printThe following is from “Statism Starts With YOU!”, now on WND.Com:
“Why did federal regulators not intervene sooner? A tragedy could have been averted. That was the first demand made following the accidental death of 8 spectators, and the injury of 12, at the California 200 off-road race. The derby was held in the Mojave Desert, in the Lucerne Valley. The driver of one of the racing trucks lost control of his vehicle, flipped and landed on bystanders, who are in the habit of getting as close as they possibly can to the tracks.”
“Evidently, what draws fans of desert racing to the sport, attest Phil Willon and David Zahniser of the Los Angeles Times, is the ‘the danger, dust and noise of watching 3,500-pound trucks roaring past — close enough almost to touch — and then rocketing into the air over treacherous jumps with nicknames like ‘the rock pile.'”
It’s all great fun until something goes terribly wrong. Then it’s someone else’s fault.” …
This tragedy, off-the-beaten-track, well illustrates the dynamics of state encroachment. Statism always and everywhere begins with The People.”
The complete column is “Statism Starts With YOU!”
Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.
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UPDATE (Aug. 20): “I miss Bush intensely,” said one of the main Republican ideologues, Charles Krauthammer. “Iraq ended this week fairly successfully. And the economy, Obama purchased with the stimulus; it’s his economy.”
That’s the depth of the thinking of your above-average Republican.
I thought of selling t-shirts that say “Don’t Take The [Fed’s] Money” as a way of pointing out that by accepting Federal money, state and local governments and individuals enslave ourselves.
I won’t make any money selling those, will I?
I had a bad cold once. I blew my nose so many times that it got red and raw. I thought about getting the Justice Department Civil Rights Division to bring suit against Kleenex.
With regard to Applebaum’s premise:
We are everywhere and always presented with false alternatives. Heads I win, tails you lose.
On the housing equity question, the elite have labored for years to prevent people from learning the real nature of the debt-notes they call money. People were immersed in an economy where if you didn’t own your home, you were seriously left behind. The root cause of the housing price boom was abandonment of the ‘reserve’ part of fractional reserve banking. Now that the scheme has gone bust, the homeowners are expected to recompense banks at the boom rate, for money the banks never even had to lend, but created out of thin air. Whatever the morality of homeowners might be, there is certainly a question of whether the banks which are being bailed out have any moral superiority over those who are the victims of their fake-money scheme. After all, they created the money to buy the property with, created the boom and then the bust, and now they hold title to the properties. What did they do to earn it?
This is the question that is avoided. Instead, we are presented with the quandary of which party should be bailed out — banks or homeowners, or both? How about neither, and let that be a lesson to people about fractional reserve debt-currency and how it fundamentally defines people’s relationship with the State? Not likely.
“We has met the enemy and he is us.”
Thank you, Walt Kelly
Good God, when will people realize you pay for everything?! The Democrats want to be my mother-I have one already, thamk you very much, and she’s overbearing enough as it is. The Republicans want to be my father. I’ve had two of those-one Heavenly, one earthly- so I don’t need another. Why do people who claim to be free enjoy slavery so much? Probably to avoid the consequences of their mistakes and sins. Until we believe in the right to fail, we will continue to live in servitude. Thank you Ilana for being a voice of one crying in the wilderness.
Well, I liked this and I particularly appreciated your illustration of the results of the road race disaster: people who’d been there (probably for years) for the thrill locking arms with Federal regulators because of tragedy.
I believe we need to be very careful about the language we use, as language imparts concepts. We should be using the “statist” term more often (as you certainly do) and apply it to both the so-called “right” and the left. Honestly, most people do not think in terms of a “statist, and non-” dichotomy.
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum notes, “Most Americans, it turns out, are suspicious of the free market. And most Americans also approve of high government spending. The majority of Americans are wary of global trade, don’t trust free markets, and also think ‘the benefits from … Social Security or Medicare are worth the costs of those programs.’ And when the sample is restricted to people who support the tea-party movement? The number is still 62 percent.”
The problem isn’t the poll. The problem is understanding. Most Americans fail to see (because politicians and the media keep them from seeing) the hand of government in the recent residential mortgage crisis and so blame “free” market forces. Global trade, too, is far from “free” trade as government interventions won’t allow market forces from self-correcting. As to Social Security and Medicare, after contributing exorbitant sums to these programs for most or all of their careers, it is difficult not to be biased. Most Americans are not commenting on the viability of the programs so much as hoping to get a little of their money back.
