Some Thoughts and Reactions on the Aurora Massacre

July 27, 2012

(Link to article at Strike the Root)

Once again, the Aurora ordeal shows not only the insanity of gun control laws, but it shows that we can’t rely on government police to protect us from crazy mass murderers. Just like we can’t rely on a national government-monopolized military-security complex to protect us from foreign invaders.

I am having the same kinds of thoughts as I was having when I wrote an article I had on Strike the Root in April of 2011, Protecting Ourselves from the State.

In that earlier article, I referred to the sickeningly rampant occurrences of sexual assaults within the military, not just against female soldiers which is bad enough, but male against male. I linked to this Newsweek article, which reported on this, on the tens of thousands of male sexual assault victims in the U.S. military who have made reports to superior officers. It is really sick how anyone could treat someone else that way, and the higher-ranking officers who blame the victims and protect the criminal assailants. In my article, I referred to those higher-ranking officers as “criminal coddlers,” because that is what they are.

My point was, how could we depend on these types of people who assault one another to protect us? What if the President declares some kind of martial law because of a false flag and/or economic collapse and civil unrest? We saw from Katrina in 2005 that local police and federal agents acted like criminals. Also in my article I referred to how there was already precedence in the U.S. of a President treasonously turning the guns of the U.S. military against the people, and I pointed to an article by Jacob Hornberger as to why having a standing army was a bad idea in the first place. And I called on local police and U.S. military personnel alike to disobey any and all unlawful (and treasonous) orders by the President or any superior officer to deliberately violate any civilian’s God-given rights no matter what the circumstances.

But I don’t know if local police these days really understand what the rule of law really is, or what the rights of the individual are, and I am less hopeful that local police would come to the defense of the innocent civilian and instead would help an occupying U.S. military invade our cities and towns and act against our liberty and security.

Local police these days are out of control and act like neanderthals, Nazis and outright criminals. On the Cop Block website, George Sand writes of a teenager who was shot five times for drinking under age (even though he’s 19, for crying out loud!). Sand writes in detail of the young man’s ordeal, and how the local criminal cop assailants try to cover up their responsibility with lies.

Why are so many cops now so cowardly in their not being man enough to tell the truth about their wrongful deeds and take responsibility for it? In many cases now across America there are a lot of cover-ups, lies and unlawful arrests and detainments of innocent civilians who speak up about what really happened during certain events and who take pictures or videos.

In many serious situations, the police set up perimeters around a crime scene while a crime is still in progress, but they don’t go in to stop the crime (like they used to do).

Officer Safety is more important now than civilian safety, thanks to socialism and the deification of government and its agents. In Aurora, however, the cops claimed to be unable to go into the theater because of the gas that the shooter had sprayed. Cops with courage would have gone right in and attempted to apprehend the shooter.

And now, because of fascist gun control laws in various cities like Aurora, Colorado, a theater full of unarmed, vulnerable civilians was attacked by a lone nut shooter. But on the news shows, thanks to government schooling, the first thing the statists think of is gun control. Very simple-minded now are Americans, as their sheepishness has been shaped by the 12-year State-worship indoctrination program.

We live in a truly sick, dysfunctional society now. Local, state and federal governments are legally disarming honest, law-abiding civilians, so that, even if another theater-goer wanted to shoot the Aurora shooter to save the remaining victims form being victims, they are not allowed to by law. That’s sick. If just one person there was armed he could have taken care of the situation toward the beginning and saved maybe ten more people from being killed and dozens from being wounded.

So what these “liberals” really want is this: a defenseless, totally vulnerable and dependent unarmed civilian population, and an armed government, military and police. In their little fantasy-worlds, they cannot see how very un-liberal that is. So, thanks to a hundred years of progressive rule over the U.S. and progressive government schooling, what we have is a totally vulnerable civilian population but a strong and armed government and police. These “liberals” do not understand that what they desire — and indeed what we now have — is a police state. And, as Infowars points out, the dangerous enmeshment between federal military and local police is increasing.

But the current two-tier system in America is this: Government people and civilians. I know, officially, local police are part of the “civilian” population, while military is the military. But really, it’s government vs. the civilians. Police are government. They are the local government-monopoly in community policing and security.

As we have seen now, this structure of government monopoly in community policing and security is counter-productive. The civilian population is made more vulnerable by having a government-monopolized police. That is because monopolists are not accountable. Especially when the monopoly is something the entire population is compelled by force to have to use for its “services,” and worse, compelled by law to have to obey.

Now, our society is a civilian population who must be obedient to local police, and soon the military if Obama treasonously unleashes them against us following economic collapse and civil unrest, etc. Some of the people on local police forces and in the military barely graduated high school and some have criminal records and are drug users and addicts. But they have legal authority over us! We must obey these people! That is what our society is now. (See this, this, this, this, this, and this.)  Only in a sick, totalitarian, police state banana republic society would this be the case.

And I also wanted to include my reaction to this post by Ed Bugos who details his experiences with flying from Canada into the U.S. and with the Nazi-like TSA. The way that low-life degenerates are allowed to interrogate innocent civilians like they’re criminal suspects, asking very personal questions that are none of the interrogators’ g****** business, this really makes me want to toss my cookies.

Bugos tells of how this is the very kind of situation that his family fled from in Slovakia in 1968. And he then brings up Hans Hoppe and the Myth of National Defense! Hans-Hermann Hoppe! And Hoppe’s idea of a private law society! There really is a freedom and personal responsibility solution to the government-created mess we have now.

You see, when we have a system in which some people have legal authority and officialdom over others, when some people are allowed to be above the law and treat others like dirt and get away with beating them up or murdering them, we have a problem. No one should have any monopoly in any service or production of any good. And that includes “national security” and local policing.

