Creating the Game Changer..
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Nightmare on Elm Street..
by Edgar J. Steele
November 21, 2003
"(A) nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
--- President John F. Kennedy, in remarks made on the 20th anniversary of the Voice of America at H.E.W. Auditorium, February 26, 1962
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
--- President John F. Kennedy
Forty years ago tomorrow, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in an open limousine down Elm Street, near Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.
I watched last night's ABC "Special Report" with Peter Jennings, which did the best job of whitewashing the JFK assassination that I have seen.
There were several holes in the ABC production, but the single most glaring concerned the 3rd shot, to JFK's head, the one that threw his head back, documented thanks only to the Zapruder film (which the government suppressed for so long).
The Zapruder film was shown again and again, frame by frame, early on in this program, but always was stopped just prior to the head shot. So, too, the animated sequence they employed ignored the head shot. What they concentrated on disproving was the "magic bullet" theory, which says that the bullet which hit both JFK and Governor Connelly had to have taken a couple of impossible turns. It's the magician's stock in trade to distract you with one hand while doing the deed with the other, don't forget.
Jennings carefully ignored the head-shot issue until almost the very end of the program, then dealt with it in the context of a lengthy debunking of the Oliver Stone film, "JFK." Here is the entirety of Jennings' explanation: "A bullet can throw a body in any direction." That's it. I kid you not.
The head shot is the single most incontrovertible item proving there was more than one shooter. I was amazed to see such a costly and slick production essentially ignore the most important aspect of the case. The very first time I saw the Zapruder film, I became a believer that, at minimum, there were two shooters.
Try this for yourself: get a hundred watermelons and set them on a stone wall. Then, fire a high-velocity rifle slug at each in turn. Every single one will be thrown backward. Every one. Not one will deviate.
There is an initial explosion in all directions upon impact of a projectile into an object. Then, as a bullet passes through an object, more and more of its velocity is transmitted into that object. Thus, a solid object goes directly and violently along the path of the projectile. A mushy object, like a watermelon or a human head, doesn't go as quickly, but it goes along that path, just the same. The laws of physics are like that - constant and repeatable.
You can download a complete copy of the Zapruder film for yourself from this site: http://cdo.co.uk/jfk/download.php?show=zapruder
Watch it closely and you will see the spray of blood that erupts from the front of Kennedy's head when that bullet impacts, just as you will see those watermelons spray juice toward you in reaction to the rifle slugs (the juice actually is traveling in all directions, but you can only see that which is flying back from the object, of course). Remember how Jackie was covered in blood spray afterwards, as she stood next to LBJ in Air Force One during his swearing in? Notice that, at the moment of the head shot, she has turned and is directly facing JFK from aside him as he claws at the wound in his throat.
Remember all those gory gangster movies that so authentically show the shooter getting spattered with blood when taking a close-up kill shot? Remember the accidental shot that John Travolta makes inside the car in "Pulp Fiction?" Blood sprays back from the point of impact. Every time.
Even more persuasive are the JFK autopsy photos, which show the gaping exit wound in the back of his skull: http://www.jfklancer.com/aphotos.html Compare them to the exit "wounds" in the backs of all those watermelons you just killed. Compare the much smaller entry wounds, too.
It is a standard trial lawyer trick to allow the other side to proceed to trial with as many weak issues as possible, so that the trial can be made to seem to be about them. Then, the real weakness is glossed over. Often, the jury simply does not notice. That is what has been done by Peter Jennings in the current ABC program. He is very convincing on the issues he chooses, because those are the issues that support the Oswald-as-lone-gunman story. There are others, however, with the head shot issue merely being the most glaring.
Oswald said it plainly before he was, himself, assassinated: "I'm a patsy." Hear it for yourself: http://home.cfl.rr.com/mayhr01/audio/patsy.wav
The best and most thoroughgoing analysis of the JFK assassination I have seen is Michael C. Piper's book, "Final Judgment," which now is all but banned in America and therefore very hard to find, since it is out of print. You would be well advised to secure and read a copy, if at all possible.
The real tipoff came at the very end, when Jennings explained why so many want there to have been a conspiracy: simply to justify so monstrous a crime. "Six million dead on one side of the scale and the Nazi regime on the other - huge crime balanced by a huge criminal. Similarly, people want JFK to have been killed by something other than that wretched waif, Oswald."
Jennings' invocation of the now ritual, semi-religious "holocaust" shows just who is in charge, and makes clear on which side of this issue all right-thinking Americans are expected to land.
Members of this list think for themselves, fortunately.
John F. Kennedy was a good man, an individual thinker and a courageous individual. He would have proven to be a great president, despite the tragedy that his civil rights program has become. He was the last of a breed.
JFK's death marked the beginning of a coup that now has come to full flower in America. Freddy Krueger would be proud.
New America. An idea whose time has come.
-ed
"I didn't say it would be easy. I just said it would be the truth."
- Morpheus
Copyright ©2003, Edgar J. Steele
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LIBERTARIANS FIGHTING PATRIOT ACT..
Enough of Bush, Ashcroft and their destruction of freedom..
By Tom Brune
November 18, 2003
Washington - Nevada conservative activist Janine Hansen is the first to say she is no Democrat or liberal, but she also complains the Bush administration has gone too far in eroding privacy and civil liberties with the Patriot Act and other anti-terrorism measures.
Hansen, president of the anti-feminist Nevada Eagle Forum, backed up her complaint Thursday in Reno by stepping forward as a featured speaker at a three-city announcement launching the Nevada Campaign to Defeat the Patriot Act.
Most criticism of the controversial act is associated with the ACLU and other liberal groups, but more often than not in the West, it is conservative libertarians like Hansen who take the lead.
Months ago, Hansen said, she persuaded the Nevada legislature to add language protecting civil liberties to its new anti-terrorism laws.
"I really led the battle on this," she said. "The ACLU supported me, but I was the first one there."
For a growing number of conservative libertarians, the Patriot Act and the Bush administration's "big government" war on terror are becoming wedge issues that threaten to separate them from the Republican Party and President George W. Bush.
Those worried about this include Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, David Keane of the American Conservative Union, Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Gun Owners of America.
"We all want to continue to fight and win the war against terrorism, but there is absolutely no need to sacrifice civil liberties," said Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman who works with both the American Conservative Union and the ACLU.
Barr and others will testify today at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on anti-terrorism and civil liberties chaired by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a staunch ally of Attorney General John Ashcroft in defending the domestic war on terrorism.
The Republican Party barely acknowledged libertarians or their concerns. The Patriot Act was passed by Congress overwhelmingly, and if there are problems with the law, Congress will fix them, said Christine Iverson of the Republican National Committee.
Most mainstream Republicans still back the war on terror, Weyrich concedes, and he said it will take a high-profile act of government abuse to draw in the broader public on the side of the libertarians.
There has always been a strain in the Republican alliance between the libertarians - they favor a small, unobtrusive government and unfettered personal liberty - and the traditionalists, who favor strong law enforcement and military and have a social agenda.
In this week's issue, The American Conservative magazine highlights that strain and asks, "Will Libertarians Flee the GOP?"
One sign of disaffection among conservative libertarians is their ability, even eagerness, to join coalitions with libertarians from the left, and even unions and environmentalists, to fight the Patriot Act.
The Nevada Campaign is one such group, and an alliance of conservatives such as Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) and liberals like Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) sponsored the recently introduced SAFE Act to restrain the Patriot Act.
The coalitions, however, could crack in an election year. If Democrats make civil liberties a key issue, many libertarians will return to the Republican fold, Weyrich said.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc. / Article licensing and reprint options
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uslibs183548186nov18,0,6227230.story
..space is there, and we're going to climb it..
~ JFK ~
http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/jfksound.htm
mankind must put an end to war..
or war will put an end to mankind..
~ JFK ~
http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/jfksound.htm
THIS IS THE ILLUSION..
You live in a society where you believe you exist as an man or a woman..
You believe you are bettering yourself and working your way toward an goal of financial independence..
But in reality, you exist to better the global economy..
You exist as a source of life for the ruling class..
In the real world, you are blinded by the illusion of necessity..
Throughout history, man has tried with varying rates of failure to control other men for the purpose of gaining more power..
Poor men want to be rich, rich men want to be king, and kings want to be god..
This adage has proved true time and time again..
Today, in the United States, more than 250 million people have bought into this adage and exist in a system created for global corporate profit..
Unfortunately, the real world offers broader opportunities for success to those in a position to take advantage..
At the same time..
It scars those who can not reap its benefits..
Philosophy of Liberty..
http://familyguardian.tzo.com/Subjects/Freedom/Articles/PhilosophyOfLiberty-english.swf
GOVERNMENT IS A PAGAN CULT AND WE'VE ALL BEEN DRINKING THE KOOL AID..
SOURCE: http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_nunez.html
By Humberto Nunez
Government is a pagan cult. When you join the Armed Forces, the first thing they do is shave your head. Just like in many cults, where they shave your head. The Army also uses sleep deprivation in Boot Camp, just like many cults do, to brainwash their people.
Secret Service Agents are willing to “die for their beliefs” (in defense of The President: their cult leader).
Many men say that they would “die for their country”. This is a form of pagan Martyrdom for the pagan cult State.
Many today say that “religion has caused more war… “ and blah blah blah.
But the fact is that governments send out draft cards, not churches. Governments started WWI and WWII, not religion. In fact, during times of peace governments hate religion because religion is the governments’ #1 competition for allegiance, and during times of war, governments use religion for their own agenda.
Another similarity to cults: FBI Agents even dress similar to Mormons, and have the same type of haircuts. Many cults have a dress code of some kind, just like in the Army, and even in the Corporate world.
When you join the Moonies you would probably end up selling flowers for them, and the Moonies will keep all the profits from the work you do. When you work today, the pagan cult State takes your profits (in the form of income taxes), and they won’t let you leave their cult (the State). If you attempt to not pay your taxes, you would be arrested and branded a criminal.
Now, I did a little research into the symptoms and signs of a cult and found these 5 Warning Signs: (to distinguish a cult from a ‘normal’ religion)
The organization is willing to place itself above the law; this is probably the most important characteristic.
The leadership dictates, (rather than suggests) important personal (as opposed to spiritual) details of followers’ lives, such as whom to marry, what to study in college, etc.
The leader sets forth ethical guidelines members must follow but from which the leader is exempt.
The group is preparing to fight a literal, physical Armageddon against other human beings.
The leader regularly makes public assertions that he or she knows is false and/or the group has a policy of routinely deceiving outsiders.
Now, let’s break these down one by one.
1. The organization is willing to place itself above the law; this is probably the most important characteristic.
Example: Death Penalty.
What is the purpose and intention behind State sponsored Death Penalty? The primary purpose and intention behind State sponsored Death Penalty is not to deter crime, nor is it to be tough on crime. To understand the purpose and intent behind this, we must study psychology, in particular, behavioral psychology; like in training a dog. To train a dog, one must use behavioral modification techniques. For example, the primary purpose and intention behind anti-smoking laws is to get you to obey the State. Before you can train a dog to kill, you must first train the dog to obey simple commands; like sit, and roll over. The same is true of recycling laws. Glass bottles are actually much safer for the environment than plastic bottles. The primary purpose and intention behind recycling laws is not to save the environment, it is a behavioral modification technique to get the people to obey the Government.
Now, back to State sponsored death penalty laws. The primary purpose and intention behind Death Penalty laws is to get people used to the idea that the State is above the law. It is illegal for people to kill and to murder. With State sponsored Death Penalty laws, the State is Above the Law.
There you have symptom #1:
1. The organization is willing to place itself above the law; this is probably the most important characteristic.
2. The leadership dictates, (rather than suggests) important personal (as opposed to spiritual) details of followers’ lives, such as whom to marry, what to study in college, etc.
I can give a dozen examples of this behavioral modification ploy of cults. Recycling and anti-smoking laws were two examples I explained above. Dictating the behavior of Americans today is pervasive throughout our entire society.
3. The leader sets forth ethical guidelines members must follow but from which the leader is exempt.
We can see this today very clearly when it comes to violence. Many Americans today are forced to attend Anger Management Courses while at the same time the State uses violence (like in the Iraq War).
4. The group is preparing to fight a literal, physical Armageddon against other human beings.
Three words: War on Terrorism
5. The leader regularly makes public assertions that he or she knows is false and/or the group has a policy of routinely deceiving outsiders.
I don’t think that last symptom (of a cult) needs further explanation.
Well there you have it; the Government has all of the 5 major signs/symptoms of being a cult.
For the philosophy behind The Nature of Government I recommend this read:
http://familyguardian.tzo.com/Subjects/LawAndGovt/Articles/NatureOfGovernment.htm
It is A MUST READ for all Americans and all freedom loving peoples of the world. It is so good that if I start quoting from it, I’ll just end up pasting the entire article here in my article. So I’ll just leave it at that and say you the reader here MUST READ IT.
Now, the atheist says “Show me God.” I say, “Show me government.” I do not believe in the existence of government. Now hold your horses, I know that sounds silly at first, but let me explain.
Let’s say you were on a ship full of people. Now the people in that ship went insane and started hallucinating, thinking that you were an alien from another planet and that you must be killed. If those people on that ship killed you, you would really be dead, literally. Just because of the reality of the consequences of that mass hallucination (you being dead) does not prove that you were really an alien. It just proves that the people were suffering from mass hallucination. So, just because the so-called ‘government’ can arrest you and put you in jail, that does not prove the existence of government. It just proves mass hallucination.
Let’s start again now:
The atheist says “Show me God.” I say, “Show me government.” Now don’t tell me the White House. That is not ‘government’. That is a building. That’s just as if I were to show an atheist a church (a building), that would not prove the existence of God.
Ok now, you might show me a Police Officer in uniform, and offer proof on how he can actually arrest me, to prove the existence of Government.
Well, I can show an atheist a priest in uniform, but that would not prove the existence of God. Even if Congress gave priests the authority to arrest people on the streets that would still not prove the existence of God to an atheist. Just like a cop in uniform does not prove the existence of government, it only proves that the people are suffering from mass hallucination.
People today are obsessed with the laws of the pagan-cult State. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, etc. etc, people meditating day and night on the ‘laws’ of the pagan-cult State, as opposed to the Law of God. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, these men have become cult figures. They have replaced Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, Moses, as the men of God to be pondered on and studied.
Sacrifice for Protection
In ancient times, people performed human sacrifice to their pagan false gods for ‘Protection’ from the gods. They believed their gods also played the role of ‘Provider’ by performing human sacrifice for rain for their crops for example.
Today, the US Fed. Govt. is asking for “Sacrifice for Protection’. The State today is now saying that the people must sacrifice their Freedoms and Liberties for ‘Protection’ from terrorism (demons, evil spirits, etc.) and that the State will then ‘Provide’ them with safety.
This is metaphorically a form of human sacrifice. It is not a human sacrifice where you literally kill someone (like in the Death Penalty), but it is a “human” sacrifice. I mean, the State is not asking the animals to sacrifice their Freedoms and Liberties, it is asking us humans, so it is a “human” sacrifice as opposed to an ‘animal’ sacrifice in that sense. Also, there is death involved; the death of our Freedoms and Liberty.
By the way, State sponsored Death Penalty is another form of human sacrifice for the pagan-cult State, and State sponsored abortion is a form of child sacrifice for this pagan-cult State.
Black Robes: Judges and Devil worshippers
Judges wear Black Robes just like Devil worshippers. The Judges’ Desk is the altar of baal. They bring men tied up in handcuffs before the altar (Judges’ desk) and these men are for the human sacrifice and the entire court proceeding is a satanic ritual.
Sounds crazy? Is it a coincidence that the ‘language of the court’ is Latin (ex: Habeas Corpus) just like the ‘language of a Catholic Exorcism’ is also in Latin? Lawyers speak Latin in the court room just like Priests use Latin when performing exorcisms when you have a ‘case’ of full DEMONIC POSSESSION.
Also, the same type of ‘respect’ a Priest would expect from a visitor to his church is the same type of respect a Judge expects in his court room. There’s even a penalty for disobeying this ‘respect’; it’s called “Contempt of Court”.
Another psychological conditioning behavior modification technique being applied on the American Public is this: Television shows like Judge Judy, Judge Joe, all these People’s Courts television shows. The primary intention and purpose behind these so-called Court Room Justice shows is to condition the public to get used to entering a court room with NO Trial by Jury. In not one of any of these types of shows do you ever see a Trial by Jury; that is not a mistake, it is intentional, and by design.
I can go on and on with this article and offer a million more details.
To conclude, if the US Govt. plans to attack Iran, North Korea, etc. in the future. And if there is the possibility that this War on Terrorism might lead to WWIII. Then, that is nothing but pagan-cult MASS SUICIDE. And the US Govt. is a pagan cult, and WE’VE ALL BEEN DRINKING THE KOOL AID. [Does Jim Jones from Ghana ring a bell?]
Now, some readers of this article (especially neoconservatives) would automatically brand me an Anarchist. I am not an Anarchist, what I am questioning is the role of government. According to the Founding Fathers of America, the role of government was to protect your Individual Rights. NOT TO TAKE THEM AWAY.
And finally, if the people will not serve God, they will end up serving and being slaves of government. I am sure many Christians would believe this, and even some followers of eastern philosophies; for this is a form of 'Bad Karma'.
And, if man will not serve God, then woman will not serve man. This is also a form of 'bad karma' [and it may also explain why the divorce rate is so high].
The Commie Lesson..
I ACTUALLY AM A VISITOR FROM ANOTHER PLANET..
This is not too hard to believe, as my critics, who are many, will tell you without blushing that I am definitely something from another planet..
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, I am told that you people spend somewhere approaching a quarter Trillion dollars a year (that's 250 Billion with a "B" dollars per year) on a military establishment. And I was in the restaurant here, being from outer space, I was talking to this fellow, who told me he was a Christian, and he apparently thought this was great.
So I asked him, "why do you spend all this money?"
And he scratched his head, and said "Well gee, now that the Soviet Union is all dissolved, I don' t know."
I said "well, why did you used to spend a quarter Trillion dollars a year on your military establishment?" And he said "Oh! We wanted to defend ourselves from communism!"
And I asked "what is communism?"
And he said "Communism is a foreign and alien ideology that threatens by military force to impose itself over our objection and against our will."
I thought that was kind of interesting, and I told him that I know a little something about communism, and I asked him if he knew what communism was and he said, "well, no".
And I asked him if he had been trained in the public schools, and he said "yes." So I walked him through the communist manifesto, as I will you now.
The communist manifesto was created by a fellow named Moses Mordecai Levi. You Americans out here know him a Karl Marx, he was the son of a rabbi, and I asked why this guy went by an alias? The discussion fairly quickly elevated to the status level of Battle-Stations Missle:
I said, "The first plank of the communist manifesto is:
Abolition of all property and land ownership and the application of all rents for public purposes."
And I asked this Christian, "Do you own your own home?"
He said "Yep."
I said, "What happens if you stop paying the property tax?
He said "The sheriff will sell it."
I said, "I am woefully confused, of course, I am from another planet. How can the sheriff sell what you own?"
He was sorrowfully silent. So I said "isn't it a fact that you hold title and that you are not an "allod" on the land and isn't your problem actually that you have an equity position in real property and the state wherein you live owns the land and that's why they can move your butt off of it when you don't pay their rent?" And as he stared into the ceiling, I said "if you pay property tax you practice the first plank of the communist manifesto. On the spaceship down here I was reading this big thick book called the Bible, the Bible you Christians use, and I understand that you are in violation of Leviticus 25:23 if you do that." He looked puzzled...