After the Republicans gain in the fall, government might “ONLY” grow at 10%/year in 2011 and 2012 and they will all congratulate themselves!
And back in Tea Party land, when they are not apoplectic because some Sufi Moslems pray on Vesey Street instead of Reade Street in Lower Manhattan or cheering the idea of waterboarding dimwit Taco Bell clerks for “Liberty”, they have a new cause:
http://dailycaller.com/2010/08/19/tea-party-coalition-forming-to-push-for-balanced-budget-amendment/
This utter nonsense sponsored by the likes of Lindsay Graham and John BAILOUT McCain. These neocon statists whose moronic wars to end sexism and bring “democracy” to Afghanistan and Iraq are bankrupting America (not to mention the illegal immigration they love) – are proposing an amendment to the US Constitution (that they regularly ignore). The constitution gives the power to balance the budget to the same CONGRESS that funds the wars, No Child Left Behind, Prescription Drug benefits… – now these statists propose handing the power to balance the budget to the Supreme Court!!! The “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Sales Tax” and the “Anthony Kennedy Income Tax Surcharge”!
Other Republican Tea Party types advocate the oxymoronic “Fair Tax” which will enable the Federal Government to monitor every purchase you make!! Freedom??
Completely PATHETIC!
“That’s the depth of the thinking of your above-average Republican.”
You don’t know what you have until you loose it?
RE: Chuck & Bush — America’s statist partisan politics resembles the politics of ANIMAL FARM. I feel like Old Benjamin:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79a/
“Old Benjamin, the donkey, seemed quite unchanged since the Rebellion… About the Rebellion and its results he would express no opinion. When asked whether he was not happier now that Jones was gone, he would say only “Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey,” and the others had to be content with this cryptic answer… Benjamin was the only animal who did not side with either faction. He refused to believe either that food would become more plentiful or that the windmill would save work. Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on — that is, badly… Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse — hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life… The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Insightful column today. May I add another area that is “untouchable” by all sides in this debate of big government? Military pay and compensation. I’m an ex-Air Force pilot. I went to the airlines in 1991 for a few reasons but the increase in pay was certainly near the top.
Today, there is more money in being a rank and file officer in the military than being in the private sector as a pilot. Military pay and compensation has more than doubled since 2000 to over $122,000 per year. A very good article on this fact appeared in USA Today highlighting the boom towns of the country were those with military bases simply because the pay has gone sky high. Meanwhile at American Airlines (those whose taxes pay the military salaries) took a 30% pay cut in 2003. We are still in contract negotiations after 4 years.
I thought it best summed up by a reserve pilot I talked to on our bus ride to work. He also worked for American, but had left, temporarily, for the higher pay of the military and to accumulate years for military retirement. He told me the best deal was the nearly $100,000 that would be paid directly to him for his children’s college, even if they lived at home. This benefit is to anyone who served active duty for three years after 9-11. I didn’t make $100,000 total pay in my first three years as an officer! When I mentioned to him that it was “all printed money,” his response was “I don’t care, as long as the check cashes.” That is a very similar response to the Detroit woman who didn’t know from where her bonus welfare check came and said “It’s Obama money.”
Bear in mind, with the deficits our government is running, all pay, contracts and entitlements could be cut in half and there would still be a deficit because of the interest on the national debt, but just try to suggest cutting military pay. Let a candidate run on that as a campaign promise and see how far his campaign goes. This country is in deep, financial trouble.
Much of the demand for government services is attributable to the progressive tax system. Under progressive taxation, the majority can impose upon a wealthier minority massive tax burdens that the majority itself does not have to bear. This in turn provides an incentive for the majority to demand extravagant levels of government spending in the expectation that the burden will be thrown over upon others.
For too many years we have listened to and believed our government when we should have heeded the words of Mark Twain, “Congress is America’s only true native criminal class.” It now appears some of our greatest minds are losing theirs.
There is one thing that I was taught in the state school systems of both Maryland and Florida, surprisingly enough, was personal responsibility. Freedom and responsibiliy are two sides of the same coin. With freedom comes the responsibiliy for our “freedly made” mistakes. As a practical matter, no one and no government can completely protect us from our own stupidity.