Chief Justice Roberts, Economic Fascist
by Gary North
On July 2, 1776, Congress voted for the Declaration of Independence. Most of the members signed it on July 4, although more signed over the next month.
The problem was this: a declaration of independence from King George III (and from Parliament, which was really the source of bureaucratic meddling and taxation of a staggering 1% of GDP), was that it led within six years to to massive debt, hyperinflation, and increased taxation. After 1788, it led to more of the same. It has finally led to Nanci Pelosi's ideological agent on the bench, John Roberts.
In upholding Obamacare, which is in fact Pelosicare, Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion. He indulged in some lawyer-like deception, as lawyers are paid to do. The law specifically says that the mandatory payment for not buying insurance is a penalty, not a tax. He determined that this penalty would be unconstitutional if it were a penalty (commerce clause), so, lo and behold, it's a tax!
This is all nonsense, of course. The government has regulated lots of things under the commerce clause, telling people what they must do, can do, and cannot do. If the Supreme Court gives any regulation a thumbs-up, the regulation continues. No single case is going to reverse the federal bureaucracy from pursuing its agenda under the commerce clause.
One man's opinion on what the commerce clause means is merely his opinion. This opinion does not bind the federal bureaucracy or any future Court decision. It just gave Roberts a way to justify his theory of the legality of unlimited federal taxation, now to be collected as fines for not buying health insurance.
He argued that the government can now force residents and citizens of the United States to buy health care insurance that they do not want, or else face a government-imposed fine for not buying it. He called this a tax. The majority five accepted this.
To the extent that his opinion has established a precedent, Roberts has at long last legalized open economic fascism to America. Of course, it has been alive and well every since the New Deal, and really since the First Bank of the United States (1791 to 1811). But now it has been placed under the judicial umbrella of a Supreme Court decision.
Economic fascism is the doctrine that there is a government-business alliance that makes the nation wealthy or strong militarily. This idea has never had a judicial basis before. Now it does.
A tax in America prior to last week was a payment by the citizen or legal entity to an agency of civil government. Not so in the new, improved American fascism, as articulated by Chief Justice Roberts. In fascism, a compulsory payment to a private, profit-seeking entity is considered a tax. You can pay it to an insurance company, or you can pay a fine to the federal government. Take your pick. They are both taxes.
CENTRAL BANKING
The first fascist agency in post-Constitution history was the First Bank of the United States. It went out of existence in 1811. The Second Bank of the United States created a replacement: 1816 to 1836.
In the historic case, McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall announced that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." He got the phrase from the attorneys who argued the case. It was not original with him. Conservatives love to quote that phrase. Conservatives are blind. Marshall used this doctrine to keep Maryland from levying a tax on a private entity: the Second Bank of the United States. In striking down this state tax, Marshall established the legality of economic fascism in America: the government-business alliance.
Maryland correctly argued that Congress did not have the right to delegate sovereignty to a private agency. This was the judicial heart of the matter. But Daniel Webster, who was the Bank's legal counsel, argued that Congress did have this right. Marshall sided with Webster.
The argument of Maryland is never discussed in the textbooks. This is one of those crucial facts in history that has gone down Orwell's memory hole. Marshall's creation of tax immunity for the Bank established the central legal principle of central banking. This is the cornerstone of the Federal Reserve System. It is sacrosanct. This is why any reference to Maryland's case against the Bank is not discussed. The textbooks discuss Marshall's principle as if the Bank's position as a private agency under the government's legal umbrella were somehow constitutional. It is constitutional only because Marshall steadfastly refused even to reply to the central argument of the state of Maryland.
Wikipedia provides the textbook version of the significance of this case.
This fundamental case established the following two principles:
The Constitution grants to Congress implied powers for implementing the Constitution's express powers, in order to create a functional national government.
State action may not impede valid constitutional exercises of power by the Federal government.
Marshall's verbal smokescreen worked. In fact, the decision established this principle above all: A privately owned central bank that is functionally independent of Congress possesses the legal characteristic of federal sovereignty, and is therefore immune from regulation by any lower jurisdiction.
This is never discussed. This is why it is so difficult to find the text of the opposing attorneys. Before the Internet, is was almost impossible. We never saw an extract from Maryland's argument. We never saw even a summary: the issue of delegated sovereignty to a private entity.
I have provided extracts from Maryland's presentation here.
That decision handed over the nation to private central planners. The central bank has the power over the central institution of the free market: money. Marshall gave America economic fascism at the center of the economy: money. Jackson and Congress removed it. He let the Second Bank's charter lapse in 1836. (Note: the following year, 1837, was the only year in U.S. history in which the U.S. government had no debt.)
Woodrow Wilson reimposed the system, under which we live.
Marshall's opinion stuck.
ROBERTS' OPINION
If Roberts' opinion sticks, the national fascist state has its marching orders.
The central government in Washington now has the power to compel Americans to pay private companies for services they do not want, on penalty of a fine. But this fine is now called a tax.
I have read a conservative's whitewash of this monstrous decision. The writer says this was a ruling of great cunning. It was, indeed. This is one more example of terminally naive conservatives who dream that the American fascist state can be reversed on a legal technicality. Not now. Not if Roberts' argument sticks.
Roberts has enunciated as a principle of law the fundamental principle of the fascist economy: there is a legitimate government-business alliance, established by law, which places government over the private, profit-seeking business, and the business in return is granted some of the immunities possessed by the state. It means that a business can make you an offer you can't refuse. This principle is now the law of the land.
Americans must now pay insurance companies their pound of flesh or else pay a fine to the federal government. This fine is called a tax by Roberts.
Watch premiums rise!
ECONOMIC FASCISM: INDIRECT AND DIRECT
In 1819, the attorney for the state of Maryland argued against the chartering of a profit-seeking central bank is the name of the power to tax or in the name of the commerce clause. His words seem prophetic. He asked the right questions. John Marshall rejected the obvious answer: "no." He said "yes." He upheld the Second Bank of the United States. We would be wise to understand the issues raised by the losers.
But we contend, that the government of the United States must confine themselves, in the collection and expenditure of revenue, to the means which are specifically enumerated in the constitution, or such auxiliary means as are naturally connected with the specific means.
But what natural connection is there between the collection of taxes, and the incorporation of a company of bankers? Can it possibly be said, that because congress is invested with the power of raising and supporting armies, that it may give a charter of monopoly to a trading corporation, as a bounty for enlisting men? Or that, under its more analogous power of regulating commerce, it may establish an East or a West India company, with the exclusive privilege of trading with those parts of the world? Can it establish a corporation of farmers of the revenue, or burden the internal industry of the states with vexatious monopolies of their staple productions?
Justice Roberts also said "yes" – not on the commerce clause, but on taxes. The power to tax is the power to destroy. It is also the power to force Americans to pay for insurance they do not want to fund high-risk participants in the program.
In 1819, American economic fascism was indirect and limited to central banking: a prohibition against a state tax on a privately owned, federally chartered agency. This indirectly subsidized a private corporation. Under Roberts' economic fascism, Americans will be taxed by the government unless they do business with privately owned agencies. This indirectly subsidizes private insurance agencies.
CONCLUSION
Economically, nothing has changed. It's the same old system. What makes this new variant new is that it is judicially protected under the taxation clause rather than the commerce clause.
It's like dog turds or cat turds. Take your pick.
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1162.html
Monday, July 2, 2012
"The truth is that the big health insurance companies drafted much of the law. The Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare was very good news for health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and government bureaucrats. It was very bad news for doctors and patients."
Michael Snyder
You might as well stick a fork in the U.S. healthcare system because it is finished. Even before Obamacare, Americans paid far more for healthcare than anyone else in the world. Now thanks to Obamacare we will be faced with much higher health insurance premiums, much higher taxes, much longer waits to see doctors and more government bureaucrats involved in our lives than ever before. As I have written about previously, the U.S. healthcare industry is a horrible mess, and now Obamacare is going to take the entire system directly into the toilet. All over America today, families are going broke because of outrageous health insurance costs and suffocating medical debt, doctors are going broke and leaving the profession because they can’t make a living, and sick people are dying because they cannot get the care that they need. So what solution does Obama give us? A nearly 3,000 page monstrosity that will destroy what is left of our crumbling healthcare system and that will unleash 16,000 new IRS agents to hunt down the millions of Americans that do not currently have health insurance. For those that love Big Brother socialist totalitarianism, Obamacare is a dream come true. For the rest of us it is a total nightmare.
Obamacare is truly a Trojan horse. The millions of Americans that support Obamacare believe that they have been “given” something. But that is a lie.
All of us aren’t going to be getting free government healthcare as a result of this law.
Instead, we are all being forced to buy health insurance policies that many Americans do not even want from deeply corrupt health insurance companies that make more money when they provide less healthcare. If we don’t buy government-mandated health insurance the IRS will be coming after us. This reality was beautifully communicated by this cartoon that was posted on Facebook recently.
As a result of Obamacare, there will be more government intrusion in our lives than ever before. Hordes of government bureaucrats will now run the system, with predictable results.
If you think that the amount of paperwork in our healthcare system is bad now, just wait until this new law is fully implemented.
Is Obamacare complicated? For an answer to that question, just check out this flow chart. What sick minds came up with such a monstrosity?
Actually, we know that answer. The truth is that the big health insurance companies drafted much of the law. The Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare was very good news for health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and government bureaucrats. It was very bad news for doctors and patients.
So who is going to pay for this monstrous system?
You and I are.
Americans for Tax Reform has compiled a list of 21 of the new taxes that Americans will be paying as a result of Obamacare. And because Democrats have decided that they will fight to the death to save this law, the Republicans will have to take the White House, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives to have any chance of fully repealing it.
As I wrote about the other day, there are a whole host of reasons why Obamacare is bad for America. But instead of going on and on about what I think, I thought that I would share some of the very interesting things that other people have been saying about the Supreme Court Obamacare decision.
The following are 12 incredible Obamacare quotes that show that our wretched healthcare system is headed directly into the toilet….
#1 Donald Trump
Let me get this straight . . .
We’re going to be “gifted” with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don’t! Which purportedly covers at least ten million more people without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that didn’t read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a Dumbo President who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, for which we’ll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese , and financed by a country that’s broke!!!!!
‘What the hell could possibly go wrong?’
#2 Senior Wall Street Journal Economics Writer Stephen Moore during an interview with Fox and Friends….
“Again, whatever you want to call it Alisyn, fines, taxes, penalties, but three quarters of those costs will fall on the backs of families who make less than $120,00 a year, so it’s a big punch in the stomach to middle class families.”
#3 Dr. Elaina George of the Project 21 African-American Conservative Leadership Network
“Because of the mandate, Americans will be forced to pay for a system that will increase costs for patients, remove health care decisions from both the doctor and the patient and lead to rationing. It changes health care as we know it into a system based on one-size-fits-all, cost-controlled and conveyor belt socialized medicine”
#4 The incomparable Charlie Daniels
“The United States of America took a giant step toward a totalitarian socialist government when the Supreme Court voted to uphold Obamacare, allowing the individual mandate for the government to force American citizens to buy health insurance whether they want to or not.”
#5 Ron Paul
“This is patently obvious: the power to ‘regulate’ commerce cannot include the power to compel commerce! Those who claim otherwise simply ignore the plain meaning of the Constitution because they don’t want to limit federal power in any way. The commerce clause was intended simply to give Congress the power to regulate foreign trade, and also to prevent states from imposing tariffs on interstate goods. In Federalist Paper No. 22, Alexander Hamilton makes it clear the simple intent behind the clause was to prevent states from placing tolls or tariffs on goods as they passed through each state — a practice that had proven particularly destructive across the many principalities of the German empire.”
#6 U.S. Representative Todd Akin
“Today America is threatened with a stage three cancer of socialism, and Obamacare is exhibit 1. There are many of us here who have been fighting this for three years and we don’t really want the compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the post office introduced in our healthcare and we are not going to rest until every single line of this bill is repealed.”
#7 The Health Ranger Mike Adams
“But even if Obama is replaced in the White House, the damage has already been done. With its decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has set a precedent of government control over private paychecks, and that precedent has fundamentally crushed economic freedom in America and opened the door to limitless taxes for everything imaginable. King George III couldn’t have done it better.”
#8 Documentary Filmmaker Michael Moore
“You better get on the train or watch your party implode – that’s my words of advice to the Republican Party”
#9 The communications director of the Tenth Amendment Center Mike Maharrey
“The states simply need to follow Thomas Jefferson’s prescription and nullify the entire act. They should just refuse to implement this monstrosity. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has already indicated he will refuse, and other states should follow his lead.”
#10 Becky Ayers
I’ve never bought medical insurance. The only time a policy has covered me was when it came incidental to a job. The Lord has blessed me with disgustingly good health; then, too, when I was 18, my mother died of a brain tumor that had escaped diagnosis for six years despite excruciating headaches and other symptoms a professor of nursing later described as “classic.” If I were bleeding and unconscious, I might wind up in the clutches of the medical establishment, but never of my own volition.
So I deeply and personally resent Roberts’s little parlor-trick of a word-game. Forcing me to buy medical insurance is unconstitutional if we call it a “fine” but perfectly OK if it’s a “tax.”
#11 Byron Maduska in the Leavenworth Times….
“A new survey of Doctors has been released. The results are bleak.
