The mainstream press is aglow with expressions of hope and optimism that newly inaugurated President Joe Biden will lead America out of the deep morass in which the nation finds itself. If only Donald Trump had not been elected, the argument goes, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats would have led America to the promised land by now. But now that Joe Biden, the Unifier Extraordinaire, is president, everything is going to be hunky-dory.
I hate to rain on Biden’s military-lined inaugural parade but it just ain’t gonna happen. What these people still don’t get — indeed, what Trump and his Republican cohorts still don’t get — is that America is in a deep morass not because of who is elected president but rather because America has an immoral and inherently defective system. When you’ve got a bad system, it doesn’t matter who is president or who controls Congress. The bad system is going to win out whoever is in charge.
This bad system has been labeled the welfare-warfare state. It was not America’s founding system. It’s the opposite of America’s founding system. The decision to convert the federal government to a welfare-warfare state is the root cause of the morass in which our nation finds itself. No amount of “unity,” “optimism,” or wishful thinking is going to change that fact.
For more than 100 years, Americans lived under a system that was commonly referred to as a free-market, private-property, limited-government system. It was a radical system in which Americans were free to keep everything they earned and decide for themselves what to do with their own money.
There was no coerced charity. Charity was entirely voluntary. No Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, farm subsidies, education grants, welfare, or other socialist programs.
There was sound money. No Federal Reserve System or fiat (i.e., paper) money. Gold and silver coins were the official legal tender of the United States under the Constitution for more than 100 years.
No immigration controls. No minimum wage laws. No income taxation. No public schooling. No FDA or Centers for Disease Control. No drug laws. No gambling laws. Hardly any economic regulations.
No Pentagon, CIA, NSA, or FBI. No foreign wars, foreign interventions, coups, assassinations, torture, foreign aid, alliances with dictators, and foreign military bases.
Twentieth-century Americans abandoned all those founding principles, in favor of the socialist, interventionist, and imperialist system known as the welfare-warfare state or also the national-security state.
Essential to this paradigm shift was a life of the lie — a life that maintained that nothing had changed — a lie that said that America was still a “free-enterprise system” and was still a “republic.” It is a lie that is adhered to by today’s statists, both Democrats and Republicans.
Not so for us libertarians. We know the truth, and we tell the truth. Their statist system is the cause of America’s problems. They can never make it work, no matter how much “unity,” optimism, and hope they have. Inherently defective means that something cannot be made to work no matter what.
Thus, the crises and the chaos for the past four years had nothing to do with Donald Trump as president. They had everything to do with their rotten and corrupt welfare-warfare state system. That’s what these Democrat statists and their cheerleaders in the mainstream press just don’t get.
Of course, Republicans statists don’t get it either. They think that the only reason that Trump wasn’t able to “make America great again” was because of those pesky Democrats and their Russia collusion-delusion conspiracy theories. They don’t see that the problem was instead the welfare-warfare state way of life to which they and their leader Trump were devoted that was the cause of the problem.
After all, think about it: There are no philosophical differences between Trump and Biden and their respective political parties, as manifested by their joint commitment to such programs as Social Security, Medicare, foreign military bases, foreign interventionism, federal management of healthcare, the Federal Reserve, out-of-control federal spending and debt, and all of the other aspects of the welfare-welfare state.
No, the battle between Trump and Biden and their respective political parties was never over philosophy or policy. It was over control, money, and power. That’s what the entire welfare-welfare-state way of life is all about.
There is only one way out of this statist morass — libertarianism. We libertarians must not fall within the statist mindset by settling for reforms of the welfare-warfare state, including such statist reform programs as school vouchers, health-savings accounts, Social Security “privatization,” assassination reform, surveillance reform, and other such things.
We must instead continue standing in favor of liberty — and showing our fellow Americans what a genuinely free society is all about — e.g., a separation of economy and the state, a separation of healthcare and the state, a separation of church and state, a separation of school and state, voluntary charity, and the restoration of a limited-government republic.
Will the statists label us libertarians as “non-unifiers”? Undoubtedly. In fact, it could be worse. Former CIA Director John Brennan has just announced that President Biden’s “intel community” is moving to investigate the “pro-Trump insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”
Yikes! Are we libertarians who are not part of the “pro-Trump insurgency” safe from the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon? Does this mean that libertarians are now subject to be sent to Gitmo for torture, reeducation, indefinite detention, and trial by kangaroo tribunal? (I have dibs on the lower bunk!)
Does this mean that FFF should no longer focus on the national-security establishment’s regime-change operation against President Kennedy on November 22, 1963? Whoops! Too late — we have a major online conference already planned for this spring entitled “The National-Security State and the Kennedy Assassination.” More details to follow.
If Brennan, Biden, or any of their national-security state cohorts think they are going to intimidate us libertarians at FFF into silence, they had better think again.
The post Woe to the Libertarian Non-Unifiers appeared first on The Future of Freedom Foundation.
The Future of Freedom Foundation was founded in 1989 by FFF president Jacob Hornberger with the aim of establishing an educational foundation that would advance an uncompromising case for libertarianism in the context of both foreign and domestic policy. The mission of The Future of Freedom Foundation is to advance freedom by providing an uncompromising moral and economic case for individual liberty, free markets, private property, and limited government. Visit https://www.fff.org