President Biden today announced he would forgive up to $20,000 in student loans for people making less than $125,000 per year, with several other qualifications determining the amount each applicant is eligible for.
Biden’s political opponents have raised very reasonable objections to this politically motivated favoritism just over two months before the mid-term elections. What about people who paid off their loans? Why only student loans and not others arguably taken to underwrite more productive efforts than women’s studies or French poetry?
Why does someone who borrowed money to start a profitable business that employs people have to pay back its loans when someone who works a tax-subsidized job does not?
While calling out such blatant vote-purchasing for its violation of equal justice under the law and other statist dogma is perfectly valid, let’s not forget the economic law demonstrated by this bailout: the government cannot “invest.”
Politicians love to use that word for its wealth transfer schemes. “Invest in infrastructure,” “invest in working families” (which families don’t work?), and, in this case, “invest in education.”
Merriam-Webster dictionary provides two relevant definitions for the word “invest.” Government-guaranteed student loans doesn’t meet either of them:
1: to commit (money) in order to earn a financial return
2: to make use of for future benefits or advantages
Had the government’s “investments” in student loans met the definition of the word, there would be no need for a bailout. The money spent on tuition would be paid back out of the additional earnings students realized over and above what they would have earned without going to college.
That they not only aren’t in the black based on additional earnings to what they would have earned with a high school diploma, but can’t pay the loans back at all, should end once and for all the ability for politicians to claim they are “investing” in anything.
This excludes all the student loan borrowers who can pay back their loans but now will shift some of that burden onto others. Doctors, lawyers, university professors, and other affluent debtors will force plumbers, taxicab drivers, and construction workers – not to mention other doctors, lawyers, etc. who worked their way through school without student loans or who already paid them back – to pay their debts.
The grand experiment with government “investing” in higher education has produced two returns: people who can’t earn enough to pay back the loans and people who can but choose to force somebody else to do so.
All the same arguments against student loan bailouts can be made against public education in general. Why are homeowners forced to pay for public schools whether they use them or not, while wealthy renters pay nothing? Why is the service called “education” Sovietized in the first place? Is there something special about education that makes the government owning its means of production successful?
Of course not. Just look at the results. The more the government has “invested” in education, the less literate and numerate graduating students have become. Like every government-provided service, the cost keeps going up and the quality keeps going down.
Education, healthcare, infrastructure, transportation, the military – they are all the focus of massive government “investment.” And those investments all continue to produce the same returns: skyrocketing prices and plummeting quality.
Everything the government does is Afghanistan.
Investors in the private sector aren’t better people. They merely work under different incentives. When private sector actors invest, they stand to lose their own money. This powerful incentive doesn’t produce perfect results, but it produces infinitely better results than government spending. And when private sector investments go bad, no one else is forced to pay for their mistakes.
That is, unless one is on the Christmas list of the ultimate government investor, the Federal Reserve System. Its “investments” in stimulating the economy are the most damaging of all, producing steadily rising prices, artificial booms, disastrous busts, and more and bigger bailouts over time.
We have no choice but to pay for Biden’s latest vote buy. But let’s not let him or any other politician continue to call their loot distribution “investment.” Doing so should be tried in The Hague as a crime against veracity.
I had the opportunity last night to watch the sixth and final episode of the HBO documentary, The Anarchists. Director and executive producer Todd Schramke accomplished the primary mission of any good documentary filmmaker: he made an interesting miniseries about interesting people. He also managed to weave the events filmed over the course of three to four years into a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
While this made the series entertaining, it did fail one basic requirement of a good documentary: it failed to inform. After six approximately 50-minute episodes, I was left with more questions than answers. It’s worthwhile to review what the series got right and what it either got wrong or omitted.
The philosophy
It starts out on a positive note, clearly delineating what most people associate with the term, “anarchy,” from what the series’ protagonists are advocating. Because so many political philosophers over the centuries have operated from the assumption that chaos and disorder would result in the absence of government, most people believe the word itself means chaos and disorder.
It’s analogous to most people believing the word “inflation” means rising consumer prices, rather than the expansion of money and credit by the banking system. They confuse the effect with its cause.
Schramke clarifies that the definition these anarchists are working from is, “the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation without political institutions or government.”