If Obamacare is fully implemented, 83 percent will consider leaving the practice of medicine. Sixty-one percent say it’s an affront to their ethics. Eighty-five percent say it destroys the doctor-patient relationship. Sixty-five percent say governmental involvement is the cause of the problems in medical care now. Seventy-two percent say the insurance mandate won’t result in improved access to medical care. Seventy-four percent say they’ll stop accepting Medicare patients, or leave Medicare altogether. Seventy percent say reducing governmental involvement would be the single best fix for healthcare in this country. The negatives of Obamacare went on and on in the results of the survey.”
#12 Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli
“This decision goes against the very principle that America has a federal government of limited powers; a principle that the Founding Fathers clearly wrote into the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. The Constitution was meant to restrict the power of government precisely for the purpose of protecting your liberty and mine from the overreaching hand of the federal government. This unprecedented decision says that Congress has the authority to force citizens to buy private goods or face fines – a power it has never had in American history, and a power King George III and Parliament didn’t have over us when we were mere subjects of Great Britain. Since the federal government itself could never articulate to the court a constitutional limit to this power, Congress has gained an unlimited power to force citizens to buy anything.”
Link:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/12-incredible-obamacare-quotes-that-show-that-our-wretched-healthcare-system-is-headed-directly-into-the-toilet
"In a time when consumers are increasingly demanding transparency, free choice and the ability to shop around for competitive bargains, Obamacare codifies secrecy, mandatory compliance and monopolistic practices."
Mike Adams
Now that Obamacare has been ruled a tax by the U.S. Supreme Court, reality is starting to sink in for all those who emotionally supported it. Promoted as a way to provide either free health care or low-cost health care to the masses, the sobering reality is that under Obamacare, health insurance prices keep rising, not falling. That’s no surprise, of course, since the Obamacare legislation was practically written by the health insurance companies, and they sure didn’t put their weight behind a sweeping new law that would earn them less profit.
In an era when the so-called “99%” are sick and tired of being exploited by the one percent who control everything, they just handed their medical futures over to precisely the one percent who skillfully monopolize the conventional health care system!
Obamacare is, at every level, a huge victory for the one percent.
A costly new tax on the middle class
By the year 2016, the Obamacare “penalty” tax will reach roughly $2,000 per year for a two-person household. According to Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal, 75% of the financial burden of Obamacare’s new taxes will fall onto Americans making less than $120,000 a year (http://www.humanevents.com/2012/06/30/wsj-chief-economist-75-of-obama…). The great Middle Class, in other words, will bear this new tax more than anyone else.
In effect, what has really happened here is a great swindle: Obama got the middle class to support his legislation by promising it was NOT a tax, and by promising it would LOWER health insurance costs. In reality, however, it RAISES health insurance costs, it IS a tax, and the majority of that tax burden falls squarely on the very same middle-class voters who put Obama into office under false pretenses. That’s a swindle, by any definition.
Not surprisingly, this realization doesn’t sit well with many middle class taxpayers. While the original emotional appeal of Obamacare was nicely packaged and seductively marketed to the masses, the sobering, post-honeymoon reality slaps us all in the face like a wet fish: Smack! This thing is another huge tax increase on the working class! And on top of that, it gives the IRS scary new powers to pry into our private finances. How did you all think compliance with Obamacare was going to be enforced, anyway? It’s going to empower the IRS with even more agents!
Government monopoly for Big Pharma
Even worse than the trillions in new taxes and the IRS spy grid that’s now being set up to monitor compliance with Obamacare, there’s also the sobering fact that Obamacare never even attempted to give consumers a free choice in their health care providers. There’s no coverage of naturopathic medicine, herbal medicine, acupuncture or nutritional therapies. The entire law is written around — and for — Big Pharma and the conventional “sick care” industry that’s best described as a “medical racket.”
Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, we don’t even have a chance to opt out of this corrupt, failed system of patented chemical medications and overpriced surgical procedures. Now, we are forced to hand over our hard-earned money to the very same medical system that we already know is responsible for killing over 750,000 Americans a year. It’s called “iatrogenic death,” and it means death by health care.
So not only are we being chemically abused and medically enslaved in America, we are now financially forced to pay for the privilege of being raked over the coals by the medical establishment. It makes you wonder… where is the “care” in Obamacare?
But wait, there’s more! From this position of being coerced by the government to pay for a system of medicine you don’t even want, it’s not much of a leap to being coerced to undergo medical procedures you don’t want, either.
How Obamacare will lead to mandatory vaccinations for everyone
Forced vaccinations — for adults! — are on the way, friends. And here’s why: Once everybody is “in the system” of mandatory health care, we will begin to hear arguments like this:
“Anyone who refuses to get vaccinated against influenza is thereby at risk of being an influenza carrier and infecting other people, thus increasing health care costs for us all. To save money, government must force everyone to get vaccinated!”
It’s a false argument, of course, but it will be used to literally line people up at courthouses (with the threat of arrest and jail time) and force them all to be vaccinated against their will.
The same false logic can be used to force people to undergo chemotherapy, take AIDS drugs, undergo coronary bypass surgery or be subjected to almost any medical procedure deemed “necessary” by the government. In the realm of mental health and psychiatry, this opens up a Pandora’s Box of exploitation of patients for the purpose of raking in record profits for the criminally-operated psychiatric drug industry.
Such is the inevitable abuse of monopolistic market practices enforced by a corrupt government that serves the interests of its corporate masters: Once the sick care industry has this monopoly and can force everyone to participate, they will exploit that advantage to its fullest profiteering capacity.
Remember: It is the dream of every corporation to dominate the world. Obamacare just gave Big Pharma and the other sick care giants huge monopolistic cheats to pursue precisely that goal.
Sober up, America
In a time when consumers are increasingly demanding transparency, free choice and the ability to shop around for competitive bargains, Obamacare codifies secrecy, mandatory compliance and monopolistic practices.
Maybe it’s time to sober up and take an honest look at what Obamacare really is instead of what Obama promised it would be. People bought into the dream, but what they actually received was a monumental swindle.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/obamacare-the-great-swindle.html
Sunday, July 1, 2012
"As we have seen in other areas of government domination — immigration, the drug war, public schooling, etc. — a government intervention never resolves the crisis that precipitated it. Instead, it only makes things worse than before. When things get worse, the statists inevitably call for a new intervention intended to fix the crisis. The situation only gets worse, which precipitates calls for new interventions. That’s precisely what has happened in immigration, the drug war, public schooling, and healthcare."
The Mandate Was Never the Issue
by Jacob G. Hornberger
It really doesn’t matter which way the Supreme Court ruled on President Obama’s healthcare mandate. As long as the government is involved in healthcare, there is going to be an endless series of interventions, leading ultimately to a total government takeover of the entire healthcare arena.
For months, we have seen conservatives obsessing over the mandate, suggesting that the defeat of the mandate would be some sort of gigantic victory for economic freedom.
What nonsense. The reason that the mandate was enacted was to address the healthcare crisis. If the mandate had failed to pass or if it had been declared unconstitutional, the government programs that instigated the crisis would have remained in existence. That would have necessarily entailed some other type of new interventions to address the existing crisis.
The fundamental problem is that conservatives and, of course, liberals continue to firmly embrace the programs that are at the root of the healthcare crisis: Medicare, Medicaid, medical licensure, and government regulation. As long as the root causes of the healthcare crisis are permitted to remain in existence, the healthcare crisis will continue to exist, which means that both conservatives and liberals will inevitably be coming up with their own favorite interventions to address the crisis, which will only worsen the crisis, which will mean, of course, calls for new interventions.
There is but one solution to America’s healthcare woes — to get rid of the root cause of such woes. That means an immediate repeal (not reform) of Medicare, Medicare, medical licensure, and healthcare and insurance regulation — and a repeal of the taxes that are collected to fund such things. The solution involves a complete separation of healthcare and the state, just as our ancestors separated religion and the state. Leave people free to keep their own money and provide for their own healthcare.
The United States once had the greatest healthcare system in the world. Healthcare was reasonably priced in the free market and physicians loved their profession. Not anymore. Healthcare costs have soared out of control and doctors are retiring early, now hating what they do in life. The reason? Socialism and interventionism, in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, licensure, and regulation.
As we have seen in other areas of government domination — immigration, the drug war, public schooling, etc. — a government intervention never resolves the crisis that precipitated it. Instead, it only makes things worse than before. When things get worse, the statists inevitably call for a new intervention intended to fix the crisis. The situation only gets worse, which precipitates calls for new interventions. That’s precisely what has happened in immigration, the drug war, public schooling, and healthcare.
Despite the manifest failure of socialism and interventionism all over the world, American statists just won’t let go. Like their statist counterparts around the world (e.g., in Greece, Italy, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, China, etc.), they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that their beloved socialist and interventionist paradigm has failed.
But as things continue to deteriorate, more and more people are discovering that we libertarians have been right about this from the beginning: It was a horrible, immoral mistake for America to have adopted Medicare, Medicaid, licensure, and regulation.
Instead, America should have continued down the road to free markets, private property, and limited government, a road that continued to encompass a free market healthcare system.
That is still the right road — the road to recovery — the road to a healthy, prosperous, peaceful, and free society.
Link:
http://www.fff.org/blog/index.asp
by Jacob G. Hornberger
It really doesn’t matter which way the Supreme Court ruled on President Obama’s healthcare mandate. As long as the government is involved in healthcare, there is going to be an endless series of interventions, leading ultimately to a total government takeover of the entire healthcare arena.
For months, we have seen conservatives obsessing over the mandate, suggesting that the defeat of the mandate would be some sort of gigantic victory for economic freedom.
What nonsense. The reason that the mandate was enacted was to address the healthcare crisis. If the mandate had failed to pass or if it had been declared unconstitutional, the government programs that instigated the crisis would have remained in existence. That would have necessarily entailed some other type of new interventions to address the existing crisis.
The fundamental problem is that conservatives and, of course, liberals continue to firmly embrace the programs that are at the root of the healthcare crisis: Medicare, Medicaid, medical licensure, and government regulation. As long as the root causes of the healthcare crisis are permitted to remain in existence, the healthcare crisis will continue to exist, which means that both conservatives and liberals will inevitably be coming up with their own favorite interventions to address the crisis, which will only worsen the crisis, which will mean, of course, calls for new interventions.
There is but one solution to America’s healthcare woes — to get rid of the root cause of such woes. That means an immediate repeal (not reform) of Medicare, Medicare, medical licensure, and healthcare and insurance regulation — and a repeal of the taxes that are collected to fund such things. The solution involves a complete separation of healthcare and the state, just as our ancestors separated religion and the state. Leave people free to keep their own money and provide for their own healthcare.
The United States once had the greatest healthcare system in the world. Healthcare was reasonably priced in the free market and physicians loved their profession. Not anymore. Healthcare costs have soared out of control and doctors are retiring early, now hating what they do in life. The reason? Socialism and interventionism, in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, licensure, and regulation.
As we have seen in other areas of government domination — immigration, the drug war, public schooling, etc. — a government intervention never resolves the crisis that precipitated it. Instead, it only makes things worse than before. When things get worse, the statists inevitably call for a new intervention intended to fix the crisis. The situation only gets worse, which precipitates calls for new interventions. That’s precisely what has happened in immigration, the drug war, public schooling, and healthcare.
Despite the manifest failure of socialism and interventionism all over the world, American statists just won’t let go. Like their statist counterparts around the world (e.g., in Greece, Italy, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, China, etc.), they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that their beloved socialist and interventionist paradigm has failed.
But as things continue to deteriorate, more and more people are discovering that we libertarians have been right about this from the beginning: It was a horrible, immoral mistake for America to have adopted Medicare, Medicaid, licensure, and regulation.
Instead, America should have continued down the road to free markets, private property, and limited government, a road that continued to encompass a free market healthcare system.
That is still the right road — the road to recovery — the road to a healthy, prosperous, peaceful, and free society.
Link:
http://www.fff.org/blog/index.asp
"The ingredients for a "perfect storm" are slowly coming together, and in the months ahead we could very well see the next wave of the economic collapse strike..."
17 Reasons To Be EXTREMELY Concerned About The Second Half Of 2012
What is the second half of 2012 going to bring? Are things going to get even worse than they are right now? Unfortunately, that appears more likely with each passing day. I will admit that I am extremely concerned about the second half of 2012. Historically, a financial crisis is much more likely to begin in the fall than during any other season of the year. Just think about it. The stock market crash of 1929 happened in the fall. "Black Monday" happened on October 19th, 1987. The financial crisis of 2008 started in the fall. There just seems to be something about the fall that brings out the worst in the financial markets. But of course there is not a stock market crash every year. So are there specific reasons why we should be extremely concerned about what is coming this year? Yes, there are. The ingredients for a "perfect storm" are slowly coming together, and in the months ahead we could very well see the next wave of the economic collapse strike. Sadly, we have never even come close to recovering from the last recession, and this next crisis might end up being even more painful than the last one.
The following are 17 reasons to be extremely concerned about the second half of 2012....
