The Imbecilic Central Planners of Western Governments

Several bloggers and columnists have been referring to the Western governments using and manipulating the uprisings and yearnings to be free amongst the Middle Eastern populations as a goal of having more Western control over Middle Eastern countries and governments. But there has been the implication that it is a planned agenda on the part of the globalists and central bankers. Well, there are those with their agendas who have been in positions of power and have been using governmental apparatus with which to implement their particular agendas, but what has really been “planned” has been, as Mises referred to, “planned chaos,” the true chaotic outcome of implementing the agenda of Central Planners.

But whether or not Western governments’ bureaucrats have been planning to control the Middle East, for oil or whatever, is debatable. I do not think that it’s a matter of TPTB stating, “Let’s draw up a plan for the West to control the oil-rich Arab (and Persian), Muslim nations,” because if that were the case, then our Western government leaders — if not long ago, then at least by now — would have used their forces to seize the Middle Eastern territories as “theirs,” primarily the U.S. (e.g. as compared to taking lands away from indigenous Native Americans, etc.), the U.S. having been the Global Emperor since World War II (i.e. the U.S. government would have seized the oil-rich Middle-Eastern territories and declared them as U.S. territories).

I can’t believe that government bureaucrats would instead devise a plan, stating, “Let’s take down the duly elected leader of Iran in 1953, replace him with a dictator with a brutal torture regime that assassinates political dissidents, and continue supporting that regime with the purpose of making Iran’s population become more and more religiously radicalized toward their uprising and Revolution in 1979 that will cause Iran to become a radicalized, anti-American Islamic Republic that will do everything it can to spread anti-American hatred and aggression across the globe.” I just find that hard to believe.

And I can’t believe that government bureaucrats would devise a plan, stating, “Let’s invade Iraq in 1990-91 (after encouraging Iraq to invade Kuwait) and intentionally destroy Iraq’s civilian infrastructure and thereby cause destroyed water and sewage treatment facilities, and cause disease and hundreds of thousands of deaths amongst the Iraqi population with the purpose of making them and their Muslim neighbors hate the West and especially the U.S. even more, so that they’ll strike back at the West, and give the U.S. government more excuses to further invade and occupy those territories (but not outright seize those territories directly by conquest).” I can’t believe that the Western government bureaucrats had deliberately set out to make such a foolish, self-destructive, counter-productive long-term plan. (Or did they?)

But actually that’s my point. The Western government bureaucrats over the past century have been the most enthusiastic yet imbecilic engineers of socialism’s goal to Centrally Plan the world toward some great socialist collective utopian society. Whatever the Central Plan is as set forth by the socialists (and fascists, communists, capitalists — there’s no difference in the end), the results are never as the Planners intended, because you cannot Centrally Plan a society. There is something called Human Action, and individual free will. Each of the billions of individuals in the world has one’s own agenda for one’s own individual life, and the individual’s needs, wants and desires just don’t fit in with Central Planners’ utopian fantasies.

For example, the Zionists starting in the late 19th Century wanted a safe homeland for Jews worldwide. They chose the land of Palestine, not based on practicality and reason, but based solely on a mysticism of Biblical scriptures. The Zionists would not consider any other territory anywhere else in the world, and their supporters used the compulsory apparatus of the State, particularly the Western governments of the U.S. and the British Empire, to eventually displace what had been an Arab majority of Palestine at the beginning of the 20th Century to turn that into a Jewish majority by mid-century.

The violence and civil strife that we have seen since the formal creation of the current state of Israel is what socialist Central Planning has wrought in the Middle East. Immersed in their fantasies based on Biblical mysticism, the Central Planners never really considered just how safe — or unsafe — Jews would be when placed right in the middle of a territory completely surrounded by millions and millions of Arabs and Muslims, particularly following the decades of Western governments’ wheeling and dealing, Arab displacement and disruptions of Arab and Muslim families that had been established for generations, for centuries.

The religious Zionists wanted a homeland for Jews, but didn’t realize that they were being used by the political “Zionists” in order to place what has essentially been a Western government in the middle of the non-Western Middle East. That may have been for the sake of ensuring that the oil in surrounding oil-rich areas made its way to the clients of the West, who knows. But this is another reason why I believe that socialism and its Central Planning intrusions are crimes.

