I have always liked PJ O’Rourke’s unashamed, radical writing,
combining both humor and criticizing the most serious duplicity of ALL
politicians and other government criminals, including their minions and
protected hangers-on. He has produced some of the best anti-establishment
writing that panders to freedom – NOT the insane politics of today’s thoroughly
corrupt American welfare/warfare state, while so many people (politely called
public servants) manage to keep straight faces after taking oaths to protect
and defend the Constitution. Even after 27 amendments, that magnificent (though
flawed) historical document still describes a government mostly limited to the
tasks of small government listed in its elegant Article I, Sections 7-10, plus
the following never-changed amendments:
Consider Amendment IX (nine) - The enumeration
in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or
disparage others retained by the people
...and Amendment X (ten) - The powers not
delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the
States, are reserved to the States respectively, or the people.
These and the other first ten amendments to the US
Constitution (called the Bill of Rights) have remained unchanged
since their adoption in 1791 – and STILL limit the US government to a much, much
smaller one than the Federal behemoth with whom we struggle and so often
glorify today. As usual, the US military’s primary purpose is war, not defense
(Astronaut Jack Swigert quote, 1982). It’s good for military contractors’
businesses, but creates hell to pay for the economies participating in this
wealth-destroying charade.
Here is PJ’s excellent article, with which I wholeheartedly
agree, though I don’t risk much in going farther than him after I present it:
It took me several years AFTER I ran for Congress in 1982
and 1984 to finally conclude that politics is - by far - the most dangerous,
dishonest and destructive profession by which any human ever soiled himself.
Every “free lunch” it provides is funded by forcing innocents to pay for the
insane, unaccountable lists of wet dreams promoted by politicians for their own
aggrandizement, limited prosecutable liability and glorification as heroes. As
you will see – the apparently legal, political theft built up
over the last century has now shifted from a minority to a majority of voters
in our overblown, “don’t stop the presses” economy. It has thoroughly shifted
the balance of power in the US by giving American politicians a 60% to 40%
incentive to vote for more government, as I describe in Chapter 14
of my pending book, Lasting Liberty Lost, attached. This can, and
will, have only one outcome, and it’s not good. As I have written before, the
US has gone from the world’s largest creditor to the world’s largest debtor in
the last four decades.
No private burglar, bully, child molester, rapist or
murderer - not even those organized into mafias, crime syndicates and other
criminal organizations NOT protected and/or subsidized by government - has ever
come close to the unsavory escalation of crime, war, destruction and tyranny
that is the modern welfare/warfare state. In other words, most - perhaps all -
governments and their minions murder many, many times more than private parties
and organizations not subsidized or otherwise protected by government. The
twentieth century included the murder, torture, rape and/or death by starvation
of more than 100 million people, by just three countries (Soviet Union,
Communist China and Hitler’s Germany). Bernie Madoff’s well-publicized
multi-BILLION dollar fraud to his investors was a drop in the bucket compared
to tens of thousands of American governments who LEGALLY enjoy this plunder,
protected from legal liability in most cases. The US alone suffered more than
400,000 casualties in the WW II.
That is why you might be surprised, even shocked, by my last
two paragraphs.
Steven Pinker’s magnificent book The Better Angels of
our Nature documents the following claim in painstaking detail.
Surprisingly (contrary to all media reporting), today’s Planet Earth (including
America) is by far the LEAST violent period of human history, after World War
II (1941-45) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). The destructive policies of
the twentieth century were well-established long before top-of-the-world 20th-century
dictators like US President Franklin Roosevelt and his cohorts Stalin and Mao
took up the task. My friend Jerry recently turned me onto Pinker’s wonderful
book, which shattered my long-held illusions about how today’s human societies
have been the least violent. Ironically, the ongoing and insistent overreach of
modern welfare/warfare states has wreaked havoc in every corner of our lives for
political (i.e., ever-fraudulent and coercive) goals, including taxing and
regulating us into lifetimes of tyranny, taxes and too-early deaths. Randolph
Bourne (quoted below) and General von Clausewitz understood why, but you may
not.
Mankind will find, as it has found in our lifetimes and long
before we were born, a better way to “govern”, “regulate” or “help” its
unfortunate victims than to torture, starve and bludgeon them into slavery,
death, wealth destruction and economic collapse. Ironically, the detonation of
two terrible atomic bombs in Japan a month before I was born was the LAST time
the Grand Old US of A followed its Constitution by declaring war before
dropping troops, bombs and inflated currencies into every backwater tyrant’s
backyard.
War is the Health of the State –
Randolph Bourne (1918)
War is politics carried on by other means –
Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz (1812)
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