievable in so short a span of time.  From the utter silliness of invading Iraq and Afghanistan and the “peace president” expanding it to what is now a four-front war to the ravaging of civil liberties in the name of national security.  The definitional standard for a police state means that every citizen is in danger of fines, jailing, maiming and killing at the hands of the armed tax eaters in their government approved costumes except the blanket immunity granted to the aforementioned praetorians doing the bidding of their masters.  In other words, when thugs like Pistole at the head of the TSA hire priggish proxies like Aguilar who hire creatures like this:

When he tried to assert his rights, Tyner was told by a TSA supervisor on tape, “By buying your ticket you gave up a lot of rights.”

The buck stops with everybody.

Aguilar, the TSA supervisor at San Diego is positing a novel concept in law in which a refusal by a citizen to submit to a search and the TSA’s subsequent refusal to allow him to board still does not relieve Tyner of being burdened with their heavy-handedness and increased fines.  They are trying to make an example of what should have happened a long time ago – stop cooperating with tyranny.  Tyner took a rather Gandhian approach to the TSA madness by simply saying he will not be a part of their passenger terror campaign.  How dare a citizen stand up in a non-violent fashion and say enough is enough?

Tyner is rather elegantly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.  You will note that he is not being hounded because he is a potential terrorist but he has really rankled the empty suits in the national security apparatus by refusing to play their game.  A police state cannot tolerate the slightest refusal to their over-reaching and intrusive regime of controlling every aspect of the population, otherwise the other sheep will be alerted that their long somambulance is over and it is time to fight.  To fight through non-cooperation from the voting booth to air travel to tax protests.

This country is on the brink of tremendous societal upheaval not only because of the economic seppuku the American Three Stooges, the executive, legislative and judiciary branches, have stumbled in to but the growing realization on the part of the cattle in the feedlot called America that resistance may not be futile.

You see, Pistole, Aguilar and the whole sordid oceans of apparatchiks that run these dangerous and useless “law enforcement” organizations with the power to rob Americans of their freedoms and liberties are al Qaeda’s closest allies in the these united States.  Not only has the TSA embarked on what can only be characterized as the first institutionalized sexual molestation program in the American government but they have done this:

The Obama administration has appointed Nawar Shora, legal director of the Arab-American Anti-Defamation Committee (ADC), to serve as a senior adviser for the TSA’s office of civil rights and civil liberties.

They are operating an intrusive racket at all the government airport hubs that systematically degrades Americans and tosses the Bill of Rights in the trash EVERYDAY.  Those who read my postings know that I consider the Constitution the enemy of human freedom but think the Bill of Rights were a weak rejoinder against its excesses.  Some might say they are rogue but they are no more rogue than the entire sordid and totalitarian superstructure known as Constitutional government in these united States.  They are the colossus that bestrides the Potomac much like the Eye of Mordor.

If the Islamic dream of a Muslim America were ever achieved, there would be hundreds of thousands of government apparatchiks both armed and unarmed who would gladly salute that flag and take the oath to serve the new masters.

Good God, that is what cops do.  It is not protect and serve but punish and suppress.  That is their nature and from the local police to the armed Federal agencies, they are the enforcers of the unknown multitude of bad laws that pollute the corpus of this once great land.  The TSA is merely the latest and most newsworthy example of police behavior.  I have said it before and it bears repeating:  if it weren’t for cops and tax collectors, America would be a free country.

If bin Laden is alive today, he is very content and grinning from ear to ear. He won.

The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another — and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men — three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless.

– Aristotle

Copyright © 2010 by hezekiahwyman.com

12 Nov Send the TSA Sex Toys for Security Training: Do Your Part, Citizen! by Bill Buppert

“TSA – Closing the barn door since 2001”

I propose that we institute a Dildos for Dummies program.  Sort of like Toys for Tots but this one specifically targets all the “grown-ups” and their professional cadre at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).  Hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans can take a part of whatever is left over after paying taxes and purchase these items and send them as gifts to the address below accompanied by a nice little card wishing them well and hoping that these training aids will enable them to service Americans more effectively at the thousands of TSA outposts that blight the American landscape at every airport.

John Pistole, known in some circles as Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistoles, is the current leader of the vaunted TSA.  Be sure to make the mailing address below both eh return and mailing address.  Here is his mailing address:

Transportation Security Administration
601 South 12th Street
Arlington, VA 20598

Here are some office symbols to put under John’s name when you send it out.

