It's Not About Healthcare

Obama finally got his way in the passage of a bill that has been decades in the making. Healthcare seems to be all that pops up on the news these days, but the debate was raging long before President Obama took office.

First came Hoover and FDR. Then the 1964 Democrat controlled Congress brought with it Medicare and Medicaid. These now have over 104 million combined beneficiaries. Former President Nixon supported a plan that required employers to provide a minimum level of insurance to employees. Healthcare as employee compensation to get around wage controls, set the stage for an unaccountable four-party health insurance market. In 1976, President Jimmy Carter called for a "comprehensive national health insurance system with universal and mandatory coverage" as a part of his campaign platform. Sound familiar?

For decades, our government has tried repeatedly to impose universal healthcare on citizens of the United States. ObamaCare is the socialized healthcare plan of the century, repackaged. It is not a new idea, and as history has proven, it is not a road America wants to go down. It will only bring more trouble, poverty and steady decline to our nation.

So, what is the healthcare debate really about? To understand the purpose of "healthcare", we must understand the principles of liberty and production - both vital parts of human society. People depend on production. Think about the things you use throughout the day: clothes, coffee, cars, or a microwave. Someone had to produce each item. Stop. Think. What would your day be like if you didn't have these things?

Each American is in some way dependent on the labor and property of another person - a producer. We all need the other guy to produce efficiently so the things we use will be abundant and cheap.

It makes sense then, that in order for individuals to prosper, someone must produce food, shelter, clothes, and all the other things we use. It also logically follows that people produce more good things when they are not hindered by force and confiscation of their profits, property and tools.

If you produce something using your own time and property, you don't want to give it up unless you get something that is useful in exchange. It really is that simple.

In other words, the strength of an individual or a nation is dependent on the quantity and quality of useful things it produces. If we want food, clothes, housing, cars, trucks or video games, we have to either produce those exact things or produce something to exchange with the producer of those things.

Are we producing anymore? Agricultural and industrial capacity in the United States is nearly destroyed. According to estimations by the United States Department of Labor, over 650,000 more manufacturing jobs will be gone by 2018. Farming and agriculture jobs are also expected to decline by 80,000.

How did this happen? Agriculture and industry made us strong and prosperous. For some reason, someone has been allowed to drive the farmer off his land and the manufacturer out of his factory. Most of them didn't want to leave. They were forced out.

We must understand that anything that interferes with the United States' ability to produce makes us poorer and weaker as a nation. Wealth redistribution, unwise regulation, burdens of litigation, constant inflation, barriers to voluntary association and barriers to voluntary exchange all reduce how much we are able to produce.

Eventually, this decline will leave us in poverty and helplessness as a nation.

Our retirements are devastated. Many people have been forced to delay or exit retirement altogether. Families are struggling against growing college tuition rates. Teachers all over northeast Georgia are taking more unpaid furlough days. This decline must be stopped.

To give our children any honest hope, we absolutely must learn to think in larger terms. The success and strength of Georgia will rise or fall with the success and strength of America. We must understand that the state has to stand up for the rights and property of our citizens in aggressive, proactive ways.

Our central government has been up to no good more often than not, since the founding of our nation. For example, according to Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton who was Washington's Treasury Secretary, swindled the people through conniving payment of federal and state war debts. His plan had the following two goals: To confuse the people and corrupt the legislature.

Jefferson concluded: "And with grief and shame it must be acknowledged that his machine was not without effect ; that even in this, the birth of our government, some members were found sordid enough to bend their duty to their interests, and to look after personal rather than public good."

The federal government is always looking for new ways to steal our property. Our ignorance of money and production is the strength of these tyrants.

Productivity retained in the hands of the producer is the solution.

So when we hear talk about the benefits of "Healthcare," "Cap and Trade," "Global Warming," "Bailouts" or other government actions, there is really only one question:

Will this government action help us produce more of the good things we use everyday in Georgia, leading to abundance, prosperity and strength?

Statistics, math, logic, history, current events, human nature, and even the Bible, all emphatically say... "No."

Blessings,

Shane Coley

The Misesian Vision

Shane says: "This is the most important speech you will read all year."

