Scott Lazarowitz's Blog

Charles Johnson: How Government Creates Poverty As We Know It (2007)

Jeffrey Tucker: Ninety-Nine Years of Evil

Anthony Wile: Elite Campaign to Reelect Obama in Full Swing?

Karl Denninger: More Truth From the MSM (College)

Tyler Durden: Israel Puts Facilities on High Alert Following Warning of Rising Iran Strike Threat

Gary North: The Crucial Pillar of the New World Order

Washington’s Blog: Government Misrepresents Employment Picture

Karen De Coster: Government Nutrition Mandates

Clayton Cramer and David Burnett: Tough Targets: When Criminals Face Armed Resistance from Citizens

John Mueller: Embracing Threatlessness

Michael Rozeff: Wrong Ideas Are Sinking America

Becky Akers: The Super Bowl’s ‘Security’

Herbert Spencer: The Right to Ignore the State (1851)

Eric Margolis: Graveyard of Empires

Linda Schrock Taylor: Cain and Palin Applaud Dishonor

Leonard Read: The Lesser of Two Evils (1963)

Eric Blair: 5 Wars That America Must End for Peace and Freedom to Prevail

The Daily Bell: Western Elites Caught ‘Red-Handed’ in Iran?

Infowars: Bills in state legislatures to nullify NDAA indefinite detention of innocent civilians

Paul Craig Roberts: The Real Economic Picture

Pat Buchanan: Ron Paul: Reactionary or Visionary

Henry Hazlitt: How Should Prices Be Determined? (1967)

Anthony Gregory: How Much Does the Safety Net Help the “Very Poor”?

Eric Peters: More Car Totalitarianism

Karl Denninger: “FB”: Do Not Buy

Justin Raimondo: Can Ron Paul Be Tamed?

Doug Casey on the Coming War with Iran

Washington’s Blog, David Swanson: 27 of 35 Bush Articles of Impeachment Apply to Obama

James Bovard: The EEOC’s Forgotten Racial Racketeering

Robert Fisk: Israel and Palestinians: The present stands no chance against the past

Russell Longcore: How Will the American Economy Die?

Tom Engelhardt: Iranian Aircraft Carriers in the Gulf of Mexico

Sheldon Richman: Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market

Economic Collapse Blog: The United Nations Wants to Crash the World Economy in Order to Save the Environment

Mike Masnick: Whistle-blowing Scientists Sue FDA for Snooping on Their Personal Email Accounts

In a post yesterday, I argued against a regulatory police state, and that each individual has a right to one’s life and a right to one’s property being free from aggression by others, regardless of how large the property or how much wealth one has. Here is an article from June, 2010 that I wrote regarding the Rand Paul-Civil Rights Act controversy that also contains similar points.

David Bernstein comments on the recent Rand Paul-Civil Rights Act controversy at Cato Unbound, and Sheldon Richman responds.

In May, Kentucky U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul (and son of Congressman Ron Paul) made remarks regarding the 1964 Civil Rights Act that were actually too mealy-mouthed for even me to understand, but, essentially he was trying to say that the federal government perhaps went too far with that Act, but he really wouldn’t elaborate directly (because of being a mealy-mouthed politician) by stating (what I think he probably believes, and that I believe) that the Civil Rights Act should only apply to public property and government-run facilities and services, and should NOT apply to private property nor any privately owned businesses. However, this year’s campaign notwithstanding, according to David Weigel of the Washington Post, in 2002 Rand Paul wrote that

a free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin … (It is) unwise to forget the distinction between public (taxpayer-financed) and private entities…

Certainly much less mealy-mouthed and more direct (because he wasn’t running for any public office at that time).

Bernstein explains some of the context of the 1960s:

… the issue that got Rand Paul into hot water: Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations…

… From a philosophical perspective, libertarianism and Jim Crow laws are completely at odds. Consistent with their classical liberal heritage, libertarians believe that the government must treat all its citizens as individuals with equal rights, and therefore may not discriminate on arbitrary grounds, like race. The government must also apply its laws fairly and impartially, including by protecting members of unpopular minority groups from private violence. A penumbra of this opposition to government discrimination is that the right to vote must not be denied for arbitrary reasons. Finally, the government may not require private parties to discriminate.

