Democracy Isn’t Worth Beating Yourselves Up Over

Some important items regarding the effectiveness of democracy caught my eye this week, and I will share them here.

To begin, libertarian author and researcher James Bovard challenges the myth of democracy that many people believe: that the “government is us,” and that government bureaucrats’ decisions are ultimately the people’s responsibility because “you voted for it.” For example, as Bovard writes:

Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1938, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.” But it wasn’t “ourselves” that ravaged the nation with the New Deal’s thousands of decrees that crippled Americans’ right to make contracts or use their own property. When he ran for reelection in 1936, he never mentioned his plan (revealed in early 1937) to pack the nation’s highest court with new appointees to rubberstamp his decrees. Yet because he won in 1936, he implied that the citizenry were somehow bound to accept all of his power grabs as if they themselves had willed them.

Also recently, LewRockwell.com columnist Michael Rozeff pointed out,

I submit that the people or peoples that inhabit a certain portion of North America known as America did not overthrow the government of Iran in 1953. They did not direct themselves into the Vietnam War. They did not decide to bomb Serbia, starve the people of Iraq, and later invade Iraq. They didn’t decide to debase the dollar. They did not devise or pass Obamacare. They did not decide to bail out Wall Street investment bankers or hedge funds. They did not decide to militarize America’s police. They did not decide to have a war on drugs with stiff prison sentences. They didn’t decide to have a war on poverty. They didn’t decide to have a massive NSA program of surveillance and spying on themselves and the rest of the world and then to keep it secret from themselves.

And Bovard asks, if the government is “we the people,” then why are government agents constantly allowed to be above the law?

If the citizen is the government, why are there far harsher penalties for any private citizen who pushes, threatens, or injures a federal employee than the punishment for feds when they take the same actions against private citizens? Why are governments allowed to claim sovereign immunity when their employees kill private citizens? Why is it routine procedure for politicians and government employees to lie to citizens, but a federal crime for citizens (such as Martha Stewart) to lie to the government?

Speaking of sovereign immunity, Will Grigg wrote of yet another case in which government police beat the crap out of an innocent human being, and a woman no less. And they then arrested her and charged her for “assaulting an officer.” The neanderthal thugs in blue have been doing that a lot these days.

And the woman victim in Grigg’s example had attempted to sue the police department, only to — once again — get shooed away by the thug-abetting government judge.

So, yet another judge comes to the defense of the poor little cops who beat the crap out of an innocent defenseless civilian. This, in my opinion, is in the same category of the Obama-flunky judge who came to the defense of Obama to reinstate the indefinite detention of Americans provision of the NDAA law, after the first judge, the heroic Kathleen Forrest, struck it down. It seems that most government judges come to the defense of violent abusers with badges because they are fellow government employee parasites. And that’s the way it is, as Walter Cronkite used to say.

But this is a “democracy” and you all voted for it, as many people like to believe. The “government is us,” so that’s why we like to beat ourselves up. And let’s print our own money as well so we can ruin our entire economic system and bring our country to ruin.

Might as well. We voted for it.

Well, can “we the people” ever begin to accept the idea of jury nullification? Hmmm, I don’t know. It takes actual critical thinking skills to hear a case regarding a law which shouldn’t exist, and actually find the defendant “not guilty” because he hasn’t actually committed a crime.

But he violated a government diktat or arbitrary rule whose sole purpose is to add revenue to an already bloated government and its bureaucrat apparatchiks. “GUILTY!”

Jury nullification? Freedom?

Don’t. Go. There.

And, according to CNN (via Infowars) the government that we all voted for and is “we the people” is now telling insurance company executives to stifle any open criticism of the dreadful effects of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare, or such insurers will suffer the dreadful effects of “retribution” by those feds in Washington a.k.a. “we the people.”

Which is nothing new, by the way. HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius foresaw the current aftereffects of ObamaCare. In September, 2010 she warned the insurance industry that they would pay a price for any “misinformation” if they blamed their future rate increases on the Affordable Care Act.

How to explain Sebelius’s tyrannical behavior? Kathleen was at one time the president of the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association.

Experts in tyranny, they are.

Jeepers, that Obama sure picked a winner here. Yup.

Remember, you voted for it, people. The government is you. All this economic chaos is because we the people caused it. It certainly wasn’t the politicians, the bureaucrats, the lawyers and other criminals and non-productive misfits of society in Washington, no.

Perhaps Hans-Hermann Hoppe was right, after all.

And finally, law professor Jonathan Turley asks, “Are police addicted to drug money?” Well, of course they are. It’s free money, free stuff for the government parasites. This is the sole reason for the continuation of the criminal drug laws. And I say they are criminal not because they are laws against criminality, but because they promote criminal behavior by the police-thugs who are employed by the government and paid for by the taxes which are stolen from the hapless “citizens” who believe that the “government is us.”

And that’s the way it is (as Walter Cronkite would say).

Power, Drugs and a Way to Medical Freedom

Arthur Silber has this post on Glenn Greenwald and challenging those with power.

Dr. Mercola writes about one of the biggest money-making scams in America: the prescription drug scam.

And there may be a light at the end of the tunnel regarding ObamaCareless. Judy Morris has this post on how ObamaCare is kick-starting free-market health care.

Secessionists Do Not Like Being Slaves of the State

Thomas DiLorenzo has this article on the dreaded “S-Word.”

“Secession”!

DiLorenzo responds to some historically-ignorant New York Times columnist who misinterprets with fear Balaji Srinivasan’s suggestion that Silicon Valley secede from the United States. The Times writer, according to DiLorenzo, seemed to imply that advocating secession is condoning slavery.