No one should be above the law. When people are put into positions of  government-monopolized enforcers of the law in which they are above the law, it criminalizes that “service.” Allowing anyone to have the power to grab someone else, handcuff someone else, aim a gun at someone and threaten him, but not allowing others to have that same power, inherently encourages criminality on the part of these government-monopolized “law-enforcers.” Now, the whole situation will be worse when Obama sics the military (many of whom are murderers of innocents overseas and also have local criminal records) onto the rest of us.

For these reasons, the American Revolutionaries wrote the 2nd Amendment, to attempt to protect honest, decent people from the criminality of the agents of the State.

Radley Balko recently noted, once again, that the hysteria amongst the police nationwide over cops getting shot and the dangerousness of government-monopolized police is just hysteria. The incidents of cops getting shot on duty have decreased steadily, while the incidents of cops shooting and murdering civilians (particularly innocent civilians and not criminals) have increased in recent years. It is the police who are out of control. Local departments are not training their rookies efficiently enough (sometimes claiming “budget constraints,” although the local police sure are increasing their bureaucracies and the bureaucrats to fill those unnecessary local commissar posts, increasing their bloated tax-funded pensions, and spending a lot of tax dollars on high-powered, militarized equipment to prosecute a criminal-State-imposed drug war for no good reason). And local police departments hire those with lower IQs as well.

One state, Indiana, has made it legal for someone to protect oneself against police illegally breaking into one’s home and threatening one’s family. Balko noted the hysterics amongst the police crowd in reacting to the new law. “Legalizing cop shooters,” etc. No, legalizing self-defense, period.

This legislative act was in response to the state supreme court’s imbecilic ruling that you may not resist police unlawfully breaking into your home.

When cops act like criminals and threaten you in your own home, and you know that you have done nothing wrong and have harmed no one, then of course you have a God-given right to use whatever means necessary to protect yourself and your family (and your dogs). It doesn’t matter if they are cops or non-cops. Morally speaking, no one’s occupation should shield one from the rule of law, from responsibility for one’s own actions of criminal trespassing and criminally threatening the lives of innocents. In this case, when police have broken into your home, and you know there’s a good chance that they will kill you, then, what are you going to do, just let them kill you? (Progressives say “yes.”)

If the police arrest those who disobey local gun laws, who carry a gun with them anyway for their own protection, then such an innocent civilian should then have the arresting officer arrested and charged with endangerment. If he is just enforcing laws on the books, “just following orders,” that is no excuse. It is the same thing with the drug war. And perhaps criminal charges of endangerment should be pressed against the city councilors who voted for those dangerous disarmament laws and the same for the mayors who signed them into law.

When government officials endanger the civilians’ lives, then it is time for the people to fight back.

Continuing My Message to Ron Paul: Get Out of the GOP, and Go Third Party

Butler Shaffer has this article, Where Do We Go From Here? regarding, after the Ron Paul campaign for President, what now? Butler offers some advice mainly directed toward the youngins, because it is they — many of whom recognize that their previous generations have left them with debts, an economy in shambles and not a promising future — who are the most motivated to bring back freedom.

Many of the Ron Paul supporting youngins have learned more about history, economics and monetary policy and the Federal Reserve, and the actual truth about the wars and the lies and propaganda of the warmongers, from reading articles on LewRockwell.com, Antiwar.com, the Mises Institute, FFF.org, and other freedom-oriented websites, as well as reading books by Dr. Paul, Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe. Certainly more truth than they could ever possibly get from their government-controlled K-12 and college State-worship indoctrination centers.

It’s going to be an uphill battle. You need to convince people that there really is such a thing as Absolute Law. The rule of law is absolute: No one should be allowed to initiate aggression against others (key word there is “initiate”). And no one should have the power to monopolize anything, compel the rest of the population to have to use that monopoly, and legally restrict the rights of others from entering those fields.

And in a truly civilized society, all relationships, contracts and associations must be voluntary. No coercion, no force. Private property includes an individual’s ownership of one’s own person, and one’s otherwise justly acquired private property. The individual has a “right to be secure” in one’s person, property and effects. That is the right to be free from the aggression and intrusions of others.

But most of all, no one may be above the rule of law. In our current system, however, we have a territorial monopoly government, whether it be state, local, or federal,, in which the agents of the State — especially the government-monopolized police — are permitted to be above the law. That is the biggest problem with our system. No Constitution, and no Bill of Rights, is going to protect you when some people are allowed to have some kind of legal authority over you, with guns and badges. This kind of system just doesn’t work. Just look at the kinds of people who are on local police forces now, and the crimes they have been committing against innocent civilians and getting away with it. Look at the TSA, and the military. Why are there more suicides in the military than there are soldiers killed at war now? Because of guilty consciences?

In the meantime, the system we have now is what we have, until some changes are made. At least at the national level, changes need to be made, and Ron Paul has the right ideas. At least for now, I still believe that Ron Paul ought to get out of the GOP, because they do not take him seriously there.

Dr. Paul wrote this email to his delegates. For some reason, he seems overly — and, in my opinion, unnecessarily — devoted to the Republican Party. I think Dr. Paul needs to be more realistic. The Republican Party is half of the one Government Party now in charge. It cannot be reformed from within. It is a political party that is devoted to war, government expansionism, debts, corporatism, and authoritarianism. No different from the Democrats.

And my message to the Ron Paul delegates, as Lew Rockwell noted, is that they shouldn’t even go near Tampa. Not when the GOP Establishment are making that whole event a Total Police State.

