Open Letter to Freepers: The U.S. As You've Known It Is Already Dead

I was reminded two very important quotes from John Adams about the American Revolution:

* As to the history of the revolution, my ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 - 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. o Letter to Thomas Jefferson (1815-08-24), The Works of John Adams

What do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution. * Letter to H. Niles (1818-02-13)

In other words, years before the American Revolution, there had been a revolution in people's minds about the way things were and the way things should be.

Forget the disputes over just how real are Obama's high poll numbers. This is beyond Obama, or even his current followers.

Whether we realize it or not, the US went through another mental revolution of thought over the past few decades -- maybe beginning as far back as the anti-war protests of the 1960s, maybe to Roosevelt's New Deal, maybe to Lincoln forcing a more centralized Union...whatever.

This revolution of thought has slowly eroded the entire mental foundation of the country's founding principles.

The U.S., as it was and as many of us here still think of it, is already gone. Dead. A number of us have not fully caught up to this emerging reality.

Obama, and Bush before him, are only making that obvious. Steele, Arlen Spectre, the feckless GOP, all the rest -- it's all part of bigger picture already drawn and entrenched, maybe even before many of us were born.

Many of us are holding onto a mental artifact that is gone or never existed in the minds of our "fellow Americans." That remains true no matter what happens to Obama, long after he's gone.

Does that mean we give up? No. But that if you're making a personal decision not to give up, you have to start thinking more seriously about follow-up to those Tea Parties and perhaps to secession.

The U.S. is, beyond everything else, an idea. When our "fellow Americans" no longer share the basic elements of that idea -- of even basic standards of mutual respect, logic, reason, civil discourse, respect for others as equals -- our "fellow Americans" are no longer our "fellow Americans."

Nothing lasts forever. The USA began its slow descent the day the Constitution was ratified. Economic surplus always attracts decreasing marginally productive people. Eventually over time, the system reaches a tipping point where producers are outnumbered by consumers.

Take a look throughout history. Think the people currently inhabiting Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, London and now the USA (especially California) are the same ones who had built those former empires? Or are they the descendants of the ever increasing dependent classes?

Socialism always fails, right? So what's the easiest way of hitting the reset point in the USA? By accelerating the implementation of socialism. Think about it this way: imagine a bully group which has you outnumbered, yet they have a fatal weakness for a narcotic drug. Do you confront them head-on in a blaze of glory, or due you cultivate their addiction until they die?

The system is very, very close to dying. If you don't understand this, then you won't be prepared. Watch California - even if they get bailed out, it will only be with printed money, not real wealth. They are a proxy for the rest of the country.

This sucker's going down; my advice is to watch & wait. Protect yourself and be prepared to help when the country reaches its death climax.

The Revolution Was

1938

Reduction of the sovereign power of states was accomplished mainly in four ways, as follows:

One, by imposing Federal features on the social security systems of the states and making the administration of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance a function of the Federal government;

Two, by enormous grants in aid out of the Federal Treasury to the states on condition in every ease that the states conform to Federal policies, the state governments, under popular pressure to accept Federal funds because they looked like something for nothing, finding it very difficult to refuse;

Three, the regional design for great Federal works and the creation of regional authorities like the T.V.A., with only a trivial respect for the political and property rights of the overlaid states, and, Four, by extreme and fantastic extensions of the interstate commerce clause.

The Constitution says that the Congress shall have the power "to regulate commerce with foreign nations, among the several states, and with the Indian tribes." That is the famous clause. Commerce among the several states is of course interstate commerce. Now, when the New Deal undertook to regulate wages or hours or labor conditions in the nation, it did not write a law saying that such should be the minimum national wage or such the minimum national day's work, nor that the rules of the National Labor Relations Board should govern all employee-employer relations throughout the nation. Not at all. It could hardly say that without first tearing up the Constitution. What it did say was that only such goods as were produced under conditions that conformed to the Federal law — only those and no other — should be permitted to move in interstate commerce.