But what we have here now in America is slavery. America is a country in which much of the population is enslaved by the ruling political class, the thugs in Washington. Just look at ObamaCare. The feds order you to do this or that, and if you don’t do it and if you don’t pay the fine for not obeying they will send goons to your house and drag you away. The same thing applies to all the extortion payments you must forfeit to the bureaucrats, and all the regulations you must obey and the restrictions on your daily behavior imposed by the Rulers. For those who don’t think that’s slavery and who are “fine with that,” they are “sheeple.”

DiLorenzo also points out in his article — and such a point is lost on many who worship at the smelly feet of Leviathan in DC — that the early Americans who founded the “United States of America” seceded from the British. THAT was a real “secession”!

Now, if you believe that people don’t have a right to secede and that they must be bound and shackled to live under the iron fist of non-productive Rulers who feed off the people’s labor, then knock yourselves out. Best of luck to the sheeple. But there are those who believe that each individual has a right to own one’s own life, to not be owned by one’s neighbors or by the State, and has a right to something called “self-determination.” Those concepts are quite the opposite of slavery.

Actually, those who believe that the people are obligated to serve the government by their labor involuntarily expropriated by the State — that’s what should be the real definition of “slavery.” Sadly, those who are pathologically short-sighted and unable to see the big picture just can’t understand that. It really is those people who criticize the secessionists who are the real advocates of slavery. And shame on them.

Justin Raimondo writes about the revelation that the NSA has been spying on foreign leaders, and how Dianne Feinstein is angry about it. She supports the NSA spying on her fellow innocent Americans but she’s angry about spying on some of her fellow Rulers in other countries. As Raimondo puts it, “surveillance is for peons.” (And slaves of the State.)

And Wendy McElroy has this post at the Dollar Vigilante blog comparing many current Americans’ (and Canadians’) denial of the U.S. police state to the denial that many Germans experienced during Hitler’s Nazi Germany. McElroy observes,

The state is a thief and an arrogant bully who is given free rein to steal from productive people and punish anyone for the slightest disobedience of unreasonable laws, even for having a disobedient attitude. The state becomes a ‘legitimized ‘ vehicle for criminals to impose organized force upon a society that would otherwise function through trade or other voluntary exchange.

The so-called United States of America is now quickly becoming a totalitarian nightmare. A police state, which includes the draconian ObamaCare and its IRS S.W.A.T. goons to enforce it.

People including Wendy McElroy are leaving. She is moving to Chile. And I think that Robert Higgs mentioned in this great video that he is moving there too, or some similar place. And it appears that Jeff Berwick of the aforementioned Dollar Vigilante has established a “Galt’s Gulch” there now. I myself am not able to do such a move. Oh, well. I am hoping that the secessionist movement grows and becomes more popular to counter the criminal and increasingly intolerable Leviathan Monster State that is destined to implode and collapse on its own weight.

Fukushima Getting the West Coast

Washington’s Blog has a new post on the effects of Fukushima radiation on the west coast. Fukushima Is Here.

Anti-Business Collectivists (Those Conservatives!)

I keep hearing the radio blabbermouths criticizing Obama and the Left on their socialist/fascist ObamaCare disaster and other terrible policies. Unfortunately, they include the immigration issue as part of their complaints. Conservatives are collectivists as much as the Left, and they do not understand the importance of private property and free markets, including in the immigration issue. So I am reposting this article I had on LewRockwell.com last year. 

A Disagreement With Collectivist Anti-Business Conservatives on Immigration

June 27, 2012

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

The conservatives are up in arms over Barack Obama’s “executive order” regarding immigration and deportation laws, his granting amnesty to about a million young people whose parents brought them over to the U.S. when they were children. “He’s pandering to the Hispanics in an election year,” they cry. “Obama is inviting more ‘invaders’ into the country, a whole new group of voters for Democrats!” and so forth.

Of course Obama’s move is political. Does Obama really care about the lives of all these people, and about protecting them from immoral deportations? Not really, given how deportations have skyrocketed in record numbers during his administration.

But very briefly for those worried about Obama’s Executive Orders: Yes, there is a huge problem if those orders involve further dictatorial intrusions, restrictions on our liberty, or property or wealth confiscations.

But I have no problem if such an Executive Order involves ignoring or nullifying existing intrusions, restrictions or confiscations.

When an act of positive law, an ordinance, government-imposed mandate or restriction violates someone’s life and liberty, then that is an immoral act of positive law (enforced by armed police), and it must be repealed forthwith.

It doesn’t matter who repeals it, Congress or the President, struck down by courts, nullified by the people – whatever – or whether “proper constitutional procedures” are followed. If something is an immoral act of aggression against innocent human beings, get rid of it, immediately!

Philosophically and morally, the conservatives who see entrants not officially authorized by the U.S. government as “invaders,” do not realize how communistic their views of State-controlled exclusion really are.

The conservatives support the federal government’s central planning of the population as far as who gets in and who doesn’t. And with such central planning, they thus support the collective ownership of the entire territory. However, when the collective assumes ownership and control of an entire territory, then everything within the territory goes with that collective (or State) control.

It is impossible to empower a collective population with that kind of group territorial ownership but at the same time say that each individual, each parcel of “private” property, and each business within the territory is privately owned, and that each private owner has ultimate control and sovereignty of one’s property, business, and one’s life. In reality, each individual is merely “renting space,” and is owned by the collective.