The second plank of the communist manifest is: Heavy progressive income tax.
You people don't fill out Illinois state form 1040's here do you, and you don't fill out form 1040's for the federal government do you? Because if you do, you practice the second plank of the communist manifesto and you are in violation of your Bible at Malachi 3:8 and Deuteronomy 4:13.
He loosened his tie...
I said the third plank of the communist manifesto is: Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
I said "How long have you lived in Illinois?" He said "All my life." I said "You don't have any probate courts here, do you? You don't have a legal profession that is wall to wall teaching you to fill out wills instead of create trusts, do you? Because if you know anyone who has been through probate court, or if you have personally been through probate court, you have practiced the third plank of the communist manifesto and you are in violation of Deuteronomy 21:15-17 and Numbers 18:20-24." . He loosened his tie a little more...
The fourth plank of the communist manifesto is: Confiscation of property of all immigrants & rebels.
"You don't turn on the TV around April 1st in Illinois and see them drag some tax protestor off to jail, do you?" "Annually," was the reply. "Well", I said, "if you participate in that or allow that to happen, or if that has happened to you, that's the fourth plank of the communist manifesto, and it is a violation of Leviticus 26:17 and Proverbs 28:1." His eyes started to glaze over.
I looked at him and said the fifth plank of the communist manifesto is: Centralization of credit by the creation of a national bank.
I said, "You pay your debts at law, in silver, don't you? You don't discharge your obligations in equity, do you?" He started to squirm. I said "if you rely on this green paper money for your sustenance, if your mind thinks in terms of this green paper when you go to purchase things, you practice the fifth plank of the communist manifesto, and you are in violation of Leviticus 19:35-36, Deuteronomy 25:13-16 and the aforementioned nasty and nefarious Exodus 20:15.
EXODUS 20: 15 reads THOU SHALT NOT STEAL."
He started to become uneasy....
I said, the sixth plank of the communist manifesto is: Centralization of the means of communication & transport in the hands of the state.
"You don't have ports of entry out here on the Interstate, do you? Your trucks don't have to drive in and out of these scales, do you? You don't drive automobiles with the admiralty flag of the state of Illinois on the back with the yearly rental fee stuck in the middle on a sticker, do you? Because if you do, you practice the sixth plank of the communist manifesto and you are in violation of Deuteronomy 7:2 and Exodus 23:32-33." He started to figit uncomfortably.
I said the seventh plank of the communist manifesto is: Government control of factories and the instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing in to cultivation of wastelands and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
I said, "You don't have a Bureau of Land management, do you? You don't live under the administrative circumstance of the Department of Agriculture, do you? And you don't have companion circumstances in the state law along with EPA and a host of other things, because if you allow yourself to live under that system, you practice the seventh plank of the communist manifesto and you are in violation of Leviticus 25: 1-7, actually Leviticus 25: 1-10. He closed his eyes.
I said the eight plank of the communist manifesto reads: Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
I said, "Do you have a Social Security number?" He as he shook his head up and down sorrowfully, I said "well doesn't that mean that you're a fourteenth Amendment juristic person a merchant in interstate commerce under contract over time for profit and gain in a regulated enterprise and you have waived all your constitutional rights under contract in exchange for privileges, franchises and immunities?" He said "Privileges?" I said "yes, privilege! PRIVATE LAW: Privilege." He put his chin in his solar plexus. I said "If you have a Social Security number, you practice the eighth plank of the communist manifesto, and you are in violation of your Bible at Leviticus 19:13 and Deuteronomy 24:14&15." He became physically agitated.
Number nine, I said: A combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries. Gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of population over the country.
"You don't have a Federal Emergency Management Association in Illinois, Do you? You don't have FEMA at the state level, do you? Because is you do, you practice the ninth plank of the communist manifesto and you're in violation of Leviticus 25: 1-7. By this time he was just plain angry.
I finished by quoting the tenth plank of the communist manifesto: Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Conform education with industrial productions.
I said "Are you a homeowner?" He said "yeah." I said "you pay the property tax?" He said "Yeah." I said "Do you know where 75% of the property tax goes in this state?" He said "no." I said "It goes to support the public fool ..ahh .. the public school system. I looked at him, I said "You don't tithe your children to the state, do you? You raise them at home the way Yahweh told Moses to tell you to do, don't you?" As he got up and walked away, I said "If you support the public education establishment, you are in violation of Deuteronomy 4: 9-10, Deuteronomy 6: 1-25 and Deuteronomy 11:19. And you practice the tenth plank of the communist manifesto."
And I went and got him and brought him back and sat him down and I said "You know, I am from outer space and one of the reasons they sent me to this planet is that I'm not the brightest firecracker that ever went off in our galaxy. But what I'm trying to figure out is why the hell would you spend 250 Billion "Dollars" a year defending yourselves against something that you willfully and premeditatively do, under the color of law, and practice every second of every minute of every hour of every day all year long?
He said, "My God, I never thought about that! What do you think we should do?"
I said, "I don' t know. Did the communists ever run a presidential candidate?" He said, "Oh yeah, Gus Hall, the venerable ancient 80 year old president of the communist party used to run every time until the Democrats took over the Congress after WWII."
I said to him, "If Gus Hall would have been elected President of the United States, do you think he would have abolished property tax, do you think he would have abolished the income tax, do you think he would have instructed the legal profession to only create trusts for families to hold property in, and that he would have abolished the probate courts? Do you think he would have stopped the incarceration of so-called Tax rebels? Do you think Gus Hall would have closed the federal reserve? Do you think he would have shut down the federal communications commission and allowed you to flip through the dials on your TVs here in Chicago and watch television stations unlicensed by the government? Do you think he would have eliminated all the bureaucracies that control trade, commerce, business, industry and agriculture? Do you think he would have dumped the Social Security Administration and admitted that there was no trust fund, and that the whole thing was just a gigantic chain letter used to alter your citizenship status in the thirties and redistribute your wealth? That Roosevelt, he was a pretty crafty guy, wasn't he?"
I said "Do you think Gus Hall would have closed the public school system and sold the public schools back to the families in the neighborhoods wherein they existed?" As I opened up the copy of the Bible the motel clerk told me I could keep for free, my Christian friend got up and left, and I couldn't bring him back.
The above is a transcript of a tape by:
Peter Jon Simpson
Erwin Rommel School of Law
c/o P O Box 211
Atwater, Minnesota 56209-0211
320- 857- 2400
2401 fax
rommellaw@aol.com
http://members.aol.com/rommellaw
"The Law is the Weapon
the Courtroom the Battlefield
the Judge is Your Enemy
Your Lawyer is an Enemy Spy"
THIS IS THE ILLUSION..
You live in a society where you believe you exist as an man or a woman..
You believe you are bettering yourself and working your way toward an goal of financial independence..
But in reality, you exist to better the global economy..
You exist as a source of life for the ruling class..
In the real world, you are blinded by the illusion of necessity..
Throughout history, man has tried with varying rates of failure to control other men for the purpose of gaining more power..
Poor men want to be rich, rich men want to be king, and kings want to be god..
This adage has proved true time and time again..
Today, in the United States, more than 250 million people have bought into this adage and exist in a system created for global corporate profit..
Unfortunately, the real world offers broader opportunities for success to those in a position to take advantage..
At the same time..
It scars those who can not reap its benefits..
For some it is difficult to see..
What is the name of your Country?
First, view the definition of brainwashing from American Heritage Dictionary..
brain·wash·ing, n. The application of a concentrated means of persuasion, such as an advertising campaign or repeated suggestion, in order to develop a specific belief or motivation..
An important factor to realize is all Planks of the Communist Manifesto are applied in America, which includes the likes of the Federal Reserve System..
Having that information in mind, now we provide the following information. . .
The following was written by John W. Baer is an American professor of economics at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland..
The below excerpts are from an article that was originally published in a 1989 issue of .. believe it or not .. Propaganda Review..
The Strange Origin of the Pledge of Allegiance By John W. Baer
How did this Pledge of Allegiance to a flag replace the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights in the affections of many Americans?.
In 1892, a socialist named Francis Bellamy created the Pledge of Allegiance for Youths' Companion, a national family magazine for youth published in Boston..
The magazine had the largest circulation of its day with a circulation around 500,000. Two liberal businessmen, Daniel Ford and James Upham, his nephew, owned Youths' Companion..
One hundred years ago the American flag was rarely seen in the classroom or in front of the school Upham changed that..
In 1888, the magazine began a campaign to sell American flags to the public schools. By 1892, his magazine had sold American flags to about 26 thousands schools..
In 1891, Upham had the idea of using the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of America to promote the use of the flag in the public schools..
The same year, the magazine hired Daniel Ford's radical young friend, Baptist minister, Nationalist, and Christian Socialist leader, Francis Bellamy, to help Upham in his public relations work..
Bellamy was the first cousin of the famous American socialist, Edward Bellamy. Edward Bellamy's futuristic novel, Looking Backward, published in 1888, described a utopian Boston in the year 2000..
The book spawned an elitist socialist movement in Boston known as Nationalism, whose members wanted the federal government to national most of the American economy..
Francis Bellamy was a member of this movement and a vice president of its auxiliary group, the Society of Christian Socialists.. He was a baptist minister and he lectured and preached on the virtues of socialism and the evils of capitalism. He gave a speech on Jesus the Socialist and a series of sermons on The Socialism of the Primitive Church..
In 1891, he was forced to resign from his Boston church, the Bethany Baptist church, because of his socialist activities. He then joined the staff of the Youths' Companion..
By February 1892, Francis Bellamy and Upham had lined up the National Education Association to support the Youths' Companion as a sponsor of the national public schools' observance of Columbus Day along with the use of the American flag..
By June 29, Bellamy and Upham had arranged for Congress and President Benjamin Harrison to announce a national proclamation making the public school flag ceremony the center of the national Columbus Day celebrations for 1892..
Bellamy, under the supervision of Upham, wrote the program for this celebration, including its flag salute, the Pledge of Allegiance. His version was:
I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the Republic for which it stands--one nation indivisible--with liberty and justice for all..
This program and its pledge appeared in the September 8 issue of Youths' Companion. He considered putting the words fraternity and equality in the Pledge but decided they were too radical and controversial for public schools..
The original Pledge was recited while giving a stiff, uplifted right hand salute, criticized and discontinued during WWII. The words my flag were changed to the flag of the United States of America because it was feared that the children of immigrants might confuse my flag for the flag of their homeland. The phrase, Under God, was added by Congress and President Eisenhower in 1954 at the urging of the Knights of Columbus..
The American Legion's constitution includes the following goal:
To foster and perpetuate a one hundred percent Americanism..
One of its major standing committees was the Americanism Commission and its subsidiary, the Counter Subversive Activities Committee.. To the fear of immigrants, it added the fear of communism..
Perhaps a team of social scientists and historians could explain why over the last century the Pledge of Allegiance has become a major centerpiece in American patriotism programs..
Coalition Comments:
It is truly amazing that the title of the article is:
The Strange Origin of the Pledge of Allegiance
Why does John Baer think the origin of the Pledge is strange?.
Does he believe that he lives in a civil society that is not socialist or communist?.
Or maybe he does understand and is trying to tell us something. Did you know that most Americans are deemed a national of the United States and not a national of the state in which they live?.
Did you know that before the Civil War (so-called) that each state was referred to as a country?.
And, is it not interesting that Karl Marx said:
Socialism leads to Communism
And his Communist Manifesto of 1848 set forth the dicta that:
The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality..
The real interesting thing about Bellamy is that he was thrown out of the church for practicing socialism. One would guess the church saw the real truth behind the plot of socialism: it is just used as a tool for ultra-capitalism (mammonism)..
Don't believe it?.
Look at who Bellamy teamed up with after he was thrown out of a Christian church... One would guess Tony Brown is right:
The Capitalists are the Communists, and...
the Communists are the Capitalists..
You see... Communism is not only political, it is established by law..
It gets way better than this, read Treason by Design to see how these socialist subversives operated on the political and legal end of this plot that has stealthily been instituted on the rightful Americans of the several states..
IS THERE STILL A PLACE FOR GOLD?
Gold’s Dust vs. Dusty Gold
by Gary North
The best way for a nation to build confidence in its currency is not to bury lots of gold in the ground; it is, instead, to pursue responsible financial policies. If a country does so consistently enough, it’s likely to find its gold growing dusty from disuse.
~ Editorial, Wall Street Journal (July 8, 1969)
This statement is true, but it is unlikely that the editorial writer all those years ago understood why it is true.
When it comes to wise economic policy-making, let us get one thing straight: it doesn’t come like manna from heaven. It isn’t a free lunch. It comes only because there are political sanctions that reward government officials who devise and enforce policies that make consumers better off, and punish government officials who devise and enforce policies that make consumers worse off. These institutional sanctions must be consistent with the laws of economics – and there really are laws of economics. If the policies violate economic law, then the nation will get irresponsible financial policies, and lots of other kinds of irresponsible government policies.
The editorial writer implied that dusty gold is a silly thing to pursue. He also implied that a nation doesn’t need a supply of gold if it pursues wise financial policies. What he was really saying is that gold has nothing to do with wise financial policies. A gold standard is therefore irrelevant. It is an anachronism. It gathers dust, like gold itself.
I think otherwise. I think dusty gold is a great thing. I believe that gold bullion is good. I even believe that gold dust is good. But dust on a government’s supply of gold is even better, assuming that the public can legally obtain this gold on demand, as is the case with a gold coin standard. Permit me to explain why I believe this.
But first, let me mention a fact of political life: the Establishment hates gold.
THE ESTABLISHMENT VS. GOLD
Hostility to the traditional gold coin standard has been the mark of Establishment economists and editorialists ever since the U.S. government confiscated Americans’ gold in 1933. The Establishment hates gold. Its spokesmen ridicule gold. They want responsible fiscal and monetary policies, of course – all of them publicly assure of this fact, decade after decade – but the national debt just keeps getting bigger, and price inflation never ceases, also decade after decade. Somehow, fiscal and monetary responsibility just never seem to arrive.
Why do they hate gold? Because gold represents the public. More than this: gold is a powerful tool of control by the public. A gold coin standard places in the hands of consumers a means of controlling the national money supply. A gold coin standard transfers monetary policy-making from central bankers and government officials to the common man, who can walk into a bank and demand payment for paper or digital currency in gold coins. This is the ultimate form of democracy, and the Establishment hates it. The Establishment can and does control political affairs. They make democracy work for them. They are masters of political manipulation. But they cannot control long-run monetary policy in a society that has a gold coin standard. They hate gold because they hate the sovereignty of consumers.
We are also officially assured by Establishment-paid experts that fiscal and monetary responsibility has nothing to do with a gold coin standard, in the same way that international price stability, 1815–1914, had nothing to do with the presence of a gold coin standard. A gold coin standard would not provide fiscal responsibility, we are told. This is a universal affirmation, the shared confession of faith that unites all branches of the Church of Perpetual Re-election.
On this one thing, the economists are agreed, whether Keynesians, Friedmanites, or supply siders: gold should have no role to play in today’s monetary system. (A few supply siders do allow a role for bullion gold in central bank vaults – without full redeemability by the public – as a psychological confidence-builder in a pseudo-gold standard economy. They do not call for full gold coin redeemability by the public, or 100% reserve banking.)
The Wall Street Journal is no exception to this rule. It thinks that we can somehow get fiscal responsibility without a gold standard. Nevertheless, the editorial writer stumbled upon a very important point. The gathering of dust on a government’s stock of monetary gold is as good an indicator of fiscal responsibility as would be the addition of gold dust to the stock of monetary gold.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
New money, including newly mined gold, confers no net benefit to society. New money does confer benefits on those people who get access to it early, but it does this at the expense of late-comers who get access to the new money late in the process. Those people who have early access to the new money gain a benefit: they can spend the newly mined (or newly printed) money at yesterday’s prices. Competing consumers who do not have immediate access to the new money are forced to restrict their purchases as supplies of available goods go down and/or prices of the goods increase. Thus, those people on fixed incomes cannot buy as much as they would have been able to buy had the new money not come into existence.
Some people benefit in the short run; others lose. There is no way that an economist can say scientifically that society has benefited from an increase in the money supply. He cannot add up losses and gains inside people’s minds. There is no such standard of measurement. Murray Rothbard made this point a generation ago.
Thus, we see that while an increase in the money supply, like an increase in the supply of any good, lowers its price, the change does not – unlike other goods – confer a social benefit. The public at large is not made richer. Whereas new consumer or capital goods add to standards of living, new money only raises prices – i.e., dilutes its own purchasing power. The reason for this puzzle is that money is only useful for its exchange-value. Other goods have "real" utilities, so that an increase in their supply satisfies more consumer wants. Money has only utility for prospective exchange; its utility lies in its exchange-value, or "purchasing power." Our law – that an increase in money does not confer a social benefit – stems from its unique use as a medium of exchange.
[Murray N. Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? (1964), p. 13.
Rothbard’s point is vital: an increase of the total stock of money cannot be said, a priori, to have increased a nation’s aggregate social wealth. This implication has a crucial policy implication: the existing supply of money is sufficient to maximize the wealth of nations. Enough is enough. "Stop the presses!"
An economist who says that society has benefited from an increase in the money supply has an unstated presupposition: it is socially beneficial to aid one group in the community (the miners, or those printing the money) at the expense of another group (those on fixed incomes). This is hardly neutral economic analysis.
Let us assume a wild, unlikely hypothesis: the supply of dollars will someday be tied, both legally and in fact, to the stock of gold in the Federal Reserve System vault. Let us also assume that banks can issue dollars only for gold deposited. For each ounce of gold deposited in a bank, a paper receipt called a "dollar" is issued by the bank to the person bringing in the gold for deposit. At any time, the bearer of this IOU can redeem a paper "dollar" for an ounce of gold. By definition, one dollar is now worth an ounce of gold, and vice versa.
What would take place if an additional supply of new gold is made by some producer, or if the government (illegally) should spend an unbacked paper dollar? Rothbard describes the results.
An increase in the money supply, then, only dilutes the effectiveness of each gold ounce; on the other hand, a fall in the supply of money raises the poser of each gold ounce to do its work. [Rothbard is speaking of the long-run effects in the aggregate.] We come to the startling truth that it doesn’t matter what the supply of money is. Any supply will do as well as any other supply. The free market will simply adjust by changing the purchasing power, or effectiveness of its gold unit. There is no need whatever for any planned increase in the money supply, for the supply to rise to offset any condition, or to follow any artificial criteria. More money does not supply more capital, is not more productive, does not permit "economic growth."
Once a society has a given supply of money in its national economy, people no longer need to worry about the efficiency of the monetary unit. People will use money as an economic accounting device in the most efficient manner possible, given the prevailing legal, institutional, and religious structure. In fact, by adding to the existing money supply in any appreciable fashion, banks bring into existence the "boom-bust" phenomenon of inflation and depression. The old cliché, "let well enough alone," is quite accurate in the area of monetary policy.
This leads to a startling conclusion: the existing money supply is sufficient for all economic transactions. We don’t need any more money. (Well, actually, I do. But you don’t.) We also don’t need a Federal Reserve System to manage the money supply. We don’t need a government rule that compels the Federal Reserve or the Treasury to increase the money supply by 3% per annum or maybe 5% (Friedman’s suggested rule). Besides, who would enforce such a rule? It’s a rule for rulers enforced by rulers.