TSA Routing Symbols
TSA-1 Administrator
TSA-1 Business Transformation & Culture
TSA-1 OSC – Executive Secretariat
TSA-2 Chief Counsel
TSA-4 Strategic Communications and Public Affairs
TSA-5 Legislative Affairs
TSA-6 OSC Civil Rights and Liberties (OCRL)
TSA-9 CFO – Claims Processing
TSA-10 Intelligence & Analysis
TSA-11 OPT Information Technology/CIO
TSA-12 OPT – Operational and Technical Training
TSA-13 Inspection
TSA-14 CFO Finance
TSA-15 Model Workplace
TSA-16 OPT Security Technology
TSA-17 Administration (CAO)
TSA-18 Law Enforcement/FAMS
TSA-19 Transportation Threat Assessment & Credentialing
TSA-20 OSC Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
TSA-21 Human Capital
TSA-22 OSC Ombudsman
TSA-24 Risk Management – Annapolis Junction
TSA-25 Acquisition
TSA-28 Transportation Sector Network Management
TSA-29 Security Operations
TSA-30 OHC – Administrative Appeals and Review
TSA-31 OSC – Sensitive Security Information (SSI)
TSA-32 Operational Process and Technology
TSA-33 Special Counselor (OSC)
TSA-34 OPT – Risk Management and Strategic Planning
TSA-35 OPT – Operational and Performance Metrics
TSA-36 OSC Privacy
TSA-37 OSC Audit Liaison
TSA-901 OSC – Transportation Security Redress (OTSR)

Don’t bother sending anything to TSA 6, 20 or 36 because they haven’t hired anyone to work those functions yet.

The sex toys come in a variety of sizes and the bigger the better.  If enough large ones are received, the TSA can use them as office chairs to save money.

An alternate delivery option would be to bring them to the airport with you a la Robert Plant and offer them as a gift during the aggressive pat-down for those who wish to opt out of the Porno Scanner.  A sheepish and woeful “how did that get there” could always belay an uncomfortable situation.

As a result of the overwhelming popularity of the new invasive body search campaign by the TSA on traveling Americans, a variety of new programs are on the horizon to include:

• VOYEURS (Virtual Orientation for Youth and Elderly Rectal Search)
• NAMBLA Training (North American Man Boy Love Association)
• Future Sex Offenders of America, sort of like 4H but different
• The first government entity to establish a direct relationship with the National Association for the Advancement of Science & Art in Sexuality (NAASAS) which is the adult trade organization which provides professional and educational resources to unify and positively impact adult businesses.

Besides the global beacon to all pedophiles and pederasts the TSA has issued worldwide for their ultimate employment opportunity, the TSA may very well have stumbled onto a way to pay their own freight as a government agency by leasing or selling the rights to the archived material they collect with the imaging devices (they say they won’t [wink, wink]) or video footage of the more controversial episodes where the Americans subjected to the aggressive sexual pat-downs put up a ruckus.

So please, my fellow Americans, dig deep and often and send the gift that keeps on giving.   I just sent mine today.  Demonstrate to the TSA exactly how you feel about the invasive body search that degrades not only Americans but steals our very humanity from us.  If you travel, your wives and children no longer belong to themselves; they are now government property to sexually exploit as they wish.  This child molestation however you paint the pig.  TSA won’t be happy until you fly naked and in chains.

Copyright © 2010 by hezekiahwyman.com

11 Nov TSA Joins the Porn Industry by Bill Buppert

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

It really is ingenious.  The TSA is being used as the forefront of conditioning for the wet dream of American governance in the future.  What is that future?  To reduce all American cattle to the conditions that exist when we are all trapped in the airline fuselage at 35000 feet; the condition of unquestioning obedience to all commands issued by the government proxies disguised as flight attendants and airline pilots (more so the former than the latter).  You cannot do anything that is not government approved otherwise you may be fined, jailed or shot down on the tarmac.  In defense of the pilots, they are starting to get pretty uppity at their incompetent masters in the TSA and FAA.