The socialist Central Planners amongst today’s neoconservatives do not believe in a people’s right of self-determination, do not believe in the inalienable right of the individual to be free, and do not believe in property rights. That is why the neoconservatives sided with Mubarak against the Egyptian protesters, and insist on the paranoid fear-mongering that the uprisings are all controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Unfortunately, neoconservative journalists, broadcasters, and other apologists for State aggression (such as Limbaugh, Kristol, Palin, Beck, NRO, etc.) have been unwitting dupes of the socialist Central Planners of the U.S. government (such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the two Bushes, etc.) and their socialist Central Planning agendas.

So, with regard to the assertion that the mess in the Middle East (and Asia) that the U.S. government has wrought (and wants to worsen with more intrusions) is all part of a Big Plan, I really don’t believe it. We know what these Central Planners’ Big Plans have been, which are in fantasy, la-la land and total make-believe (perhaps drug-enhanced, I don’t know), and not with the real world. The consequences of their illicit actions by use of the compulsory apparatus of the State have been the Planned Chaos that Mises (and Hayek)  was talking about.

Democracy, The Scheme That Impoverishes

Stephan Kinsella has this post on Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s writings on democracy (most notably in Hoppe’s great book, Democracy: The God That Failed), and points out one of Hoppe’s comparisons between democracy and monarchy being monarchy’s clear distinction between the rulers and the ruled, as opposed to democracy’s confusion insofar as this crap, “government by, of, and for the people.” John Tyner has more on democracy, the TSA and how the worst rise to the top.

Now, the truth is, democracy is nothing more than mob rule, in which 51% of the people get to tell the other 49% what to do, and if the others don’t like it, tough noogies. Democracy gives us government by, of, and for the professional politicians and bureaucrats, most of whom couldn’t function in the private sector and would otherwise have to rely on charities or mental hospitals to take care of them. Democracy also gives us government of, by, and for the powerful elites of the government-protected banking cartel, and the private sector makers of weapons of mass destruction (Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, etc.) and so on.

More to the point politically and economically, democracy employs a “public government,” in which the “public” owns the compulsory apparatus of the State, but really in which the collective and their State own and control all wealth, property and the means of production; i.e. democracy is communism with a facade of “self-determination” in a society that pretends that private property actually exists.

In his book, Hoppe points out that there is a better alternative to either democracy’s “public government,” majority dictatorship and where everyone has a right to everyone else’s wealth and property, or monarchy’s “private government” in which all the property is owned by the monarch. The alternative to those two is “natural order,” in the context of recognition of the sanctity of private property, and in which “individual rights” means the individual has a right to own one’s own life, a right to be free from the aggression of others, a right to establish voluntary associations and contracts with others, and in which no one is permitted to use compulsion or aggression against others, and theft and trespass are also outlawed. (I’m in.)

In this article on The Daily Bell, Anthony Wile refers to “regulatory democracy,” and comments on the color revolutions in the Middle East, which supposedly are revolutions for “democracy,” but Wile believes that current authoritarian regimes are merely replaced by new authoritarian regimes, even if the peoples of those countries are granted more open governance and “self-determination.”

Of course, there is always the chance that military rule remains in place or that a “front man” is somehow maneuvered into position who will represent military interests. But military rule does not work well in the 21st century; such regimes usually come under pressure to produce some sort of democratic façade.

The last option has to do with the evolution of Islamic republics within the Middle East. This is the one that I believe will eventually become a reality. It will happen because this is the outcome that Western money power actually seeks. The Anglo-American power elite needs an enemy if it is to continue its “war on terror.”

The war on terror has many benefits for the Anglosphere. It allows for the continued construction of authoritarianism at home and for the pursuit of ongoing low-key military engagements abroad. There is little upside to regulatory democracy in these countries from the Anglo-American point of view, or so it seems on careful consideration.