The Misesian Vision

Mises Daily: Monday, January 25, 2010 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

[This talk was delivered at the Jeremy Davis Mises Circle in Houston, Texas, on January 23, 2010.]


I'm finding it ever more difficult to describe to people the kind of world that the Mises Institute would like to see, with the type of political order that Mises and the entire classical-liberal tradition believed would be most beneficial for mankind.

It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It's a fascinating thing to behold.

People can no longer imagine a world in which we could be secure without massive invasions of our privacy at every step, and even being strip searched before boarding airplanes, even though private institutions manage much greater security without any invasions of human rights.

People can no longer remember how a true free market in medical care would work, even though all the problems of the current system were created by government interventions in the first place.

People imagine that we need 700 military bases around the world and endless wars in the Middle East, for "security," though safe Switzerland doesn't.

People think it is insane to think of life without central banks, even though they are modern inventions that have destroyed currency after currency.

Even meddlesome agencies like the Consumer Products Safety Commission or the Federal Trade Commission strike most people as absolutely essential, even though it is not they who catch the thieves and frauds, but private institutions.

The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sounds outlandish, even though we have a long history of both.

People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didn't create in America the world's most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom — the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself — is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration.

This has profoundly affected the political culture. We've lived through regime after regime, since at least the 1930s, in which the word "freedom" has been a rhetorical principle only, even as each new regime has taken away ever more freedom.

Now we have a president who doesn't even bother to pay lip service to the idea of freedom. In fact, I don't think that the idea has occurred to Obama at all. If the idea of freedom has occurred to him, he must have rejected it as dangerous, or unfair, or unequal, or irresponsible, or something along those lines.

To him, and to many Americans, the goal of government is to be an extension of the personal values of those in charge. I saw a speech in which Obama was making a pitch for national service — the ghastly idea that government should steal 2 years of every young person's life for slave labor and to inculcate loyalty to the leviathan — with no concerns about setting back a young person's professional and personal life.

How did Obama justify his support of this idea? He said that when he was a young man, he learned important values from his period of community service. It helped form him and shape him. It helped him understand the troubles of others and think outside his own narrow experience.

Well, I'm happy for him. But he chose that path voluntarily. It is a gigantic leap to go from personal experience to forcing a vicious national plan on the entire country. His presumption here is really taken from the playbook of the totalitarian state: the father-leader will guide his children-citizens in the paths of righteousness, so that they all will become god like the leader himself.

To me, Obama's comment illustrates one of two things. It could show that Obama is a potential dictator in the mold of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, for the presumptions he puts on exhibit here are just as frightening as any imagined by the worst tyrants in human history. Or, more plausibly, it may be an illustration of Hannah Arendt's view that totalitarianism is merely an application of the principle of the "banality of evil."

With this phrase, Arendt meant to draw attention to how people misunderstand the origin and nature of evil regimes. Evil regimes are not always the products of fanatics, paranoids, and sociopaths, though, of course, power breeds fanaticism, paranoia, and sociopathology. Instead, the total state can be built by ordinary people who accept a wrong premise concerning the role of the state in society.

If the role of the state is to ferret out evil thoughts and bad ideas, it must necessarily become totalitarian. If the goal of the state is that all citizens must come to hold the same values as the great leader, whether economic, moral, or cultural, the state must necessarily become totalitarian. If the people are led to believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning.

On the face of it, many people today do not necessarily reject these premises. No longer is the idea of a state-planned society seen as frightening. What scares people more today is the prospect of a society without a plan, which is to say a society of freedom. But here is the key difference between authority in everyday life — such as that exercised by a parent or a teacher or a pastor or a boss — and the power of the state: the state's edicts are always and everywhere enforced at the point of a gun.

"It begins in a seemingly small error, a banality. But, with the state, what begins in banality ends in bloodshed."

It is interesting how little we think about that reality — one virtually never hears that truth stated so plainly in a college classroom, for example — but it is the core reality. Everything done by the state is ultimately done by means of aggression, which is to say violence or the threat of violence against the innocent. The total state is really nothing but the continued extension of these statist means throughout every nook and cranny of economic and social life. Thus does the paranoia, megalomania, and fanaticism of the rulers become deadly dangerous to everyone.

