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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. ~ The 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Do Americans have a free press? One of the benefits of "democracy" we’re told is the gift of a free press, but what is a free press exactly and can it truly be said that Americans have one?

Certainly the news media in America does not resemble the mediocre and bland "news" put out by Soviet State media in the past, or say, Cuban newspapers or Egyptian TV news today, but in many ways American media is not free from State control by the U.S. government. For sure it is not direct control, such as in the Soviet model. Rather the control is indirect, exerted through the fear the U.S. government can generate through legal actions it can take that can destroy the value of any commercial enterprise or the career of any individual targeted for retribution.

In economics, private ownership of property that is controlled by the State through various regulatory methods is generally described as the Fascist or Corporativist model. Of course, State elites desire the cartelization and State oversight and indirect State control of news content in an effort to control information and manage public opinion — which are crucial to controlling electoral outcomes. And certainly the First Amendment required indirect methods of control rather than the outright control of the Soviet model. The key to this is the fascist model of allowing private ownership, but with state influence and control based on regulations, rewards and mutual financial interests.

A free press can exist only where there is private control of the means of production. ~ Ludwig von Mises.

One of the indirect methods that the State has to control and influence the media is through the training of would-be reporters in the pseudo-science of "journalism." It is in these State-funded, bureaucratic and cartelized educational institutions, such as Colleges and Universities, where reporters are trained by professors who are immune from the truths of the marketplace and where this contempt for freedom is passed on to their students. And even those institutions that do not accept State funding still are regulated by the State through accreditation.

Although newspapers are not subject to the same State regulatory controls, the broadcast media — and by far the vast majority of Americans get their news from the big TV news sources (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and FOX) — are subjected to a weight of bureaucratic controls on them that could only serve to restrict what they report on.

The controls on radio and later on television, unsurprisingly, originated with the crypto-fascist New Deal. Although the Federal Radio Commission was established in 1927, it actually had no control on content, though it immorally claimed a monopoly for the government over the radio spectrum. The FRC was replaced by the more powerful Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1934, as part of the New Deal program to cartelize industries in favor of established, big businesses, in this case ABC and NBC, and raise the costs for smaller competitors. The FCC regulates radio and television broadcasting, including interstate telecommunications by wire, satellite or cable and international communications that originate or end in the United States.

The FCC exerts indirect control over the content of broadcast media through its licensing of broadcasters and its power to fine companies over the highly subjective opinion of what constitutes "offensive" content. Every eight years radio and TV broadcasters must reapply to renew their licenses. This allows the State to apply pressure on the broadcast news media via the corporations that own them. The mere threat of a refusal to renew a license can wipe out the value of a TV news company. Obviously, those executives who manage these news organizations will be very wary of doing anything that could risk the destruction of shareholder wealth, and consequently their own careers. A conspiracy of mutual interests polices the content of the MSM.

“The imposition of the [income] tax will corrupt the people. It will bring in its train the spy and the informer. It will necessitate a swarm of officials with inquisitorial powers. It will be a step toward centralization…. It breaks another canon of taxation in that it is expensive in its collection and cannot be fairly imposed;… and, finally, it is contrary to the traditions and principles of republican government.” ~ U.S. Representative Robert Adams, January 26, 1894.

The other major weapon the State has against a free press is the income tax itself, which as many writers have said, from Thomas Jefferson, to Karl Hess and Frank Chodorov, is incompatible with a free society. As Frank Chodorov wrote "The composition of the ruling regime makes no difference; the Internal Revenue Bureau is a self-operating inquisitorial body. It has the means of harassing, intimidating, and crushing the citizen who falls into its disfavor." [emphasis in the original]

I think there is no underestimating the fear that the IRS instills in the minds of reporters, the same as it does in those of the public at large. Everyone knows that with one phone call from the IRS, your life is turned upside down, with the very real possibility of financial ruin and imprisonment. How often does the MSM report on the IRS? They are more likely to showcase the victims of IRS persecution and cheerlead for the destruction of capital and organizations rather than expose the everyday activities of an organization what can only be considered a disgrace to a society that claims to defend due process and freedom. As tax attorney and historian Charles Adams remarked "… in all fairness to the chicken media, it is well understood that the First Amendment’s right to criticize the government does not apply to the IRS."

It’s also well known that the IRS has often become a political weapon used to punish, harass and destroy just about anyone. FDR, JFK, LBJ and Richard Nixon are well known for having used the income tax system in this way to harass and destroy their political enemies, whether individual voters, organizations, or Congressmen and Senators. The IRS can destroy careers by leaking the information it has collected through its grueling audits. And should you think the Courts can protect you from the IRS, Judges are just as intimidated by the IRS as Congressmen. Supreme Court Justice William O’Douglas made himself a target of the IRS by dissenting against the IRS on many cases, and faced impeachment proceedings using information likely derived from his tax files. In another case IRS Commissioner Sheldon Cohen did a tax favor for the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas and actually stated, in writing, that the IRS may "need Abe’s vote one day." However, it seems Fortas crossed the IRS as later he was forced to resign based on information the IRS leaked to Life magazine. That’s two Supreme Court Justices that fell to the IRS. Surely this has not been lost on succeeding and current members of this body.

The sad truth is that the income tax destroys that old-fashioned concept of free government, that is, institutions that are free and independent from arbitrary pressure and corrupting interests.

