Democracy – the Dumpster Fire Requested by the Masses and Supported by the Elite

In Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s classic “Democracy – The God That Failed“, the utter weakness of this form of government is laid bare, as all non-principled people pursue the “free” things government can provide, from the poorest in the street to the upper class CEO, government becomes the vehicle of theft:

With a [democratic] government anyone in principle can become a member of the ruling class or even the supreme power. The distinction between the rulers and the ruled as well as the class consciousness of the ruled become blurred. The illusion even arises that the distinction no longer exists: that with a public government no one is ruled by anyone, but everyone instead rules himself. Accordingly, public resistance against government power is systematically weakened. While exploitation and expropriation before might have appeared plainly oppressive and evil to the public, they seem much less so, mankind being what it is, once anyone may freely enter the ranks of those who are at the receiving end. Consequently, [exploitation will increase], whether openly in the form of higher taxes or discretely as increased governmental money “creation” (inflation) or legislative regulation.

A year and a half ago I posted “How Understanding History Helps Understanding the present and the Future” in which I quoted Hans:

The Right accepts the reality of human differences but the Left does not. Because Leftists try to make everyone equal, they favor massive interventions by the State to abolish human cdifferences.

I am not saying that the so-called Right is honest, honorable or trustworthy, it is just that it seems to be a few degrees away from evil in admitting that no entity can “make” everyone equal, except in slavery.

One must note that the so-called Left, who politically years ago were aligned more with Thomas Jefferson, has drifted very far from the thoughts of the founding document the US Declaration of Independence which says in part:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it ..

Are we really created equal. No way, no how. However, what is equal is the rights as humans created in the image of God have under natural law, that is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness retaining all the personal property we acquire honestly with our work along the way. Government was supposed to see us equal under the law. As it turned out, most in government, Democrats and Republicans, see themselves above the law.

The bent humans develop overtime can be used for good but also for evil. We should by now see start evidence of how this plays out in crisis events, tyrants and snitches at every level of society come out of the woodwork. People we have known for years seem to have abandon common sense and have a cult-like zealous look in their eyes as they argue the latest fad built on half-truths, either from the masses or from government.

Hans points out that it is not only the masses, but the elites that are on-board with this agenda:

The egalitarian worldview of the Left is not only incompatible with libertarianism, however. It is so out of touch with reality that one must be wondering how anyone can take it seriously. The man-on-the-street certainly does not believe in the equality of all men. Plain common sense and sound prejudice stand in the way of that. And I am even more confident that no one of the actual proponents of the egalitarian doctrine really, deep down, believes what he proclaims. Yet how, then, could the Leftist worldview have become the dominant ideology of our age? At least for a libertarian, the answer should be obvious: the egalitarian doctrine achieved this status not because it is true, but because it provides the perfect intellectual cover for the drive toward totalitarian social control by a ruling elite

The United States has been on this path at least since the War Against Southern Independence from 1861-1865 when the state crushed those who were following the Declaration of Independence when it said:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ..

The seven secession documents outlined that these entities were taking back the powers it had given to the federation formed in 1787 with the US Constitution as they no longer consented! What, pray tell, will happen to us in the future when we lay claim to that founding principle? With the masses, the elites and the state in partnership, those that understand what is going on will be surrounded.

It has to be noted again that Lincoln’s centralizing of power was admired by Karl Marx, who correctly understood that:

So in fact it was the Republicans that led the United States down this road that the Democrats have fully embraced. How stupid is that.

Late 1930s American Communist convention

So today in 2020 we have the masses that are enthralled by “bread and circuses” while not being able to critically think what the end-game is here that the elites have for us all. Seems that most college graduates only see the first consequence of any action or decision, and rarely if ever see that the second and third consequences will be disastrous to them. But the masses are generally asses .. they go insane together in large groups and only then do some come back one at a time.

The other thing that democracy has done to society is to make it immoral. Few in society today think it is wrong to take with others have honestly earned and give it to the government to redistribute. Theft via government is honorable in their mind. Personal property of others means nothing as well.

Surf is up dude .. hang on!

Peace out.

-SF1

A Federated Republic Would Never Have to Depend on One Person for Its Survival

I will lay the blame primarily on Abraham Lincoln, whose reaction to the secession of seven states in 1861 led to this republic’s change from version 1.0 in 1781 to version 2.0 (thanks to the US Constitution(1787), a coup d’etat by any simple analysis) to version 3.0 in 1865 that rendered the states as impotent servants to the master (general/federal government), a virtual democracy (i.e. mob rule).

Lincoln’s effort to save actually destroyed!

The genius of the Articles of Confederation is that it recognized as each state was in fact a sovereign country (just like the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized). The presidential election pre-US Constitution was a non-issue, and 99% of Americans only saw the federal government when the post-rider stopped a few times a week. Furthermore, if one state had a tyrant, it would minimally impact other states.

In 2020, I would give almost anything to have the federal politics happen hundreds of miles away and have little impact on my day to day, year to year life in my own community. Can it be that whatever “federal” power is necessary that it be with this aim:

The said states hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of their Liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretence whatever. – Article III ‘The Articles of Confederation” 1777

The US Constitution brought the executive branch to a much more powerful level encouraged by those like Alexander Hamilton who saw royalty and a central government as the path toward empire. The empire has been realized, but at what cost? The cost was the soul of this republic.