It begins in a seemingly small error, a banality. But, with the state, what begins in banality ends in bloodshed.

Let me give another example of the banality of evil. Several decades ago, some crackpots had the idea that mankind's use of fossil fuels had a warming effect on the weather. Environmentalists were pretty fired up by the notion. So were many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied because they had long ago conceded that there are some public goods that the market can't handle; surely the weather is one of them.

Enough years go by, and what do you have? Politicians from all over the world — every last one of them a huckster of some sort, only pretending to represent his nation — gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and plan its weather down to precise temperatures half a century from now.

In the entire history of mankind, there has not been a more preposterous spectacle than this.

I don't know if it is tragedy or farce that the meeting on global warming came to an end with the politicians racing home to deal with snowstorms and record cold temperatures.

I draw attention to this absurdity to make a more general point. What seems to have escaped the current generation is the notion that was once called freedom.

Let me be clear on what I mean by freedom. I mean a social or political condition in which people exercise their own choices concerning what they do with their lives and property. People are permitted to trade and exchange goods and services without impediment or violent interference. They can associate or not associate with anyone of their own choosing. They can arrange their own lives and businesses. They can build, move, innovate, save, invest, and consume on terms that they themselves define.

What will be the results? We cannot predict them, any more than I can know when everyone in this room will wake up tomorrow morning, or what you will have for breakfast. Human choice works this way. There are as many patterns of human choice as there are humans who make choices.

The only real question we should ask is whether the results will be orderly — consistent with peace and prosperity — or chaotic, and thereby at war with human flourishing. The great burden born by the classical liberal tradition, stretching from medieval times to our own, is to make believable the otherwise improbable claim that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of orderliness.

To be sure, that generation of Americans that seceded from British rule in the late-18th century took the imperative of liberty as a given. They had benefitted from centuries of intellectual work by true liberals who had demonstrated that government does nothing for society but divide and loot people in big and small ways. They had come to believe that the best way to rule a society is not to rule it at all, or, possibly, to rule it in only the most minimal way, with the people's consent.

"The political order in which we live is but an extension of the capacities of our collective cultural imagination."

Today, this social order sounds like chaos, not anything we dare try, lest we be overrun with terrorists and drug fiends, amidst massive social, economic, and cultural collapse. To me this is very interesting. It is the cultural condition that comes about in the absence of experience with freedom. More precisely, it comes about when people have no notion of the relationship between cause and effect in human affairs.

One might think that it would be enough for most people to log on to the World Wide Web, browse any major social-networking site or search engine, and gain direct experience with the results of human freedom. No government agency created Facebook and no government agency manages its day-to-day operation. It is the same with Google. Nor did a bureaucratic agency invent the miracle of the iPhone, or the utopian cornucopia of products available at the Wal-Mart down the street.

Meanwhile, look at what the state gives us: the Department of Motor Vehicles; the post office; spying on our emails and phone calls; full-body scans at the airport; restrictions on water use; the court system; wars; taxes; inflation; business regulations; public schools; Social Security; the CIA; and another ten thousand failed programs and bureaucracies, the reputations of which are no good no matter who you talk to.

Now, one might say, Oh sure, the free market gives us the dessert, but the government gives us the vegetables to keep us healthy. That view does not account for the horrific reality that more than 100 million people were slaughtered by the state in the 20th century alone, not including its wars.

This is only the most visible cost. As Frédéric Bastiat emphasized, the enormity of the costs of the state can only be discovered in considering its unseen costs: the inventions not brought to market, the businesses not opened, the people whose lives were cut short so that they could not enjoy their full potential, the wealth not used for productive purposes but rather taxed away, the capital accumulation through savings not undertaken because the currency was destroyed and the interest rate held near zero, among an infinitely expandable list of unknowns.

To understand these costs requires intellectual sophistication. To understand the more basic and immediate point, that markets work and the state does not, needs less sophistication but still requires some degree of understanding of cause and effect. If we lack this understanding, we go through life accepting whatever exists as a given. If there is wealth, there is wealth, and there is nothing else to know. If there is poverty, there is poverty, and we can know no more about it.