While accurate, that definition on its own is incomplete. The reason anarcho-capitalists (the type of anarchists presented in the series) do not believe chaos and disorder would result from the absence of government is they have a plan to secure life, liberty, and justly acquired possessions (hereafter “property”) without government.
Anarcho-capitalists do not believe in a world with no rules. They merely believe in a world with no rulers. The natural law that no one may violate the property rights of another would still be in play in an anarcho-capitalist society. But instead of a monopolist institution like government, the defense of those property rights would be provided by the free market.
By leaving this crucial aspect of anarcho-capitalist thought out of the definition, the viewer is left to assume anarcho-capitalists believe their society would depend upon everyone “doing the right thing,” with no recourse when they don’t. This is completely inaccurate.
Anarcho-capitalists (for the most part) recognize force must be used at times to defend property. They simply don’t believe a monopoly will provide that security as efficiently as would competing firms in a free market.
The other, more egregious flaw occurs just after the 28-minute mark of Episode One, Schramke says:
“If you want to trace the origins of this philosophy, all roads will take you back to one of the most polarizing writers of the 20th century.”
He is talking about 20th century novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (the episode cuts to a Mike Wallace interview with Rand), who obviously had an influence on several of the people in the series. Two are named “John Galton” and “Juan Galt,” respectively, and there are other references to Rand and her work throughout.
But Rand not only wasn’t an anarchist; she was openly hostile towards both anarchists and libertarians in general. In her own words,
“More specifically, I disapprove of, disagree with and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called “hippies of the right,” who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism. Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either. Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by the concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshiping fringe of the collectivist movement, where it properly belongs.”
The truth is the origins of anarcho-capitalism are much older than Rand, who had an inflated view of the originality of her ideas. I haven’t found a single tenet of her philosophy that cannot be found in the writings of John Locke, particularly the Essay on Human Understanding and the Second Treatise of Government.
As far as I am concerned, Rand’s chief contribution was to translate these ideas into mid-20th century psychoanalytic jargon. No anarcho-capitalist I know of would point to Rand as the definitive authority on the philosophy. Many admire her valuable work but also recognize she made a lot of errors.
Anarcho-capitalism, or non-communist anarchism, traces back at least as far as Lysander Spooner and through 20th-century thinkers like Murray Rothbard, who was kicked out of Rand’s “court” precisely because of his anarchist ideas.
While we see links to Rothbard’s For a New Liberty as Schramke films his web searches on anarchism, we are told nothing about this more rigorous presentation of the anarcho-capitalist society. We are left with the simplistic notion that anarcho-capitalism simply means “nobody telling me what to do” or “as long as I don’t harm anyone, I can do what I want.”
In Schramke’s defense, he simply may be making the best of what he has to work with. In one scene, the likable but tragic figure, Nathan Freeman, after having been dismissed from his role as event organizer of Anarchapulco, attempts to set up a vendor booth on the conference grounds. When the new organizer tells him he is not allowed to do this, Freeman protests that this violates anarchist principles, saying words to the effect of, “I thought if I’m not harming anyone, I can do what I want.”
But Freeman was harming someone. He was violating the property rights of the event’s owners, who had every right to decide who can sell products on their property and who could not, and also had the prerogative to charge a fee for such privilege at their discretion. Were it a true anarcho-capitalist society, the owners could not only exclude Freeman, but use force to remove him if he refused to comply.
Indeed, this foundational pillar of anarcho-capitalism is found nowhere in the series. The viewer is left with the idea anarchism is simply a license to party, use and sell drugs, and enjoy the beautiful Acapulco climate.
The “community”
In fairness, most of this is due to the extensive footage of the annual Anarchapulco conference, which like most conferences here in Statistland is a combination of informative presentations and partying one would never do in one’s hometown. Fair enough. But little is shown the viewer about the “community” constantly referenced in the series and how it purported to be an anarchist one.
To begin with, it is unclear how many people comprise this community. We are shown a half dozen or so adults – the Freemans and their children, Lily Forrester and John Galton, Erika Harris, Juan Galt, Paul Propert, Jason Henza, and the guy who steals Jason Henza’s wife (his name escapes me). Were there more? How many more? Five? Five hundred? We don’t know.