Read the rest here:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/17-reasons-to-be-extremely-concerned-about-the-second-half-of-2012
What is the second half of 2012 going to bring? Are things going to get even worse than they are right now? Unfortunately, that appears more likely with each passing day. I will admit that I am extremely concerned about the second half of 2012. Historically, a financial crisis is much more likely to begin in the fall than during any other season of the year. Just think about it. The stock market crash of 1929 happened in the fall. "Black Monday" happened on October 19th, 1987. The financial crisis of 2008 started in the fall. There just seems to be something about the fall that brings out the worst in the financial markets. But of course there is not a stock market crash every year. So are there specific reasons why we should be extremely concerned about what is coming this year? Yes, there are. The ingredients for a "perfect storm" are slowly coming together, and in the months ahead we could very well see the next wave of the economic collapse strike. Sadly, we have never even come close to recovering from the last recession, and this next crisis might end up being even more painful than the last one.
The following are 17 reasons to be extremely concerned about the second half of 2012....
Read the rest here:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/17-reasons-to-be-extremely-concerned-about-the-second-half-of-2012
Rating our Presidents...
Rating and Ranking Our Presidents
by Patrick J. Buchanan
In 1948, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. wrote for Life magazine a controversial article on a subject that has been the cause of spirited and acrimonious debate ever since. He listed the consensus of our academic elite as to which American presidents had been Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average and Failures.
Leading the list were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and FDR. Below, but also among the Greats, were Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The Near Greats were Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams and James K. Polk.
In 1962, Schlesinger followed with a New York Times piece, also based on the responses of historians, political scientists and journalists. This list had the same top seven. But Jackson had fallen to Near Great and Polk, who took the Southwest and California away from Mexico, had risen from 10th to eighth.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others have since produced their own rankings. The latest in the field is Robert Merry, a lifelong journalist and now editor at The National Interest. In "Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians," Merry adds a new criterion. Did this president win a second term, and was he succeeded by a man of his own party?
For this would mean his contemporaries, the American people of that era, had judged him to be a good, successful or even great president.
In the 20th century, McKinley, twice elected, but assassinated in 1901, left his office to Theodore Roosevelt, who won in his own right in 1904 and was succeeded by his friend and ally William Howard Taft.
FDR won four terms, and on his death in 1945 was succeeded by Vice President Harry Truman, who won in his own right in 1948.
Ronald Reagan won two landslides, pulled us out of the economic malaise of the Jimmy Carter presidency, won the Cold War and was succeeded by his vice president, George H.W. Bush, who swept 40 states in 1988.
Yet some historians have rated Carter, repudiated after one term, higher than Reagan, which tells us more about who has been doing the ranking than it does about Ronald Reagan.
Consider Warren G. Harding. After his 1920 landslide, he died in office in 1923. His successor, Calvin Coolidge, was elected in a landslide in 1924, and in 1928 Herbert Hoover won another Republican landslide.
Yet historians rank Coolidge as mediocre and Harding among our worst presidents. Liberal ideology has never lacked for a warm dwelling place in the history departments of America's universities.
Wilson's second term was an historic failure. After winning in 1916 on the slogan, "He kept us out of war!" he plunged us into a European bloodbath that produced 116,000 U.S. dead and a Versailles treaty that rewarded our imperial allies with new African, Middle East and Asian colonies, giving the lie to Wilson's promise that this was a war to "make the world safe for democracy."
Wilson – not Harding, Coolidge or Hoover, all of whom tried to ease the vindictive terms imposed on a defeated but democratic Germany – set the table for Nazism. Adolf Hitler was born at Versailles.
In 1918, Wilson lost both houses of Congress, and his party was crushed in 1920. Americans concluded that his second term had been a failure. Yet historians mark him as Great or Near Great.
Harding brought us out of the Wilson depression of 1919-1920 without any Obama-like intervention in the economy, cut the income tax rate by two-thirds, gave us the Washington Naval Agreement, the greatest arms reduction treaty in history, and worked to alleviate the most onerous aspects of the Versailles treaty that Wilson had imposed on Germany.
Harding and Coolidge gave America the greatest prosperity it had ever known, the Roaring Twenties, and the people rewarded them accordingly.
Yes, some of Harding's cronies were crooks – but so, too, were some of Harry Truman's, whose second term was marked by scandal, political nastiness and a winless war, after which he was repudiated by a nation that gave Dwight Eisenhower a landslide.
"Communism, corruption and Korea" was the slogan attached to Truman's legacy by the GOP in 1952. America agreed.
Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War in six months and presided over eight years of peace and prosperity, is now rising in the rankings of historians, some of whom now put him as high as 11th.
Though a plurality of Americans list John F. Kennedy in polls as the best president of their lifetime, fewer historians still share that view.
Other presidents are difficult to rank.
Richard Nixon's second term resulted in his resignation.
Yet his first term – ending the Vietnam War and the draft, creating the Cancer Institute and Environmental Protection Agency, creating a new majority that gave the GOP five victories in six presidential elections – was judged by the American people such a smashing success they rewarded him with a 49-state landslide.
In "Where They Stand," Bob Merry offers his own assessments. Buy his book, take it to the beach, and bring the subject up with the after-dinner drinks. A long and loud discussion should ensue.
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan249.html
by Patrick J. Buchanan
In 1948, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. wrote for Life magazine a controversial article on a subject that has been the cause of spirited and acrimonious debate ever since. He listed the consensus of our academic elite as to which American presidents had been Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average and Failures.
Leading the list were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and FDR. Below, but also among the Greats, were Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The Near Greats were Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams and James K. Polk.
In 1962, Schlesinger followed with a New York Times piece, also based on the responses of historians, political scientists and journalists. This list had the same top seven. But Jackson had fallen to Near Great and Polk, who took the Southwest and California away from Mexico, had risen from 10th to eighth.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others have since produced their own rankings. The latest in the field is Robert Merry, a lifelong journalist and now editor at The National Interest. In "Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians," Merry adds a new criterion. Did this president win a second term, and was he succeeded by a man of his own party?
For this would mean his contemporaries, the American people of that era, had judged him to be a good, successful or even great president.
In the 20th century, McKinley, twice elected, but assassinated in 1901, left his office to Theodore Roosevelt, who won in his own right in 1904 and was succeeded by his friend and ally William Howard Taft.
FDR won four terms, and on his death in 1945 was succeeded by Vice President Harry Truman, who won in his own right in 1948.
Ronald Reagan won two landslides, pulled us out of the economic malaise of the Jimmy Carter presidency, won the Cold War and was succeeded by his vice president, George H.W. Bush, who swept 40 states in 1988.
Yet some historians have rated Carter, repudiated after one term, higher than Reagan, which tells us more about who has been doing the ranking than it does about Ronald Reagan.
Consider Warren G. Harding. After his 1920 landslide, he died in office in 1923. His successor, Calvin Coolidge, was elected in a landslide in 1924, and in 1928 Herbert Hoover won another Republican landslide.
Yet historians rank Coolidge as mediocre and Harding among our worst presidents. Liberal ideology has never lacked for a warm dwelling place in the history departments of America's universities.
Wilson's second term was an historic failure. After winning in 1916 on the slogan, "He kept us out of war!" he plunged us into a European bloodbath that produced 116,000 U.S. dead and a Versailles treaty that rewarded our imperial allies with new African, Middle East and Asian colonies, giving the lie to Wilson's promise that this was a war to "make the world safe for democracy."
Wilson – not Harding, Coolidge or Hoover, all of whom tried to ease the vindictive terms imposed on a defeated but democratic Germany – set the table for Nazism. Adolf Hitler was born at Versailles.
In 1918, Wilson lost both houses of Congress, and his party was crushed in 1920. Americans concluded that his second term had been a failure. Yet historians mark him as Great or Near Great.
Harding brought us out of the Wilson depression of 1919-1920 without any Obama-like intervention in the economy, cut the income tax rate by two-thirds, gave us the Washington Naval Agreement, the greatest arms reduction treaty in history, and worked to alleviate the most onerous aspects of the Versailles treaty that Wilson had imposed on Germany.
Harding and Coolidge gave America the greatest prosperity it had ever known, the Roaring Twenties, and the people rewarded them accordingly.
Yes, some of Harding's cronies were crooks – but so, too, were some of Harry Truman's, whose second term was marked by scandal, political nastiness and a winless war, after which he was repudiated by a nation that gave Dwight Eisenhower a landslide.
"Communism, corruption and Korea" was the slogan attached to Truman's legacy by the GOP in 1952. America agreed.
Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War in six months and presided over eight years of peace and prosperity, is now rising in the rankings of historians, some of whom now put him as high as 11th.
Though a plurality of Americans list John F. Kennedy in polls as the best president of their lifetime, fewer historians still share that view.
Other presidents are difficult to rank.
Richard Nixon's second term resulted in his resignation.
Yet his first term – ending the Vietnam War and the draft, creating the Cancer Institute and Environmental Protection Agency, creating a new majority that gave the GOP five victories in six presidential elections – was judged by the American people such a smashing success they rewarded him with a 49-state landslide.
In "Where They Stand," Bob Merry offers his own assessments. Buy his book, take it to the beach, and bring the subject up with the after-dinner drinks. A long and loud discussion should ensue.
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan249.html
"I have only one question: "Why aren’t you packing now?"
by Jeff Thomas
"How can an otherwise sane individual become so enamored of a fantasy, an imposture, that even after it’s exposed in the bright light of day, he still clings to it – indeed, clings to it all the harder? No amount of logic can shatter a faith consciously based on a lie."
~ Lamar Keene, a scam artist who posed as a psychic, describing why it was so easy to fleece people.
Homo sapiens is a creature of habit. Most people have a strong desire to do what they can to create a life (and lifestyle) that is comfortable for them. Once this is done, we curl up and settle in. We then may add the occasional improvement to this situation, but, otherwise, we prefer then to be left alone to maintain what we have created.
It should not, therefore, be surprising if, when that comfy situation is threatened, we wish the threat would simply go away. Similarly, it is understandable if, when that threat begins to grow, we may simply pull the covers over our heads and pretend the threat either does not exist, or is far more benign than it appears.
Hence, it is a perennial condition of human nature to behave as described by Lamar Keene, when we discover that the government that we have been brought up to believe exists for our protection, has become no less than the greatest threat to our well-being.
Consider the following events, with regard to the USA:
The Patriot Act (Passed in 2001 and extended in in 2011 with additional controls) expands law enforcement powers and removes civil liberties and constitutionally guaranteed rights. www.renewamerica.com/columns/webster/090419
The National Defense Authorization Act, passed on 31st December, 2011, allows the indefinite imprisonment by the military of any "suspects" (including American citizens on American soil) without allowing due process of law. www.en.wikipedia.org/nationaldefenseauthorisationact
The MAP-21 Bill, which allows the Internal Revenue Service to suspend the passport rights of Americans, based on the premise that their tax obligations may be unfulfilled. www.losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/IRSbill
The National Defense Resources Preparedness order, created in March, 2012, allows the President to take over control of all food, water, labour and industry in the US, "to promote national defense." www.naturalnews.com/035301/Obamaexecutiveorders
30,000 Drones to fly over the US allowed by executive order, February, 2012, providing the government with an Orwellian surveillance ability and a killing capacity ranging from selected individuals to entire communities. www.wsws.org/articles/2012/jun2012/pers-j21.shtml
FEMA Interment Camps, to be constructed in every state, with 3 – 15 in each state, for an undisclosed purpose. www.americanthinker.com
Compounds to store "disposable coffins," each with hundreds of thousands of 4-5 person coffins stored near city centres around the country. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERaw6AW7Zec
450 million hollow point bullets ordered by the Department of Homeland Security To be used domestically. (The DHS is not responsible for addressing national invasions or overseas wars; it exists solely for the control of internal disorder. Hollow point bullets are not intended for sharpshooting – they are designed specifically to maximize tissue damage.) www.articles.businessinsider.com
The above are all actual occurrences. The reasons for them can be debated. (After all, the DHS may well have ordered 450 million rounds of hollow-point bullets because they were thinking of doing a bit of target practice. And the disposable coffins may be intended to be given out as grow-boxes on the next Earth Day.)
In fact, each of the above, conceivably could have been the product of well-meaning legislators, planning for what they conceived as "a better tomorrow." The trouble is, taken together, it is difficult to imagine that this may be the case. Indeed, taken together, they suggest the creation of a police state that rivals what Joe Stalin or Brother Adolf created.
Circa 1885, folk philosopher James Whitcomb Riley, said, "When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."
At some point, when we observe a government that consistently institutes executive orders and legislation that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it behooves us to conclude that it is in fact, a duck. Is it possible that we may be proven incorrect? Yes, absolutely so. However, when the overwhelming evidence points to the unpleasant realization that our comfy life is soon to end, we would be wise to take preparatory action.
Just how many ducks does it take before we decide there are enough to call them a flock? If such a flock represents a significant and uncontrollable danger to us, we would be advised to get out of the way. In such cases, it is infinitely wiser to err on the side of caution.
Not long ago, I overheard a discussion between an American businessman and an associate from my own country. The American was describing the seemingly endless array of draconian laws and executive orders that have been coming his way, courtesy of his government, in recent years.
His associate said, "I have only one question: "Why aren’t you packing now?"
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/orig12/thomas-jeff6.1.1.html
The power to destroy...
by Peter Schiff
The Supreme Court decision is devastating for the economy and individual liberty. Apart from creating an all powerful federal government, changing substantially what it means to be an American, the law will send health care costs soaring, further undermining our economy. It will destroy jobs, impoverish millions, and lead to much higher inflation and lower living standards.