Flight attendants, not so much; these rude, ill-trained waitresses in the sky whose primary job appears to be making the flight as uncomfortable as possible and ensuring that total compliance to ludicrous and silly government diktats are met to the letter.  When Stalin was staffing his secret police, he overlooked a goldmine of potential candidates here.  But then again, back in the day, the flight attendants were selected for their exquisite manners and good looks unlike today’s legion of overweight (ah, India!) and lumpy harridans whose only mission in life seems to be to skulk about the cabin with the customer service motif that informs the behavior of the apparatchiks behind the counter at the US Post Office and any local Motor Vehicles Revenue depot.

The entire air transport industry has become a virtually nationalized industry in a truly economically fascist sense in which ANY business transaction from ticketing to baggage to flight rules are the government’s whim.  n Now we have the TSA (Thugs Standing Around) adding to the long list of failures and theater that has been their raison d’être joining the lucrative porn industry even though like all government operations they will LOSE money.  The latest disgraceful endeavor by one the country’s least loved government agencies will be the legalization for the “only ones” to traffic in both naked pictures pilfered from Americans trying to board planes and the forced groping and molestation of passengers of all ages and both sexes who opt out of the imaging.  I have always had a suspicion that one of the sub rosa agendas of the TSA was to be the instrument to instill obedience and conditioning across a wide swath of subjects to make the once and future surveillance state more effective.  A means to soften and incrementally improve instant compliance to nameless armed and unarmed government lackeys in bad costumes.  How precious, by the way, that the TSA changed their uniform colors from white to blue in order to give the optical illusion of slimming the Macy’s Day Parade floats posing as TSA “officers”.

Most of these highly paid morons would fail to pass muster at a fast food franchise but here they are given the “color of law” and the authority to abuse and bully hundreds of fellow subjects and be paid to do so with minimal training and worse supervision.  Not only has the TSA been absolutely ineffective but it is probably one of the most useful employment schemes cooked up by the Federal government to take care of a non-problem since the heyday of RedDR’s bold socialist programs in the 1930s.

Ironically, the TSA has just hung the world’s largest Help Wanted sign out for the world’s sexual predators who can now have a comfortable job, nice pension and Federally granted immunity to view and potentially traffic in voyeuristic porn of every stripe.  As a bonus, they simply have to don a costume and they can lay hands on all the women and children they desire in a most ungentlemanly fashion.  A recipe for disaster but that is, after all, what government does.

Unlike a stop by our local constabulary on their never-ending pursuit of revenue for their masters, Americans have an opportunity here to see that this particular sex slave operation is completely optional.

Don’t fly.

Do you really believe the Feds when they say they will not store any images?  Do you really believe that the TSA employees will not conduct their own “profiling” to do what every teenage boy has desired for eons..and be paid to do so?  What the TSA is allowing and urging their employees to do is nothing short of sexual assault and child molestation.  The appearance of the pictures of young children they will have on their computer consoles is a punishable offense in every state that will land you on the Sex Offender list for the rest of your life whether you deserve it or not.  The Federal government is quite literally proclaiming that they are above the law and will ensure that the employees of the TSA will have the full protection of the law.  It would be interesting to see how many sex offenders are currently employed by the TSA.

It is sickening and disgusting.

This is not security; this is nothing more than further proof that the government is barking mad.  This is yet another instance of the rulers rationalizing evil for their own nefarious ends.  I would personally rather deal with the astronomically improbable instance of a terrorist taking over an aircraft than seeing my wife and children ogled or FFU (Federally Felt Up).

I have ruminated before how the men related to the  mothers, daughters and wives who have been brutalized by the armed and unarmed uniformed tax-eaters can get away with that kind of behavior with no fear for their lives every day after they have committed these acts against these women.  This is the same unspeakable thing.  Now another brick in the wall to prove that while there may be males in America, there are not many men.

Three huzzahs for the pilot Mike Roberts for putting his fortune and honor on the line and refusing to subject himself to this humiliation even though it may cost him his job as a pilot.

There have been a host of commentators more able than myself covering the other dimensions of this Federal Porn Initiative to include former Fatherland Security Czar Chertoff’s (he bears a striking and creepy resemblance to V.I. Lenin) enrichment in pimping the porn viewer technology, the airlines advantage in stifling the ticketing options through government restriction and the veritable hijacking of the private airline industry by the Federal government.   Most airports in America are owned by state and local governments with over-weaning interference from the Federal government.

The bottom line is this is yet another pristine example of why the TSA is a clown posse and why they are a natural adjunct, if not poster child, for the American Federal government.