It was to address this deep ignorance that the discipline of economics was born in Spain and Italy — the homes of the first industrial revolutions — in the 14th and 15th centuries, and came to the heights of scientific exposition in the 16th century, to be expanded and elaborated upon in the 18th century in England and Germany, and in France in the 19th century, and finally to achieve its fullest presentation in Austria and America in the late-19th and 20th centuries.

And what did economics contribute to human sciences? What was the value that it added? It demonstrated the orderliness of the material world through a careful look at the operation of the price system and the forces that work to organize the production and distribution of scarce goods.

The main lesson of economics was taught again and again for centuries: government cannot improve on the results of human action achieved through voluntary trade and association. This was its contribution. This was its argument. This was its warning to every would-be social planner: your dreams of domination must be curbed.

In effect, this was a message of freedom, one that inspired revolution after revolution, each of which stemming from the conviction that humankind would be better off in the absence of rule than in its tyrannical presence. But consider what had to come before the real revolutions: there had to be this intellectual work that prepared the field of battle, the epic struggle that lasted centuries and continues to this day, between the nation-state and the market economy.

Make no mistake: it is this battle's outcome that is the most serious determinant in the establishment and preservation of freedom. The political order in which we live is but an extension of the capacities of our collective cultural imagination. Once we stop imagining freedom, it can vanish, and people won't even recognize that it is gone. Once it is gone, people can't imagine that they can or should get it back.

"Never miss an opportunity to tell the truth. Sometimes, thinking the unthinkable, saying the unsayable, teaching the unteachable, is what makes the difference between bondage and sweet liberty."

I'm reminded of the experience of an economist associated with the Mises Institute who was invited to Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union. He was to advise them on a transition to free markets. He talked to officials about privatization and stock markets and monetary reform. He suggested no regulations on business start-ups. The officials were fascinated. They had become convinced of the general case for free enterprise. They understood that socialism meant that officials were poor too.

And yet, an objection was raised. If people are permitted to open businesses and factories anywhere, and we close state-run factories, how can the state properly plan where people are going to live? After all, people might be tempted to move to places where there are good-paying jobs and away from places where there are no jobs.

The economist listened to this point. He nodded his head that this is precisely what people will do. After some time, the government officials became more explicit. They said that they could not simply step aside and let people move anywhere they want to move. This would mean losing track of the population. It could cause overpopulation in some areas and desolation in others. If the state went along with this idea of free movement, it might as well shut down completely, for it would effectively be relinquishing any and all control over people.

And so, in the end, the officials rejected the idea. The entire economic reform movement foundered on the fear of letting people move — a freedom that most everyone in the United States takes for granted, and which hardly ever gives rise to objection.

Now, we might laugh about this, but consider the problem from the point of view of the state. The whole reason you are in office is control. You are there to manage society. What you really and truly fear is that by relinquishing control of people's movement, you are effectively turning the whole of society over to the wiles of the mob. All order is lost. All security is gone. People make terrible mistakes with their lives. They blame the government for failing to control them. And then what happens? The regime loses power.

In the end, this is what it always comes down to for the state: the preservation of its own power. Everything it does, it does to secure its power and to forestall the diminution of its power. I submit to you that everything else you hear, in the end, is a cover for that fundamental motive.

And yet, this power requires the cooperation of public culture. The rationales for power must convince the citizens. This is why the state must be alert to the status of public opinion. This is also why the state must always encourage fear among the population about what life would be like in the absence of the state.

The political philosopher who did more than anyone else to make this possible was not Marx nor Keynes nor Strauss nor Rousseau. It was the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who laid out a compelling vision of the nightmare of life in the absence of the state. He described such life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The natural society, he wrote, was a society of conflict and strife, a place in which no one is safe.

He was writing during the English Civil War, and his message seemed believable. But, of course, the conflicts in his time were not the result of natural society, but rather of the control of leviathan itself. So his theory of causation was skewed by circumstance, akin to watching a shipwreck and concluding that the natural and universal state of man is drowning.

