Yet, consider the following:

We may still have fundamental freedoms of speech and the press, but America is in a transition from liberty to despotism, a halfway house on the road to tyranny. We already have economic tyranny in America. If you add up all the taxes you pay, including income taxes, Social Security, sales, real estate, gasoline, telephone, and dozens of other hidden taxes, government loots over forty percent of your hard-earned income in taxes.

Yet, only a hundred years ago, the average worker paid no more than five percent of his income in taxes. In 1901, there was no income tax, Social Security tax, or most of the other taxes you pay today. In the Middle Ages, medieval rulers took about 20 percent of their serfs’ produce. Our government now taxes us worse than serfs. If government claims the right to forty percent of your income, it claims the right to forty percent of your labor, and forty percent of your life. In effect, the people we “elect” have put us on a chain gang until May 10th of every year, working for the bureaucrats.

Most parents may not see it this way, but local governments, in effect, kidnap your children through public-school compulsory-attendance laws. They force you to send your children to government (public) schools that waste twelve years of your children’s lives and turn them into illiterates. They then tax you to support these so-called “schools.”

“War on Drugs” government SWAT teams can break down your door in the middle of the night without a warrant, based on the drug tip of a malicious, anonymous informant, then threaten you in your own living room. Drug laws dictate what we can or cannot put in our own bodies. These laws tell us we do not have the right to smoke marijuana, even if we have cancer and the marijuana alleviates the nausea from chemotherapy drugs.

Government tells us we cannot commit suicide if we have terminal cancer with excruciating pain, nor can a doctor assist us to commit suicide. By these laws, government tells us it now owns our bodies. These laws deny our right of free choice for important personal decisions in our lives.

Try building a new home for yourself, and you will run into a hornet’s nest of building department inspectors, zoning commissions, environment impact statements, and local agencies who will tie you up in knots. Try starting a small business and you will need government licenses and approvals. Local, State and Federal tax authorities, like vultures, will then devour your profits with their ever-increasing taxes.

Taxes loot your hard-earned money to pay for dozens of “entitlement programs” such as Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, corporate subsidies, welfare programs, health care for illegal immigrants, and now a “welfare” program for the entire population of Iraq called the Iraq war. Your voluntary consent is not required for these programs. Government forces you to pay for them.

Federal, State, and local police agencies use asset-forfeiture laws to steal the cars, homes, businesses, and bank accounts of innocent people under the pretext of a War on Drugs. Victims of drug raids then have to prove their innocence and sue the agency to get their property back. Asset-forfeiture laws have turned too many local police departments into agencies for legalized looting.

Anti-gun politicians make thousands of gun laws that restrict a woman’s right to protect herself from a rapist, a homeowner’s right to protect himself from a robber in the middle of the night, or American citizens’ right to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees our right to bear arms is under massive assault. It may be only a matter of time until we lose this right altogether.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulations can control who an employer hires, fires, or promotes, how much he has to pay his employees (minimum wage), and what their “conditions of employment” must be. This same agency can sue an employer into bankruptcy for “discrimination” or other “infractions” of its regulations.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can stop a home builder from building homes, a farmer from farming his land, a rancher from grazing his cattle, an oil company from drilling for desperately needed oil, or a logging company from cutting down trees to give us lumber for new homes. EPA regulations sharply jack up the price of oil and destroy property rights in America for a great and noble cause — to protect “endangered” species like the Alabama mud rat, mosquito-infested swamps called “wetlands,” and “delicate” frozen Arctic wastelands that look like the surface of the moon.

The Food and Drug Administration forces drug companies to spend over $500 million and seven years to get approval for a new drug. It puts pharmaceutical companies through a regulatory torture chamber that strangles the development of thousands of new, life-saving drugs. It has made SWAT-team raids on vitamin stores to “protect” us from Vitamin C and other dangers.

Federal agents can persecute a religious sect they don’t like, as the Feds did in Waco, Texas. They persecuted these people partly because the sect owned allegedly “illegal” firearms, firearms the 2nd Amendment says they had the right to own. After slaughtering innocent women and children in a ball of fire, none of the Federal agents were ever prosecuted or sent to prison for their actions.

Finally, in response to the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Federal government passed an “anti-terror” bill that created secret military tribunals. These tribunals will be like medieval star-chambers, where defendants’ legal rights will be ripped to pieces, and trial by jury will be denied.

These tribunals have set a terrible precedent. It is only a matter of time before government prosecutors expand the vague definition of “terrorism” to an ever-widening list of “crimes” that can be used against American citizens. Government judges and prosecutors will then be able to try and convict Americans without the “messy” need for juries, proof, evidence, or the presumption of innocence.

Does all this sound like “the land of the free?” Government in America is a growing tyranny. It is a government that would shock our Founding Fathers, a government they would consider a greater tyranny than the British monarchy they fought a revolutionary war against. Worse, whatever freedoms we have left are being taken from us at an ever-accelerating rate.