More importantly, we are not told how this group of people represents or purports to represent an anarchist community. All we know of them is they have all moved to a major city in an even more authoritarian and socialist country than the one they left, although it is presented in the first episode as being inviting to anarchists because it is a “failed state.”
We are not told how most of the members of this community support themselves financially. Lily and John are somehow involved in selling drugs, although Lily maintains they were not competing with the Mexican cartels in the opioid trade. There are several references to Nathan Freeman continuing to work after the family moves to Acapulco, presumably still running his software company, Red Pill. But we don’t know for sure and are not told whether he is still complying with U.S. tax laws on the income he generates.
Beyond that, we know nothing about how the other members of the community support themselves. Neither do they seem to have attempted to replace the government’s property protection functions with any organized private institution. Some have not even armed themselves, judging by what we are told of the tragic cartel hit on Lily and John, resulting in the latter’s death and serious wounding of housemate Jason Henza.
Schramke provides no other insight into the nature of the community in Acapulco. As far as the viewer knows, they are simply people sharing the same political beliefs who moved to Acapulco and either took jobs within the local community or started businesses, all under the authority of the several layers of municipal, state, and federal government as they exist in Mexico today.
So, where is the anarchism?
Schramke forms his series into a cautionary tale about the dangers of anarchy, articulated by Lily Forester in a speech to the Anarchapulco conference in the last episode. But we don’t see any evidence of an even partially-anarchist society. Instead, we are presented with a group of people who seem to embody the hippieish strawmen in Ayn Rand’s condemnation.
The final episode closes with a quote from founder Jeff Berwick: “There’s quite a few people who came here who were just damaged, you know, just because they didn’t fit in in society. But they kinda felt like they had a bit of a, a bit of a community. I don’t know why that makes me emotional.”
The anarchist society proposed by anarcho-capitalists wouldn’t be a community of “misfits.” It would be comprised of the same people we see every day – farmers, doctors, plumbers, CEOs, cashiers, auto mechanics, etc. – pursing the same, mundane lifestyle they do in our present, statist world, simply with better security of their property than currently provided by the government.
Due to the choices or ignorance of either the director, his subjects, or both, viewers new to the concept of anarcho-capitalism will have no idea it would look nothing like what was presented in the documentary. Worse, they will take away from the series that anarchism was attempted and failed in Acapulco 2017-2020. Based on what is shown in the series, nothing of the sort occurred.
NBC, ABC, and CBS today all feature stories about the FBI returning Donald Trump’s passports, seized in its August 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago. This just four days after the Washington Post reported that federal agents were looking for “nuclear documents” among the boxes of materials taken from the White House during the raid.
Wait. Both those statements can’t be true, can they? Is it really plausible the Justice Department genuinely believes or ever believed there are nuclear secrets among the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago but was willing to return Trump’s passports just a few days later?
It has now been eight days since the raid. Were there “nuclear documents” among the materials seized or not? Certainly, the Justice Department knows the answer to that question. Why has no reporter asked?
If there were a genuine national security threat to the United States among those papers, the government would have known it within hours of taking possession of them. It would have assigned as many agents as necessary to review the documents and confirm or deny the threat immediately. Had a genuine threat of that magnitude been confirmed, a flurry of other national security activity would have been reported in the days since the raid.
It isn’t just that the government and its media apparatus got it wrong or provided information that turned out to be inaccurate later. They lied. They said things they knew at the time they said them weren’t true and continue to do so.
On Friday, Newsweek reported that the former president was “digging his legal hole “deeper and deeper” by calling the reporting on nuclear documents “a hoax,” according to legal expert Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor,
Kirschner was lying, too. First, being a former prosecutor, Kirschner is well aware that statements Trump makes to the media when not under oath cannot damage him legally. More important, Kirschner knew that if there were anything of consequence among the seized documents, Trump wouldn’t be at liberty to post his statement on Truth Social.
He wouldn’t be at liberty at all.
The “digging his legal hole deeper and deeper” statement smacks of the avalanche of headlines 2017-19 indicating that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was “closing in” on Trump for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. Week after week, month after month, “anonymous sources” confirmed the latest strand in the rope that would hang Trump had been woven into place.