The Republican Party is a group of socialist politicians who hate individual freedom, private property, and they appeal to the emotions and fear of the masses, just like the Democrats. Dr. Paul can put libertarian-sounding language in this year’s Republican Convention platform, but no one pays any attention to those things.

To anyone who thinks Willard is going to do anything to advance freedom, private property rights, and peace, I have a bridge to sell you. Willard is just another sleazebag politician who cares nothing about your freedom, or your life. He will send your son off to war if it will please the military-industrial complex and get their campaign donations for his reelection. Just like Bush and Obama. They’re all the same, these statists. Only Ron Paul stands on actual principles of private property, voluntary contracts and freedom of association, as well as the right to self defense.

So, Ron Paul’s forming a third party challenge of the two wings of the Government Party in Washington is necessary now. We need Dr. Paul to really shake things up with this campaign.

Things need to be shaken up in Washington.

Ron Paul needs to tell the statist quo to go to hell, and tell Washington that the people want their freedom back. Of course, if he doesn’t do this, whatever. There will be other people who can follow in his footsteps, (such as Tom Woods for example), that is, those who think that there may still be a chance to prevent a total collapse of society via the electoral and Constitutional processes (although I don’t think so).

A total collapse of society will occur as long as we keep the current monopoly in Washington, as long as we keep central planning in national security, and money and banking especially. People need to get their heads out of the sand, overcome their denial and their idealistic fantasizing, and face the truth.

And Ron Paul should get out of the GOP and run as a third-party candidate for President.

Authoritarianism or Self-Determination

July 20, 2012

Copyright © 2012 by LewRockwell.com (Link to article)

Well, another “Independence” Day has come and gone. Yet, each year that goes by, we have less independence and less freedom to direct and control our own lives and destinies.

Just what happened to the passion for self-determination of the Revolutionaries who seceded from the dictatorial King George’s rule?

When Honest Abe Lincoln used the armed forces to punish people for separating from his rule, that reversed the independence achieved by the earlier Revolutionaries. The idea of self-determination had been stomped by the boot of federal government authority.

And unlike the American Revolutionaries who questioned and challenged creepy King George’s laws, dictates and intrusions, most current Americans seem to be uncritically and unthinkingly accepting of government’s abuses. How can we reverse this trend?

In fact, many Americans are calling for more laws, more bureaucracies, and more police. Worse, those who openly question or criticize government’s incompetent, corrupt or criminal actions are referred to by the authoritarian majority as “unpatriotic” or “conspiracy theorists.”

It is an uphill battle for those of us who want to restore our freedom and our right to self-determination.

The Authoritarian Schools

It seems to me that many of these American authoritarians – left and right, liberal and conservative – are products of government schools.

America’s educational ranking has dipped from #1 to the double digits.

But what have dragged the schools down, in my opinion, are the federal government, teachers’ unions, political correctness, and the cultural degenerates who have taken control over the schools.

The schools are authoritarian and punitive, and many of the teachers unions won’t allow competency testing of teachers. Critical thinking amongst the youths is punished, as a child’s natural expressions of curiosity get diagnosed as “hyperactive,” or “oppositional defiant disorder,” and many of the schools are outright prisons now.

However, one method of teaching that is contrary to the statists’ authoritarian, top-down approach is the Montessori method, a program founded by Italian physician Maria Montessori. The Montessori method allows the individual child’s education to be directed from the natural impulses and interests of the child, within the framework of some set limits. The teachers respect and encourage the child’s self-direction. Within classrooms, the ages of the children are usually within about three years, but not necessarily all the same age.

This concept is similar to the political concepts of individual liberty and self-determination, and “government by the consent of the governed.”

Here is an in-depth article by Stephan Kinsella on the Montessori program. And, as this Montessori school notes, “classrooms are child-centered, not teacher-centered,” and “emphasis is on individual learning, not group learning.”

Clearly, our current control freak bureaucrats and teachers unions would not accept such a program in which the natural, self-directed learning impulses of an individual child are encouraged.

Now, since college my interests in psychology have been specifically in self psychology. I am very much influenced by Swiss psychologist Alice Miller, especially her book Drama of the Gifted Child. (That Scribd link is to the original 1979 version, which I recommend. In the1996 revision, however, Miller made too many changes, and for the worse.)*

Miller’s books, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child, have also influenced me. Other theorists similar to Alice Miller include D.W. Winnicott and Heinz Kohut.

One of Alice Miller’s main ideas is that of narcissistic disturbance.

Regarding the Montessori child-centered education program, some readers may be concluding that such a program only encourages narcissism (and selfishness).

On the contrary, as Alice Miller has noted, when the child’s own natural, individual impulses and self-direction are respected, encouraged and loved by the teachers and caretakers, then the child’s real inner self is what is being nurtured.

A narcissistic disturbance occurs, however, when the child’s true self and self-direction are not tolerated by the adults in the child’s world, and, as a reaction, the child takes on a false self identity, becomes conforming to the group at the expense of one’s individuality, or can become anti-social or abusive.

It is this “disturbance” that characterizes our authoritarian government schools. Government school teachers and bureaucrats seem to be very demanding that their students follow meaningless rules and regulations to satisfy the teachers’ and bureaucrats’ insatiable need for control.

And that kind of narcissistic disturbance is how I view our current top-down, authoritarian political system. Members of the “false-self,” power-craving ruling class climb over others and spend millions to get to the highest positions of power. And their agendas are to expand the power of the State and enrich themselves at the expense of others, and at the expense of our freedom. They do not want people to have more freedom, only less, and they want themselves to have more power.

Sadly, that is the Soviet, authoritarian Amerika in which we now suffer. Such a banana republic has been officially confirmed by the Chief Banana Republican of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, in his vote-switching, Orwellian judicial contortionist ObamaCare acrobatics.

