Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Civil War in Tampa, Class War in Charlotte

The Republican and Democratic parties, the twin pillars of the imperial government currently occupying the state of Virginia, just recently finished their taxpayer-funded conventions in Tampa and Charlotte, respectively. Statists of both colors, red and blue, came creeping out of the woodwork to bend the knee to their presidential candidate, marvel at their own magnificence, condemn their opponents as enemies of truth, justice, and the American way, and of course, worship at the altar of the almighty government. Would that the convention halls of Tampa and Charlotte, crawling with sociopathic mass murderers, glorified looters, and meddlesome petty tyrants, receive the same judgment which God accorded to the depraved Old-Testament cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the world would be a far better place for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

"This Is How Liberty Dies - To Thunderous Applause"

Since the 2008 presidential campaign, Ron Paul and his libertarian alliance, have devoted themselves to working within the system of the Republican Party. The plan was to take advantage of the party framework to obtain publicity for Ron Paul's message which he would not have otherwise received, while also gradually gaining influence within the party to restore its Old-Right tradition of men like non-interventionist Robert Taft and anti-Fed Charles Lindbergh. Although Paul encountered vicious resistance from the Republican establishment in both 2008 and 2012, the persuasive power of peace, liberty, and prosperity continued to prevail against the entrenched statism of the neoconservative-dominated Republican Party. Ron-Paul libertarians began cropping up across the country, from places as different as frosty New England, the sleepy South, and the wild West. Ron Paul rallied a diverse group of people to the cause of liberty, including active-duty soldiers who knew firsthand the horrors of war, housewives who home-schooled their children in fear of public-school indoctrination, entrepreneurs who helped themselves by helping others, senior citizens who had seen it all and then some, and of course college students bursting with idealism. Most of Ron Paul's supporters were not lifelong libertarians, but disenchanted Republicans and Democrats who had become jaded by the status quo of politics. Ron Paul inspired people not only to volunteer and contribute to his campaign, however, but also to become active in politics themselves, leading to the election of many "liberty candidates" at local, state, and federal levels. Ron Paul sowed the seeds of a truly bottom-up revolution in defense of liberty, which he hoped would take root in and benefit from the infrastructure of the Republican Party. Sadly, he was terribly mistaken.

In the 2012 Republican primary, Ron Paul won a majority of the delegates in nine states - Virginia, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Iowa, Oregon, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and Nevada, a diverse group of Rebels, Yankees, and cowboys only Ron Paul could unite. According to the Republican Party's own rules, any candidate who wins a plurality in five or more states is considered a presidential nominee, and is accorded a speaking position and a vote on the convention floor. Since Ron Paul won at least five states - indeed, he won nine - he was an official nominee due certain privileges. The Republican Rules Committee, however, fearing that the image of a divided party would undermine the presidential prospects of the establishment-anointed Mitt Romney, treacherously decided to amend its rules in order to subvert the democratic process so that Ron Paul's voice and his delegates' votes would be suppressed.

Leading up to the convention, the Republican National Committee, hoping to preempt a Ron-Paul presence, twisted technicalities to decree that the duly elected delegations of Louisiana, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma - all Ron-Paul states - were disqualified. Despite going to great lengths to disenfranchise Ron-Paul delegates, the RNC still failed to achieve its goal of lowering Ron Paul's states to beneath the five-state minimum. In response, the Republican Rules Committee tried to amend the five-state threshold to a ten-state threshold. Fortunately, that blatant power play was defeated, thanks to the opposition of a Virginia committeeman who appreciated how the amendment would disenfranchise not just his state, but any minority voters outside of the Republican establishment. Thwarted, the RNC then tried a different strategy. After reinstating a few of the previously banned Ron-Paul delegates from Louisiana and Massachusetts, the RNC then unilaterally stripped the entire Maine delegation of its eligibility. Because the RNC did not reinstate enough Ron-Paul delegates to restore his fairly won majority in Massachusetts and Louisiana, the removal of the entire Maine delegation left him with only four states, the other five he won having been banished from the convention by executive fiat.

As if the fact that the Republican establishment cheating Ron Paul of his hard-fought and well-earned place at the convention and disenfranchising delegations from five Ron-Paul states were not bad enough, the manner in which the Republican establishment seized power added insult to injury. Romney delegates applauded and chanted "USA! USA! USA!" like football fans from Oakland or Philadelphia as the RNC, in the fashion of a Communist government staging a sham election, dictatorially overruled primary results, depriving Maine delegates of their democratically won positions, and replacing them with establishment-appointed lackeys who would vote for Romney as their masters commanded. "It's a disgusting, disgusting display of a hostile takeover from the top-down," moaned an unseated Maine delegate.

Apparently, to Romney delegates, either the ends justify the means or there is something "American" and worthy of cheering in the outright stealing an election. What made the RNC's bullying of Ron-Paul delegations so puzzling was that Romney's nomination was already assured, his delegates outnumbering Ron Paul's four to one. The RNC could have completely avoided controversy by seating Ron Paul's delegations, granting Paul the privileges he was due as a nominee, then proceeding to anoint Romney anyway, but they chose conflict over comity. Romney and the RNC have forgotten that the point of a convention is for all factions to come together to discover common ground and reconcile differences, not for the majority to lord itself over the rest of the party. Indeed, despite the fact that Ron Paul represented 20% of the Republican delegates and millions of politically active voters from all walks of life, Romney has made a point of not courting Paul at all, and has actually distanced himself from Paul on many issues. The RNC's treachery against Ron Paul and his delegates was not practical but personal, a vindictive insult and pointed threat aimed at any with the audacity to champion, peace, liberty, and other principles of the Founding Fathers in the Republican Party. "There's nothing American about what just happened," protested a Nevada delegate after the RNC refused to seat him and his fellow delegates. "This is the death of the Republican Party." Good riddance, he might have added.

The Republican establishment did not stop at persecuting Ron-Paul delegates, however. Just as the Roman Empire salted the earth upon which the ruins of Carthage stood to ensure that nothing would ever grow upon that fallow ground again, the RNC staged a coup to prevent a grassroots uprising from ever daring to challenge the establishment again. To accomplish this bold task, the Republican Rules Committee proposed "Rule 16," an amendment which turns primary elections into less of a bottom-up process in which the voters have the power and into more of a top-down process in which insiders and officials in smoked-filled rooms call the shots. Specifically, Rule 16 forces state-level Republican officials to revise their state's primary election procedures so that delegates are apportioned on a winner-take-all basis, and grants state parties the authority to dismiss delegates attached to candidates of whom they oppose. Rule 16's changes to apportionment turn state delegations into monoliths which disproportionately over-represent the plurality winner and are less-representative of how the people actually voted. Rule 16's changes to how delegates are "bound" allows the state party and primary candidates to enter into a conspiracy in which delegates can be removed and replaced at will, in direct contravention of how the people of a state actually voted. For example, if four Republicans ran in a state primary, with Areceiving 45% of the vote, B and C receiving 10% between themselves, and D receiving 45% of the vote, Rule 16 would allow the two 5% candidates to remove their delegates and replace them with D-appointed delegates (perhaps in exchange for preferential treatment when sharing the spoils of the presidency), thus redistributing their 10% to D, despite the fact that the people of the state voted for B and C. Rule 16 makes a mockery of democracy, suppressing large swathes of voters in a misguided mania of projecting unanimity and placing plenary power in the hands of the party and politicians over the people. Grassroots candidates must now overcome new RNC-erected barriers in the already formidable fight of overthrowing an incumbent. Rule 16 reveals that disenfranchising Ron-Paul delegations was only the first step in a greater plan to institute obstacles which ensure that those brave few who follow in Paul's footsteps will be at an even greater disadvantage than their intrepid predecessor.

There were some, however, who resisted Rule 16, rightly seeing it for the shameless usurpation of power it was. While debate raged on the convention floor, the delegations from Virginia and Rhode Island, which opposed Rule 16, were forcibly detained from the vote, circling around the convention in a bus for 45 minutes. By the time the delegations finally arrived, the deed had been done: Rule 16 was on the books. Even more egregious, however, was the shocking revelation that the floor vote on the adoption of Rule 16 was not a legitimate vote, but a completely scripted sham. John Boehner, current Speaker of the House presiding over the proceedings, called for a verbal vote, in which delegates in favor of centralizing electoral power were to shout "aye," and delegates in favor of keeping elections decentralized were to shout "nay." Despite booming shouts from both sides, Boehner quickly declared that, "In the opinion of the Speaker of the House, the ayes have it," ratifying Rule 16 without ever taking a real vote. Footage from the convention reveals that Boehner's "opinion" that "the ayes have it" was actually a line he was instructed to recite from a teleprompter. In other words, the Republican establishment had determined the election results ahead of time, the vote itself a mere charade to conceal the coup. Unfortunately, when ardent opposition to Rule 16 and Boehner's weak performance revealed the Republican establishment's ruse, Romney delegates lacked the integrity to demand a fair vote, applauding their false victory like an unethical football fan who cheers when his team benefits from a bad call. Perhaps the Republican establishment was giving the party a free preview of what life will be like under Rule 16.

