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.
“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?
I hear it all the time. “Mussolini defined fascism as the merger of state and corporate power.” It has been suggested that modern American corporations like Disney, Meta (Facebook) or Alphabet (Google) acting in ways that align with the federal government’s wishes constitute fascism, based on this “merger of power” definition.
Here is the problem. Not only did Mussolini never define fascism that way, but he said almost precisely the opposite. “Merger” implies cooperation, partnership, or a meeting of the minds between equals. Fascism bore no resemblance to this. Mussolini’s actual words were, “The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others.”
What was a fascist “corporation?”
When Mussolini used the word, “corporation,” he didn’t refer to a single company like Disney or Alphabet. Rather, each corporation was a cartel formed from all companies in a particular economic sector. Mussolini divided the economy into twenty-two such “corporations,” which were run by members of the Fascist Party appointed by Mussolini himself. As John Gunther wrote in Inside Europe,
“Every corporation contains three supervising delegates of the Fascist party; each corporation is headed by a member of the cabinet or an under-secretary, appointed by Mussolini. The deputies, moreover, are “voted” into he chamber from an approved list chosen by the Grand Fascist Council; electors are privileged simply to say Yes or No to the whole list. Mussolini’s two general “elections” have been grossly dull affairs.
The state, being supreme, regulates economy for its exclusive benefit. Fascism may be, spiritually, “an attempt to make Romans out of Italians,” but physically it made Italy a prison.”[1]
This was not a “merger” of powers. It was the state exercising absolute power over the economy. It was autocratic rule over private businesses by the government.
So, why is this misquote and misunderstanding of fascism so popular? Because it coincides with a general tendency towards the “anti-capitalist mentality” Von Mises described and which is again ascendant across the political spectrum in America.
“If libertarianism works, why has there never been a libertarian country?” We hear it all the time from those whose historical perspective can be measured in weeks and months. We also know the answer to this question: “There has been: the United States of America.”
The American republic was libertarian to the core at its birth. The Declaration of Independence posited the existence of natural rights that preexist government, and that government is instituted for one purpose and one purpose only: “to secure these rights.”
Conservatives don’t believe this. Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke didn’t believe it. Nor did Russell Kirk. Republican politicians may claim to believe it to get votes, but they legislate as if they do not. True conservatives believe the purpose of government is to restrain man’s savage inclinations. What liberty is permitted is subordinate to that end.
Neither do liberals believe in this “American Creed.” Like their philosophical father, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they believe the purpose of government is to restore some mythical “equality” that existed in nature before private property evolved and ruined everything. A just society, Rousseau and the liberals contend, requires, “the total alienation of each associate, together with all of his rights, to the entire community.”
Rights cannot be both inalienable and totally alienated. This worldview, like the conservative, is fundamentally opposed to the ideals of the Declaration.
In opposition to Hobbes, Rousseau, and their contemporary Edmund Burke, the founding generation were all “channeling” John Locke in 1776. Jefferson called Locke one of the three greatest men who ever lived on multiple occasions. Near the end of his life, he penned a resolution for the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia to ensure it was Locke’s worldview that was taught to students.
When George Mason referred to himself as “a man of 1688,” he was referring to the Glorious Revolution and English Bill of Rights, both inspired by Locke’s principles.
So far from these founding principles had the republic strayed under Federalist rule, believed Thomas Jefferson, that he referred to his presidential election as “the revolution of 1800.” In his first inaugural, he called for a return to libertarian principles, describing “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
It was not the only time Jefferson asserted a libertarian role for government. In an 1816 letter to Francis Gilmer, he wrote, “No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.” In his Notes on Virginia, Jefferson wrote, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
These principles won election after election and led to the death of two opposing parties, the Federalists and the Whigs, in the first half of the 19th century. The Federalist platform of high protectionist tariffs, government infrastructure projects, and a central bank was defeated over and over again until the new Republican Party found success by being on the right side – the libertarian side – of the slavery issue.
The new party was able to ride a coalition of former Whigs and abolitionists to victory in 1860 and dominance over American politics for the next half century. Unfortunately, the Republicans were on Alexander Hamilton’s side rather than Jefferson’s on most policy matters.
