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My State of the Union The President gave his State of the Union speech, so now I will offer my analysis of events and trends. The Good News The US will invade Iraq. Following Desert Storm, the stock market rebound and this is likely to occur again. The economy has been in the tank for three years, however, so don't look for significant economic improvement until 2004. And, yes, much depends on Congress passing the President's economic stimulus package.
Confidence in the United Nations as an instrument to maintain peace is ending. The UN has been revealed as morally bankrupt, irrelevant and corrupt. Its efforts to reconstitute itself as a global government are a direct threat to America’s sovereignty. America must withdraw and allow the UN to join the former League of Nations as yet another Socialist, utopian failure. Americans are growing increasingly skeptical of environmental claims and there is an increasing awareness that legislation passed in the name of protecting the environment exists primarily to attack property rights, impacts negatively on all aspects of the economy, and coercively interferes with personal lifestyle choices. Americans continue to live longer, healthier lives due to the technological advances that provide for greater and safer provision of food, improved medical techniques and pharmaceuticals, and the affordable provision of energy to heat or cool our homes, and serve the needs of business and industry.
The Bad News We will invade Iraq, oust Saddam, and are likely to have troops and civilian administrators there for years. Iraq is not a unified nation of people with a common culture. It was pieced together after WWI and keeping it functioning as a single nation will prove the real challenge. Americans are in serious danger of losing constitutionally protected rights. Efforts continue to assign every newborn child a lifetime identification number and to require everyone to carry a National I.D. card. This will affect every personal decision from being able to get a driver’s license, a job, or even being allowed to board an airplane. Huge government data banks will destroy privacy. The drain on time and money of federal, state and local regulation of every element of business and industry is choking off the entrepreneurial and innovative initiative of the American economy. The areas of liability are expanding exponentially and other government mandated expenditures thwart growth. Taxation now takes forty cents or more of every dollar earned. Our economy is based increasingly on a socialist, not capitalist, economy. Property taxes have soared. Estate taxes deprive families of the ability to pass their accumulated assets on to their heirs. Tax laws are unknowable, unfathomable, and often capriciously applied. Illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico, is totally out of control and both the White House and Congress refuses to address the damage and drain this is imposing on taxpayer supported schools, hospitals, police and other civil functions. The nation’s schools are in total meltdown. We have ceased to effectively educate children from kindergarten through the twelfth grade and everyone knows it. The system is totally controlled by the US Department of Education. Control of schools must be returned to local communities where it existed from the earliest days of the nation until the mid-1950s. An aging population and their families will continue to put more pressure on government to care for them because Social Security and Medicare has left them dependent on the government, rather than on savings, investments, private (competitive) insurance programs, and the care of their families. The nation’s health systems have to be freed of ever expanding federal government control through programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. In addition to a dwindling supply of nurses, the legal liabilities, insurance costs, and regulatory paperwork are causing many physicians to consider leaving the profession. The nation’s legal system desperately requires change to reduce the endless forms of liability that have been expanded by trial lawyers who use the courts to grow rich in the guise of seeking societal change. The nation’s court system is short of judges, slowing the provision of justice. The nation’s infrastructure of roads and bridges is in serious need of repair and expansion. Hollywood and other elements of the entertainment industry continue to produce tawdry, poor quality films and television programs, appealing to the lowest common denominator in good taste and civility. To learn more about the way the United Nations is working to undermine our nation’s sovereignty, purchase "The United Nations Versus the United States." Fighting for Freedom while Losing our Freedom It is an irony that while Americans prepare to fight to liberate the Iraqis from the despotism of Saddam Hussein, we have been slowing losing the freedoms we take for granted. For a very long time, conservatives in America have been sounding the alarms about the gradual loss of individual freedom. The process began in the 1930s with the implementation of the income tax and proceeded following World War II as the Supreme Court, Congress and the Executive Branch slowly eviscerated the Constitution. The warnings fell on deaf ears for the most part, but now with the rise of talk radio and television personalities addressing Americans are slowly becoming aware of what they have lost. This is made abundantly clear in "Dependent On DC: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives on Ordinary Americans"; a densely packed book by Charlotte A. Twight ($17.95, Palgrave/Macmillan) that tracks the history of lost freedoms. It requires some real intellectual effort to make one’s way through this book and it is worth it. It will leave you feeling depressed and it should. "We in America have traded individual liberty piecemeal for dependence on government, without revolution, without reflections, often without systemic understanding." Americans have ceded the federal government the right to demand and know everything about our lives and to have total control over our lives, from birth to death. In the process, it takes our earnings before we can make individual decisions about how to invest, save or spend it. "If we are to hope for a future blessed with civil liberty, private property rights, free markets, and personal autonomy, it is imperative that we understand what has happened and how it has happened," writes Twight, a professor of economics at Boise State University, who also holds a degree in law. As she details, the current system of taxation is so vast no one can possibly know its contents. Federal rules and regulations reach into every aspect of our lives, virtually making every one of us liable to commit a criminal act without ever knowing it. "In 2000 some 4,699 federal rules and regulations were under consideration and the Federal Register contained 74,258 pages of proposed and final rules and regulations for that year alone."