Thanks to the bug-bitten Roberts, the Supreme Court has empowered the federal government to enslave all Americans even further by calling a mandate a “tax.”

The Authoritarian News Media

The modern authoritarian worship of the State has also been brought to us by professional journalists, the Press, those whose role it was supposed to be to challenge the rulers, and expose their corruption, incompetence and criminality. Unfortunately, mainstream news media reporters, editors, commentators and pundits are by and large propagandists and shills for the State now.

The State stenographer mainstreamers have enmeshed themselves and their false identities with the collective and with the State and power, and they now view the ideas of self-determination, self-direction, individualism and independence with suspicion and contempt.

With Chief Bureaucrat Roberts’s judicial acrobatics were “conservative” pundits Charles Krauthammer and George Will as further self-contorting State apologists. The so-called conservatives seemed to join Roberts’s attempt to save the “legitimacy, reputation and stature” of the high court (but not saving our liberty!).

Sorry, statists, this ObamaCare decision has further reduced the court’s “legitimacy and stature.” People with actual common sense can now see how absurd the Supreme Court’s rulings have been. Each one of the Justices (sic) is clearly just another government bureaucrat, and nothing more.

The State-power apologists amongst the Press have increasingly become more appendages of the State than its watchdogs. That correlates, in my view, with how Americans in general have grown more in deference to authority, especially governmental authority.

One particularly depressing recent showing of such authoritarianism was a column by David Brooks of the New York Times (which I haven’t gotten since 1987, by the way). Brooks believes that America does not have a “leadership problem,” but a “follower problem.”

To Brooks, people who “reject hierarchies and leaders” believe that the “whole world should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king.” (Doh!)

“Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions,” says Brooks. But he says it’s because of vanity, because we pretend that we are better than everyone else around us.

Are these statists too caught up in their emotional enmeshment with the State to understand that it is they who think they’re better than everyone else?

And could our “distrust of our institutions” possibly be because of the wars that our “leaders” have started for no good reason? And all the anti-American retaliation they have caused? Or because of the Bush-Obama police state that is turning America into Nazi Germany right before our very eyes?

Or Congress spending like drunken sailors and forcing our grandchildren to have to pay for their selfishness?

No, there aren’t enough blind, obedient followers of authority who should get on their knees for the State, according to Brooks, apparently.

Americans’ choices for “leaders” include incompetents such as Premier Obama and Premier-Wannabe Romney, and other warmongers and moonbats, but it’s not enough for Brooks, it seems.

But from the alternative media such as the Internet, there are real journalists who not only point out how authoritarian America has become, but just how subservient to the State today’s so-called journalists have become.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, for example, has recently pointed out how the New York Times acted as a State-propagandist sheet in helping the Obama Administration whitewash its murders of innocent civilians overseas.

And Greenwald has also highlighted a Newsweek/Daily Beast video that glorified President Obama’s drone bombing of innocents overseas, and Hollywood producer Davis Guggenheim’s “documentary” of Obama the great leader with great accomplishments that shouldn’t be questioned. (David Boaz recently detailed those great accomplishments.)

And let’s not forget those ghastly “JournoLists” from a few years ago, those “left-leaning” news reporters who intentionally omitted certain things about Barack Obama in their news stories, in an attempt to sway the 2008 election.

And more recently a smilingly biased George Snuffleupagus celebrated the Roberts Mandate-Tax ruling with Vicki Reggie Kennedy, widow of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Those “false selfs,” artificial elites and false intellectuals obediently defend the State’s further expansion.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains here how the natural elites and intellectuals of the past became replaced by these current artificial elites.

And the artificial elites and false intellectuals do their best to suppress the speech of those who oppose the State. (Here is Jon Stewart’s exposé of “journalists” Chris Wallace et al. and their very unprofessionally ignoring of Ron Paul last year.)

Authoritarian Propagandists for Unnecessary Wars

And the one main way of the authoritarians – left and right – to further propagandize for further State power and control, and further encroachments and usurpation of our liberty and right of self-determination, has been through war and war propaganda (more here).

Greenwald recently focused on Scott Pelley’s 60 Minutes profile of Defense Sec. Leon Panetta, described as “13 uninterrupted minutes of drooling propaganda.”

Greenwald has also written about NBC’s Brian Williams and Jim Miklaszewski, CNN’s Erin Burnett and ABC’s Diane Sawyer and Brian Ross as fear-mongers and State-propagandists for war with Iran.

And, as Alice Miller noted (via Arthur Silber) in her book, The Untouched Key, “In the fact of mobilization for war … the questions of the younger generation are silenced. To doubt the wisdom of the state is regarded as treason. Any discussion or consideration of alternative possibilities is eliminated at a single stroke.”

Miller has written on the origins of dictators’ evil and the dynamics of cruelty (with further elaboration by Arthur Silber). With people whose real self was suppressed in their earliest days, and having internalized the cruelty, humiliations, neglectfulness, abuse or violence of their early primary caretakers, their denial of the suffering of others is easier. They are more prone to believing the lies and propaganda of their “authorities,” more accepting of the criminality of those in charge, such as the warmongering Bush and Obama Administrations, and more accepting of the State’s intrusions against them, such as due process-destroying Patriot Act and NDAA, and TSA groping, molesting and cancer-scanners.

Some people refer to such unquestioning support and blind obedience to the criminal State as a form of “Stockholm Syndrome.”

A further example: When WikiLeaks revealed how incompetent, corrupt or criminal our government “leaders” really are, many Americans including journalists were more upset with WikiLeaks than about how corrupt and incompetent the government criminals are.