Then what do we need? Freedom of contract and the enforcement of contracts. Nothing else? Only laws that prohibit fraud. To issue a receipt for which there is nothing in reserve to back up the receipt is fraudulent.
WHY GOLD?
A productive gold miner, by slightly diluting the purchasing power of the gold-based monetary unit, achieves short-run benefits for himself. He gets a little richer. Those people on fixed incomes now face a slightly restricted supply of goods available for purchase at the older, less inflated, price levels. Miners and mine owners bought these goods with their newly mined gold. This is a fact of life. But this is a minor redistribution – miner redistribution – of wealth compared to the effects of a government monopoly over money. The compulsion of government vastly magnifies the redistribution effects of monetary inflation. It is cheaper to print money than to mine gold.
We live in an imperfect universe. We are not perfect creatures, possessing omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect moral natures. We therefore find ourselves in a world in which some people will choose actions which will benefit them in the short run, but which may harm others in the long run. Our judicial task is to minimize these effects. We should pursue a world of minor imperfections rather than accept a world with major imperfections. But we would be wise not to demand political perfection. Messianic societies never attain perfection. They attain only tyranny.
To compare a gold standard with perfection – zero monetary expansion – misses the point. Perfection is not an available option. Instead, we should compare the effects of a gold coin standard, where no one can issue receipts for gold unless he owns gold, with the effects of a monetary system in which the government forces people to accept its money in payment for all debts, goods, and services. Compared to the cost of creating a blip on a computer, the costs of mining are huge. The rate of monetary inflation will be vastly lower under a pure gold coin standard with 100% reserve banking than under a credit money standard run by central bankers through the fractionally reserved commercial banks.
Professor Mises defended the gold standard as a great foundation of our liberties precisely because gold is so expensive to mine. Mining expenses reduce the rate of monetary inflation. The gold standard is not a perfect arrangement, he said, but its effects are far less deleterious than the power of a monopolistic State or a State-licensed banking system to create credit money. The economic effects of gold are far more predictable, because they are more regular. Geology acts as a greater barrier to monetary inflation than can any man-made institutional arrangement. [Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, [1912] 1951), pp. 209–11, 238–40.] The booms will be smaller, the busts will be less devastating, and the redistribution involved in all inflation (or deflation, for that matter) can be more easily planned for.
On all this, see my on-line book, Mises On Money.
Nature is niggardly. This is a blessing for us in the area of monetary policy, assuming that we limit ourselves to a monetary system legally tied to specie metals. We would not need gold if, and only if, we could be guaranteed that the government or banks would not tamper with the supply of money in order to gain their own short-run benefits. For as long as that temptation exists, gold (or silver, or platinum) will alone serve as a protection against policies of mass inflation.
HOW WOULD THE SYSTEM WORK?
The collective entity known as the nation, as well as another collective, the State, will always have a desire to increase its percentage of the world’s economic goods. In international terms, this means that there will always be an incentive for a nation to mine all the gold that it can. While it is true that economics cannot tell us that an increase in the world’s gold supply will result in an increase in aggregate social utility, economic reasoning does inform us that the nation which gains access to newly mined gold at the beginning will able to buy at yesterday’s prices. World prices will rise in the future as a direct result, but he who gets there "fustest with the mostest" does gain an advantage. What applies to an individual citizen miner applies equally to national entities.
So much for technicalities. What about the so-called "gold stock"? In a free market society that permits all of its residents to own gold and gold coins, there will be a whole host of gold coins, there will be a whole host of gold stocks. (By "stock," I mean gold hoard, not a share in some company.) Men will own stocks of gold, institutions like banks will have stocks of gold, and all levels of civil government – city, county, national – will possess gold stocks. All of these institutions, including the family, could issue paper IOU slips for gold, although the slips put out by known institutions would no doubt circulate with greater ease (if what is known about them is favorable). The "national stock of gold" in such a situation would refer to the combined individual stocks.
Within this hypothetical world, let us assume that the United States Government wishes to purchase a fleet of German automobiles for its embassy in Germany. The American people are therefore taxed to make the funds available. Our government now pays the German central bank (or similar middleman) paper dollars in order to purchase German marks. Because, in our hypothetical world, all national currencies are 100 percent gold-backed, this would be an easy arrangement. Gold would be equally valuable everywhere (excluding shipping costs and, of course, the newly mined gold which keeps upsetting our analysis), so the particular paper denominations are not too important. Result: the German firm gets its marks, the American embassy gets its cars, and the middleman has a stock of paper American dollars.
These bills are available for the purchase of American goods or American gold directly by the middleman, but he, being a specialist working the area of currency exchange, is more likely to make those dollars available (at a fee) for others who want them. They, in turn, can buy American goods, services, or gold. This should be clear enough.
PAPER PROMISES ARE EASILY BROKEN
Money is useful only for exchange, and this is especially true of paper money (gold, at least, can be made into wedding rings, earrings, nose rings, and so forth). If there is no good reason to mistrust the American government – we are speaking hypothetically here – the paper bills will probably be used by professional importers and exporters to facilitate the exchange of goods. The paper will circulate, and no one bothers with the gold. Gold just sits there in the vaults, gathering dust. As long as the governments of the world refuse to print more paper bills than they have gold to redeem them, their gold stays put.
It would be wrong to say that gold has no economic function, however. It does, and the fact that we must forfeit storage space and payment for security systems testifies to that valuable function. It keeps governments from tampering with their domestic monetary systems.
Obviously, we do not live in the hypothetical world which I have sketched. What we see today is a short-circuited international gold standard. National governments have monopolized the control of gold for exchange purposes; they can now print more IOU slips than they have gold. Domestic populations cannot redeem their slips. The governments create more and more slips, the banks create more and more credit, and we are deluged in money of decreasing purchasing power. The rules of the game have been shifted to favor the expansion of centralized power. The laws of economics, however, are still in effect.
TRADING WITHOUT GOLD
One can easily imagine a situation in which a nation has a tiny gold reserve in its national treasury. If its people produce, say, bananas, and they limit their purchases of foreign goods by what they receive in foreign exchange for exported bananas, the national treasury needs to transfer no gold. The nation’s currency unit has purchasing power (exported bananas) apart from any gold reserves.
If, for some reason, it wants to increase its national stock of gold (perhaps the government plans to fight a war, and it wants a reserve of gold to buy goods in the future, since gold stores more conveniently than bananas), the government can get the gold. All it needs to do is take the foreign money gained through the sale of bananas and use it to buy gold instead of other economic goods. This will involve taxation, of course, but that is what all wars involve. If you spend less than you receive, you are saving the residual. A government can save gold. That’s really what a gold reserve is: a savings account.
This is a highly simplified example. I use it to convey a basic economic fact: if you produce a good (other than gold), and you use it to export in order to gain foreign currency, than you do not need a gold reserve. You have chosen to hoard foreign currency instead of gold. That applies to citizens and governments equally well.
What, then, is the role of gold in international trade? Free market economist Patrick Boarman (the translator of Wilhelm Roepke’s Economics of the Free Society) explained the mechanism of international exchange in The Wall Street Journal (May 10, 1965).
The function of international reserves is NOT to consummate international transactions. These are, on the contrary, financed by ordinary commercial credit supplied either by exporters, or in some cases by international institutions. Of such commercial credit there is in individual countries normally no shortage, or internal credit policy can be adjusted to make up for any un-toward tightness of funds. In contrast, international reserves are required to finance only the inevitable net differences between the value of a country’s total imports and its total exports; their purpose is not to finance trade itself, but net trade imbalances.
The international gold standard, like the free market’s rate of interest, served as an equilibrating device. I think it will again someday. What it is supposed to equilibrate is not gross world trade but net trade imbalances. Boarman’s words throw considerable light on the perpetual discussion concerning the increase of "world monetary liquidity."
A country will experience a net movement of its reserves, in or out, only where its exports of goods and services and imports of capital are insufficient to offset its imports of goods and services and exports of capital. Equilibrium in the balance of payments is attained not by increasing the quantity of a mythical "world money" but by establishing conditions in which autonomous movements of capital will offset the net results, positive and negative, of the balance of trade.
Some trade imbalances are temporarily inevitable. Natural or social disasters take place, and these may reduce a nation’s productivity for a period of time. The nation’s "savings" – its gold stock – can then be used to purchase goods and services from abroad. Specifically, it will purchase with gold all those goods and services needed above those available in trade for current exports. If a nation plans to fight a long war, or if it expects domestic rioting, then, of course, it should have a larger gold stock than a nation which expects peaceful conditions. If a nation plans to print up millions and even billions of IOU slips in order to purchase foreign goods, it had better have a large gold stock to redeem the slips. But that is merely another kind of trade imbalance, and is covered by Boarman’s exposition.
THE GUARDS
A nation that relies on the free market to balance supply and demand, imports and exports, production and consumption, will not need a large gold stock to encourage trade. Gold’s function is to act as a restraint on government’s spending more than the government takes in. If a government takes in revenues from its citizenry, and then exports the paper bills or fully backed credit to pay for some foreign good, then there is no necessity for the government to deplete its semi-permanent gold reserves. The gold will sit idle – idle in the sense of physical movement, but not idle in the sense of being economically irrelevant.
The fact that a nation’s gold does not move is no more (and no less) significant than the fact that the guards who are protecting this gold can sit quietly on the job if the storage system is really efficient. Gold in a nation’s treasury guards its citizens from that old messianic dream of getting something for nothing. This is also the function of the guards who protect the gold. The guard who is not very important in a "thief-proof" building is also a kind of "equilibrating device." He is there just in case the overall system should experience a temporary failure.
A nation that permits the free market to function is, by analogy, also "thief-proof." Everyone who consumes is required by the system to offer something in exchange. During economic emergencies, the gold is used, like the guard is used during vault emergencies. Theoretically, the free market economy could do without a large national gold reserve, in the same sense that a perfectly designed vault could do without guards. The nation that requires huge gold reserves is like a vault that needs extra guards: something is probably breaking down somewhere – or breaking in.
CONCLUSION
What I have been trying to explain is that a full gold coin standard, within the framework of a free market economy, would permit the large mass of citizens to possess gold. This means that the "national reserves of gold," that is, the State’s gold hoard, would not have to be very large.
If we were to re-establish full domestic convertibility of paper money for gold coins (as it was before 1933), while removing the "legal tender" provision of the Federal Reserve Notes, the American economy would still function. It would function far better in the long run. Consumers would be able to reassert their sovereignty over politicians and government-licensed bankers.
This, of course, is not the world we live in. Because America is not a free society in the sense that I have pictured here, we must make certain compromises with our theoretical model. The statement in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial would be completely true only in an economy using a full gold coin standard: "The best way for a nation to build confidence in its currency is not to bury lots of gold in the ground." Quite true; gold would be used for purposes of exchange, although one might save for a "rainy day" by burying gold. But if governments refused to inflate their currencies, few people would need to bury their gold, and neither would the government.
If a government wants to build confidence, it should "pursue responsible financial policies," that is, it should not spend more than it takes in. The editorial’s conclusion is accurate: "If a country does so consistently enough, it’s likely to find its gold growing dusty from disuse."
In order to remove the necessity of a large gold hoard, all we need to do is follow policies that will "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense [with few, if any, entangling alliances], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
To the extent that a nation departs from those goals, it will need a large gold hoard, for it costs a great deal to finance injustice, domestic violence, and general illfare. With the latter policies in effect, we find that the gold simply pours out of the Treasury, as "net trade imbalances" between the State and everyone else begin to mount. A moving ingot gathers no dust.
This leads us to "North’s Corollary to the Gold Standard" (tentative):
"The fiscal responsibility of a nation’s economic policies can be measured directly in terms of the thickness of the layer of dust on its gold reserves: the thicker the layer, the more responsible the policies."
This article is a revision of an article that I published in The Freeman in 1969. My analysis has not changed since 1969, but the price level in the United States is 4.9 times higher. See the inflation calculator of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The government’s gross national debt (on-budget debt, not accrual debt, which is vastly larger) at the end of 1969 was $366 billion. At the end of this year, it will be approximately $5.9 trillion.
The Establishment still ridicules gold. The public still doesn’t understand gold. And academic economists tell us that central banking is the wave of the future: the best conceivable world.
The more things change (debt, prices), the more they stay the same (economic opinions).
November 14, 2003
Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.freebooks.com. For a free subscription to Gary North's newsletter on gold, click here.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north225.html
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
F.B.I. PLANS MAJOR D.N.A. HARVESTING..
DNA of millions will be kept by government police..
FBI may collect juveniles' DNA..
By Richard Willing, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — DNA profiles from hundreds of thousands of juvenile offenders and adults arrested but not convicted of crimes could be added to the FBI's national DNA crime-fighting program under a proposed law moving through Congress..
The law, if enacted, would be the greatest single expansion of the federal government's power to collect and use DNA since the FBI's national database was created in 1992. The FBI says its national DNA database holds genetic profiles from about 1.4 million adults convicted of state and federal crimes.
The changes, in a little-noticed section of a bill that would authorize $755 million for DNA testing, were approved by the House of Representatives on Nov. 5. Backers say the Senate is likely to approve a similar version by early next year.
The FBI system works by using computers to match a person's DNA, the cellular acid that contains an individual's unique genetic code, to DNA taken from unsolved state and federal crimes. Using DNA drawn from convicted adults, the system made 8,920 matches through September, the FBI says.
Proponents, including the Bush administration, say that expanding the number of profiles in the database would greatly increase the number of crimes solved. Keeping DNA profiles on file to solve future crimes, they argue, differs little from maintaining a database of fingerprints, which the FBI also does.
The American Civil Liberties Union counters that DNA is different because it contains genetic information that should be kept private. Taking a person's DNA before he is even convicted, said ACLU Washington lobbyist Jesselyn McCurdy, "removes the presumption of innocence."
Advocates for juveniles say that giving teenagers what amounts to a "permanent criminal genetic record" defeats the purpose of the juvenile justice system by treating the youths as adults.
"It runs counter to the tenets of juvenile court, which is toward confidentiality and giving a child another opportunity to turn around," said Nancy Gannon of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, which advises state governments on justice policy.
Thirty states already collect DNA from juvenile offenders, typically ages 13-17, for their own use. In 1998, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 634,000 youths were found responsible for crimes by juvenile courts or other authorities.
Virginia began taking DNA from arrestees in January and expects to collect 8,000 samples this year. Other states are considering arrestee sampling. To date, Virginia has matched DNA taken from arrestees to 40 unsolved crimes, including 11 sexual assaults. But federal laws prevent these samples from being added to the national database and compared to unsolved crimes in other states.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-11-16-fbi-juvenile-dna_x.htm
Databases Ripe for Abuse..
Cato Institute..
by Timothy Lynch
August 21, 2000
Timothy Lynch is director of the Cato Institute\'s Project on Criminal Justice.
The federal government is constantly trying to expand its purview over every aspect of American life. And wherever the feds go -- whether it be health care or education -- they inevitably demand information about people. Sooner than you think, the feds will want your DNA to be stored in an FBI database.
Congress unleashed a runaway train in 1994 when it established a program called Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). The CODIS program offered state officials federal funds if they assisted the FBI with DNA-sample collection. By 1998, all 50 states had passed laws requiring local police departments to collect DNA samples. At first, the demand for DNA collection seemed innocuous and uncontroversial. Only convicted sex offenders would be required to give DNA samples. Such a database would enable the authorities to track down serial rapists. Who could oppose that?
Once the DNA database was established, however, the police quickly realized that they could increase their chances of catching criminals by expanding it. We've been sliding down the slippery slope ever since.
The second stage was to get a sample from all convicted felons, not just sex offenders. In New York, Gov. George Pataki is pushing to require anyone convicted of a misdemeanor to submit to DNA profiling. The former police commissioner of New York City, Howard Safir, goes even further. He says that any person arrested should be included in the database. According to Safir, "The only ones who have anything to worry about from DNA testing are criminals." Then why stop with arrestees? Why not obtain samples from every single American?
There is, of course, cause for concern. Federal officials have abused their powers in the past, such as by throwing Japanese-Americans into detention camps, by conducting barbaric experiments on black men in Tuskegee, Ala., and by deliberately exposing GIs to atomic blasts, to name just a few.
If we believe that tomorrow's political leaders will somehow be incapable of abusing their power over a fully centralized DNA database, the next generation will never forgive us -- and rightly so.
This article originally appeared in The USA Today on August 21, 2000.
http://www.cato.org/research/articles/lynch-000821.html
As most are aware..
Most people in America have it in their minds that the Second Amendment protects one’s right to maintain ownership of firearms..
In the post mentioned above, I put such philosophy in question with applying a legal principle or “term of art” to whom said amendment actually applies..
In regard, as one can imagine, there were some out there that selected to be upset or came up with arguments of what was stated in the post. Moreover, I have been going back-and-forth with this position with others in the “patriot community” for years now.
Made it be known that the post was not meant to be construed that I do not agree with the right of a man or woman to maintain such right. I highly support the NATURAL RIGHT of a man to protect himself, his family, and his country by use of arms. The point of this instant post in reference was to establish that the Second Amendment does not encompass such right. The purpose of the post was an exercise to attempt to get people off invalid arguments and/or positions so they are not wasting time and/or looking incompetent and/or foolish.
Now, back in regard to arguments of which were proposed, the most interesting argument was that the cite I used from US v. STEWART, No. 0210318 (9th Cir. November 13, 2003) used the word or term “individual”. See below:
“We have held that the Second Amendment “was not adopted in order to afford rights to individuals with respect to private gun ownership or possession.” Silveira v. Lockyer 312 F. 3d 1052, 1087 (9th Cir, 2002)”
Although one can consider that the term individual means a “citizen of the United States” (or federal citizen) as defined by Title 5 USC Section 552a as amended—hence meaning a 14th Amendment citizen—such argument is without merit. Another argument was the punctuation made a difference. This latter position is something that I had run across about ten years ago. Although punctuation is important to sentence construction, in this instant case it carries no substance. The plain and simple position in this matter is the term of art used and the intent of the Bill of Rights. Expanding on that issue, there are matters where I have problems with intent of clauses in constitutions and statutes, but in the instant case the term “the people” really confirms the intent.
In the case of Silveira v. Lockyer (312 F. 3d 1052, 1087 (9th Cir, 2002)) I found a couple of footnotes in said case to reaffirm what I had concluded and stated. I remind you that I had not read Silveira v. Lockyer prior to writing this post. Below is where the court noted “the people” as being a term of art known:
Footnote 25 from Silveira v. Lockyer, 312 F. 3d 1052, 1087 (9th Cir, 2002)” quoting United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 265 (1990) (citations omitted). The use of the word “people” should have the same meaning in the Second Amendment as it does throughout the Constitution: “[T]he people” seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution. The Preamble declares that the Constitution is ordained and established by “the People of the United States.” The Second Amendment protects “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments provide that certain rights and powers are retained by and reserved to “the people.” While this textual exegesis is by no means conclusive, it suggests that “the people” protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a CLASS OF PERSONS [emphasis mine] who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.”