In other articles, we’ve covered the manipulations involved in these color revolutions. We’ve reported on American involvement in the youth movements that have been so important to these revolutions. The involvement of a senior marketer for Google in the Egyptian revolution is another signal: Google, Face Book and other Internet facilities are said to be intimately involved in propagating regime change. There are also issues related to food and even water scarcities. It would be my position that these are, to a large extent, manufacured as well…

Only time will tell as far as how things in the Middle East will turn out in the next few years. Let us hope that Middle Easterners can somehow undo the artificial territory divisions of a century ago that were based on what the corrupt, self-serving Western government elites wanted at the time. And only time will tell as far as how things will turn out here in the U.S. Will we become less and less free and more and more impoverished? Or can we avoid that by abolishing the federal U.S. government completely and letting the American states have their independence and sovereignty that the Founders intended them to have, and that they have a right to have?

U.S. Government Now Treats the American People As the Enemy – The People Need to View the Government As an Invading and Occupying Foreign Government

I have been listening to talk radio for 35 years now. In recent years, it has been increasingly frustrating to hear some of our current talk show hosts as they blindly defend the State, so naively believing all the lies and propaganda the State feeds them. From ObamaCare to the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, despite the outright crimes committed by the State’s agents, and despite its ruinous intrusions into every aspect of everyday life socially and economically, the faith that many people nevertheless seem to have in the State is amazing.

There does not seem to be a genuine understanding of the State for what it is, its being an institution of compulsion, a monopoly in various areas of life it has no business even addressing, and an organization whose agents are permitted to be above the law. Most people don’t even question that and can’t understand how it is impossible for a society to function when it makes up rules for some people that others are not obliged to follow.

The more intrusions Americans have allowed their governments — federal, state and local — to inflict into their lives, the more aggressively governments have been enforcing those intrusions, and certainly not on behalf of the American people, that’s for sure. The worst level of government, of course, has been that centralized federal Leviathan in DC. We really can get rid of that thing, close it all down, abolish the federal government, and let the states have complete sovereignty and independence, and it really would work for the better of society. But the piglets are afraid of independence, unfortunately, and prefer to be lifelong dependents and objects of their beloved federal State’s aggression and violence.

As the Leviathan parasite continues to grow and grow with no end in sight, we can see how its agents have been increasingly zealous in hypnotizing the citizenry to allow it to continue to expand further, overseas in its illicit, murderous wars for the sake of nothing but State expansion, and at home with one fascist intrusion after another by TSA, CIA, with spying on us more an aspect of everyday life and getting Americans to spy on one another, all for the sake of Leviathan’s self-serving lust for power.

The generals’ psy-ops on U.S. senators is proof enough of the zeal to justify expansion of State power.

The psy-ops are supposed to be used on the “enemy,” but now that we see that the generals are using that psychological warfare on U.S. senators who presumably represent the American people, the message that the American people are now the enemy of the U.S. government is loud and clear.

We also see, especially in Glenn Greenwald’s article today, the U.S. Department of Justice strengthening its campaign against whistleblowers, people who expose the criminality of the State’s agents. Given that the State exists as an institution of compulsion and monopoly, its inherent criminality will become more prevalent the more the State expands. Of course, the federal government has expanded so much since America’s founding that the government’s budget is in the trillions. In the TRILLIONS! So, the more the State expands, the more intrusions into daily life it imposes, the more aggressive its agents will be, and the more criminal an enterprise it will be. Unfortunately, the State’s defenders seem to be more comfortable rationalizing the aggression and the intrusions than in exposing how criminal and immoral such intrusions are, for some reason.

I’m sure there is a psychologist out there who isn’t on the State’s payroll who can explain such a phenomenon amongst the masses, this sick co-dependence of the people worshiping the State while it molests them and tramples on their persons and property with the utmost depravity. James Bovard wrote about “Battered Citizen Syndrome,” so maybe that’s it, I don’t know.

Greenwald writes about the DOJ’s going into New York Times journalist James Risen’s bank, credit, phone and travel records to locate Risen’s source for a book associated with CIA incompetence. Not only are these intrusions by government officials into a private citizen’s private records disturbing, but the reasons for the intrusions have nothing to do with national security and everything to do with punishing those who expose the government’s crimes, pure and simple. This is a natural result of centralizing power in Washington and the monopolization of territorial security. The State exists on its own behalf as it feeds off the productivity of the masses.