More recently, CNN contributor LZ Granderson suggested that Americans and the Press should stop being so “nosy” about what the government is up to. Stop investigating, stop exposing government and military corruption and crimes, stop challenging government bureaucrats’ actions and assertions. And don’t question the State’s intrusive and illegal surveillance of innocent people either! Let the State intrude into our lives, but how dare we know what they’re up to!

And the zeal with which U.S. military hacks have persecuted alleged whistleblower soldier Bradley Manning would make the bureaucrats of SAVAK and the current Iranian Regime proud.

The authoritarians in charge who hate individual liberty and self-determination – and the authoritarian Americans who support them – are the ones who support the U.S. government’s provoking of foreigners overseas, but “boo” someone who advocates peace, personal responsibility and the Golden Rule.

Many Americans just don’t seem to understand how much of a police state the U.S. has become. There’s something in the news every day, but people don’t want to see it, because it’s so horrifying a thought, even though it’s a reality now.

How Do We Restore Our Right to Self-Determination?

How can we restore our right to self-determination when control-freak bureaucrat regulators send police after those who wish to remain independent, or “off the grid”? How do we stop the Gestapo-like tactics that government agents are using against homeowners? When people try to exercise their right to self-determination, they are punished.

Obama and his ilk are going right along with the UN’s campaign to disarm innocent, law-abiding civilians, which coincides with the apparent true gun control intentions of his administration’s Fast and Furious criminal scheme. And U.S. Army manuals are training the troops to confiscate Americans’ guns.

Again, how are we to protect ourselves against government-police encroachments? That very kind of self-protection was the very reason for the 2^nd Amendment! Just as a child has the God-given right to gouge the eyes out of or kick in the balls any bigger person who abuses, molests, or threatens to harm, abduct or kill him.

Premier Obama is clearly preparing for some kind of military law to rule American streets, and his latest Executive Order among many now gives himself the power to seize control over all communications networks including our phones and the Internet.

Obama has given himself the power to have innocent civilians detained indefinitely or killed by military soldiers, without due process, without Obama or his minions being required to present evidence against the accused. With his murder of Anwar al-Awlaki, Obama has shown that he will use this power against people whose only crime was being critical of Obama and the U.S. government.

Obama’s Department of Homeland Security has ordered 400 million rounds of ammunition, and new weaponry as well, and is clearly preparing for something.

So, as the Republican Conventioneers  prepare to replace the current socialist-fascist-communist with another authoritarian puppet (and NATO troops prepare for a possible false flag op), it seems to be an uphill battle to convince people to question and challenge government bureaucrats’ lies and disbelieve their propaganda. (Unless Ron Paul abandons the GOP and runs for President as a third-party candidate, of course.)

Conclusion

People need to let go of their faith in an inherently failed system of central planning.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe explained in his book, Democracy, The God That Failed, just how the structures of central planning, publicly-owned government, a government with a monopoly in territorial protection, and the abandonment of private property and contract rights could very well lead to our current situation.

Our current system inherently breeds the authoritarianism under which we are suffering.

Some solutions that need to be considered (and soon) include:

1. Our dissolving the U.S. government even more decisively than the Soviet Union was dissolved. (More here, here, here, and here.)

2. States seceding and restoring independence and freedom from authoritarian federal dictatorial rule. (More here, here, here, here, and here.)

3. Nullification. Thomas Woods’s book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21^st Century, is helpful to understand how to unshackle ourselves from the federal Leviathan slave master. Woods responds to nullification skeptics here. (More here, here, here, here, and here.)

* Scribd has removed that page.

60 Minutes Story on Jack Abramoff: Tells the Truth About Our Inherently Corrupt System

Last night 60 Minutes ran their story on Congressional lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Now, I don’t watch TV, thank God, but WBZ radio simulcasts the audio of 60 Minutes Sunday nights. It was interesting to hear just how easily corruptible politicians are.

They are all a part of a government territorial monopoly, which institutionalizes criminality and can never be “fixed” or “reformed.” That is because it is a system of monopoly in which the entire population is compelled to use its “services,” obey its made-up “laws,” and in which the rulers are above the law. Isn’t it time that people begin to at least question the legitimacy of such a system?

No one should be above the law. The hopeful idealists out there need to overcome their denial. At the very least, we need to abolish the central-planning, federal form of government that rules over us, and return full sovereignty and independence to the states. Everything needs to be decentralized and localized, and private property and contract rights need to be restored. Perhaps I am unrealistically idealistic and hopeful that we somehow can do that soon to avoid and prevent the economic collapse that is inherently inevitable with such a Leviathan monopoly system.

The ‘Right to Health Care’

July 3, 2012

Copyright © 2012 by LewRockwell.com (Link to article)

In order to maintain a peaceful, civilized society, it is necessary to assume that human beings have rights. Among such rights are the right of each human being as an individual to self-ownership and the right to liberty, and the right to be free from others’ aggression.

Your right to own your own life is really the basis of not being enslaved by others. And part of your right to self-ownership includes every aspect of your life, including your own private health and medical matters.

As Wendy McElroy noted this week in her article, Your Identity Is Yours, “The right to privacy rests largely on a presumption of innocence. It assumes that — in the absence of evidence of wrongdoing — an individual has a right to shut his front door and tell other people (including government) to mind their own business.”

And these rights are negative rights in that we have them inherently as human beings, as Judge Napolitano reminds us many times.

However, some people believe that human beings have positive rights, that is, a right to have something provided to one by society, by the community, such as medical treatment, an education, etc. But this implies that one has a right to demand others to provide such things.

If you have a right to medical treatment, then, obviously your neighbors are obligated to provide it to you.

