A Nation Of Free Men Or Free Things
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-04/nation-free-men-or-free-things
Thu, 07/04/2019 - 16:15
Authored by Daniel Greenfield via Sultan Knish blog,
The 2020 Democrat primaries are underway with candidate after candidate promising a nation, not of free people, but of free things.
Free college, free health care and free everything else. Even for illegal aliens.
Of course there's a price to pay.
You get free health care by giving up the freedom to pick your own health care. You get free education, but the indoctrination is the price.
The Fourth to many is Fireworks Day. Every country has its fireworks days and this is the day that this one chooses to light up the night sky. The day means nothing to them because though they are surrounded by free things, they aren’t free.
The difference between freedom and free things has been progressively erased so that many think that the American Revolution was fought because the British weren’t providing affordable health coverage to the colonies. If only they knew about the NHS, they would vote to go back.
All that the Crown really wanted was for the colonists to pay their “fair share”, a share that was determined thousands of miles away. All that the colonists wanted was the rights of Englishmen that they believed they were entitled to. After a great deal of bloodshed, the colonists won the right to be Americans instead—an odd series of consonants and vowels having to do with an Italian explorer but meaning free and limited government.
There is a big difference between a free country and a country of free things. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. A free country isn’t obsessed with free riders, only a country of free things obsesses with making everyone pay their fair share for the benefit of the people who want the free things. The rugged individualism of Colonial America has given way to stifling crowds, co-dependent on each other, lined shoulder to shoulder, clutching at each other’s wallets, crying, “Take from him and give to me.”
We are a nation overflowing with the right to things paid for with other people’s money. A nation where the government gives you food, housing and education; while Walmart gives you cheap products made in China, that used to be made in America, back when people were able to afford health care, housing and food without having to pick each other’s pockets.
The fireworks that shoot up in a wonderland of blue and red, silver and gold, are a faint echo of the real thing, the gunpowder that blasted back and forth between the lines of government troops, their Hessian mercenaries and the rebel colonists who chose to ride free, rather than bend their necks to the plans of an expanding empire. The faint smell of gunpowder and the dark shapes of the barges only mime the war that was fought here.
Did so many men risk their lives just to end up with a system that made the one they escaped seem positively libertarian by comparison? If they had known that they were going to end up with the NHS, death panels that will eventually adopt some version of the Liverpool Care Pathway’s euthanasia protocol, and a co-dependent system where everyone is looted for the greater good of the looters—they might have stayed home on their farms, sadly watching the fighting from a distance.
JFK’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” was always a hollow lie. Half the country is expected to ask what their country can do for them, while the other half is expected to ask what they can do for their country. This simmering civil war is often pegged as a class war, but it isn’t about class. There are billionaires and paupers on both sides, and the divide cuts across the Middle Class, dividing those who derive their income from private business from those who receive it from government and government-subsidized employment.
The Fourth of July is Independence Day, but every other day is Co-Dependence Day, the days we celebrate our integration, our volunteerism and our compliance with a vast system which makes everyone dependent on the government and which makes the government dependent on everyone who still works for someone other than the government—including the freest of free riders, who work for themselves. Empires function by draining every drop from their possessions to cover their costs. The British Crown tried to drain America to pay down its debt, resulting in growing protests from the population and eventually a revolution. Now the Empire of Co-Dependency is draining its independent subjects for the benefit of its dependent subjects and the dependency infrastructure that employs its numberless bureaucrats who govern it all.
The American Revolution was not a struggle for another nation, one of many, but for a free nation. It was not split off to accommodate the national strivings of an ethnic group or their historical destiny. Its guiding idea, like its national holiday, was independence, but independence means very little unless it reaches the individual.
A nation where everyone is part of one great co-dependent community, a centrally planned marketplace that can only be balanced if everyone is forced to buy what they are told to buy, is not a free nation. It will not even be independent for long. The logic of co-dependence is to expand that dependency beyond the borders and make the region and then every part the world dependent on one another to balance out the numbers.
The new Crown is not a person, it is an idea. The throne at whose foot a formerly free people kneel is the golden seat of the welfare state. While the fireworks light up the sky, a counterrevolution undid the revolution. There is a new king and his face is on every magazine cover in the land. His bounty is a jagged bear trap that turns everyone into a ward of the state at their own expense.