Part of this communistic approach to things by the conservatives can be seen in their apparent obsession with citizenship. Do you see how some conservatives are obsessed with Obama’s citizenship, like that matters? Oh, the constitution says something about “eligibility,” but the Constitution itself is extremely flawed.

But being a “citizen” really does go with that idea of collective ownership of the territory and of everything and everyone within it.

Is an individual more a citizen of the government than of the country or of the territory? Unfortunately, many people conflate the country of America with the government.

Citizenship is really a euphemism for how the government owns us. And the more imperialistic and hegemonic the U.S. government has become, the more it has claimed ownership over other territories, foreign lands and economies, and the foreigners themselves.

What we have now is a contradiction of the principles of liberty and self-ownership, as referenced in the American Declaration of Independence.

Sadly, there are many narcissistic people who want to believe that the individual’s rights to life and liberty mentioned in the Declaration only apply to Americans. But no, all human beings have inalienable rights to life and liberty.

So, if we accept the premise that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that such rights are natural, inherent rights that each individual has as a human being, then we would have to acknowledge that of course all human beings have a right to freedom of movement, freedom of travel, and the right to migrate anywhere in the world, as long as they don’t trespass on private property.

Actually, as consumers of goods and services in America, we should want to have as many people migrating to America as we can have. The more immigrants, the more people who are available not only as laborers, but as businesspeople and entrepreneurs to employ more Americans.

The immigration issue shows the conservatives’ contempt for consumers, and for private property rights and freedom of contract. The conservatives approve of the intruder government’s seizure of and control over private businesses and contracts between employers and laborers, at the ultimate expense of consumers.

These central planning intrusions not only violate the property and contract rights of both business owners and workers in the moral sense, but such government intrusions have shown to be impractical, and cause distortions in markets.

Or planned chaos, as Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises would call it. And as Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger noted in Immigration Socialism versus Freedom and the Free Market,

Hayek pointed out that the central planner, no matter how brilliant, can never possess the requisite knowledge and expertise to plan and direct a complex market activity. One of the primary reasons for that inability is that market conditions, which turn on ever-changing subjective valuations of people, are changing constantly, and they’re different in every particular locale across the land.

With the idea of immigration freedom, Hornberger compares the freedom to travel, work and establish voluntary employment contracts with how Americans of different U.S. states interact:

After all, look at the United States, the largest free-trade and free-movement zone in history. People are free to cross borders of the different states. No border patrol. No customs. No interstate checkpoints. No passports. No papers. It works the same way when people cross from county to county.

It didn’t have to be that way. The Framers could have said, “Each state shall have the sovereign prerogative of controlling its borders from the people of other states.” Thank goodness they didn’t do that, because if they had, there is no doubt that many a state government would today be exercising that power, to protect its state from competing workers and producers …

The same principle of free trade and free movements of people that characterize the domestic United States is what should be adopted for international borders as well: people freely crossing back and forth, visiting, touring, buying, selling, investing, opening businesses, working, and living their lives as easily as people do domestically.

The true moral defense of private property rights and contract rights in immigration, labor and employment is this: Each individual has a right of ownership of one’s own life. The businessperson has started one’s business with one’s own effort, labor and capital. Therefore, that individual has a God-given right to do with one’s own property whatever one wishes, as long as one does not violate the persons or property of others.

That means that any third party who interferes with that individual’s business, including the contracts that such a businessperson establishes voluntarily with one’s customers and employees, that third party is being an intruder, a trespasser.

Such intruders and trespassers include government bureaucrats and their armed agents attempting to enforce artificial socialist controls over the lives, property and businesses of others.

And from the laborers’ perspective, the foreign worker has right to work, earn an income to support one’s family, and has a right to travel as long as one doesn’t trespass on private property, and has a right to establish voluntary contracts with employers.

And consumers have a right to trade their wealth with the businesspeople and seek the best quality service or goods at the best price, and it’s no one else’s business.

The current collective- and government-ownership of the territory, businesses, labor and the people effects in an egregious diminution of liberty and is a disservice to consumers.

The current socialist, central planning control over businesses forces the consumers to be served by only non-immigrant workers, many of whom may be less qualified than immigrant workers may be.

In a free society of private property and the sanctity of private contracts, the consumers would rule and be better served by the producers of goods and services, the employees of whom being the best available workers according to the producers’ own judgments and the consumers’ satisfaction – but NOT according to non-productive government bureaucrats!

Alas, conservatives prefer the current situation of socialist government controls, economic central planning, restrictions, intrusions, even police state policies such as the Arizona “Your Papers, Please” law, and arrests and deportations, in the immigration issue.

Further, many people erroneously view immigrants as draining America’s wealth and productivity and making us less safe in our communities. I would agree that the welfare state has acted as a magnet for the foreign-born non-productive class.

But at the same time, America had also been a magnet for the very productive and motivated amongst foreigners wanting to come here for a better life for themselves and for their families. (But not so much now for foreigners, or for native-born Americans, unfortunately.)

In fact, a major recent study has shown that, with large changes in immigration laws since 1965, there is “no evidence that (immigrants) have reshaped the social fabric in harmful ways,” and concluded that “America is neither less safe because of immigration nor is it worse off economically.”

However, what really have reshaped America’s social fabric are the welfare state policies of FDR and LBJ, and government’s seizure of control over education, which have added to the destruction of the family and the discouragement of independent living and critical thinking among the general population.

America is worse off economically not because of immigrants but because of the obscene growth of the government sector, which siphons wealth from the productive sector.