Still, it was not until the Progressive Era that Jefferson’s libertarian principle was officially repudiated by Woodrow Wilson, directly, and indirectly by the American electorate when they put Wilson in the White House. Wilson couldn’t have been clearer that it was a government limited to enforcing the libertarian non-aggression principle that had to go. He wrote in The New Freedom,
“We used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple that all that government had to do was to put on a policeman’s uniform, and say, “Now don’t anybody hurt anybody else.” We used to say that the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with, except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government was the government that did as little governing as possible. That was the idea that obtained in Jefferson’s time. But we are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions under which we may live, the conditions which will make it tolerable for us to live.”
It doesn’t get much plainer than that.
Jefferson had defined liberty as, “unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’; because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.”
For Wilson, it was something quite different. “Human freedom consists in perfect adjustment of human interests and human activities and human energies,” wrote Wilson. Of course, it was the government that was to do the “adjusting” necessary to achieve this “new freedom.”
The Great Reset is the logical conclusion of this reasoning.
The 20th century was dominated by progressives attempting to do precisely what Woodrow Wilson said needed to be done: adjust mankind until they achieved their utopian vision of perfect equality and “social justice.” Today, those adjustments have reached the ridiculous extremes they were always destined to reach.
From time to time, the Republican Party, notably during the Reagan years, has opposed this vision with a watered-down libertarian message, always riddled with loopholes that allowed it to expand the government even faster than the liberals when elected. But notice it was the libertarian message that resonated. Ask rank and file Republicans what attracts them to conservatism, and they will often say things like “limited government” and “God-given rights.” George W. Bush won in 2000 promising “a humble foreign policy.’ But these are antithetical to true conservative principles.
The Libertarian Party has recently had a dramatic change in leadership. The Mises Caucus won every national committee seat it ran a candidate for, including the national chair. It won based on repudiating what it said was weak party leadership too concerned with not offending anyone and too focused on approval from the progressive establishment. The new leadership promises a bolder, purer libertarian message focused on the issues that truly affect the lives of most Americans.
To them I humbly offer this advice: Do not forget we are not conservatives or liberals or any combination of the two. We do not fall on any “spectrum” between right and left. We are not “socially liberal, but fiscally conservative.” We see the world in a completely different way, based on completely different principles than conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats.
I use the words, “conservative” and “liberal” solely in a political sense. They have nothing to do with one’s personal preferences, although many try to blur the line between personal and political to skew the libertarian message one way or the other. These political terms refer exclusively to the role of government, or for hardcore Rothbardians, what can be responded to with force even in a stateless society. Our answer is simple: only a previous violation of property rights.
Americans are starving for a radical message. That explains both the Trump phenomenon and the success of Bernie Sanders and “the Squad.” But unlike these conservatives and liberals, libertarians can point to a clear record of success when their principles were implemented. It was called the Industrial Revolution and the meteoric rise in living standards for the majority of society.
Libertarians should resist pedantic distinctions between “classical liberal” and “libertarian” – they are one in the same, merely at different points in development. As the late, great Will Grigg once said, “I reserve the right to get smarter over time.” So do libertarians, who have learned over time to apply their principles more consistently than their proto-libertarian ancestors.
Do not be afraid to take “extremist” libertarian positions. Jefferson cut military spending by over 90 percent. Libertarians should run on doing likewise. That’s what allowed Jefferson and his party to eliminate all internal taxes. But it doesn’t end there.
All of the damage done during the progressive era must be undone. Repeal the New Deal root and branch. Close the federal Department of Education and then go to work on ending public schooling at the state and local levels. Legalize competing currencies for the dollar. And once sound money’s superiority to central bank larceny is clear to all, End the Fed.
Unlike fringe issues like “legalizing sex work,” however valid they might be from a libertarian perspective, these are the policies that can change the lives of every American citizen. They also have the potential to reawaken that yearning for liberty that Bastiat said, “makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world.” At the same time, they will be most viciously opposed by all the forces who benefit from an unfree world.
If you’re not being falsely labeled a racist, a bigot, a Russian operative, a fascist, or all of the above by the totalitarian establishment, you’re probably not being effective. Refuse to engage the enemy on its terms. Trust that there is an untapped yearning for freedom out there in those who see through these cheap, cartoonish tactics, especially now as the Regime is failing so spectacularly.
The 20th century saw a reversal in the trend towards human freedom. The 21st has so far been worse. We are at a crossroads. It is not hyperbole to say the choice is freedom or slavery. Let no one for a moment be confused as to which side we’re on.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine in late 1776, when the newly independent American states were at war with the mightiest empire in the world and not doing terribly well. Seven more years of hardship lay ahead, during which even John Adams’ family would struggle to keep body and soul together during the lean years of the Revolutionary War. Abigail Adams sold pins, handkerchiefs, and other trade goods sent home by her husband to feed the family while he was away making history.