Historically, many of the leading advocates of civil rights for African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century—for example, Moorfield Storey, the first president of the NAACP—were, if not hardcore libertarians, at least classical liberal fellow travelers. In more modern times, the few prominent libertarian commentators of the early 1960s, such as Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, supported the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that banned discrimination by state and local government officials. Conservatives, by contrast, typically bought into the notion of “States’ Rights.”…

…segregation and exclusion of African Americans in public places in the South wasn’t entirely a voluntary choice of business owners. Jim Crow segregation involved the equivalent of a white supremacist cartel. The cartel was enforced not just by overt government regulation like segregation laws, but also by the implicit threat of private violence and extra-legal harassment of anyone who challenged the racist status quo. This violence and extra-legal harassment was often undertaken with the approval of local officials; the latter, in fact, were often the perpetrators….

And Bernstein continues to describe how libertarians can be supportive of anti-discrimination laws including covering private sector interests.

And Sheldon Richman makes these points, among others:

Standard libertarian criticism of Title II, which prohibits racial discrimination in public accommodations, appears to treat the targeted restaurants and hotels as purely private businesses that, however odious their racial policies, were unjustifiably imposed on by government policies that violated private property rights. But this account misses something crucial. Outwardly those businesses looked like private enterprises, but the substance was different. As Bernstein points out, the social-legal environment in the pre-1964 South, when Jim Crow reigned, was hardly what any libertarian would envision as a laissez-faire environment. Rather, the region was in the grip of a pervasive social system based on white supremacy—one enforced by formal government rules, discretionary official decision-making, and extralegal measures, ranging from social pressure all the way to violence that was countenanced and even participated in by government officials.

A racially liberal entrepreneur who sought to compete next door to a segregated restaurant in the downtown of a Southern city would have been in for a difficult time. How would the city’s zoning, licensing, and building-code authorities have reacted?…

…Professor Bernstein seems to reluctantly accept Title II only because a “massive federal takeover of local government to prevent violence and threats against, and extralegal harassment of, those who chose to integrate” would have been “completely impractical.” Undoubtedly so.

But why does that exhaust the options? Why assume government is the only salvation? That’s an odd position, indeed, for a libertarian. Professor Bernstein does not so much as mention another strategy for ending racial discrimination in public accommodations: direct nonviolent social action by the people affected and those in sympathy with them.

We can’t dismiss that as impractical because it had been working several years before Title II was enacted. Beginning in 1960 sit-ins and other Gandhi-style confrontations were desegregating department-store lunch counters throughout the South. No laws had to be passed or repealed. Social pressure—the public shaming of bigots—was working…

…Title II, in other words, was unnecessary. But worse, it was detrimental…

…The social campaign for equality that was desegregating the South was transmogrified when it was diverted to Washington. Focus then shifted from the grassroots to a patronizing white political elite in Washington that had scurried to the front of the march and claimed leadership…

…Libertarians need not shy away from the question, “Do you mean that whites should have been allowed to exclude blacks from their lunch counters?” Libertarians can answer proudly, “No. They should not have been allowed to do that. They should have been stopped—not by the State, which can’t be trusted, but by nonviolent social action on behalf of equality.”

So in other words, going beyond social pressure (and boycotts, etc.) to change business owners’ treatment of others based on race, and instead using the armed power of the federal government to force private businesses to change was the beginning of an ever-increasing mountain of laws and regulations and further anti-discrimination laws that have actually caused our society to go the other way, as far as actually causing regressive attitudes and intrusions. For example, anti-discrimination has become “affirmative action,” in which people who are not qualified for a job or for admissions to college nevertheless get hired or admitted (because of their race, etc.) over others who are more qualified (which in itself is discrimination, racial, ethnic or otherwise, and violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act!). And I’m sure there have been plenty of restaurant or hotel owners or managers who have felt compelled to allow someone on their premises that they might otherwise not have wanted to allow, not based on race or ethnicity, but based on the patrons’ behaviors, lack or sobriety or their appearance, but didn’t reject such patrons out of fear of accusations of discrimination or fear of lawsuits.

People who own a business, whether it be a “public accommodations” business or not, have a right to be free from the aggression and coercion of others. The law against theft and trespass really is absolute — or ought to be — and can’t be compromised for any reason including well-meaning social good or “social justice.” People have a right to their private property and that their voluntary associations and voluntary contracts not be violated by anyone.

