End the War on Drugs, Repeal the Income Tax and Capital Gains Tax, and Decentralize America

(This article was adapted from some of my blogs from the week of December 13, 2010, with some further elaboration.)

America is continually suffering from so many problems now, and it’s all caused by the federal government. There’s the economic recession or depression which is only going to get worse because of the intrusions imposed on our economic freedom and well-being by the monstrous Federal Reserve and especially Ben Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing II. And there is the continually annoying issue of taxes. And also there are these counter-productive Wars on Terrorism and Drugs, in which the bureaucrats have only been making bad situations worse. I just don’t know where to begin.

Redstate.com has a post that asserts that in order to deal with the violence and chaos from the drug cartels south of the border that are invading Texas and Arizona, it is a question of not if but when the U.S. government must invade Mexico. Not once throughout the whole post is the idea of ending the war on drugs that’s causing the whole mess, yet that is the only way to solve that problem. Market Ticker’s Karl Denninger agrees with me.

Marine veteran Fred Reed matter-of-factly discussed this proposal of invading Mexico just a few weeks ago.

What the Pentaloons don’t understand, being armed Boy Scouts who believe their own propaganda – “Ooo-rah! Yes sir! Yes sir! Can do, sir!” is that they usually can’t. The chief reason is that people really, really do not like American soldiers invading their countries, wrecking cities and killing their children. The military, which thinks at right angles, cannot wrap its mind around this difficult thought. Thus Americans invariably begin by thinking, “We are right. We are for democracy. We are trying to help these people. Therefore they will love us.”

Must America lose another war, sacrifice more American lives, murder more foreigners, engage in more death and destruction, and put itself into even further bankruptcy because conservatives don’t like the thought of someone else having a good time, and don’t like the thought of personal responsibility? (And I thought it was the Left who were guilty of acting out their death instinct!)

It seems to be mostly the conservatives who want to continue the War on Drugs, despite how futile and counter-productive that fascist scheme is. Many conservatives don’t want people to have the freedom to choose what chemicals to put into their own bodies, because conservatives don’t believe in personal responsibility. Conservatives believe in the fascist nanny state, unfortunately, and it is this nanny state, anti-personal responsibility policy they support that is causing a black market in drugs, driving up the prices and making it highly profitable for the black market druggists, thus incentivizing those in such a scheme to push the drugs onto others, and engage in trafficking, and turn into savages not afraid to kill those who move in on their turf. Conservatives support this.

Why can’t people of our modern era learn from history, the history of Prohibition, which banned the production, sale and distribution and consumption of alcohol? That was over 80 years ago! Instead of learning from history, and supporting common sense and personal responsibility, too many people just want the nanny state government to have the power to dictate to private individuals what chemicals they may or may not ingest, and it is actually the conservatives — not just the Left — who don’t want people to to be expected to take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions and actions.

Now, I personally oppose drug usage, as well as alcohol. The only times I ever drank alcohol were during high school and college, but that was many, many years ago. I’ve never even smoked. Why would I deliberately inhale the waste of burning garbage?

Instead of common sense and supporting freedom and personal responsibility, too many people, the statists, the warmongers, and the government expansionists, want to continue the senseless, murderous War on Drugs, and now want to militarily invade Mexico. Perhaps that’s the true long-term purpose underlying the War on Drugs anyway. Perhaps the statists and expansionists have wanted to invade Mexico all along, and continuing the War on Drugs to deliberately effect in chaos has been their way of getting what they really wanted.

Perhaps the War on Drugs statists really just want to make Mexico another U.S. territory. If that’s the case, then it would be similar to how the statists, warmongers, and government expansionists have for many decades been deliberately radicalizing and provoking the Muslims overseas, and deliberately eliciting their jihad against the West as an excuse for the statists, warmongers and government expansionists to invade and occupy Middle Eastern and Asian countries as they have been doing especially since 1990, because ultimately they want to make those oil-rich lands U.S. territories. If so, then why can’t they just openly advocate the U.S. government’s conquest of the people of those countries and the seizures of their territories? At least that would be more aboveboard than what the statists, warmongers and government expansionists have been doing for the past several decades.

On taxes, I had written a post supporting the tax-cut extension deal supported by most Republicans and by Obama and some Democrats, at least the Senate Democrats. And then I wrote a follow-up post on that, continuing my support and with some elaboration. If the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire on January 1st, right in the middle of this huge economic downturn, it would be devastating especially combined with Ben Bernanke’s QE 2 that will effect in further increased inflation. Even if it were only those whose income is above $250,000 that would be affected, the so-called “millionaires and billionaires,” that would still have devastating effects on everyone, because when the “millionaires and billionaires” suddenly have much more of their income taken away by the government, they immediately close plants, cease expansions and capital projects and investment, which is followed by more and more lay-offs, higher unemployment.