While Republican insiders are busy slapping themselves on the back for ramming through cheap shots and power grabs the way the Democrats rammed ObamaCare into law, perhaps they might reflect on the story of how Ronald Reagan, by far the party's most popular president at home and abroad, won the presidency. In 1976, Reagan, a conservative outsider within the Republican Party, challenged the statist Gerald Ford in the presidential primary. Reagan and other conservative delegates fought Ford doggedly, and were able to force a brokered convention. Ford went on to lose the presidential election to Jimmy Carter, but by 1980, because of the grassroots uprising of 1976, Reagan had risen to prominence and was in a position to win the presidency. Such underdog success stories are precisely what Rule 16 targets for elimination, however. Brian Dougherty, a delegate from Pennsylvania, explains how Rule 16 would have changed the course of Reagan's life:
"Now these rules as they are, if they were in place in 1976, Ronald Reagan would never have risen to power in the Republican Party. When he challenged Ford in 1976, he would not have had a say. And then he would not have been in a position to win in 1980. So we would not have had a President Reagan if these rules had existed back then."
Chances are, the Republican establishment does not want to risk aborting a potential Reagan, especially when Reagan is the standard by which every other Republican presidential candidate is judged - and falls short.

The full aftermath of the Republican establishment's despicable, despotic tactics in Tampa remains to be determined, but it is certain that the party may have purged millions of passionate and principled voters, sealing its doom in the coming presidential election as well as jeopardizing the future of the party altogether. Michael Steele, former Republican National Committee Chairman, ridiculed the Republican establishment's abuse of Ron Paul and his delegations:
"What the Republican National Committee did to Ron Paul was the height of rudeness and stupidity for this reason: why would you alienate an individual who has the ability to attract a new generation of voters, who are already skeptical of your institution but are willing to at least listen through the vehicle of this individual and the words that he is saying? Why would you alienate them, get on the floor and not let them speak? Not have his name go up on the board and see the number of electoral votes that he receives? This is crazy! They fear that which they cannot control."
Steele is right; if the Republican establishment was thinking strategically, it would realize that it has far more to gain in an alliance with Ron Paul and his liberty candidates. Unfortunately, statism is deeply embedded in the Republican Party, driving irreconcilable differences between neoconservative Republicans and Ron-Paul libertarians that make an alliance unlikely. The reason the Republican establishment is so afraid of Paul is because the bills for decades of fiscal profligacy, arrogant imperialism, and avaricious centralization of authority are finally coming due. Ron Paul is ardently opposed to everything for which the Republican establishment stands - sound money over central banking and fiat money, peace and trade over imperialism, a government limited to defending property over the entitlement and welfare state, and Thomas Jefferson over Abraham Lincoln - and has, much to the Republicans' chagrin, been prophetically predicting the coming crash for years. Ron Paul is right, which infuriates the declining and falling Republican establishment to no end. The fact that Ron Paul's message of peace and liberty resonates with such a diverse cross-section of Americans is truly terrifying to the Republicans in power.Seeing the writing on the wall - not just in the descent of its empire but in the ascent of Ron Paul - the Republican establishment fears the impending loss of its money and power, and like a cornered, wounded, frightened animal, is overpowered by instincts of self-preservation, lashing out with all its might.

The Republican Party's treachery in Tampa should come as no surprise to Ron-Paul libertarians. After all, the Republican Party, despite its brief Old-Right phase during the first half of the 20th century, was originally conceived in the 1850s as a pro-government/anti-liberty party of mercantilism, and seized power in the 1860s to inaugurate mass murder and economic exploitation against the free and independent Southern states. John Sherman, brother of Federal war criminal William T. Sherman, explained that the goal of the Republican Party was "to nationalize as much as possible, even the currency, so as to make men love their country before their states. All private interests of individuals, all local interests, all banking interests, the interests of individuals - everything - should be subordinate now to the interest of the government." No wonder the Republican Party was not above crushing a fifth of their delegations in the name of party unity; authoritarianism runs deep in their blood. In more recent years, the Republican establishment has fought the ascendancy of Ron Paul tooth and nail, employing tactics ranging from the overt (attempting to exclude Ron Paul from primary debates, sanctioning intimidation tactics and outright violence against Ron-Paul delegates, trying to nip liberty candidates in the bud by funding/endorsing establishment candidates in Republican primaries, etc.) to the covert (portraying Ron Paul as a "kook," maligning his principles as "crackpot" and "anti-American," accusing him of racism and "blaming America for 9/11," minimizing his presence in presidential primaries, etc.). The Republican establishment is afraid of letting Ron Paul be heard because they know that, as Samuel Adams said, "It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." Free speech for Ron Paul means freedom in the minds of men - a threat to the U.S. empire over which Republicans and Democrats share rule, and from which they share the spoils.

Republicans have chosen ideological purity over strategy; they want pro-government/anti-liberty neoconservatives marching obediently in their ranks, not independent-minded libertarians, paleoconservatives, constitutionalists, or any Old-Right faction for that matter. Even the Tea Party, a fairly conventional conservative grassroots movement, is considered too extreme for the statists of the Republican establishment. Rather than continue to work within a system in which they are not welcome, Ron-Paul libertarians should part ways with the Republicans, choosing between joining an existing third party (like the Libertarian Party), running independently, or forming a new third party. For Ron-Paul libertarians to associate with the Republican Party, no matter how convenient, inflicts serious damage upon their personal credibility and, more importantly, the persuasive power of their message. Now that the Republican establishment has just forced Ron Paul and his delegations from the convention, the futility of trying to compromise with the Republicans should be crystal clear. The Republican establishment views Ron Paul as an enemy, not an ally, so much so that it would actually risk civil war at its own convention in order to disenfranchise his delegations and deprive him of his privileges as a nominee.

Working within the Republican Party has always taken an optimistic and short-term view of politics at the expense of a realistic and long-term strategy. It may help, as Ron Paul noted in a post-convention interview on the Tonight Show, liberty candidates (who would have gone unnoticed otherwise) promote libertarian principles to larger audience, but runs the risk of the words of liberty candidates (Ron-Paul libertarians posing as Republicans) becoming associated with the actions of statist Republicans, like the Bush Administration or the current "Tea-Party" House of Representatives, both of which have gleefully grown the government. In the mind of the average voter, the "R" behind the Ron-Paul libertarian and neoconservative's name closes the gulf between the two, and automatically places the libertarian at a huge deficit in redeeming his reputation and regaining credibility. By uniting with Republicans, libertarian ideas become associated with Republican policies, leading to tragedies in which freedom takes the fall for the failures of government intervention, which was exactly what happened during the housing bust. Then, in 2007-2008, capitalism, innocent of any crime, was punished, while the government, guilty of all charges, got away with murder. Republicans waving the flag of freedom while enriching and empowering the government undermine the cause of liberty, and are as dangerous as those waving the flag of tyranny. Free from the Republican Party, that time and energy spent undoing a negative could have been devoted to doing something positive. A civil war for control of the Republican Party will cost more than victory is worth. Ron-Paul libertarians stand to gain more by seceding from the Republican Party - abandoning them to rot in the grave they dug for themselves - in order to form their own identity and determine their own destiny in a new party of their own - the Liberty party!

So, in sum, when the Republican establishment failed to defeat Ron Paul - who won ever-increasing support while playing by the Republican Party's own rules - it treacherously changes the rules by executive fiat and claims victory. The RNC's shocking usurpation of power from the people and despotic tactics befitting a banana republic were more than just the closing chapter in a vendetta against Ron Paul, but an attempted abortion of all future grassroots challengers who dare defy the Republican establishment. The Republican establishment may have won the battle in Tampa, but having now built its foundations on shifting sand, Ron Paul will ultimately win the war for freedom. Hopefully the disenfranchised victims of Tampa - from Ron-Paul libertarians to Tea-Party conservatives - will oblige the Republican establishment and take their business elsewhere. The Republican establishment should remember the words of Oscar Wilde: "There are two tragedies in life. One is not getting what we want; the other is getting it."