But what if Dr. Johnson doesn’t want to treat Mr. Jones? And what if Mr. Smith doesn’t want to contribute to Mr. Jones’s medical treatment? In the view of the artificial positive rights crowd, Mr. Jones has a right to demand that Mr. Smith contribute to Mr. Jones’s health care and demand that Dr. Johnson treats him.

But what if Mr. Jones smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish? Should he still have a right to use the armed power of the State to order Mr. Smith to contribute to his medical treatment, and order Dr. Johnson to treat him?

You see, these artificial positive rights actually contradict our negative, natural rights. With the individual’s natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, one has a right to seek medical treatment, and engage in voluntary associations with others, doctors, nutritionists, etc. It also includes the right to not associate with others with whom one does not want to associate.

The individual’s right to self-ownership, the right to own one’s own life, includes the right to not be violated or enslaved by others. That includes the right to live one’s life and not be ordered by others to participate in some group medical or insurance scheme against one’s will.

Of course, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights do not specifically mention such rights, because the Bill of Rights could not possibly enumerate all the rights to do with our own lives as we wish – that list would never end. That is why the Ninth Amendment reads: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

The individual has a natural, inherent right to not be ordered by others to buy health insurance. The individual has a right to not be ordered by others to have to visit a doctor, or a government-approved doctor, or to report one’s private medical matters to anyone. Sure, if an individual establishes a contract with an insurer voluntarily, part of the agreement of which includes a provision that the individual provide such information, then that is the individual’s right to choose if one wants to do that.

If someone chooses to be a medical doctor, devotes hours and hours every day and years of intensive study and labor toward training to become a medical doctor, then who is it that owns such efforts, labor, energy and the actual career itself? That doctor? One’s neighbors? The government? Alas, many on the progressive “liberal” Left believe that the community and the State have such ownership rights.

Sorry, progressives. Of course that doctor is the sole owner of one’s work, and it is that doctor’s right to trade one’s skills with employers’ compensation or with patients’ fees.

It is also that doctor’s right to treat for free those who are in financial need, as Dr. Ron Paul has done in his medical practice.

Such a practitioner has a self-ownership right to voluntarily associate with and establish contracts with others, or to not do so with others, and a right to not be ordered by government bureaucrats to treat anyone that the doctor does not want to treat. Such an individual has a right to arrange one’s practice in such a way not that government bureaucrats order it to be, but in a way that the doctor believes it should be.

And the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship is such that when an individual voluntarily goes to a doctor and establishes an association or contract with that doctor, then it is the patient and doctor who have the sole right of contract to decide on and control the terms of that contract, not some non-productive government bureaucrat!

Individuals also have a right to refuse a doctor’s prescription or a vaccine, if the individual has determined that alternatives might be better, or especially if information on specific drugs shows that they might actually be harmful.

And that reminds me, why are Barack Obama, Willard Romney and others so obsessed with ordering people that they must have health insurance, but rarely if ever encourage people to act preventatively?

Sorry, but calling for more BMI screening or outright banning certain foods or drinks, or mandating certain things is not preventative medicine. We do not seem to hear these people encouraging personal responsibility, or that people take vitamins and supplements that are shown to be much better for daily health maintenance than the things these government people are constantly suggesting.

Now, if someone wants to suggest that the individual does not own one’s own life, one’s private matters, one’s diet and nutritional decisions, and one’s own private business or medical practice, then you might be suggesting that such parts of an individual’s life are really owned by one’s community. In that case, the community has the right to make demands on the individual, and the right to use the individual and one’s person and labor however the community desires.

It is this very health care debate in which the “liberals” and progressives have shown their true motivations.

The “health care” schemers want to force people to report their private medical matters to the government, or otherwise compel people to do something that might go against their better judgment. So if the individual does not obey orders, the Left activists want to fine (i.e. steal from) that individual, or, if one doesn’t pay the fine, the Left activists would have him arrested and jailed by IRS goons.

Not a very caring, compassionate or peaceful way to show your “liberal” concern for others, in my opinion.

For these reasons, more rational people need to view the schemers’ motivations as suspicious. They seem more motivated to just have control over others, at the expense of liberty and even at the expense of others’ good health.

And the “health care” schemers’ attitude toward doctors really reflects the Left’s general resentment and envy toward those who work hard and develop special skills, and become successful at not only helping others but making a good living at it.

In this famous passage from Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, the doctor explains why he refuses to practice medicine in a world in which his life and work are owned by the government:

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I could not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but ‘to serve.’ That a man’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in the operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

The way it used to be, the government and its police left people alone to pursue their interests, including medical practitioners whose careers naturally helped those in need.

But now, Washington’s Politburo intellectuals, bureaucrats and fascists are obsessed with ordering people around and enslaving the working class.

So to conclude, when it comes to health care, here are some of your real rights that bureaucrats have been usurping away from you:

You have a right to see a doctor if you want to.

You have a right to not see a doctor if you don’t want to.

You have a right to buy insurance.

You have a right to not buy insurance.

You have a right to not participate in a government-controlled medical scheme.

You have a right to not be vaccinated.

You have a right to not take prescription drugs.

You have a right to exercise your own ways of preventative medicine.

You have a right to take vitamins and nutritional supplements.

You have a right to access your vitamins and nutritional supplements. And a right to be free of the Big Pharma-FDA revolving door attempting to shut down supplement makers for the sake of Big Pharma profits.

You have a right to drink raw milk.

You have a right to farm and grow your own food on your own property, and a right to share it with your neighbors, and it’s none of government bureaucrats’ business!

You have a right to be free from sniveling, cowardly, control-freak bureaucrats who don’t like your independence sending S.W.A.T. teams to your property to terrorize (or murder) you for providing for yourself and your family.