And America is worse off economically because of government’s intrusions in Americans’ economic lives, with taxation-thefts and regulatory trespasses, and especially because of government bureaucrats’ imbecilic fiscal and monetary central planning.

And America is less safe not because of foreign immigrants but because of the growing police state, and because of U.S. government foreign policy, which for many decades – certainly well before 9/11 – has consisted of invading and occupying foreign lands, interfering with foreign peoples’ business, and bullying and provoking foreigners.

But when some of these collectivist-conservatives on the radio bark about immigrants as “intruders” who “don’t belong in our country,” there is a definite need for clarification on who the real intruders are.

The ones who really don’t belong in America are the communist-oriented non-productive bureaucrats in Washington. The legislators who make laws that violate our liberty, their aides who actually write the bad laws that are really meant to favor special interests and established businesses, the contractors, the government “workers” with their bloated pensions.

In other words, the non-productive government sector, many of whom are hostile to the very principles of private property and individual freedom that made America the once-great nation that it was.

Those are the real intruders, the true foreign invaders occupying our precious lands. They are the ones who should be given a dishonorable discharge, deported, exiled, given the heave-ho, and taken away to places more acceptable to them, such as North Korea or Iran or Cuba, rather than their continually making America into their Soviet-style police-state paradise of plunder and pillage and siphoning off the hard labor of the productive class.

Those non-productive Washington prison wardens really ought to cut the government’s shackles that tie us down, enslave and imprison us. So too should they cut the shackles of the entrepreneurial immigrants who would otherwise start businesses, provide jobs, and provide goods and services to consumers (that non-productive government bureaucrats don’t do!).

More people are now realizing how impossible it is for Washington central planners to run things in a territory as large and populated as the U.S. So, eventually we will have to break up into smaller sections or just return sovereignty and independence to each state. Obviously, migration into states would then be handled much more easily.

Perhaps President Obama has only begun to set people free, first with the immigration issue. Maybe next by ending the illicit and immoral drug war. (Or maybe not.)

But as long as Executive Orders set people free, how could anyone in his right mind oppose them?

More Evidence That Central Planning Can’t Be “Reformed.”

Infowars reporter Paul Joseph Watson writes on a “Fallujah-style” checkpoint with cops pointing guns at innocent motorists’ heads in Sacramento. They were doing this because apparently a wanted parolee gang member was on the loose. The gang member had allegedly shot and wounded a federal immigration official and three local cops.

Watson compared the cops’ hysteria with the LA cops pursuing the LA “cop-killer” Christopher Dorner, and the hysterical post-Boston Marathon bombings police siege and unconstitutional door-to-door searches.

Now, while Watson did not make reference to or imply this, as I wrote in my recent article, Let’s Reform Central Planning and the Police State, my contention has been that had the suspects in all these cases not shot or killed police but only mere civilians, the cops would not have acted so hysterically.

And they are getting worse now, as in the current example in Sacramento, because most Americans now are more authoritarian and self-centered than ever. Given the reverence that sheeple Americans now have for authority, for uniformed authority, if someone actually threatens any of those uniformed “men in blue,” it is as though someone threatens Mommy and Daddy. That’s how personal the pathological authoritarianism in America has become. And, regarding how self-centered many people are now, when the narcissistic cops see that “one of their own” has been harmed by someone, the cops as a group seem to become pathologically in fear of their own lives, to the point of their own threatening of any individual who crosses their paths. That’s just my observation on that. (And all the prescription drugs, steroids, and hard street drugs that many of them are using these days aren’t helping matters.)

No. More. Police. Socialism.

Bill Buppert tells it like it is in Sadism and Statism: Rhyming with the Reaper.

And Pat Buchanan tells it like it is on Washington, DC and ObomberCare.

Finally, Kevin Gosztola describes how our government’s CIA-operated drones are terrorizing innocent people in Pakistan and other places. The tax-parasite sadists also target the rescuers of those attacked by the drones.

No. More. “National Security.” Central. Planning.

With ObamaDisaster, Perhaps Now the Left Can Finally Question Their Irrational Ideology

The problems caused by the Affordable Care Act have been well beyond just the government’s website. Even Democrats and leftists are openly criticizing it. They are seeing their insurance policies being cancelled, their premiums being raised, or their jobs eliminated or turned into part-time. This is certainly not the fault of the private sector.

The people on the left need something like this as a learning experience. But will any of them finally learn anything? Will they begin to question the myths they have believed so strongly for so many years?

How ironic that many on the left scoff at religious people and the various doctrines they believe, while the leftists themselves (a.k.a. “liberals”) have their own set of beliefs, myths and dogma they stand by religiously, and with much zeal as a matter of fact, to the point of their constant shouting down of speakers with whom they disagree. On the college campuses the intolerance toward opposing points of view by the Left is sickening. (I wonder if any of those academics, students and professors alike, actually realize how intolerant they are. Perhaps they should be shown videos of themselves in the classrooms cutting off someone who disagrees with the rest of the group, such as someone with a conservative or libertarian point of view. It’s just a thought.)

When it comes to “health care,” I think that many on the Left don’t like the idea of personal responsibility, as is the case with many of them in other areas of life. “As long as I can go to a doctor when I feel sick, and not have to pay for it, then I can eat stuff that’s not good for me, smoke and do drugs, and it doesn’t matter, because someone else is paying the doctor,” seems to be what many on the Left want to say. And please don’t tell me they support government-controlled medical care because they “care for the poor.” If they did, they’d donate to the poor and help the poor with their medical care, privately.