Condoleeza Runs Her Mouth

Condoleeza Rice, George W. Bush's former National Security Director and Secretary of State, gave a widely ballyhooed speech in which she, in addition to criticizing Obama for insufficient aggression against the perceived enemies - despite the fact that he has escalated war in every theater, intervened in whole new conflicts, and codified Bush's illegal wartime practices into unconstitutional law - tooted her own horn in a story about growing up amid segregation:
‎"A little girl grows up in Jim-Crow Birmingham. The segregated city of the South where her parents cannot take her to a movie theater or to restaurants, but they have convinced her that even if she cannot have it hamburger at Woolworths, she can be the President of the United States if she wanted to be, and she becomes the Secretary of State...Yes, America has a way of making the impossible seemed inevitable in retrospect, but we know it was never inevitable."
Rice believes she can build a personal brand around the fact that she grew up during segregation. Most black people her age did, too, but instead of making a career out of it they obtained real jobs. More importantly, however, the Civil Rights Act was an unconstitutional and immoral violation of private property. People should have the right to "discriminate" on their own property, with what they own - and pay the price. Discrimination may result in the loss of a lucrative customer base or a potentially qualified employee, or it may result in customers valuing whatever good/service the property owner offers less, thereby costing him business. Either way, the property owner reaps what he sows. There is nothing inspiring or patriotic about the federal government using its military might to force someone to sell a cheeseburger to Rice. There is nothing "American" about the federal government seizing authority over private property and depriving property owners of their right to use their property in whatever manner they wish. As much as it may offend the polite sensibilities of liberals and conservatives alike, discrimination is not immoral; it is absolutely amoral, for what a property owner does with his own property is his own business. So long as a property owner does not aggress against the property of another, he should be left alone, not forced under penalty of asset seizure or imprisonment to obey arbitrary rules and regulations. In fact, the Civil Rights Act was a coup against the whole concept of property, for if a property owner does not have absolute dominion over his property, he cannot be said to truly own anything at all.

Furthermore, despite her cruel words for the South (in addition to implicitly criticizing Birmingham as "a city of the South," after Rice's speech she noted in an interview that "American values have not been in evidence there"), it was the federal government she so reveres that propped up slavery with fugitive slave laws and even an abortive Lincoln-backed constitutional amendment (the "Corwin Amendment"), and Northern states that instituted "Black Codes" (racist statutes which ranged from denying blacks rights to prohibiting them from living in a given state) as early as the 18th century. What Rice shallowly defines as "American values" appear closer to the quasi-socialist egalitarian principles of the French Revolution ("liberty, equality, and fraternity") rather than the traditional classical-liberal principles of the United States ("life, liberty, and property"), and reveals her true ignorance, for there has never been an authentic "American" culture - although there have been attempts to impose one by force.

For example, after the federal government's conquest of the Confederacy - a historical tragedy Rice no doubt applauds - one of the objectives of the legalized looting spree known as Reconstruction was to indoctrinate Southerners into adopting the crassly commercial, violently nationalistic, obsessively puritanical "American" culture of the Yankees - the same "American values" which Rice now trumpets, and which the U.S. government spreads around the world at gunpoint. The constitutions of Southern states, once free and independent sovereigns which won their freedom from the British Empire and formed the federal government as an agent to serve them in a limited capacity, were forcibly rewritten in deference to the now-almighty central government. The Fourteenth Amendment, which consolidated untold power - the nebulous, potentially limitless power to enforce equality at gunpoint - in the federal government, was ratified illegally, the Northern states having to resort to brute force in temporarily disenfranchising the recently conquered Southern states resisting ratification of the amendment, clearing the way for greater centralization of power - eerily similar to the Republican establishment's convention coup against Ron Paul and his duly elected delegations. Even though the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified illegally, it still barely passed over the objections of many other non-Confederate states like New Jersey and Oregon, which rightly saw it as a coup by which the federal government would usurp the rights of the people of the states. Rice's remarks about "American values" were reminiscent of an encounter between Confederate Lieutenant General Richard Taylor and a Federal officer during Taylor's surrender to Federal Major General General Edward Canby:
"There was, as ever, a skeleton at the feast, in the person of a general officer who had recently left Germany to become a citizen and soldier of the United States. This person, with the strong accent and idioms of the Fatherland, comforted me by assurances that we of the South would speedily recognize our ignorance and errors, especially about slavery and the rights of the states, and rejoice in the results of the war...I apologized meekly for my ignorance, on the ground that my ancestors had come from England to Virginia in 1608, and in the short intervening period of two hundred and fifty-odd years, had found no time to transmit to me the correct ideas of the duties of American citizenship. Moreover, my grandfather, commanding the 9th Virginia regiment in our Revolutionary army, had assisted in the defeat and capture of the Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, and I lamented that he had not, by association with these worthies, enlightened his understanding. My friend smiled blandly, and assured me of his willingness to instruct me."
Taylor was being humble, omitting the fact that his father was Zachary Taylor, a former U.S. president. Rice unwittingly plays the part of the haughty, ignorant foreigner when she speaks condescendingly of "American values" lacking in the South. Southern culture existed for ages before there was ever an "America," and will endure long after the U.S. colossus finally reaps what it has been sowing. Settled primarily by English Cavaliers hoping to preserve their noble way of life and Celtic pioneers seeking freedom on the frontier, the South evolved into a decentralized society in which individuals were sovereign over their property (usually a plantation or family farm), loyal first and foremost to their local community (such as county or state), and defensive of their liberty (since most had fled their homeland to escape oppression in the first place). Because Southern culture was bottom-up, local institutions like family and church gained great significance, and top-down interlopers like the federal government were held in contempt. Finally, because the South was populated by Cavaliers and Celts, both of whom were descended from proud chivalric traditions, duty and honor figured prominently into Southern life. Because of the independence of Southern life on the farm or frontier, classical liberalism - a political ideology of laissez-faire, liberty, and peace - flourished in the South. In fact, it was the Southern classical-liberal political tradition which ultimately produced many of the Founding Fathers, men of monumental significance like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, as well as lesser-known but equally important leaders like Patrick Henry, George Mason, John Randolph of Roanoke, John Taylor of Caroline, and St. George Tucker. The South has a glorious cultural heritage, and has nothing for which to apologize, least of all to authoritarian warmongers like Rice, who would not know culture if it up and bit them.

Overcoming adversity was a theme of Rice's throughout the night. Earlier in her speech, she spoke of great challenges which "the nation" has "overcome:"
"...a Civil War, brother against brother, hundreds of thousands dead on both sides, but we emerged a more perfect union.  A second founding when inpatient patriots were determined to overcome the birth defect of slavery."
Rice is reciting the usual cliches about the so-called "Civil War," and is wrong on four levels. First, and most obviously, the "Civil War" was not, in fact, a civil war. A civil war is a war fought between multiple factions for control of a government, but the "Civil War" was a war in which the South fought the North for freedom from the federal government - in particular the economic burden of federal protective tariffs upon Southern agriculture.

Second, the image of "brother against brother," a standard "Civil-War" trope, is largely a myth invented to conceal the ugly truth that the "Civil War" was actually an imperial conquest of North over South, and reinforce the post-bellum propaganda that the U.S. was a "nation," and "indissoluble Union," not a diverse, divided, decentralized republic of sovereign states. Brother did not fight brother; one country conquered another. The South, after decades of abuse, seceded from the Union for freedom from taxation without representation, and the North, dependent on the federal regime of economic exploitation of the South, waged total war against the South, until the South - at a disadvantage in money, manpower, and materiel - could no longer sustain the horrific costs of war, and was forced to surrender to Northern rule once more.

Third, the U.S. did not emerge from the "Civil War" as "a more perfect Union." If by "more perfect Union," Rice means a Union built upon the bones of over 600,000 slain soldiers and civilians, a Union based on force of arms instead of consent of the governed, a Union in which the central government tore the Constitution asunder as it rapaciously usurped liberty of the people, a Union which fanatically waged a war of conquest to subjugate the free and independent Southern people, then  yes, congratulations, the "Civil War" did form a more perfect Union. If anything, the U.S. victory in the "Civil War" was a Pyrrhic victory, since it marked the death of the U.S. as a uniquely American republic and rebirth as a European-style empire. So, in a sense, Rice is right when she says that the "Civil War" was a "second founding," but fails to realize that this second founding was a regression rather than progression, that Lincoln and Republicans overthrew the classical-liberal principles which inspired the first founding and erected a quasi-socialist ideology in their place. The "Civil War" was a second founding: America's own version of the French Revolution, in which Republicans played the role of the Jacobins, slaughtering the innocent in the street, desecrating time-honored traditions and institutions, and seizing vast amounts of money and power for themselves - all in the name of progress. In fact, if anything, it was the South which stood for Rice's precious "American values," and the North which betrayed them.

Fourth, slavery was not a "birth defect" of the U.S., but rather an institution inherited from the British Empire. At the time of the "Civil War," slavery had been abolished peacefully throughout the Western world; not a single European country resorted to violence in abolishing slavery. Market forces alone were slowly but surely rendering slavery obsolete as a costly and inefficient form of labor, to say nothing of the growing moral consensus that slavery was contrary to classical liberalism and Christianity. Despite the inevitability of peaceful abolition in the South, zealous abolitionists in the North screeched that slavery must be overthrown violently, idolizing lunatics like John Brown as liberators rather than murderers. Motivated by a personal lust for Northern hegemony in the U.S., as well as a superstitious fear that they must act as the instruments of God in purifying the world in order to escape divine judgment, these intolerant abolitionists considered all cultures different from theirs sinful, particularly the antebellum South and what was left of the Native-American tribes. Although the North started the "Civil War" for economic reasons, abolition proved a convenient flag for Lincoln and the Republicans to wave in order to revive flagging Northern morale and discourage foreign intervention. In the course of the supposed Northern crusade to "free the slaves," however, not a single slave was freed - despite the hype, the Emancipation Proclamation actually explicitly protected slavery in U.S. territory, conveniently abolishing it in Confederate territory where the federal government had no authority - though many slaves were tormented, raped, murdered, and conscripted by Federal forces.