The real civil rights are with the individual, who has a right to be free from the aggression or coercion of others, whether it be one’s own person or one’s private property, home or business. Unfortunately, that right to be free from the aggression of others has turned into, via “civil rights” the right (or more accurately, power) of people to force themselves into someone else’s private property. That’s trespassing. I know that I’m in the minority who believe that laws against theft and trespassing must be absolute. You can’t say that only some trespassing is forbidden in society, but other trespassing — forcing oneself onto someone else’s private property or into someone’s private business against his will, without consent — is acceptable. I don’t think so.

Jacob Hornberger pointed out regarding the Rand Paul-Civil rights Act controversy that the people on the left would say that private homeowners have a right to decide who can go into their private home based on any reason, but not private business owners, because of the left’s problem with free enterprise and profit.

The left also have a problem with the idea of someone having complete control over one’s own property, as well as one’s own business, even one’s own life as an individual. That is why most of the left are collectivists and not individualists.

The anti-discrimination laws and “civil rights” laws, like zoning and other State intrusions into private property, are of a fascist system. While socialism is public ownership of property and the means of production, fascism is State control over privately owned property and the means of production. Those systems which violate private property rights contrast with capitalism, which is private ownership and control over property and the means of production. Capitalism, free markets, voluntary exchange, whatever you want to call it, is the only system that protects liberty, the rights of the individual, the right to one’s own person and to one’s own justly acquired property, the right of freedom of association and freedom of contract, the right to be free from the aggression of your neighbors, from criminals, from all others, especially the right to be free from the aggression of the State. Fascism, communism, and socialism are all systems in which the aggressions and intrusions by others are institutionalized.

But in the end, private property is private property, and we need to get rid of all the intrusions that federal, state and local governments impose on individuals and private property owners. And that includes the fascist zoning laws, which, as Sheldon Richman made reference to, might have been used in the 1960s South by local government officials to threaten non-biased private businesses to force them to discriminate against black Americans. That would be where the private business owners’ right to bear arms comes in — to protect them and their black customers from the violence of local officials.

A few days ago I had this response to Paul Craig Roberts’s article, in which Roberts called on Ron Paul to compromise by supporting policies such as minimum wage and other regulations as a meas of attracting more people from the Left. I stated that Ron Paul won’t compromise on such policies which he knows are economically unsound as well as immoral, and I called on the Left to do the compromising. And I also included a list of books with online editions and articles online for people to read to learn more about why freedom and free markets contribute far more to economic growth and prosperity than do government intrusions, and in fact freedom and free markets are more ethical and moral as well.

Here are some additional comments on why the Left (and everyone else) should oppose a regulated economy just as much as they oppose governmental intrusions into their personal lives.

One thing that those who support more regulations of private businesses don’t understand is that, the more regulations (that is, arbitrary rules, mandates and dictates given by government bureaucrats) there are, the more power you are giving to the armed agents of government to enforce those regulations, be they local police, FBI, SEC, FTC, etc. Just look at what Gibson Guitar had to endure, with S.W.A.T. team raids and government theft of the company’s property, and what Rawsome Foods suffered at the hands of the bureaucracy police because some people happen to prefer raw milk rather than the chemical-laden crap we buy at the local grocer.

This fascism of bureaucracy is only getting worse, as that is what can be expected when you abandon the ideas of individual rights, property rights and the rule of law, which is exactly what before-the-fact, presumption-of-guilt arbitrary government regulations, bureaucratic red tape and reporting requirements do. And this applies to the financial sector as well. There is no need for a psychopathic, fanatically bureaucratized, Soviet-like Dodd-Frank monstrosity, when all you really have to do is go by the rule of law.

For the financial crisis that we have had to endure in recent years, if there were actual free markets in banking, financing and housing, and no government mandates and bailouts, and under the rule of law that actually punishes theft and fraud, we would not have the problems our society has now. Some people on blogs and in articles recently have been calling such a situation (a situation that would be approved of by Thomas Jefferson et al. were they around today, by the way) “utopian,” but it actually is those who are calling for more and more nanny-state regulations and intrusions who are the utopians, as though the never-ending growth in regulations and intrusions that treat the population like babies and like criminals in their obedience to dumb, non-productive bureaucrats will finally solve problems.