246 years later, things aren’t nearly so bleak for Americans…yet. But they do suffer from the worst inflation in decades, growing shortages of food and other items, and an impending economic “hurricane,” if JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is correct.
The difference is this hardship is completely self-inflicted and unnecessary. Americans don’t suffer deprivation now to preserve newly declared independence and found a republic that will go on to inspire the world. They suffer from policies their own government imposed upon them, starting with Covid lockdowns, that have done no good whatsoever while causing immense harm.
With Washington, D.C., it’s always all pain and no gain.
In April, 2020, I asked, rhetorically, “When the Coronavirus Shutdown is over, will anyone blame their governments for the economic devastation they caused?”
First, let’s debunk a loudly trumpeted fiction: “corporate power.” There is no such thing. Power is the ability to use force and violence with impunity. No corporation has that. Only the government has power and only as much as the citizenry will allow it.
Yes, very wealthy people have more influence over the government than everyone else. You should have known that before you built a government with such enormous power to begin with.
And it was you, who identify yourselves with the deceptively innocuous name, “We the People,” who constructed the monstrosity that now demands you take any injection it decrees and refrain from speaking any word or even thinking any thought that threatens it.
You didn’t build it all in one day. It took decades. But every brick in this edifice of evil was made of the same clay: invading the property of your neighbors to obtain what you believed was additional safety. Before each brick was laid, voices of reason warned you of the danger. You not only refused to listen but derided all who appealed to your common sense.
It’s one thing to disregard the morality of respecting the life, liberty, and possessions of your fellows. It’s another to refuse to recognize the obvious results.
You told healthcare providers they could charge anything they wished, regardless of their customers’ ability to pay, and taxpayers would pay the difference. Then, you were outraged by how quickly healthcare prices rose.
You told colleges and universities they, too, could charge whatever they wished, financed by loans guaranteed by taxpayers. You were again outraged not only at the artificially high prices, but the students inability to pay back the loans. What did you expect?
It doesn’t take an advanced degree in economics to recognize these obvious cause and effect relationships. Anyone with a sixth-grade education and control over his emotions could spot them a mile away. Unfortunately, people meeting both criteria are in the minority.
One can trace the beginning of the problem as far back as one wishes. The Constitution itself was an enormous expansion of government power, passed much like the infamous Patriot Act. But even its powers didn’t satisfy you.
Throughout the following century you participated with your banks in the fraudulent practice of fractional reserve banking, resulting in periodic “panics.” You didn’t need government to protect you from these. Arrangements wherein you earned interest by foregoing use of your money while the banks lent it out were available to you. But you wanted to “have your cake and eat it, too.” When the inevitable result occurred, you screamed for the government to protect you.
You had been warned as early as the first Congress against allowing the government to incorporate a bank. You were told it was unconstitutional and economically destructive by none other than Thomas Jefferson himself. You ignored the warning and supported the bank. Ditto the second version.
You were again provided loud and vociferous warnings against the Federal Reserve System, a scheme that transfers wealth from everyone in society straight to those “elites” you are always complaining about. But you supported it overwhelmingly because it promised you safety from the aforementioned panics caused by your own refusal to accept reality.
When the bank caused the Depression you were also warned it would cause, you demanded the government save you from that, too. Your so-called “greatest generation” elected a fascist who transferred the legislative power from Congress to the executive branch and built the modern administrative state. The New Deal regulatory structure is a barrier to new competition for the established corporations that write its rules.
Having demanded this structure be built, you now complain corporations are too big and don’t have enough competition.
The same dictator also granted your demand to be released from responsibility to save for your retirement. He and his accomplices in Congress created a program that takes 15 percent of your income – money you could otherwise save – and spends it immediately, promising to tax others in the future for a monthly pension doled out to you.
For running similar schemes, you imprisoned Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff. But the architect of this criminal scheme was rewarded with four terms as president.
The history of rewarding tyrants and vilifying benefactors is long. The Federal Reserve was conceived in secret by a cabal of corrupt government officials and representatives of the Rockefeller and Morgan financial empires.