My fear had been that if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire that that would be the point of the SHTF, and that such devastation during this recession/depression would spark new protests, and may be the real beginning of what the doom-and-gloomers Peter Schiff and Gerald Celente and others had been predicting: “civil unrest,” rioting, food riots, looting, societal chaos, etc. And empty store shelves, especially food store shelves, people literally starving. I’m not in the mood to see any violence.

However, this tax cut bill currently in Congress is another temporary tax-cut extension, for only two years. I just don’t think such a temporary extension will encourage businesses to invest and expand any more than they already are. In fact, this whole thing is just ridiculous.

The biggest mistake that Americans allowed the U.S. government to make was the institution of that unconstitutional and immoral income tax, as well as the capital gains tax. Your neighbors do not have any moral claim on any profits you honestly make — they belong to you, and anyone claiming any “take” on your profits and taking it from you by the force of State gunpoint is as much theft and robbery as would be their taking even one cent of your labor earnings away from you! The income tax and the capital gains tax need to be repealed once and for all, for the sake of bringing back our prosperity and raising our standard of living once again, as well as undoing the moral decay that has caused America to turn into a rotting Third World cesspool.

So right now, I am at least tentatively supportive of the Mike Pence-Jim DeMint Tax Relief Certainty Act, which would permanently extend the Bush tax cuts. THAT is what the economy needs — permanent tax cuts — so that businesses and investors have long-term confidence and security and are willing to take the necessary risks with THEIR money and capital. THAT is what will effect in the creation of new jobs and more prosperity for lower- and middle-income Americans, and a higher standard of living for all.

The current tax-cut extension bill is still only temporary, and is garbage, like a band-aid, a kick-the-can-further-down-the-road piece of garbage.

Robert Wenzel posted a video of Michael Milken, who remarked on California’s current crisis, and that the state — and maybe other states — may have to compromise states’ rights with the federal government as a trade-off for federal assistance. Sorry. It should be going the other way. The people of those other states who are living responsibly and aren’t engaging in the kind of socialist public theft that California is doing should not have to foot the bill for California’s irresponsibility. And the people of California shouldn’t be giving up their freedom and independence as a compromise for a nanny-federal government to take care of them. Wenzel also posted about Ireland’s fiscal problems, and about George Sorros’s suggestion that EU just print more money. Wenzel has the correct solution for Ireland, and for all the other EU states:

The only real solution is for individual countries to secede from the EU, bring back their own currencies, restructure their debt, i.e., go bankrupt, and start fresh with a new stable currency, and attempt to keep it that way, by shrinking the role of government and its drain on money.

You betchya! THAT is exactly what America should be doing! The only real solution for Europe as well as for the U.S. is for states to secede from their centralized, Leviathan parasitic monsters who have usurped the states’ freedom, prosperity and independence.

As we have seen, especially in the last decade or two of how the U.S. federal government has taxed and regulated the people into near-impoverishment, as well as making us less safe with the feds’ expansionism and provoking the inhabitants of foreign lands, centralism just doesn’t work. The idea of “limited government” is an impossibility, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has noted. The federal government has grown and grown and grown since America began, and it has never, ever shrunk. And it never will shrink. This whole thing of centralism is a sham, a fraud. It can never work, and it never will work. Centralism only leads to totalitarianism, as we are seeing right before our very eyes. The only way to save our freedom and prosperity, and retain our security as a population of this North American territory, is to abolish the federal U.S. government, and let the states have their independence and sovereignty back that the feds stole and usurped.

As Hans Hoppe has written quite a few times, especially in his book, Democracy: The God That Failed, it is much better to have many smaller States rather than one big State. If the people of each state can retain their independence and freedom from the federal leech, THEN they can worry about getting rid of their state government. But until then, smaller States are better, because such an arrangement allows people to “vote with their feet.” If things in Illinois get out of hand, for instance, then people in Illinois can move to Kentucky, and so on. But it’s MUCH more difficult for Americans to leave the entire U.S., for many reasons.

But, as far as statism in general is concerned, we can address that with non-violent resistance, and have a revolution against despots and tyrants by, as Carl Watner has written, without firing a single shot. Perhaps just ignoring the State is helpful, especially if millions amongst the population would do that. Hans Hoppe has the right idea:

In any case, this goal (of rolling back State power) can only be reached if, instead of talking and seeking access to the State, the State is openly ignored, avoided and disavowed; and its agents and propagandists are explicitly excluded from one’s proceedings. To talk to the State and include its agents and propagandists is to lend legitimacy and strength to it. To ostentatiously ignore, avoid and disavow it and to exclude its agents and propagandists as undesirable is to withdraw consent from the State and to weaken its legitimacy.

Here is Prof. Hoppe in a 2005 lecture on the advantages of small States and dangers of centralization: