Somewhat Off-topic...but, it's related to where I've taken part of this board...FWIW:
AFR MISSION STATEMENT Breaking the Demopublican Monopoly by Nelson Hultberg
One of the popular theories of the 20th century was that political freedom and economic freedom can be separated -- that a nation can regiment its economy and monetary system with centralized controls and still remain politically free. History, however, is proving this premise to be a sad illusion. And today's Washington D.C. is a most obvious example.
Like a modern day Cyclops with one eye and a stunted brain, our Federal Government grows fatter and fatter every decade as it corrupts the forces of freedom and the soundness of our money. Grunting and belching, regimenting and taxing, spending and consuming with the abandon of a drunken Caesar, this gargantuan beast has, in the span of 90 years, transformed a once productive marvel and manufacturing leader of the world into a decadent debtor nation hell-bent to follow Rome into the dustbin of history.
The two levers of power that have allowed Gargantua to grow into such a beast were given to it in 1913 with the enactment of the Federal Reserve and the progressive income tax. These two institutions destroyed the idea of "limited government" that the Founders had given us in 1787. The Federal Reserve was granted the legal power to create paper money and thus rob Americans of their wealth surreptitiously. With Richard Nixon's closing of the gold window in 1971, this power then allowed the Fed to inflate the currency at will, which has increased Washington's capacity to depreciate the dollar even further and rob Americans of their wealth even faster. The second lever of power, the progressive income tax, gave to the Federal Government the ability to seize unlimited earnings from productive Americans to buy voter support from vast hordes of special interest groups.
This was the death knell of our free republic. With the ability to print money and confiscate our incomes, the Federal Government has been able to grow exponentially over the past century -- well beyond the strictly constrained power that the Founding Fathers intended it to be.
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