Rockefeller had built his fortune honestly, foregoing larger dividends to reinvest profits in his oil company, resulting in growth for the company and decades of falling oil prices for consumers. When his competitors appealed to the government for help, you overwhelmingly supported breaking up Standard Oil, resulting in higher oil prices for you, unearned wealth for Standard Oil’s competitors, and enormous new powers for the government.
Considering how his honest effort was rewarded by those it benefited, it’s hard to blame Rockefeller for throwing in with the government in a scheme to make dishonest money at the same peoples’ expense.
Several decades later, Bill Gates built a software company that refused to send money to Washington. You rewarded that with full-throated support for the government’s antitrust suit against Microsoft, based upon the ridiculous premise that Microsoft had an obligation to design its product for the convenience of its competitors.
Gates learned the same lesson Rockefeller did. That mob self-styled “We the People” can’t be trusted with freedom. Better to collude with the government and try and control them. Who knows what they might do next?
Yes, very wealthy people with names like Schwab, Gates, Bezos, and Benioff get together with government officials at meetings like the World Economic Forum and the Bilderberg Group, where they make all sorts of nefarious plans for running your life. Guess what? That’s just talk, something they have every right to do. Only power you gave the government gives it any teeth.
Like Frankenstein, only you can destroy the monster you created. The Canadian truckers are showing you how. Even if the government physically removes the truckers (which may not be as easy as it sounds), the truckers still have the power. By simply refusing to drive they can bring the global elites’ managed economy to its knees. If they remain resolved and people support them, they will win.
It’s much the same with social media censorship. Facebook’s stock recently lost almost 30 percent of its value in a single day after its total user base declined for the first time in its history. Imagine tens of millions of American Facebook users making a coordinated effort to delete their accounts on the same day and join Gettr, Gab, or MeWe.
That would be game over for Facebook. And it would be both morally superior and vastly more effective than trying to regulate Facebook through the political process. It could be done with a fraction of the time, effort, and organization it took to get Trump or the “Freedom Caucus” elected, which accomplished nothing.
Here’s an inconvenient truth: People like Gates, Bezos, and Benioff would be far richer than most people in any political system, whether capitalist, socialist, fascist, or our present combination of all of the above. If thousands of years of history hasn’t taught you that yet, then you’ll just have to take my word for it. But they only have power over you because they can collude with a government that has that power.
If you want your life and your freedom back, you’re going to have to change your behavior. Stop electing demagogues who promise to protect you from elites by making the government even more powerful. Start electing representatives who will do the opposite.
Stop demanding more “taxes on the rich” and instead demand repeal of capital gains taxes, especially on gold, silver, cryptos, and other competition for the Federal Reserve’s currency. Stop demanding more regulation of corporations and start using your economic power as consumers to support their competition. Elect people who will outlaw executive branch agencies usurping the legislative and judicial powers.
These suggestions share two things in common: 1) they are realistically attainable and 2) they are less emotionally satisfying than trying to “stick it to the elites.”
Children make decisions based on their emotions. Adults make them based on reason. For over one hundred years, you’ve demanded society be run based on the childish notion that anything about reality that displeases you can be rectified by giving the government the power to prohibit it, mandate it, or subsidize it. Playing this sucker’s game has resulted in people like Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates being poised to literally rule the world.
If you’ve read my book, An Anti-State Christmas, you’re familiar with my critiques of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol. If you haven’t, you can download a free copy at antistatechristmas.com.
One may have walked away thinking the writers of both stories were merely misguided, lacking understanding of elementary economic concepts. That’s true, but their stories aren’t just stupid. They’re evil. They instill in people, at a deep, emotional level, an idea that has led to more human suffering in the world than any other.
This is the perennial belief that a person acting in his or her own self interest not only doesn’t benefit others but harms them. This really is the basis for every slander hurled at Potter and Scrooge, respectively.
It contradicts one of the very first economic principles, which Adam Smith famously called, “the invisible hand.” He observed that in an environment where property rights are protected and exchanges of property are voluntary, people pursuing their own self-interest through peaceful market transactions will do more good for others than people supposedly sacrificing their self-interest.
The truth of this maxim has been proven so many times it’s astounding the lesson remains unlearned. As just one example, it is commonly known extreme poverty fell by 90 percent in the thirty years between 1990-2020. What’s less commonly acknowledged is that 100 percent of the progress occurred in countries that “reformed” their economies.
Let me translate “reformed” so you understand what the academics prefer you didn’t: they became less socialist and more capitalist.