Now, on top of all this, have come revelations about a lawless regime of wholesale wiretapping and data mining by the Bush administration. The fact that as a reporter, you now know that who you call, who calls you and even the content of your conversations has been swept up by the government, must have a chilling effect on what the MSM reports on and what stories reporters even chose to pursue. The fact that this program was hidden from the public for over a year at the request of the State is further proof of the MSM’s intimidation by the State. And even this exposure seems to be based on the fact that it is an illegal program, and not that the State claims the legitimacy to catalog the thoughts, actions and words of every American.

And this doesn’t include the pervasive culture of leaks and sources that so easily allow opportunities to corrupt information and mold public opinion in favor of some governmental interest. The practice of press manipulation through leaking or planting stories with corrupted or naïve reporters, which is then cited by the same sources as independent corroboration of their claims, was on full display in the selling of the colonization of Iraq. The administration would then export its press manipulation by subsidizing Iraqi newspapers and reporters (surely a practice that never happens in America?). The Pentagon even advocated deliberately planting fake news in overseas media, surely knowing full well these stories would then be told to Americans as genuine events.

"… among the evils against which America must protect herself one of the most destructive is the evil of modern propaganda techniques applied to the problem of government." ~ John T. Flynn.

Many commentators with access to the foreign-language news media outside of America have commented on the extent that information is hidden from the American people by the American media’s seeming deference to the U.S. government’s claims and assertions.

The MSM may expose a political financial scandal now or then, and regularly covers the follies of the Congress and President. But the MSM will never question the legitimacy of any State regulation or activity, whether its intervention is moral, reasonable or just, and whether regulation can ever achieve its stated intention or whether it might actually exist for nefarious purposes that they themselves are complicit in hiding from the eyes and ears of the public. The likely reason why the public holds reporters in such low regard is that they sense, perhaps subconsciously, that the mainstream media are little more than an arm of a State that is thoroughly corrupt.

The sad fact is that Americans no longer have a free press. A free press was an early legacy of the Revolution against British Mercantilism that achieved the independence of the American colonies, but soon this system too would be corrupted and collapse into Statist meddling and control in favor of special interests.

Although the web shows some promise of recovering the fallen standard of the free press, it too is not immune from the fear and controls imposed by the State via the income tax and general business regulations. What is needed to reestablish a flourishing free press is to reestablish laissez-faire through the abolition of all government intervention to tax, subsidize and regulate the economy and social relationships. What is needed is the complete separation of the State and the economy.

As Ludwig von Mises wrote, "Freedom and liberty always mean freedom from police interference." And this is the first prerequisite for a genuine free press.

Adam Young [send him mail] is a freelance content writer, SEO (Search Engine Optimizer), website builder and anti-statist T-Shirt design contributor.

Everyone knows the story of how Superman was born on the doomed planet Krypton and sent to Earth where he grew up a farm boy in Kansas. Why has this character endured for now almost 70 years? With his super-strength, speed, indestructibility, heat, X-ray, telescopic and microscopic vision and ability to fly, he would seem to have little relevance to you or me and any challenges we might encounter in our daily lives.

The character of Superman was created by two Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (a Canadian!) leading many to identify several Jewish cues in Superman’s origin. Like Moses set loose on a river in his basket, the son of a doomed people, Superman was sent to Earth in a rocket ship, and like Moses, was raised in a mysterious land. However, most people don’t know that Superman’s powers are the unforeseen byproduct of Kryptonian eugenics, although this was added decades later as part of the back story to explain why Krypton exploded.

Famously, Superman uses these powers to defend u2018Truth, Justice and the American Way’ and is considered in his comic books as the most powerful man in Metropolis, if not on Earth. Actually, the dispute over this status is the revised origin for Lex Luthor’s vendetta against Superman. Originally, many decades ago, Superman inadvertently caused Luthor’s hair to fall out, causing Luthor to swear revenge for this humiliation. This is a pretty lame origin story for a supervillain, but on the other hand, it shows how, as a rival to a super-man, his arch-nemesis is a small and petty man. However, when Superman was reinvented in the 80′s, Lex Luthor was also given a tune up, so that their rivalry stems from Luthor’s claim, as the wealthiest and most influential man in Metropolis, to also be the most powerful man in the city … until Superman arrived on the scene. And instead of the humiliation of going bald, Luthor was now humiliated when he was sent to jail for staging a fake terrorist attack on his yacht in order to lure Superman into the open to meet him.

But why is Superman relevant to today’s world and to you and me? The key to the answer is that in fiction, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out in his criticism of detective stories, the reader is encouraged to imagine or identify themselves as the heroes of the story. Who hasn’t wondered what they would do if they had all the powers of Superman?

The real underlying moral theme of Superman is the recurring unasked, but obvious question to readers, of what would you do if you were Superman in this situation? What would you do with the powers of Superman if you had them? Would you use them for personal wealth and glory? Conversely, what would you do if you had all the wealth and influence of Lex Luthor? Would you use that wealth to pursue petty vendetta’s and endanger the innocent with your schemes for revenge?

With all the powers of Superman no crime would be impossible for you. Who could stop you? What could stop you?

Of course, what makes Superman Superman is not his Kryptonian heritage and the yellow Sun of Earth, but his childhood in Kansas and his parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent. It is his upbringing, the ideals and morals taught and lived out by Clark Kent that makes Superman a hero instead of the global conqueror that he was originally sent to Earth to be, sent to impose on humanity "proper Kryptonian ideals" as his mother put it.

What does all this say about another person who is described as "the most powerful man on Earth?" A man who endlessly lectures all within range of his voice of his noble intentions, his superior morality and the power of his corrupt office? "I’m the decider" he famously taunted. So much for democracy.