Today’s situation did not happen overnight, and most people could trace it back to the 1970s, but few realize that the real roots of this go back much further. The wedding of big government and big business was a Whig wet dream from the early 1800s that Lincoln himself believed in like a religion. Even by 1861 the US Constitution was easily raped by Lincoln himself all in the name of “safety” for the “union”. Preserving all thirty-some states with territories to the west complicit with big business barons working their behind the scenes magic with the US government to eliminate the competition.

Enter a recent book review “The Election to End All Elections” by Angelo M. Codevilla on Michael Anton’s new book called ‘The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return

[Michael Anton] urges Americans to vote for Trump, disappointed though they may be with his performance, because they know even better than before how much this country’s ruling class would use control of the presidency to hurt us in our private and public lives for having dared to reject their mastery. Trump, imperfect as he is, is like a finger in a dike that, if removed, would loose a deluge. Anton describes how the Democratic Party-led complex of public-private power has been transforming our free, decent, and prosperous country into its opposite—and how it’s going to do to the rest of America what it has already largely accomplished in California.

Personally, I find more and more people disillusioned with how the Marxist inroads into not just the colleges but also much of corporate America has been achieved in the past few decades. Many went to college for “communications” finding out that the MSM is nauseating to consider working for, and others now feel the same way about the medical fields (MIC – Medical Industrial Complex) with the Covid-19 “over-reaction”!

It is intriguing that a rather young person would see with such clarity just into what California is experiencing right now, and all the dots that line up as to the sequence of bad decisions to get to where millions are in a state of exodus there. Angelo writes in the review of Michael’s book:

[Here] in 2020 productive middle-class families are fleeing California—so much so that the state will probably lose a seat in the House of Representatives after this year’s census. And all because its government—controlled by oligarchs in the entertainment and high-tech industries, as well as the state bureaucracy and public sector labor unions—raised taxes, imposed regulations, let public services decay, stopped defending against criminals, and empowered left-wing social activists. Today’s California is for government-favored oligarchs and those who service them. You want a career? If you don’t conform every word and action to the ruling orthodoxies, your work and talents will be wasted. You want your children to grow up intelligent and decent? The schools will teach them little reasoning and much depravity. Like you, they will also learn to compete by favor-seeking rather than by performance. You see crime rising, sense that you have to protect yourself, but know that, in most of the state, the police will arrest you for it. And you are sick of paying for it all.

The bottom line it seems is that in much of middle-upper class America, most kids do not become taxpayers until they are almost 30. This allows the Marxist/totalitarian mindset to take root the longer kids are in college, making PhDs the ones with the most student debt and the most likely to be compliant in whatever corporation will have them! This is by design.

Michael Anton goes on to say:

The real power…resides not with elected (or appointed) officials and “world leaders”; they—or most of them—are a servant class. The real power resides with their donors, the bankers, CEOs, financiers, and tech oligarchs—some of whom occasionally run for and win office, but most of whom, most of the time, are content to buy off those who do. The end result is the same either way: economic globalism and financialization, consolidation of power in an ostensibly “meritocratic” but actually semi-hereditary class, livened up by social libertinism.

The intellectuals from the monarchy days is what I am reminded of. These types do NOT like competition, and government is big and bad enough to wield a club apparently. Angelo continues:

Despising any divine or natural authority and contemptuous of America’s history, those in the ruling class make war on the American people’s culture and national identity. Ironically, this ruling class, led almost exclusively by white men, has cast white men in general as the proper targets of universal vengeance—an inversion of reality sustained by a near-monopoly of power over corrupt institutions and mass communications. Anton’s section on “Propaganda and Censorship: Narrative, Megaphone, and Muzzle” is particularly worth reading.

Insightful stuff here. It is at this point where the talk turns to conservative vs. liberals .. and right away I think of the civil approach the South had with the “rule(US Constitution)-breaking” North where the ends justifies the means:

Truth-bomb time from Angelo:

They [ruling class] do not believe they have to worry about controlling their own violent troops because they are sure that they have nothing to fear from conservatives. That is because conservatives have continued to believe that the United States’s institutions and those who run them retain legitimacy. Conservative complaisance made possible a half-century of Progressive rule’s abuse. The War on Poverty ended up enriching its managers while expanding the underclass that voted for them. The civil rights movement ended up entitling a class of diversity managers to promote their friends and ruin their opponents. The environmental movement ended up empowering the very same wealthy, powerful folks while squeezing the rest of America into cookie-cutter living and paying inflated energy prices. The feminist movement delivered divorce and abortion—far from benefiting women, it has made millions dependent on ruling class favor. The COVID-19 pandemic has had almost nothing to do with public health and almost everything to do with separating, impoverishing, and disconnecting people inclined to vote against the ruling class. As leftist judges rule, conservatives respond by appointing judges who pledge not to rule. As leftist governors establish their brand of effective sovereignty by decree, conservative ones obey court orders. So long as, and to the degree that, the illusion of legitimacy stands—so long as the Right obeys while the Left disobeys and commands—there is no end to what the Left can do because there is so little that conservatives do to fight back.

.. until there is physical fighting, and like with the War Against Southern Independence, all the gloves will come off.

The boomerang and blow-back are real things that the Left is not ready for, and some in rural America are hoping for, so for now Trump, just one person, is holding it all back. Federation to Democracy to Socialism/Fascism/Marxism which is a very toxic brew.

Peace out.

-SF1

Source: Claremont Review of Books