As it stands, the cumulative effects of a century of Force has our society’s resources so misallocated that we are in for a hell of a ride very soon. I believe the immutable correction of misallocations is going to be severe, and that we will have the attendant populist backlash that brings to the fore even harder forms of State Force. Perhaps in the 60’s there was a chance to defuse the time-bomb of misallocation begun in the 30’s (and perhaps back to the 1890’s), but instead we just connected more and more proverbial C-4 instead. And now, with the entitlement bomb for the boomers as the “trigger”, we are set for a chain reaction explosion that is going to leave us devastated.

Seriously, one of my major concerns is whether I (and my family) am going to be on the right side of the razor wire ten years from now. Some wicked times are ahead. I know such dire predictions were made by folk in the 60’s and 70’s, but we are now indeed up against an inability ot infuse significant new money into the supply without hyperinflation with a mind boggling amount of unfunded/underfunded welfare benefits coming due. We have War to pay for on the credit card as well. I don’t see any other time in history where a nation has been so in debt, with an entitlement class coming into its own, with no further monetary slight of hand available. No more promises can be made to delude the people. The Bill has come due, the credit card is maxxed, and the bank account is dry. And I have no doubt that the author of the article at the Rutland Herald will pointing accusing fingers at the peaceful and productive as the culprit and be calling loudly on the Force Merchants even more (razor wire and all).

Oh well.

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.