In short, Rice glorified imperialism and mass murder, all to Republican applause thunderous enough to rival Hurricane Isaac. Rice's speech was actually trumpeted as one of the highlights of the convention, overshadowing Republican celebrities like Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, and even Paul Ryan. Frighteningly, Rice is rumored to have Romney's ear on foreign policy. Under the influence of a sociopath like Rice, expect President Romney to invade peaceful foreign lands for the alleged crimes of their governments ("liberate oppressed people"), stage coups against their governments ("overthrow tyranny"), establish U.S.-friendly puppet regimes ("promote democracy"), confiscate the land's natural resources and people's property for redistribution to politically connected crony capitalists ("help build the economy"), murder freedom fighters who resist imperialism ("fight terrorists") and permanently occupy the country to protect his puppet regime ("make them ready for democracy"). In other words, expect Radical Reconstruction in the Middle East.

Romney Glorifies Government

Romney, who in the primary touted his economic expertise (i.e. a career of flipping businesses and growing government) as a presidential qualification, failed to criticize the spectacular failure of Obama's economic policies - particularly the atrocious Keynesian stimulus - or articulate an alternative approach. Obviously, this failure is because at heart Romney and Obama differ only in degree, not in kind. On economics, Romney and Obama both believe in countercyclical economic policy (i.e. spending and printing money), central banking (government monopolization of the money supply in order to commit legalized counterfeiting), and bailouts (interfering with vital signals of profit/loss to enrich politically protected crony-parasites). Romney may believe that the federal government should lower tax rates a few percentage points, grow federal spending at a slightly slower rate, but in the words of Ron Paul, such "tinkering around the edges" will not make a meaningful difference. Voters will not opt for a counterfeit when they can purchase the genuine article.

In his speech, Romney generally avoided tackling economics, despite the fact that economics is the decisive issue this election. Instead, Romney mentioned education, energy, women, Bain Capital, and even Neil Armstrong. The Wall Street Journal offered a brief but compelling example of what Romney could have said on the subject of economics:
"President Obama will say I want to cut taxes on the rich. But a fairer tax code with lower rates for everyone will lead to more investment, faster growth, and more middle-class jobs. I want to eliminate the special tax favors that the rich can exploit because they have political power that average Americans don't. Mr. Obama wants to keep the current tax code because it gives the rich and powerful in Washington more money power. I want average Americans to have more money and power instead."
Such a statement would have been nothing radical, solidly within the establishment's narrow range of officially approved opinion. Reducing taxes to stimulate economic growth has been a bipartisan activity throughout the 20th century: Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, JFK in the 1960s, and Reagan in the 1980s. Still, Romney could not even summon up that much courage, instead devoting a significant amount of time to the mirage of "better" government, rather than truly conservative ideal of "less" or even "no" government. If Romney cannot deliver an inspiring economic message, Obama will run circles around him with promises of government "investments" in everything under the sun, horror stories about "the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer," and fairytales about "created or saved" jobs.

Obama is a tyrannical statist with a particularly obnoxious sense of sanctimony. He is not the worst president of all time, but definitely not one of the best, and certainly one of the most annoying. While in power, Obama has presided over countless usurpations of life, liberty, and property. Most significantly, over the past three years, the economy's natural powers of recovery have not been able to overcome the heavy hand of Obama: unemployment remains high, economic growth remains low, and all the while, the oppressive burden of government continues to mount. Yet despite Obama's enormous vulnerability in reelection, the Republicans - supposedly reinvigorated by conservative grassroots movements like the Tea Party - ultimately nominate Romney, the most bland, liberal, and politically perilous of all the candidates. Romney, who signed the state-level version of ObamaCare into law as Governor of Massachusetts, has absolutely no credibility on the subject of healthcare, one issue on which the American people are united in opposition to Obama. Romney could conceivably turn the issue to his advantage, claiming that as someone who misguidedly signed the ObamaCare prototype into law, he has firsthand experience with its failure and wants to protect the rest of the country from the terrible mistake he made in Massachusetts. Instead, Romney has dug himself into an even deeper hole, recently stating in his too-slick-for-his-own-good, million-words-per-minute, talking-out-of-both-sides-of-his-mouth Yankee style that he would not repeal ObamaCare in full - despite repeated assurances to the contrary - and would actually retain many of the worst elements of the law. Romney does not need to "repeal and replace" ObamaCare with more government intervention, such as mandating that insurers provide coverage to preexisting conditions (i.e. further socializing health insurance by redistributing healthcare costs from the young and healthy to the old and sick), just repeal ObamaCare altogether, along with the myriad other federal distortions of healthcare economy. In nominating Romney, the Republicans forfeited their winning issue against Obama, and practically ensured his reelection. Unless Romney finds a way to transmute his chronic flip-flopping into a selling point, rally CNN and MSNBC to his side, and beat Obama at playing the blame game, Republicans should get used to seeing Obama's stupid grin for another four years.

A Teetering, Tottering Platform

The platform which the Republicans adopted in Tampa is predictably consistent with the party's postwar legacy of "despotism at home and aggression abroad" to quote Lord Acton. Two points of the platform bear comment: "unequivocal support" for the State of Israel, and the perpetuation of corporatism disguised as laissez-faire.

The State of Israel is accorded "unequivocal support," despite the fact that it is an authoritarian, womb-to-tomb socialist, fully militarized police state with one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world. The unholy alliance between the U.S. and Israeli governments is a relic of Cold-War geopolitical strategy, when the U.S. allied with the State of Israel in order to balance power in the Middle East after the Soviet Union allied with various Arab regimes. Conservative Christians have been deceived into believing that the State of Israel is descended from the oppressed Jewish people of Biblical times, and that the regional antagonism towards the State of Israel is the manifestation of a far greater spiritual battle between good and evil. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The State of Israel has a greater resemblance to the fallen rule of Ahab and Jezebel than the righteous reigns of David or Solomon.

Zionism, the 19th-century Jewish nationalist movement which led to the United Nations' creation in 1947 of the State of Israel from the Palestinian territory of the former British Empire, was first and foremost a secular movement. According to the Bible, however, it was God, not the U.N., who in Genesis 12:1-3, 22:16-18 made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants for the Promised Land. In Ezekiel 39:21-24, it was God who described how he would punish the descendants of Abraham, along with its neighboring nations, for their transgressions. Finally, in Jeremiah 16:14-16 and Zechariah 13:9-9, it was God who promised that he would ultimately restore the descendants of Abraham to the Promised Land. God has plainly stated that He will accomplish the restoration of Abraham's progeny. No secular authority, certainly not the abominably evil U.N., can fulfill God's covenants. When Christians bow before the word of the U.N., they dishonor God's promise.

Furthermore, in His original covenant with Abraham, God never even sanctions a given government, promising only that if Abraham ventured forth to the Promised Land, He would "make [Abraham] a great nation." A "nation" does mean a "government" (a nation is a group of people of common culture, language, history, but not imply a government), and certainly not a social-democratic state over three millennia later. In fact, although the descendants of Abraham did eventually become a great nation in Canaan, it was the advent of secular government (the United Monarchy) which marked the downfall of the descendants of Abraham from the decentralized days in which Jewish government was theocratic, prophets and judges upholding God's commandments in each of the Twelve Tribes. The State of Israel blasphemously seizes these holy covenants to build legitimacy for its rule, but it is a false prophet, a semi-socialist secular state without any authentic lineage to the Old Testament.

Sadly, after the Assyrian Captivity of Israel and the Babylonian Diaspora of Judah, the Biblical nation of Abraham's progeny went into exile and ceased to exist. God has sworn that He will one day restore the Jewish nation to its former glory, but as a spiritual nation, not a secular government like the State of Israel. Christians love to fret over the passage, "I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse," yet the secular Zionists who orchestrated the founding of the State of Israel are not the descendants of Abraham - the last remnant of them were deported from Judah in the early 6th century B.C. - and so are not owed any "blessing" from people mindful of God's judgment. Besides, even if the State of Israel were deserving of the "blessing" of Christians, that does not logically imply that Christians must lobby the U.S. government to employ coercion against its taxpayers to involuntarily fund coercion against the perceived enemies of the State of Israel. Christians who take their moral duty seriously should promote peace and spread the Gospel, not play politics or levy war. Government is legalized aggression against one's neighbor, the institutionalization and systematization of plunder, and is thus the antithesis of the peace, love, and joy of Christianity.