Note that the court stealthily stated “class of persons”, i.e. “the people”. Now, reviewing what I stated “the people” meant:
PEOPLE. "The popular leaders, who in all ages have called themselves THE PEOPLE", etc. Bl Comm 438 (Ballentine's Law Dictionary)
That was the “class of persons” the court was referring to. Please note that the court did not say exactly what it meant. This is one of the major problems I have with Black Robes (see p.s. also). They make a special effort to keep everyone in the dark… Hence my Number 1 Rule: DO NOT READ CASE LAW TO LEARN THE LAW. You have to use the doctrines which come mainly from sundry law dictionaries and other sources.
Now, going over a footnote from Silveira v. Lockyer supra that goes over pre and post Fourteenth Amendment issues of which may encompass the use of the term “individual” as used in the case of the original post:
Footnote 17 from Silveira v. Lockyer, 312 F. 3d 1052, 1087 (9th Cir, 2002)” In Hickman, we did not rely on our earlier decision in Fresno Rifle & Pistol Club, Inc. v. Van de Kamp, 965 F.2d 723 (9th Cir. 1992), that the Second Amendment is not incorporated by the Fourteenth and does not constrain actions by the states, although we noted in dictum that had standing existed, Fresno Rifle would be applicable. We undoubtedly followed that approach in Hickman because, as noted above, we must decide standing issues first. Fresno Rifle itself relied on United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), and Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 (1886), decided before the Supreme Court held that the Bill of Rights is incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. Following the now-rejected Barron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. (7 Pet.) 243 (1833) (holding that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states), Cruikshank and Presser found that the Second Amendment restricted the activities of the federal government, but not those of the states. One point about which we are in agreement with the Fifth Circuit is that Cruikshank and Presser rest on a principle that is now thoroughly discredited. See Emerson, 270 F.3d at 221 n.13. Because we decide this case on the threshold issue of standing, however, we need not consider the question whether the Second Amendment presently enjoins any action on the part of the states.
Note that they state “the now-rejected Barron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. (7 Pet.) 243 (1833) (holding that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states)”. Which is in fact stating: The Bill of Rights did not protect or apply to a man (or person) from a state action in 1833, but after the advent of the Fourteenth Amendment it now does or may apply. As I have been telling people for years, the Fourteenth Amendment had pulled everyone into the jurisdiction of the legislation of congress; however, the Fourteenth Amendment did not change the original purpose of the 2nd Amendment (or many others): It did not protect the rights of men that were in one of the several states then, and it still does not apply to men in the Fourteenth Amendment de facto States now. It applies to THE STATE.
Accordingly, below is the conclusion of the court from Silveira v. Lockyer, 312 F. 3d 1052, 1087 (9th Cir, 2002), of which states that the 2nd Amendment in the Bill or Rights does not apply to the right of an individual MAN to possess firearms.
“After conducting our analysis of the meaning of the words employed in the amendment’s two clauses, and the effect of their relationship to each other, we concluded that the language and structure of the amendment strongly support the collective rights view. The preamble establishes that the amendment’s purpose was to ensure the maintenance of effective state militias, and the amendment’s operative clause establishes that this objective was to be attained by preserving the right of the people to “bear arms” — to carry weapons in conjunction with their service in the militia. To resolve any remaining uncertainty, we carefully examined the historical circumstances surrounding the adoption of the amendment. Our review of the debates during the Constitutional Convention, the state ratifying conventions, and the First Congress, as well as the other historical materials we have discussed, confirmed what the text strongly suggested: that the amendment was adopted in order to protect the people from the threat of federal tyranny by preserving the right of the states to arm their militias. The proponents of the Second Amendment believed that only if the states retained that power could the existence of effective state militias — in which the people could exercise their right to “bear arms” — be ensured. The historical record makes it equally plain that the amendment was not adopted in order to afford rights to individuals with respect to private gun ownership or possession. Accordingly, we are persuaded that we were correct in Hickman that the collective rights view, rather than the individual rights models, reflects the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment. Thus, we hold that the Second Amendment imposes no limitation on California’s ability to enact legislation regulating or prohibiting the possession or use of firearms, including dangerous weapons such as assault weapons. Plaintiffs lack standing to assert a Second Amendment claim, and their challenge to the Assault Weapons Control Act fails.” Silveira v. Lockyer, 312 F. 3d 1052, 1087 (9th Cir, 2002)
Of course we know that “Governments are instituted by the consent of the governed.” That is the “collective” that was mentioned above. However, they left out that the collective then become subject to STATE, or THE PEOPLE, as citizens by voting consent or silence. More legal trickery by ignorance and disinformation.
In closing:
All such matters encompassed, the issue of the term “individual” is a frivolous position. As I stated in the post that prompted this response: In the original context of the US Constitution, one had no contract with the federal government, the states and officers thereof did (and still do). If you are a “citizen of the United States (i.e. federal citizen)” acting as a constituent of the de facto officers of these insurgent Fourteenth Amendment States (or governments), you can look to having your NATURAL RIGHTS restricted by the Police Power of the de facto state in which you live, and by the federal government (as you have choose to be under a protectoral (trust and other means) relationship—or do business with—it).
The issue is plain and simple: Legislation without Representation, i.e. the issue is the standing that you have in regard to the state (i.e. being that of a state national (freemen) or a US national (subject/slave) that is subject to a de facto state and congress under the 14th Amendment. Said amendment encompasses due process to be afforded by the states under the mandate of the federal government. That is about it.
I have attached Silveira v. Lockyer 312 F. 3d 1052, 1087 (9th Cir, 2002) so that you may review it.
It is a good case with lots of information to better your understanding.
Regards, LB Bork-PAC
p.s. I also had an associate tell me there was a book written by “liberal” law professors (sorry title escapes me) that set forth the Second Amendment did encompass the rights of an individual to own firearms. All I have to say to that is: What better way to advance the meritless argument to: a) hide the real truth about the US Constitution from the masses to maintain and illusion and control; and, b) to perpetuate the money that keeps going into attorney’s pockets that present such meritless arguments. Sorry, I have very little respect for the “Law Industry”, hence do not trust it much.
It is always from a minority..
Acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe..
That the majority in the end learns to do better..
~ Fredrich August von Hayek ~
Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
(1899-1992)
BRITISH SURVEILLANCE..
English are the most spied on people in the world..
Big Brother and Britain’s War on Terror
By George Thomas
CBN News Sr. Reporter
Today, the English are the most surveilled people in the world. With less than one-quarter of America's population, Britain has nearly three million surveillance cameras in the country.
CBN.com – LONDON — Britain recently revealed a highly sophisticated plan to protect London from a terrorist attack. Using the latest surveillance technology and a scheme to reduce downtown traffic, authorities have designed a "ring of steel" around the city. But not everyone is pleased with the heightened security at a potential cost to privacy.
Days after the September 11th attacks, Britain's top intelligence agencies began secretly drawing-up plans to prevent terrorists from launching an attack against London. Seventeen months later, they created what some say is one of the world's most formidable defense systems.
Now 800 video-surveillance cameras equipped with the latest infrared technology have been installed throughout central London.
The closed circuit television cameras, also known as CCTV, are mounted on poles at more than 200 entrance points around the city. The coverage includes all the capital's best known landmarks such as the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace.
The cameras were initially authorized as part of new effort to reduce traffic congestion in the city. London Mayor Ken Livingstone said, "Every traffic engineer in the world is following this, every city administration. I addressed the American Conference of Mayors on this. A lot of them said 'If it works and you get re-elected, I'll do it.'"
But not everyone is convinced. One British driver said, "It won't be good news for us, it will be bad news." When asked if it will make a difference to traffic in London, another driver said, "Not a dog's chance."
But London's most senior law enforcement official says the cameras will also be used to fight crime and terrorism.
Here’s how it works. Drivers entering the city now have to pay a five-Pound toll charge. That is roughly eight U.S. dollars. Once a car enters the toll zone, a camera detects the car and then captures the license plate. The information is then converted and saved on a database. The toll must be paid by midnight.
The license plate in the database is then compared to the payment database. If the toll is paid, the image of the vehicle and license plate number are deleted. If not paid, the license number is sent to another database to check registration details. The computer then sends out penalty notices. Once the penalty has been paid, the image of the vehicle and license are deleted. If three penalty notices have to be issued, the vehicle is impounded.
Those in charge of this highly sophisticated project hope that thousands of drivers will abandon their cars for public transportation. That would then lower the congestion in the city.
Derek Turner, an official with Transport for London, the private group in charge of the project, said, "It is clearly the largest scheme of its type, not just in the country, but in the world, and we are absolutely convinced it is going to work."
But the project is more than just about stopping congestion. The high-tech cameras can scan up to 3,000 license plates an hour giving police instant access to any suspicious vehicles. And there is more to these video cameras than meets the eye. They can also zoom in on the faces of drivers entering the city.
Terrorism consultant Dr. Magnus Ranstorp said, "Some of those cameras are extraordinarily sophisticated, they have facial recognition, pre-programmed is actually faces of criminals so that the computer will identify individuals who are wanted by the authorities."
All this information is then fed to a massive central computing center through fiber optic cables.
Today, the English are the most surveilled people in the world. With less than one-quarter of America's population, Britain has nearly three million surveillance cameras in the country — 10 percent of the world's total. Increasingly, the data from these cameras are being pooled.
Ranstorp said, "In fact there are very few places in London, particularly in the major metropolitan areas, were you would not have, were you would not be followed by a camera."
London is the most security conscious city in the world. Some have called it a fortress. Here in London's financial district and across the city, an average person is photographed up to 300 times a day.
But some are concerned that their country is becoming a police state. Privacy advocates argue the surveillance technology promotes a false sense of security and is a complete invasion of public privacy.
Gareth Crossman, head of policy at a London-based watchdog group called Liberty, said, "The concern is when the information and the footage from the CCTV cameras is just used as part of a fishing expedition in order to find out any information which might be available about people driving in and out of the city."
Crossman says millions have been misled over the dual function of this new surveillance system. He calls this "function creep."
"When a system is put in place, whether it be a CCTV system, ID Card system, it will always be put in for a particular purpose," he explained. "Once it's in place the government or whichever body it is that's introducing it, will then say, ‘Now that we have this system in place, let's see what else we can use it for.’ As a consequence, whatever is being initially proposed, you can almost guarantee that in a few years down the line, there will be all sorts of new suggestions as to what further uses it can be put to."
What is amazing about all this surveillance is that a majority of Brits don't seem too worried by it. In fact, the cameras are hailed as the people's technology.
And it's not just the English who are gaga over CCTV technology. Since 9/11, camera surveillance has been rising around the world.
The big question for Americans is, will the U.S. follow in Britain's footsteps? In the aftershock of the most devastating terrorist attacks in history, the U.S. government issued an urgent appeal for new security tools to stop terrorism. Billions of dollars in government contracts flowed to the most promising of the latest surveillance technologies.
Today, many private businesses, town governments and police departments across the U.S. are installing surveillance cameras.
In fact, 26 million surveillance cameras have already been installed worldwide, and 11 million of them are in the United States. That figure is expected to grow dramatically in the years to come.
And now at a time when U.S. federal agents watch Americans more closely than ever, privacy advocates want to know, who is watching the watchers?
http://www.cbn.com/CBNNews/News/030501a.asp
US insurance giants asked to scan files for terrorism suspects..
DETROIT - Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and Aetna have scoured the records of millions of patients, employees and health care providers in search of terrorists.
Company representatives said Blue Cross Blue Shield has checked 6 million Michigan files and Aetna has checked 13 million nationwide, including 18,000 in Michigan, The Detroit News reported Sunday.
None of the people whose records were checked was linked to terrorism, the insurers said.
"I wouldn't say we were asked. We are legally obligated to look to see whether we are somehow receiving any transaction of goods and services" from a suspected terrorist, said Blues spokeswoman Helen Stojic.
The government says it only demands that companies don't do business with terrorists.
Some customers, public policy experts and civil libertarians say health care insurers shouldn't conduct the investigations.
"It's kind of disgusting," said Virginia Rezmierski, an adjunct associate professor in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and School of Information at the University of Michigan. "At what point did Blue Cross Blue Shield become an arm of the government, as opposed to a service provider for people?"
Since last spring, the Blues' computers identified about 6,000 Michigan residents who matched names, addresses or other keywords on the government's list of terror suspects. A more extensive computer probe showed none was a terrorist suspect.
Fred Laberge, Aetna's assistant vice president for corporate relations, said his company also found no terrorists, but he declined to say how many false positives registered.
He said Aetna's search was less detailed than those conducted by the Blues, but would not elaborate.
Had the computer searches turned up any matches with the federal list, the insurers would freeze the customer's account and report the match to the government within 10 days. The government then would deal with the matches on a case-by-case basis, Treasury Department spokeswoman Anne Womack Kolton said.
Such computer searches are "not a requirement for anyone," Womack said. Businesses may "make the decision on their own" how to comply with an executive order signed by President Bush in 2001 aimed at preventing terrorists from laundering money through legitimate businesses, she said.
Blues subscriber Kimm Cristodero, 46, a receptionist at a doctor's office, said health care companies should stay out of government inquiries into terrorist activities.
The government has enough tools to fight terrorism without involving private businesses, she said.
"I'm all for fighting terrorism, but the government already has all kinds of secretive laws to work with," said Cristodero, who lives in Warren. "Why would the health care industry get involved?"
The names of the 6,000 Michiganians popped out of the Blues computers because their files matched one or more keywords in the government's terrorist list: names, hostile nations, even the names of passenger ships on which the subscriber traveled.
For example, the insurance company said, a person who lived on Lebanon Street might show up as a potential terrorist.
Suspicious names were then further investigated by employees to determine whether there was a true match.
The Blues' computer checks will continue monthly for new subscribers, employees and health care providers.
Barry Steinhardt, the national director of the technology and liberty program for the American Civil Liberties Union, said people don't buy health insurance to launder money.
"This appears to be another case of a company that is invading the privacy of its customers in a zeal to participate in the homeland security effort," he said.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/7277705.htm
PATRIOT ACT.. SHOW US YOUR MONEY!.
Feds spy on your finances. But does it help catch terrorists?
John Berlau
"This is really a bill which, if enacted into law, will be [a longer] step in the direction of stopping terrorism than any other we have had before this Congress in a long time," one of the bill’s sponsors declared. The legislation authorized broad surveillance of financial transactions, bypassing the Fourth Amendment’s normal protections against "unreasonable searches and seizures" by requiring businesses to collect and share information with the government. After the measure passed and was signed into law, the debate was far from over. The American Civil Liberties Union and other critics continued to rail against the law as an unnecessary breach of privacy.
"Under the act and regulations the reports go forward to the investigative or prosecuting agency...without notice to the customer," one civil libertarian wrote. "Delivery of the records without the requisite hearing of probable cause breaches the Fourth Amendment....I am not yet ready to agree that America is so possessed with evil that we must level all constitutional barriers to give our civil authorities the tools to catch terrorists."
But times have changed, one of the law’s defenders countered. "While an act conferring such broad authority over transactions such as these might well surprise or even shock those who lived in an earlier era," he wrote, "the latter did not...live to see the heavy utilization of our domestic banking system by the minions of organized terrorism as well as by millions of legitimate businessmen." The author did not "think it was strange or irrational that Congress, having its attention called to what appeared to be serious and organized efforts to avoid detection of terrorist activity, should have legislated to rectify the situation."
These may sound like the arguments for and against the USA PATRIOT Act, passed immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001. But they concern another piece of legislation, the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) of 1970. The only change I made to these decades-old quotes was to substitute the word terrorist for criminal and terrorism for crime.
The congressman was Wright Patman, the populist Texas Democrat who pushed through the bill on the premise that it would help fight drug trafficking, tax evasion, and other crimes, including the then-prohibited ownership of gold as a commodity. The civil libertarian was Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. In the 1974 case California Bankers Association v. Shultz, Douglas wrote a dissent, joined by Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, concluding that the Bank Secrecy Act violated the Fourth Amendment. The final quote is from William Rehnquist, now the Court’s chief justice, who wrote the majority opinion upholding the law.
Needle in a Haystack
The reason the arguments sound familiar is that the BSA set the precedent for much of the PATRIOT Act, not to mention government fishing expeditions such as the Pentagon’s aborted Total Information Awareness program. The law authorized the government to require bank reports of all transactions over a dollar value set by the Treasury Department, even if there is no reason to suspect a criminal connection. For the first time, in the words of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, "the government claim[ed] the legal right to maintain routine surveillance, without summons, subpoena, or warrant, over the details of citizens’ financial transactions."
The district court struck down the BSA’s reporting requirement, but its decision was reversed by the Supreme Court. In a complicated majority opinion, Rehnquist said that banks, as businesses, don’t have the same Fourth Amendment rights as individuals. The opinion relied on the many post-New Deal cases that minimized economic liberties, including one that said "corporations can claim no equality with individuals in the enjoyment of a right to privacy." In this and in a subsequent BSA case, U.S. v. Miller (1976), the Court ruled that a bank’s customers generally lack standing to challenge the law.
Law enforcement agencies thus found a convenient end run around the Fourth Amendment. They can access the details of a bank customer’s transactions from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) without showing probable cause -- or any evidence at all. That is why the PATRIOT Act’s defenders argue that the law is not a radical departure from what the government already had the power to do. Writing in the Summer 2003 issue of City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald accuses the PATRIOT Act’s opponents of trying to "invent new rights," because it has long been the case that "there is no Fourth Amendment privacy right in records or other items disclosed to third parties."
While Mac Donald may be partly right about the case law, she overlooks two important questions. One is whether surveillance programs like FinCEN are consistent with the principles of a free society. The other is how effective they’ve been: Have we gotten more security during the last 30 years in exchange for the privacy we’ve sacrificed? Looking specifically at the BSA and other bank surveillance measures, prominent experts in law enforcement, national security, and technology say the answer is no. The record of FinCEN, the agency that was charged with tracking terrorist financing prior to 9/11, seems to vindicate their arguments. The lack of success with the financial information that the government has long been collecting does not bode well for more-ambitious data dredging plans. Indeed, experience suggests that piling up more data could make it harder to zero in on terrorists.
"I consider all these measures to be highly counterproductive," says John Yoder, director of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Office in the Reagan administration. "It costs more to enforce and regulate them than the benefits that are received. You’re getting so much data on people who are absolutely legitimate and who are doing nothing wrong. There’s just so much paperwork out there that it’s really not a targeted effort. You have investigators running around chasing innocent people, trying to find something that they’re doing wrong, rather than targeting real criminals."
The paperwork is indeed massive. Even before the PATRIOT Act, banks sent more than 12 million transaction reports to the government in 2000 alone. In a 2000 report for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, economist Lawrence Lindsey, who later became head of the Bush administration’s National Economic Council, calculated that banks file more than 100,000 reports on innocent customers for every money laundering conviction. Oliver "Buck" Revell, a highly decorated 30-year veteran of the FBI who supervised the bureau’s counterterrorism division in the 1980s and ’90s, agrees that the sheer volume of data generated by these measures can overwhelm law enforcement efforts. "You can be buried in an avalanche of information," Revell says. "The total volume of activity makes it very difficult to track and trace any type of specific information....It’s virtually impossible to look at millions and millions of CTRs [currency transaction reports] and make any sense out of them if you don’t have some prior intelligence as to what might be occurring."
Yoder argues that the information overload from bank surveillance contributed to the intelligence failure before the September 11 attacks. "We already had so much information that we weren’t really focusing on the right stuff," he says. "What good does it do to gather more paperwork when you’re already so awash in paperwork that you’re not paying attention to your own currently existing intelligence gathering system?"