And Robert Wenzel writes about an individual who cares about true justice, and who believes that juries have a right to know that they themselves can nullify a law if they believe it is a bad law. And now, after distributing literature outside the courthouse to inform juries or potential juries of their rights of nullification, that individual himself is treated like a criminal. In reality, when the State punishes someone for behavior in which no victim exists, it is the State and its agents who are the true criminals.

And as we can see from some businesses located near the nation’s airports, as Becky Akers writes, it is time to banish these invasive, criminals of the State from our establishments, from our homes, and, one hopes, ultimately from society. A cafe near the Seattle airport has banned TSA employees from entering that establishment. Akers writes,

If you own a company, refuse to buy from or sell to anyone affiliated with the TSA. Do your competitors deal with the agency? Advertise the fact that you don’t.

And all of us can socially ostracize the TSA’s criminals – as well as Leviathan’s lackeys in general. Decent people certainly don’t invite pedophiles, thieves, and murderers to their homes; they don’t allow their children to play with their kids nor, later, to marry them; they protest their presence on committees and refuse to serve beside them; they glare rather than saying “hello” when passing one on the streets of a small town.

But people need to do more than just ostracizing the criminal agents of the State. I’m sure it would be very risky on the part of James Risen of the NYT, and I know that we Americans can’t really “sue the federal government,” but one thing I would strongly suggest that Risen do is file criminal complaints against the specific individuals who actually engaged in the criminal activity of trespassing into his personal bank accounts and phone records. He needs to have these intruders and invaders criminally charged, and take it to the Supreme Court if he has to. It’s not just a matter of “suing” anyone. No one should be above the law, not in a nation that presumably is a “nation of laws, not of men.” A genuinely civil society must be one under the Rule of Law, in which no one is exempt from the most basic rules against theft, trespass and the initiation of aggression.

And Karl Denninger writes about the TSA’s recent criminal harassment and physical assaults against passengers after their train ride, not even prior to their traveling on the train. Denninger writes that

The entire legality of these processes is predicated on security.  But once you’ve departed the conveyance that pretense no longer exists and neither does the limited administrative exemption that allows these searches under existing law.

Denninger mentions 42 USC 1983 of the U.S. Code, Civil Action for the Deprivation of Rights. But these are not really civil matters — they are criminal matters, and need to be treated as such.

As we have seen from the zeal of the military’s generals and the DOJ’s snoopers, and the TSA’s molesters, none of what the federal government has been doing is really in the name of national security, but it is in the name of empowering the agents of the State, in the name of enforcing subservience of the population toward those who have been granted the officialdom of the State and who may use the armed apparatus of the State to enhance their own lust for power.

Americans need to stand up for their rights not to be abused, searched, trespassed, violated and assaulted. Americans must begin to use their one and only available means of justice, the government’s own monopoly justice system, and demand, when their lives, persons and property are criminally assaulted and trespassed, that those responsible for such crimes are criminally charged with those crimes. As Becky Akers noted, “The State has long been our direst enemy; it’s past time we treated its minions as such.”

As the federal government increasingly exposes itself as viewing the population as its actual enemy, we amongst the masses need to view the federal government as nothing but a group of invaders, intruders, and criminals. We need to view the federal government as an invading foreign government, one that has been occupying America by force of gunpoint. With that in mind, we need to withdraw our consent to its monstrous acts of criminality and stand up for ourselves, if we are to save this country and our freedom.

OB/GYN Producer of “Silent Scream” Dies at 84

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founding member of NARAL or National Abortion Rights Action League who then became a staunch anti-abortion activist, has died at 84. He was the OB/GYN physician who produced the film Silent Scream, which was a documentary demonstrating through ultrasound the process of an abortion. After performing thousands of abortions, and after several years of pro-abortion political activism, it was through several new techniques such as ultrasound, electronic fetal heart monitoring and other technological breakthroughs during the 1970s that Dr. Nathanson was convinced that the unborn fetus was in fact a living human being. He then devoted his life to actively advocating against abortion.

Now, I myself had been solidly “pro-life” or “anti-abortion” for the past 20 years or so, but, given my realization that the State has shown itself to be an inherently morally bankrupt institution, based solely on having the power of compulsion over others which no individual human being has any moral right to have, I must confess that I have become wishy-washy on the abortion issue. The State itself just does not have any legitimacy in existing, so how can any “anti-abortion” laws possibly be made or enforced?