Move along, citizen, nothing to see here…unless, of course, you are a TSA employee.

“If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of Almighty God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.”

– Samuel Adams

Copyright © 2010 by hezekiahwyman.com

09 Nov Restitution, Not Revenge

Kaiser Leib is an emerging light in libertarian commentary and recently penned this cogent and thoughtful rumination on restitution and vengeance.  I have long thought that the concept of criminal punishment through incarceration and fines was an odd way to remedy wrongs against persons.  I also believe that the monopoly on the administration of” justice” by the state will always lead to widespread corruption and abuse whether through prosecutorial over-reach, institutionalized rape or a host of other maladies that emerge when the state has the primary function.

This, of course, does not even touch on the horrendous notion of the state being able to murder citizens even if innocent through the death penalty.

There is even the notion of remanding the perpetrator to the tender (or not so tender) mercies of the aggrieved family in a privatized criminal justice system.

David Friedman and Stefan Molyneux have done journeyman’s work in building a foundation for the privatization of justice.   From the institution of police to the incarceration system to the War on Altering Your Consciousness; all have worked to warp the very fabric of the civilizational construct of the US into a hybrid Police-Prison state.  We are all just moments away from utter ruin by being escorted into the maws of the government justice system in the US.

A complete top-down appraisal of the entire approach to justice in  America is in order as soon as possible. –BB

On the 3rd of July, 2010, a driver in Colorado probably ran over a cyclist and proceeded to drive away. Lacking clarity of thought (as indicated by his aforementioned actions) he drove to a Pizza Hut, parked, and called Mercedes’ roadside assistance program to report the damage to his vehicle and guarantee it could be repaired.

This is an open-and-shut hit-and-run case, it would seem. Hit-and-run qualifies as a felony. But the man above is Martin Erzinger, and his employer is Morgan Stanley. He is a well-to-do man, a man of importance for whom a felony would be very damaging. By association, a felony charge would damage Morgan Stanley. Thus, the Daily Mail reports, Martin Erzinger is going to live the rest of his life without a felony record.

Internet message boards, and much of the online news media, are in an uproar over this chain of events. The Daily Mail’s article on the hit-and-run spawned a blog post by Reuters’ Felix Salmon, which inspired the sages at the Huffington Post to opine on the matter. Boingboing weighed in, spawning a Reddit comment thread to join one already posted in the politics section. These outlets cry out as one, against what appears to be a terrible miscarriage of justice.

Upon closer examination, though, I see no miscarriage of justice. Erzinger should pay, yes, and handsomely. His victim, a surgeon by the name of Steven Milo, has lived. Erzinger can, should and will pay for the entirety of Milo’s treatment, to say nothing of a princely sum for his pain and suffering, along with a recurring payment to replace any wages Milo may lose if he is unable to do his job. To remove more utility than that from Erzinger’s holdings – especially to fund government operations – would be ultimately counterproductive as it would reduce his ability to repay his victim.

Read the rest here:  https://kaiserleib.com/blog/?p=169

Notes in the Margin:  Thomas DiLorenzo penned another brilliant essay about a new book out on Jefferson that returns TJ back to his libertarian roots where he belongs.

05 Nov The Aftermath or How the Tea Party Learned to Love Big Government by Bill Buppert

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
– Alexis de Tocqueville

I have several predictions for the new Congress just elected in November 2010:

1.   The deficit and debt will continue to skyrocket.
2.  The US will continue to make war on the world.
3.  No government department will be destroyed , dismantled or suffer budget cuts.
4.  The Treasury Department and the Fed will continue their collusion to drive the value of the fiat dollar to zero.
5.  Liberties and freedoms will continue to diminish.

Republicans will continue an historic trend of big budgets and bigger spending.  The Tea Party will quite likely be a tempest in a…teapot and then the GOP will get back to business as usual.  And yes, the Tea Party has been co-opted by the GOP and not vice versa,  Despite the propaganda to the contrary, the Grand Old Politburo has tended to be just as spendthrift as their Democrat doppelgangers.  They are not a party of thrift and frugality but a political faction just as wedded to centralized control and spending with the added benefit of being easily seduced by the Democrat siren song for war that they sang during the first 68 years of the twentieth century.  The advocacy of war abroad always brings the more unpleasant aspects of exported violence home.  Witness the self-immolation of ALL aspects of liberty in the United Kingdom.