It will give Romney a club to use against Obama during the election. Obama will have a lot of explaining to do as he strongly stated during the debate to pass the bill that the individual mandate is not a tax. The Supreme Court just said it was.
In his majority opinion Justice Roberts specifically said the government does not have the authority, under the Commerce Clause, to compel Americans to buy a product. He then said it has unlimited power to tax people who do not buy products the government wants them to buy. This is a distinction without a difference. Based on this ruling, here are examples of what the government can now do:
Tax you for going to church. Tax you for not going to church. Tax you for protesting. Tax you for not protesting. Tax you for expressing a controversial opinion. Tax you for joining or not joining a particular organization. Tax you for writing something controversial. Tax you for speaking or writing critically of government. Basically, there is nothing the government can't do, so long as it does it as a tax.
Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/schiff/schiff169.html
Stay out of the subway in Boston for a few days if you can help it...
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has announced a series of biological tests that they will be conducting in subway systems near Boston. DHS will be releasing bacteria into the MBTA tunnels, in what they say are tests to evaluate sensors installed in the tunnel system.
The DHS sensors are designed to detect biological agents. The testing is expected to go on for at least one year, with multiple bacteria releases every month.
DHS officials insist that the bacteria release, a dead bacteria called B-subtilis, will have no adverse health risks on healthy individuals. What this means for people with compromised immune systems isn’t known, DHS hasn’t publicly commented on that.
B-subtilis is a Gram-positive, catalase-positive bacterium commonly found in soil. Although DHS insists that are no health risks, the EPA fact sheet does show some negative health effects associated with this bacteria.
B. subtilis does produce an extracellular toxin known as subtilisin. Although subtilisin has very low toxigenic properties (Gill, 1982), this proteinaceous compound is capable of causing allergic reactions in individuals who are repeatedly exposed to it.
B. subtilis has also been implicated in several cases of food poisoning (Gilbert et al., 1981 and Kramer et al., 1982 as cited by Logan, 1988).
It goes on to say that in those with compromised immune systems:
Infections attributed to B. subtilis include bacteremia, endocarditis, pneumonia, and septicemia.
According to DHS,(their documents can be seen on the DHS website here)
Several subway systems across the country were considered to host the proposed pilot test.
Preliminary discussions were held with a few subway systems, and the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) was considered to be an optimal location due to the extensive chemical simulant studies that were recently performed there.
Department of Homeland Security Plans to Release Bacteria in Boston Subway System.
Link to article and hyperlinks:
http://libertychatter.com/department-of-homeland-security-plans-to-release-bacteria-in-boston-subway-system/
List of new Obamacare taxes...
Obamacare: 21 New or Higher Taxes
Ryan Ellis puts together some important data on the tax impact of Obamacare:
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/06/obamacare-21-new-or-higher-taxes.html
Ryan Ellis puts together some important data on the tax impact of Obamacare:
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/06/obamacare-21-new-or-higher-taxes.html
Here are four stories that didn’t make the mainstream news...
9/11: Have We Been Bamboozled?
by Jim Fetzer
Here are four stories that didn’t make the mainstream news. They range from some you will find easy to believe to some you’ll find incredible. One of them explains the staged photograph taken in the White House of Obama and others watching the raid on the “Osama compound”.
If you want to know more about the fabrication of 9/11 and you’re tired of the lies we’ve been told or want new independent information, you’ll want to check out The Vancouver Hearings, which were held June 15-17 at the Denman Theatre, 1737 Comox Street in Vancouver. Most of the presentations are linked to the titles of the speakers’ presentations. The “official account” of 9/11 has been destroyed just as thoroughly as were the Twin Towers!
Story 1: The “collapse” that wasn’t a collapse
Videos show Flight 175 completely entering the South Tower before it explodes, when that should have happened on contact. Would you believe that Pilots for 9/11 Truth has studied air/ground communications and discovered that Flight 175 was in the air but over Pittsburgh at the time?
Did you know the fires in the towers did not burn hot enough nor long enough to cause steel to weaken, much less melt? Have you noticed those buildings are blowing apart in every direction rather than falling to the ground – that they did not collapse?
Story 2: The first death of Saddam Hussein
How about the hanging of Saddam Hussein? You probably saw it on television. It was widely broadcast at the time. But Saddam Hussein, his two sons and about 60 members of his general staff were killed on April 7, 2003.
Chris Wachter, a B-1 bomber pilot, took them out with 2 JDAM bombs at a restaurant on the outskirts of Baghdad. He was lionized when he returned to his base, put on CNN, awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and honored by The Rev. Robert Schiller at The Crystal Cathedral on May 25, 2003.
The following day, he was flown back to Langley, VA, home of the CIA, and told that, while they admired his flying skill, “officially,” Saddam had gotten away. Killing the leader of a foreign nation had been made illegal by executive orders from three presidents: Reagan, Carter and Ford. So they put one of his doubles in a spider hole, “found him” and then tried him and hung him on December 30, 2006. Almost no one noticed the difference.
Story 3: The second death of Osama bin Laden
Everyone knows that Barack Obama took out Osama bin Laden during that daring raid on his compound in Pakistan, right? There was a famous photograph of Obama, Biden and Hillary watching as it went down.
However, Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, explained there had been no coverage for the first 20-25 minutes and these assaults only take five minutes or less. Osama bin Laden actually died of medical complications on December 15, 2001 and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Scholars for 9/11 Truth published an editorial about it. David Ray Griffin wrote a book on it, Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive? Nicholas Kollerstrom has an article, “Osama bin Laden: 1957-2001.”
Story 4: What didn’t happen at the Pentagon
The official account claims a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon, but there’s no massive pile of debris, no wings, no tail, bodies, seats or luggage. Not even its massive engines were recovered from the building even though they are virtually indestructible – they weren’t there.
The plane is supposed to have skimmed the ground at 500 mph and taken out a series of lampposts en route to its target. But “ground effect” makes that impossible and those lampposts would have ripped off the wing and exploded the jet fuel stored inside it.
It didn’t happen. And the only photo the Pentagon has provided shows a plane that is far too small to have been Flight 77. For more on the fabrication of all four crash sites, see my Vancouver Powerpoint presentation.
Click here for hyperlinks and photos:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/06/29/911-have-we-been-bamboozled-2/
by Jim Fetzer
Here are four stories that didn’t make the mainstream news. They range from some you will find easy to believe to some you’ll find incredible. One of them explains the staged photograph taken in the White House of Obama and others watching the raid on the “Osama compound”.
If you want to know more about the fabrication of 9/11 and you’re tired of the lies we’ve been told or want new independent information, you’ll want to check out The Vancouver Hearings, which were held June 15-17 at the Denman Theatre, 1737 Comox Street in Vancouver. Most of the presentations are linked to the titles of the speakers’ presentations. The “official account” of 9/11 has been destroyed just as thoroughly as were the Twin Towers!
Story 1: The “collapse” that wasn’t a collapse
Videos show Flight 175 completely entering the South Tower before it explodes, when that should have happened on contact. Would you believe that Pilots for 9/11 Truth has studied air/ground communications and discovered that Flight 175 was in the air but over Pittsburgh at the time?
Did you know the fires in the towers did not burn hot enough nor long enough to cause steel to weaken, much less melt? Have you noticed those buildings are blowing apart in every direction rather than falling to the ground – that they did not collapse?
Story 2: The first death of Saddam Hussein
How about the hanging of Saddam Hussein? You probably saw it on television. It was widely broadcast at the time. But Saddam Hussein, his two sons and about 60 members of his general staff were killed on April 7, 2003.
Chris Wachter, a B-1 bomber pilot, took them out with 2 JDAM bombs at a restaurant on the outskirts of Baghdad. He was lionized when he returned to his base, put on CNN, awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and honored by The Rev. Robert Schiller at The Crystal Cathedral on May 25, 2003.
The following day, he was flown back to Langley, VA, home of the CIA, and told that, while they admired his flying skill, “officially,” Saddam had gotten away. Killing the leader of a foreign nation had been made illegal by executive orders from three presidents: Reagan, Carter and Ford. So they put one of his doubles in a spider hole, “found him” and then tried him and hung him on December 30, 2006. Almost no one noticed the difference.
Story 3: The second death of Osama bin Laden
Everyone knows that Barack Obama took out Osama bin Laden during that daring raid on his compound in Pakistan, right? There was a famous photograph of Obama, Biden and Hillary watching as it went down.
However, Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, explained there had been no coverage for the first 20-25 minutes and these assaults only take five minutes or less. Osama bin Laden actually died of medical complications on December 15, 2001 and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Scholars for 9/11 Truth published an editorial about it. David Ray Griffin wrote a book on it, Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive? Nicholas Kollerstrom has an article, “Osama bin Laden: 1957-2001.”
Story 4: What didn’t happen at the Pentagon
The official account claims a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon, but there’s no massive pile of debris, no wings, no tail, bodies, seats or luggage. Not even its massive engines were recovered from the building even though they are virtually indestructible – they weren’t there.
The plane is supposed to have skimmed the ground at 500 mph and taken out a series of lampposts en route to its target. But “ground effect” makes that impossible and those lampposts would have ripped off the wing and exploded the jet fuel stored inside it.
It didn’t happen. And the only photo the Pentagon has provided shows a plane that is far too small to have been Flight 77. For more on the fabrication of all four crash sites, see my Vancouver Powerpoint presentation.
Click here for hyperlinks and photos:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/06/29/911-have-we-been-bamboozled-2/
Mark your calendar and hold on...
SGT Report
People like to ask about dates. “When do you think the collapse will happen?” they ask. What are your thoughts on the Mayan calendar? How ’bout December 21st, 2012?
Most of us informed and awake folks aren’t interested in trying to predict specific dates. That’s an art best left to Nostradamus. That said, highly respected truth tellers James Turk and John Williams have both tied dates to predictions. In an interview with James Turk he told me that he thinks we will see $400 silver and $8,000 gold some time between 2013-2015. And John Williams firmly believes the die has been cast for hyperinflation in the United States, likely beginning in 2014.
Over the past 48 hours we’ve stumbled across three separate pieces of information, all predicting essentially the exact same thing regarding a fall 2012 economic collapse. Serendipity or coincidence, it’s information I want to pass on. As always, discussion is welcomed below.
The first warning is from a St. Louis based police officer who called into the Alex Jones radio show on Sunday, June 24th. The second warning comes our way via the Silver Doctors. And the third came today from unflappable Director of UBS Floor Operations Art Cashin. All three warnings are presented here for your benefit and consideration:
The first warning came our way via the Sunday broadcast of the Alex Jones radio show. Jones announced that he only wanted to take calls from members of the military or police. A man identifying himself as a police officer named ‘Jim’ called in to report some startling information.
“We have been told that in October we need to be prepared for an event that will require us to use air and ground support, in conjunction with the military here.”
During the call Jim comes across as passionate, sincere and very shaken by the information he tries to share. After the commercial break, Jim gets choked up as he tries to convey his appreciation for what Alex Jones has tried to do in terms of waking people up in the effort to save the Republic from the clutches of the forces seeking to destroy it. Now, nearly in tears, Jim concludes by saying “This country’s dead Alex. It’s gone” before unexpectedly hanging up.
Here’s the entire call including the head of the show with the date of the broadcast for posterity’s sake. I edited out the commercial break, and posted this call on my backup You Tube channel SGTreport.
Warning 2 from Silver Doctors, on Monday:
LEAP/2020 has issued a RED ALERT for the Western banking system, stating that Europe’s hour of payment has arrived, and compares the next two months to the Israelites circling Jericho for 7 days prior to blasting the trumpets. LEAP/2020′s red alert states the Western banking system’s trumpet blast will occur in September or October.
The seven blasts of the trumpets of Jericho marking the September October 2012 period will cause the “Dollar Wall’s” last sections and the walls which have protected the world as we know it since 1945 to collapse. The shock of the autumn 2008 will seem like a small summer storm compared to what will affect planet in several months.
The third warning comes by way of Art Cashin and Zero Hedge on Tuesday morning:
While Europe is dominating headlines this week, UBS’ Art Cashin suggests “mark your calendar and cross your fingers” as he notes the disproportionate prevalence of events that occur in September. Focusing on The Economist’s Greg Ip’s recent post on a possible seasonal pattern in banking crises, via this recent Reinhart & Rogoff extension paper by Laeven and Valencia, he notes: “The frequency with which the world goes to hell in September seems hardly random.” Unfortunately the authors provide no explanation for this beyond observing, “An interesting pattern emerges: banking crises tend to start in the second half of the year, with large September and December effects.”
No one can possibly know exactly when the death of the Western fiat banking system will occur. We just know that it will collapse – it cannot be stopped. And increasingly it looks like it will happen sooner rather than later.
This is not fear porn. It’s the reality of the dire times we now find ourselves in. Take heed, and prepare the best you can.
We are all in this mess together.
Link:
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/watching-the-clock-will-a-total-economic-collapse-occur-in-september-october_06282012
Here we go again...
Report: Al-Qaida planning to crash U.S. airline during London Olympics
Comment: The same old story is trotted out one more time – The mythical white Al Qaeda is going to hijack a plane and blow it up. Time to be scared.