Furthermore, in the Bible, the Jewish people are the perpetual underdogs, always defending themselves against bigger, badder enemies like the Canaanites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Romans. Today, however, the State of Israel is a mighty and militaristic government, aggressively consolidating power in the Middle East while courting favor in the U.S., all under the guise of self-defense. Since its founding, the State of Israel conquered new territory from neighboring Middle-Eastern states. The State of Israel, through its lobbyists, think tanks, and media, has been extremely successful at marketing itself as a helpless victim besieged by evil on all sides - even using the Holocaust as a card to play in deflecting any criticism of its actions - when its military and alliances make it a chief hegemonic and destabilizing power in the Middle East. The State of Israel's foreign policy relationship with the U.S. government has enabled Israeli bellicosity, poisoned Israeli-Arab relations, and has led to less peace and more war than would have existed otherwise.

On the subject of foreign policy, Jefferson counseled "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none." The U.S. government should keep Jefferson's advice in mind when meddling in the Middle East. Like any nation, the State of Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself, and has vigorously done so in the past, oftentimes in spite of so-called international authorities like the UN. In fact, the State of Israel's foreign policy is the embodiment of the old saying that "the best defense is a good offense." By lobbying the U.S. government to preemptively strike places like Iran, however, the State of Israel is simply trying to outsource its imperialism to a greater power. If the State of Israel does not believe a battle is worth fighting itself - and it is more than capable of fighting - then it should not try to convince others to fight that battle on its behalf. Sadly, the U.S. government has proved far too obliging of an ally, intervening in regional conflicts and even starting wars at the behest of the State of Israel. If the U.S. government stopped intervening in the Middle East, a balance of power would emerge in which the fear of defeat would keep aggression in check and trade would link the interests of all together. In such a balance of power, the State of Israel may not be as mighty, but the U.S. government's picking and choosing of friends and enemies in the Middle East is precisely what has prevented peace.

An example of the folly of foreign intervention is the current condition of Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Two years ago, a wave of popular uprisings swept the Middle East. Dubbed the "Arab Spring" by gawking Western onlookers eager to jump on the bandwagon, the uprisings toppled many crusty old regimes, the two most prominent of which were Mubarak in Egypt and Gaddafi in Libya. Obama, despite lacking the constitutionally required consent of Congress, illegally supplied munitions, materiel, manpower, and of course his magic mouth to rebels. After the downfall of Mubarak and Gaddafi, however, the regimes which the rebels erected in their place were hardly the liberal social democracies the U.S. government expected. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has begun restricting the rights of women and religious minorities like the Coptic Christians. In Libya, al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization behind 9/11, was revealed to have orchestrated the entire rebellion, and its flag now flies from Gaddafi's former palace. The so-called rebels were not heroes fighting for freedom from oppressive governments, but militant terrorists fighting for control of governments which they believed were too secular and tolerant - in other words, not oppressive enough. Despite this disheartening revelation, Obama has not learned his lesson, and has intervened in the Syrian civil war by providing "non-lethal assistance" such as radios to al-Qaeda rebels. Of course, radios to al-Qaeda are still indirectly lethal as they facilitate terrorist operations against the Syrian people, as well as free up funds for al-Qaeda to spend on lethal operations which it could not have otherwise afforded. In addition to this public assistance, Obama has also directed the CIA to smuggle automatic rifles, antitank weapons, rocket launchers, and ammunition to al-Qaeda through a secret, shadowy network of Middle-Eastern intermediaries. Obama's professed goal in Syria is "regime change," although regime change will be futile if the new regime is worse than the old, which is exactly what happened with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al-Qaeda in Libya. The U.S. government should have seen that it had no dog in the fight between terrorist rebels and decaying dictatorships that was the Arab Spring - now an Arab Winter - and refused to intervene on either side. Instead, the U.S. government rushed to ally with the rebels, and thus propelled into power today the very same terrorists it may be fighting tomorrow.

The second troubling aspect of the Republican platform is its economic statism, best described as "corporatism," the corrupt collaboration of big business and big government for mutual political gain. The Republican Party, despite laughably claiming in its platform that it was "born in opposition to the denial liberty," was actually founded in the 1850s as the party of mercantilism - an ideology that employs economic fallacies to justify empowering the government to enrich its crony-parasites - and are, in calling for corporatism, simply reconnecting with their Lincolnesque (i.e. firmly statist) roots. Although the Republicans claim that they will "pursue free-market policies," a sample of eight of their ideas should disabuse any free-thinking voter of that notion:

1) A "federal-state-private partnership" to "invest in the nation's infrastructure"

Infrastructure expenditures are the federal government's favorite excuse to spend other people's money. The government argues that the free market does not supply some goods/services - known as "public goods" - in adequate quantity or quality, and thus the government must intervene to correct this market failure. Roads, bridges, and lighthouses, and other elements of infrastructure are some common examples of the so-called public goods. Unfortunately for the government, public goods are an economic fallacy. Public goods are based on the idea that goods like roads will not be provided on a free market because of a "free-rider problem," in which others who did not pay for a good/service experience positive spillover effects, such as being able to drive on a road for which they did not pay. The existence of free riders, says the government, deters people from demanding necessary goods/services like roads. The truth, however, is that the government itself disproves its own argument with the methods it employs to finance the construction and maintenance of roads - tolls. Instead of paying taxes and tolls to the government, consumers could pay tolls to a privatized road, or perhaps purchase access to roads on an advance subscription basis. Some may object that the U.S.' infrastructure is already "crumbling," and that private corporations will make it even worse. Infrastructure may be crumbling in this country, but it is because the federal government is responsible for its management and maintenance. In a free market, quality and quantity rise while prices and costs fall - a textbook case of an increase in value - while in government, the reverse happens - quality and quantity fall while prices and costs rise. Finally, privatized infrastructure would be subject to profit-and-loss test, a vital signal which indicates whether more or less of a good/service is in demand, as well as the extent to which firms have reallocated undervalued factors of production to higher-valued utilization. Applied to infrastructure, profit and loss would not only make the provision of roads more efficient, but also eliminate the possibility of expensive boondoggles, such as Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere" and high-speed rail crisscrossing Florida.

2) "Overhauled...federal training programs"

Federal jobs training programs are programs in which the federal government trains the unemployed in job skills federal bureaucrats deem relevant. Labor, if left free, is one of the most mobile factors of production, adjusting to changes in supply/demand, technology, and productivity. Unemployed workers are capable of learning new skills without federal assistance, and for those few who cannot, employment is assured so long as they are flexible in accepting lower wages. Even if jobs retraining were beneficial, it would come at the expense of the taxpayers who were deprived of their property, and would have been better-spent elsewhere if it had been left in the private sector.

3) Intervening to ensure that "adequate credit and financing are available to spur manufacturing and expansion"

If a borrower cannot attain financing for a project, it is because the lender believes that the project is likely to fail and the borrower default. If the federal government intervenes, either in guaranteeing the loan, or providing funds it calls "credit" but is really just a glorified subsidy, it has diverted resources away from other projects which lenders would have judged a wiser use of their funds, and towards misconceived projects which never should have existed in the first place. The lenders, after all, are the men and women with the fiduciary duty, fiscal stewards who have the greatest incentive to manage their money carefully. The government, by contrast, has no accountability for its failures, and can only attempt to ape fiscal responsibility. The spectacular failure of Solyndra, the Northern-Californian solar-panels manufacturer which Barack Obama and Joe Biden both visited to  tout as a model for the green-jobs economy and an example of the benefits of stimulus, should serve as a warning to politicians eager to interfere with how the free market allocates credit.

4) A " value-added tax or national sales tax" contingent upon the "simultaneous repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment"

The fact that a value-added tax is even on the table speaks volumes about the statist leanings of the Republican Party. A few years ago, even speculating about a VAT as a potential solution to the federal government's fiscal crisis was anathema among Republicans, yet now the once-reviled VAT is worthy of inclusion in the party platform. A VAT is a pervasive consumption tax, popular in the social-democratic states of Europe, which levies taxes upon goods/services at every order of production. Specifically, manufacturers are taxed on the "value added," the difference between the price paid for a higher-order good/service (say, ore) and the price for which it was ultimately sold as a lower-order good/service (say, steel).