You have a right to refuse a government bureaucrat’s order to buy health insurance.

And you have a right to tell the government to stick it.

Supreme Bureaucrat John Roberts Further Advances Amerika’s Collapse

In his judicial acrobatics and contortionist stretching and pulling non-existent tax-rabbits out of his magician’s hat, Supreme Court Chief Justice (sic) John Roberts has decided that the individual insurance mandate from ObamaCareless is a tax. In doing so, Roberts further confirmed for me that he is nothing more than a politician, a government bureaucrat, certainly not a “principled jurist.” We’ll leave the description of “principled” for Ron Paul, Jacob Hornberger and Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Some people have speculated that Roberts’s decision and switching of his ObamaCareless vote were probably due to political calculations. However, this is not how judicial decisions should be determined. The genuinely principled jurist would unquestionably come to the defense of the individual and of freedom. The genuinely principled jurist would say, “Of course the individual has a right to be free of government bureaucrats’ commands, dictates, mandates, orders, intrusions, violations, and has a right to live one’s life however one wishes, and has a right to make use of one’s own person, labor and property however one wishes, as long as one is peaceful. And the individual and one’s such rights are protected here by the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the Ninth Amendment especially.”

But Comrade Roberts sides with the federal government’s unconstitutional and immoral authoritarian powers and dictatorial orders and tax-thefts, NOT with the individual and not with freedom. Oh, well.

Apparently, Comrade Roberts was originally with the conservatives against the mandate and against the whole criminal scheme, but switched his vote in May, followed by an intensive campaign by the Court’s conservatives to try to pull him back in.

Sociologist and economist Franz Oppenheimer referred to the economic means (voluntary) and the political means (coercion and aggression) as the two ways of acquiring wealth. We can say that in this instance the Chief Bureaucrat Roberts used the political means — for the Congress to have more power to steal more wealth from the people. But also he used political calculations either to try to heal whatever low opinion Americans might have of the “high” court coming out of the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision, or as a means of his own possible speculating that ultimately his decision would help Republicans to regain power in the long run.

I read recently that Roberts had never or rarely spoken about his political views or court cases with friends and associates, and even wouldn’t become an official member of the Federalist Society, even though he has associated with them and appeared with them many times. Some people think that was because a membership in such a group might have gone against him in future court nominating hearings. That’s political calculating.

Regarding the Roberts Mandate Tax, even in Congress now some Democrats are reluctant to call their new coercive orders a “tax,” despite the Supreme Bureaucrats’ decision. In her incoherent conversation with Wolf Blizter, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz insisted that the mandate is not a “tax,” but a “penalty.” And she said, “This is a penalty that will be assessed on the tax return if you choose to roll the dice and make us all pay for your being irresponsible and increase all of our health care costs … We’re not going to tolerate that any more in Amerika. You have to be responsible and you have to pay a penalty if you choose not to be.”

Wasserman Schultz clearly does not understand the idea of “responsibility.” She apparently believes that not obeying the commands and orders of the high-and-mighty U.S. Congress or the President is being “irresponsible.” No, Ms. Schultz, taking care of yourself, not smoking, not eating bad foods, not taking drugs etc., but instead taking vitamins and nutritional supplements and eating healthy foods for prevention — that is being “responsible.”

The people who have been irresponsible are those snorting Congressional pigs and criminals, with their spending like drunken sailors and increasing debts on our grandchildren and passing legislation that removes due process and makes the average individual vulnerable to a Gestapo-like police state. Shame on all of you there in Soviet, D.C.

And shame on the newest entrant to the Washington Political Hack Club, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

More Fascism in America Upheld by the Supreme Bureaucrats

July 2, 2012

Copyright © 2012 by LewRockwell.com (Link to article)

Given so many bad decisions by the Supreme Bureaucrats in Washington in the past few years, I am not surprised that they would uphold one of the worst and most clearly un-American pieces of legislation in U.S. history.

The Supremes upheld the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare. The biggest surprise for me was that the “conservative” appointee of President George W. Bush, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined the four communists “liberals” in approving what is essentially the power of the federal government to order Americans to buy health insurance.

As Ryan McMaken observed, “Now that one of Bush’s appointees saved Obamacare for Obama, every conservative who voted for Bush to get ‘strict constructionists’ on the bench should have the word ‘sucker’ tattooed on his or her face.”

Chief Bureaucrat Roberts wrote the majority opinion. Now, in that terrible, freedom-destroying opinion, Roberts wrote, as told by Reuters,

“The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s majority.

“Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness,” he concluded. The conservative Roberts joined the four most liberal justices to uphold the law’s key provision.

The threatened fine as punishment for not buying health insurance is not a “tax.” To me, a government “tax” is a fee that is imposed on the civilian, non-government victim to involuntarily use government services. That is supposedly why we have taxes: to pay for government services (that we did not contractually agree to use in the first place).

You cannot call this punishment-fine a “tax” because the people whose wealth is being stolen are not being punished for not using a government service. They are being punished for not buying a privately-provided medical insurance plan. It is not a “tax.” As Nancy Lugosi would say, “Are you serious?”

Perhaps it is time for Chief Bureaucrat Roberts to retire, no?

And this fascism will be enforced by the notorious and unconstitutional IRS. In my opinion, IRS income-thefts are unconstitutional because they consist of government bureaucrats intruding and prying into individuals’ private lives, which they have no right to do.

The Fourth Amendment states that we have a “right to be secure” in our persons, papers, houses and effects. The Fifth Amendment states that we have a right not to be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

So just who are these government bureaucrats to demand that we report our private financial contracts and employment matters, property sales, bank accounts to them? All these matters are private matters and are none of the government’s damn business!

