Tag: police state

What Do Americans Celebrate July 4th? Political Extremism

I have found it more entertaining every year to hear what Americans think of the 4th of July. Most have never read the Declaration of Independence or even understand the political dynamics of the days in 1776. Most just know it is a day off, an excuse to party. The state (government in control of this land) could not be happier.

Test drive these words and see if your average politician might be tempted to put up barb-wire fences and gun turrets around the US Capitol:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation .. 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, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…

Alter or abolish is the remedy for a government that no longer has the consent of the people, yet here we are.

The role of government in society has been argued for centuries, yet common sense dictates that every generation could and should struggle with the proper extent that government (i.e. force, coercion, monopoly) should try to “help”.

From an insightful article written by a man 10 years my senior, I have found some interesting “truths” for me to ponder, as well as my kids and grand-kids. For example:

.. can’t we at least be happy when the government helps needy people? No, we can’t. The more goodies the government doles out, the more violent society becomes. That’s because it becomes more and more vital to be at the head of the line for those goodies; without them, you’re left with a crippling tax bill and nothing to show for it. The higher the fraction of people’s income that comes from the government, the more intense becomes the jockeying. You do your best to smear anyone who is claiming to be more worthy of largess than you. Society becomes spontaneously pulverized and at war with itself, all thanks to “help” from the government.

A society at war with itself is advantageous to the state as this distraction can serve to allow it to not only offer to fictitiously broker peace between the warring factions while “managing” the “crisis but also allows it to weigh in violently around the globe as a world-stage bully. A hobby that the state/empire loves to do, experiment around the world with ideas for democracy which then can be modified for use domestically to enhance the “police state”.

The rights that the founding fathers were willing to be called and hunted as “traitors” for can be seen in the following list of illegitimate government actions:

  • If you are sick, you have the right to be treated by whomever you please, for a price negotiated to the satisfaction of both parties, without government intrusion.
  • If you have services you wish to offer to the world, you have the right to do so without asking permission from the government. Only if you engage in force or fraud does the government have a right to intrude.
  • The government has no right to enslave you or your children to fight and die in some trumped-up war. If the nation were ever in genuine danger, there would be no shortage of volunteers to defend it.
  • The government has no right to tax an amount approaching half of your earnings. The legitimate functions of government can be financed by a tiny fraction of that.
  • The government has no right to rob you in order to pass out money to some favored victim group. Genuine charity is voluntary, but when the government gets involved, waste and fraud and theft are built in.
  • The government has no right to force you to pay for the worthless indoctrination centers called “public schools.” That money rightfully belongs to parents so they can make an informed decision for how best to educate their children.
  • The government has no right to deprive you of the means of self-defense. Any government official who attempts to use force to do so is committing the worst order of crime and should expect an appropriate response.
  • The government has no right to pull your car over on the highway and steal any cash you may be carrying. Any criminals who participate in this practice should expect an appropriately enraged response from those they seek to rob.
  • The government has no right to condemn and raze your home to enable some private developer to build a shopping mall.
  • The government has no right to lock you up if you have committed no crime, on the pretense that some people are irrationally frightened of some microscopic bug, and therefore everyone must hide until the last traces of irrational fear have vanished.
  • The government has no right to shut down your business for any reason, unless you have been found to have engaged in force or fraud by a non-corrupt court of law.
  • The government has no right to require you to wear a diaper on your face, or to be injected with an experimental biological agent.
  • The government has no right to force you to do business with someone you don’t want to do business with. It’s not nice to be a bigot, but bigots pay for discriminating through higher labor costs, lost trade, and a general echoing back of the world to the spirit one projects onto it. For the law to criminalize bigotry merely bottles it up, where it achieves higher and higher pressure until it explodes. It also creates a lawsuit-happy nation where everybody is terminally aggrieved over some perceived slight and wants to whine about it endlessly. The right to freedom of association is absolute.
  • The government has no right to apply coercion in any way to stop or influence anything you are doing, unless you are violating someone else’s rights. A free individual runs his own life, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. Anything else is tyranny.

On July 4th, will you be celebrating your “freedom”? Asking for a friend!

Those who advocate the strategy of “elect better officials” are deluding themselves. Candidates for office always promise to be the new, different, actual, genuine representative of the people who would never violate anyone’s rights. But once they’re elected, it’s only the biggest donors they give a flying consideration about, and they have taken care to ensure that there is no way to sue them for breach of contract. They are accountable to no one but themselves and their own selfish interests, financed with what used to be your money.