But let “the government” take care of it. But who is “the government”? “We the people”? No, the government is bureaucrats, politicians, control freaks, people who like power and control over others, robbers and lawyers (sorry for the redundancy) and otherwise misfits and the burnouts of society, that’s who.

So, as with the conservatives who are duped every time a Republican warmonger starts a new war for no good reason, the “liberals” get bamboozled into supporting one socialist welfare program after another, despite the disasters they have caused. ObamaCare is a great example.

But, as Larken Rose has pointed out, these politicians who rule over us couldn’t give a you-know-what whether you have “health care,” or whether you get sick and die. If you think that a congressman cares about you or your health, then you are not with reality. Psychopaths do not care about other people. I think I’ll post that Larken Rose video on how those people in Washington view you at the end of this post.

Regarding the Affordable Care Act, Patrice Lewis has this very realistic assessment of the Left’s idealistic vision of what an ObamaCare, “single payer,” or otherwise government-run or government-controlled health care scheme is or should be.

Many on the left really believe that “health care” should be free, or at least paid for by the “magic health care fairy,” as Ms. Lewis jokingly calls it. But when the government gets involved with any of these everyday matters in life, it uses the only means it knows to implement the fantasies of its bureaucrats: coercion and compulsion, backed by the armed force of government’s guns and badges. And Lewis correctly points out that the coercive programs of governments cause “unintended consequences.” In the case of the Affordable Care Act, Lewis writes,

Insurance companies are doubling rates and/or dropping customers by the hundreds of thousands. Employers are cutting employee hours to under 30 hours/week to avoid providing health care. Other employers are dropping family coverage or not hiring that extra person to stay below government mandates for insurance coverage. Gee, who’da thunk?

…

Right now (even before Obamacare has been fully implemented), this program is already destroying jobs, it’s destroying doctors (including those thinking of entering the field), it’s destroying personal finances, it’s destroying hospitals, and it’s destroying insurance companies. Destroy destroy destroy.

Of course, government officials are professing “surprise” at all the difficulties incumbent in Obamacare. They are “surprised” that people are shocked and unhappy with the costs. They are “surprised” that insurance companies are dropping the coverage of up to a million people (so far). They are “surprised” at endless unintended consequences.

And the unintended consequences have nothing to do with the Healthcare.gov website’s problems, as the results cited above were already taking place a while ago, when employers and insurers knew ahead of time what ObamaCareless was going to cause. And it’s very simple as to why these things are happening, as Lewis notes, comparing the ObamaCare of the government sector to the private sector:

The reason is because the private sector is subject to the forces of competition in the marketplace. When people have the freedom to choose whether or not to purchase a product, companies are forced to improve their goods and reduce costs to attract those customers. Duh.

But government is a monopoly fueled by coercion and force. It doesn’t need to improve or economize; but it can force you at gunpoint to accept the rotten products or services that, in a free market, would have been eliminated in a heartbeat.

And she goes on to quote the former Libertarian Party Presidential nominee Harry Browne, and cites his book, Why Government Doesn’t Work. Now, Ms. Lewis describes herself as a “constitutional conservative,” but I think given her past writings that I’ve read, we can safely also describe her as a “libertarian.”

By the way, here is the late Harry Browne on Big Government and why it is not good for us (and that includes ObomberCare!):

As to the harmful effects of ObamaDisaster, another libertarian writer, Mark Crovelli at LewRockwell.com, explains how his health insurer has just dropped the coverage that Crovelli was happy with.

If I get sick, I prefer to figure it out for myself.  If I get cut, I prefer to suture myself.  I don’t need prescription drug insurance (because I refuse to take them), and I don’t need cheap copays (because I just don’t go to the doctor).   I carry insurance solely to protect myself against catastrophic injury, period.

My care in scrupulously protecting my managing my own health used to be rewarded by saving money on health insurance.  I was able to save money for my business and myself by paying as little as possible for medical services.  The money that I saved by suturing myself went straight into my own pocket.  The money that I saved by trying to avoid the doctor’s office went straight into my own pocket.  This improved the financial position of both my business and myself.

My health insurer, however, has recently notified me that I will no longer have the option to save money on my health insurance.  The insurance plan that met my needs perfectly for many years apparently does not provide coverage that is adequate, according to my political overlords.

Crovelli has become a “health draftee,” as Murray Rothbard put it in his critique of “HillaryCare” in 1993, which would have been much like ObamaCare. And the people on the Left think they are “against slavery”! Go figure.

But as long as more power is given to those overlords, those monopoly bureaucrats, that is what matters — to them! Because they don’t care about you. And not only are they reckless, ruthless sociopaths and power-grabbers, but they are complete incompetents, as most of them have made a life-long career feeding at the public trough while never having had any experience whatsoever in the actual productive sector. And that includes “conservatives,” too, such as Dick Cheney, John McCain and Congressman Peter King.

I have to put “conservatives” into quotes like “liberals,” because conservatives aren’t conservative just as today’s liberals aren’t liberal. Conservatives love Big Government (i.e. government waste, fraud and incompetence) when it comes to foreign policy and the surveillance state. And “liberals” believe that the government should be empowered to chain people down through regulations, taxes, and thousands of fascist nanny-state laws to thoroughly restrict freedom of movement and trade as much as possible. They are not “liberal.”

There is a big difference between those on the conservative and liberal side, and libertarians. The difference is that libertarians believe in freedom, and the liberals and conservatives believe in government. That’s the difference.