And yet today, Hobbesianism is the common element of both left and right. To be sure, the fears are different, stemming from different sets of political values. The Left warns us that if we don't have leviathan, our front yards will be flooded from rising oceans, big business moguls will rob us blind, the poor will starve, the masses will be ignorant, and everything we buy will blow up and kill us. The Right warns that in the absence of leviathan, society will collapse in cesspools of immorality lorded over by swarthy terrorists preaching a heretical religion.

The goal of both the Left and Right is that we make our political choices based on these fears. It doesn't matter so much which package of fear you choose; what matters is that you support a state that purports to keep your nightmare from becoming a reality.

Is there an alternative to fear? Here is where matters become a bit more difficult. We must begin again to imagine that freedom itself could work. In order to do this, we must learn economics. We must come to understand history better. We must study the sciences of human action to relearn what Juan de Mariana, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Frédéric Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Murray N. Rothbard, and the entire liberal tradition understood.

What they knew is the great secret of the ages: society contains within itself the capacity for self-management, and there is nothing that government can do to improve on the results of the voluntary association, exchange, creativity, and choices of every member of the human family.

If you know this lesson, if you believe this lesson, you are part of the great liberal tradition. You are also a threat to the regime, not only the one we live under currently, but every regime all over the world, in every time and place. In fact, the greatest guarantor of liberty is an entire population that is a relentless and daily threat to the regime precisely because they embrace the dream of liberty.

The best and only place to start is with yourself. This is the only person that you can really control in the end. And by believing in freedom yourself, you might have made the biggest contribution to civilization you could possibly make. After that, never miss an opportunity to tell the truth. Sometimes, thinking the unthinkable, saying the unsayable, teaching the unteachable, is what makes the difference between bondage and sweet liberty.

The title of this talk is "the Misesian vision." This was the vision of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. It is the vision of the Mises Institute. It is the vision of every dissident intellectual who dared to stand up to despotism, in every age.

I challenge you to enter into the great struggle of history, and make sure that your days on this earth count for something truly important. It is this struggle that defines our contribution to this world. Freedom is the greatest gift that you can give yourself and all of humanity.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of The Left, the Right, and the State.

This talk was delivered at the Jeremy Davis Mises Circle in Houston, Texas, on January 23, 2010.

Soil and Liberty

Our nation is at a crossroad. We are facing the potential collapse of our currency and the following disintegration of our society. There are technical reasons this is true. Some mainstream financial advisors take this position. Certain economists take this position.

Our security depends on knowledge. Please consider the following ideas.

Dollars

Imagine a Wall Street hedge fund manager who has acquired millions of dollars in the previous year. Imagine if he sold everything of value he had, including house, clothes, cars, etc. and only held dollars. Imagine that he never traded those dollars for anything. He just held his dollars.

Is he wealthy?

Or is he hungry and cold?

He cannot eat, wear or be sheltered by his dollars. Unwilling to part with his dollars and having no other property, he is a man in poverty.

This would also be true if he held a currency that no producers would accept in exchange for goods and services. This is the current situation for Zimbabwe Dollars.

Soil

Let’s say our Wall Street banker finds this situation to be untenable.

He is hungry and cold.

So he buys food, shelter and clothing. These are all directly or indirectly based on products which come from the soil.

The people who produced these things live in houses, wear clothes and eat food which are dependent on soil.

So, even the Wall Street banker has nothing if he only has dollars. And even the Wall Street banker is directly dependent on soil.

All nations are agrarian or have agrarian dependencies, whether they know it or not.

Only a fool believes a nation can survive without a strong agricultural base.

Only an enemy would undermine a nation's agricultural base.

Our agriculture and industry have been undermined.

Production

Have you ever noticed that everything we do or use relies on production?

Consider the following questions:

Can we agree that if a person stops eating, he will die?

Can we agree that if a person is dead, he no longer thinks, at least temporally speaking?

Can we then agree that thought relies on food?

Can we agree food must be produced?

Can we then conclude that thought relies on production?

If thought relies on production, can you name even one thing that you do or use that does not rely on production?

Teachers

Teaching can be edifying or destructive. One can be taught to build or to tear down.

If teachers have a desire to promote and support the teaching profession or society as a whole, they must teach production.