No, Dodd-Frank and other intrusions calls for more bureaus and more bureaucrats, and gives more power to more police, FBI, and so on. With cases like Rawsome Foods and Gibson Guitars, and various “insider trading” laws and other made-up “crimes,” it only gives the armed agents of government more excuses to get off on their power trips in their raids and their more recent Nazi-like tactics. The police state that we have now isn’t just evident with the ‘Occupy’ movement, traffic fascism and the education system, but with all sorts of businesses in which people are just trying to make a living and have a right to be left alone and a right to be presumed innocent until actually suspected of some actual crime.

Further, the more regulations you have, and the more costly and intrusive they are, the more damaging they are economically to smaller businesses and those just starting out in their fields, and just plain discouraging of those who were merely considering entering the business world. And the more protective such regulations are of the more established businesses who can afford the extra lawyers, lobbyists, and, of course, those campaign contributions for the Congresspeople to vote for legislation to restrict smaller businesspeople and entrepreneurs, and that will help those established businesses in protecting their high profits.

Besides the police state that further regulations enhance, and the government-protectionism of established businesses, on a more fundamental level it is a matter of rights. Individuals have a right to live and right to liberty, and have a right to be free from the aggression and intrusion of others. This means more specifically that individuals have a right “to be secure” in their persons, property and effects from intrusions by others. People have a right to own their own lives, and that includes the right to own their labor, the energy and effort they themselves exert in order to be productive. The individual is the initial rightful owner of one’s labor, until one trades one’s labor with an employer, a customer or client in a mutually-beneficial, voluntary contract.

For some reason, some people seem to think that your labor is initially owned by your community in which you live or by the collective or the population in general. Those are the people who believe that the individual is owned by the collective and exists to serve the collective’s needs. However, the truth is that such a destructive philosophy, on which many of our current “laws” and regulations are based, is directly violating of the rights of the individual: the right of self-ownership, the right to be secure in one’s person, property and effects, and the right to use one’s own labor and productivity as one sees fit to sustain one’s own life.

People have a right to establish voluntary contracts with others, and those contracts are private contracts and they are only the business of those parties involved in such contracts. That applies to employer-employee contracts, private contractors dealing with clients, sales people dealing with customers, etc. For some reason, there are people who don’t like the idea of that kind of freedom, that kind of voluntaryism amongst free, consenting individuals, and that such contracts are really owned by the community and that the community has a right to know what the terms of private contracts are and even have a right to demand specific terms of contracts. And they believe that they have a right to a certain take on those contracts and/or profits from any transactions (via the State). But such demands, such takings are really intrusions into those contracts of others, and really amount to acts of trespass and theft (via the State).

There is also the idea of the government demanding information from you regarding your personal life or your economic life. This demanding of private information comes from the idea that people are guilty until they prove themselves innocent by allowing such governmental intrusions. That goes against the idea of presumption of innocence and the right to be secure in one’s person, property and effects. Intrusions are trespasses. Remember, if it’s wrong for your neighbors to intrude in your private affairs, then it’s wrong for the government to do so.

I know, a lot of people have been indoctrinated for generations and generations to believe otherwise, but no, if you believe in the rule of law, and you believe in true justice and living in a peaceful society, you have to decide whether only some acts of trespass and theft should be considered criminal, or whether all such acts are criminal. Unfortunately, our society has allowed the community and the State to encroach themselves into private people’s private personal and economic matters, in the name of this or that, when in reality, these intrusions are just institutionalized criminality. And at the same time, we have laws upon laws upon laws that make up phony crimes, in which people minding their own business are persecuted by their neighbors via government and police. Amerika has become an inside out, upside down world of a bizarre Orwellian nature.

Now, I would like to address this ignorant ideology of “soak the rich.” For some reason, some people seem to think that an individual’s right to one’s life and self-ownership, including the right to sell one’s labor and property as one sees fit, and the right to the fruits of one’s labor and the right to one’s justly acquired property, become diminished rights the more wealth one has. That is, for example, if someone accumulates $100,000, then one has less of a right to that wealth than someone who has accumulated $1,000. And that the neighbors or the community has a right or ought to be empowered to take more of the first individual’s wealth then the second individual’s wealth.

So the more wealth one honestly accumulates, the less he actually owns it and the more the community, one’s neighbors, can claim ownership of it? No, that just goes against the concept of a society forbidding aggression, and against the moral principles of private property and the rule of law. Just who are the neighbors to make a claim on that wealth without the consent of the owner? What’s the difference between those neighbors claiming such wealth via government force and those people just stealing it themselves by force? A society that says that some taking of private property is allowed by law is a society that is doomed to degenerate morally, and that is what we have today.

There is a control freakishness of some people in society, in which they must give orders and make demands on others, to reveal personal information and to open up bank accounts and businesses to government snoopers, and there are those control freaks who are just compelled to forcibly enter the private homes and businesses of others, this need to be intrusive. There is a covetousness of some people who must have what others have and take it from them by force. All these trespasses and thefts have had their rationalizations throughout the decades, but they are still thefts and trespasses, and it is still covetousness, regardless how it is rationalized.

“But, it’s for the poor,” etc. Actually, it has been these government mandates, regulations, reporting requirements, fees, licensure, minimum wage laws, union protectionism, etc. that have been stealing from the poor (as Jacob Hornberger noted recently here and here), stealing their opportunities by restricting their entering into the work force or from starting a small business, and so forth. It’s not “for the poor,” it’s for the government bureaucrats, and to protect the Establishment.

My earlier post on this issue included a list of links for further reading.

I hope that Ron Paul does not compromise on his principles of morality, private property, freedom of association and freedom of contract as Paul Craig Roberts requests of him on behalf of getting more votes from the Left. What we need is more freedom. Freedom begets economic prosperity and higher standard of living for the most number of people in a society.

January 30, 2012

© 2012 LewRockwell.com (Link to article)

At a recent debate when Ron Paul mentioned the “Golden Rule,” that we should treat foreigners as we should be treated, he was booed by a number of people in the audience. This happened at a previous debate. At that previous debate, Paul further questioned how we would like it if a foreign government invaded and occupied the U.S. and set up its military bases here.

How can so many people (and so many popular radio talk hosts and their listeners) condemn the suggestion that everyone must be equal under the rule of law?

The myth of American exceptionalism is that the U.S. is an example of moral progress, peace and prosperity for the rest of the world to follow. But that has not been the case during most of America’s existence.

Perhaps America was somewhat exceptional at its founding, when the ideas of the rights of the individual and private property were taken seriously. But when a Constitution, which limited the rights of the individual and empowered a centralized government, was written and ratified, that was really the end of such moral exceptionalism.

The Founders had the right idea, but the statists, centralists and fraudsters took control, and that was the end of that.

The societal and moral advancement that the Founders took from the Enlightenment has tended to regress backwards, as America’s federal government continually expanded in size and intrusiveness, and its actions overseas became more primitively aggressive.

The moral degeneracy of America escalated considerably when Honest Abe Lincoln waged a brutal and immoral war against civilians in order to compel the population into a life of enslavement by central planners. Woodrow Wilson unnecessarily extended World War I, which contributed to the rise of Hitler. FDR’s New Deal really was the final nail in the coffin for whatever freedom there was remaining in America.

In foreign affairs, for the past century the reality of American exceptionalism has been this: that our government may interfere in the internal affairs of foreign nations, may place its governmental apparatus and military bases on other peoples’ territories, may commit acts of aggression, murder, and property destruction, and get away with it through rationalization and propaganda – but other governments may not do that on our lands or do those things to our people.

American exceptionalism is the belief that our government need not be accountable under the rule of law, while we hold foreigners accountable.

Regarding the current “War on Terror,” yes, real terrorists attacked America on September 11, 2001. But when our government then invades and destroys whole countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, then you should logically expect the targeted innocent foreigners to defend their territories.

One thing that America’s government-controlled schools (both public and private) have accomplished over the past century is the suppression of critical thinking skills. Instead, because the people have allowed the almighty State and its media stenographers and propagandists so much influence and intrusion into the entire education system, the result has been generations of people with an instilled unquestioned loyalty to the State theocracy.

Because of this, America has become increasingly authoritarian and restrictive in its liberty to the point of the police state and non-sustainable, bankrupting empire we currently suffer. Those who question The Powers That Be are themselves stigmatized and marginalized, and in some cases, punished and persecuted. Americans have been cheering their government’s illicit aggressions overseas, and booing those who stand for the Golden rule and the rule of law.

In fact, some of the same people who have been supporting the U.S. government’s immoral aggressions overseas have been those preaching the loudest about “Christian moral values.” Sorry, but when one supports one’s government invading other countries that were of no threat to us, one’s preaching of Christian morality is just hypocrisy.