George W. Bush, sadly and frighteningly, is indeed the most powerful man on Earth, made so by the inhumanity of the U.S. military machine, able to rain death down from the skies on thousands, and potentially billions. And this is not mere hyperbole. When presented with the opportunity to use this awesome and evil power that he wields, he had a choice, to choose between the moral, Good choice, and the immoral and Evil one. Sadly, we know which he chose. W. bombs because he loves.

When the public was clamoring for revenge, eager to strike out and kill any target that could be claimed to have even the faintest connection to the wound of 9/11, did George W. Bush urge caution and restraint? Did he recognize that with great power comes great responsibility for how that power is used (and abused)? Did he marshal arguments against the use of violence and the murder of the innocent?

No.

When the choice came, Bush chose to use his power to further the cause of Evil and further the enslavement of the human race under despotism and war, and looting present and future generations to fund his cronies. When presented with a crisis, Bush didn’t hesitate to tip his power onto the evil side of the moral scale, promoting and extending a fearsome regime of perpetual war, militarism, empire, torture, fear mongering, a burgeoning police-state, and crony capitalism.

When the choice came, Bush, like every depraved madman, embraced not the ways of peace, but any excuse to revel in the martial spirit and kill at will. Instead of arguing for the dignity of every human being, he seized the opportunity, like any other tyrant throughout history, to engage in human experimentation through violence. His whims would redesign societies both abroad … and at home. Thinking he was the greatest man alive, Bush became nothing more than a cartoonish supervillain, bristling with dire warnings and threatening to hold the world hostage to his whims with machines of mass destruction. "You’re either with us, or with the turrists" he famously bellowed.

Instead of behaving like how we would all expect everyone to act, with restraint, patience and consideration for guilt and innocence, before considering a proportional response, Bush unleashed a wave of violence and murder. All because he had the power to. And that is why he has failed.

The extraordinary character of Superman perhaps inadvertently provides an important and everlasting moral example to us all. Power does not determine right and wrong. Rather it is one’s ideas and principles that in turn determine the choices we all make. Superman is a hero, not because of his Kryptonian powers, but because of his moral character and how he chooses to use his power.

All fantasy is typically about a struggle between Good and Evil, which has obvious application to the real world (especially in these dark times). Even when faced with extraordinary circumstances, the Good Man will not succumb to Evil, whether it’s Evil Men and their works, or just Evil ideas, but will fight ever more enthusiastically against it. As all moral storytelling teaches, every man (or woman) has it within them to do heroic deeds, to make heroic choices, to be more than what is expected of the average man, to be in a certain sense, supra-men — and super heroic.

There is much to value in fantasy and sci-fi precisely because it allows moral dilemmas to be presented and considered fresh from the commonplace world that we actually live in. After all, isn’t the moral of The Lord of the Rings that even the smallest and weakest can defeat evil, not just the stereotypical mighty hero. And what is the moral of Star Wars but that although evil can rise and triumph, it can also be defeated, even from the most unlikely sources and opportunities. Liberty can triumph over slavery.

Adam Young [send him mail] has never undressed in a phone booth.

I’m no fan of soccer myself, but even I’ve noticed that every four years the world is engulfed in madness. People run out into the streets. Entire countries seem glued to their TV’s. Daily business evaporates. Even internet use drops off. But coverage in the U.S. media? Nada. Not even on the Fear Channel’s flagship program the Panic Room.

It’s easy to see why soccer is so popular around the world. Unlike other sports like hockey, baseball, football, golf and basketball, the barriers to entry are very low. All you need is an open space, markers for the goal posts and a ball. Sometimes you don’t even need that. A children’s charity commercial running up here in Canada features African boys who play soccer in a stretch of dirt with a "ball" made from plastic bags wadded together with string. Soccer is a highly accessible sport. No expensive equipment like skates, sticks, helmets, bats, gloves, clubs and whatever else are required.

There was recently an article on Slate that offered an explanation for soccer’s failure to capture the American mind. Supposedly, Americans can’t stomach the, shall we say, exaggerated and theatrical fouls the author claims are so common in soccer. Elaborate dives and face-clenching bouts of agony over some imagined sprain or tackle. Surely no American baseball, basketball or football player would exaggerate an injury. This doesn’t sound like a convincing explanation to me. Faking or exaggerating injuries doesn’t seem to affect the popularity of pro wrestling.

The more likely reason, I think, is a combination of nationalism — and the U.S. is certainly one of the most absurdly nationalistic societies on Earth, given to wild fanatical claims about itself in comparison to others, and naturally prefers “American” sports like baseball, basketball and football to foreign sports — and and the other is what could be called elitism. Although most Americans believe in merit or something like it, in their favored sports they seem to prefer athletes who are far beyond average. Whether it’s giants in basketball or football or power hitters in baseball, Americans seem to prefer displays of brute force and size over finesse and coordination.

Whether it’s kicking the ball, or battling it out of the park or dunking it, this preference for strength, I think, is a definite feature of the American sports mindset. Almost as if it wouldn’t be a sport if the average person with average ability could play it well.

And it’s not an original observation to say that American society is an unusually violent and brutal society in regards to it’s favored forms of entertainment, from sports to the movies and videogames to TV shows, especially the highly-rated TV show the "U.S. bombs and/or invades (insert name of country here)" regularly broadcast by the news/war channels. I think it’s certainly true that this preference for displays of destructive violence is translated into sports that feature displays of strength and favor large size.

Perhaps for Americans, sports are merely an interlude between wars and a substitute for the disparity of military destruction that the U.S. enjoys over other regimes, which excites and inspires the most nationalistic Americans.