If a teacher simply wants to be guaranteed a certain quantity of paper tickets, like dollars, perhaps they should move to Zimbabwe. People in Zimbabwe have plenty of paper tickets. Of course the people starve, but even the poorest person has vast quantities of worthless paper money.

Perhaps teachers actually want valuable incomes so that they can enjoy food, shelter, clothes, relationships and leisure activities.

If food, shelter and clothing are what the teachers want, they should NOT lobby the government for guaranteed quantities of dollars. Instead, since everything we do or use relies on production, they should teach the students how to be productive.

Anything that interferes with the freedom to teach students how to be net productive should be considered an enemy of the teacher, student and society.

Fundamentals

I have noticed that people eat food and use things.

The government produces nothing and wastes much.

Government has nothing to give.

Everything we do or use relies on production.

Through taxation, regulation, litigation and inflation, government reduces the quantity of production, which makes us all poorer.

The things we use must be produced.

I have noticed producers exchange with producers. Paper money which has been devalued and made worthless will not be accepted by a producer. Our dollars will soon be worthless, which means producers will not accept our dollars in exchange for what they have produced.

We have destroyed agriculture and industry in our nation.

We are losing generational knowledge and trade skills.

We can no longer produce adequate quantities of what we need and want.

Conclusion

Paper money is poverty. Electronic money is death. All nations which debase their currency have collapsed.

Unless we learn the truth about production and the truth about money, we will lose our liberty and prosperity. Unmistakable poverty and tyranny will take its place.

Dollars are worthless and useless in their own right. We must understand the true foundations of liberty, beginning with soil and production. Otherwise, when dollars can no longer be exchanged for production, we will witness the disintegration of the United States as we know it.

Every man, woman and child must learn and teach the truth about production and the truth about money.

If we do that, the United States of America will again be strong, prosperous and free.

Banana Republic

Note the sarcasm...

The following is an excerpt from Taipan Daily.

Turbo Timmy’s Christmas Eve Coup

Justice Litle, Editorial Director, Taipan Publishing Group
Monday, January 11, 2010

"The AIG fiasco was just a warm-up. Turbo Timmy’s latest coup could wind up costing taxpayers trillions – and the country hardly noticed."

Banana Republic, Here We Come

"No, the reason to be excited now – if one is able to ride the paper gravy train, that is – is because the backroom deal makers have won. They have shown, with little room for doubt, that the government can and will do what it takes to rescue Wall Streeters at all costs... even if it means sacrificing the health of the real economy in true banana republic fashion.

And so why worry? Why worry if a tidal wave of “Alt-A” mortgage resets is coming? Why worry that current policies continue to starve the real economy of credit and jobs, while at the same time encouraging banks to hold back on loans and ramp up their trading desk activity?

There is no reason to worry, you see, because Washington has finally proven adept at taking care of its own. It no longer matters if the real economy goes to hell, because the Fed and Treasury’s access to funds is unlimited now! No matter what, planet paper will be first and foremost... no matter what, planet paper will be saved.

We have learned all the wrong lessons in spades. “Too big to fail” has worked... the culprits of the last crisis are now as big and bold as ever (on the risk-taking side if not the lending side)... bad policies (in regard to propping up the U.S. housing market) now have blank-check support... and we as taxpayers have handed over our fiscal birthright to Turbo Timmy for a mess of pottage without even knowing it.

One can almost forgive the crooked denizens of Washington and Wall Street for rubbing their hands together with glee. If American citizens are willing to tolerate this, perhaps they are willing tolerate anything. If the taxpayer, the hard worker, the honest saver, has not grown furious by now, perhaps he never will." -- Taipan Daily

The Arrogance of David Brooks

David Brooks, a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, wrote an article entitled Tea Party Teens on January 4, 2010.

Many things could be said about Mr. Brooks' article, but I will focus on his weak and arrogant arguments against the Tea Party participants and their common beliefs.

Mr. Brooks writes:

"The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply."

Educated Class

I can only imagine how he defines his category the "educated class".

Probably a combination of coursework certificates at specific schools, along with unwavering agreement with the approved academic mantra.

