The latest outbreak of death and destruction between Israel and Palestinians should cause Americans to reflect on an important question: Why should Americans be taxed so that their money can be sent to the Israeli government in the form of weapons or other foreign aid? Indeed, why should the U.S. government be sending aid to any regime whatsoever?
There are plenty of supporters of Israel here in the United States. Many of them would be more than happy to send a portion of their income or wealth to Israel. They should be free to do so.
Photo from Al Jazeera English
On the other hand, there are also plenty of people who support the Palestinians and would never send a dime to the Israeli regime. Why should they be forced to fund a government that they ardently oppose?
Yet, that is precisely what foreign aid entails. The IRS forcibly collects money from people and then other U.S. officials use some of the collected money to fund not only the Israeli government but also many other regimes, some of which which are quite brutal and tyrannical. The Egyptian military dictatorship comes to mind.
Foreign aid is usually nothing more than a bribe. The idea is to get foreign regimes dependent on the money so that they will do the bidding of U.S. officials in the international arena. When the U.S. government invades foreign countries, for example, it likes to have many other regimes coming to its support to lend an aura of respectability to what it is doing. That’s where foreign aid comes into play. The nations who are dependent on it will immediately come to the support of U.S. officials. They know that if they don’t, their foreign-aid dole will terminate.
In a genuinely free society, people have the right to keep everything they earn and decide for themselves what to do with their own money. Our American ancestors understood this fundamental principle of liberty. That’s why, for example, there was no income tax, IRS, and foreign aid in, say, the late 1800s. For that matter, there was also no Social Security, Medicare, education grants, corporate bailouts, farm subsidies, or other mandatory charity programs. Our American ancestors had a different view of freedom than today’s Americans, which should cause people to stop and reflect on where we are as a country today and where we want our country to be tomorrow.
The pandemic and now the death and suffering being unleashed, once again, in the Middle East provide an excellent opportunity for the American people to engage in some serious soul-searching. Do Americans want a genuinely free country or not? If they do, a good place to start would be the termination of all foreign aid to Israel, Egypt, and every other regime in the world.
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