And worse would be the federal government attempting to impose anti-abortion laws on the population. The U.S. government has zero — zilch — moral righteousness when it comes to lecturing others on the criminality or immorality of killing or murdering human beings. The U.S. government is responsible for the murders of millions and millions of innocent human beings, in its own country especially in the mid-19th Century and other parts during later times such as in Waco, and in Germany and other European countries and Japan during World Wars 1 and 2, in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and other areas of the Middle East and Asia, and so on. It is immoral to murder an innocent human being, regardless of whatever a situation might be, and no amount of State propaganda and no amount of fear-mongering and warmongering can justify the deliberate murder of innocent human beings.

However, on the abortion issue, I remain as staunchly opposed to abortion as I have been for the past 20 years, and believe that, it is not only the murder of a human being, but the act itself is commonly a cause of emotional anguish and long-lasting guilt feelings on the part of the mother. Not that people ask me on a daily basis, and I’m sure that there are plenty of pro-choice people who don’t agree, but my advice to those who find themselves unexpectedly or inconveniently pregnant is to go through with the pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption. There are plenty of couples on waiting lists to adopt a baby. That would be the right thing to do.

But Dr. Nathanson was a major force in bringing to the attention of the average American the reality of the true nature of abortion. And he also brought to our attention the corruption and deceit on the part of abortion activists during the 1960s and ’70s in getting Roe v. Wade passed. That Supreme Court decision basically stated, according to my own personal translation, “It’s okay to kill an unborn baby before the third trimester, but it’s not okay to kill the baby after the third trimester, based on arbitrary line-drawing that suggests that some human beings are of lesser value just because of being at an earlier stage of development.” And that’s it.

Now, here is what Dr. Nathanson wrote about the abortion industry’s propaganda, in “Confessions of an Ex-Abortionist,” from his 1997 book, The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind:

(W)e had convinced the Supreme Court to issue the decision which legalized abortion throughout America in 1973 and produced virtual abortion on demand up to birth.

How did we do this?….

We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200 – 250 annually. The figure constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law. Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalization….

I am often asked what made me change my mind. How did I change from prominent abortionist to pro-life advocate? In 1973, I became director of obstetrics of a large hospital in New York City and had to set up a perinatal research unit, just at the start of a great new technology which we now use every day to study the fetus in the womb. A favorite pro-abortion tactic is to insist that the definition of when life begins is impossible; that the question is a theological or moral or philosophical one, anything but a scientific one. Fetology makes it undeniably evident that life begins at conception and requires all the protection and safeguards that any of us enjoy.

Why, you may well ask, do some American doctors who are privy to the findings of fetology, discredit themselves by carrying out abortions? Simple arithmetic: at $300.00 a time 1.55 million abortions means an industry generating $500,000,000 annually, of which most goes into the pocket of the physician doing the abortion. It is clear that permissive abortion is purposeful destruction of what is undeniably human life. It is an impermissible act of deadly violence. One must concede that unplanned pregnancy is a wrenchingly difficult dilemma. But to look for its solution in a deliberate act of destruction is to trash the vast resourcefulness of human ingenuity, and to surrender the public weal to the classic utilitarian answer to social problems.

Class Warfare: Government Workers vs. the Productive Class

Several times now, I have heard references on the radio talk shows to this struggle between government employees and taxpayers as “class warfare,” a war between the private sector and the public or government sector. Someone on the radio referred to the old phrase, the “haves vs. the have-nots,” but now the “haves” are the government class, except they have acquired what they have through dishonest means: through the coercive, confiscatory power of the State.

And now we have all the unions and teachers and police in Wisconsin protesting state government cuts, while the Democrats in the state legislature are running and hiding like little cowards.

Jason Lewis on the radio suggested that the Wisconsin attorney general should demand a special election to replace the Democrat state legislators who are derelicts of their sworn oaths of office. Will all this turn violent? I hope not, or we might have to call out Rodney King,”Can’t we all just get along?”