Mueller was never “closing in on Trump.” The media that reported he was knew it. The “anonymous sources” claiming to leak inside information of the investigation knew it. And deep down, a large portion of the public who wanted to believe Trump was a Russian agent, knew it, too.
Yet, they all kept saying it in unison.
Like “recession,” there may not be one, official definition of “dystopia.” But a society in which every public institution, along with a good percentage of the population, not only regularly repeats assertions they know to be false but persecutes anyone who dissents is at least in the ballpark. When the lies form the bases for coercive government policies, then, like two quarters of negative GDP indicating a recession, you have a “good rule of thumb.”
It certainly doesn’t matter what “dystopia experts” say.
An article on Revolver today laments the sad state of the U.S. military. Calling its soldiers “too fat” and its generals, “woke, parasitic, and incompetent,” the news outlet longs for the bygone days when Americans had, “the military they once did, and the one they deserve.”
This on the heels of the unprecedented FBI raid on former President Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. Conservatives have had a five-year-long reality check on the true nature of that organization, which conspired with the intelligence community to manufacture the Russian collusion narrative that dominated much of Trump’s presidency.
Even then, conservatives couldn’t face the reality that the FBI has always been a political organization, placing top priority on its own survival and expansion of power, as longtime observer of the federal bureaucracy, Dr. Frank Sorrentino, said on a recent episode of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom.
Likewise, they can’t see the military for what it is and has always been: just another government bureaucracy primarily concerned with its own survival, expansion, and ever-increasing funding. Instead, conservatives cling to myths about the military’s glorious past and the need for a great leader to come in and restore its previous virtues.
This unwillingness to acknowledge reality no matter how hard it punches them in the nose is tied to the most basic pillars of conservative thought. Unlike the libertarians who founded the United States, conservatives do not believe governments are instituted among men to secure natural, inalienable rights. That would require a view of human nature wherein man was capable of good and evil; government being the institution to restrain the evil side.
Conservatives don’t share that view. They believe man by nature is completely depraved, his savage instincts tenuously held in check by government power and longstanding societal customs. They truly believe law enforcement is out on the front lines of a war every single day, risking their lives to keep civilization from devolving into chaos.
This dovetails with the conservative view of Christianity, which sees man as fallen and only redeemable by the grace of God. Forget Jesus’ own words that, while sinners, we are also “the light of the world” and the salt of the earth.” Conservatives only hear the sinner part. Many seem to regard the Apocalypse as the most important book in the New Testament, its warlike imagery about the “end times” suiting their worldview much better than Jesus’ admonishment to Peter to “put your sword back in its sheath.”
And so, the unmasking of one federal institution after another, starting with the so-called “intelligence community,” proceeding to federal law enforcement, and now even the military, represents an existential crisis for conservatives. They should finally acknowledge these institutions were never what they thought they were. But they can’t. To do so would undermine their entire view of the world.
Instead, they yearn for the days when the “rank and file” FBI agents rooted out dangerous threats that might otherwise have destroyed the republic and the military heroically won “the good war” and saved the world from tyranny. They decry the sad comparison between political hacks like Christopher Wray and James Comey vs. hardnosed, incorruptible Elliott Ness (actually a Treasury agent) or between the fat, woke, and dimwitted Mark Milley vs. the steely-eyed General Patton.
While liberalism, based on a mad quest for absolute equality, provides no path to freedom, neither does conservativism, which is at its root based upon a suspicion of liberty itself. If we’re interested in a free society, conservatism’s myths must be busted once and for all.
The myth of the noble, apolitical FBI is an easy one. Right from the beginning, the agency was a political organism through and through. It’s longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover, infamously kept files on everyone from Congressmen to presidents to ensure his position and power could never be questioned. Neither was he particularly interested in pursuing organized crime during most of his tenure, preferring to target a series of “Public Enemy Number One” solitary criminals.
Apologists for the agency who acknowledge its corruption during the Hoover years point to a “golden age” after his tenure where the FBI supposedly became the apolitical force for good conservatives imagined it to be. But this is just more hokum.
A statue of the blindfolded lady justice in front of the United States Supreme Court building as the sun rises in the distance symbolizing the dawning of a new era.