This reporting to the government our private financial matters, our private health and medical matters, or other matters that are private has been one big step toward yet another tyranny that has taken us all down to the status of banana republic.

As Leviathan grows in size, power and intrusiveness – and more and more every day, it seems – our liberty shrinks and shrinks.

Of course, Barack Obama’s main goal – and that of many Democrats and progressives – is for single-payer health care. That’s a total government monopoly over the health care-insurance system (i.e. SovietCare).

Total State control is what many of these tyrants crave, and for them to be at the top. This Supreme decision fuels their totalitarian fire.

But, there shouldn’t be too much panic amongst the freedom-loving masses. As in 2010, the voters can always elect anti-ObamaCare candidates to the Senate and Congress this November, candidates who will promise to repeal ObamaCare if elected.

But wait a minute! Didn’t many of those candidates in 2010 who were elected also promise to repeal ObamaCare? And did they repeal ObamaCare? Nope. Oh well, as I wrote in March, 2010, these elections are mere rearranging of deck chairs, and just kicking the can down the road toward Amerika’s final collapse.

So while Congress is not reliable in saving us from the federal government’s overreaches, usurpations and intrusions, neither is the Supreme Court.

The Supremes are a government monopoly in ultimate judicial decision-making. Monopolists are not accountable.

But these monopolists will obviously be loyal to their fellows who also “work” for the State. They will not come to the defense of the individual and one’s liberty.

Another problem with these well-fed and pampered Supreme Monopolist Bureaucrats is their lacking in common sense.

For example, the five “conservative” Justices recently voted to uphold police strip-searches of people arrested for minor offenses such as overdue parking tickets or walking a dog without a leash. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that “people detained for minor offenses can turn out to be the most devious and dangerous criminals.”

But Justice Kennedy, how many people arrested for overdue parking tickets really turn out to be “the most devious and dangerous criminals”? There is no common sense in that! In my opinion – and, of course, I may be way off here, I don’t know – when a case comes before you in which someone has been arrested for an overdue parking ticket, someone who has actual common sense would say, “It’s just a parking ticket! That’s NOT an arrestable offense!” Such a Justice with actual common sense would vote to forbid such invasive, potentially harmful strip-searches. But not Justice Kennedy (and his four fellow supreme schmucks). Some states have been expanding their long lists of arrestable offenses now, in the Totalitarian States of Amerika.

By the way, if someone actually is arrested for some minor thing, such as walking a dog without a leash, he or she should not only sue the local police department, but have the arresting officer arrested and charged with endangerment. That officer’s arresting some innocent civilian and bringing him or her to the police station and made to stay in a cell with actual criminals is endangering that civilian’s life. In this case, it is the arresting officer who is the dangerous criminal! But I digress.

So, as an alternative to the useless “Supreme” Court, what is needed is scrapping the whole system in favor of freedom. No restrictions on competition. People should exercise their God-given right to seek third-party arbitrators in their communities or their neighborhoods and not be forced to use the one government-run service. In an actual free society, no one would have any monopoly power, certainly not the power to order someone to buy health insurance, or do this or that against one’s will.

And the inhabitants of each of the states that compose the United States of America should not be forced by law (or the Constitution!) to have to rely on the federal Supreme Bureaucrats for the final word on anything.

As I mentioned, Americans having this federal-government monopoly in ultimate judicial decision-making has shown to be counter-productive to the preservation of liberty. We can probably expect that, when the economy and the system collapses and there is civil unrest and martial law, the Obama Regime will attempt to totally disarm the civilian population, and the Supremes will uphold that. “It’s an emergency, you know.”

In our current system of so-called justice, such a non-contractual, not-voluntarily agreed-upon relationship between the people and the federal government has shown to be a complete farce. In such a bizarre, banana republic system, the people are serfs of the State and its bureaucrats.

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe stated in Private Law Society,

Just imagine a security provider, whether police, insurer or arbitrator, whose offer consisted in something like this: I will not contractually guarantee you anything. I will not tell you what specific things I will regard as your to-be-protected property, nor will I tell you what I oblige myself to do if, according to your opinion, I do not fulfill my service to you – but in any case, I reserve the right to unilaterally determine the price that you must pay me for such undefined service. Any such security provider would immediately disappear from the market due to a complete lack of customers. Each private, freely financed security producer instead must offer its prospective clients a contract. And these contracts must, in order to appear acceptable to voluntarily paying consumers, contain clear property descriptions as well as clearly defined mutual services and obligations …

While states, as already noted, are always and everywhere eager to disarm its population and thus rob it of an essential means of self-defense, private law societies are characterized by an unrestricted right to self-defense and hence by widespread private gun and weapon ownership. Just imagine a security producer who demanded of its prospective clients that they would first have to completely disarm themselves before it would be willing to defend the clients’ life and property. Correctly, everyone would think of this as a bad joke and refuse such on offer. Freely financed insurance companies that demanded potential clients first hand over all of their means of self-defense as a prerequisite of protection would immediately arouse the utmost suspicion as to their true motives, and they would quickly go bankrupt. In their own best interest, insurance companies would reward armed clients, in particular those able to certify some level of training in the handling of arms, charging them lower premiums reflecting the lower risk that they represent. Just as insurers charge less if homeowners have an alarm system or a safe installed, so would a trained gun owner represent a lower insurance risk.

People would thus be able to defend themselves if some neanderthal claiming to be a neighborhood security provider attempted to “arrest,” kidnap and detain someone for an overdue parking ticket. The same thing would apply to someone claiming to punish an individual for disobeying government bureaucrats’ fascist commands to buy health insurance.