But back to my earlier point about the Left and how they irrationally view government-controlled medical care. The problem with the Left is this fantasizing that characterizes many of them in which government bureaucrats will take care of you, oversee your “health care” as though they actually care about you, or that they actually have the slightest idea how to oversee your care even if they did care about you or your health.

For example, as I referenced in this post, it is difficult to imagine a former president of the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association, Kathleen Sebelius, to be “the secretary” mentioned more than 2,500 times in the Affordable Care Act who will have so much power over our medical care. We might as well have Paul Krugman be our surgeon.

So you can get a more in-depth understanding of why monopoly government and its coercive dictates don’t work, by reading some of the books I have listed on my “Recommended Books” page. Some of the links go to free online editions of those books.

As I mentioned above, here is Larken Rose explaining how those people in Washington see you. And no, they don’t view you as equals, and they don’t really believe that they “work for you.”

Some Interesting Items Today

The Washington Times has this story on how feds and Maryland storm troopers raided the home of a former Washington Times investigative journalist to seize personal notes and FOIA-obtained government documents pertaining to several stories she had done on problems with DHS. The goons illegally used search warrants for reasons totally unrelated to those items they actually seized. (Totalitarian much?)

Philip Giraldi has an article on The American Conservative magazine on spy agencies spying on one another, Iran, Turkey and Israel. (You apy on me, I’ll spy on you. Let’s call the whole thing off.)

Jacob Hornberger has an article on the Texas public school controversy on 9/11

Karl Denninger explains how badly ObamaCareless will harm you.

Eric Margolis points out that even with all the unconstitutional and “ungentlemanly” NSA spying on Americans and foreigners, U.S. foreign policy is still a bunch of crapola. (It’s because central planning in anything screws everything up, and that’s why.)

And Patrice Lewis has these helpful tips on homestead water. An extensive report, actually.

Racism Everywhere

Yesterday I linked to Thomas Sowell’s article on the results of “race-hustling.” Sadly, there are some people who are obsessed with their or other people’s skin color, like that means anything. And this includes government or educational affirmative action programs which base some of their hiring or admissions on the race of the applicant, an unintended consequence of which is the discriminating against someone else based on his or her skin color.

And, as Sowell has noted in the article and in his past articles, many news media outlets refuse to identify the race of the black perpetrators and white victims of racially motivated violence, while the news outlets would enthusiastically publish the races if they were reversed. The mere fact that there are black youths in the cities who are gathering together to form mobs and beating up on innocents and with racial motivations is certainly not a result of all the affirmative action programs and LBJ’s Great Society, as much as they are probably more a result of racist and revenge-mongering attitudes of the race hustlers of the Left. (Some outspoken examples of that have included The Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Shrapnel.)

But some of those race hustlers and race-baiters on the Left are not all people of color — some are white as well. For example, MSNBC propaganda host Chris Matthews played a clip of Sen. Ted Cruz speaking before some supporters outside of Washington saying that it was “great to be back in America” (after being in Washington). While Cruz was obviously implying that the pols and the bureaucracy in DC are “not America” (and in fact, in my opinion, are an occupying foreign regime) and are out of touch with what America is really supposed to stand for, Matthews immediately concluded that Cruz was implying it was great to be back in “white America.” But only a fool could make such a conclusion, or someone who knows full well what Cruz meant but was intentionally putting a racial aspect to it to continue that false label of “racist” on the Tea Partiers.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights activists made a lot of progress during the 1960s in getting governments to repeal their Jim Crow laws which specifically discriminated against people of color, by law, and which punished private businesses who had multi-racial and -ethnic customers, especially in the south. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in this post, the 1964 Civil Rights Act included not only public policies and government-owned institutions but privately-owned businesses and functions as well. That was one area in which the Act itself became a means of some people having the power to violate the rights and property rights of others. The distinction between private and public property was now further blurred, much to the delight of the covetous Left.

And yes, there are the Archie Bunkers of the world but certainly not as many as there used to be. However, over the past 12 years the many current Archie Bunkers, such as U.S. Rep. Peter King,  have taken their obvious racist attitudes out on the Muslim populations overseas and Arabic or Muslim members of society here in the U.S. Those particular targets of racism are acceptable in the mainstream of ignorant vengeful American “exceptionalists” who believe that Americans are superior over other peoples and have a right to inflict violence and murder on the “terrorists,” i.e. foreigners who retaliate against the U.S. government’s wars of aggression and occupations.

And in our more modern times there are whole government police departments who are notorious for their official policies of discrimination especially against people of color and Muslims or those of Middle-Eastern features. The NYPD is one of those departments, in their illegal surveillance of Muslims and their illegal stop-and-frisks of innocent youths mostly black and Hispanics.

A recent example of racist NYPD behavior was the arrest of the 19-year-old black college student who had purchased a very expensive belt at Barneys in New York. The arrest was based on the assumption that because he was young and black that therefore he could not have afforded the purchase. He is now suing Barneys and the NYPD. But he really should sue the actual officers involved and not the department, as local taxpayers should not have to pay for the racist unlawful arrests by government police officers. And another young black shopper, a 21-year-old nursing student, is also suing the NYPD for their abusive and racist treatment, merely because she was a black woman purchasing a very expensive item at Barneys.

Now, if I had a son who worked for the NYPD and who treated presumably innocent young people this way, I’d probably give him a good what fer, as Jed Clampett would say (and I’m against spanking, as I’ve already stated). But I digress.

