Posted on 01/08/2008 1:14:37 PM PST by RWB Patriot
To the Memory of
ALBERT J. NOCK
Foreword
THIS WAS, to be sure, "the home of the free and the land of the brave." Americans were free simply because the government was too weak to intervene in the private affairs of the people-it did not have the money to do so-and they were brave because a free people is always venturesome. The obligation of freedom is a willingness to stand on your own feet.
The early American wanted it that way. He was wary of government, especially one that was out of his reach. He had just rid himself of far-away and self-sufficient political establishment and he was not going to tolerate anything like it in his newly founded country. He recognized the need of some sort of government, to keep order, to protect him in the exercise of his rights, and to look after his interests in foreign lands. But, he wanted it understood that the powers of that government would be clearly defined and be limited; it could not go beyond specified limits. It was in recognition of this fear of centralized power that the Founding Fathers put into the Constitution-it never would have been ratified without them-very specific restraints on the federal government.
(Excerpt) Read more at mises.org ...
Tinkering to improve the income tax code has clearly not worked. It’s time to restore the power to the people by decentralizing Congress’s power. We need a fundamental change. The Fair Tax will do just that by replacing all federal income taxes with a consumption tax and abolish the oppressive IRS. It’s time for The Fair Tax! Fair Tax ping!
"Ron Paul, as you know, has been part of the Mises Institute since the very beginning. A few months ago, he suggested a book idea to me: the most important ..."
From the mises institute web site:
"This article was written before the Holocaust in Lebanon of Summer 1982. At the time of this writing, after weeks of indiscriminate massacres of many thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians
...[I}it is impossible to predict whether the Zionist occupation as far north as Beirut will result in a "North Bank" as militarized and permanently occupied as the West Bank. The invasion also has implications for the analysis included herein of the oppression of Oriental Jews by Arab states-the Jewish quarter in West Beirut has been subject to the same Israeli shelling and destruction as the dominant Moslem quarters of that part of Beirut."
Rich= Reich
The person that coined ‘No taxation without representation’ must be turning over in their grave.
On paper we have the government that was given us by the founders, but in reality it’s a far cry from what they instituted and intended to pass on to future generations. The other response I get when I post this sort of lamentation is the question am I calling for armed insurrection. It’s depressing that people can be deprived of as much freedom as we have today, compared to 200 years ago, and when someone points it out they are considered to be calling for an armed revolution.
I also say from time to time that I’m glad to be in the last years of my life, not the first, that I would not want to grow up in the world of today. The response to that is say I have no one to blame but myself, that it’s my generation that has brought us to this point in American history. I used to try to point out that I’ve fought it at every step for 50 years and more to no avail, but that gets me nowhere!
We are truly like the frog that is placed in a pot of cold water on the stove and the burner turned on so that the heat increases gradually until it reaches fatal levels. I know it sounds Chicken-Little-like to say it, but I fear we are reaching the boiling point and we are going to be unable to reverse the trend without some very unpleasant consequences.
Sorry to bore everyone with my “sky is falling” rhetoric, but reading this article/book just reinforces my fear that we are on the road to being a nation that our founders would not recognize.
From the book...which I can’t seem to pull myself away from:
“In name, it was a tax reform. In point of fact, it was a revolution.
For the Sixteenth Amendment corroded the American concept of natural rights; ultimately reduced the American citizen to a status of subject, so much so that he is not aware of it; enhanced Executive power to the point of reducing Congress to innocuity; and enabled the central government to bribe the states, once independent units, into subservience. No kingship in the history of the world ever exercised more power than our Presidency, or had more of the people’s wealth at its disposal. We have retained the forms and phrases of a republic, but in reality we are living under an oligarchy, not of courtesans, but of bureaucrats.”
Forgive me, I had not caught what this man said about the Revolution. However, despite that, I still feel he has the right idea about why income taxes are unfair.
OH MY GOODNESS.....this is dead on:
“...The third great immunity is that of the mind, the freedom to think as one wishes. The impairment of this immunity is not easy to detect, for the operation can be conducted in such a way that the victim is never aware of it. It is necessary to look at the methods employed by the government to shape thought, to know that the shaping is being done; when the job is completed it takes a keen observer to realize that people think differently from the way they used to think.
Thus, the farmer who receives checks for not planting does not realize that his grandfather would have thought the practice immoral; he accepts the taking of gratuities as the regular order of things, as quite proper, because government propaganda has got him into that frame of mind. Free school lunches do not strike the modern mother as an insult, as suggesting that she is unable and unwilling to carry out the responsibility of motherhood; the convenience of free lunches, plus the saving of expense, plus the government’s leaflets have changed her way of thinking. And so with every activity of government turned Santa Claus by the income tax: a mass of propaganda introduces the new practice and more propaganda justifies it, until the people think as the government wants them to think. Free judgment becomes next to impossible.