While it did not cite the BSA directly, the recently published Joint Congressional Inquiry report on intelligence lapses before 9/11 did find that law enforcement and intelligence agencies faced a "huge volume of intelligence reporting," within which were "various threads and pieces of information that, at least in retrospect, are relevant and significant." The report concluded that "although relevant information...was available to the Intelligence Community prior to September 11, 2001, the Community too often failed to focus on that information and consider and appreciate its collective significance in terms of a probable terrorist attack." This was partly because analysts were trying to find a needle in a very large haystack of data created by laws like the BSA.
Banker or Spy?
Fears that the BSA would swamp law enforcement with data were expressed from the beginning. The federal court decision striking down the law’s reporting requirement (issued, coincidentally, on September 11, 1972) called the BSA a "far-fetched" way to catch criminals and warned that it could be counterproductive. The court quoted an IRS commissioner as saying that "the creation of a mass of paper beyond our capacity to utilize could have the effect of submerging and making unobtainable information of special interest to us."
Despite such concerns, financial surveillance has been massively expanded during the last 30 years, while other intelligence-gathering techniques, such as the use of informants, have been sharply restricted. The Treasury Department’s BSA regulations required banks, subject to some exemptions, to file a currency transaction report on every cash transfer of $10,000 or more. In the 1990s, the department established FinCEN, which expanded the regulations to require that banks file "suspicious activity reports" on all transactions of $5,000 or more if they have "no apparent lawful purpose or are not the sort in which the particular customer would normally be expected to engage." Banks are forbidden to notify customers about the reports. "In effect, bankers have been drafted as spies and snitches," wrote banking industry consultant Bert Ely in a 2002 paper for the conservative Free Congress Foundation.
"Know Your Customer" rules, proposed by FinCEN and the Federal Reserve in 1998, would have required banks to profile every customer’s "normal and expected transactions" and report the slightest deviation to the feds. The rules were withdrawn after the Libertarian Party, the ACLU, and other groups helped generate 300,000 public comments in opposition.
But according to Wired magazine, as of 1999 more than 88 percent of U.S. banks already had "Know Your Customer" policies in place to satisfy regulators who looked at their suspicious activity reports. And after the September 11 attacks, regulators began openly using the phrase again. At an American Bankers Association conference in October 2001, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Vice President Suzanna Costello told the audience her agency was "looking for...effective Know Your Customer" programs at the banks it regulates. "A year ago, I wouldn’t have even said ‘Know Your Customer,’" she said. "But I see that it’s back."
The Citizen-Soldier Burden
Customer surveillance is not just at banks anymore. In his dissent in the California Bankers Association case, Justice Douglas made a sarcastic suggestion that turned out to be prophetic:
"It would be highly useful to government espionage to have reports from all our bookstores, all our hardware and retail stores, all our drugstores....What one buys at the hardware and retail stores may furnish clues to potential uses of wires, soap powders, and the like used by criminals."
Even before 9/11, FinCEN had put out a rule applying the "suspicious activity" reporting requirement to any establishment that processed money orders or sold smart cards, including convenience stores. The PATRIOT Act extended the requirement to many more businesses. FinCEN, pursuant to the act, recently put the "suspicious activity" reporting rules into effect for brokerage houses, and real estate transactions are next on the list. The law also specifically covers casinos, credit card agencies, and life insurers. In the next few months, the Broward Daily Business Review reports, "the Treasury Department will decide whether the act covers travel agents, automobile dealers, mutual funds and dealers in precious metals and stones." And under the law, virtually all businesses, including the "hardware and retail stores" mentioned by Douglas, now have to report to the government any cash purchases over $10,000.
Treasury Department General Counsel David Aufhauser explained the new reporting requirements this way in a 2002 interview with The Washington Post: "The Patriot Act is imposing a citizen-soldier burden on the gatekeepers of financial institutions." He justified this burden by arguing that "they are in the best position to police attempts by people who would do ill to us in the U.S. to penetrate the financial system."
Few politicians, even among those who have criticized other parts of the PATRIOT Act, are willing to challenge the proposition that businesses should be deputized to spy on their customers. The late Justices Douglas, Brennan, and Marshall might be shocked that liberal Democrats in Congress such as Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Paul Sarbanes of Maryland have been the biggest proponents of expanding the Bank Secrecy Act. They see it as a way of targeting wealthy people who pay less than their "fair share" in taxes by moving some of their investments overseas. The only member of Congress who has gone on record in support of repealing the BSA entirely is Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).
Yet given the BSA’s track record, experts say there’s no reason to believe the new financial surveillance measures will stop the next attack. They could simply swamp law enforcement with even more useless data. The critics say reporting mandates have flooded the government with massive volumes of irrelevant information, such as reports on the "suspicious activities" of law-abiding customers withdrawing large amounts of money for medical treatment or depositing thousands of dollars in casino winnings, and have not been effective in either attacking the drug trade or preventing terrorist attacks.
J. Michael Waller, vice president of the Center for Security Policy, a hawkish D.C. think tank, is usually not in sync with the ACLU. He fully supports Attorney General John Ashcroft’s detention of Arab visitors and advocates targeted ethnic profiling. But he calls the BSA’s routine mass surveillance measures "really, really dumb."
"To me, it’s just a well-intentioned thing with no cojones behind it," says Waller, who is also a professor of international communications at the Institute of World Politics in Washington. "It’s a huge burden on the banks. It could mean that every time somebody trades in some stock and just buys other stock with the same money, it’s got to be reported to FinCEN. [FinCEN bureaucrats] are giving themselves millions of times more information than they can possibly handle or analyze....What if you get a $25,000 or $50,000 book advance? ‘Oh, that’s an anomaly; let’s look at this guy.’ Think of the probably millions of anomalies occurring every day. It’s really stupid."
Hawala Bungle
Although it was not one of the agencies covered in the 9/11 report, FinCEN had its own intelligence failures, and they cast light on how effective the expanded financial reporting mandates might be. In the months prior to 9/11, FinCEN appeared to be choking on the flood of bank reports it received. In the March 25, 2002, issue of Insight, Jamie Dettmer reported that "Treasury sources say there is a two-year backlog of SARs [suspicious activity reports] still waiting to be entered into the agency’s computers." In addition, several banking compliance officers told him "they were unaware of any SARs they’d filed being followed up by federal investigators."
FinCEN apparently was so busy processing paperwork that it ignored the valuable advice of one of its experts -- advice that many say could have led to the Al Qaeda money trail. Patrick Jost, who came to FinCEN in the ’90s with an atypical background as a jazz musician, linguistics instructor, and video game programmer, was an expert on hawala, the shadowy, informal system of money trading in South Asian and Middle Eastern countries that leaves a very faint paper trail. In a hawala transaction, someone from Pakistan living in America could send money back home by paying a U.S. vendor, who in turn would contact a trusted partner in Pakistan, who would give the money in local currency to its intended recipient. The money technically never leaves the U.S. It is a money transfer without money movement. Although hawala is often used for innocent purposes such as sending money to relatives, in the late ’90s there was already evidence that it was being used by terrorists. As Jost documented in a 1998 paper he co-wrote for Interpol, terrorists used hawala to finance a series of bomb blasts in Bombay, India, in 1993.
William Wechsler, head of a White House working group on terrorist financing, met with Jost in 1999. Wechsler recalls that after hearing Jost’s explanation of hawala, he spread the word to counterterrorism experts in the government, many of whom contacted Jost for help. Jost was also doing research on other aspects of terrorist financing, such as the countries terrorist money flows through. But FinCEN, even though it was charged with helping law enforcement track criminal money laundering, instructed him to decline Jost’s offer of assistance and discouraged him from pursuing further research on terrorism financing. Jost told The Washington Post in 2001 that FinCEN Director James Sloan and Chief of Operations Connie Fenchel "didn’t want FinCEN to pursue this line of work." According to the Post, after being "made to feel unwelcome, Jost left government in June 2000." (Jost and FinCEN officials declined to comment for this article.)
Wechsler recalls that the issue of terrorism did not seem to be a high priority for FinCEN, which appeared much more interested in processing data for the drug war. "FinCEN, along with the rest of the federal law enforcement community, for too long assigned far too low a priority to understanding the nature of and the threat from underground remittance systems, like the hawala network," he says.
Now that supposedly has changed. FinCEN has set up a toll-free number for banks to report transactions they truly think are suspicious, and the Treasury Department has a targeted "watch list" of suspected terrorists for banks to report on. But FinCEN and other agencies will still be inundated with an even bigger flood of reports about mostly legal financial transactions, thanks to the mandates of the BSA and the PATRIOT Act.
Wechsler, along with other Clinton administration officials such as Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Eizenstat, supported the expansion of "suspicious activity" reporting. (He proudly claims that "there are a lot of provisions of the PATRIOT Act that the Clinton administration had asked for.") He argues that new technology will be able to sift through the data. "We should spend the money that it takes to make sure we are able to use the information as effectively as possible, and that we are able to give back to the banking community the after-action reports, how it was used," he says. "But all of those are marginal questions compared to the overall statement that this is way too burdensome and useless. It’s nonsense; it’s very useful."
Yet for 30 years agencies have said technology eventually would be able to pinpoint the needle in this enormous haystack, and the elusive technology has yet to appear. The Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) project was aimed at developing methods to sift through huge volumes of data from public and private sources, looking for patterns that could indicate terrorist activity. After a loud public outcry about the privacy implications, Congress voted earlier this year to deny the project funding. Now the Pentagon is trying to revive it under a new name, Terrorism Information Awareness.
Missing Human Intelligence
Professional criminals often know the banking laws and how to get around them. And terrorist money, without prior intelligence, appears to be even harder to track than drug money. While large cash transfers can occasionally tip off authorities to drug activity, terrorists leave few telltale financial signs. As Jost pointed out in Senate testimony in late 2001, money used for terrorism often comes from legal businesses and charities. "With a certain amount of simplification, money laundering and terrorist financing are opposites," he said. "In money laundering, dirty money becomes clean; in terrorist financing, clean money become dirty."
Take the September 11 hijackers. The only way we know of that any of them broke the law prior to the attacks was by overstaying their visas. They gave no signs to the financial institutions they dealt with that they were plotting something sinister. "The terrorists didn’t spend a whole lot," observes Richard Rahn, a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and the author of The End of Money and the Struggle for Financial Privacy. "They stayed in cheap hotels, ate in cheap restaurants and rode in cheap rental cars....And so these measures that are promulgated to try to just collect financial information willy-nilly are not really very useful." Bert Ely, the banking consultant, noted in his Free Congress Foundation paper that "the FBI has estimated that the Sept. 11th hijackers spent just $500,000 over more than a year carrying out their diabolical acts. Payments moving through the U.S. financial system average $1.7 trillion per business day."
A SunTrust bank in Florida did file an internal report, as required for wire transfers of $3,000 or more, on money received by 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta, which came from the United Arab Emirates in 2000 and totaled more than $100,000. But "there was nothing unusual in the way those accounts and transactions were opened or maintained," says SunTrust spokesman Barry Koling. The only possible tipoff was that the money came from the UAE, which Jost had identified in his 1998 Interpol report as a hotbed of hawala and terrorism financing. But FinCEN apparently had not issued any warnings about the UAE, as it had about Colombia and other hot drug spots.
That oversight illustrates the importance of what’s called "human intelligence." Both privacy and national security advocates say that since the advent of massive data-
bases and laws like the BSA, the government too often has relied on technology as a savior and disregarded the importance of human sources, both experts in the field and snitches among the bad guys. FBI veteran Revell says that in his major cases, it was the informant who led to the financial data, not the other way around. "When we were investigating the skimming of the casinos by the mob in Las Vegas [in the late 1970s and early ’80s], we had to have intelligence on how it was being done before we could really determine evidence of how it was being done," he recalls. "The development of informants within the mob’s control structure of Las Vegas led us to be able to discover the money laundering and to bring charges and wipe the mafia out in Las Vegas."
Even data mining experts say the most advanced technology is useless without human intelligence. "The data won’t do anything unless you ask the right questions," says Marc Epstein, CEO of Data Mining International, a Los Gatos, California, firm that makes software for the U.S. Customs Service and other law enforcement agencies. Epstein says that before the government starts collecting massive data for a TIA-style program, it should make better use of the data it has. He says there is much that can be gleaned simply from the customs data of goods going into and out of the country. "From a pure law enforcement point of view, putting aside privacy concerns, more information is better," Epstein says. "But we’re not using the information that we have well."
30 Years of Failure
There are plenty in the tech world who would take issue with Epstein’s assertion that more information is always better. Software engineer Bruce Schneier, for example, has written about the inevitable problem of "false positives" in a large database. Passengers at airports are already seeing the effect of false positives that mistakenly put them on "no fly" lists, presumably because their names are similar to those of terrorists or criminals. Recent press reports have chronicled the travails of several men named David Nelson, including the actor who played himself on the popular ’50s TV show The Adventure of Ozzie and Harriet, who have been delayed or prevented from catching their flights because the name mysteriously set off an alarm in an airport computer.
"When you are scanning a population that is composed of hundreds of millions of people, and the class of criminal you’re looking for is a couple hundred or a couple thousand, there are no tools available, and there are almost certainly never going to be tools available, with the sophistication to focus almost exclusively on the bad guys," says Bob Gellman, who in the ’90s acted as chief counsel of a House subcommittee on privacy and technology. Gellman says data mining’s success in the private sector will never translate to law enforcement because a different level of precision is required. "If direct marketing companies, with all the research they do, get a 3 percent response rate, they’re ecstatic," Gellman says. "And these are smart people with lots of data and lots of motivation because they’re making money, and they can’t do much better than that."
In the debate over the PATRIOT Act and other broad surveillance measures, the Bank Secrecy Act should be thought of as a 30-year experiment in subverting the Fourth Amendment. The experiment has imposed tremendous costs on individual privacy and the economy (even before 9/11, the banking industry was estimating compliance costs of $10 billion a year), with few tangible results in stopping crime and even fewer in preventing terrorism. Getting back to the standards of the Fourth Amendment is a good idea, not just for securing privacy but for making law enforcement and intelligence agencies more focused and effective at stopping criminals and catching terrorists.
"Most police officers, I find, have very high regard for and deference to the Fourth Amendment," says Bob Barr, the former CIA agent and U.S. attorney who served as a Republican congressman from Georgia for eight years and is now a consultant on privacy issues for the ACLU and the American Conservative Union. "I think they understand, perhaps better than a lot of bigwigs, that it is there to protect them and to help keep them focused as well as to protect the individuals."
John Berlau, a writer for Insight magazine, received the National Press Club’s 2002 Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism.
http://www.reason.com/0311/fe.jb.show.shtml
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVES CRACKING UP..
Will libertarians leave the Cold War coalition?
By W. James Antle III
Ask a roomful of well-read conservatives to identify the political theorists who most influenced them, and some of the following names are likely to come up: Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Richard Weaver, F.A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman. That it would seem so natural for men from disparate philosophical traditions to appear together on such a list is a testimony to the success of the postwar American Right in forging a coherent national conservative movement out of traditionalist and libertarian elements.
This makes the emerging signs that this conservative-libertarian consensus is starting to unravel all the more problematic for the Right. The views expressed in most major American conservative periodicals reflect a combination of libertarian and traditionalist positions. In the not so distant past, even when compared to explicitly libertarian publications, there would be great similarity in subject matter (arguments for lower taxes, school choice, and Social Security privatization), contributors (Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, and Walter Williams), and intellectual heroes (Hayek, Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises). There might be differences of emphasis, tone, and degree—the conservative magazines were much more concerned with political feasibility and the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party than their expressly libertarian counterparts—but also substantial agreement. The op-ed pages of conservative newspapers remain heavily populated by commentators affiliated with the libertarian Cato Institute, often described in the press as a conservative think tank.
Pick up copies of the mainstream conservative and libertarian magazines and compare them today. In their treatment of the Bush administration, Attorney General John Aschroft, the Iraq war, and the Republican leadership, the libertarian magazines will read much more like the Nation than conservative outlets like the Weekly Standard. There have been increasingly testy exchanges taking place between the writers of National Review and Reason over such issues as the Patriot Act.
Also consider that in two recent cases where popular conservative figures have been embroiled in personal controversies—when the Washington Monthly and Newsweek reported on William Bennett’s substantial gambling habit and Rush Limbaugh disclosed that he was addicted to painkilling drugs—libertarian commentators piled on with the same relish as their liberal counterparts. FoxNews.com columnist Radley Balko lambasted Bennett as a hypocrite on his Web site: “Your vices—sinful, regretful, damnable. My vices—not so bad. The guy lost $1.4 million in one two-month stretch. But he doesn’t have a problem. Cancer patients who want to smoke marijuana—they’re the ones who have problems.” Reason editor Nick Gillespie wrote how conservative defenses of the pre-eminent radio talk-show host were ruining the “otherwise enjoyable story of Rush Limbaugh’s exposure as a pill-popping hypocrite.” This hostility is partly attributable to Bennett and Limbaugh’s high-profile disagreement with libertarians over drug legalization and greater willingness to use government in the service of conservative ends in general. But it also shows the degree to which many conservatives and libertarians no longer see themselves as being on the same team.
The combination of libertarian and traditionalist tendencies in modern American conservatism was due in part to the need to gather together that ragtag band of intellectuals lingering outside the New Deal consensus who were opposed to the rising tide of left-liberalism. An alliance made out of political necessity, it drew some measure of intellectual consistency from the efforts of the late National Review senior editor Frank Meyer. He argued for the compatibility of innate individual freedom with transcendent morality, emphasizing that liberty has no meaning apart from virtue, but virtue cannot be coerced. Meyer saw libertarianism and traditionalism as two different emphases within conservatism, neither completely true without being moderated by the other. In fact, he held either extreme to be “self-defeating: truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.”
“Fusionism” was the name for Meyer’s synthesis, and while it was never without critics, it worked well enough for most conservatives and for the development of an American Right that counted anti-statism and traditional morality as its main pillars, alongside support for a strong national-defense posture. When Ronald Reagan became the Republican presidential nominee in 1980, this even became the basis of the GOP platform: smaller government, family values, and peace through strength.
Yet a growing number of libertarians no longer think they are getting much out of the fusionist bargain. Liberty magazine editor R.W. Bradford called upon his fellow libertarians to cease thinking of themselves as operationally part of the Right. Writing in the September/October issue of that magazine, he argued that the mainstream conservative movement has abandoned “its claimed love of liberty and opposition to ever more powerful government” and instead have become “the greatest advocates of an imperial foreign policy, of massive defense spending and of invading people’s homes in the names of the Wars on Crime, Drugs and Terrorism.”
Jeffrey Tucker of the Ludwig von Mises Institute has argued that “conservative” as a term for those who love liberty has gone the way of “liberal”—hijacked by statists so that it now means precisely the opposite. “We lost the word liberalism long ago, and only adopted the term conservative with the greatest reluctance. It is time to give it up too, neither describing ourselves as such nor allowing others to do so. We don’t take our marching orders from neocons. We don’t believe what we see on TV. We do not love the GOP. We are not nationalists. We believe in the idea of liberty. We are libertarians …”
FoxNews.com’s Balko normally votes Republican and cast his ballot for George W. Bush in 2000 but now says he’s “90 percent certain” he “won’t be voting for President Bush in 2004.” He further argues that the “right now poses a greater threat to freedom than the left.” Jim Henley, a noted libertarian blogger, put it even more bluntly: “Having abandoned the substance of limited government since early in the Gingrich ‘revolution,’ conservatives increasingly eschew even the rhetoric of limited government. Animosity aside, they’re just no use to libertarians any more.”