If you, my reader, do not see this, it is not your fault. Your liberty has been taken from you gradually, one new tax and regulation at a time. You have become accustomed to the taxes and regulations. You think they are “normal” and therefore nothing to complain about. You mistakenly believe that because you elect your representatives, and because they enact laws based on majority rule, that their laws, taxes, and regulations are moral and legitimate. It is like your wife or husband not noticing you have gained thirty pounds over the past five years because they see you every day, and the weight gain was gradual.

So it is with gradual tyranny. But if Americans living 150 years ago suddenly came back to life today, they would be shocked, for they would see the stark difference in their freedom.

President Bush and his Republican lemmings continue to waste hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives to protect the “freedom” of the Iraqi people. Well, how about first giving Americans back the freedom that is their birthright, the constitutional freedoms our Founding Fathers fought and died for?

Tweet This Post

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. – James Bovard (1994)

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. – Somerset Maugham

At the end of the nineteenth century, federal taxes only absorbed about 3 percent of the national income ($6.64 per person), and state and municipal taxes added another 6 percent ($13.28 per person). There was no income tax, except a temporary one during the Civil War, until the 16th Amendment to the Constitution established this tax in 1913. The bulk of federal revenues came almost entirely from tariffs, excise taxes, and customs duties. The federal debt was small and steadily contracting. There were minor outlays for social services, and the Treasury often had a surplus.

Low taxes meant that workers or business owners kept most of their wages or profits to spend on themselves or their businesses. At the end of the nineteenth century, Americans had the right to keep what they earned. The combination of a free economy, political liberty, strict protection of property rights, and a small federal government was the spark plug that turned America into the most productive nation on Earth.

The Founding Fathers created a brilliant political structure, but they also made some serious mistakes; there were holes in the dam right from the start. Unfortunately, the Constitution gave the federal government the right to coin money, ‘regulate commerce,’ and ‘promote the general welfare’ of the nation. At the time, these phrases were strictly interpreted and government interference in the economy was minor.

But gradually those general phrases took on an ominous new meaning as the country’s moral-political philosophy took a sharp turn to the left. Over the years, like a spreading malignant cancer, government’s right to ‘regulate commerce among the states’ and ‘protect the general welfare’ turned into government’s right to strangle our economy with hundreds of thousands of regulations, and create the Welfare State.

The dominant political doctrine ruling America today is socialism. Socialism rests on the idea that compassion is a moral and political duty, not a personal choice. Under the socialist Welfare or Entitlement State, government forces us to help others, whether we like it or not. Compassion has been turned into compulsion.

As a result, the guiding principles of our Founding Fathers have been all but forgotten. Limited government and the scrupulous protection of our property rights are just a fading memory. In their place, government is again telling us that ‘society’ or the collective is more important than you and I. Socialist liberals tell us that the ‘public good’ and the economic ‘rights’ of the needy are more important than our liberty.

Need, not individual rights, has become the ruling principle of our time. Government uses regulations and entitlement programs to allegedly protect the common good and create a safety net for everyone. Our government now forces us to live by Karl Marx’s dogma of socialism and communism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

That’s what a welfare state is all about. And when I say welfare I don’t mean simply for the poor, but for everyone. Most government subsidy, insurance, and entitlement programs are a form of welfare. Government taxes us to pay for food stamps, Medicare, bank bailouts, rent subsidies, farm subsidies, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and handouts to corporations. There’s an endless list of programs that benefit every conceivable pressure group.

Three entitlement programs are the powder keg behind exploding federal deficits: Medicare, Social Security, and federal pensions. In 2005, they accounted for over 75 percent of all federal entitlements. These programs’ millions of beneficiaries are not welfare recipients — they are middle-class retirees. Almost 75 percent of federal benefits are paid with no regard to a person’s financial status, and only about 17 percent of these benefits help Americans get out of poverty.

If we add up all the taxes we pay, including sales taxes, property taxes, Social Security taxes, city, state, and federal income taxes, and hundreds of business taxes passed on to consumers, we’ll find that government takes anywhere from 35 percent to 50 percent of our income. In the Middle Ages, feudal lords took about 20 percent of their serfs’ crops to pay for the lords’ protection. The medieval serfs of Europe were taxed less than the new middle-class serfs of America.

It doesn’t matter that we voted ourselves into serfdom. If government confiscates 40 percent of your salary or profits, it doesn’t matter if your ruler is a dictator, a medieval lord, or the ‘will of the majority.’ Our Founding Fathers didn’t base our government on unlimited majority rule. They had a healthy fear and scepticism about human nature, and men’s lust for power. Instead, they designed a political structure to protect us against majority rule. For example, freedom of speech and religion protects us against a majority mob that may not like what we say or who we pray to. That’s the purpose of the Bill of Rights and Constitution — to protect us against the whims, greed, or stupidity of the majority.

Majority rule doesn’t sanction or guarantee personal liberty. Instead, it usually violates personal liberty. A majority of the German people voted the Nazi party into office and approved most of its policies. Our own government has become dangerous precisely because it uses majority rule to justify violating our individual rights.

Our Founding Fathers would be turning over in their graves if they saw what has happened to the Republic they so carefully crafted in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They would be horrified that the monster they feared most, unlimited majority rule, has been unleashed and holds sway over our country and our future.

Tweet This Post