Ever-larger government peddles itself as the solution to society’s problems, but intrusive, thieving government is the source of a huge fraction of society’s problems. We do of course need to deal with actual private criminals in order to keep people secure in their homes and property, but when the government turns criminal we have a much bigger problem, and we are left to ourselves to deal with it.

I do hope you see clearly that politics is not the way the people can exit from our existing ramped up tyrannical paradise.

Most people would read that and assume that violence is the only other option at this point, however, as the author of this article suggests, no, but if one is violently attacked by an illegitimate government, self defense is itself a natural right regardless of the law:

Am I in favor of violence? Quite the opposite: I vehemently oppose it. Violence is never justified except in self-defense, where it is absolutely called for in measure proportionate to the threat. That’s why when government officials initiate illegitimate violence, they should not be shocked if their violence is met by necessary self-defense. It is they, and no one else, who are responsible for the illegitimate violence they initiate, and when it is returned to them in equal measure, they have no one to blame but themselves.

When the Redcoats headed to Concord and Lexington to capture the guns the militia had stored in those locations, natural self defense rights were being violated and measures appropriate to the threat were put in place.

Remember that. Wise as serpents, harmless as doves .. and if you don’t have a sword, sell your coat and buy one .. it sure came in handy in Concord and Lexington back in 1775!

-SF1

Patriot Act 2.0: Making Criminals of Patriots – Worked Before, Right?

Here comes the boot. Not just social media purges, but a fast-track to criminalize a whole slew of stuff to enhance the police state (but I thought Democrats wanted to defund the police?).

Caitlin Johnstone in her article today outlines the ramifications of this push just in time for Joe Biden, a pro at removing natural rights from citizens, can preside over with a smile:

The censorship of a political faction at the hands of a few liberal Silicon Valley billionaires will do the exact opposite of eliminating right-wing paranoia and conspiracy theories, and everyone knows it. You’re not trying to make things better, you’re trying to make them worse. You’re not trying to restore peace and order, you’re trying to force a confrontation so your political enemies can be crushed. You’re accelerationist.

A Venn diagram of people who support the latest social media purges and people who secretly hope Trumpers freak out and attempt a violent uprising would look like the Japanese flag.

The correct response to a huge section of the citizenry doubting an electoral system we’ve known for years is garbage would have been more transparency, not shoving the process through and silencing people who voice doubts and making that entire faction more paranoid and crazy.

As I said in my previous post, you can count on government to bury itself, and if it only hurt 99% of the politicians it would be one thing .. but the effects will reach out and touch all those who depend on government for their lives. The innocent will be hurt the worst at the end of the day.

Rough road ahead, be prepared!

Peace out.

-SF1

The Benefactors of the Corona-virus (COVID-19) Hype

People scanning a QR code on their phones while volunteers check their temperatures before entering a market in Kunming, in China’s southern Yunnan Province.Credit…Wong Campion/Reuters

Just curious who might benefit from all this commotion, fear and threats to the safety of the world as well as 330M Americans?

  1. International Bankers: Weekly QE (I think this is #5) of $690B [NOTE: TARP was approved as $800B but eventually came in at $16T) Republican effort to shore up big business at the expense of taxpayers.
  2. Welfare State: “Families First” bill would cost tens of billions of dollars. In addition to providing full government funding for coronavirus testing, the bill would “mandate private businesses provide additional paid sick leave; expand unemployment insurance eligibility; strengthen food security initiatives for senior citizens, children, pregnant women, and food banks; increase funding for Medicaid; and bolster unemployment benefits, among other provisions.” PLUS “Should the bill pass, businesses would be federally required to provide seven days of paid sick leave—with or without a pandemic .. should someone need to miss work due to an instance pertaining to stalking, domestic violence, or sexual assault, or should an employee need to help a friend going through such an event, a private business would be federally required to provide paid sick leave.” Democratic effort to ‘Buy Votes’ at the expense of the taxpayers.
  3. Police State: “.. Don’t go underestimating the government’s ability to lock the nation down if the coronavirus turns into a pandemic, however. After all, the government has been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now. The building blocks are already in place for such an eventuality: the surveillance networks, fusion centers and government contractors that already share information in real time; the government’s massive biometric databases that can identify individuals based on genetic and biological markers; the militarized police, working in conjunction with federal agencies, ready and able to coordinate with the federal government when it’s time to round up the targeted individuals; the courts that will sanction the government’s methods, no matter how unlawful, as long as it’s done in the name of national security; and the detention facilities, whether private prisons or FEMA internment camps, that have been built and are waiting to be filled.” – John Whitehead in this article. Totalitarian effort toward total domestic control.