Many economists, ranging from supply-side to neoclassical, claim that consumption taxation is preferable to income taxation because it does not punish work or saving. Even if this were true, saving is not superior to consumption. In the end, saving, along with all other economic activity, is merely a means to consumption. Interestingly, however, a consumption tax like a VAT would ultimately burden income - and therefore, saving. If a VAT were instituted, firms would not simply "shift forward" the costs of taxation to their customers, as many economists breezily predict. Firms already set prices at their profit-maximizing level; if firms could raise prices without losing profits, they would have already done so. The theory of firms "passing on" costs is shallow. Instead of passing the costs of a VAT down the line, the costs of a VAT would proceed in the opposite direction - backwards, decreasing firms' demand for intermediate goods and factors of production (land, labor, and capital). Falling demand for land, labor, and capital imply falling incomes as well, meaning a reduction in wages and rents. Therefore, although originating as a tax on consumption, the ultimate incidence of the VAT falls upon income, penalizing work and savings just like an income tax.

The Sixteenth Amendment will not be repealed. Under the pretense of the Sixteenth Amendment, the federal government has seized enormous amounts of unconstitutional power - for example, the authority to ignore the Fourth Amendment - far too much power for it to ever willingly relinquish. The federal government also has no compelling reason to switch from the taxation of income to the taxation of value added, especially if the proposition is revenue-neutral. Although repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment is, politically speaking, out of the question, now that both parties are considering a VAT, taxpayers should gird themselves for some form of a consumption tax as "tax reform" rather than "tax reduction." Indeed, Republicans have long been led astray by "tax reform" - broadening the tax base and lowering tax rates - at the expense of "tax reduction." For example, in the Republican primary, Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan proposed the reduction of income-tax rates to 9% in exchange for the creation of two new consumption taxes, also at 9% - rates which would, no doubt, rise over time, just as the income tax originated as a minor levy on the ultra-wealthy but grew into a behemoth over time. Similarly, the FairTax, a supposedly "grassroots" tax-reform movement, is a revenue-neutral plan to replace the income tax with a national sales tax of 23%. In both cases, the federal government would continue to confiscate and redistribute the same amount of taxpayer money every year, but the burden would be distributed among more people. What matters is not, to paraphrase the French absolutist Jean-Baptise Colbert, how the goose's feathers are plucked, but rather the amount that are plucked. To make a difference, taxes must be reduced, not merely reformed.

5) A plan to "restructure the the twentieth-century entitlement state"

Propositions to save Social Security and Medicare are frightening not only in their disturbing ignorance of the extent of the entitlements' bankruptcy, but also in the horrific means which would be necessary to accomplish their ends. Republicans and Democrats alike are terrified to acknowledge that federal entitlements are a looming crisis. In the Republican primaries, when Texas Governor Rick Perry criticized Social Security as a "Ponzi Scheme," Romney criticized him from the left, singing the praises of federal entitlements. Perry, however, despite getting blasted for sticking his head over the trenches, was right; Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and a collapsing one at that. A Ponzi scheme is a financial con in which purported returns are paid to existing investors from funds which new investors contribute. In reality, however, there are no returns, just more contributions from new investors, so when no more new funds can be solicited, the scheme collapses and the con is revealed. Social Security works exactly the same way: payments to retirees are not generated from returns, but taken from the taxes of younger working taxpayers. Similarly, a growing population of new taxpayers is necessary to sustain the system, otherwise there will not be enough taxes to maintain payments to retirees. Unlike a Ponzi scheme, however, Social Security is mandatory, not voluntary; at least Ponzi did not force anyone to invest in his scheme. Unfortunately for federal entitlements, the tide has turned: the U.S. population is shrinking, not growing, and thus the system is becoming excessively top-heavy and unsustainable. Like a Ponzi scheme running out of new investors, Social Security is running out of new taxpayers, and will soon crash like Bernie Madoff's fund. Because of this demographic shift, Social Security has accumulated vast unfunded liabilities, none of which are "on-budget" as part of the national debt, but all of which are very real. Currently, the present value of the unfunded liabilities of federal entitlements over the coming 75 years is approximately $222 trillion. This does not mean that for the federal government to meet its obligations it needs $222 trillion over the course of 75 years, but that the federal government needs $222 trillion right now in order to meet its obligations over the next 75 years.

Nothing short of the total enslavement of the population would be necessary to secure such a sum, which may not even be economically possible. If it were possible, tax rates would be raised to such confiscatory levels that many people would simply lose the heart to work, at which point the federal government would intervene, forcing people to work against their will. After removing cost-of-living adjustments from Social Security - itself an implied default - the federal government would then count on the Federal Reserve to inflate the money supply in order to decrease the value of the payments owed to the beneficiaries of Social Security. Since the degenerate days of the Roman Empire, inflation has served as a time-honored way for governments to default on their debts without ever having to accept responsibility. As economist Gary North has noted, however, episodes of hyperinflation have only ever raged for a few years before ending in utterly devastating economic and societal crashes. If the Federal Reserve attempts to hyperinflate the unfunded liabilities of federal entitlements away, it will backfire, causing a crushing depression that makes matters even worse.

Given that not even hyperinflation is capable of fully devaluing the unfunded liabilities of federal entitlements, the more likely scenario is a milder but still miserable regime of higher payroll taxes, lifting the cap on taxable income, reneging on payments to richer taxpayers, removing cost-of-living adjustments from the benefits formula, and inflation to devalue whatever liabilities are left. Such measures are what grand bipartisan plans to "save" federal entitlements will inevitably entail.

Even if federal entitlements could be saved, they should still be abolished, for they do more harm than good. Every year, federal entitlements rob trillions of dollars from taxpayers, trillions which if left to their rightful owners could be channeled into the private sector as authentic savings and investments. Savings would satisfy individual time preference, and investments would finance the production of new goods/services in the future. The opportunity cost of what those trillions of dollars could have accomplished if left free is gargantuan. Instead of being saved and invested, however, those trillions go to the federal government, which, although legally obligated to sequester the funds for redistribution to current beneficiaries, irresponsibly squanders them on general expenditures instead. Under the false pretense of mandating savings, the federal government confiscates trillions of dollars for its own consumption. If those trillions of dollars were saved and invested, rather than confiscated and wasted, the economy would be immeasurably richer. Since savings and investments - deferring present production/consumption to develop capital or technology which will yield greater production/consumption in the future - are the source of a progressing economy, the federal government's annual seizure and sterilization of trillions of dollars in potential savings and investments has inflicted untold economic damage, and probably been as economically retrogressive as the evils of central banking and income taxation.

In addition to the staggering question of "what could have been?" is the fact that the payroll taxes which nominally finance federal entitlements constitute burdensome employment taxes, artificially depress wages, and create a severe disincentive to hire new employees. The bankruptcy of federal entitlements presents a prime opportunity to seal these black holes once and for all. The sooner federal entitlements are abolished, the better. Yet the Republicans claim that this is a system worth fighting for.

6)"Transparency and accountability of the Federal Reserve"

The Federal Reserve is constitutionally incapable of achieving the objectives which it has arrogated unto itself - price stability and full employment - yet the Republicans meekly believe that transparency and accountability will somehow make a difference. Transparency and accountability are beside the point; the issue should be reining in the Federal Reserve's status as a government-enforced banking cartel and legalized counterfeiter, with the ultimate goal of total abolition of the tyrannical abomination that is central banking.

Central banks like Federal Reserve, according to the Austrian economics, are the most significant enablers of the business cycle of periodic booms and busts. Since its inception on a dark, stormy night at J.P. Morgan's estate on Jekyll Island, the Federal Reserve has presided over the decline and fall of the U.S. dollar (a loss of over 95% of its purchasing power since 1913), the U.S. economy (boom-bust cycles in 1920-1921, the Great Depression, and the tech/dot-com/housing bubbles of the 1990s-2000s), and the U.S. itself (monetization of federal deficits to enable the waging of both World Wars, the Cold War, and now the War on Terror). The reason the Federal Reserve is such a menace is because it artificially expands credit, which leads to malinvestments destined to fail because they are predicated on a mirage of rising savings, and inflates the money supply, which devalues the purchasing power of the currency.

Oversight of this system will not make central banking any less of a destabilizing agent in the economy. Oversight may reveal some dark secrets of the Federal Reserve, but it is the legalized counterfeiting which the Federal Reserve undertakes in broad daylight, announces triumphantly to the press, and for which it receives political protection from its conspirators in the federal government that warrants its abolition. The Federal Reserve's guilt is already plain as day; ample evidence exists to try, convict, sentence, and execute the Federal Reserve. A Federal Reserve free from corruption would still be the cause of boom-bust cycles and inflation. Besides, the federal government and the Federal Reserve are dependent on each other: the Federal Reserve (its officials appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate) derives its power to enrich its member banks by artificially expanding credit from the federal government, and the federal government depends on the Federal Reserve to enable its fiscal profligacy by monetizing its deficits whenever needed. The federal government has a significant financial interest in central banking, and so cannot trusted with holding the Federal Reserve accountable.