So, there are anti-color/ethnic racists and there are racists on the Left. One problem is that a lot of ignorant people such as the MSNBC host mentioned above have this apparent need to spread lies, based on race, about others with whom they disagree on the issues. For example, a lot of people on the Left and conservatives as well smeared Ron Paul as ‘racist” based solely on those “newsletters” that had been written by someone else but under his name. The leftists smeared Dr. Paul mainly because they don’t like his opposition to economic interventionism and central planning, and the conservatives smeared him because he opposes immoral wars of aggression and occupations that they support. But neither side seemed to actually hear what Dr. Paul had to say on the matter, and they didn’t seem to want to know that as a physician he treated many low-income folks free of charge. And he did that regardless of what their skin color happened to be, but just because he’s basically a good guy. And minorities would have benefited much more from a President Ron Paul’s actual policies than they do now from the current White House invader.

The root cause of racism is this compulsion that many people seem to have to view others as members of groups, not as individuals, and making false assumptions of those people based on their group-membership status or characteristics. As Dr. Paul himself had pointed out,

Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans only as members of groups and never as individuals. Racists believe that all individual who share superficial physical characteristics are alike; as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called “diversity” actually perpetuate racism. Their intense focus on race is inherently racist, because it views individuals only as members of racial groups….

The true antidote to racism is liberty.

So what we really need is liberty, the freedom to do our shopping or walking along a street or being at the airport without being harassed or unlawfully arrested by government security people, as well as the freedom to associate or not associate with others.

As Thomas DiLorenzo referenced in his article today, on the various leftists who believe that opponents of central planning and authoritarianism are in some way “racist” or “confederates,” all we really want is the freedom to live our lives, and be left alone by the government, regardless of our skin color. It’s really not too much to ask.

The Gatekeepers and their Controlled, Redacted Leaks

Arthur Silber has another post regarding Glenn Greenwald’s control and timing of which Snowden-released documents to reveal and when to reveal them. Silber has stated that if there are documents which reveal the State’s various crimes, they should all be disclosed to us, and immediately. Check out my recent post on Silber’s several posts on Snowden and Greenwald.

And no, there are no “national security” interests to protect by continuing to withhold, censor or redact documents, despite what the State and its flunky pundits try to assert. If you honestly want to protect our national security, then tell our stupid bureaucrats to stop initiating wars of aggression and occupations and provoking foreigners. Duh. These national security bureaucrats are like the dog chasing its tail, and they’re doing it intentionally to continue to “create monsters to destroy” to justify their parasitic bureaucracies.

In Silber’s latest post, he points out how Establishment news writer Richard Cohen of the Washington Post now praises Edward Snowden as “careful” by releasing the NSA information to “responsible” news organizations such as the Guardian and the New York Times, as opposed to “tossing it up in the air” as WikiLeaks had supposedly done. (See Arthur Silber’s post comparing Snowden-Greenwald to WikiLeaks.)

Greenwald’s slowly and “carefully” releasing the redacted documents is being approved by the Ruling class, which also consists of the Rulers’ gatekeepers including Richard Cohen. And now we know whom the “Guardian” is guarding.

As Silber noted, and as I have seen on various blogs now, such as the comments on this post on EPJ, some people seem to have a problem with criticizing Greenwald for his “control” over document releases. “At least he’s informing us as to what the NSA has been up to,” etc., so we shouldn’t criticize him. Well. I happen to believe in calling out those who on the surface are on our side, but who nevertheless give clear signs that, ultimately, the State and the Rulers (and their surveillance agenda) matter most.

In contrast to the “careful” and “responsible” Edward Snowden and Greenwald who do not seem to believe that the information in question belongs to the people but rather to the Rulers, Bradley Chelsea Manning had stated, correctly, that the information is in the “public domain.” And Manning also noted, “… Washington Post sat on the video… David Finkel acquired a copy while embedded out here. . . . – i want people to see the truth . . . regardless of who they are . . . because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

The people don’t need the State’s gatekeepers to sift through material to decide for us what we can or cannot (or may or may not) see. Let it all out now and let the people sift through it all. We own it.

However, in this column just today by Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Judge also brings up the revelations of NSA criminality. The Judge asks, “Where is the outrage?”

Arthur Silber answers that:

The conclusion should be painfully obvious. The manner in which the Snowden leaks are being delivered to us represents no serious threat to the ruling class and the Establishment whatsoever. The ruling class is entirely comfortable with the leak stories. In fact, the ruling class affirmatively benefits from leaks of this kind: Americans are becoming accustomed to a startlingly comprehensive level of surveillance, and they are granting it their approval. That we are surveilled much if not most of the time is barely even “news” any longer. It’s just the way things are. Perhaps we need to make a few adjustments at the outer margins, but basically everything is hunky-dory. Add a little “transparency,” “oversight” and “accountability” and Americans will let the State surveil them 24/7. Don’t you want to be safe? Of course you do.

Some More Outrages

Grant Smith has some details on 10 explosive U.S. government secrets about Israel.

According to Todd Starnes of Fox News, a U.S. Army soldier claims that the U.S. Army is teaching the troops that Christians and Tea Partiers are “enemies of America.” Evangelicals and Catholics are “extremists.” (And Obama’s authoritarian rule isn’t “extreme”?)

Paul Joseph Watson has this article on Michelle’s federal food fascism: Packed school lunches must be accompanied by a doctor’s note. i.e. the government (that your taxes pay for!) forces kids to have to eat only government-approved and -delivered unhealthy crap. Isn’t it about time that parents and their kids decide for themselves what they should eat, and tell the government teachers to go f themselves?

Thomas Sowell has this article on the race hustlers.