I am sure there are more as with every crisis, many are looking for legal and illegal, moral and immoral ways to use this to their advantage.

I guess being older ( #60-ish) makes one tired of the brokenness. Fear has not beaten me down as much as seeing evil win over and over again. I agree with Solomon when he said in the book of Ecclesiastes 1:9:

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Those that have faith in a loving Father and Creator do have an edge in this broken world. These people have a gift that can not be artificially prompted, but comes about naturally and spontaneously in the face of fear .. this is called courage in the middle of the storm.

Prayin’ for the American people to wake up and see that it isn’t the virus that will kill them, it may very well be the response to the virus that will ruin us for years and possibly kill even more innocent people along the way.

-SF1

 

Immigration: Why Adding Government to the Equation Makes it Difficult

I have long had a heart for those men who risked leaving family for a season to make good money with hard work to provide their family a better life. I too had to leave one state with my wife and kids and be employed in another necessitating weekend commutes and double housing expense.

I too know that the current distribution system of taking money from those working and giving a percentage of it to others who don’t work is fundamentally flawed, and then add on to that the giving of this money also to those that cross an imaginary line called a “border”.  What most people do not understand that inside this line are other lines that reflect private property. The US footprint is not all government land, and, all government land is essentially, the people’s. But I digress.

The bottom line is that governments do not really care about people, they just want to be the middleman in all the transactions. They actually prefer that families break up so that they can be the “father” who provides for the kids. When you come to terms with the dysfunction of the government you then know why our society is getting increasingly dysfunctional. Government has become people’s god. For a good book on this, try Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “Democracy – The God That Failed” (there may be free PDF versions available).

The following Mises article from 2006 highlights the conundrum:

  • The philosophy of individual rights and capitalism implies that foreigners have a right to come and to live and work here, i.e., to immigrate into the United States. The land of the United States is owned by individuals and voluntary associations of individuals, such as private business firms. It is not owned by the United States government or by the American people acting as a collective; indeed many of the owners of land in the United States are not Americans, but foreign nationals, including foreign investors. The private owners of land have the right to use or sell or rent their land for any peaceful purpose. This includes employing immigrants and selling them food and clothing and all other goods, and selling or renting housing to them. If individual private landowners are willing to accept the presence of immigrants on their property as employees, customers, or tenants, that should be all that is required for the immigrants to be present. Anyone else who attempts to determine the presence of absence of immigrants is simply an interfering busybody ready to use a gun or club to impose his will.
  • … the philosophy of individual rights and capitalism implies that the immigrants do not have a right to be supported at public expense, which is a violation of the rights of the taxpayers. Of course, it is no less a violation of the rights of the taxpayers when native-born individuals are supported at public expense. The immigrants are singled out for criticism based on the allegation that they in particular are making the burden intolerable.

To satisfy both of these rights, one has to undo what the US has done since the 1930s when the welfare state was brought on the scene “for the common good”

What we see today is a reflection of a principle that Mises himself proposed, as George Reisman from this Mises article points out:

This is a classic illustration of Mises’s principle that prior government intervention into the economic system breeds later intervention. Here the application of his principle is, start with the Welfare State, end with the Police State. A police state is what is required effectively to stop substantial illegal immigration that has become a major burden because of the Welfare State.

Our government loves it that people are divided along this continuum since it is viewed as an innocent bystander to this hot-button issue.

Government is 99% of the problem. Those educated, inoculated and propagandized by the state will never see it.

-SF1

Sky Borg Comes Home from the Middle East

“.. However, what NASA’s Integrated Aviation Systems Program Director Ed Waggoner calls a “major milestone” is seen as a worrying trend by some who fear that the normalization of unmanned drones buzzing across the sky is a slippery slope – particularly if such drones become armed…”

Yes, and also the typical progression of having these transferred into HSA, State and local police units just like MRAPs have in the past decade.

“New normal? NASA’s Predator drone flies solo in commercial airspace for 1st time”

From: Russia Today

Ask the average Iraqi, Afghani, or Pakistani if these sky borgs made them feel safer. It is the same feeling only worse than seeing a police car behind you.