Could it be that soccer’s worldwide popularity resides more in it’s equality of access, which favors societies where individuals have less disposable income to spend on sports equipment, but also is an expression of a more anti-imperialist and peaceful mentality in relation to the rest of the world?

Of course, another reason why Americans don’t get soccer might be that with their turn towards militarism and imperialism, they would naturally favor socialist cartels like the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball.

Adam Young [send him mail] writes from Canada and does not play hockey.

As one blogger said it best, "Even by Blair’s standards, it was a performance of nauseating hypocrisy, as he sought to seize the moral high ground in relation to [the] violence and destruction that he himself helped unleash."

On Monday, July 11, Blair refused the lickspittle Conservative "opposition’s" demands for a government inquiry into the bombings, insisting, following Dick Cheney’s lead, that an investigation into his regime’s failures would distract from the task of catching the perpetrators, and announced that he believed an inquiry into the bombings would be a "ludicrous diversion."

In response to the bombings, several people drew the obvious link between Blair’s participation in the war crime of invading Iraq and the blowback of revenge killings in Britain, just as it had in Spain. George Galloway, who brought both barrels to his appearance before the sham investigation into the embargo on Iraq and allegations of bribery with illegal oil sales, issued a statement that in part read:

"We have worked without rest to remove the causes of such violence from our world. We argued, as did the Security Services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings. We urge the government to remove people in this country from harms way, as the Spanish government acted to remove its people from harm, by ending the occupation of Iraq and by turning its full attention to the development of a real solution to the wider conflicts in the Middle East."

Liberal Democratic party leader Charles Kennedy made the obvious observation when he remarked: "Those, like President Bush and Tony Blair, who have sought to link Iraq with the so-called ‘war on terror’ can hardly be surprised when members of the public draw the same link when acts of terrorism occur here in the United Kingdom."

Charles Kennedy spoke for many when he stated the obvious, that the Iraq War gave Jihadists a popular recruiting cause, a training ground and further reasons to try to strike the West.

Even Blair’s former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, saw the link: "There may be room for debate over whether there is a connection between the war in Iraq and the London bombings, but there is no escaping the hard truth that the chain in that country is a direct result of the decision to invade it," he told the Guardian.

London Mayor Red Ken Livingston offered these uncharacteristically wise for him, comments on the bombings, when asked what he thought motivated the attacks:

"I think you’ve just had 80 years of western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the western need for oil. We’ve propped up unsavory governments, we’ve overthrown ones we didn’t consider sympathetic. And I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s … the Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan. They didn’t give any thought to the fact that once he’d done that he might turn on his creators … If at the end of the First World War we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free and have their own governments, and kept out of Arab affairs, and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this wouldn’t have arisen."

However, to admit that his actions precipitated the events would be a repudiation of Tony Blair’s entire post 9-11 career. So, naturally, he did what comes naturally to every politician. He ignored reality. Unfortunately for the fatuous Blair, along came the ICM poll published in the Guardian newspaper. With a margin of error of 3 percentage points, the poll found that 33 percent of Britons said that Tony Blair himself bore "a lot of responsibility" for the bombings, and 31 percent thought he had "a little" responsibility.

In response to the poll Blair snorted: "Of course these terrorists will use Iraq as an excuse. They will use Afghanistan. Sept. 11 happened of course before both of these things, and then the excuse was American policy, or Israel. They will always have their reasons for acting. But we have got to be really careful of almost giving in to the perverted and twisted logic with which they argue."

Perverted and twisted logic. Yes, let’s not give into that. Let’s deny all the evidence. Like the repeated claims by Al-Qaeda and it’s imitators that they are acting to frustrate and repulse the decades long Anglo-American imperialism in the Arab world and now the installation of a new Anglo-American condominium over the Muslim world under the cover of "democratically-elected" puppet regimes to deflect widespread and rising hostility to their allied military despots and domestic sympathizers. Let’s ignore cause and effect and continue to insist on illogical and perverted explanations that purely by coincidence, I’m sure, continue to justify continued imperialism and it’s expansion into new lands in the futile search for a military solution to a political tactic.

If as Tony Blair and George W. Bush say, the terrorists strike out to destroy Western values and societies, why have they not bombed Portugal, which is very similar to Spain? Why not Switzerland and Sweden? Austria and Germany? Canada, Brazil, France, Mexico, Greece and any other Western countries? Why do they continue to attack countries that are occupied by inhumane regimes that participated in the invasion of Iraq and the continued occupation of the Arab world through proxy despotisms? Unfortunately, for Blair, he conveniently forgets that Al-Qaeda has repeatedly cited the pre-9/11 U.S. occupation of Arabia and the embargo of Iraq as the reason for their attacks on 9/11 and the Madrid bombers openly cited Spanish participation in the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Did the IRA commit their bombings, including an attack on Downing Street itself, because they hated the English way of life and English values or did they hate the government’s policy of occupying Northern Ireland? Could it be that just as one earlier occupation of a neighboring land produced terror on British soil, another occupation of a distant land has produced terror again.

I suspect Tony Blair is fully aware of how his policies have brought terror to Londoners, and disaster to Iraq, but such is the contempt for humanity and honesty by politicians in general and Tony Blair in particular, who has a long career behind him of deceit, that he refuses to acknowledge his complicity in this enormous crime he has committed in partnership with his confederate in state terror George W. Bush. Their joint project of bringing (Western managed) "democracy" to the brown-skinned peoples of the Earth riding a wave of aerial bombs is an insult to any pretence of morality. With their doctrine of "Shock and Awe" they have demonstrated their contempt for any sense of moral legitimacy. After all, who is being shocked and awed by the display of mass destruction? What is the purpose of Shock and Awe? Isn’t the audience the general public — both here and in the Arab world? Doesn’t it announce that this is the death we can bring if you oppose us? This is a doctrine of terror. The purpose for this doctrine is to terrorize.