As the last wave of fireworks die out, the shooting stars sinking to earth and vanishing into the darkness, the light of Independence Day fades and the crowds slowly trudge away from the brief spectacle, past the lines of police barricades, through narrow streets, past government buildings, back to their co-dependent lives in a co-dependent nation where the will of the people and the rights of the individual matter less than the latest proposal to solve the problems of their independence by making the country a more dependent place.
A few hundred years ago in these streets, men and women celebrated the end of tyranny, and in its darkest hour, lines of grim men marched along the waterfront up to the highest point on the island to mount a final defense. Sometimes the older buildings still wear their shadows on their brick walls and by the golden light of the fireworks you can almost see them, shadows moving in the darkness, their footsteps taking them north, a faint song on their lips, muskets in their hands, their lives lost and gained in defense of their freedom.
~~~
Paul Craig Roberts: Some Unhappy Thoughts For The Fourth Of July
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-04/paul-craig-roberts-some-unhappy-thoughts-fourth-july
Thu, 07/04/2019 - 14:15
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
The human race, being a collection of stupids, continues to make decisions that imperil itself.
For example, a simple mistake in a warning system about incoming ICBMs can end all life on earth. The supersmart idiots who invented nuclear weapons did not think about the possible unintended consequences of their handiwork. They wanted to defeat the Nazis, and that was the limit of their imagination.
If you don’t like that example, consider this one. The digital revolution has made us dependent on communications and control systems, such as those that operate power systems, that can be fried by superflares, which the sun on which we depend has every 2 or 3 thousand years, and shut down by hackers.
As I understand it, the same thing can happen from a nuclear blast in the atmosphere. When power systems go down, nuclear reactors can overheat and produce Fukushima meltdowns. Try to image the consequences of a large number of such meltdowns. Yet, we have adopted a technology that subjects us to these kind of risks as well as to an Orwellian police state existence.
Why? Because the human race is mindless. Unlike highly intelligent non-human animals who are capable of rational decisions, humans can’t see beyond the end of their noses. The smell of money is what they respond to.
And there are health risks of technology, such as those associated with the rollout of 5G.
Nevertheless, 5G is rolling out as it serves material interests, that is, corporate profits. The external costs of these profits, if the many dissenting scientists and medical professionals are correct, will greatly exceed in medical bills, infertility, anguish, shortened life spans, and so forth, the totality of profits from 5G.
But don’t think your government, or the 5G corporations care.
Americans take their soma in the form of brainwashing and have become brainwashed sheep. As far as I can tell, they will remain brainwashed sheep until they are beat into non-existence. Are brainwashed people capable of rebellion?
No one today, the 4th of July, will call for an uprising against our easily identified oppressors. The reason is that everyone allowed to speak publicly is in the pay of our oppressors.
Americans are so firmly locked into The Matrix that it is doubtful that they can be rescued.
When the world faces “the Great American Democracy,” the world faces a brainwashed public in the grip of material interests who are backed up by nuclear weapons, controls over the use of which have been consistently removed since the Clinton regime.
On the Fourth of July brainwashed Americans will wave the flag and chant: USA, USA, USA.
~~~
Celebrating The Fourth, Then And Now
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-04/celebrating-fourth-then-and-now
Thu, 07/04/2019 - 12:15
Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,
Americans who celebrated the Fourth of July in 1880 were celebrating a concept of freedom that is opposite to the concept of freedom that Americans today celebrate on the Fourth.
The freedom that 1880 Americans celebrated was a society in which there was which there was no income taxation, no mandatory charity, no government management or regulation of economic activity, no immigration controls, no systems of public (i.e., government) schooling, no Federal Reserve System, no paper money, no punishment for drug offenses, and no Pentagon, CIA, or NSA, no wars in faraway lands, no secret surveillance, no torture, no assassination, and no indefinite detention.
The “freedom” that Americans today celebrate is one in which there is Social Security, Medicare, education grants, farm subsidies, and other mandatory-charity programs, government management and regulation of economic activity, immigration controls, public (i.e., government) schooling, the Federal Reserve, paper money, punishment for possessing, distributing, or ingesting unapproved substances, a massive military establishment consisting of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, and forever wars, secret surveillance, torture, assassination, and indefinite detention.
Thing about that: Two opposite systems and yet people under both systems celebrating their freedom. Something is clearly not right with this picture.