Anshel Pfeffer
The al-Qaida branch in the Arabian Peninsula is believed to be planning a terror attack during the Olympic Games in London, scheduled to begin at the end of the month. According to a report in today’s Sunday Times, quoting intelligence services, the organization has recruited a Norwegian Muslim convert who was supposed to hijack a U.S. passenger plane and crash it on a suicide mission. It is not clear though that the attack targeted one of the Olympic venues, despite the timing.
Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been involved in a number of attempts to carry out high-profile attacks on Western targets.
Jonathan Evans, head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, said in a rare public address last week that “the games are not an easy target, and the fact that we have disrupted multiple terrorist plots here and abroad in recent years demonstrates that the UK as a whole is not an easy target.” Despite the successes in foiling terror attacks, Evans warned that “in back rooms and in cars on the streets of this country there is no shortage of individuals talking about wanting to mount terrorist attacks here,” and spoke of the threat of Western Muslim citizens who have been radicalized and trained in camps in countries such as Yemen and Sudan, traveling back to the West to carry out attacks.
According to the sources quoted in The Sunday Times, a Norwegian citizen in his mid-30s and who names himself Abu Abdulrahman converted to Islam in 2008 and has in recent months been undergoing training at AQAP bases in Yemen. There have been a number of reports over the last few months of Western citizens who joined al-Qaida and are involved in its operations in Yemen against the local Western-backed security forces...
Read more here:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/report-al-qaida-planning-to-crash-u-s-airline-during-london-olympics.html
"The high court’s ruling leaves in place 21 tax increases in the health-care law costing more than $675 billion over the next 10 years, according to the House Ways and Means Committee. Of those, 12 tax hikes would affect families earning less than $250,000 per year, the panel said, including a “Cadillac tax” on high-cost insurance plans, a tax on insurance providers, and an excise tax on medical device manufacturers."
Mike Adams
By now, we all know the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate portion of Obamacare by declaring it a “tax.” This is, in essence, a declaration that the federal government now has unlimited power to force consumers to spend some (or even all) of their take-home pay on various products, services or even intellectual property that they have no interest in buying in the first place. It is a concentration of economic power in the hands of the federal government, and it suddenly ends economic liberty in America (http://www.naturalnews.com/036329_Obamacare_Supreme_Court_economic_fr…).
It’s also the largest tax increase in the history of the United States. By upholding Obamacare’s individual mandate as a “tax,” Chief Justice Robert just labeled President Obama the largest tax increase President in the history of the country! (http://decoded.nationaljournal.com/2012/06/roberts-labels-obama-a-tax…)
And yet President Obama himself declared the individual mandate was NOT a tax. Here’s the video: http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video?id=8620606
And here’s the transcript of his interview with George Stephanopoulos:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/09/obama-mandate-is-not-a-t…
But now, of course, Chief Justice Roberts has declared it IS a tax, after all. Thus, Obama’s key legislative achievement has become the single greatest legislative deception in the history of America.
How much will this new tax cost you? The Washington Post has published a handy online calculator:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/what-health-bil…
It shows that the new tax begins in 2014, then ramps up to its maximum penalty at 2016, at which point you are taxed year after year until you cave in and buy into the monopoly Big Pharma health insurance scam. This is, for the record, the largest tax increase in history. And it’s for a system of medicine which is a Big Pharma monopoly that doesn’t even give consumers the freedom to choose natural medicine or alternative therapies!
21 new taxes on Americans
The high court’s ruling leaves in place 21 tax increases in the health-care law costing more than $675 billion over the next 10 years, according to the House Ways and Means Committee. Of those, 12 tax hikes would affect families earning less than $250,000 per year, the panel said, including a “Cadillac tax” on high-cost insurance plans, a tax on insurance providers, and an excise tax on medical device manufacturers. (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/28/republicans-ruling-fo…)
Now that Obamacare’s penalty is a “tax,” not a “fee,” Mr. Obama is breaking a 2008 campaign pledge not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $250,000. This new “tax” will hit across the economic spectrum, despite his campaign declaration that health care should “never be purchased with tax increase on middle-class families.” Now, Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats have enacted the largest tax increase in history.
(http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/28/curl-roberts-to-the-r…)
Federal government can now order you to engage in selected commerce
For the record, under the precedent now set by the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal government can simply order you to engage in whatever commerce the government chooses. All they have to do is create a penalty for refusing to go along with their order, and characterize the penalty as a “tax.”
Ron Paul gets it. He understands the simple truth that the government has no power to compel people to engage in commerce. “The insurance mandate clearly exceeds the federal government’s powers under the interstate commerce clause found in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution,” writes Ron Paul. “This is patently obvious: the power to ‘regulate’ commerce cannot include the power to compel commerce! Those who claim otherwise simply ignore the plain meaning of the Constitution because they don’t want to limit federal power in any way. The commerce clause was intended simply to give Congress the power to regulate foreign trade, and also to prevent states from imposing tariffs on interstate goods. In Federalist Paper No. 22, Alexander Hamilton makes it clear the simple intent behind the clause was to prevent states from placing tolls or tariffs on goods as they passed through each state — a practice that had proven particularly destructive across the many principalities of the German empire.” (http://lewrockwell.com/paul/paul799.html)
Health insurance premiums will soar
Obamacare is going to absolutely shred the infrastructure of our medical system, it is going to send health insurance premiums soaring, it is going to dramatically expand the size and the scope of government, it is going to fundamentally alter the relationships between doctors and their patients and it is one of the largest tax increases in U.S. history. Not only that, it is also going to add about a trillion dollars to our national debt over the next decade. So no, the Obamacare decision is not good news. Obamacare was one of the worst pieces of legislation in American history, and now we are stuck with it.
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/15-reasons-why-the-obamacar…
Huge political revolt now expected
What are the political ramifications of all this? Obamacare remains widely hated by much of the U.S. population — at least the portion of the population that actually works for a living — and this Supreme Court decision will likely ruffle even more feathers of taxpayers who are tired of being pick-pocketed by the federal government at every turn. While most people don’t mind paying some reasonable level of tax to the feds, having the government invade your take-home pay and start forcing you to spend it on things you may or may not want is another thing entirely.
Because of the backlash against this law, it seems almost certain that this Supreme Court decision will play right into the hands of Mitt Romney, who will now make repealing Obamacare the centerpiece of his election campaign. He has already stated, in the Weekly Standard, “If We Want to Get Rid of Obamacare, We’re Going to Have to Replace President Obama.” (http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/romney-if-we-want-get-rid-obamaca…)
But even if Obama is replaced in the White House, the damage has already been done. With its decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has set a precedent of government control over private paychecks, and that precedent has fundamentally crushed economic freedom in America and opened the door to limitless taxes for everything imaginable. King George III couldn’t have done it better.
Nevertheless, based on this decision I now predict a sweeping victory for Republicans in the 2012 elections as a backlash against Obamacare. I’m not saying I support Romney or the Republicans, because I think all politicians are crooks for the most part, and I agree with Gov. Jesse Ventura that the two-party system is largely just two criminal gangs jockeying for power on how they can exploit the people they claim to represent. Whether it’s DemoCRIPS or ReBLOODlicans in power, they’re all political gangstas.
Even if Romney takes office next January, actually repealing Obamacare would be almost impossible to achieve, by the way. Unraveling bad laws is far more difficult than getting them passed in the first place. It would take a true taxpayer revolt to pull it off.
The American revolution just inched one step closer to reality
We may be headed for that sooner than you think, by the way. With this decision to seize control of the money right out of your own paycheck, the moral collapse of the U.S. government is now complete. Once this “tax” starts to come due, many taxpayers will be in a state of near revolt. That, coupled with the economic collapse heading our way from the EU, will bring many Americans to a point of financial desperation.
It is from such conditions that, historically, revolutions emerge. And that’s assuming we even make it to 2014 when the Obamacare tax is supposed to be levied on the American people. By some estimates, the U.S. government may suffer a crushing financial collapse between 2012 and 2015. If the government collapses, Obamacare and all the other bad laws go down with it: the Patriot Act, the DMCA, the NDAA, and so on. That’s the one interesting thing about human history: Every time governments become too large, too bloated and too deeply invested in crushing liberty, the People eventually rise up against the injustices and take their country back, starting with a clean slate (which eventually becomes corrupt a few years later, of course).
It is the cycle of human civilization… the rise and fall of civilizations. We are living in the time of the fall of the American empire, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Hope you’re ready to live in “interesting times,” because we all have a front row seat to history in the making.
Link:
http://www.naturalnews.com/036341_Obamacare_new_taxes_mandate.html
Day 18 of the Libertarian read-athon...
The Road to Totalitarianism
by Henry Hazlitt
In spite of the obvious ultimate objective of the masters of Russia to communize and conquer the world, and in spite of the frightful power which such weapons as guided missiles and atomic and hydrogen bombs may put in their hands, the greatest threat to American liberty today comes from within. It is the threat of a growing and spreading totalitarian ideology.
Totalitarianism in its final form is the doctrine that the government, the state, must exercise total control over the individual. The American College Dictionary, closely following Webster's Collegiate, defines totalitarianism as "pertaining to a centralized form of government in which those in control grant neither recognition nor tolerance to parties of different opinion."
Now I should describe this failure to grant tolerance to other parties not as the essence of totalitarianism, but rather as one of its consequences or corollaries. The essence of totalitarianism is that the group in power must exercise total control. Its original purpose (as in communism) may be merely to exercise total control over "the economy." But "the state" (the imposing name for the clique in power) can exercise total control over the economy only if it exercises complete control over imports and exports, over prices and interest rates and wages, over production and consumption, over buying and selling, over the earning and spending of income, over jobs, over occupations, over workers — over what they do and what they get and where they go — and finally, over what they say and even what they think.
If total control over the economy must in the end mean total control over what people do, say, and think, then it is only spelling out details or pointing out corollaries to say that totalitarianism suppresses freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of immigration and emigration, freedom to form or to keep any political party in opposition, and freedom to vote against the government. These suppressions are merely the end-products of totalitarianism.
All that the totalitarians want is total control. This does not necessarily mean that they want total suppression. They suppress merely the ideas which they don't agree with, or of which they are suspicious, or of which they have never heard before; and they suppress only the actions that they don't like, or of which they cannot see the necessity. They leave the individual perfectly free to agree with them, and perfectly free to act in any way that serves their purposes — or to which they may happen at the moment to be indifferent. Of course, they sometimes also compel actions, such as positive denunciations of people who are against the government (or who the government says are against the government), or groveling adulation of the leader of the moment. That no individual in Russia today gets the constant groveling adulation that Stalin demanded chiefly means that no successor has yet succeeded in securing Stalin's unchallenged power.
Once we understand "total" totalitarianism, we are in a better position to understand degrees of totalitarianism. Or rather — since totalitarianism is by definition total — it would probably be more accurate to say that we are in a better position to understand the steps on the road to totalitarianism.
We can either move, from where we are, toward totalitarianism on the one hand or toward freedom on the other. How do we ascertain just where we now are? How do we tell in what direction we have been moving? In this ideological sphere, what does our map look like? What is our compass? What are the landmarks or constellations to guide us?
It is a little difficult, as nebulous and conflicting usage shows, to agree on precisely what liberty means. But it isn't too difficult to agree on precisely what slavery means. And it isn't too difficult to recognize the totalitarian mind when we meet one. Its outstanding mark is a contempt for liberty. That is, its outstanding mark is a contempt for the liberty of others. As de Tocqueville remarked in the preface to his "France Before the Revolution of 1789,"
Despots themselves do not deny the excellence of freedom, but they wish to keep it all to themselves, and maintain that all other men are utterly unworthy of it. Thus it is not on the opinion which may be entertained of freedom that this difference subsists, but on the greater or the less esteem that we have for mankind; and it may be said with strict accuracy, that the taste a man may show for absolute government bears an exact ratio to the contempt he may profess for his countrymen.
The denial of freedom rests, in other words, on the assumption that the individual is incapable of managing his own affairs.
Three main tendencies or tenets mark the drift toward totalitarianism. The first and most important, because the other two derive from it, is the pressure for a constant increase in governmental powers, for a constant widening of the governmental sphere of intervention. It is the tendency toward more and more regulation of every sphere of economic life, toward more and more restriction of the liberties of the individual. The tendency toward more and more governmental spending is a part of this trend. It means in effect that the individual is able to spend less and less of the income he earns on the things he himself wants, while the government takes more and more of his income from him to spend it in the ways that it thinks wise. One of the basic assumptions of totalitarianism, in brief (and of such steps toward it as socialism, state paternalism, and Keynesianism), is that the citizen cannot be trusted to spend his own money. As government control becomes wider and wider, individual discretion, the individual's control of his own affairs in all directions, necessarily becomes narrower and narrower. In sum, liberty is constantly diminished.
One of the great contributions of Ludwig von Mises has been to show through rigorous reasoning, and a hundred examples, how government intervention in the market economy always finally results in a worse situation than would otherwise have existed, even as judged by the original objectives of the advocates of the intervention.
I assume that other contributors to this symposium will explore this phase of interventionism and statism rather fully; and therefore I should like to devote particular attention here to the political consequences and accompaniments of government intervention in the economic sphere.
I have called these political accompaniments consequences, and to a large extent they are; but they are also, in turn, causes. Once the power of the state has been increased by some economic intervention, this increase in State power permits and encourages further interventions, which further increase State power, and so on.