The two parties are simply the two left-wings on the statist bird of prey that happens to be the Federal government.  Slavers of a more sophisticated variety but slaveholders nonetheless.

R.W. Bradford, the late and great editor of Liberty magazine, avers:

But much more importantly, the correlations between spending and political parties changed radically. Prior to fiscal year 1970, there were very strong correlations between fiscal restraint and Republican control of the White House and Congress, and between spending increases and Democratic control of those institutions. Since then, there has been hardly any correlation, despite the fact that Republican candidates for office generally claim to favor fiscal restraint and Democratic candidates for office generally claim to favor the expansion of government.

The Bush II years provide ample evidence that Republican thrift is a myth and the Democrats have followed suit under Obama.

By comparison, please note that Democratic President Bill Clinton increased the National Debt by less than $18 Billion in his ENTIRE LAST YEAR in office! A far cry from what Bush and the Republicans gave us.

Bill Clinton steadily reduced the debt increase while he was in office, thanks largely to the 1993 Debt Reduction Act* that was OPPOSED BY EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN IN CONGRESS, led by Newt Gingrich! The Republicans claimed that the Debt Reduction Act would result in HIGHER deficits and also result in an economic recession during President Clinton’s term. Obviously, with hindsight they were completely wrong. This is not to say that Clinton was a great President, we have not had one of those since Grover Cleveland (and there are only a handful) but the behavior of the President in fiscal matters was better than what his successors would do.

This is not to diminish Obama’s fiscal illiteracy as he has done in nearly two years in office what it took almost 200 years to tally before the end of the 1980s.  The total acknowledged debt [ed:  I say acknowledged because I do not trust the government to keep honest books] now is 13.6 trillion, up from 10.6 trillion in the month Obama took his wrecking oath in Mordor; he did this in an astonishing 20 months time.

The system WILL collapse because it is historically unprecedented and economically illiterate to think otherwise.  The problem is revenue and spending.  The conventional answers are backwards, you do not raise taxes to meet present spending.  You determine what level of spending is legitimate and cut everything else.  IN a perfect world, the Federal government would not even exist and all the respective states would peacefully leave the Union and form voluntary confederation arrangements in their respective regions. Taxes will go up and production will go down.  A sure recipe to speed along the inevitable collapse.

Here is an example of how the present spending trends look:

Do you notice a peculiar trend for the Socialist Security spending?  Every two years, it is increasing by roughly fifteen percent which means that in twelve years it doubles.  It continues and ironically will not be stopped until it collapses.

Some conventional wisdom recommends cutting our defense by 50% and I would suggest we could cut it by 80% or more and still be safe.  The military-industrial complex is not necessarily an efficient conduit of job creation for dollars spent:

… defense spending creates 8,555 total jobs with $1 billion in spending. This is the fewest number of jobs of any of the alternative uses that we present.

Mind you, the authors were your typical collectivists whose only economic universe is comprised of the sheared and the shearers so their prognostications did not include the benefits of the sheared retaining more of their income to freely and creatively make job opportunities happen.

You will not see the Department of Defense cut nor our war on the world cease under Republican stewardship of the purse-strings in Congress.

And no, the record level of Federal employees (2.15 million) will not be cut…even by one.  And, incidentally, this does not include the figures for contracted employees of the Federal government

From 1981 through 2008, the civilian work force remained at about 1.1 million to 1.2 million, with a low of 1.07 million in 1986 and a high of more than 1.2 million in 1993 and in 2008. In 2009, the number jumped to 1.28 million.

Including both the civilian and defense sectors, the federal government will employ 2.15 million people in 2010 and 2.11 million in 2011, excluding Postal Service workers.

The administration says 79 percent of the increases in recent years are from departments related to the war on terrorism: Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, State and Veterans Affairs.

After years of decline at the end of the Cold War, the Defense Department is restaffing. Mr. Obama estimated that the Pentagon will have 720,000 employees this year and 757,000 employees next year – up from a low of 649,000 in 2003.

The Republicans will continue the statist quo.  They may have control of the house but they will not control themselves.

The impending doom continues…

“The concentrating [of] these [legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government] in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government.”