And when people assert Americans’ right to defend America against invaders, yet refer to foreigners who defend their own lands, their lives and their families from invaders and occupiers as “terrorists,” no wonder Christianity and moral values have declined in America.

The narcissism of modern State worship is such that, when the exceptionalists assert that the U.S government must have a “presence” on foreign lands, it is as though they view those lands as theirs, just like a possessive child would do. It seems more like covetousness, if you ask me.

No, the narcissistic exceptionalists, who pray to the democratic god of the secular State, seem to believe that their government may commit acts of aggression against foreigners, but not the other way around. Praise the almighty State, as it can do no wrong.

Former Senator and current presidential candidate Rick Santorum seems to be one of those more outspoken worshipers of the State and its aggressive expansion overseas. Santorum even believes in the central planning of the almighty State domestically, in the social area.

Santorum wants to use the armed police apparatus of the State to impose his own personal social views onto the rest of the population, much like the Islamists that he ironically criticizes for wanting to impose their Sharia Law onto others.

If we don’t behave in our private lives as Santorum and his beloved almighty State order us to do, then we are infidels, apparently.

And I heard another American exceptionalist recently, Sean Hannity, express total cluelessness in his pushing the anti-Iran fear-mongering that is being used to start yet another unnecessary, counter-productive war. In arguing with a caller, Hannity was saying that (and I am paraphrasing) he merely wanted to prevent mass violence and bloodshed that could be prevented by forcibly removing Iran’s nuclear capability. Hannity was referring primarily to protecting Israel (despite the fact that Israel has a few hundred nuclear warheads and Iran knows this).

So regarding the possibility of mass bloodshed, Hannity has apparently been oblivious to the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis throughout the 1990s, killed by U.S. government violence and sanctions, and the further hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis since the U.S. government’s 2003 invasion.

Because of reliance on mainstream news outlets and talk radio for their brainwashing information, most people don’t even know recent history, and they therefore don’t seem to understand Ron Paul’s point about “blowback.”

When dissidents openly criticize the State, its intrusions and its violence, the faithful seem intensely threatened, as though they have been personally harmed. The dissidents must be booed and ostracized, even though here Ron Paul is the one with the sense of morality and he is the one who believes that our government must be accountable under the rule of law as others must be.

But as our society gradually degenerated over the past century in its abandonment of moral values and the rule of law, it should be of no surprise now that the exceptionalists have no problem with their primitive priests of the almighty State apprehending and detaining someone without charges, without even being required to show evidence against the accused, as agents in an advanced society would have to do. The exceptionalists have faith in their beloved State (until they find themselves falsely accused and unlawfully detained, of course).

The religion of State has shown its ugliness with the Bradley Manning whistleblower case. Many people have reacted emotionally to this case, and with much ignorance, that’s for sure. It is as though whistleblower critics have been on a medieval witch hunt with the Manning case.

This young soldier allegedly released “classified” information to WikiLeaks. But, if the chat logs are legitimate, Manning’s motivations were not on behalf of any foreign government, financial interest or any element hostile to America.

On the contrary, Manning’s motive was out of love for his country, and to expose the corruption of our government’s imbecilic bureaucrats and expose the military’s war crimes. If anything were un-American, it would be covering up those crimes.

And despite the government’s hysterical propaganda, the truth is that the release of the classified information probably could not have caused any harm to any U.S. soldier overseas or to any American at home.

Some critics of Manning and WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange have been calling for their imprisonment or death. That is because the critics’ loyalty just doesn’t seem to be as much to their country as it seems to be to the government, the almighty State.

That is what our sick culture has become: an authoritarian theocracy with total rule over us. The Total State seems to be what the primitive-thinking narcissists want, and that is why so many people cheer the State, cheer its wars and the deaths of foreigners, and that is why they boo the ideas of freedom, personal responsibility and accountability under the rule of law.

With our authoritarian culture now, we are definitely surrounded – not by Muslims, but by the almighty criminal State, by federal, state and local government Gestapo bureaucrats.

And we are doomed unless we reverse course – and that means chopping away at the many, many layers of Leviathan, the bureaucracies, the foreign bases and the domestic camps, chopping away until we finally are able to restore the freedom the founders envisioned when they created America.