The occupation of Iraq goes on and on, long after even the criminals involved have abandoned their original pretenses for invading in the first place, yet has this intellectually dishonest man and his Dark Master in the White House shown a single instance of regret? Have they shown a single iota of remorse for the tens of thousands of dead and thousands more maimed — for all they destruction they’ve caused and the tens thousands they have killed and injured?

Quite possibly Tony Blair rightly fears the real eventual possibility of impeachment and arraignment as a war criminal if he were ever to show even the hint of uncertainty over the rightness of his war crimes. But this is the route chosen by a coward. By choosing to hold to the facile and puerile defense of his actions, and to continue to claim that their actions and those of their predecessors in Arab lands have no bearing on Arab and Muslim terrorism, Tony Blair and George W. Bush have chosen imperialism over withdrawal. By claiming that it is an "ideology of evil," a set of beliefs that must be eradicated through warfare, that they fully intend to kill ideas by killing people, Blair and Bush announce their desire for perpetual warfare that can only end in ever more acts of mass murder and the eventual genocide of an entire people.

Tony Blair is a disgrace to the people of England.

Adam Young [send him mail] is descended from the English on both sides. Cheerio!

In a televised statement, the u201Cprime ministeru201D intimated he believed invading terrorists, homicide gunmen, mercenaries and foreign helicopters were responsible for the attacks.

"We know that these people act in the name of democracy but we also know that the vast and overwhelming majority of people in the home countries of these terrorists are decent and law-abiding people who abhor those who do this every bit as much as we do," he said.

"I think we all know what they are trying to do,u201D He continued. u201CThey are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things that we want to do, trying to stop us from going about our business as normal, as we are entitled to do and they should not and they must not succeed.u201D

Al’Bahar also directly challenged the terrorists who he claimed u201Chave invaded Iraq and plunged our country into chaosu201D and warned that the resistance to their violent methods would not falter and that they would not win:

"When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated. When they seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed."

Mr Balar also paid tribute to the resilience of the people of Iraq and said the terrorists must not be allowed to succeed.

"There are obviously casualties, both people who have died and people who are seriously injured, and our thoughts and prayers, of course, are with the victims and their families.

"It is a very sad day for the Iraqi people but we will hold true to the Iraqi way of life," he said.

With additional reporting by Matthew Tempest, Ian J Griffiths and agencies.

Adam Young [send him mail] is a freelance Austro-libertarian writer and reviewer and lives in Canada.

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"After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are refusing to change the most fundamental institution of our civilization," the president said in urging Congress to approve his amendment. "Their action has created confusion on an issue that requires clarity."

Mr. Bush’s amendment, appropriately titled The President’s Amendment, would amend the Constitution of the United States to officially retire the constitution, and places all secular and religious authority in the hands of the President of the United States, who would be given the additional titles of Defender of the Constitution and Liberator of the Americans with the power to legislate by executive order, to tax on his own authority, to expropriate property and hold Americans and foreigners in prison indefinitely without charges.

Mr. Bush, during his White House address, stated the need for this unusual move, which many commentators interpreted as an election season tactic to intimidate rivals and the courts and to silence critics.

In his statement, Mr. Bush noted actions by State Courts and the U.S. Supreme Court to question his claim to be the sole interpreter of Constitutional provisions guaranteeing certain rights for native-born Americans and foreign-born nationals captured or killed by American forces at home and abroad. This, Mr. Bush said, is contrary to his interpretation of Constitutional law. A president has the authority to interpret and enforce that interpretation on the other branches of government and the state and local governments as well, Mr. Bush said. u201CThe government is the most fundamental institution of human civilization, and I am the government.u201D

Mr. Bush, who casts himself as a "compassionate conservative," left the door open for civil trials as an alternative to military tribunals or summary executions.

"Unless action is taken, we can expect more arbitrary court decisions, more litigation, more defiance of my law by local and other officials — all of which adds to uncertainty in my regime and our popular war against evil," Mr. Bush said. "By taking this action, I can protect America’s families from evil, defend their freedom, and ensure essential American justice from the despotism of the courts, the press and the French."

Democrats accused Mr. Bush of attacking the document that is the bedrock of American democracy to divert election-year attention from his economic record — an allegation the White House denied. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who still hopes to run against Mr. Bush if there is a presidential election this year, said: "I believe President Bush is wrong. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater."

"All Americans should be concerned when a president who is in political trouble treats the Constitution of the United States with such disrespect," said Kerry, who opposes recognizing that foreigners possess natural rights, but will oppose the Presidential Amendment if it reaches the Senate floor. Mr. Bush is "looking for a wedge issue to divide the American people," Kerry said. "And say what you will about the American people, many still support having a constitution." Sen. Kerry did add, "Bring it on!"

Campaigning in Georgia, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., said he was against the president’s idea of amending the constitution. "I don’t personally support presidential dictatorship," he said. "My position has always been that it’s for the states to decide."

A major libertarian Republican group, Republicans for a Functioning Constitution, accused Mr. Bush of "pandering to the totalitarians" and "discriminating against the Constitution."