The most powerful brief statement of this interaction with which I am acquainted occurs in a lecture delivered by the eminent Swedish economist, the late Gustav Cassel. This was published in a pamphlet with the descriptive but rather cumbersome title: From Protectionism Through Planned Economy to Dictatorship.[1] I take the liberty of quoting an extensive passage from it:
The leadership of the state in economic affairs which advocates of Planned Economy want to establish is, as we have seen, necessarily connected with a bewildering mass of governmental interferences of a steadily cumulative nature. The arbitrariness, the mistakes and the inevitable contradictions of such policy will, as daily experience shows, only strengthen the demand for a more rational coordination of the different measures and, therefore, for unified leadership. For this reason Planned Economy will always tend to develop into Dictatorship….
The existence of some sort of parliament is no guarantee against planned economy being developed into dictatorship. On the contrary, experience has shown that representative bodies are unable to fulfill all the multitudinous functions connected with economic leadership without becoming more and more involved in the struggle between competing interests, with the consequence of a moral decay ending in party — if not individual — corruption. Examples of such a degrading development are indeed in many countries accumulating at such a speed as must fill every honorable citizen with the gravest apprehensions as to the future of the representative system. But apart from that, this system cannot possibly be preserved, if parliaments are constantly over-worked by having to consider an infinite mass of the most intricate questions relating to private economy. The parliamentary system can be saved only by wise and deliberate restriction of the functions of parliaments….
Economic dictatorship is much more dangerous than people believe. Once authoritative control has been established it will not always be possible to limit it to the economic domain. If we allow economic freedom and self-reliance to be destroyed, the powers standing for Liberty will have lost so much in strength that they will not be able to offer any effective resistance against a progressive extension of such destruction to constitutional and public life generally. And if this resistance is gradually given up — perhaps without people ever realizing what is actually going on — such fundamental values as personal liberty, freedom of thought and speech and independence of science are exposed to imminent danger. What stands to be lost is nothing less than the whole of that civilization that we have inherited from generations which once fought hard to lay its foundations and even gave their life for it.
Cassel has here pointed out very clearly some of the reasons why economic interventionism and government economic planning lead toward dictatorship. Let us now, however, looking at another aspect of the problem, see whether or not we can identify, in an unmistakable way, some of the main landmarks or guideposts that can tell us whether we are moving away from or nearer to totalitarianism.
I said a while back that three main tendencies mark the drift toward totalitarianism, and that the first and most important, because the other two derive from it, is the pressure for a constant increase in governmental intervention, in governmental spending, and in governmental power. Let us now consider the other two tendencies.
The second main tendency that marks the drift toward totalitarianism is that toward greater and greater concentration of power in the central government. This tendency is most easily recognizable here in the United States, because we have ostensibly a Federal form of government and can readily see the growth of power in Washington at the expense of the states.
The concentration of power and the centralization of power, I may point out here, are merely two names for the same thing. This second tendency is a necessary consequence of the first. If the central government is to control more and more of our economic life, it cannot permit this to be done by the individual states. The pressure for uniformity, and the pressure for centralization of power, are two aspects of the same pressure.
It is not difficult to see why this is so. Obviously, if government is to intervene in business, there cannot be forty-eight different kinds of conflicting interventions. Obviously, if government is to impose an over-all "economic plan," it cannot impose forty-eight different and conflicting plans. Planning from the center is possible only with centralization of governmental power. And so deep is the belief in the benevolence and necessity of uniform regulation and central planning that the Federal government assumes more and more of the powers previously exercised by the states, or powers never exercised by any state; and the Supreme Court keeps steadily stretching the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to authorize powers and Federal interventions never dreamed of by the Founding Fathers. At the same time recent Supreme Court decisions treat the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution practically as if it did not exist.[2]
A notable example of this tendency exists with regard to labor legislation. Supreme Court decisions regarding the Wagner Act and its successor the Taft-Hartley Act (legally, and essentially, a mere amendment of the Wagner Act) have not only steadily widened the sphere of Federal regulation to cover activities and labor relations that are primarily, if not almost wholly, intra-state, but have ruled that the states themselves have no power over these primarily internal activities and relations if Congress has chosen to "pre-empt" the field.
The third tendency that marks the drift toward totalitarianism is the increasing centralization and concentration of power in the hands of the President at the expense of the two co-ordinate branches of the government, Congress and the courts. In the United States this tendency is very marked today. To listen to our pro-totalitarians, the main duty of Congress is to follow the President's "leadership" in all things; to be a set of yes-men; to act as a mere rubber-stamp.
The dangers of one-man rule have been so emphasized and dramatized in recent years — we have seen so many appalling examples, from Hitler and Stalin to their many pocket-sized editions, the Mossadeghs and Peróns — that any warning of this danger to Americans may seem needless. Yet most Americans, like the citizens of the countries already victimized by their native Mussolinis, may prove incapable of recognizing this evil until it has grown beyond the point of control. One invariable accompaniment of the growth of Caesarism is the growing contempt expressed for legislative bodies, and impatience with their "dilatoriness" in enacting the "Leader's" program, or their actual "obstructionist tactics" or "crippling amendments." Yet in recent years derision of Congress has become in America almost a national pastime. And a substantial part of the press never tires of reviling Congress for "doing nothing" — that is, for not piling more mountains of legislation on the existing mountains of legislation; or for failing to enact in full "the President's program."[3]
If we ask how it comes about that Congress and other legislative bodies throughout the contemporary world have tended to fall into public disrepute, we again find that the answer lies in the apparently unshakeable contemporary faith in the necessity and benevolence of a continually expanding government intervention. Congress and the planners can never agree among themselves on precisely what the government should do to remedy some supposed evil. They cannot agree on an unambiguous general law, whose application in specific cases could be safely left to the courts. All that they can agree upon is that "something should be done." In other words, all they can agree upon is that the government must intervene, that the special area of economic activity under discussion must be "controlled." So they frame a law setting forth a number of vague but high-sounding goals and create an agency or commission whose function it is to achieve these goals through its own omniscience and discretion. The National Labor Relations Law (the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act) is a typical example. It sets up a National Labor Relations Board, which thereupon proceeds to become a prosecutor, court, and legislative body all rolled into one, and starts laying down a series of rulings and handing down a series of decisions, many of which surprise no one more than the Congressional members who created the agency in the first place.
From then on, Congress in that particular sphere is treated mainly as a nuisance. The administrative bodies that it has set up resent its "interference" and "meddling" with their activities. These administrative bodies devote themselves in large part to extolling "administrative discretion" at the expense of the Rule of Law — that is, of any body of clear rules to be applied by the courts. Any subsequent effort of Congress to reduce the range of administrative discretion, arbitrariness, and caprice is denounced as "crippling" to administrative bodies, and as interfering with that "flexibility" of action so dear to the administrative heart.
Along with this growth of administrative agencies and administrative power, less and less controlled either by Congress or the courts, there has been a constantly widening interpretation of the President's constitutional powers. This has occurred both in the foreign and in the domestic field.
It is especially marked in the sphere of foreign relations. The Constitution, contrary to the repeated assumptions of the champions of Presidential omnipotence, nowhere specifically gives the President power to conduct foreign relations. Specifically, he has merely the formal power to "receive ambassadors and other public ministers." Perhaps this implies power over the routine conduct of foreign affairs, which could hardly be carried on by Congress; but it certainly does not apply to any crucial decision. For the Founding Fathers gave Congress alone the power to declare war. And they specifically provided that no treaty could be made by the President without "the advice and consent of the Senate." In practice, ever since George Washington, presidents have generally ignored the instruction to seek the advice of the Senate in treaty-making. And in recent years they have repeatedly tried to evade the requirement even for Senatorial consent. They have done this by three extra-constitutional devices.
One of these is to frame and sign a complicated multilateral treaty and then argue that the Senate must ratify it without suggesting amendments because any attempt to introduce amendments would make the whole treaty impossible.
A second device, coming more and more into practice, has been to frame a treaty setting up an international agency which is authorized from then on to take its own actions or makes its own rulings by discretion. This applies to the United Nations, with its innumerable sub-agencies, to the International Monetary Fund, and to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Once the Senate has approved such an arrangement it loses any real say regarding the decisions of the agency it has set up, though the President can still have some partial control through his executive appointments to such a body.
The third extra-constitutional device is, of course, that of resorting to an "executive agreement" instead of a "treaty," claiming that this is just as binding on Congress and the country as a treaty would have been, and thereby evading the Constitutional requirement for Senate ratification. When the Senate tried to pass a clarifying amendment (and missed only by a single vote the necessary two-thirds majority for doing so) to assure the supremacy of the Constitution over treaties, and to prevent back-door amendment of the Constitution through the treaty-making device, President Eisenhower and his advisers opposed it. In this debate, the pro-Presidential press, in its news columns, constantly referred to this proposed amendment as an attempt to curb "the President's treaty-making powers." They used this phrase repeatedly in face of the fact that there are no exclusively Presidential treaty-making powers in the Constitution. The President has no treaty-making powers whatever that do not require the advice and consent of the Senate, and the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senators present. The claim that there is a Presidential power of making "executive agreements" with foreign nations binding on this country, which the Senate has no right to control, is completely without foundation.
In the domestic sphere, the President's powers have grown chiefly through the steady multiplication of Federal agencies. Many of these, through their rule-making and rule-enforcing powers, and their wide discretionary latitude, have become combined legislative and policing agencies to a large extent outside the control of the Congress.
The major wars in which the United States has engaged in the last forty years have also led to an enormous growth in the President's so-called "war powers." Now there is no specific mention of "war powers," or any listing of them, in the Constitution. This growth of war powers derives mainly from the precedents created by the unchallenged assumption or usurpation of such powers by presidents in the past. Hence their steadily cumulative nature.
Finally, the mere habit of huge Presidential power has led to the assertion of still more power. An outstanding example of this was President Truman's action in seizing the nation's steel plants in 1952, in order to force the steel companies to accept the wage decision of the Wage Stabilization Board that he appointed. Attorneys for the Government blandly argued, and Mr. Truman himself contended, that the President could do this under his "reserve powers" or "inherent powers" in the Constitution. This was again an assertion of powers that the Constitution itself nowhere mentions. And though this claim was finally rejected by the Supreme Court, it was only by a vote of six to three. Minority members argued that the President could seize anything he wished under these so-called inherent or reserve powers. Had this become the majority decision, no private property anywhere in the country would be safe from seizure. Presidential power would be unchecked and practically unlimited.
It should hardly be necessary to point out that this constant expansion of the claims for Presidential powers has almost necessarily been accompanied by a constant reduction of the powers and prerogatives of Congress. Today we find increasing resentment even of the Congressional power of investigation of the executive branch. This is surely a minimal power, without which Congress could not intelligently exercise its other functions. But Congressional investigations have in late years been constantly denounced either on the ground that they prevent the executive agencies "from getting any work done," or under the pretense that they undermine the morale of Federal officials and are almost invariably unfair. It is ironic that Congress, whose ability to check Presidential power has been steadily shrinking in the last forty years, should today be more often than ever before accused in the press of "usurping" the functions, powers, or prerogatives of the President.
One of the remarkable developments of the last decade, in fact, has been the frequency with which the President, on one excuse or another, has "forbidden" members of the executive branch to testify on certain executive activities before Congressional committees. More and more of the activities of the Federal government tend to become "top secret," even in peacetime. Congress is said to be prying into something that is none of its business. People presuming to speak for the President have frequently come close to asserting what we may call the principle of executive irresponsibility or non-accountability — that is, the principle that the President does not have to account to the elected representatives of the people for his official actions.
One would think that the horrible examples of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mossadegh, Perón, etc., would give pause to our own advocates of more and more executive power in the United States. Why haven't they done so? Partly, no doubt, from the deep-rooted habit of putting one's own country in a category by itself, as if what went on abroad could have no relation to anything going on at home. It is the old illusion that "It can't happen here."
Another reason why these dictatorial trends abroad are not related to our own domestic trends is that we are in the habit of using different vocabularies to describe similar developments, depending on whether they occur abroad or at home. We may call a foreign tendency a trend toward dictatorship, but argue for the same tendency at home on the ground that we need a "strong" executive.
Now there is, true enough, a possible danger of having an executive so weak, so incapable of maintaining law, order, and firmness and dependability of policy, that the executive weakness itself breeds a threat of revolutionary uprising followed by dictatorship. But this happens only under rare and special conditions, not a sign of which exists in present-day America. At the moment of writing, the nearest prominent example we have of a "weak" executive in the Western world is in France. But when we examine even that case closely we find that the real defect in the French system is less that the Premier lacks sufficient legal powers as long as he remains in office, as that he lacks security of tenure. The French Assembly can irresponsibly vote him out of power at any time. He has no corresponding power of dissolution to force the French Parliament to exercise its removal powers responsibly. Having no security of tenure, he is too often paralyzed in action. Yet the French, instead of giving him the unequivocal power of dissolution possessed, for example, by the Prime Minister of Great Britain, have tried to solve the problem in the wrong way by often giving the Premier in office "decree law powers" that he ought not to have. In other words, the French, instead of forcing the Assembly to exercise its powers of approval or disapproval responsibly, periodically give the Premier powers that should be properly exercised only by a legislature.
Regardless of whether or not this analysis of the present French situation is accepted as correct, it is certainly clear that outside of France no major nation today suffers because of "too weak" an executive. Most of the so-called "free" nations, including ourselves, already suffer from dangerously excessive powers in the hands of the executive, and above all from a government that has acquired dangerously excessive powers.