The rift between conservatives and libertarians is not merely an esoteric debate between dueling pundits; it has also has concrete political ramifications. In one of the hardest-fought races of the 2002 campaign, Republican John Thune lost to incumbent Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) by just 524 votes. Libertarian Party candidate Kurt Evans won more than 3,000 votes—even though he dropped out of the race and endorsed Thune—more than enough to alter the outcome of the election. Small-l libertarians voting for Libertarian Party nominees rather than Republicans helped cost Republican Slade Gorton of Washington his Senate seat in 2000 and helped Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada hold onto his in 1998.
Libertarians have not limited their support to third-party efforts. Some have begun contemplating support for a Democratic presidential candidate to oust the Bush-Ashcroft Republicans. The antiwar Howard Dean appears to be the favorite. Already a Libertarians for Dean blog site debating the merits of libertarian support for his candidacy has been set up on the Web. While a Libertarians for Clark Web site appeared and quickly dissipated following Wesley Clark’s declaration of candidacy, the Dean site is still going strong with those posting on it inclined to support him. The liberal American Prospect ran a piece by Noah Shachtman on its Web site citing several prominent libertarians, including Reason assistant editor Julian Sanchez and Cato Institute senior editor Gene Healy, at least willing to contemplate a vote for Dean over Bush. Even libertarians less inclined to vote Democratic have been talking about tactical alliances with the Left. One example is Reason’s science correspondent Ronald Bailey, who devoted an entire article to his decision to join the ACLU.
The Right’s response so far has largely been silence. Some conservatives have noticed that they are losing libertarian support. National Review’s John J. Miller wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times about the “GOP’s Libertarian Problem.” But his response was mainly that libertarians would vote Republican if they knew what was good for them, without acknowledging that the reason many do not is that even conservative Republicans have increasingly moved away from limited government. Others, like commentator and film critic Michael Medved, have ridiculed libertarian defectors as “losertarians.”
Conservative intellectuals and journalists are no more interested in anti-statism than the politicians they back. In his recent essay for the Weekly Standard, Irving Kristol listed support for the welfare state and interventionism unrelated to concrete national interests as components of his neoconservative persuasion. Fred Barnes has written in praise of “big government conservatism,” and while few of his colleagues would be so bold as to champion that phrase, a growing number clearly support what he considers to be the inherent trade-off that appears to guide the Bush administration’s policy: “To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he’s willing to broaden programs and increase spending.” This is why adding new government agencies, increasing federal expenditures, and running large budget deficits are acceptable to many of the Right’s leading spokesmen and policy wonks as long as accompanied by modest—and potentially short-lived—tax cuts. It is therefore evident to libertarians that smaller government is no longer a serious political objective of the dominant forces on the American Right.
Although there are many reasons for this, the decline of conservative anti-statism is mainly attributable to two factors: political considerations and the perception that bigger government will buy better security against terrorism. Conservatives have come to the conclusion that cutting spending programs that benefit middle-class constituencies is a losing proposition at the ballot box. Spending cuts are as unpopular as tax increases, and while conservatives score points by raising the specter of higher taxes when campaigning against liberal Democrats, the liberals counterattack by playing to fears that Republicans will cut funding for education, Social Security, and Medicare. Rather than continuing a fruitless effort to persuade the electorate that big government is economically and socially harmful, it is easier and politically more advantageous to play to the public’s contradictory desire for both high spending and low taxes.
Things have only got worse since 9/11, as many conservatives now regard smaller government as incompatible with protecting the nation from terrorism. This has manifested itself not just in increased military spending but in new domestic expenditures as well. While Republicans were pledging to eliminate Cabinet departments as recently as 1996, the Bush administration has instead created a new one, the Department of Homeland Security, even though homeland security was something most Americans probably thought they had been getting from their spending on the Department of Defense.
Conservatives have been down this road before—during the Cold War. William F. Buckley Jr., whose tendencies over the years have been significantly more libertarian than those of today’s neoconservatives, famously wrote in an article that appeared in Commonweal on Jan. 5, 1952,
[W]e have got to accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. … And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington—even with Truman at the reins of it all.
Substitute militant Islam for Soviet power and Gephardt (or whichever establishment Democrat with presidential ambitions you prefer) for Truman and this is a fairly accurate representation of many contemporary conservatives’ position on the size of government during the War on Terror. Viewing the fight against international terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda as analogous to the Cold War struggle, they believe reinstating limits on the federal government is not just a lower priority but even a competing one.
Hence, many of today’s conservatives accept the present cost and scope of the federal government as a given and are reluctant to control even its rate of growth. The Right’s traditional pro-defense position is in the process of being transformed into neo-Wilsonian hubris and nation building. When combined with the fact that many topics that have long divided the Right along libertarian and traditionalist lines—homosexuality, pro-life issues, immigration—are becoming more salient, there is precious little to keep libertarians in the fold as a constituent group of an increasingly neoconservative American Right.
Can Meyer’s fusionism be saved? This would be a challenging task now that growing numbers of conservatives eschew minimal government and a similarly high percentage of individualists have become “lifestyle libertarians” who reject moral orthodoxy. Indeed, it could even be argued that the mainstream Right today turns fusionism on its head by paying little more than lip service to either libertarianism or traditionalism.
But the combination of libertarian and traditionalist views among conservatives remains strong at the grassroots level. There is little evidence that the majority of those who consider themselves conservative have signed onto the project of building a “conservative” welfare state at home and projecting benevolent global hegemony abroad. The nannyism and predilection to view the state as a problem-solver of first resort that seem intrinsic to modern American liberals make any long-term relocation of libertarians to the left side of the political spectrum seem problematic. Libertarians with a deeper appreciation for the compatibility of liberty and traditional values like Lew Rockwell, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and William L. Anderson have also been gaining in influence.
Perhaps we should look to the late 1960s and early ’70s, the last time libertarians became disaffected with the Right and sought a unique political identity. One of the products of this period was the Libertarian Party, founded in 1971. This was back when the controversy over Vietnam raged and the issues were remarkably similar to those provoking conservative-libertarian tensions today—war, a Republican administration that was aggressively expanding government, and concern about civil liberties. The friction waned after libertarians enjoyed little success through their third-party movement and conservatives resumed railing against the depredations of big government. Republicans would in the ensuing years turn from Richard Nixon, whose legacy included wage and price controls, to Reagan, a candidate who favored tax cuts, deregulation, and spending restraint, while opposing peacetime conscription (although the independent libertarian identity was kept alive at least in part by Reagan’s inability to reverse the growth of government once in office).
A return to first principles could restore the Right’s fusionist consensus, but this would require that a vigorous challenge be mounted against the ideology now being represented as conservative orthodoxy. New York Times columnist David Brooks is often quoted as proclaiming, “We’re all neoconservatives now.” The impending breakup of fusionism shows that this is only true insofar as dramatic changes are made to the character of the American Right itself—changes many who have labored under its banner want no part of.
__________________________________________________
W. James Antle III is a senior editor of EnterStageRight.com.
November 17, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
http://amconmag.com/11_17_03/cover.html
GOVERNMENT SPY LAW TAKES EFFECT..
The government is watching you - official
November 14 2003
by Jo Best
'Snoopers' charter' becomes law - is it your ISP's fault?
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The 'snoopers' charter' - through which the government has forced the monitoring of every phone call made, website visited and email sent - officially became law on Thursday.
While the almost universal rejection of the data retention orders from the opposition was widely expected to derail the governments plans, last minute political manoeuvring saw it through the House of Lords.
Deputy opposition leader, Baroness Blatch had proposed a 'fatality motion' – a way of killing off the Order in an event that happens only a few times in a century – but it was scuppered when the government threatened to return the favour by nixing every Order that any future Tory government tried to pass.
And so the proposals were passed unopposed.
But a couple of amendments were made that went down well with privacy campaigners: the Interception of Communications Commissioner will now have to have to inform individuals when their privacy has been improperly invaded and Baroness Blatch said that the government would have face a Private Members Bill designed to make the Order more palatable to the opposition.
Despite claims from legal authorities that the Order contravenes the European Convention on human rights, the Order will now oblige all communication service providers to keep records of who their customers phoned, where from, who and when they emailed for 12 months, as well as recording what websites they visited.
While the government claims that the Act is necessary for purposes of national security, a number of authorities not known for their anti-terrorist activities, including the ministry for gambling, will be able to get their hands on users details.
Simon Davies, head of Privacy International, has vowed to fight the law through the courts and puts its successful political passage through the Lords down to the ISPs themselves: "They have acted in a reprehensible manner all the way through, sitting on the sidelines. They never raised the whole issue of privacy, they just had a fever-like concern to get their costs underwritten by the government", he told silicon.com. "They should hang their heads in shame."
James Blessing, technical development at business ISP Zen, says that service providers are caught between a rock and a hard place, defending their users' interests and at the same time having to be seen to be doing the 'right thing'.
"With an act like this, you can't fight the idea – you can't turn round and say you won't monitor your users after 9/11 – but you can fight bits of the Act, but then you're seen as petty and people think it's just a case of ISPs not wanting to spend money", he told silicon.com.
The Act's passage through the Lords wasn't the worst case of political wrangling however. It seems the big names in the ISP world have led the way in smoothing the legislation's path through parliament.
Blessing said: "BT couldn't be seen to be objecting, AOL are a bespoke service with filtering and controls already in place, Freeserve don't want to be seen to be kicking up a fuss and with the smaller ISPs, they're just trying to carve out a niche and keep things going."
http://www.silicon.com/0,39024729,39116907,00.htm
BEYOND NIETZSCHE..
By Bill Bonner
We humans flatter ourselves. We believe we are reasonable
people. So successful are we at applying reason to the
things close at hand that we cannot resist applying the
same process to things far afield about which we haven't a
clue..
We try to make sense of the events around us by describing
the "reasons" they happen... and then we extrapolate... looking logically forward to what those reasons will produce next..
Still, we go about our work with the patience of the proto~
economists ~ the two Adams, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson,
the Scottish moral philosophers of the 18th century..
We do not try to predict the future, but only to understand the
nature of man. We study him as if he were a bug or a maybe
a honey bear ~ adorable, dangerous, and moronic all at once
- and try to guess about what he will do next..
What is unique ~ more or less ~ about man is his ability to
reason..
Unlike the tse~tse fly or the wallabee, man can put
2 and 2 together. Up close, working with things that make
sense to him, he comes up with 4 more often than not. But,
when he applies these same reasoning talents... collectively... using compound abstractions... to other people's business ~ such as how to achieve peace in the Mideast or a boom on Wall Street ~ 2 somehow becomes 5.245 or a swamp in Indonesia... and the whole equation soon degrades into complete nonsense..
Reason, as it turns out, is man's greatest strength. It is,
alas, his greatest weakness..
Nietzsche identified two different kinds of knowledge..
There are the things you know from personal experience and
observation, which he called "erfahrung." There are also
the abstractions you think you know ~ the kind of thing
that is reported in the paper and discussed on the
editorial pages ~ which he called "wissen.."
Today, continuing in the Nietzschean tradition of erudition
and the Daily Reckoning tradition of pseudo~
intellectualism, we expand Nietzsche's insight. Not only
are there two forms of knowledge, there are also two
entirely different ways of reasoning..
The first is the type of reasoning you do with things you
know about..
If you see someone climb too far out on the limb of a tree, for example, and see the limb break... you might reasonably conclude that the same thing could happen to you in similar circumstances. We'll call this kind of thinking
"schwer uberlegen.."
But if you turn your thoughts to the WAT (War Against
Terror) or the next election, you are using a different
thinking process altogether..
Instead of thinking about things you know... you are thinking about things you cannot know and cannot even explain. We call this type of thinking "leicht denken.."
For example, yesterday's International Herald Tribune offered an editorial comment from Zbigniew Brzezinski, entitled "Time for America to intervene.."
Immediately, we are in a different world..
America cannot intervene, because the nation exists only as
an abstraction..
An American soldier can shoot someone... an American plane can drop a bomb... but America itself is much too big..
Whatever "America" does will only be done by a tiny percentage of the whole thing... most Americans will play no role, some will be opposed... and more than a few will be completely unaware of what is going on..
"The U.S. response... has to be guided by a strategic
awareness of all the interests involved... "
Who is Brzezinski kidding?
Take America's interests, for example. What are they? Who can say? Americans have various interests ~ relatives, vacations, business connections ~ but they are not necessarily the same..
You could say, broadly, that "America has an interest in
peace" in the Mideast. But so what? At what price? Under
what conditions? Even if it were true... there is no way of
knowing what actions might bring it about..
But people take this kind of thinking seriously. They think
they can understand big issues as well as small ones and
manipulate world events as though they were rubbing two
sticks together..
"Germany must pay... " voiced an editorial from 1919 in Le
Temps. "The enemy must pay for everything... that's the
fundamental principle.."
Philippe Simonnot continues his long slog through the errors of economists during the 20th century. At the end of WWI arose the third big one ~ the illusion that Germany would, or could, pay for the huge losses incurred by the allies during the course of the world's most costly war. All the combatants had borrowed
heavily to finance the war. Now, they wanted Germany to pay
off the debts..
What would it pay with? Germany was falling apart. Her
economy was ruined. She had borrowed colossal sums to pay
for the war ~ an amount equal to 3 times her GDP! German
political and social structures were tottering. It looked,
in fact, as though the country might be on the verge of
revolution..
Besides, as Keynes pointed out, the cease fire was achieved
by explicitly promising (he called them "sacred
engagements") Germany that she wouldn't have to pay more
than her fair share of the war's costs. But the argument
fell on deaf ears... except those of the young Nazis, who
used it to show that Germany had been stabbed in the back..
Asked his opinion of the war debts, Calvin Coolidge reduced
the matter to a simple and ineluctable logic..
"They borrowed the money, yes or no?"
Of course, Germany would never pay the war debts. Of the
152 billion marks demanded, only 23 billion were ever paid.
And even this modest amount came with a very high price tag
~ "the crisis of '29 was engendered, in part, by the
financial illusions of 1919," Simonnot says..
And so, Norman Angell was almost right, after all. War does
not pay..
But from the beginning of the war until its end, leicht
denken helped people believe what they wanted to believe ~
that there would be no war, that it would be short, that
the costs would be borne by someone else..
World War I took a course that hardly a single person in the whole world expected. And that no one ~ save perhaps some lunatic
fringe revolutionaries ~ would have wished..
How is it possible, dear reader?
The world's finest minds ~ millions of them ~ focused on an issue of life~and~death importance... and still, barely a solitary person was able to understand or even predict it..
What to make of it... when the result of their aggregated
efforts is the biggest catastrophe ever to befall humanity?
For WWI was no natural catastrophe. No Vesuvius buried
people in ash. Instead, they were buried by millions in the
mud of Europe by cannon and machine gun fire. No freak
storm... no asteroid hit the planet... no drought or
pestilence. Still, by the war's end, millions lay dead.
A third of France's capital was used up. A third of
Britain's. A fifth of Germany's. And then, mankind went
back to its business... on its way to its next big mistake.
Your editor, on his way to his next big mistake...
What Are We Struggling For?
Is it liberty?
What is this thing called liberty?
Is it a kind of freedom that requires the mortgage of our lives and souls? Is it something so precious that we are willing to kill and die for fear of losing it?
If this is so, then liberty is a hard master and an awfully expensive date. If this is "freedom", then it is a strange freedom indeed..
So ~ is it freedom then?
How do we even define freedom?
To the Collectivist, freedom is freedom FROM responsibility and worry over day to day needs. It is freedom FROM a capitalistic, competitive ratrace..
However, to the Individual, freedom is freedom TO live an unencombered life and to own property with the ability to defend that ownership..
Obviously, this thing called "freedom" is awfully subjective..
I know some who have separated themselves in the name of freedom..
This "soveriegn" status is a tenuous thing; those who are practicing it live in fear. They may be absolutely, legally, constitutionally, morally and ethically correct, but they must stake their very lives on this in a society that does not recognize the foundation they stand on..
Some have paid the ultimate price in armed raids and others are rotting in jail. Is this really freedom?
So what's the point then? Do we give up and jump into the boxcars? I don't think so. However, it is time to reassess just exactly what the GOAL is here, and to define it very clearly..
What IS freedom, how is it defined, and by whom?
True freedom is spiritual..
We will always face limitations on our physical freedom.. the very nature of even our original republican government recognizes and requires it..
There is no absolute freedom ~ only a point somewhere on a continuum..
What is the difference between a bit to the right or a bit to the left? Again, your answer will be entirely relative. It HAS to be! Spiritual freedom is beyond that..
A spiritually free individual is truly free to fight and die for principles, and is also free to prosper, (spiritually,) even under tyranny..
The ultimate physical penalties, torture and death, are no threat to one who knows spiritual freedom..
May we know that freedom, and rejoice in it! May it be our motivation, our goal and our reward..
© Copyright Peter J. Celano, 1995. All rights reserved. Permission granted to freely repost in electronic form, provided the entire article is reproduced intact, along with this copyright notice. Please contact me at celano@ic.net for permission to reproduce in any other form.
Above all things..
I hope the education of the common people
will be attended to..
Convinced that on their good sense..
We may rely with the most security for the preservation
of a due degree of liberty..
~ Thomas Jefferson ~
US Founding Father..
drafted the Declaration of Independence..
3rd US President..
2nd Amendment Supporters ~ Consider this..
PEOPLE.. "The popular leaders, who in all ages have called themselves THE PEOPLE", etc. Bl Comm 438 (Ballentine's Law Dictionary)
Now, consider this..
Amendment II.. A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of CITIZENS to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. [original punctuation]
It does not say that… It says this..
Amendment II. A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of THE PEOPLE to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.. [original punctuation]
Don't buy it? Read the Federalist Papers...
They use RULERS in regard to the “elected” state and federal representatives, NOT Servants..
The term “the people” when used in the US Constitution—for all practical purposes—means THE STATE. If you are a state national (i.e. not a federal citizen), the US Constitution (and federal government)—in general—has little or nothing to do with you. You have no contract with the federal government, the states and the officers thereof do, i.e. “the people”. Ergo: The Bill of Rights applies to them. Of course there is the complication of the implementation of the Fourteenth Amendment that applies in certain circumstances to “Federal Citizens” via their national government, i.e. the legislation of congress (see “subject to the jurisdiction” or “internal” or “within the United States”)..
That is right..
As used in the preamble of the US Constitution, “We the People” refers to the popular leaders, not you and I..
What is the NRA talking about? It appears that they need better attorneys. They should be talking natural rights..
See the case below and the quote taken from it..
From US v. STEWART, No. 0210318 (9th Cir. November 13, 2003)..
“We have held that the Second Amendment “was not adopted in order to afford rights to individuals with respect to private gun ownership or possession.” Silveira v. Lockyer 312 F. 3d 1052, 1087 (9th Cir, 2002)”
CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, CRIMINAL LAW & PROCEDURE..
US v. STEWART, No. 0210318 (9th Cir. November 13, 2003) Conviction for machine gun possession is reversed where 18 U.S.C. section 922(o) is an invalid exercise of Congress's commerce power. However, conviction for possession of firearms by a felon is affirmed..