Some people have been ignorantly comparing these public employee protests in Wisconsin with the protests in Egypt, referring to the “workers” in Wisconsin as the “common people,” protesting the state or local government who wants to cut their benefits and pensions, when in reality the government and these public “workers” and their unions are on the same page. The real class warfare, the real fight is between the government’s employees and the taxpayers or private sector. It is the actual productivity from the private sector whose earnings, profits and funds are confiscated by the government through its coercive police power, that is used to fund these public employees’ high salaries, benefits and pensions. It is the taxpayers and the Tea Party people who elected the new governor and Republican legislators because they were getting sick of being taken for a ride, sick of their freedom and their right to their own earnings being egregiously whacked.

In total contrast to these Wisconsin protests, the protests in Egypt are for their freedom — freedom from State and police aggression, freedom of speech and religion and dissent, and that’s it (regardless of what the paranoid nutsos on the right want people to believe). The paranoid conservatives view what is going on in Egypt as some kind of insurrection of Muslim extremists. With the conservatives, constant Tea Party “freedom from government intrusions” rhetoric covers what really is their true authoritarian love of and obedience to the State and the State’s authority and power.

So the Wisconsin protests are not like those in Egypt. In Egypt the protests are of the everyday workers (and the students and youths), who don’t like the State and its agents living off the workers’ productivity. The State is a parasite and their leader of 30 years Mubarak has accumulated billions off his own people. But now they have successfully peeled off that leech.

But in Wisconsin, the leeches are the agents of the State who are protesting because they want even more from the actual producers, the productive middle class. And let’s be honest about this now, it isn’t a “living wage” these government employees want or want extended, it’s the extravagant pay, benefits and pensions far above what the market would provide in a free and open exchange, without coercion or threats. It is the extravagant benefit packages that workers in the dreaded private sector could never get. And pensions after the age of 50 or 60 that private sector workers rarely get. None of this has to do with a “living wage,” but in actuality is nothing more than welfare hand-outs.

However, don’t think that I’m just picking on government employees — It’s the same deal with the Wall Street parasites: Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke going into Congress and fraudulently threatening them with “civil unrest” and Martial Law if they didn’t fork over the tax-funded loot, nothing more than extortion. That is what our entire society has become, thanks to FDR, Johnson and Nixon, the Bushes and the Clintons — the Government-Industrial-Parasite-Complex.

And it’s the same damn thing with the military industrial complex, with their false flags, their provocation of terrorism in order to fight it. This literally has become a Sodom and Gomorrah public trough criminal society.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling all teachers and all police “criminals” because of their voracious appetite for extravagant pay packages, overtime and huge pensions and tenure all at the expense of the productive middle class — just most of them — at least in Wisconsin as we can plainly see. No, I’m just kidding. But those teachers who called in sick in order to go to the state capitol should all be fired. And there are plenty of people out of work in Wisconsin who are probably intelligent and qualified enough to replace the lying, dishonest teachers.

Now, don’t get me started on teachers’ unions and this thing called “tenure,” now. Give. Me. A. Break. There are too many teachers who suck now, because they are utterly incompetent and just plain dumb, and they have no right to be teaching children. We can’t have dumb people teaching the next generation, but that is what we have had too much of now.

And the police. Now, what is this with police officers deliberately doing overtime in their last year before retirement in order to jack up their pensions? These are law enforcement officers, whose job it is to “enforce the law”! I don’t think that deliberately screwing your fellow neighbors and local taxpayers is a particularly honest way to “enforce the law.”

That is the problem now with the State. Because of its various monopolies, such as in education and policing and territorial protection — and yes, there are private schools, but the State has a monopolistic control over the education industry — there is no competitive incentive for these government monopoly workers to be productive and to serve the interests of their fellow citizens and taxpayers. And the poorer quality workers with lower quality output or lower quality work do not suffer any consequences for their poor work or their lack of productivity. In the dreaded private sector, however, the bad ones get fired (usually), or their employers go out of business. In the private sector, employers have an incentive to keep better quality workers on the payroll. But in the public, government, monopoly sector, the employers do not have that pressure.

But most of all, freedom is what creates prosperity for the most people in any society. When the State uses its armed power to restrict the people, their rights of association and contract, their right to make use of their property and skills however they want, in order for the State to protect certain professions from competition, that is when more people become less prosperous, and there is less opportunity and productivity in society. And the more restrictions imposed by the State on society, the more poverty there is.