In a Federal government restricted to its proper sphere, the President might properly be given more powers than he has at present in some directions, and fewer powers in others. But any general argument for a "stronger" executive can seem plausible only as long as it remains ambiguous and vague in its specifications. If we must speak in broad general terms, then we are entitled to say in such general terms that the powers and the responsibilities of the President have grown far beyond those that either can or should be exercised by any one man.
We have now outlined what I have called the three main tendencies that mark a drift toward totalitarianism. They are (1) the tendency of the government to attempt more and more to intervene, and to control economic life; (2) the tendency toward greater and greater concentration of power in the central government at the expense of local governments; and (3) the tendency toward more and more concentration of power in the hands of the executive at the expense of the legislative and judiciary.
To these I am tempted to add a fourth tendency — the pressure for a world state.
The addition of this will doubtless come as a shock to many self-styled liberals and well-intentioned idealists who would regard the establishment of a world state as the crowning achievement of liberalism and internationalism. A little examination, however, will show us that the present pressure for a world state represents a false internationalism and a retreat from freedom. It is, on the contrary, merely the equivalent on a world scale of the pressure for centralized government on a national scale. It aims to set up the coercive machinery of a world state before the world is remotely prepared in sentiments or in ideology to accept a world state. The zealots for such machinery are too impatient to study the necessary preliminaries to a world state (even assuming that a world state, which would concentrate all world political powers in a few hands, is even ultimately desirable). Such zealots for a centralized world government with coercive powers fail to recognize that if international good-will and intellectual clear-sightedness existed on the part of national statesmen, practically all the reasonable objectives of a so-called world state could be achieved without setting up such a world state. And until this good-will and clear-sightedness are achieved within individual nations, the creation of a compulsive world state would be either futile or catastrophic.
The pressure for a world state, in fact, represents not true internationalism, but intergovernmentalism, interstatism. It would lead to the setting up of machinery for a universal and procrustean coercion. We seem to be moving, in the present era, toward more and more restriction of the liberties of individuals by governmental agencies. This is the tendency that has produced the pressure for international price-fixing; for the creation of "buffer stocks" of international commodities; the institution of international subsidies and handouts; the paternalistic governmental establishment of industries in "underdeveloped" nations without regard to their appropriateness, efficiency, or need; and finally the growth of an international inflationism, as represented by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund.
This whole tendency makes a travesty of international freedom for the individual, which is the essence of true internationalism. For true internationalism does not consist in compelling the taxpayers or citizens of one nation or the inhabitants of one part of the globe to subsidize, or give alms to, or even to do "business" with, the citizens of any other nation or the inhabitants of any other part of the globe. True internationalism, on the contrary, consists in permitting the individual citizen or firm in any nation to buy from, or sell to, or trade with, the individual citizen or firm of any other nation. It consists, in brief, in the freedom of trade advocated so eloquently by Adam Smith in the eighteenth century and practically achieved in the nineteenth — a freedom of trade that (notwithstanding scores of international agencies and multilateral treaties) has now been destroyed.
We are losing our freedoms today, in brief, through a false ideology — or, to use an older expression, because of intellectual confusion. Nothing is more typical of this contemporary intellectual confusion than the enunciation by the late President Roosevelt of the so-called Four Freedoms. As George Santayana points out in a footnote in his Dominations and Powers:
Of the "Four Freedoms" demanded by President Roosevelt in the name of mankind, two are negative, being freedoms from, not freedoms to. Had he chosen the word "liberty," he would have stumbled on reaching these desired exemptions, because the phrase "freedom from" is idiomatic, but the phrase "liberty from" would have been impossible. "Liberty" thus seems to imply vital liberty, the exercise of powers and virtues native to oneself and to one's country. But freedom from want or from fear is only a condition for the steady exercise of true liberty. On the other hand it is more than a demand for liberty; for it demands insurance and protection by provident institutions, which imply the dominance of a paternal government, with artificial privileges secured by law. This would be freedom from the dangers of a free life. It shows us liberty contracting its field and bargaining for safety first.
The contemporary world has gone astray, in sum, because it has sought freedom from the dangers and risks of liberty.
Link:
http://mises.org/daily/5705/The-Road-to-Totalitarianism
by Henry Hazlitt
In spite of the obvious ultimate objective of the masters of Russia to communize and conquer the world, and in spite of the frightful power which such weapons as guided missiles and atomic and hydrogen bombs may put in their hands, the greatest threat to American liberty today comes from within. It is the threat of a growing and spreading totalitarian ideology.
Totalitarianism in its final form is the doctrine that the government, the state, must exercise total control over the individual. The American College Dictionary, closely following Webster's Collegiate, defines totalitarianism as "pertaining to a centralized form of government in which those in control grant neither recognition nor tolerance to parties of different opinion."
Now I should describe this failure to grant tolerance to other parties not as the essence of totalitarianism, but rather as one of its consequences or corollaries. The essence of totalitarianism is that the group in power must exercise total control. Its original purpose (as in communism) may be merely to exercise total control over "the economy." But "the state" (the imposing name for the clique in power) can exercise total control over the economy only if it exercises complete control over imports and exports, over prices and interest rates and wages, over production and consumption, over buying and selling, over the earning and spending of income, over jobs, over occupations, over workers — over what they do and what they get and where they go — and finally, over what they say and even what they think.
If total control over the economy must in the end mean total control over what people do, say, and think, then it is only spelling out details or pointing out corollaries to say that totalitarianism suppresses freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of immigration and emigration, freedom to form or to keep any political party in opposition, and freedom to vote against the government. These suppressions are merely the end-products of totalitarianism.
All that the totalitarians want is total control. This does not necessarily mean that they want total suppression. They suppress merely the ideas which they don't agree with, or of which they are suspicious, or of which they have never heard before; and they suppress only the actions that they don't like, or of which they cannot see the necessity. They leave the individual perfectly free to agree with them, and perfectly free to act in any way that serves their purposes — or to which they may happen at the moment to be indifferent. Of course, they sometimes also compel actions, such as positive denunciations of people who are against the government (or who the government says are against the government), or groveling adulation of the leader of the moment. That no individual in Russia today gets the constant groveling adulation that Stalin demanded chiefly means that no successor has yet succeeded in securing Stalin's unchallenged power.
Once we understand "total" totalitarianism, we are in a better position to understand degrees of totalitarianism. Or rather — since totalitarianism is by definition total — it would probably be more accurate to say that we are in a better position to understand the steps on the road to totalitarianism.
We can either move, from where we are, toward totalitarianism on the one hand or toward freedom on the other. How do we ascertain just where we now are? How do we tell in what direction we have been moving? In this ideological sphere, what does our map look like? What is our compass? What are the landmarks or constellations to guide us?
It is a little difficult, as nebulous and conflicting usage shows, to agree on precisely what liberty means. But it isn't too difficult to agree on precisely what slavery means. And it isn't too difficult to recognize the totalitarian mind when we meet one. Its outstanding mark is a contempt for liberty. That is, its outstanding mark is a contempt for the liberty of others. As de Tocqueville remarked in the preface to his "France Before the Revolution of 1789,"
Despots themselves do not deny the excellence of freedom, but they wish to keep it all to themselves, and maintain that all other men are utterly unworthy of it. Thus it is not on the opinion which may be entertained of freedom that this difference subsists, but on the greater or the less esteem that we have for mankind; and it may be said with strict accuracy, that the taste a man may show for absolute government bears an exact ratio to the contempt he may profess for his countrymen.
The denial of freedom rests, in other words, on the assumption that the individual is incapable of managing his own affairs.
Three main tendencies or tenets mark the drift toward totalitarianism. The first and most important, because the other two derive from it, is the pressure for a constant increase in governmental powers, for a constant widening of the governmental sphere of intervention. It is the tendency toward more and more regulation of every sphere of economic life, toward more and more restriction of the liberties of the individual. The tendency toward more and more governmental spending is a part of this trend. It means in effect that the individual is able to spend less and less of the income he earns on the things he himself wants, while the government takes more and more of his income from him to spend it in the ways that it thinks wise. One of the basic assumptions of totalitarianism, in brief (and of such steps toward it as socialism, state paternalism, and Keynesianism), is that the citizen cannot be trusted to spend his own money. As government control becomes wider and wider, individual discretion, the individual's control of his own affairs in all directions, necessarily becomes narrower and narrower. In sum, liberty is constantly diminished.
One of the great contributions of Ludwig von Mises has been to show through rigorous reasoning, and a hundred examples, how government intervention in the market economy always finally results in a worse situation than would otherwise have existed, even as judged by the original objectives of the advocates of the intervention.
I assume that other contributors to this symposium will explore this phase of interventionism and statism rather fully; and therefore I should like to devote particular attention here to the political consequences and accompaniments of government intervention in the economic sphere.
I have called these political accompaniments consequences, and to a large extent they are; but they are also, in turn, causes. Once the power of the state has been increased by some economic intervention, this increase in State power permits and encourages further interventions, which further increase State power, and so on.
The most powerful brief statement of this interaction with which I am acquainted occurs in a lecture delivered by the eminent Swedish economist, the late Gustav Cassel. This was published in a pamphlet with the descriptive but rather cumbersome title: From Protectionism Through Planned Economy to Dictatorship.[1] I take the liberty of quoting an extensive passage from it:
The leadership of the state in economic affairs which advocates of Planned Economy want to establish is, as we have seen, necessarily connected with a bewildering mass of governmental interferences of a steadily cumulative nature. The arbitrariness, the mistakes and the inevitable contradictions of such policy will, as daily experience shows, only strengthen the demand for a more rational coordination of the different measures and, therefore, for unified leadership. For this reason Planned Economy will always tend to develop into Dictatorship….
The existence of some sort of parliament is no guarantee against planned economy being developed into dictatorship. On the contrary, experience has shown that representative bodies are unable to fulfill all the multitudinous functions connected with economic leadership without becoming more and more involved in the struggle between competing interests, with the consequence of a moral decay ending in party — if not individual — corruption. Examples of such a degrading development are indeed in many countries accumulating at such a speed as must fill every honorable citizen with the gravest apprehensions as to the future of the representative system. But apart from that, this system cannot possibly be preserved, if parliaments are constantly over-worked by having to consider an infinite mass of the most intricate questions relating to private economy. The parliamentary system can be saved only by wise and deliberate restriction of the functions of parliaments….
Economic dictatorship is much more dangerous than people believe. Once authoritative control has been established it will not always be possible to limit it to the economic domain. If we allow economic freedom and self-reliance to be destroyed, the powers standing for Liberty will have lost so much in strength that they will not be able to offer any effective resistance against a progressive extension of such destruction to constitutional and public life generally. And if this resistance is gradually given up — perhaps without people ever realizing what is actually going on — such fundamental values as personal liberty, freedom of thought and speech and independence of science are exposed to imminent danger. What stands to be lost is nothing less than the whole of that civilization that we have inherited from generations which once fought hard to lay its foundations and even gave their life for it.
Cassel has here pointed out very clearly some of the reasons why economic interventionism and government economic planning lead toward dictatorship. Let us now, however, looking at another aspect of the problem, see whether or not we can identify, in an unmistakable way, some of the main landmarks or guideposts that can tell us whether we are moving away from or nearer to totalitarianism.
I said a while back that three main tendencies mark the drift toward totalitarianism, and that the first and most important, because the other two derive from it, is the pressure for a constant increase in governmental intervention, in governmental spending, and in governmental power. Let us now consider the other two tendencies.
The second main tendency that marks the drift toward totalitarianism is that toward greater and greater concentration of power in the central government. This tendency is most easily recognizable here in the United States, because we have ostensibly a Federal form of government and can readily see the growth of power in Washington at the expense of the states.
The concentration of power and the centralization of power, I may point out here, are merely two names for the same thing. This second tendency is a necessary consequence of the first. If the central government is to control more and more of our economic life, it cannot permit this to be done by the individual states. The pressure for uniformity, and the pressure for centralization of power, are two aspects of the same pressure.
It is not difficult to see why this is so. Obviously, if government is to intervene in business, there cannot be forty-eight different kinds of conflicting interventions. Obviously, if government is to impose an over-all "economic plan," it cannot impose forty-eight different and conflicting plans. Planning from the center is possible only with centralization of governmental power. And so deep is the belief in the benevolence and necessity of uniform regulation and central planning that the Federal government assumes more and more of the powers previously exercised by the states, or powers never exercised by any state; and the Supreme Court keeps steadily stretching the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to authorize powers and Federal interventions never dreamed of by the Founding Fathers. At the same time recent Supreme Court decisions treat the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution practically as if it did not exist.[2]
A notable example of this tendency exists with regard to labor legislation. Supreme Court decisions regarding the Wagner Act and its successor the Taft-Hartley Act (legally, and essentially, a mere amendment of the Wagner Act) have not only steadily widened the sphere of Federal regulation to cover activities and labor relations that are primarily, if not almost wholly, intra-state, but have ruled that the states themselves have no power over these primarily internal activities and relations if Congress has chosen to "pre-empt" the field.
The third tendency that marks the drift toward totalitarianism is the increasing centralization and concentration of power in the hands of the President at the expense of the two co-ordinate branches of the government, Congress and the courts. In the United States this tendency is very marked today. To listen to our pro-totalitarians, the main duty of Congress is to follow the President's "leadership" in all things; to be a set of yes-men; to act as a mere rubber-stamp.