If you don't have the proper certifications or if you disagree with the monolithic "government as god" religion, you would be one of the poor, ignorant fools who needs the educated class to take care of you.

Who produced the things that Mr. Brooks uses? Not the educated class he has in mind. They work for the government and produce nothing. What most of the self-proclaimed educated class teach actually reduces production, which makes us all poorer.

Believes In

Mr. Brooks is chastising us simple minded folk because we don't believe what the educated class is telling us.

Silly us. We reach different conclusions based on the available information.

I am amazed at his choice of words. The educated class believes in global warming. He is right, in a sense. Global warming can only be accepted as an article of faith, while the facts tell a different story.

They want us to believe in what they tell us. The trouble is that many of the claims can be tested and the facts don't support their claims.

However, we can easily see that global warming propaganda is a planned tool of manipulation, designed to further crush producers.

So...

Then, after expecting us to accept the global warming lies and ignore the socialist manipulations, he presents us with claims of cause and effect. We don't have our own views about the world. We simply react to the educated class.

the educated class believes, so the public doesn't

the educated class supports, so the public opposes

the educated class is, so the public isn't

Think about the implications.

• We uneducated Americans don't think for ourselves.
• We choose what to think only based on what the educated class thinks.
• The educated class has no credibility so no one believes them.

What a brilliant defense of the influence and value of the educated class!

Against

Mr. Brooks continues:

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

What a juvenile and illogical claim he makes. We are defined by what we are against?

Tea Party Patriots are for life, liberty and private property.

Using his formula, we can assert the educated class are defined by what they are against.

They are against life, liberty and private property.

Mr. Brooks' article brought to mind a passage from The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis.

"The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so."

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943

Educated class? Not me. Never.

I am a liberty loving American and I want our nation back.

INTERPOL Now Above The Law

And ready for action...

Who is INTERPOL?

"INTERPOL is the world’s largest international police organization, with 188 member countries. Created in 1923, it facilitates cross-border police co-operation, and supports and assists all organizations, authorities and services whose mission is to prevent or combat international crime."

INTERPOL has been granted full immunity to operate in the United States by an executive order signed December 17, 2009 by President Obama.

On December 29, 2009 the classification protocols for originating SECRET and TOP SECRET documents were modified and expanded by executive order.

Classification authority can be delegated (Section 1.3), which means the Czars will likely be able to exercise this classification authority via delegation from the President of the united States.

Why should the Department of Agriculture have authority to originate SECRET documents?

Except in rare cases in the stewardship of a limited government, government secrets are not good for liberty.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~ Benjamin Franklin

INTERPOL - History and Current Events

INTERPOL was founded in 1923 and was taken over by Germany from 1938 until 1945. Four of the presidents of INTERPOL were Nazi SS officers. The President that revitalized the organization after WWII was from France, but also worked for the last of the German leaders.

Hitler used INTERPOL as a control point for the police infrastructure across the nations Germany was conquering. By exercising central power to pressure the leading police officials to control their own personnel, Hitler controlled of all the police powers of the state. It was a sinister and effective system of control.

INTERPOL is reportedly the second largest international organization after the UN.

INTERPOL is working together with UN officials and the 188 member countries to "debate the global police issue and to craft a declaration that would lead to an action plan for international police peacekeeping within 12 months."

Today in the united States, we have agencies originating TOP SECRET and SECRET documents which will be off limits, even through the Freedom of Information Act.

These documents can be used to guide police activities conducted by INTERPOL on US soil for which INTERPOL has no oversight and is answerable to no one. INTERPOL can operate completely above the law.

We will not know if anyone makes use of this system until it is too late to do much about it. One thing is certain. At least one legally untouchable domestic black-ops system is in place if any high officials decide they want to use it.

Liberty Solution

Got liberty?

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.“ ~ Johann Goethe

Want liberty?

People have to work to get it.

A few in our founders' generation did that.

We have been steadily giving it away ever since.

We have to work to get it back.

If we do our part, our children will be granted a special gift.

They can then work to keep it.

Knowledge is power.

Learn the truth about production.

Learn the truth about money.

Learn the truth about government.

Liberty Solution

Liberty, States Rights, Nullification