Seumas Milne believes that the spies, not the leaks, are threatening our security.

Some More Misc. Items

Kevin Carson writes about cops in Philadelphia who didn’t like it when civilian bystanders didn’t come to the aid of a cop getting beaten up by a non-cop.

Walter Block points out Barbara Amiel’s economic illiteracy in her concern for protecting elephants from poaching and “extinction.”

Michael Snyder at The Truth blog writes of 28 signs that the U.S. west coast is being fried by Fukushima radiation.

Joshua Cook on the Ben Swann blog discusses Dr. Mike Vasovski’s decision to go off the “insurance grid” as a means of protecting his patients’ privacy.

Jacob Hornberger says that income taxation protects the rich and hurts the poor.

Kelley Vlahos writes about the incident in Washington, DC, in which the young mother with a baby in her car drove recklessly around Capitol Hill and was murdered in cold blood by police.

National security analyst Marcy Wheeler has this article in the U.K. Guardian claiming that the NSA’s criminal invasiveness against Americans (and foreigners) makes people and their security more vulnerable, not less. (No, really?)

And Chris Rossini clarifies Rep. Charlie Rangel’s misunderstanding of the “Civil War” period.

Oath Keepers: “Expose Unconstitutional Actions”

As I mentioned in my previous post, it is time that oath-takers obey their oaths and the law.

The Oath Keepers organization has this post full of information detailing the crimes, corruption and incompetence of our treasonous government in Washington.

Do Innocent Civilians Have a Right to Defend Their Homes From Criminal Police Marauders?

John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute has this article on the many times now that police and S.W.A.T. teams are breaking into private residences and murdering people who believed that the marauders were criminals. Well, actually those people who break into other people’s homes are criminals. Too many times now the police go to the wrong address, and even when they are at the right address the “laws” they are enforcing are unjust and immoral laws, such as with the drug laws. This is another aspect of how our society has been perverted, as I noted in my article yesterday on LewRockwell.com.

We can talk about whether or not the usurping of local policing and residential security by the State is legitimate some other time, as I have done in the past.

But there is a reason why the writers of the Constitution included a recognition of the right to bear arms. As I wrote in my article, The Police State: A Ghastly Product of the Left, the 2nd Amendment refers to “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” not the “right of the government to keep and bear arms.” Many amongst the early Americans believed, and rightly, that the people have an inherent right to protect themselves from those who have been given some extra authority over their lives: the State and its agents. Because the so-called Revolutionaries recognized that human nature was such that no man could be trusted with artificial authority and the armaments of the State. (Well then why the hell did the “Founders” create an apparatus which gives some people such artificial authority over others? But I digress.)

As Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote, the early Americans believed that they had a right to not only be armed but to possess an equally powerful arsenal as the government (or more so, in fact).

The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.

I know, that passage is referring to possible conflicts between the people and the federal government, but not particularly to the people in their communities having to defend themselves from their out-of-control and criminally irresponsible local government “LEOs.” However, many of the S.W.A.T. team murders and wounding of innocents and destruction of private property are federal agents such as DEA, FBI, ATF and IRS goons as well as local police goons, most of whom do not have a clue as to the meaning of the Fourth and other Amendments of the Bill of Rights, as John Whitehead referred to.

My point is that all human beings are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, at least that is what “justice” and the “law” in America supposedly guarantees in America. So those federal agents and local LEOs out there have all sworn an oath to obey the U.S. Constitution as well as their state constitutions. That means they are obligated by law to follow the Fourth Amendment as well as the Fifth, the Third, etc. When these armed goons of the government break into the home of an entirely innocent human being, of course he has a right to defend himself and his family. That is what the 2nd Amendment protects, that natural, inherent right of self-defense. This means that all human beings have a right to possess whatever armaments that are required to fend off an attack. It doesn’t matter who the attackers are.

Now, I am not suggesting that people go and violate their local or state gun restrictions, unless they want to risk getting themselves in trouble, regardless of how unjust and unconstitutional such restrictions actually are. But I am merely pointing out the rights that human beings have.

Sadly, there are a lot of people on the Left who don’t like the idea of someone defending himself against the crimes and violence of a government goon or a street criminal, as the Left just wants the government — no matter how corrupt and criminal — to be armed and the civilians to be disarmed and defenseless.

But as I have pointed out in the past, here is a question for those LEOs and armed feds out there: When the economy collapses, or when the food stamps programs get cut massively and mass looting and rioting occur, or when EBT cards are no longer working (like if the power grid is sabotaged) or when there are bank runs, and if your governor or the President gives you unlawful orders to violate a civilian’s constitutional rights, such as through illegal gun confiscation, cash or gold confiscation, or unlawfully arresting or detaining innocent people and so on, whose side will you be on?

Will you dutifully follow unlawful orders from above and thus violate the constitutional oath you swore to obey? Or will you protect the rights of the people whose lives you have supposedly been hired by the government to protect?

Further, as things currently are, the armed feds and LEOs are enforcing unjust laws, such as drug laws and other police state-enhancing laws such as bureaucratic codes and so on. Such officers really need to consider what it is exactly they are enforcing, and ask themselves why they would be enforcing such bad and unjust laws.

Are the drug laws, for instance, really worth breaking into someone’s home and endangering the family’s lives? Do you really believe that someone putting drugs into his own body or selling them to someone else who wants to put them into his body is worse than your breaking into someone’s home and possibly murdering innocent people? (Because, after all, someone who has not harmed others is truly an innocent person.)

Some (Not-So-Common) Common Sense From Larken Rose