And then the New Deal courts stretched the definition of interstate commerce to the extreme of saying that the Federal government may regulate a wheat farmer who feeds his own wheat to his own chickens, on the ground that if he had not raised his own wheat he would have had to buy wheat for his chickens and buying it would be in the way of interstate commerce; or, that the Federal government may regulate the hours and wages of elevator operators, janitors, and char-women in a Philadelphia office building because some of the building's tenants are engaged in interstate commerce.

On the reduction of local self-government, hear the Governor of Kansas. He was visiting Iowa and made a speech in Des Moines. Twenty years ago, he recalled, the county — for example, the one in Kansas where he began to practice law — offered an almost perfect example of responsible self-government.

"We were able, I believe, to do a reasonably good job of local government. In meeting and solving our problems we looked to the state government very little and to the national government not at all. The citizens of the county knew who their elected officers were. They came and talked with us frequently. We knew their difficulties. We dealt with them across the desk, over the counter, and sometimes down at the corner drug store. They had definite opinions about the affairs of the county. They spoke their minds freely and they registered their approval and disapproval directly at the polls on the second Tuesday of the next November. There was no doubt and no uncertainty about it.

"Now, that has been a matter of only about twenty years — a short time indeed in the history of people. But in that twenty years there has taken place a most astonishing change. The court house is the same. The theoretical structure of county government is unaltered. But in practical operation the picture now is very different. Federal agencies are all around us. There is scarcely a problem presented to the county officials of today which is not either directly or indirectly involved with implications and issues related occasionally to state, but more often to Federal, regulation. There are Federal offices in the basement and in the corridors on the second floor. Except during the regular term of court there are extra employees of some Federal agency in the court room. A couple of Federal auditors or investigators are usually using the jury room. The whale warp and woof of local government is enmeshed in the coils of bureaucratic control and regulation.

"And that is only the story so far as county government is concerned. You know that parallels could be drawn in our cities, in our educational districts, and even more clearly in our state capitals. Let me cite just one example. In 1874 the western part of Kansas suffered a very severe calamity in the form of a horde of grasshoppers. Our state was young, only thirteen years old. The ravages of the grasshopper threatened the livelihood of many of the settlers. Upon that occasion the Governor called a special session of the legislature. It met, considered the problem and enacted proper legislation for relief and aid... and a disaster was averted.

"If that same situation should occur today we all know what would happen. It would take practically a photo finish to determine which would land first — the grasshoppers or a horde of Federal agents. The state and the county would have absolutely and exactly nothing to say about it. The policy and the means and the method of dealing with the problem would all be determined in Washington, D.C. The benefits, all from the Federal Treasury, in such manner and such form as Washington should dictate, would come to the farmers without their scarcely knowing what it was about — and we take it for granted. The other day a great number of farmers in my state did receive Federal checks, and dozens of them were wondering what in the world they were for, as they knew of no payment that was due under any of the existing programs in which they were participating."

So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them.

Much of it is irreversible. That is true because habits of dependence are much easier to form than to break. Once the government, on ground of public policy, has assumed the responsibility to provide people with buying power when they are in want of it, or when they are unable to provide themselves with enough of it, according to a minimum proclaimed by government, it will never be the same again.

All of this is said by one who believes that people have an absolute right to any form of government they like, even to an American Welfare state, with status in place of freedom, if that is what they want. The first of all objections to the New Deal is neither political nor economic. It is moral.

Revolution by scientific technic is above morality. It makes no distinction between means that are legal and means that are illegal. There was a legal and honest way to bring about a revolution, even to tear up the Constitution, abolish it, or write a new one in its place. Its own words and promises meant as little to the New Deal as its oath to support the Constitution. In a letter to a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, urging a new law he wanted, the President said: "I hope your committee will not permit doubt as to Constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation." Its cruel and cynical suspicion of any motive but its own was a reflection of something it knew about itself. Its voice was the voice of righteousness; its methods therefore were more dishonest than the simple ways of corruption.

"When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen... and when we see those timbers joined together, and see that they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, allthe tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few... in such a case we find, it impossible not to believe that... all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was struck." —Abraham Lincoln, deducing from objective evidence the blueprint of a political plot to save the institution of slavery.

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