Finally, "a growing array of linked federal electronic databases key to Social Security numbers…allowed ever increasing government violation of American’s personal privacy" including our personal medical records. Americans have literally lost control over their working income, their retirement income, their health care, their children’s education, their right to be free of government intrusion in our personal decisions, and our privacy. A huge federal bureaucracy can be seen in the fifty titles of the U.S. Code that requires approximately eight linear feet of law library shelf space; the U.S. Code Annotated occupies approximately thirty-three feet; and the Code of Federal Regulations requires an additional twenty feet of space. As Twight bluntly states, "Discretionary federal government power to disrupt the lives of law-abiding individuals is now pandemic."
It is against the law to not provide the government the information it seeks in order to control any aspect of your life. Washington, D.C. is filled with lawyers and lobbyists who sole job is to seek protection against existing laws and the prevention of new ones that further erode personal liberty and the conduct of every aspect of business and industry that underwrites our economy. This is not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind. Indeed, it is the exact opposite. The Constitution deliberately makes the process of changing its broad protections a difficult process, but dictates of the Supreme Court have circumvented the amendment process and have "reinterpreted" Constitutional provisions such as its interstate commerce clause and the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. As depressing as this is, Americans can do something about it. We can begin by voting true conservatives into office. We can begin by keeping the pressure on Congress to reduce the vast numbers of regulations and laws that attack our privacy, our property rights, and ability to conduct business, large and small, in this nation without requiring huge expenditures to cope with a hopeless morass of laws. We can "grandfather" those in Social Security who need those funds and permit citizens to opt out of the system . We can seek an end to the Department of Education, a totally illegal agency without any Constitutional authorization. We can demand that the EPA and dozens of other agencies be scaled back to their most fundamental functions. Or eliminated entirely. We can and must demand total reform of our system of taxation. In Russia, a flat tax of 13% has put that nation on the road to economy recovery and restored confidence in its government. What Americans today accept as a system that always existed did not exist prior to the second half of the last century. It is socialism, not capitalism. It is a legal form of enslavement when individuals cannot make critical decisions about what their children are taught in local schools, what kind of medical treatments they can secure, what they can do with their own money as regards investments and savings. Prior to World War II, the US government was not the monolith it has become. In countless ways, Americans are not free. They are not free as the framers of the Constitution intended them to be. Nothing less than a sustained effort to reverse the process will return our original, intended freedoms to us. This is why supporting The National Anxiety Center and other organizations fighting to restore your personal freedom is so necessary, so vital. If you have as little as $15, $20 or $25 to help, please donate what you can. As 2003 begins, your help is critical to the continued work of the Center.
©
2003 Alan Caruba. |
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Americans
have concluded this nation is the only one capable of spreading freedom through
the judicious use of our power. A decision has been made to no longer deal with
dictatorships as legitimate sovereign governments. They do not respect international
law. This applies as well to Communist nations.
"The
Social Security Act requires Americans to exchange dependence on savings and family
in old age for dependence on government…" In the process, it deprives many
people of an effective means to provide for their old age and for their survivors.
Likewise, the 1958 National Defense Education Act and the 1965 Elementary and
Secondary Education Act gave the federal government total control over the education
systems in every State, determining the content of what children learn. Medicare
provided an avenue to increase federal control over our nation’s health care systems.
In the United Kingdom, they have introduced lifelong identification number for
every new born baby and legislation exists to do the same to American babies unless
steps are taken to stop this method of controlling people’s lives from birth to
death; putting life and death decisions into the hands of bureaucrats.
In
effect, the profusion of laws has "largely destroyed the rule of law"
because noone can know what laws and regulations to obey and which are being unknowingly
transgressed. Moreover, most of the laws and regulations can be interpreted in
any fashion a bureaucrat interprets them. Corporations maintain internal lawyers
and regulatory experts to deal with this and hire outside firms to assist them.
Having eroded the rule of law, the nation discovers that huge corporations like
Enron and others have deliberately flouted the law, corrupting equally huge accounting
firms in the process.