This is an attempt to answer the question, “what is justice?” in as few words as possible:
All human beings are created equal in one way only: no one has an inherent right to rule over another.
Based on this equality, all human beings own themselves.
Self-ownership means exclusive use and disposal of one’s body, thoughts, words, deeds, and legitimately acquired possessions (i.e., “life, liberty, and estates”), called by the general name of “property.”
Everyone has a right to his or her property (and nothing else). No one may violate the property of another.
Property may be exchanged only with the mutual, voluntary consent of all parties.
“Justice” is the preservation of property or the making whole of someone whose property has been violated.
The war on civilization and its peaceful inhabitants is testing us like nothing else in our lifetimes. It is not only testing our resolve, but our principles. And nothing has tested the latter more than what has come to be called, “woke capitalism.”
As I wrote in last week’s installment of this series, it is important that the resistors have the right ideas. It is not enough simply to defeat our enemies. We must do so in a way that we don’t win battles but lose the war. And as with the political system, the arguments against woke capitalism are riddled with errors that will ultimately undermine our cause.
To understand if and why woke capitalism is a problem, we must first understand what capitalism is and why it is the only economic system compatible with a free society.
Our principles
We believe that every human being is created equal in one way and in one way only: no one has an inherent right to rule over another person. As a result of that equality, every individual owns himself or herself.
This state of self-ownership implies certain rights. They are first and foremost to not be killed by another person (right to life), to act according to one’s will (right to liberty) and to exercise ownership over legitimately acquired possessions. The natural limit to these rights is that one does not violate the equal rights of others.
John Locke reduced all of the above to a single word, saying people enter society and form governments for the “mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property.”
Another way to say this is that everyone has a right to what he or she owns and nothing more. This is the standard by which to determine what is a legitimate right and what is not.
One’s physical body, thoughts, beliefs, speech, actions, and peacefully acquired possessions are all one’s property. They cannot be taken away by someone else without one’s consent. Therefore, “healthcare” cannot be a right, it being the thoughts, speech, actions, and possessions of someone else. Neither does anyone have the right to involuntarily dispossess Person A to trade with Person B to provide healthcare to himself or Person C.
One may not claim a right to something that requires the labor of others without violating the property rights of those others. This applies equally to conscripting either Person A or Person B in the above example.
The right to possess real and movable estates contains within it three basic elements: use, exclusion, and disposal. If one owns a thing, he may use it as he sees fit as long as he does not do so in violation of the property of others. He may exclude others from its use without his consent. He may also dispose of the thing as he sees fit, meaning give it away as a gift, exchange it for other property, or destroy it.
Justice consists of preserving the property of individuals or making them whole when their property has been violated. Conversely, injustice is harming the property of individuals other than in self-defense. There is no other legitimate definition of justice, nor does legitimate justice require modifiers like “social” or “racial.”
Governments are formed ostensibly to administer justice, or, as John Locke put it, for the “preservation of their property.”
The American Declaration of Independence unnecessarily complicated the matter by separating “property” into myriad enumerated and unenumerated “rights,” going on to say, “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” But the intent of those words was the same as Locke’s:
Anarcho-capitalism disputes none of the above other than the means for administering justice. Rather than a monopolist agency designated for the purpose, anarcho-capitalism proposes a free market solution. But the purpose of that solution is the same: to administer justice, meaning to preserve property.
What is capitalism?
The economic system generally known as “capitalism” or “the free market” derives directly from these principles. Capitalism assumes only one rule: that transfer of property may occur only with the voluntary consent of the owner. All other elements of the system: contracts, market prices, competition, etc., proceed from this rule.
Inherent also in capitalism is an element of property described by the founders as the right to “the pursuit of happiness.” This was listed separately from the right to liberty to emphasize that one is entitled to act exclusively in one’s own self-interest, rather than towards ends determined by others, within the same limit of not violating the property of others.
Adam Smith famously observed that people acting exclusively in their own self-interest do more good for society as a whole than those who intend to do so.
This is known as the “invisible hand” of the market. It is this aspect of the capitalist system from which all benefit to society springs. It is the reason capitalism always outperforms socialism. To reject the right of economic actors to pursue exclusively their own interests is to deny the right to the pursuit of happiness and to negate capitalism’s benefits to society.
