Turning Point? Rutland Herald, You Have No Point
Posted by Alex R. Knight III on Nov 12, 2009 in Commentary • 1 commentA November 12 editorial appearing in Vermont’s Rutland Herald titled “A Turning Point” reveals in fineness the blind cult of statism; the idea that government, by using its power of violent coercion, is somehow capable of exercising a kind of noble compassion.
In lambasting “conservatives” (always the manner in which dogmatic leftists paint with a broad brush anyone who may even question the notion of government being anything but mankind’s greatest invention), the piece states:
“For 30 years or more, they have seen history going in their direction, even if the conservative revolution, as it has been styled, never achieved completion. This has been a span of history dominated by the idea that government was an impediment to progress and an enemy of freedom.”
Had any of this actually been the case – to wit, that “conservatives” had truly embraced the aforestated concept, likely government today would either be skeletal, or entirely non-existent. The government-worshippers would’ve all been discredited and discarded generations ago.
The editorial continues: “And yet the decades prior to the Reagan revolution were shaped by another view – that government had a vital role to play in guaranteeing security from attack by our enemies abroad and from economic catastrophe at home.”
Note immediately the ignorance and arrogance expressed by this collectivistic buffoon. Sorry, the U.S. government’s enemies are not necessarily my enemies, so don’t try dragging me under that umbrella with you, Mr. Statist. If the government you love like a religion hadn’t spent over the last 100 years meddling violently (and government only exists by use of violence) with people in foreign lands, Americans would have little to fear in terms of war or terrorism. And as for economic catastrophe? Explain to me how governmental interventionism, distortion of markets, baseless debt-driven fiat currency issued by the Federal Reserve, and heavy-handed taxation have helped anyone except politicians and others who produce nothing – much less anything of actual value.
It gets even better: “Roosevelt [Franklin D., not Teddy] saw both his great programs as essential in protecting freedom – his program to attack the Depression and his program to win World War II. It was his insight that no one can be free who lacks a job, a meal, a house, or good health.”
I could pull this apart in a thousand different ways while standing on my head, but let’s keep it simple: The Depression happened because the Federal Reserve wanted it to. When certain independent banks – yes, there were still some in those days – balked at becoming part of the Fed’s sinister system, they brought the walls down as a little punitive incentive to get all dissenters in line. As for WW2, it was only after FDR deliberately started a stell-trade war with the Japanese and insisted on shipping American arms to England at taxpayer expense that America got involved. Had he not been such a provocateur, no Americans would have died in or been forced to pay for that war. American ships and lives would’ve never been attacked. And further, how was “freedom” ever “protected” by a military draft, wage withholding (introduced in 1943 as a “voluntary” – and supposedly temporary — wage tax), rationing, etc.? And, I further fail to understand the logic behind the idea that forcing others at gunpoint to subsidize someone’s meals, house, and health is “essential in protecting freedom.” It sounds like one of the best ways, rather, to rationalize taking any and all freedom away. More of the same irrational bunk appears later in the piece: “Some of Roosevelt’s greatest accomplishments had to do with protecting Americans from the ravages of unchecked capitalism. He brought the nation’s banks under greater regulation. He established a system to protect farm income. He created Social Security for the elderly.”
Capitalism evil. The “nation’s” banks under tighter rules than the Fed. Farm subsidies. The SS Ponzi scheme first developed in Otto von Bismarck’s Prussia. Yeah, just great stuff.
This continues: “Social Security requires a government bureaucracy – ‘big government’ – but few would argue that establishing a basic level of economic security for the elderly does not secure freedom for them and their families.”
I guess I’m one of those few, pal. What this scam fosters is dependency on one end, and slavery on the other. There is no “freedom” being secured. That’s an illusion all in your Marxist mind, Mr. Statist.
The piece continues in the same collectivist vein – that housing, education (read “indoctrination”), food, health care, and a job are all somehow “rights” that must be payed for by others. This dimwit actually hails federal food stamps and housing (some of the worst slums around, by the way), Medicare and Medicaid as huge successes of government, when in truth they have all been miserably bureaucratized failures that have only succeeded in destroying individual liberty.
Towards the end, the author invokes a quote from FDR, the socialist: “In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people.”
If FDR can hear me, I’m an individualist all the way, 100% And the only way you can drag me down with your deluded notion of there being a “nation” or “one people” – both fictitious mental concepts at best – is at gunpoint.
And that kind of a system has nothing at all to do with freedom. Thus, neither does anything government does.
It is an interesting idea that before the Reagan Revolution there were decades of people embracing government as desirable and beneficial. But, in fact, the two decades immediately preceding Reagan’s election in 1980 were the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. In that period, we learned that government was being used widely for the suppression of civil rights, including the rights of minorities, women, children, young persons, and dissenters.
Americans also learned that Nixon was a traitor, that the Pentagon Papers revealed a series of lies about the conflict in Southeast Asia, that Americans had been sent to kill and bleed and die, not for freedom but for the profits of military contractor companies (death merchants). We have subsequently learned a lot more about Nixon, such his view that every child of inter-racial sex resulting in conception should be forcibly aborted.
Nixon was the Keynesian wet dream, a president willing to raise taxes to any level, impose wage and price controls, shift subsidies from trains to trucks, help big labor and big business with direct subsidies, impose tariff barriers and trade restrictions, remove the last vestiges of a gold cover clause (not a gold standard since Americans were still not allowed to own gold). His economic policies made no sense.
Nixon’s domestic political policy was to keep an enemies list, to order the Ohio governor to send troops to Kent State to slaughter civilians, and to engage in broad and unconstitutional wire tapping. He also targeted certain people for IRS audits and other government shake downs.
His foreign policy was mass murder. Between CIA-supported LBJ and CIA-supported Nixon, the war in Southeast Asia, the Vietnam “conflict,” never declared as a war by Congress, resulted in about 7.9 million casualties. It was based on a lie, the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” that LBJ once described as “those sailors were shooting at flying fish.”
The $111 billion spent between 1965 and 1975 on that conflict resulted in those millions of dead and wounded. And those billions would, based on the price of gold, be worth about $2 trillion in 2009 dollars. How does that make you feel, that the price of a dead or wounded child is worth about $395,000 in death merchant revenues?
Sure, Reagan was a jerk, his cronies were corrupt, his economic and foreign policies bankrupt. Rothbard took him to task for good reason. But his election was, in part, a response to the disgust with the Washington insiders who had brought LBJ and Nixon to power. Disgust with the Nixon era corruption and treason.
No, Reagan didn’t keep his promise to end the Selective Service administration, to close the departments of education and energy, to dramatically reduce the size and scope of government. He lost his fight to freeze federal regulations. Yes, he was just as belligerent in foreign policy as his predecessors, though with a shred of good sense in abandoning the aggression in Lebanon which was clearly not working out. But his campaign speeches and promises did appeal to many who were tired of the era of huge government. Too bad it didn’t work out better.