The Declaration of Independence set forth the ideal: All people have been endowed by nature and the Creator with certain unalienable rights — that is, rights that cannot be taken away or destroyed by anyone, including one’s own government. In fact, as the Declaration points out, the purpose of government is to protect the exercise of these rights, not infringe upon or destroy them.
The Constitution, which brought into existence the federal government, should be viewed in light of the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. We are all aware, of course, that the Constitution permitted the continuation of slavery, which is the most massive violation of freedom imaginable. There were also other violations of liberty. Notwithstanding such exceptions, however, the Framers were striving to achieve a society that reflected the values in the Declaration — that is, one where people are free and where government’s purpose is to protect that freedom.
That was the idea of limited government. The Framers could have used the Constitution to call into existence a government whose powers were omnipotent, one in which federal officials would simply be trusted to do the right thing, with the aim of taking care of the citizenry and keeping them safe and secure. They didn’t do that. They said: Here is the federal government and here are its few and limited powers.
Why were the Framers so intent on emphasizing the limited nature of the federal government as outlined in the Constitution? Because they knew that the American people would never accept anything less. Remember: When the Constitutional Convention met, it was with the purpose of simply altering the Articles of Confederation, a type of governmental system under which the powers of the federal government were so few and weak that it didn’t even have the power to tax.
That’s the way the American people wanted it. A strong federal government was the last thing they desired. Why? Because they agreed with the principles enunciated of the Declaration and they knew that a strong federal government would end up destroying their lives, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness.
Instead of modifying the Articles, the Constitutional Convention proposed a different form of governmental structure, one in which the federal government would have the power to tax. Americans were extremely leery. Why? Because they were convinced that people’s own government, not foreign regimes, is the biggest threat to people’s freedom and well-being. The last thing they wanted, after successfully taking up arms against their own government in 1776 — the British government — was another government that would become just as tyrannical.
That’s why the Framers sold the Constitution as a charter that was bringing into existence a government with very limited powers. Americans went along with the deal but only on the condition that the Constitution be immediately amended to expressly prohibit federal officials from destroying their natural, God-given rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, and others.
Why did they feel the need to expressly restrict federal officials from doing such things? Because they were certain that federal officials would end up doing those sorts of things if they weren’t expressly restricted from doing them!
They also restricted the feds from killing anyone, including foreigners, without due process of law, which meant a trial and a right to be heard. They also restricted the power of the feds to search people’s persons, homes, or businesses. They expressly guaranteed such things as trial by jury, right to counsel, and right to confront witnesses.
Why did they feel the need to detail such protections? Because they were certain that the feds would do such things if they were not expressly restricted from doing them.
The society that Americans brought into existence (notwithstanding slavery and other violations) reflected their belief in the principles of the Declaration. Freedom for them was the right of a person to engage freely in any occupation or profession without governmental permission, to engage freely in trades with others, to accumulate the fruits of one’s earnings, and to decide for himself what to do with his own money. Freedom entailed the right to live one’s life any way he chose, so long as he didn’t murder, rape, steal, defraud, trespass, or otherwise violate the rights of others to live their lives the way they chose. Freedom also meant the absence of a vast, permanent military-intelligence establishment (i.e., the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA).
Those were revolutionary notions. Those Americans are the only ones in history to have subscribed to them and actually put them into practice.
Imagine if the Framers had said to Americans that the Constitution was going to bring into existence the type of governmental system we have today — one based on mandatory charity (that is, the power of the federal government to forcibly take money from one person and give it to another person, as with Social Security and Medicare), government management and control of economic activity, government-issued paper money, a central bank (i.e., Federal Reserve), immigration controls, drug laws, income taxation and the IRS, trade wars, and an enormous, permanent, ever-growing military-intelligence establishment that would have the powers to round up people, incarcerate them in military dungeons or concentration camps for indefinite periods, torture them, assassinate them, spy on them, and embroil them in foreign wars, coups, meddling, and interventions.
The American people would have died laughing. They would have thought it was a joke. They would have tarred and feathered the Framers and given them the boot. They would have simply continued operating under the Articles of Confederation, where the federal government didn’t even have the power to tax.
Why would our American ancestors have chosen to reject the type of governmental system Americans today celebrate as “freedom”?
Because unlike today’s Americans, our American ancestors understood that the type of system that Americans celebrate today as “freedom” isn’t freedom at all.