How is woke capitalism a problem?
Woke capitalism rejects the invisible hand principle. It postulates that businesses should not merely pursue profits within a framework of property rights, but rather should also pursue “environmental, social, and governance (ESG)” goals. It also seeks to limit or exclude market participation by people who do not accept and demonstrate their support for various progressive dogmas.
The Biden administration says two straight quarters of negative GDP is much ado about nothing. Like accusations of Hero’s lost chastity in Shakespeare’s play, Biden’s economy is falsely accused of being in recession, the president’s spokespeople say.
Biden’s defenders in the media concur. The Hill informs us that two straight quarters of negative GDP defines a recession in many countries but, contrary to public opinion, not in the United States. Here, there is no recession until the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee – the “experts” – declare one.
The committee looks at a broad range of economic indicators to determine whether the economy is in recession. While declining GDP is one factor, it is not the only factor. And the chief reason the NBER has not declared a recession, according to the Biden administration and others, is the “red hot jobs market.”
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman helpfully tweeted a chart showing the relative number of jobs “added” to the economy during the presidencies of Presidents Trump and Biden.
It is true that unemployment is near historic, pre-pandemic lows at 3.6%. And although that doesn’t count the vast number of people who have left the workforce due to retirement or discouragement, the administration can still point to over 2.7 million jobs created in 2022, according to the BLS jobs report.
But arguing there is no recession because new jobs are being created rather misses the point.
Jobs are not an end in itself. The purpose of creating jobs is to produce products. One would only want to create more jobs if it would lead to producing more products. Creating more jobs to produce the same or less products wastes scarce resources.
Just imagine a manager triumphantly reporting to the owner of a company that, although production decreased in the last two quarters, the lower output was accompanied by higher payroll costs. He’d be fired immediately; perhaps referred for a mental health evaluation.
What makes a company profitable is to satisfy demand for its product with as few employees and other costs as possible. The wealth of an economy is no different. As fewer employees are needed to produce each product, more are available to produce others.
Not only does this contribute to greater wealth for the economy as a whole, but it also represents higher worker productivity and thereby higher wages.
This is why tax incentives to corporations tied to the number of jobs they’ll create is economically idiotic. While in most cases, companies will take the tax breaks and only create the jobs they need, leaving the politicians and their constituents to complain the jobs never materialized, it is really the complaining that is erroneous. Had the company created more jobs than necessary to produce its products, it would by definition be wasting resources and thereby making the population poorer in the aggregate.
It is also important to remember that what is produced matters as much as how much. A population does not become wealthier merely because the total amount of goods produced rises. It only becomes wealthier if more of what consumers value is produced.
Value can only be determined if consumers are free to refuse to purchase the increased output. Only by freely choosing whether to purchase at all and at what maximum price can the value of the new output can be determined.
This is why output resulting from government spending is at best of unknown and often of no value whatsoever. Since taxpayers have neither the opportunity to decline to purchase nor to set their own maximum price, there is no mechanism to determine the value of this output.
That government spending, currently at massive levels, is counted in GDP and GDP is still declining accentuates the fact that Americans are getting poorer in the aggregate. Not only are they producing less, but a significant percentage of what they are producing – like missiles sent to Ukraine – provide no value to American consumers.
Government bureaucrats can arbitrarily define the word “recession” any way they wish. But creating less wealth by any other name would smell as foul.
“Every revolution starts in the minds of the people” says the tagline of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom. This was most directly inspired by a statement written by John Adams in 1818:
“The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.”
As I wrote last week, we are at war. It is being fought in the political and media sphere, meaning it is, for the moment, a war of ideas.
That’s not to say our enemies are not willing to enforce their ideas with violence. To a certain extent, they are doing so already. If you are an employer in the healthcare industry, for example, you must require your employees to be vaccinated. It is the “law,” as written by an executive branch agency called the Department of Health and Human Services, which along with myriad other executive branch regulatory agencies make most of the laws U.S. citizens live under.
So much for the legislative power being delegated to Congress.
Many under the spell of progressive brainwashing might ask, “But how is this violence?” It is important to remember that every law, regulation, or other government edict is a threat of violence. That’s not “extremism;” it’s the truth. Anyone who doubts that should simply choose not to obey one.