The American Center for Law, Justice and the State, which focuses on legal and bureaucratic issues, applauded Mr. Bush’s announcement, saying it "serves as a critical catalyst to energize and organize those who will work diligently to ensure that the presidency remains the central institution in the daily life of every man and woman."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Mr. Bush believes that legislation for the Presidential amendment, submitted by Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Florida, meets his principles in protecting the "sanctity of American justice."

However, California Republican Rep. David Dreier said a constitutional amendment might not be necessary.

"I will say that I’m not supportive of amending the Constitution on this issue," said Dreier, a co-chairman of Mr. Bush’s campaign in California in 2000. "I believe that we should continue with the normal process of simply ignoring the constitution, and I think that we’re at a point — what with the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, our other spending priorities — where amending the constitution simply isn’t necessary."

John Podhoretz, author of the new book Bush Country and a strong supporter of the president added, "This is just further evidence that this president thinks in broad strokes. Our president is a history-making president and I think Americans can rest assured that America will be a long time recovering from our president’s example of moral and enlightened stewardship."

The neoconservative wing of his party has been anxious for Mr. Bush to follow up his rhetoric on the issue with action. In recent weeks, Mr. Bush has repeatedly described himself as a "war president" and described his term as "historic times."

Adam Young [send him mail] is co-founder of The Resume Store, a Canadian-based service offering rsums and cover letters.

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White House press secretary Scott McClellan confirmed that Bush would deliver a speech Wednesday describing his vision of the long-term direction of the space program.

"The president is strongly committed to the conquest of space," McClellan said Friday.

Responding to a question on how the administration expects to pay for an expensive space initiative while the nation is faced with record budget deficits and the high costs of the war against terrorism, Mr. McClellan said that the White House budget office, as well as the Department of Defense, the Office of Special Plans and the think tanks The American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New American Century were involved in the administration’s space review. And Mr. Bush will "put forth a responsible budget that meets our highest priorities while working to hold the line of spending elsewhere in the budget."

It is not known where the administration will find the technology to realize these aims, but the White House has been looking for a new role for NASA for months, with Vice President Dick Cheney leading an interagency task force since last summer, with speculation about a major new space initiative heating up last December.

However, NASA officials did not return phone calls.

While serving as Texas governor, the president never went to Johnson Space Center in Houston; in fact, last February’s memorial service for the seven Columbia astronauts was his first visit. Mr. Bush’s fresh interest in space happens to coincide with the election cycle. A new bold space initiative, it is thought, could excite Americans and bolster unity around the administrations top priority, the War on Terrorism.

In line with the Administration’s penchant for acronym’s, like the USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting & Strengthening of America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) and US-VISIT (United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology), this latest initiative is known as STAR TREK, the Strategic Terrorist Arrest and Removal to Territories Rendered Enclosed and Konfined.

Citing the need to expand the size of the detention camps in Cuba, the Indian Ocean, and elsewhere and greater security for the detainees against possible retaliation by aggressive investigative reporters and human rights organizations, the two proposed bases will provide the administration with new secure locations for suspected members of al-Qaeda and other detainees. The Bush administration is worried about a diminishing choice of locations around the world, non-cooperative allies and rising interference from earth-bound legal systems.

"Well, we’d originally thought that detaining captives outside of the borders of the United States would have protected us, I mean, them, I mean the detainees, because detention is for their own good, of course, but we felt that they needed protection from the, uh, interference by the legal system of the U.S.," said an anonymous administration official.

Asked to comment, former Clinton White House Counsel Aldo Guzman explained that "they probably feel that it is not the appropriate time to enforce a policy of global confinement on Earth, and that converting our neighboring worlds into prison planets will provide greater global security without unduly inflaming public opinion before the election. Y’know, we considered the same policy in our administration, but concluded it would be cheaper and work best as an election year stunt."

However, a prominent neoconservative defender of the administrations policies, Max Boot, believes the administrations space initiative is sound; "Well, the great thing is the Geneva Convention says nothing about torture by threatening exposure to vacuum. We think these terrorists will be very cooperative tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth. Where could they escape to? If they go outside, they’re dead."

"I kinda had the feeling that people would rather make a trip to the grocery store than a trip to the moon," Mr. Boot said. "But we need to stay in touch with space and the security spin-offs it provides."

"I welcome the president’s initiative to spread neoconservatism to other planets. Space is the New Frontier for the neoconservative movement and our allies in the Military-Industrial-Think tank Complex."

With additional reporting by Marcia Dunn.

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The visitation reportedly occurred at several points throughout the early morning before dawn, with the president claiming that each of the four brought him a message relating to his role in the world and the future course of humanity.

The president, confiding to several aides, this reporter has learned, described the first presence, which Mr. Bush could not name or recognize, as a crowned figure holding a bow and riding a white horse. The president reportedly asked him who he was, and the presence replied, "Do you not recognize me? I am your partner lo’ these many years, my son. I come out conquering and to conquer."

The president told his advisors that this figure said to him: "I come bearing a revelation, my son. Don’t change, you are doing well. But tonight you will be visited by my three allies, who visit you this day to strengthen your resolve in this time of love and mercy towards your fellow man.

"Hey, if they’re anything like my coalition of the willing, you’re in trouble, y’know what I’m sayin’ or what?" Mr. Bush reports he said.

"George… remember… mercy and love are for the weak. And you have done so well, my boy, by not demonstrating a hint of compassion for the weak and the innocent that you have so wonderfully killed without remorse. We come to tell you: Don’t stop now."

The president is reported to have repeated this conversation to his confidantes in hushed, reverent tones.