The dangers of one-man rule have been so emphasized and dramatized in recent years — we have seen so many appalling examples, from Hitler and Stalin to their many pocket-sized editions, the Mossadeghs and Peróns — that any warning of this danger to Americans may seem needless. Yet most Americans, like the citizens of the countries already victimized by their native Mussolinis, may prove incapable of recognizing this evil until it has grown beyond the point of control. One invariable accompaniment of the growth of Caesarism is the growing contempt expressed for legislative bodies, and impatience with their "dilatoriness" in enacting the "Leader's" program, or their actual "obstructionist tactics" or "crippling amendments." Yet in recent years derision of Congress has become in America almost a national pastime. And a substantial part of the press never tires of reviling Congress for "doing nothing" — that is, for not piling more mountains of legislation on the existing mountains of legislation; or for failing to enact in full "the President's program."[3]
If we ask how it comes about that Congress and other legislative bodies throughout the contemporary world have tended to fall into public disrepute, we again find that the answer lies in the apparently unshakeable contemporary faith in the necessity and benevolence of a continually expanding government intervention. Congress and the planners can never agree among themselves on precisely what the government should do to remedy some supposed evil. They cannot agree on an unambiguous general law, whose application in specific cases could be safely left to the courts. All that they can agree upon is that "something should be done." In other words, all they can agree upon is that the government must intervene, that the special area of economic activity under discussion must be "controlled." So they frame a law setting forth a number of vague but high-sounding goals and create an agency or commission whose function it is to achieve these goals through its own omniscience and discretion. The National Labor Relations Law (the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act) is a typical example. It sets up a National Labor Relations Board, which thereupon proceeds to become a prosecutor, court, and legislative body all rolled into one, and starts laying down a series of rulings and handing down a series of decisions, many of which surprise no one more than the Congressional members who created the agency in the first place.
From then on, Congress in that particular sphere is treated mainly as a nuisance. The administrative bodies that it has set up resent its "interference" and "meddling" with their activities. These administrative bodies devote themselves in large part to extolling "administrative discretion" at the expense of the Rule of Law — that is, of any body of clear rules to be applied by the courts. Any subsequent effort of Congress to reduce the range of administrative discretion, arbitrariness, and caprice is denounced as "crippling" to administrative bodies, and as interfering with that "flexibility" of action so dear to the administrative heart.
Along with this growth of administrative agencies and administrative power, less and less controlled either by Congress or the courts, there has been a constantly widening interpretation of the President's constitutional powers. This has occurred both in the foreign and in the domestic field.
It is especially marked in the sphere of foreign relations. The Constitution, contrary to the repeated assumptions of the champions of Presidential omnipotence, nowhere specifically gives the President power to conduct foreign relations. Specifically, he has merely the formal power to "receive ambassadors and other public ministers." Perhaps this implies power over the routine conduct of foreign affairs, which could hardly be carried on by Congress; but it certainly does not apply to any crucial decision. For the Founding Fathers gave Congress alone the power to declare war. And they specifically provided that no treaty could be made by the President without "the advice and consent of the Senate." In practice, ever since George Washington, presidents have generally ignored the instruction to seek the advice of the Senate in treaty-making. And in recent years they have repeatedly tried to evade the requirement even for Senatorial consent. They have done this by three extra-constitutional devices.
One of these is to frame and sign a complicated multilateral treaty and then argue that the Senate must ratify it without suggesting amendments because any attempt to introduce amendments would make the whole treaty impossible.
A second device, coming more and more into practice, has been to frame a treaty setting up an international agency which is authorized from then on to take its own actions or makes its own rulings by discretion. This applies to the United Nations, with its innumerable sub-agencies, to the International Monetary Fund, and to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Once the Senate has approved such an arrangement it loses any real say regarding the decisions of the agency it has set up, though the President can still have some partial control through his executive appointments to such a body.
The third extra-constitutional device is, of course, that of resorting to an "executive agreement" instead of a "treaty," claiming that this is just as binding on Congress and the country as a treaty would have been, and thereby evading the Constitutional requirement for Senate ratification. When the Senate tried to pass a clarifying amendment (and missed only by a single vote the necessary two-thirds majority for doing so) to assure the supremacy of the Constitution over treaties, and to prevent back-door amendment of the Constitution through the treaty-making device, President Eisenhower and his advisers opposed it. In this debate, the pro-Presidential press, in its news columns, constantly referred to this proposed amendment as an attempt to curb "the President's treaty-making powers." They used this phrase repeatedly in face of the fact that there are no exclusively Presidential treaty-making powers in the Constitution. The President has no treaty-making powers whatever that do not require the advice and consent of the Senate, and the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senators present. The claim that there is a Presidential power of making "executive agreements" with foreign nations binding on this country, which the Senate has no right to control, is completely without foundation.
In the domestic sphere, the President's powers have grown chiefly through the steady multiplication of Federal agencies. Many of these, through their rule-making and rule-enforcing powers, and their wide discretionary latitude, have become combined legislative and policing agencies to a large extent outside the control of the Congress.
The major wars in which the United States has engaged in the last forty years have also led to an enormous growth in the President's so-called "war powers." Now there is no specific mention of "war powers," or any listing of them, in the Constitution. This growth of war powers derives mainly from the precedents created by the unchallenged assumption or usurpation of such powers by presidents in the past. Hence their steadily cumulative nature.
Finally, the mere habit of huge Presidential power has led to the assertion of still more power. An outstanding example of this was President Truman's action in seizing the nation's steel plants in 1952, in order to force the steel companies to accept the wage decision of the Wage Stabilization Board that he appointed. Attorneys for the Government blandly argued, and Mr. Truman himself contended, that the President could do this under his "reserve powers" or "inherent powers" in the Constitution. This was again an assertion of powers that the Constitution itself nowhere mentions. And though this claim was finally rejected by the Supreme Court, it was only by a vote of six to three. Minority members argued that the President could seize anything he wished under these so-called inherent or reserve powers. Had this become the majority decision, no private property anywhere in the country would be safe from seizure. Presidential power would be unchecked and practically unlimited.
It should hardly be necessary to point out that this constant expansion of the claims for Presidential powers has almost necessarily been accompanied by a constant reduction of the powers and prerogatives of Congress. Today we find increasing resentment even of the Congressional power of investigation of the executive branch. This is surely a minimal power, without which Congress could not intelligently exercise its other functions. But Congressional investigations have in late years been constantly denounced either on the ground that they prevent the executive agencies "from getting any work done," or under the pretense that they undermine the morale of Federal officials and are almost invariably unfair. It is ironic that Congress, whose ability to check Presidential power has been steadily shrinking in the last forty years, should today be more often than ever before accused in the press of "usurping" the functions, powers, or prerogatives of the President.
One of the remarkable developments of the last decade, in fact, has been the frequency with which the President, on one excuse or another, has "forbidden" members of the executive branch to testify on certain executive activities before Congressional committees. More and more of the activities of the Federal government tend to become "top secret," even in peacetime. Congress is said to be prying into something that is none of its business. People presuming to speak for the President have frequently come close to asserting what we may call the principle of executive irresponsibility or non-accountability — that is, the principle that the President does not have to account to the elected representatives of the people for his official actions.
One would think that the horrible examples of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mossadegh, Perón, etc., would give pause to our own advocates of more and more executive power in the United States. Why haven't they done so? Partly, no doubt, from the deep-rooted habit of putting one's own country in a category by itself, as if what went on abroad could have no relation to anything going on at home. It is the old illusion that "It can't happen here."
Another reason why these dictatorial trends abroad are not related to our own domestic trends is that we are in the habit of using different vocabularies to describe similar developments, depending on whether they occur abroad or at home. We may call a foreign tendency a trend toward dictatorship, but argue for the same tendency at home on the ground that we need a "strong" executive.
Now there is, true enough, a possible danger of having an executive so weak, so incapable of maintaining law, order, and firmness and dependability of policy, that the executive weakness itself breeds a threat of revolutionary uprising followed by dictatorship. But this happens only under rare and special conditions, not a sign of which exists in present-day America. At the moment of writing, the nearest prominent example we have of a "weak" executive in the Western world is in France. But when we examine even that case closely we find that the real defect in the French system is less that the Premier lacks sufficient legal powers as long as he remains in office, as that he lacks security of tenure. The French Assembly can irresponsibly vote him out of power at any time. He has no corresponding power of dissolution to force the French Parliament to exercise its removal powers responsibly. Having no security of tenure, he is too often paralyzed in action. Yet the French, instead of giving him the unequivocal power of dissolution possessed, for example, by the Prime Minister of Great Britain, have tried to solve the problem in the wrong way by often giving the Premier in office "decree law powers" that he ought not to have. In other words, the French, instead of forcing the Assembly to exercise its powers of approval or disapproval responsibly, periodically give the Premier powers that should be properly exercised only by a legislature.
Regardless of whether or not this analysis of the present French situation is accepted as correct, it is certainly clear that outside of France no major nation today suffers because of "too weak" an executive. Most of the so-called "free" nations, including ourselves, already suffer from dangerously excessive powers in the hands of the executive, and above all from a government that has acquired dangerously excessive powers.
In a Federal government restricted to its proper sphere, the President might properly be given more powers than he has at present in some directions, and fewer powers in others. But any general argument for a "stronger" executive can seem plausible only as long as it remains ambiguous and vague in its specifications. If we must speak in broad general terms, then we are entitled to say in such general terms that the powers and the responsibilities of the President have grown far beyond those that either can or should be exercised by any one man.
We have now outlined what I have called the three main tendencies that mark a drift toward totalitarianism. They are (1) the tendency of the government to attempt more and more to intervene, and to control economic life; (2) the tendency toward greater and greater concentration of power in the central government at the expense of local governments; and (3) the tendency toward more and more concentration of power in the hands of the executive at the expense of the legislative and judiciary.
To these I am tempted to add a fourth tendency — the pressure for a world state.
The addition of this will doubtless come as a shock to many self-styled liberals and well-intentioned idealists who would regard the establishment of a world state as the crowning achievement of liberalism and internationalism. A little examination, however, will show us that the present pressure for a world state represents a false internationalism and a retreat from freedom. It is, on the contrary, merely the equivalent on a world scale of the pressure for centralized government on a national scale. It aims to set up the coercive machinery of a world state before the world is remotely prepared in sentiments or in ideology to accept a world state. The zealots for such machinery are too impatient to study the necessary preliminaries to a world state (even assuming that a world state, which would concentrate all world political powers in a few hands, is even ultimately desirable). Such zealots for a centralized world government with coercive powers fail to recognize that if international good-will and intellectual clear-sightedness existed on the part of national statesmen, practically all the reasonable objectives of a so-called world state could be achieved without setting up such a world state. And until this good-will and clear-sightedness are achieved within individual nations, the creation of a compulsive world state would be either futile or catastrophic.
The pressure for a world state, in fact, represents not true internationalism, but intergovernmentalism, interstatism. It would lead to the setting up of machinery for a universal and procrustean coercion. We seem to be moving, in the present era, toward more and more restriction of the liberties of individuals by governmental agencies. This is the tendency that has produced the pressure for international price-fixing; for the creation of "buffer stocks" of international commodities; the institution of international subsidies and handouts; the paternalistic governmental establishment of industries in "underdeveloped" nations without regard to their appropriateness, efficiency, or need; and finally the growth of an international inflationism, as represented by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund.
This whole tendency makes a travesty of international freedom for the individual, which is the essence of true internationalism. For true internationalism does not consist in compelling the taxpayers or citizens of one nation or the inhabitants of one part of the globe to subsidize, or give alms to, or even to do "business" with, the citizens of any other nation or the inhabitants of any other part of the globe. True internationalism, on the contrary, consists in permitting the individual citizen or firm in any nation to buy from, or sell to, or trade with, the individual citizen or firm of any other nation. It consists, in brief, in the freedom of trade advocated so eloquently by Adam Smith in the eighteenth century and practically achieved in the nineteenth — a freedom of trade that (notwithstanding scores of international agencies and multilateral treaties) has now been destroyed.
We are losing our freedoms today, in brief, through a false ideology — or, to use an older expression, because of intellectual confusion. Nothing is more typical of this contemporary intellectual confusion than the enunciation by the late President Roosevelt of the so-called Four Freedoms. As George Santayana points out in a footnote in his Dominations and Powers:
Of the "Four Freedoms" demanded by President Roosevelt in the name of mankind, two are negative, being freedoms from, not freedoms to. Had he chosen the word "liberty," he would have stumbled on reaching these desired exemptions, because the phrase "freedom from" is idiomatic, but the phrase "liberty from" would have been impossible. "Liberty" thus seems to imply vital liberty, the exercise of powers and virtues native to oneself and to one's country. But freedom from want or from fear is only a condition for the steady exercise of true liberty. On the other hand it is more than a demand for liberty; for it demands insurance and protection by provident institutions, which imply the dominance of a paternal government, with artificial privileges secured by law. This would be freedom from the dangers of a free life. It shows us liberty contracting its field and bargaining for safety first.
The contemporary world has gone astray, in sum, because it has sought freedom from the dangers and risks of liberty.
Link:
http://mises.org/daily/5705/The-Road-to-Totalitarianism
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