Pick the most insignificant amongst them, like a traffic ticket. Sure, the first response to your disobedience might merely be a letter demanding some money. But ignore the letters long enough, fail to show up for the inevitable court date, and men with guns will eventually arrive at your door to take you away or kill you if you resist.
This is the nature of government. To deny it is to depart from reality.
Deep down, everyone knows this, and our enemies know we know this. That is why it is so important for them to obtain, at the very least, our tacit consent. Thus, the massive propaganda drive in the media, the deplatforming of dissidents, and the scapegoating of “extremists.”
They need to control the way people think because they cannot overcome the whole population by force. Neither can they completely brainwash the entire population. They only need to do what they have succeeded in doing so far, which is to recruit a significant minority of the population to actively propagandize for them and rely on another significant minority of the population to “go along to get along.”
That leaves the last significant minority of the population, those willing to actively resist, to battle the government, the media, corrupted business interests, and most of their fellow citizens.
Needless to say, with this monumental task in front of them, it is important that the resistors have the right ideas. At the very least, they must avoid the enemy’s false premises. Otherwise, like an army that has been lured into advancing in the center without protecting its flank, the resistance ends up right where its enemies want them.
Our enemies have succeeded in poisoning the resistance with many false premises which need to be rejected or we will find ourselves, like the Romans at Cannae or Washington at Brandywine, rushing headlong forward only to be surrounded and destroyed.
One false premise accepted by virtually everyone is that the United States is “a democracy.” Calling the American system of government “a democracy” is like looking at a birthday cake and calling it “an egg.”
Yes, democracy is one of the ingredients in the U.S. Constitution, but it is not the only or even the main ingredient. It is more accurate to say there are a few democratic elements in the Constitution and the rest is designed to protect us from democracy.
Everyone knows there is something wrong. America and much of the world is now firmly into its third year of unrelenting “emergencies,” real and imagined, that forbid them from returning to the quiet comfort of their previous lives. For twenty-eight months they have been told they must sacrifice their personal interests for the government-media complex defined “greater good.”
It started with “fifteen days to flatten the curve,” a reasonable-sounding request in the face of a supposedly novel respiratory virus. One hundred years of science had already confirmed quarantining asymptomatic people is ineffective, but it was only going to be fifteen days.
It is only now, after the fifteen days turned into fifteen months or more in some places, after mask and vaccine mandates were enforced long after it was obvious both are ineffective, after the demand for sacrifice seamlessly metamorphized from “flattening the curve” to “slowing the spread” to “defending Ukraine” to “climate change emergency,” that a critical mass of people have finally realized they are being had.
If it were just your money they were after, it would be bad enough. And make no mistake, they do want that. Trillions have been fleeced from the many and handed to the few during this long con. But it isn’t just your money the perpetrators are after. Neither is it merely your freedom, although there is no “life” beyond biological existence without it.
No, the architects of this dystopia aren’t satisfied to loot your wealth and crush your liberty. Even controlling your physical movements isn’t enough. They want to control your thoughts, what many people would call your “soul.”
It’s not as if they make any secret of this. What else can the obsession with stamping out “misinformation” mean? They do not want you exposed to information contrary to their ends because you may think the wrong thoughts.
You may question whether the vaccines really are “safe and effective,” whether the war in Ukraine really is any of your concern (or “unprovoked,” for that matter), whether there really is a “climate change emergency” that demands you make enormous sacrifices to solve, or whether those sacrifices would really make a difference if there were.
There are only two possible reasons why information questioning any of the above narratives would need to be kept from you. Either the claims being made aren’t true and would not hold up to challenges or you are incapable of discerning truth from falsehood. If the former is true, there are criminal trials that need to be held. If the latter, then why this anguished cry about dangers to “our democracy?”
The question is constantly raised whether the architects of this assault on civilization are evil or merely misguided and incompetent. Does it matter? Is there even a clear distinction between the two? Was Vladimir Lenin evil or merely misguided? Did he not believe he was acting in the best interests of his fellow man and merely had to “break a few (million) eggs to make an omelet?” Can we not say the same for Stalin, Hitler, or Mao?