China is the largest example, but the trend is consistent in economies large and small. Wherever a country privatized government-owned industries and allowed market forces to operate, poverty fell dramatically.
Yet another way to say this is poverty fell in countries where people were no longer forced to sacrifice their self-interest for some mythical “common good,” but were instead allowed to pursue their self interest in the only peaceful economic system yet discovered: the market economy.
The communists who wrote It’s a Wonderful Life take great pains to make the hero someone who does not pursue his self-interest. In addition to unsuccessful, this also makes George Bailey very unhappy.
We are supposed to admire him because he is selflessly miserable, which begs several questions:
Is the only “moral” system one in which everyone is miserable?
Or are some people morally required to be miserable so others may be happy?
How can the latter be true if “all men are created equal?”
The claptrap pedaled by these writers is absurd but effective because it appeals to people’s emotions – and not noble ones. When Potter tries to recruit George Bailey to work for him, the truth is told, although most viewers believe the truth is false, and falsehood is the truth.
“Now, take during the Depression for instance,” says Potter. “You and I were the only ones that kept our heads. You saved the Building and Loan and I saved all the rest.”
“Yes, well, most people say you stole all the rest,” answers George
“The envious ones say that, George, the suckers,” replies Potter.
Potter is telling the truth in this exchange and George Bailey is lying. Potter did not steal anything during the Depression. He acquired assets in voluntary exchanges with their owners, the very opposite of stealing.
Potter didn’t make those he bought the assets from worse off. He made them better off. If that weren’t true, the transactions wouldn’t have occurred. That Potter was acting purely in his self-interest doesn’t change that.
As he has all his life, Potter helped others during the Depression. While exchanging much needed cash for hard assets, Potter likely saved lives and certainly preserved the existence of Bedford Falls, all while acting entirely in his own self-interest.
Meanwhile, the “selfless” George Bailey doesn’t help his customers during the crisis. They are forced tohelp him.
Regardless of how people feel about it, this is the way the world works. And speaking of feelings, this supposed admiration of selflessness and condemnation of selfishness does not proceed from any noble place in the human heart. Rather, Potter speaks the truth when he says the proponents of this nonsense are “the envious.”
The poisonous idea of self-sacrifice to some illusory “common good” led to hundreds of millions of deaths in the 20th century, with starvation alone killing tens of millions in the midst of plenty. It appeals to the basest of human emotions and inspires a disregard of reason and observable reality.
In a society morphing into a pure democracy as constitutional limits designed to prevent that are whittled away, everyone who watches this supposedly heartwarming holiday film or reads any of Charles Dickens’ socialist propaganda and believes it becomes a threat to us all.
It is not a new threat. The central lie of both stories is what led to the revolutions in 1789 France, 1917 Russia, and 1949 China, just to name a few. If you’re wondering how to see it coming, consider a few common characteristics of those disasters: the tearing down of statues and other symbols of the past, the public shaming (and sometimes assault) of “politically incorrect” dissidents, the politicization of science (see “Lysenkoism”), and weaponization of the media by the state.
We hear a lot about “rights” these days. The left tells us everyone has a right to “free” healthcare and education. The right tells us everyone has a right to a job in a factory that pays enough to support an entire household. All these supposed rights have one thing in common: they require taxpayers to subsidize them.
So, there must be something wrong there.
I break down at length the relevant Enlightenment philosophies in my book, Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? But the gist is this: the dominant philosophy in America’s first century and a half was what we’d today call “libertarian.” And that philosophy is based wholly upon property rights.
“Property rights” can be a confusing term. People sometimes use it exclusively to mean rights pertaining to real estate. Others expand it to include movable property, like money or “stuff.” This latter definition is supported by ubiquitous references to “life, liberty, and property” going all the way back to the founders. But that expression is ultimately inaccurate in describing what its source, John Locke, meant by “property.”
Property includes life and liberty as they are all components of the ultimate property right, ownership of oneself. Once you accept that all individuals own themselves, the rest of the rights naturally follow. If you own yourself, it is up to you what you direct your body to do or not do, what your mind thinks or doesn’t think, what you say or don’t say. This is liberty, a component of property, rather than a distinct right.
But what about money, land, and “stuff?” Let’s face it, this is the basis for most conflict. Most political conflicts in human history were ultimately over how wealth is “distributed.” And the libertarian answer is, “It’s not.”