-Thomas Jefferson

Copyright © 2010 by hezekiahwyman.com

01 Nov Don’t Vote In Lamprey Nation by Bill Buppert

The American Voter

The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

– Steven Biko

Voting is a scam.  Voting is the means for tyrants to get a rubber stamp from their subject populations to continue control of wealth production, freedom of movement and aspirations of freedom and liberty.  It falls into the same mythos as the tired axiom that we make war on the world to keep us free at home.  As if the presence of troops abroad magically steals any notions of world travel from would-be villains confining them to the environs of conflict we create in our neo-imperialist pockets around the Earth.

Every few years, the bread and circuses of the sacred franchise begins anew and we are harried by politician and patriot alike to embrace our sacred duty and cast our vote at the designated political “vote counting” depot.  One used to use quaint paper products but now electronic balloting is all the rage and the machines are coming under increasing scrutiny as the possibilities of corruption become inevitable…and easier.  I remember hearing that if voting could change the system it would be illegal (Mencken).  Voting is best exemplified by the notion of having a talent contest for serial killers in whom your choice is to vote or abstain.  By voting you have registered a preference for evil, by abstaining you have committed to a moral stance of refusing to acknowledge the choice.  You have established that evil deserves neither acknowledgment nor approval, it deserves only eradication.

George Carlin described it in his own inimitable fashion:

“I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, ‘If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain,’ but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.”

Democracy has proven to be mob rule dressed up in majoritarian tyranny to serve special interests whose lobbying functions for parasitic looter classes will always have a superior means of coupling expected outcomes with focused agitation for passage.  Even when the occasional popular referendum does pass the muster of voters, the robed government employees are standing by to ensure that the long march of government into every facet of our lives is unimpeded.

Once the habit of robbing your neighbor at gunpoint with voter-endorsed tax increases becomes a popular notion, the state can’t help but be happy with the outcomes.  Year after year, decade after decade, the vote literally rocks the voter into a somnambulant slumber of assuming they control their destiny.  Yet the vote is a false choice until two things happen:

1.        A bullet-proof and reproducible voting record using paper ballots is in force for all election activity.  There is a reason why France and Denmark voted NO to endorse the EU Constitution.  Electronic balloting would have returned a YES vote because that is what the uber-statists desired in Europe.  The balloting for the remainder of the EU quickly converted to electronic balloting with the concomitant YES for the EU Constitution.

2.      The provision of a None of the Above (NOTA) ballot box on all candidates and referenda and the resulting vacancy in the office if NOTA gets the majority of votes.  Imagine political offices across the nation or globe remaining vacant and humans being forced to think for themselves and cooperate with neighbors in a community to use voluntarism and persuasion to advance their notions instead of the convenient government cudgel of violence and mayhem.  Until this becomes a reality, there are no real choices.

If you must...

Even then, I would not consider it a moral enterprise to use a majority to push other Americans into different sections of the feedlot.  The noticeable absence of either of the two aforementioned measures is proof enough that the system is designed to endorse the expansion of state power in favor of the collective over the individual.

The only difference between the two major parties is the spelling.  They are both government supremacist factions dedicated to the single purpose of expanding state power and reducing individual liberty and freedom.  Period.  From the local to the national level, the parties are forever cooking up new explanations for further increasing the amount of money they steal from the population or imposing new controls on behavior and ownership of wealth.

The Tea Party is no different; a far cry from the original intent of the savage civil disobedience of its inspiration.  I remember vividly the modest news story about the Tea Party organizers agonizing over the permit process to dump tea bags in the Mirror Pool at Mordor on the Potomac.  Such nice young men…

The vote simply gives the cattle in the feedlot the illusion they are masters of their fates but they will almost always end up in the killing chutes or pushing their neighbors into it…gleefully.  That is the destiny of all democracies:  the systematic denial of freedom and liberty in the name of security and the ever expanding customer base for a class of looters and parasites whose natural home is the State where the ruling class takes from everybody to give to the connected.

Some quotes from my favorite curmudgeon, H.L. Mencken:

“There’s really no point to voting.  If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.”

“Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right.”

Democracy has an “ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. . .When the national safety is menace. . .all the great tribunes of democracy. . .convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity.”

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. . . On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Enough said.

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

-Ambrose Bierce

Notes in the Margin: A terrific compendium of reasons NOT to vote can be found here:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/non-vote-arch.html

The video and audio to my debate with Dr. Howe at Freedom Fest 2010 have finally been loaded in the Media and Interviews Tab on the front page.

Copyright © 2010 by hezekiahwyman.com