In addition to its abysmal record of utter failure, the Federal Reserve is also unconstitutional. In the Constitution, Congress is authorized, "To coin money and regulate the value thereof." First, most obviously, the Federal Reserve is not Congress: it is a government-enforced banking cartel to which Congress has illegally granted the authority to commit legalized counterfeiting. Second, less obviously, the Federal Reserve is not really coining money. In the Constitution, coining means the actual minting of commodities like gold or silver into coins, not merely printing paper money. Third, the Constitution never grants the federal government the right to form a central bank authorized to purchase federal debt for the purpose of manipulating interest rates. Since under the Tenth Amendment, the people of the states retain all powers not delegated in the Constitution, the Federal Reserve has no right to exist. The Founding Fathers, particularly the Jeffersonians, limited the monetary powers of the federal government for two reasons. First, because they knew that central banking led to inflation and financial panics, as they experienced firsthand from the Bank of North America during the War for American Independence. Second, and more importantly, was because they feared that a central bank would tempt the federal government with tyrannical power, undermining its constitutional limitations and risking the loss of life and liberty. To the Founders, central banking came at a cost to prosperity and liberty, and was thus an evil to be resisted. If Andrew Jackson could marshal the courage to overthrow the Second Bank of the United States (a prototype of today's Federal Reserve) when he was up for reelection in 1832, surely the Republicans can do better than call for an audit and more Congressional hearings.

7) In housing, "enforcing non-discrimination laws and assisting low-income families" and addressing the "demand for apartments"

After the federal government artificially stimulated demand for houses by subsidizing mortgages and fronting down payments for low-income home-buyers (the American Dream Act), forced banks to make subprime under penalty of legal harassment to suspension of their federal charter (the Community Reinvestment Act), enabled subprime lending through government-sponsored enterprises which provided Wall Street with a convenient place to offload risky mortgage securities (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), fueled it all with a prolonged credit expansion from Federal Reserve (Alan Greenspan), and ultimately created an enormous bubble in housing which ended in a crash of titanic proportions, the last thing the real-estate market needs is further government stimulus. The latest boom-bust cycle - a housing bubble - from which the economy is still in shock, should be testament to the folly of federal meddling in markets, but it is in the nature of politicians to seek new parasites to whom they can pander and promise special privileges. Apparently, aspiring apartment owners are an overlooked class.

As far as non-discrimination laws go, "discrimination" should not be criminalized. People, including banks - which are, after all, ultimately owned by shareholders, all of whom are people - should be free to manage their property in their best interests. For a bank to deny someone a loan, regardless of its reasons, is not a crime, for the denied loan applicant is not entitled to the bank's money, or anyone else's money for that matter. Besides, the fear that banks will discriminate against potential borrowers based on race is absurd. A bank is interested in making money, not in keeping the black man down, and will lend to anyone whom it believes will be able to repay the principal with interest. A correlation between denied mortgages and black applicants would prove nothing, for correlation does not equal causation. The more likely explanation would be that blacks, statistically speaking, suffer from lower income, lower education, and higher incarceration rates - all government-created problems, by the way - and so are more likely to be rejected as an excessively risky proposition. Nothing personal, just business. Poor, uneducated, criminal whites are denied mortgages for the same reason, while wealthy, educated, law-abiding blacks are granted mortgages for the opposite reason. A correlation between denied mortgages and race is purely coincidental. Non-discrimination laws amount to the prosecution of banks for discriminating against risky borrowers, and cause more problems than they solve.

8) The imposition of "countervailing duties" to punish China for its currency practices, and encouraging "victimized firms" to "raise claims" in the bureaucracies which regulate international trade.

Republicans and Democrats alike enjoy donning the armor of protectionism and beating their chests over China's supposedly "abusive" currency manipulation. First of all, any government with a fiat currency is a currency manipulator. The whole point of a fiat currency is for the government to have the power to manipulate the currency by printing money and expanding credit. By definition, a fiat currency is a manipulated currency. In fact, "monetary policy" is nothing more than fancy economic jargon for currency manipulation. Since the Republicans have planted themselves squarely in favor of central banking, outrage over currency manipulation is a bit rich. Nevertheless, the way in which China manipulates its currency is by purchasing U.S. Treasuries - through its central bank and large trade surplus - propping up demand for the otherwise worthless dollar, making the yuan more affordable in dollar terms (because the dollar has risen in value relative to the yuan), and thus lowering the price of Chinese-manufactured exports. By bankrolling the fiscally incontinent federal government, China provides lower-priced goods to American consumers, heightening their standard of living. One would think that the government would be in favor of this arrangement, since it provides a free boost to the U.S. economy and a ensures a stable source of borrowers of federal debt. The federal government complains, however, that this currency manipulation costs American jobs.

Jobs are a means to producing goods/services that consumers demand, and are not ends in themselves. Simply "creating or saving" jobs is not necessarily a positive phenomenon, especially if the created/saved jobs fail to produce something of value. Unemployment in a firm, industry, or even entire economy is a signal from consumers to businesses that they are not producing products which consumers demand. Interfering with that signal leads to the production of goods/services which consumers do not value, and thus amounts to a waste of scarce resources since the factors of production are employed in unproductive pursuits. Protecting American jobs at the expense of the American standard of living is to put the cart before the horse. Hilariously, the federal government appears oblivious to the extent that it is dependent on China's currency manipulation, not only because it entails the purchase of federal debt, but because it props up the devalued dollar from completely crashing and plunging the U.S. and perhaps the world into another depression. If any currency has been manipulated, it is the dollar, kept artificially overvalued by the Chinese, despite the best efforts of the Federal Reserve at devaluation.

Romney himself as accused China of "stealing our jobs" - as if making something more affordable is a crime, and that jobs are something that a country can own - and has vowed to "stand up to China." The Republicans think that the way to punish China for its supposed sins is to levy tariffs on Chinese imports, despite the fact that tariffs will negatively impact American consumers by forcing them to purchase overtaxed foreign goods or overpriced domestic goods. In the antebellum U.S., the North instituted the same policies against the South, levying federal protective tariffs upon foreign manufactures, forcing Southerners to make a lose-lose choice between enriching the federal government or Northern industrial monopolies. American consumers will probably not secede from the Union for freedom from economic exploitation, but will simply suffer in silence from a lower standard of living.

In its platform, the Republican Party has firmly entrenched itself in the pre-Obama status quo. Republicans have settled for the low-hanging fruit of unimaginatively rolling back the Obama agenda, but are otherwise committed to protecting the federal welfare/warfare state from real reform. Greater transparency in the way the Federal Reserve administers central banking, lower rates of income taxation, and reforming federal entitlements - although merely marginal improvements at best - may be better than nothing, but still amount to a consolidation rather than challenge of federal power. Judging from their platform, Republicans do not want to abolish the welfare/welfare state, but simply run it more efficiently. Yes, Obama is certainly an awful president, even an apocalyptic one. Yes, Obama's victories have been terrible defeats for freedom, and must be repealed by future Congresses and presidencies, or better yet nullified by the people of the states. The roots of U.S.' afflictions, however, stretch far deeper than Obama, the Bushes, Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan. Obama is merely the fruit of seeds that were planted long ago, before any generation alive today was born. To truly restore peace, prosperity, and liberty to the U.S., the tall trees of Hamilton, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt - the pantheon of presidential history - must be uprooted, hewn, and tossed into the fires of revolution. Until the ideas for which Obama stands are overthrown, men and women just like Obama will continue to slither into power, and the U.S. will never, ever be free.

"My Body, My Choice, Your Money"

Currently, the Democratic National Convention is taking place in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Democrats, however, despite their glorious roots as 19th-century libertarians rooted in the South, no longer even pretend to care about life or liberty, and are merely obsessed with empowering the government and enriching its crony-parasites. The transformation of the Democratic Party from libertarian to statist began in the late 19th century and early 20th century with the advent of Populism and Progressivism, and was consummated in the statist regimes of Woodrow Wilson (the progressive Princeton president) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the duly elected dictator). Today, the transformation now fused to the core, Democrats are so beyond hope that they are barely worthy of dignifying with criticism. Republicans, God help them, at least pay lip service to liberty - even if their actions do betray their words - but Democrats make no bones about their lust for money and power. Suffice to say, three events from the DNC illustrate the creepy totalitarianism on display in Charlotte.

The first event was a video which claimed that "government is the only thing to which we all belong." Like statists in both parties, the Democrats view people not as freeborn individuals with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but as enslaved property, resources to be exploited, and statistics to be measured. The federal government showed in the War of Northern Aggression that the so-called Union is not based on the consent of the governed, but force of arms. Secession may be out of the question, but the federal government is now trying to restrict expatriation as well. When Eduardo Saverin, the Brazilian-born co-founder of Facebook announced that he was expatriating from Florida to Singapore, Democrats were up in arms over the loss of the potential tax revenue to which they believed they were entitled. In the wake of Saverin's departure, Democrats condemned expatriation as "unpatriotic," and called for legislation that would punitively tax U.S. citizens who dared seek freedom on foreign shores. That sinister truth, that the government considers the people over whom it rules its property, is the dark underbelly of citizenship.