You have a right to all the wealth you legitimately own. Legitimate ownership is established in any of three ways. 1) You “homestead” a physical resource, meaning you expend your labor to take possession of it directly out of nature (land not currently owned by someone else). 2) You obtain the wealth through a voluntary exchange with its previous owner. Or, 3) you create the wealth by combining your mental and/or physical labor with materials obtained through 1) or 2).
The basis for ownership of a homesteaded resource is labor. A tree standing in a remote forest is not an economic good. It cannot be made into a two by four or a table until someone applies his labor to cut it down and transport it to a sawmill.
Labor isn’t just the mental or physical effort to work. It is also the time. Human beings have a finite amount of time during their lives. When the logger cuts down the tree to bring it to the sawmill, the sawmill owner isn’t just buying the tree. He is buying the tree plus some portion of the logger’s life. That is how the ownership was established. The logger exchanged part of his life to convert the tree from a remote object that could not be used by others to an economic good that can.
This is why the logger not only owns the good, but has a better claim than anyone else could possibly make. No one else has traded any part of his life for that good. Even if the logger employed other people to assist him, he has exchanged another good (money) for that labor and still retains the only claim upon the log he sells to the sawmill.
There are some who contend no one has a right to simply appropriate resources out of nature and take ownership of them. This was Rousseau’s contention. If the resources in nature belong to everyone in common, then permission is needed before resources are appropriated out of the commons. The property rights argument is that this permission is not necessary as everyone has an equal right to spend their labor to similarly appropriate resources.
Putting philosophy aside, it should be apparent to anyone the permission argument just doesn’t work. As Locke said, “man had starved” if such a permission were necessary. The first generation of humans would have been the last if they waited for the consent of everyone else before hunting and gathering.
Property rights do work and they apply to every conflict we have today. Do people have a right to healthcare? First, ask, “What is healthcare?” Answer: it is the labor or the product of the labor of others. It’s someone else’s property. So, of course, no one has a right to it unless they obtain it in a voluntary exchange. Ditto education, housing, food, clothing, etc.
This is where the government employs a shell game to allow people to rationalize theft. They don’t propose to enslave the doctor, the teacher, the contractor, or the grocer. Instead, they expropriate money from the taxpayer and use that to obtain healthcare, education, housing, etc. for those the government deems need them.
Nothing changes when money is expropriated vs. when land or stuff is expropriated. Money is “stuff.” It’s just another good for which people exchange their property. We may be forced by the government to use the Federal Reserve’s rotten money, but it’s a good all the same. So, if someone traded her property to obtain it, then taking it away by force to give to someone else is stealing.
But what about the populist right’s contention that everyone has right to a high paying job, which must be supported by tariffs? This is merely adding another shell to the shell game. If a person truly owns wealth, they have a right to exchange that wealth with anyone they please, including foreigners. Either that’s true or they don’t truly own the wealth. They also have a right to accept any price they and the seller agree upon.
Tariffs and other trade restrictions violate this property right. They forcibly override the price agreed upon by buyer and seller with a higher price in order to incentivize the buyer to pay that price to a government-connected domestic seller. Call it “stealing” or “infringing liberty” as you wish; it’s ultimately violation of a property right. That’s how you know it’s wrong.
Jefferson was a Lockean. He often called Locke one of the three greatest men who ever lived, along with Bacon and Newton. But he and other founders did us a disservice by talking about a myriad of distinct rights. There is only one right: property. Every human conflict can be reduced to one question: Who has a property right in this case and who does not? There is always an unambiguous answer, government propaganda notwithstanding.
Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the sole purpose of government was to secure our inalienable rights, including those to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That whole famous preamble was really a summary of Locke’s Second Treatise. Locke said substantively the same thing but didn’t confuse the matter by talking about distinct rights which couldn’t all be named. Rather, he simply said,
“This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers: and it is not without reason, that he seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others, who are already united, or have a mind to unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property.
The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.” [emphasis added]
This is what it all boils down to. All the soaring language about liberty, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion; it all boils down to property. You have a right to what you legitimately own and nothing more.
The purpose of a government in a free society, according to those who set up the American system, is protecting your property from those who would take it away without your consent. Period.
So, government had one job: protect property. 245 years were more than enough to evaluate its performance. Perhaps it’s time to give another system a chance to do that one job better.
The memes say it all. But if you want more “official” confirmation, a recent poll found that only 35% of Americans believe the 20-year war in Afghanistan was worth fighting. It’s hard to believe the number is even that high.