To read the full text of this opinion, go to: [PDF File] http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/9th/0210318p.pdf
rico..your perspective is well taken..
THE LEGITIMACY OF GOVERNMENT..
by Ernest Hancock - Second Amendment is For Everyone (SAFE), 4700 N. Central #201, Phoenix, AZ 85012 - Tel: (602) 375-0060 or (602) 248-8425; Fax: (602) 265-1811.
A discussion rages on at high speed with great passion here in Arizona regarding the "social contract" we're all supposed to be forced into. While the discussion continues, I was compelled to share this article with you all due to the impact it had on my ability to understand the issue and how I might share it with others.
Mark Fuller Writes
What are you proposing? Anarchy? Government has a legitimate role of protecting your life, rights and property. Its existence may cost money. Whether it is a direct or apportioned tax to cover that existence is another argument, but even if government were doing all it should do - you still have jurisdiction issues which may not be consensual.
The only option which would be available in that case would be sudden war by the government against you due to your unwillingness to clear up a minor problem. It could only be war because we're not under the jurisdiction of the government's legitimate role of clearing up such issues in the name of protecting life, rights and property.
I'm really not familar with any time in our history that things worked like this, and I always conclude that Anarchist Libertarians wish to go beyond our origins to something else. Maybe I misunderstand.
Ernest Hancock
Speaking for me, you're correct. I wish to go beyond your origins to something else. Colonial-era slogans aside, let's see what those political origins actually are. You're recommending that people not abandon the instutition called government, on the grounds that this might entail confusion over jurisdiction, and possibly even violence - a small but "sudden war by the government against" me in the event that I couldn't get along with my neighbors.
But when referring to even the recent past, we find that government is by far history's greatest peril.
Confusion over jurisdiction: Find me a year that goes by without men being sent to die in a border dispute. Know anybody who went to Grenada? Know anybody who went to the Gulf? Know anybody who's going to go to Bosnia? Know anybody who went to the European Theater?
I can point to a hundred and fifty million political dead this century alone. You can point to a hypothesis about confusion over jurisdiction in the case of a burglary.
A time in history that things worked like this? Guilty. There's conjecture about ancient Iceland and more conjecture about the American West, but nothing all that convincing, even to me. I'm not convinced there'll be a 300 Mhz desktop computer, either; I'll believe it when I see it.
Here's what we do know, though: All States nova. All tribes disperse. There is no historical precedent for a permanent State, or a stable one. Of the extant States today, the exceedingly young USA may be the oldest, which says nothing good about the advance of the science of statism.
When States nova, which they invariably do, they usually do a very bloody job of it. I've never seen a war. I've never seen a mass grave. I've never seen corpses accumulating in piles. I hope I never do. Above all, I see no reason to manufacture rationalizations for the institution that never fails to accompany wholesale slaughter. Without a government, Mark, the worst you can do is a riot.
Mark Fuller
Government has a legitimate role of protecting your life, rights and property.
Ernest Hancock
Hence, the elaborate theories about something called a "social contract." The difference between a contract and a social contract, of course, is that the former is consented to by both parties while the latter is imagined by one but binding upon another.
(Ain't it strange how we've learned to look for hokum wherever a derivative of The S Word comes up? Social Democrat. Social Justice. Social Contract. National Socialist Party. The world is filled with strange coincidences.)
If government is legitimate, merely tell me whence it derives its legitimacy.
Social contract is currently fashionable, in the ebb and flow of on-line political debate. This is a contract I never signed, that I've never seen, that has no terms, that is binding upon me but not upon the other party, that can be dispensed with at will by the government but must submitted to by me upon pain of incarceration, whose terms may change on-the-fly or even retroactively, from which there is no escape clause, which is binding in perpetuity, which binds my ancestors and descendants, which requires fealty but guarantees no consideration.
And it's bullshit on its face. But that's not the interesting thing. There are a thousand intricate dodges designed to cover the ass of statism, and refuting one of the lot isn't that fun or that illuminating, at least if you've been working these boards for a while. There will always be another transparent cloak for the Emperor to wear.
What's interesting is that there are a thousand cloaks, but there aren't a thousand-and-one. Here's the thousand-and-first, and you'll never hear it from a statist:
Because they have guns and if you don't obey, they'll shoot you. [emphasis added]
I'll come clean. I'm not writing to Mark Fuller. I have no hope of showing him anything, because I think he's determined not to be shown. But for those who aren't solely concerned with building dungeons out of cards, this is useful.
Statism can't be justified. I can give you a list of minds bigger than mine who wanted it so badly they were willing to torque their own brains, and a longer list of folks who didn't know any better. Fuller's own Locke, and Rousseau. And Blackstone. They had a common ancestor, Hugo de Groot. Back to Aristotle and all the way to Thales, forward to Rand, and even to Nozick, Jefferson, Madison, Marx, Mill. All of you have read some, and some of you have undoubtedly read more than I.
None of them said it, because all of them are beehive-busy trying to find another reason for this: "If you don't obey, we'll shoot you." That's not legitimacy, so they had to find another way. Social contract. Consent of the governed (probably the most opaque self-contradiction of the millenium). Will of the majority. Threat of descendence into chaos. Greatest good for the greatest number. Progress. Good of the Motherland. Throwing off dominion of the ZOG. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
If government is legitimate, merely tell me whence it derives its legitimacy. Why does it need so many different justifications?
If government is legitimate, why does it need guns?
Mathematicians don't need guns. We think they're legitimate. Physicists don't need guns. Biologists don't need guns. Musicians don't need guns. Tool and die makers don't need guns. Copy editors don't need guns.
Government needs guns because it isn't legitimate. It cannot persuade you, and it cannot base its appeals in reason, because there cannot be a basis in reason for an appeal to dumb savagery.
I don't care whether it claims to be instituted by my consent, or for the sake of my welfare, or as the product of some non-evident contract, or in response to the prospect of mass starvation, or for the protection of life and liberty and property. None of that matters. It cannot be justified in reason. It has not been justified in reason in four thousand years, despite all the effort of all the courts of all the despots of all the centuries. And the hand-waving of your next encounter with yet another electronic acolyte in the cult of the State will prove this yet again:
Government is not legitimate. You can tell by the effort people must go to to make up rationalizations for it.
Now, here's the dirty little secret. I said, all their rationalizations are a veneer, all their happy-babble is cover for what's really going on: "If you don't submit, we'll shoot you." [emphasis added] That's true, but to any proposition there is a converse.
The converse to the proposition in question is this: If they could compel you, they'd have no need to convince you. [emphasis added]
[Frederick Mann: This is one of the central aspects of discovering that you are inherently free, free by nature. Through your ability to make decisions, you control the energy that animates your mind and body. The terrocrats (terrorist bureaucrats) really cannot control or compel anyone. So they have to brainwash people, program them like robots, to believe and obey. Above all, they must brainwash their victims into believing in the "legitimacy" of the terrocrat system.]
If dumb savagery were all it took, statists would have it made. They could simply announce, "do it our way or we'll smoke you. We have an army." And that would be that. We'd be wandering around in loincloths carrying digging sticks.
But they don't say that. Governments throughout human history have employed a procession of yes-men long enough to circle the moon. A plethora of Prime Ministers, a rick of Rasputins, a cord of courtesans. Why bother with all that, when all it takes is weaponry? If militaries were enough, we've have had no emperors and no Presidents - and if simple brutality were enough, we'd have no militaries. Write this in your notebooks:
They do not seek dominion.
They seek legitimacy.
[Frederick Mann: In my opinion, they seek both dominion and legitimacy. But their dominion is largely based on perceived legitimacy. Undermining their legitimacy is one of the most powerful strategies for removing their dominion.]
Why does the Ayatollah seek to have Salman Rushdie murdered? Not to keep his subjects from the prose - he could ban the book easily enough. It is because Rushdie threatens the Ayatollah's legitimacy, even in the eyes of people the Ayatollah has never met and never will.
Why does Bill Clinton seek to stifle dissent by branding it right-wing hate-speech? Not because he fears overthrow, or even being denied a second term. In the unlikely event he has a second term, we all know he'll be even more likely to repress contrarian speech, not less. This is because he seeks legitimacy, seeks it above all things.
Mark Fuller constructs his tortured case for social contract for a reason, and that reason is not ignoble. He wants to be right. He wants to persuade you. The Ayatollah and Bill Clinton want to persuade you. They wish to find a basis in reason because, above all things, they want to be right.
This is what spin control is about: Pretending to be right. This is what posturing is about. If force of arms were adequate, there'd be no need to waste time on spin-control, but think about it: the world's most repressive regimes were those with the most insistent "education" programs. Witness the Soviets, witness China, witness Cambodia, witness medieval Spain.
They want legitimacy, crave it desperately. So do you. So do I.
And we all seek legitimacy in the common ground that is reason. If we seek this, we cannot start with a justification or a conclusion to which the argument must be torqued to match.
Mark Fuller
If there is not a supreme law to protect the life, rights and property of individuals (through delegated powers) then you have individuals doing what they please with impunity, as in a state of nature.
Ernest Hancock
There's only one state of nature, the only one that ever was. And in this state, people can go wandering around doing whatever they want. With impunity! This is the nature of the human organism: we are each exclusively self-controlled. [emphasis added]
[Frederick Mann: Again, this is the essence of discovering that you are free. You exclusively control yourself - whether you realize it or not. Nobody else can control you. However, if you're like most people, you've been brainwashed to believe that the "government system" controls you and the only way to escape this "control" is to change or remove the "system."]
Fuller regards this with such revulsion that he considers the mere prospect of it to be a horror, and it certainly will wreck the web of the spider spinning social contracts. In the face of a fact obvious to any observer - that each of us is intrinsically free to do as he wills - he prefers to wax about a contract that each of us knows damn good and well doesn't exist and never did. That which is obvious and evident and verifiable is to be ignored, dismissed as nonsense. That which is ludicrous is to be cultivated as "supreme law."
[Frederick Mann: In my experience, it's obvious to fewer than one in a thousand individuals that they are intrinsically free to do as they will.]
But freedom is unavoidable. Discretion is the nature of organisms; we are individuals by the very way we are made. We are exclusively self-motivated; we have no other way of operating. We can be coerced, but we cannot be enslaved. This is evident, and it is irrefutable. And this is the basis for a rational conversation about human affairs.
[Frederick Mann: Humans allow themselves to become enslaved by buying into irrational statist ideas, superstitions, lies, concepts, terms (words), definitions, and arguments.]
This is the observation that is the basis for a legitimate argument about legitimacy. When people persist in basing arguments for a "civilized" state in the imaginary, while they persist in gaping at reality itself as too monstrous to be contemplated - is it any wonder that the streets of "civilizations" never fail to run red with blood?
Frederick Mann's Comments
In a fund-raising letter to their members, the National Rifle Association (NRA) used the term "jackbooted thugs." George Bush resigned his NRA membership. Bill Clinton repeatedly denounced the NRA for using this term. Why? What do these terrocrats fear most?
Answer: The loss of their legitimacy. Terms like "jackbooted thug" destroy their legitimacy. This is the major reason why we use terms like "terrocrat." (Interestingly, The Arizona Republic used the terms "law-abusement officer" and "law-abusement agent" in an editorial on September 18, 1995!)
Using such terms and persuading others to use them is phenomenally powerful because it destroys legitimacy.
those people were religious nuts with guns..
THE LIBERTY MANIFESTO..
by P.J. O'Rourke -- The American Spectator, July 1993
(edited)
[P.J. O'Rourke is the Cato Institute's Menken research fellow. He delivered these remarks at a May 6 gala dinner celebrating the opening of the Cato Institute's new headquarters in Washington.]
The Cato Institute has an unusual political cause -- which is no political cause whatsoever. We are here tonight to dedicate ourselves to that cause. To dedicate ourselves, in other words, to... nothing.
We have no ideology, no agenda, no catechism, no dialectic, no plan for humanity. We have no "vision thing," as our ex-president would say, or, as our current president would say, we have no Hillary.
All we have is the belief that people should do what people want to do, unless it causes harm to other people.
I don't know what's good for you. You don't know what's good for me. We don't know what's good for mankind. And it sometimes seems as though we're the only people who don't. It may well be that, gathered right here in this room tonight, are all the people in the world who don't want to tell all the people in the world what to do.
This is because we believe in freedom. Freedom -- what this country was established upon, what the Bill Of Rights was written to defend, what the Civil War was fought to perfect.
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle.
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
So we are here tonight in a kind of anti-matter protest - an un-political un-demonstration by deeply uncommitted inactivists. We are part of a huge invisible picket line that circles the White House twenty-four hours a day. We are participants in an enormous non-march on Washington -- millions and millions of Americans not descending upon the nation's capital in order to demand nothing from the United States government. To demand nothing, that is, except the one thing which no government in history has been able to do -- leave us alone.
There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.
Bill, keep your hands to yourself. Hillary, mind your own business. We have a group of incredibly silly people in the White House right now, people who think government works. Or that government would work, if you got some real bright young kids from Yale to run it. We're being governed by dorm room bull session. The Clinton administration is over there right now pulling an all-nighter in the West Wing. They think that, if they can just stay up late enough, they can create a healthy economy and bring peace to former Yugoslavia. The Clinton administration is going to decrease government spending by increasing the amount of money we give to the government to spend. Health care is too expensive, so the Clinton administration is putting a high-powered corporate lawyer in charge of making it cheaper. (This is what I always do when I want to spend less money -- hire a lawyer from Yale.) If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
The Clinton administration is putting together a program so that college graduates can work to pay off their school tuition. As if this were some genius idea. It's called getting a job. Most folks do that when they get out of college, unless, of course, they happen to become governor of Arkansas.
And the Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas [Waco] because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers? Or maybe the people in Texas were attacked because of child abuse. But, if child abuse was the issue, why didn't Janet Reno tear-gas Woody Allen?
You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have. Government contains impure ingredients - as anybody who's looked at Congress can tell you. On the basis of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign promises, I think we can say government practices deceptive advertising. And the merest glance at the federal budget is enough to convict the government of perjury, extortion, and fraud. There, ladies and gentlemen, you have the Cato Institute's program in a nutshell: government should be against the law. Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.
THE LIBERTY MANIFESTO..
by P.J. O'Rourke -- The American Spectator, July 1993
(edited)
[P.J. O'Rourke is the Cato Institute's Menken research fellow. He delivered these remarks at a May 6 gala dinner celebrating the opening of the Cato Institute's new headquarters in Washington.]
The Cato Institute has an unusual political cause -- which is no political cause whatsoever. We are here tonight to dedicate ourselves to that cause. To dedicate ourselves, in other words, to... nothing.
We have no ideology, no agenda, no catechism, no dialectic, no plan for humanity. We have no "vision thing," as our ex-president would say, or, as our current president would say, we have no Hillary.
All we have is the belief that people should do what people want to do, unless it causes harm to other people.
I don't know what's good for you. You don't know what's good for me. We don't know what's good for mankind. And it sometimes seems as though we're the only people who don't. It may well be that, gathered right here in this room tonight, are all the people in the world who don't want to tell all the people in the world what to do.
This is because we believe in freedom. Freedom -- what this country was established upon, what the Bill Of Rights was written to defend, what the Civil War was fought to perfect.
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle.
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
So we are here tonight in a kind of anti-matter protest - an un-political un-demonstration by deeply uncommitted inactivists. We are part of a huge invisible picket line that circles the White House twenty-four hours a day. We are participants in an enormous non-march on Washington -- millions and millions of Americans not descending upon the nation's capital in order to demand nothing from the United States government. To demand nothing, that is, except the one thing which no government in history has been able to do -- leave us alone.
There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.
Bill, keep your hands to yourself. Hillary, mind your own business. We have a group of incredibly silly people in the White House right now, people who think government works. Or that government would work, if you got some real bright young kids from Yale to run it. We're being governed by dorm room bull session. The Clinton administration is over there right now pulling an all-nighter in the West Wing. They think that, if they can just stay up late enough, they can create a healthy economy and bring peace to former Yugoslavia. The Clinton administration is going to decrease government spending by increasing the amount of money we give to the government to spend. Health care is too expensive, so the Clinton administration is putting a high-powered corporate lawyer in charge of making it cheaper. (This is what I always do when I want to spend less money -- hire a lawyer from Yale.) If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
The Clinton administration is putting together a program so that college graduates can work to pay off their school tuition. As if this were some genius idea. It's called getting a job. Most folks do that when they get out of college, unless, of course, they happen to become governor of Arkansas.
And the Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas [Waco] because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers? Or maybe the people in Texas were attacked because of child abuse. But, if child abuse was the issue, why didn't Janet Reno tear-gas Woody Allen?
You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have. Government contains impure ingredients - as anybody who's looked at Congress can tell you. On the basis of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign promises, I think we can say government practices deceptive advertising. And the merest glance at the federal budget is enough to convict the government of perjury, extortion, and fraud. There, ladies and gentlemen, you have the Cato Institute's program in a nutshell: government should be against the law. Term limits aren't enough. We need jail.
WHY BUREAUCRATS MAKE SO MANY REGULATIONS..
by James Robertson, July, 1995.
Why do bureaucrats make so many regulations?
One reason is it gives justification (in their minds, at least) for their jobs and their existence. In their warped way of thinking, they engage in Value Destruction while calling it "beneficial regulation." Leave it to bureaucrats to impede Human Progress, while calling such Value Destruction "beneficial." We, the true Value Creators, understand the true nature of Wealth Creation in business organizations and personal networks.
Another reason is that most bureaucrats would probably feel "lost" in a world with few regulations. They don't understand the true nature of what Creates Value; instead, they think that "regulation for the sake of regulation" is a moral and practical good. Obviously they have no understanding of what it means to engage in productive, voluntary, mutually-beneficial Value Creation without force or coercion. They feel "lost" if there aren't enough regulations. Their knee-jerk reaction is: "There ought to be a regulation against that!" Of course, you and I know that most often the human activity they impede results in a terrible Waste of your time and everyone's time. Even worse than the waste of time is the tremendous Value Destruction that occurs as bureaucrats seek to destroy business networks, personal relationships they don't approve of, financial arrangements, and other True Values. Not a surprising result at all, I suppose, coming from Criminal Minds!
Another reason is that most bureaucrats feel personally powerless. Lacking much personal power, bureaucrats exert their need for power in a warped way (i.e., using force or threat of force against others). As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu noted, paradoxically this makes bureaucrats weak - because using force, or threat of force, against others is not a valid or correct exercise of genuine personal power. Genuine personally-powerful people do not need to initiate force or threat of force to accomplish their creative life purposes. Making or enforcing "regulations for the sake of regulations" is one way that bureaucrats use force, and threaten to use force, against those they disapprove of.
Another reason is that most bureaucrats actually derive psychological pleasure from trying to control others by force or threat of force. Obviously they operate at a very low, animal-like mentality for this to be true. As they see it, the more regulations they make, the more they have a chance to control human beings by force or threat of force.
Which brings us to one of the most insightful passages I've ever read concerning the true nature of bureaucrats and their regulations. The author is Ayn Rand. These quotes are from page 411 of my edition of Atlas Shrugged. Basically, Value Creator Hank Rearden has been accused of breaking some regulations the bureaucrats have made about Rearden's steel business having to do with how much or little steel he may produce, when, and to whom he may sell or not sell.