Personal Responsibility vs. Immediate Gratification

I think the increasing tension, hostility and bitterness between the principled, Liberty-minded, genuinely “small government” Republicans and the warmongering, anti-Liberty, anti-civil liberties, Establishment-licking Big Government Republicans is a good thing. This means that the Tea Partiers — at least those who really understand what a true “tea party” means — are beginning to realize that we can’t have freedom in America if we allow the government to have the power to violate our God-given, inalienable, inherent natural rights, and allow agents of the State to invade or search our property, home, phone, etc without any actual suspicion of wrong-doing, without Due Process. The principled Republicans recognize what the Big Government, warmongering statist Republicans don’t understand: that all individuals have a right to presumption of innocence and a right to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects.” So let there be conflict within the GOP (“Grand Old Pinheads”).

On a related note, yesterday, Laura Ingraham was discussing the recent phenomenon of kids spending too much time on these social networking sites, especially Facebook. They’re sharing too much of their personal lives that they would otherwise not be sharing even with their own actual real-life friends. Some of the kids say they feel a sense of self-confidence while on Facebook than they do in actual social situations, even with their own families.

Add to this phenomenon of social dysfunctionalism, if you don’t mind my calling it that (or even if you do mind), the fact that so many kids now are on prescription drugs, that probably almost none of them should be on. When I was growing up, I don’t recall hearing about any friends around or in school taking pills. But these days, because parents and teachers are too self-centered to handle what’s going in with the kids, it’s easier for those parents and teachers to just get the kids on drugs, to mellow them out, calm them down so their natural, childhood “hyperactivity” doesn’t interfere with the teachers’ and parents’ important activities (like texting their friends, and wasting time doing their social networking). Unfortunately, self-centeredness and immediate gratification have become the main traits of my generation, and because of which the youngins have to suffer with the adults in their lives ignoring them, giving them drugs to suppress their feelings, and are compelled to get some needed attention by anonymous Internet users.

Since the first half of the 20th Century, each generation has become less and less inclined to act responsibly and think in the long term, and more and more inclined toward immediate gratification behaviors. For example, the Tea Partiers should not complain that Congress has been acting irresponsibly for years and decades spending like drunken sailors and putting the U.S. government further and further into debt, when so many Americans themselves are constantly buying stuff they can’t afford, with credit cards, and not even thinking about how they will pay for things in the future. Congress is worse, in that they are forcing future generations to pay for their immediate gratification impulses, for their “pet projects” (pork, earmarks), their fantasies of nation-building overseas, and to pay for their socialist programs whose only purpose is to spoon-feed the hacks’ campaign contributing corporate cronies with tax dollars to keep those professional hacks and crooks in their respective elective offices. What a sick, selfish, dysfunctional society now.

One great example of that is the Social Security system in which Americans are forced to participate. It really is the responsibility of every individual to save and invest toward one’s retirement. With this fascist and socialist scheme the federal government has usurped and hijacked that responsibility, along with the freedom to choose one’s retirement matters. Many people actually believe that Social Security is some sort of “bank account,” in which you put some of your income into it and are paid it back when you retire. The government has deliberately deceived the American people into thinking that to continue the public’s acceptance of this fraudulent scheme.

In fact, as Tom Mullen explained this week, here is exactly what the situation is: The government forcibly takes a certain amount of your income from you and redistributes it to current retirees as part of their Social Security payments and benefits. That’s what it is. And you have no choice in the matter — it is literally a criminal scheme of theft and fraud, and it is just one of the many government schemes that have contributed to the institutionalized discouragement of personal responsibility in America over the past century.

Parents don’t want to deal with their kids, and they don’t want to take responsibility for their own retirement planning. People would much rather spend all their time on Facebook, or texting people.It is all a result of the centralization and bureaucratization of everyday life in America.

The Anti-Federalists were right.

Avoid Nursing Home Abuse by Avoiding Soviet-Style Medical Care

Yesterday on the weekend edition of NPR’s All Things Considered, there was a story about an increase in nursing home workers beating residents, and a rise in unreported homicides in some of those cases. Here is the story by reporter Sandra Bartlett.

As I’m listening to this story, I am sitting there in disbelief that there are actually people who would do something like that to elderly people, to people who are vulnerable and can’t fight back. It’s sick. (And this isn’t an S.E.I.U. rally we’re talking about.)