Mr. Bush asked the figure if he had seen his works in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We were there the whole time," said the presence. "No rest, no peace. I suffer under the incessant torture of constant warfare against the false god worshipped by man."

"’You can travel fast?" the president is reported to have asked.

"On the wings of the wind," replied the being, ‘like your mighty armed forces."

Mr. Bush reportedly repeatedly returned to his claim that this being referred to him as "his son" which Mr. Bush took as further evidence of his divine origins. "I’m thinking that guy coulda’ been God, since George W. is clearly the Fist of Heaven." Whether the president really believed it was evidence of his own or whether it referred to the unnamed being’s divine origins is not clear at this time.

"He showed me a multitude of people and said I had liberated them from their wretchedness and ended their miserable lives. And I thought, yup, that’s George W., the liberator. Too bad I didn’t think of getting a head count. I coulda used that info for my memoirs. Setting all those people free. That’s me. Now because of me they can get on buildin’ new lives in a new Iraq. Its good to be a good man, I say."

The second being, who Mr. Bush this time told his aides he believed was the Ghost of Christmas Past, arrived at 1:00 AM and was described as brandishing a large sword and sitting upon a bright red horse. This unnamed manifestation reportedly transported the president to the locations of Mr. Bush’s military triumphs in Baghdad and Tikrit. "Hot dog," the president reportedly exclaimed when told where they were going. The entity reportedly reminisced with Mr. Bush about his past wars for what appeared to the president as quite a long time, as the being enjoyed delving into the wars in great detail. Reportedly, it wanted detailed descriptions of the fighting and slaughtering, but Mr. Bush told it that he really didn’t know, as he wasn’t really present for all the "dirty business" as the president called the actual fighting. This second ghost conducted Mr. Bush back to his bedroom in time for the arrival of the third apparition.

This third phantom who arrived at 2:00 AM, and which Mr. Bush believes was the Ghost of Christmas Present, he described as holding a pair of scales and riding a black horse. Remembering the old Dickens classic, the president informed his aides that he expected a prosperous abundance of food and goods; "turkeys, geese, poultry, great joints of meat, suckling-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense cakes and seething bowls of punch, holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, pies, puddings, and fruit." But none of it was there. Instead his vision was all barren and gray. The president described the sky as gloomy, and the streets were choked up with a dingy sooty mist and filled with dead and dying bodies, half thawed, half frozen. A thick dust blew in from the empty fields. And Federal Reserve Notes blew in the streets like discarded newspaper and dried, dead leaves.

"You have never seen the like of me before!" exclaimed the Spirit.

"Your sure we’ve never met? Cause, y’know, my memory’s not so good up until about the time I turned forty." Bush says he replied.

Sources say Mr. Bush said to the ghost, "Say, you look kinda thin. Y’all should come down to Crawford for some of that Texas eatin’. You’re always welcome at the Little White House. I’m with the government, so I get first pickin’s with anything I want, y’know. Su Casa Es Mi Casa, hombre. Or is that Mi Casa Es Su Casa? I forget. Ah well."

The spirit transported Mr. Bush to what the president believed was an obscure, remote room or office that contained a mountain of papers and documents.

"This is the black hole that is your budget" the spirit said, "You are consuming and destroying the capital of your country at a prodigious pace that we have not seen since the last of the pharaoh’s. May you continue until ruin. Fill the prisons. Tax and spend. Expand the welfare and warfare state. Inflate. You are doing our work."

"Thanks!" Mr. Bush says he exclaimed. "But why is everything so bleak? I’m bringing prosperity, peace and freedom to Americans."

But the spirit gave no answer, Mr. Bush reported as he returned to await the fourth apparition.

The fourth being arrived at 3:00 AM. Mr. Bush described him as riding a pale green horse and believes he was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Mr. Bush claims he remarked to the specter "Say, you look kinda pale. There’s lotsa sun down in Texas." But the specter just gestured towards the horizon. "What’s wrong? Say, for a ghost you don’t talk much, do you?"

Mr. Bush retold how the ghost revealed visions of the future wars of the War on Terror and the paradise humanity will enter when the wars are completed. "He showed fields and fields of dead bodies — men, women and children — as far as the eye can see. So you know what I learned? We’re gonna have victory," the president told his staff, "but only if I win reelection. I got the feeling these spirits know that I am indispensable to the war and the future of the Earth, but the last one didn’t say so in so many words. Actually, he didn’t really say anything."

"And now come to think of it, he had a lot of pale, skinny people behind him, crowd seemed to stretch on forever. Those guys didn’t look too good, either. Sorta pale and skinny lookin’. Boy, those poor buggers looked like hell I tell ya. They coulda used some of that Texas barbecue. Maybe I’ll invite ‘em down to Crawford when I see ‘em again."

Sources report that his staff was somewhat concerned at the content of Mr. Bush’s revelations and advised him to not repeat them in public, especially the part about being of divine origin.

The president reportedly replied that "they mentioned Christmas a lot, so I guess they’re good Christians, like me…. Or maybe I mentioned Christmas, I forget. Maybe they all coulda’ been from out west ‘cuz they all rode horses. Or now I’m thinkin’ maybe they were the three wise men from the Bible. And now they come to me. Whatever, I know that I’m doing the work of the Lord. God sent those guys, for sure. The Lord doesn’t misunderestimate George W. Actually, now I remember something. The first visitor told me that a Great Serpent is coming, that the prayers of my supporters are helping speed its way. That the End of the World is nearing."