Not content with direct propaganda, the opulent government goes in for shaping the mind of the future by invading the educational machinery. In this it is aided by the very operation of the income tax. The rich cannot be as generous with their contributions to the colleges as they used to be, for the government has the money that they might have given. So the government comes to the rescue of these institutions with grants. It cannot be said with certainty that the government determines the curricula of the colleges as a condition of the grants. But the generosity cannot fail to impress the professors, particularly since the professors have learned to look forward to jobs in the ever-growing bureaucracy.
It is interesting to note that in nearly all the economics courses it is taught that the income tax is the proper instrument for the regulation of the country’s economy; that private property is not an inalienable right (in fact, there are no inalienable rights); that the economic ills of the country are traceable to the remnants of free enterprise; that the economy of the nation can be sound only when the government manages prices, controls wages, and regulates operations. This was not taught in the colleges before 1913. Is there a relationship between the results of the income tax and the thinking of the professors?....”
This is must read for everyone in the country. Dangerous stuff to the livelihood of government bureaucrats.
Thoughtcrime
On the road?
We’re there. We’ve arrived. LONG AGO.
The Founders are SPINNING in their graves.
I agree, but when I say how close I really feel we are to sailing off the edge of the world I catch all matter of hell around here.
Not from me you don’t and won’t.
Maybe because that’s because I’m already over the edge.
I have always thought that if income taxes were legal someone would post the law that says they are. Instead we get all these posts from confirmed socialists (who call themselves conservatives) moaning about, “How is the government going to pay to _______ or ______.”
What the Framers intended was a democratic republic that was devoid of the governmental tyranny associated with their day. What is lost in the translation is the notion that tyranny never sleeps. We are witnessing the tyranny-likened to the arms and legs of the Frankenstein monster finding each other, in a macabre scene of autonomous crawling limbs-in slow motion. Armed revolution will beget-well-first the death of the revolutionaries-and-more death.
Now what! The pen is mightier than the sword.
I have long maintained that the solution is going to be a depression. Not a recession, even a long and deep one, but a full-blown depression that deprives even government of its ability to continue to buy elections. Even with all the protections built in to the system now there are a couple of things that could plunge us, and the rest of the world, into recession.
My guess if, or when, it comes it will be sudden and not anticipated. Probably the convergence of a couple of things like a major disruption of the oil flow through the area where Sunday’s confrontation took place and a follow through of the story about people who, because of the last bankruptcy law rewrite, will let their homes be foreclosed since they can’t do much about the credit card debt that piled up.
I am not saying it’s a sure thing, but an awful lot of things in the world these days are poised to gang up on us.
Ping!
“I have long maintained that the solution is going to be a depression. Not a recession, even a long and deep one, but a full-blown depression that deprives even government of its ability to continue to buy elections. Even with all the protections built in to the system now there are a couple of things that could plunge us, and the rest of the world, into recession.”
No disrespect intended, but I’m willing to be that if you asked a majority of people what got us out of the 1920s-30s depression, most of them are going to say “FDR’s New Deal”. Heck, my parents are conservatives and even they believe it was FDR who got us out of the depression. What makes you think that another one will have a different effect?
it’s scary how far we have come since the founders outrage at much smaller taxations. Unfortunatley, Huckabee doesn’t have the respect of a true conservative to push the fairtax. Romney did say he liked the idea of it so maybe he could be convinced to run with it if he gets elected.
Fiscal Management: The cost of the War on Terror since 9/11 through fiscal year 2006 is 437 Billion. (PDF). Of that 437 Billion the Iraq War has cost 330.4 billion. The federal cost for Katrina 130 billion, of 200 billion estimated by 2009. Total federal allocation for 9/11 recovery, 20 billion.
That is a total federal outlay for Katrina, 9/11 recovery, and the war on terror of: 437 + 130 + 20 = 587 Billion dollars or, a little over 1/2 trillion dollars. The National Debt in 2001 when Bush came into office was about 5.65 trillion. Current National Debt 5 years later is 8.5 trillion. In other words, the national debt has grown by 3 trillion but the total cost of Katrina, War on Terror, and 9/11 has only cost 0.58 trillion. So where did the other 2.43 Trillion Dollars of deficit spending go?
-email sent to me from 2006. But it’s still the question we keep asking as fiscal conservatives.
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