It’s not just that the very same Islamic fundamentalist group Washington went to war with twenty years ago is now running the country. The war also failed to reduce terrorism. Major terrorist attacks in the U.S. were at their highest post-2001 when the war on terror was at its height and dropped to virtually zero during the cease fire with the Taliban negotiated by former President Trump.
Just like Washington’s wars on drugs, the war on terrorism gave us a lot more of what it was at war with. This shouldn’t be a surprise. The government fails at every major initiative it undertakes. This is the organization that managed to interrupt a 200-year trend of falling poverty rates just a few decades after declaring war on poverty in the 1960s.
But Afghanistan was especially jolting. Not many people look at the incriminating data on the war on poverty, but everyone saw the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul. In the ensuing days, reality began to sink in. The U.S. had wasted 20 years, trillions of dollars, thousands of U.S. military lives, and hundreds of thousands of lives overall, for nothing.
All. For. Nothing.
Yet, as shocking as that reality is to most Americans, they still somehow believe this same government, the one that ran that 20-year debacle, suddenly becomes highly competent when fighting an airborne respiratory virus.
Washington’s War on Covid has been no more successful than its war against the Taliban. The proof isn’t hard to find. This article collated 35 studies showing the enormously destructive Covid “lockdowns” had no effect on slowing the spread or reducing hospitalizations or deaths from Covid-19.
The best studies – the randomized controlled trials (RCTs) – suggest that masks aren’t particularly effective, either. But the federal and state governments continue to mandate them.
Then, there are the vaccines. The goalposts for evaluating them have moved significantly over the course of this year. We were originally told the vaccines would provide long-lasting immunity from the SARS-COV-2 virus. Now, we’re told the vaccines will merely lessen the severity of symptoms. The CDC director confirmed this months ago and the latest data seem to indicate that vaccination rates are not affecting the spread of Covid-19.
There is some evidence the vaccines are preventing hospitalization and death from Covid-19, but the latest study from the UK indicates fully vaccinated people made up 64% of all Covid deaths since February 2021. When you count partially vaccinated people, that number rises to 70%.
Even if vaccines are preventing hospitalizations or deaths those who choose to remain unvaccinated do not pose an increased risk to others if the vaccines aren’t preventing spread of the virus. But governments are still mandating the vaccines, just as they continued to mandate indoor smoking bans after the evidence was in that doing so didn’t improve health outcomes.
Unfortunately, there is long precedent for Americans continuing to have faith in disastrous government interventions even well after they are obvious failures. Americans still believed the New Deal was helping even after the stock market crashed a second time and unemployment started to rise again in 1937. They still believed it after FDR’s own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, told the House Ways and Means Committee in 1939,
“We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work…I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!”
They still believe it to this day no matter how many times it is debunked.
There was enormous hope in 1974 that faith in government was finally broken after President Nixon resigned in disgrace, especially among members of the new Libertarian Party. But Americans went on believing.
Keynesian economics was pronounced dead for a few years after stagflation in the 1970s – considered impossible in the Keynesian framework – but it quickly resurrected to dominate fiscal and monetary policy without a peep from the public.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton declared, “the era of big government is over.” But today it is bigger and more destructive than ever. Yet, no one in his right mind would say the war on drugs has been a success. Nor can it be argued the Department of Education has done anything but massive harm.
We have a whole generation of college graduates living in their parents’ basements, working low-paying and part time jobs, and trying to pay off massive student loans after being incentivized by easy money and government guaranteed loans to pursue college degrees with no ROI. Meanwhile, there is a crisis-level shortage of skilled tradespeople who could be on a path to upper middle-class incomes had they not been conned into college.
The harm done to young people in general pales in comparison to what the government has done to the African American community. What two hundred years of slavery and another one hundred years of institutional discrimination couldn’t do, the government accomplished in just fifty years “trying to help.”
Devastation is the only word appropriate to describe the African American community in 2021. And anyone familiar with the work of Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams knows this is not something intrinsic to their race or culture. The government did that to them and it doesn’t intend to stop.
The Afghanistan War debacle was shocking to most Americans, but it was really just one more in a long line of government failures, not all of which made such compelling TV. Nevertheless, a significant percentage of the American public not only complies with but zealously defends Covid-19 policies that will look no better than Afghanistan in the rearview mirror.
What will it take to break this religious faith in government?