The second event was a speech from Sandra Fluke, a thirty-something woman adrift in the shoals of graduate school, who sparked a controversy earlier in the year when she testified to Congress in support of the ObamaCare-based federal mandate for health insurers to offer coverage for contraceptives. That is, Fluke appeared in Congress to lobby for her right to force other policyholders to subsidize her sexual activities, for the socialization of contraceptive coverage. The Democratic Party saw fit to bestow the honor of a speaking position on Fluke, who warned of a "War on Women," bizarre feminist fear-mongering in which the deprivation of taxpayer-funded goods/services like contraceptives and abortion is considered a violation of women's rights. Actually, the real war is on the taxpayers from whom the money to pay for these goods/services was expropriated in the first place. Women have no right to the confiscated property of others, even if that property is providing the public service of preventing these leeches from spawning more of their kind. Human beings have a right to self-ownership, and by extension, ownership of property, but that is all. Any supposed right that amounts to a duty on someone else is no right at all, but merely glorified parasitism and legalized looting.

The third event was a speech from Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, in which he declared that, "Being asked to pay your fair share isn't about class warfare. It's about patriotism." A convenient argument for beneficiaries of confiscated taxpayer property to make, to say the least. Booker, along with most other Democrats, either is not aware or simply does not care that according to the federal government's own IRS data, the rich, by any measure, already  pay an overwhelming share of federal taxes. For example, according to the IRS, the top 1% of federal taxpayers, despite only earning 25% of income, paid 40% of federal taxes. By contrast, the bottom 95% of federal taxpayers paid 39% of federal taxes - less than the 1%. So, yes, by any rational measure of equity, federal taxation is extremely unfair - though against the rich, not the poor. More importantly, however, submission to the confiscation of one's property, to the systematization of plunder, is not patriotism - far from it. In fact, a true American patriot, in the noble tradition of his Revolutionary and Confederate ancestors, would resist the oppression of taxation. Ron Paul phrased it best when he said,
"Patriotism, to me, is to always support the cause of liberty, and it turns out that governments over the ages have notoriously been the chief abusers of liberty. The original American patriots declared independence from an abusive government."
Indeed, the U.S. was founded on rebellion against taxation, which the colonists viewed as a violation of their natural rights to life, liberty, and property. When English Loyalists commanded American Revolutionaries like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry to do their "patriotic duty" as Englishmen and pay taxes to the Crown, the Revolutionaries responded with the Boston Tea Party and Declaration of Independence. Resistance to government in general and taxation in particular is a defining aspect of the American heritage, and is as patriotic as mama and apple pie.

Of course, Obama took to the stage to ply the politician's trade - demagoguery and deception - making all the predictable excuses of a man who staked his presidency on leading an economic recovery, and then heaped crushing new fiscal, monetary, and regulatory burdens upon the economy. Obama cannot win on the merits of these dubious accomplishments, so he has already begun to demagogue Romney as a vulture capitalist gnawing on the carcass of the middle-class, and to deceive people into believing that his failures have actually been successes, with tall tales about how "it would have been worse" and specious numbers about "created-or-saved jobs."

Conclusion

Neither convention, Republican or Democratic, was encouraging. In fact, both were downright depressing. Despite the disparity in rhetoric between Republicans and Democrats, at the end of the day both have more in common than they do in contention. Republicans swore to restore the U.S. to the declining, debt-ridden country it was before Obama occupied the White House. Democrats pledged to march forward in the war against life and liberty, calling themselves progressive for inventing new rights that come at the expense of the rights of others, and compassionate for spending taxpayers' stolen money. Republicans and Democrats, whether consolidating or expanding federal power, have declared war on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To add insult to injury, Republicans and Democrats, despite possessing war chests of hundreds of millions of dollars from private contributors, looted $136 million from taxpayers to pay for these monstrous spectacles.

Such brazen tyranny cannot stand in the land of the free and home of the brave. When voting this November, remember the wisdom of V: "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Bending Spending

Last spring, MarketWatch released a chart purporting that contrary to popular belief, federal expenditures under Barack Obama have actually risen at a historically low rate, rather than historically high. Predictably, the left-wing statists in the media (as opposed to the right-wing statists on competing networks) condescendingly sneered at the ignorant masses for ignorantly lynching their beloved Barack for crimes of which he was apparently innocent. As if these same media personalities (professional overly opinionated jackasses) and pundits (second-rate intellectuals who could not cut it in academia) have not been zealously defending the merits of Obama's professed belief in government expenditures as a tool of Keynesian counter-cyclical fiscal policy. As usual, the supposed free press is rank with hypocrisy and corruption, willing to spin any bit of news to advance its political agenda. The grand finale, however, came from Obama himself, who, ever eager to congratulate himself on something, remarked that, "Since I’ve been president, federal spending has risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years."

Despite all the hoopla, the MarketWatch chart is fraudulent, and should be dispensed with immediately. As the above graphic illustrates, the claim that federal expenditures under Obama have only risen 1.4% is disingenuous at best. That statistic is determined from comparing expenditures from Obama's first full year in power (2010) with expenditures from his latest year (2012), but ignores the fact that in 2009, in the final months of George W. Bush's rule, expenditures ballooned from $2.9 trillion to $3.5 trillion, an increase of 17.3%. Since this explosive spending surge, Obama has fought fiercely to preserve federal expenditures at Bush's historically unprecedented level.

This soaring rate of increase was primarily the result of the "Troubled Asset Relief Program" (TARP), the bipartisan bailout in which the federal government simply deposited taxpayer loot into Wall-Street treasuries. During the housing crash (an utterly predictable Austrian boom-bust cycle resulting from Fed-generated credit expansions) Wall Street had created hysteria over the prospect of a financial meltdown without immediate federal intervention to bail out distressed banks. Our federal overlords, if nothing else, know on which side their biscuit is buttered, and so promptly obliged; in return for its complicity in the federal government's plans to reinflate the housing bubble, Wall Street was granted its bailout. The implementation of TARP consisted mainly of the U.S. Treasury simply depositing sums of money into Wall-Street treasuries, in addition to the Federal Reserve's unconstitutional bailouts of other bankrupt financial institutions. As a U.S. Senator from Illinois, Obama supported this brazen act of corporatism, exhorting fellow politicians to "step up to the plate," because "the time to act is now." Truly inspiring, cliche-free words.

The MarketWatch chart simply takes the TARP-based 2009 spending surge as given, and then measures Obama's three other years in power against each other to determine the rate at which federal expenditures have grown during his rule - a seemingly paltry 1.4%. Yet, even if Obama is innocent of the 17.3% surge (the majority of which he defended from the Senate), he is undeniably guilty of maintaining federal expenditures at that historically high level. Holding all else constant, after TARP expired, federal expenditures should have reverted to already-excessive 2008 levels. Obama interfered, however, enacting new expenditures into law (such as the multi-trillion stimulus package and ObamaCare, to name a few), to keep expenditures inflated. Bush deserves a large portion of the blame for dramatically escalating federal expenditures, but while in power Obama has consolidated rather than reversed Bush's fiscal profligacy. Incidentally, in consolidating Bush's bloated budgets, Obama has signed $5 trillion onto the on-budget national debt (to say nothing of the federal government's off-budget entitlement liabilities), more than any other president in U.S. history.

Obama's massive expenditures will negatively impact the economy. As president, Obama has spent a tremendous amount of money, some of which was confiscated under threat of imprisonment and asset seizure (i.e. "taxed"), but a large percentage of which was monetized by the Federal Reserve or borrowed. Deficit spending, in addition to diverting resources away from productive utilization elsewhere in the economy, also represents future taxation for the principal plus interest. The looming threat of future taxation reduces the present value of an individual's expected income, and thus lowers his time preference, meaning the extent to which he prefers consumption over saving/investing falls. Lowered time preference alters the structure of production so that it produces more goods in the present but fewer goods over the long term, leading to reallocation of the factors of production (i.e. unemployment), a scarcer supply of goods/services, higher prices, and a decreased standard of living. To the extent that beneficiaries of federal expenditures prosper, they do so at the expense of the victim whose property was confiscated in the legalized systematization of plunder that is taxation. So far, this is what Obama has contributed to the recovery.

None of this is to imply that the Republicans are superior to the Democrats in any way. Both parties, Republicans and Democrats, are united on statist principles - in essence, that the government should intervene in economic, social, and foreign affairs for the greater good - and differ only in degree ("what percentage of your property should the government confiscate?") and marketing (akin to the difference in competing brands of toilet paper), but not in any substantial way. After all, the House of Representatives, which has been under both Republican and Democrat control during Obama's presidency, is constitutionally charged with the "power of the purse," and is thus equally responsible for the excessive expenditures of the past three years. Paul Ryan, the supposedly conservative addition to the sinking ship of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, is just another wolf in sheep's clothing, salivating to feast upon the property of the people.