Says the bureaucrat Floyd Ferris: "You honest men are such a problem and such a headache. But we knew you'd slip sooner or later . . . [and break one of our regulations] . . . this is just what we wanted."
Rearden: "You seem to be pleased about it."
Bureaucrat Ferris: "Don't I have good reason to be?"
Rearden: "But, after all, I did break one of your laws."
Bureaucrat Ferris: "Well, what do you think they're there for?"
Continues bureaucrat Ferris: "Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against . . . We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted [Frederick Mann: Obfuscation of meaning is a key element of the con games bureaucrats and politicians play.] - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with." [emphasis added]
Ayn Rand here writes one of the most brilliant expositions I've ever seen about the core of the bureaucratic mentality.
Only if you feel GUILTY about your Value Creation can bureaucrats truly control you. When you admit and confess to yourself and to others that your Value Creation is morally wrong, you are psychologically defeated. This is precisely what they want. Only by making you yourself feel like a criminal about your Value Creation can they defeat you.
[Even if you yourself do not think you've done anything morally wrong in Creating Value and Maintaining Value (Maintaining Value includes protecting your assets), it's very important for the bureaucrats to maintain a Public Spectacle of guilty regulation-breakers. So, at the very least, the bureaucrats almost always try to obtain a "plea of guilty" so that they can control as many "self-confessed criminals" as possible. Another point is that such "self-confessed criminals" seem quite similar to the "self-confessed criminal witches" the Puritans conjured up in 17th-century Masschusetts.]
With bureaucratic regulations concerning taxes alone taking up entire rooms filled with regulation books, the bureaucrats feel pretty powerful when they can call anyone they wish a "criminal."
Indeed, Ayn Rand is correct when she implies that bureaucrats really don't particularly care what regulations are followed or not. Bureaucrats like to operate on "bureaucratic whim" and do what they like.
[Frederick Mann: The above are some of the methods of how the government bureaucrats create a nation of "law breakers" they can control through indoctrination, stultification, stagnation, fossilization, identification, enumeration, classification, accreditation, regulation, complexification, obfuscation, confusion, diversion, deception, misrepresentation, fabrication, falsification, prevarication, perversion, exaggeration, coercion, inspection, compulsion, prohibition, frustration, confrontation, taxation, extortion, inflation, destruction, aggravation, humiliation, supplication, addiction, polarization, suppression, oppression, corruption, incorporation, annexation, admonition, condemnation, persecution, prosecution, conviction, confiscation, incarceration, extradition, expulsion, decimation, annihilation, termination, and execution!]
You are morally justified in taking many, many steps to protect yourself and your assets from these vermin.
Realise that you are free. The bureaucrat-infested system is corrupt through-and-through. It's not on you to change a sewer-system such the roach-infested nest of bureaucratic vipers. Go with us, as we create our own systems and relationships. We as freedom lovers can fully concentrate on Creating Value in business organizations and personal networks with like-minded individuals. The bureaucratic vermin are largely irrelevant to your most productive relationships. It isn't even necessary to go to a hidden valley as they did in Atlas Shrugged.
It is a pleasure to deal with you, the true Value Creators!
[Next month: More on how bureaucrats and bureaucratic sympathizers "cash in on guilt" (as Ayn Rand puts it). How the bureaucrats try to control people by programming people to accept the warped "moral code" of the bureaucrats. How bureaucrats convince people they are Sinful if they disobey the warped bureaucratic "moral code." How bureaucrats convince people they deserve to be punished for disobeying their warped "moral code." How the bureaucrats try to condition humans to superimpose their bureaucratic version of "bureaucratically-approved social groups" upon instinctive human biological imprints, and create a one-to-one correspondence between them. Also: How to Become the Human Without Pain nor Fear nor Guilt. Don't miss it!]
Big brother and the destruction of true value creators..
PERSECUTION OF MICROSOFT IS IMMORAL..
By Richard Salsman
The government's persecution of Microsoft continues unabated. The U.S. appeals
court is
now considering whether the Bush administration and 19 states negotiated an
adequate
settlement in their antitrust case against Microsoft.
It's time for the American public to stand up and defend--morally defend--the
right of
this company to its success and profits.
Imagine a company that continually generates exceptional products. Suppose it
makes such
products available in ever-improved versions, at ever-lower prices. Suppose that
the
superiority of its products is so widely recognized that they are used in almost
every
industry, thereby raising productivity and living standards across the globe.
If you're a typical success-loving American, you would regard it as self-evident
that
this company ought to be applauded.
But now imagine that this firm is denounced as an evil "exploiter." Perhaps its
out-
classed competitors complain to antitrust bureaucrats, who seek to harness this
company.
The firm's ability to gain market share by creating the best products is
condemned
as "predatory." It is ordered to allow its competition to catch up. The firm is
ordered
to sign an oxymoronic "consent decree," which is deliberately made vague enough
so that
if the firm shows new signs of racing ahead, the bureaucrats can keep
prosecuting it
until it is fully reined in. The firm is compelled to provide others with
precisely
those proprietary ingredients that make its products so superior.
Now, stop imagining. This is what has been happening to Microsoft, whose
trailblazing
Windows is the operating system for most personal computers today.
According to the antitrusters, Microsoft should not set the conditions of sale
for its
own product. It should rather be compelled to make its innovations available on
whatever
terms and prices the government sets--on whatever terms benefit those who did
not, and
could not, match Microsoft's achievement.
Many people ask: If Microsoft's products are so demonstrably good, why has the
company
been under assault? The answer is: precisely because its products are good. Does
Microsoft have a unique advantage, for example, by being able to package its
browser
with Windows? Of course. It has earned that advantage, because it, and no one
else,
developed Windows into a leading product. If its competitors want the same
benefit, let
them make a product equal to Windows. If buyers do not like the terms set by
Microsoft,
they are completely free to patronize Microsoft's competitors. What they should
not be
free to do is to have Microsoft while eating it too.
All the prattle about "anti-competitive practices" means only one thing:
Microsoft is
too competent. Antitrust law is a tool to enforce the claims of any second-rater
against
any innovator. If you invent something so good that the market clamors for it
and makes
you wealthy, you are deemed a "monopolist," because your competitors are "shut
out" of
this market--the market you have created.
Microsoft is only the latest in a long line of victims of the unjust antitrust
laws.
From ALCOA in the 1950s to IBM in the 1970s to Wal-Mart in the 1980s, the
government's
goal has always been the same: prosecute an exceptional firm that is growing
rich not
through theft or fraud, but through superior production and voluntary trade.
Microsoft should be cheered for having taken an unusually firm stand against the
Justice
Department. But company officials focused on the wrong issue. Their basic
argument
should not have been that the public benefits from the unfettered freedom of the
best
producers like Microsoft. This argument is true, but is not fundamental--and the
antitrusters know it.
Microsoft needed--and still needs--to make the moral case for economic freedom.
It needs
to uphold the moral right to reap the rewards of one's achievements--the moral
right to
soar as high as one's talents take one--the moral right to succeed and not be
shackled
to others' non-success. The principle to defend is that ability should be a
source of
reward, not a cause of punishment--a principle upon which America was built, and
a
principle of which antitrust law is an obscene mockery.
This is the position that will free Microsoft--and all other producers--from the
envious
clutches of the success-haters.
_______________________________________________________________________
Mr. Salsman is an economist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and a senior writer
for the
Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California. The Institute promotes the philosophy
of Ayn
Rand, author of *Atlas Shrugged* and *The Fountainhead*.
Copyright © 2003 Ayn Rand® Institute
Big brother and the destruction of true value creators..
PERSECUTION OF MICROSOFT IS IMMORAL..
By Richard Salsman
The government's persecution of Microsoft continues unabated. The U.S. appeals
court is
now considering whether the Bush administration and 19 states negotiated an
adequate
settlement in their antitrust case against Microsoft.
It's time for the American public to stand up and defend--morally defend--the
right of
this company to its success and profits.
Imagine a company that continually generates exceptional products. Suppose it
makes such
products available in ever-improved versions, at ever-lower prices. Suppose that
the
superiority of its products is so widely recognized that they are used in almost
every
industry, thereby raising productivity and living standards across the globe.
If you're a typical success-loving American, you would regard it as self-evident
that
this company ought to be applauded.
But now imagine that this firm is denounced as an evil "exploiter." Perhaps its
out-
classed competitors complain to antitrust bureaucrats, who seek to harness this
company.
The firm's ability to gain market share by creating the best products is
condemned
as "predatory." It is ordered to allow its competition to catch up. The firm is
ordered
to sign an oxymoronic "consent decree," which is deliberately made vague enough
so that
if the firm shows new signs of racing ahead, the bureaucrats can keep
prosecuting it
until it is fully reined in. The firm is compelled to provide others with
precisely
those proprietary ingredients that make its products so superior.
Now, stop imagining. This is what has been happening to Microsoft, whose
trailblazing
Windows is the operating system for most personal computers today.
According to the antitrusters, Microsoft should not set the conditions of sale
for its
own product. It should rather be compelled to make its innovations available on
whatever
terms and prices the government sets--on whatever terms benefit those who did
not, and
could not, match Microsoft's achievement.
Many people ask: If Microsoft's products are so demonstrably good, why has the
company
been under assault? The answer is: precisely because its products are good. Does
Microsoft have a unique advantage, for example, by being able to package its
browser
with Windows? Of course. It has earned that advantage, because it, and no one
else,
developed Windows into a leading product. If its competitors want the same
benefit, let
them make a product equal to Windows. If buyers do not like the terms set by
Microsoft,
they are completely free to patronize Microsoft's competitors. What they should
not be
free to do is to have Microsoft while eating it too.
All the prattle about "anti-competitive practices" means only one thing:
Microsoft is
too competent. Antitrust law is a tool to enforce the claims of any second-rater
against
any innovator. If you invent something so good that the market clamors for it
and makes
you wealthy, you are deemed a "monopolist," because your competitors are "shut
out" of
this market--the market you have created.
Microsoft is only the latest in a long line of victims of the unjust antitrust
laws.
From ALCOA in the 1950s to IBM in the 1970s to Wal-Mart in the 1980s, the
government's
goal has always been the same: prosecute an exceptional firm that is growing
rich not
through theft or fraud, but through superior production and voluntary trade.
Microsoft should be cheered for having taken an unusually firm stand against the
Justice
Department. But company officials focused on the wrong issue. Their basic
argument
should not have been that the public benefits from the unfettered freedom of the
best
producers like Microsoft. This argument is true, but is not fundamental--and the
antitrusters know it.
Microsoft needed--and still needs--to make the moral case for economic freedom.
It needs
to uphold the moral right to reap the rewards of one's achievements--the moral
right to
soar as high as one's talents take one--the moral right to succeed and not be
shackled
to others' non-success. The principle to defend is that ability should be a
source of
reward, not a cause of punishment--a principle upon which America was built, and
a
principle of which antitrust law is an obscene mockery.
This is the position that will free Microsoft--and all other producers--from the
envious
clutches of the success-haters.
_______________________________________________________________________
Mr. Salsman is an economist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and a senior writer
for the
Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California. The Institute promotes the philosophy
of Ayn
Rand, author of *Atlas Shrugged* and *The Fountainhead*.
Copyright © 2003 Ayn Rand® Institute
Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX)
Tue Nov 11 21:43:44 2003
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?disc=149495;article=46469;title=APFN
Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX)
http://www.iir.com/matrix/overview.htm
The Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, initiated funding for a pilot, proof-of-concept project titled the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX). The MATRIX pilot project was initiated in response to the increased need for timely information sharing and exchange of terrorism-related information among members of the law enforcement community.
* The MATRIX pilot project is an effort to increase and enhance the exchange of sensitive terrorism and other criminal activity information between local, state, and federal agencies.
* The project leverages and integrates existing and proven technology to provide a new capability to assist law enforcement in identifying and analyzing terrorist and other criminal activity, and appropriately disseminating it to law enforcement agencies nationwide in a secure, efficient, and timely manner.
Organizational Structure
The organizational structure for implementation and operation of the MATRIX pilot project ensures each participant a voice in the project administration. The MATRIX pilot project has been awarded a $4 million budget by the Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice, for:
1. Database integration
2. Hardware
3. Software
4. Network support to a multistate coalition of law enforcement agencies
Nine states comprise the existing coalition, thus far, and have agreed to participate in the MATRIX project: Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Utah.
======================
http://www.iir.com/IIR_projects.htm
IIR training, research, and technical assistance programs provided through federal grant support from the U.S. Department of Justice: CenTF {WITHOUT ANY AUTHORIZED AUTHORITY)
IIR provides services to law enforcement and criminal justice agencies nationwide, and law enforcement professionals from every state have attended IIR training programs.
Center for Task Force Training (CenTF) -- Three different training courses are currently available in the CenTF Program. The Narcotics Task Force Workshop focuses on multiagency response training needs in the investigation and prosecution of narcotics trafficking conspiracies. The Methamphetamine Investigation Management Workshop addresses the operational aspects of managing methamphetamine investigations, as well as problem areas specific to these types of investigations. The Rave/Club Drugs Seminar focuses on a relatively new problem facing law enforcement--the proliferation of synthetic illicit drugs commonly associated with the nightclub or “rave” scene.
http://www.iir.com/centf/
28 CFR Part 23 Criminal Intelligence Systems Operating Policies (28 CFR Part 23) Technical Assistance and Training -- State and local agencies that receive federal funding to operate criminal intelligence systems must comply with specific regulations, including those in 28 CFR Part 23. Technical assistance and a half-day class provide information on guidelines for operating criminal intelligence systems.
http://www.iir.com/28cfr/
Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative (Global) -- The Global initiative is a collaborative effort among government bodies and nonprofit organizations to develop and implement a standards-based electronic information exchange capability, providing the justice community with timely, accurate, complete, and accessible information in a secure and trusted environment.
http://www.iir.com/global/
GIWG Global Intelligence Working Group (GIWG) -- The primary objective of the GIWG is to develop the National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan. This will best be accomplished by building on existing intelligence sharing efforts, facilitating the seamless exchange of intelligence information and promoting intelligence-led policing.
http://www.iir.com/giwg
Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information EXchange (MATRIX) -- MATRIX project is a pilot effort to increase and enhance the exchange of sensitive terrorism and other criminal activity information between local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.
http://www.iir.com/matrix
National Youth Gang Center (NYGC) -- The NYGC annually surveys law enforcement agencies to determine the scope of the youth gang problem in the U.S. The Center publishes topical reports and reviews of gang literature and operates an electronic discussion forum. NYGC also provides technical assistance and training to communities that participate in gang-related demonstration programs.
http://www.iir.com/nygc/
Project Development and Implementation Training (PDIT) -- The PDIT Program offers information and strategies to increase the awareness and capability of criminal justice practitioners and local, state, and tribal agencies to successfully implement, manage, and sustain federally funded criminal justice initiatives.
http://www.iir.com/pdit
SLATT
Training, research, and technical assistance for law enforcement professionals since 1978.
State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT) -- The SLATT Program provides pre-incident preparation and readiness training to state and local law enforcement in the area of anti-terrorism and violent extremist criminal activities. The Program's emphasis is on prevention and early interdiction of violence and criminal activities.
http://www.iir.com/slatt/
IIR provides management assistance and technical training directly to two federally funded national programs:
National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) -- A support system for the prevention, investigation, and prosecution of economic crimes, the NW3C serves law enforcement, prosecution, and regulatory agency members.
http://www.iir.com/nwccc.htm
Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) -- The six RISS Intelligence Centers provide services to over 6,600 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. By providing rapid access to information otherwise unavailable or too time-consuming to obtain, the RISS network has made a significant difference in the fight against crime.
http://www.iir.com/RISS/
http://www.iir.com/IIR_projects.htm
MATRIX LINKS:
http://www.iir.com/matrix/links.htm
CONTACT MATRIX:
http://www.iir.com/matrix/contact_matrix.htm
For more information, please contact us:
Mail Institute for Intergovernmental Research
Post Office Box 12729
Tallahassee, FL 32317
Phone (850) 385-0600 extension 279
Fax (850) 422-3529
E-mail matrix@iir.com
Web site http://www.iir.com/matrix/
If I Were Bush's Speechwriter..
Years ago, I was asked to write a speech for President Nixon..
I didn't do that, but I wish President Bush would ask me to write a speech for him now..
Here's what I'd write if he asked me to ~ which is unlikely..
My fellow Americans ~ (the word "fellow" includes women in political speeches)..
My fellow Americans. One of the reasons we invaded Iraq was because I suggested Saddam Hussein had something to do with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. No evidence that's so, I wish I hadn't said it..
I said we were going to get Saddam Hussein. To be honest, we don't know whether we got him or not. Probably not..
I said we'd get Osama bin Laden and wipe out al Qaeda. We haven't been able to do that, either. I'm as disappointed as you are..
I probably shouldn't have said Iraq had nuclear weapons. Our guys and the U.N. have looked under every bed in Iraq and can't find one..
In one speech, I told you Saddam Hussein tried to buy the makings of nuclear bombs from Africa. That was a mistake and I wish I hadn't said that. I get bad information sometimes just like you do..
On May 1, I declared major combat was over and gave you the impression the war was over. I shouldn't have declared that. Since then, 215 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. As the person who sent them there, how terrible do you think that makes me feel?.
I promised to leave no child behind when it comes to education. Then I asked for an additional $87 billion for Iraq. It has to come from somewhere. I hope the kids aren't going to have to pay for it ~ now in school or later when they're your age..
When I landed on the deck of the carrier, I wish they hadn't put up the sign saying MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. It isn't accomplished..
Maybe it should have been MISSION IMPOSSIBLE..
I've made some mistakes and I regret it. Let me just read you excerpts from something my father wrote five years ago in his book, “A World Transformed.”
I firmly believed we should not march into Baghdad ...To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant, into a latter-day Arab hero..
This is my father writing this..
...assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war..
We should all take our father's advice..
That's the speech I'd write for President Bush. No charge..
Written By Andy Rooney © MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved..
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/31/60minutes/rooney/main581171.shtml
Dan Meador (a legal researcher) has passed away this day of November 11, 2003..
From Larken Rose..
It is a rare person who can stand up for what is right, daring to put himself in harm's way, and do so with cheer, good humor, patience and kindness. Dan Meador is such a person, which is why I am sorry to report that Dan passed away early this morning.
I never had the pleasure of meeting Dan in person, and for the most part he fought on a different battlefield than I did (though against a common enemy). But from the contact we did have, it quickly became clear to me that Dan was a "breed apart"; knowledgeable yet humble, with firm principles yet so easy to get along with.
He will be missed, for his research, his passion for the truth, his hunger for justice, but also just for being a good guy. If you wish to send your condolences, support, etc., here is the place to do it:
Gail Meador - P.O. Box 547 - Marland, OK 74644
Dan certainly did his "fair share" of working to make this country a better place. If everyone did just a tenth of what Dan did, this world would be a great place to live in.
Sincerely, Larken Rose
it is clear..
one does not know..
the bottom line..
what makes this any different from?.
the public school systems..
The strongest is never strong enough..
to be always the master..
unless he transforms his strength into right..
and obedience into duty..
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau ~
Political philosopher,
educationist and essayist..
(1712-1778)
In the end it will not matter to us..
Whether we fought with flails or reeds..
It will matter to us greatly..
On what side we fought..
~ G. K. Chesterton ~
We have a natural right..
to make use of our pens as of our tongue..
at our peril, risk and hazard..
~ Voltaire ~
[François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)