This is the kind of situation that concerns me when it comes to government usurpations of private matters, such as in retirement and medical care provision, especially in the case of ObamaCare. Because non-accountable bureaucrats take over various aspects of medical care, including doctors themselves becoming government bureaucrats which will be the case under the Soviet-replicating ObamaCare, the quality of workers in America’s medical-related establishments will be reduced, as is the case with many other government-controlled sectors of society.

And ObamaCare is a takeover of the medical industry by the government, via the back door — eventually, because of the fascist mandates, dictates and strangulating regulations, it will become all government-controlled, unless it is completely repealed immediately, and replaced by further repealing all other controls, restrictions, licensure, regulations, fees, red tape and bureaucracies that already exist that the State intrudes into Americans’ private medical matters.

Because of the “economic calculation problem” (pdf article by Mises), unlike their counterparts in the dreaded private sector, government bureaucrats do not have any competitive incentive to genuinely serve the interests of their clients or customers (or, merely of their fellow citizens, for that matter) — and, yes, even in “human services” are such “profit motives” necessary. That is because you have to take into account “human action” — to be perfectly honest, most people are just not saints, and act in their own self-interests, whether they will admit it or not. And for some people who are insecure, their interests are in acting out their need for control and domination over others, particularly those who are more vulnerable in society. My point is, a competitive market in the human services industries, including medical care and nursing homes, weeds out the bad workers, while State-controlled services protects them.

Related to this, yesterday I linked to an article by Sheldon Richman on “left libertarians,” who, as Richman notes, have an emphasized concern for workers being exploited by businessmen. I, however, am not as much concerned for workers exploited by businesses and corporations as I am concerned for citizens — workers and non-workers alike — being exploited by governments. That is exactly the situation we have now, and will especially be the case with a totalitarian scheme like ObamaCare. I dread the thought of hospital workers and nursing home staff becoming government workers, as was the case in the old Soviet Union.

For those reasons, we must all make sure to eat our fruits and vegetables, and take extra vitamins and nutritional supplements, and exercise every day for the sake of prevention. To protect ourselves from the tyranny of ObamaCare and other fascist and socialist State usurpations and intrusions, prevention is key.

More on the State’s Friends With Hands in the Public’s Cookie Jar

Robert Wenzel has this post on WikiLeaks documents revealing how British public funds being handed out to foreign governments are being embezzled by the corrupt bureaucrats of those regimes, as is likely to happen whether it’s UK money or U.S. government money. But it’s far worse coming from U.S. public funds, because the U.S. seizes soooooo much private wealth from the citizenry, and hands out sooooooo much of the booty to foreigners, as well as to Americans.

The Founding Fathers could see so far into the future, they knew deep down that once any compulsory government were given the power to forcibly confiscate private wealth from others, the ones on the receiving end of the stolen loot would not make responsible use of it, whether they be businesses in the form of subsidies or grants, military hardware producers, our own government bureaucrats or foreign government bureaucrats.

The Founders also warned against government money printing and distribution, and they knew that valueless money printed out of thin air would enable the high and mighty noble bureaucrat scumbags to rob the people blind, and would be used to establish corrupt political alliances with foreign governments. And they were right.

James Madison noted, “The extension of the prohibition to bills of credit must give pleasure to every citizen, in proportion to his love of justice and his knowledge of the true springs of public prosperity. The loss which America has sustained since the peace from the pestilent effects of paper money on the necessary confidence between man and man, on the necessary confidence in the public councils, on the industry and morals of the people and on the character of republican government, constitutes an enormous debt against the States chargeable with this unadvised measure, which must long remain unsatisfied; or rather an accumulation of guilt, which can be expiated no otherwise than by a voluntary sacrifice on the altar of justice of the power which has been the instrument of it.”

Washington and Jefferson, especially, expressed wise warnings against collusions between our government and other governments, but they encouraged private American citizens to lend a helping hand or make private financial donations to foreign peoples directly.

Of course, if we could get rid of the centralized federal Leviathan bureaucracy in DC, and let the individual states have their independence and sovereignty which is their right to have and which was the way it really was supposed to be, we wouldn’t have to deal with these kinds of situations.