"I said to him ‘no sir, not with George W. in this office. Me and the boys are ending evil to stop the Lebanese and the Grecians from ending the world with new-cue-lar weapons. Ol’ George W. is fightin’ the good fight against evil.’ Then he said he was pleased that Osama and I both had gotten the talking points down so well. I wondered what he meant by that, but then I kinda interrupted him by asking if this serpent had a name. A serpent’s like a snake, right? And those boa constrictors are snakes, I think, so I was thinking I would give it a nickname, y’know like I give everybody. So I said, I can’t really think of a nickname for you Master, but I was thinking I’d call the Great Serpent Julius Squeezer. Then I interrupted him again by asking if his horse had a name. Y’know, if I had a horse, I’d name him Kegger! Y’know… for old times sake. Y’know what I mean? I guess I shouldn’t have cut him off. That mighta been important. Oh well. Condie can figure it out. Y’think he mighta meant I was ending world terrorism, ’cause that sounds right to me, right?"

Adam Young Archives

The National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Campaign Committee are offering the photograph as part of a package deal that includes a seat at a Republican fund-raiser where President Bush will speak.

For a $150 contribution, donors will be sent the photograph, reproduced below, which clearly shows the President standing at a podium in front of a stylized American flag and flanked by what appears to be the ghostly apparitions of presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

The photo, which has been cropped by staffers with the Republican campaign, was taken at a séance held in the White House.

The political tactic comes even though Mr. Bush had previously sworn off mixing election politics and the administration’s War on Terror.

Election finance-law experts said it’s unclear whether reproducing a White House photograph violates rules governing acceptable conduct by political campaigns.

Republican officials contend that its use is legal. They say that the photograph is part of the historical record of supernatural influence on the Bush presidency, and that since the fundraiser is being held in his honor, the fund-raising pitch is appropriate.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the White House séance picture was taken by the White House photographer on duty and was part of a package of photographs released to the media. McClellan said that unnamed members of the media had sold the pictures to a firm, which in turn sold them to the Republican Party.

He refused to say whether the White House would have objected to using the séance photograph had they known about it before, but said that the photograph shows the president going about his daily business, and was therefore unobjectionable. When asked, Mr. McClellan said that the president is in daily contact with supernatural forces, either God or other supernatural beings.

Democrats said they were assessing whether using the work of a government employee for political purposes violated their interpretation of federal campaign laws.

Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called it "grotesque."

Responded McClellan, "I think that the Democrats are having a very difficult time coming to grips with the fact that the president is a very spiritual man and like all spiritual men, he is aided and guided and sometimes possessed by spirits, sometimes speaking in tongues, which come to think of it, explains a lot about the presidents speaking-style."

Columnist E.J. Dionne said campaigns have used White House photographs before and the practice had never been challenged under federal campaign law.

"On the one hand, it’s better than having a fund-raiser in the Lincoln Bedroom or the Map Room, on the other hand, the president is advised by all sorts of people — his cabinet, Congress, newspaper columnists, God, so why not dead former presidents? I don’t see anything wrong with that so long as it’s generally nonpartisan," Mr. Dionne said.

Senator Hillary Clinton in a statement called the affair "disgraceful. I cannot imagine that a President of the United States would engage in necromancy in the White House. The families of those who lost their lives on September 11th and all Americans of faith can’t condone this — and neither should the President of the United States."

Majority House Leader Tom Delay when asked to comment criticized Senator Clinton. "I remember that Mrs. Clinton used to talk to Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House all the time. At least the president is talking to someone useful."

It is believed that the White House conducted the séance in early October in what appears to be a desperate attempt to resolve the ongoing deterioration of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It is not known what, if any, advice president Bush received from either presidents Washington or Lincoln, but it is rumored that following the séance, Mr. Bush expressed his gratitude to God for the opportunity to make war in his name.

Jason Ledbutter the president of the Center for Paranormal Sensory Investigation (CPSI) expressed relief that finally proof of ghosts had been offered by the government to the public. "You can’t imagine how long I’ve been waiting for this day. People would think I’m crazy, but now I can say u2018Who’s crazy now?’ the President of the United States is all the proof I need."

Ted Wilkes, a self-identified warlock associated with the neoconservative think tank, Project for a New American Century, and the magazine the Weekly Standard, expressed hope that the administration would further turn towards the magical arts in its War on Terror.

"The administration is tying its hands if it only pursues conventional warfare and ignores the magical front. Hexes, spells, curses, you name it, if we don’t use it, our enemies will, if they haven’t already. Iraqi’s say Saddam is a powerful magician, but I have my doubts, although he could have changed form and be hiding in the Baghdad Zoo for all we know."

Priscilla Deville, a self-proclaimed Wicca priestess affiliated with the website PagansPlusBushEqualWar.org commented "I’m not the only one who is gratified to see that the administration has employed necromancy and contacted two of the greatest Americans. Now, the administration must not only continue planning and waging wars like pagans, but embrace paganism too. The Romans were pagan and look how great they turned out."

The Rev. Matt Robinson, well-known televangelist and former Republican candidate for president said on yesterday morning’s broadcast of his program the "700 minus 34 Club" that "the séance, while clearly the practice of the forbidden dark arts, were miraculously transformed by the Lord to bless this president and all his works. God himself sent two of his saints in heaven to appear next to our Leader. George W. Bush is God’s president. Now, if he’d only listen to the Lord and liquidate the homosexuals, exterminate the Supreme Court, abolish Congress and govern as the founding fathers intended."

The séance is one in a series of supernatural or paranormal events that have figured prominently in the public and private comments and remarks by the administration and its supporters in certain communities of the electorate.

On September 11, 2001 the administration credited God’s direct intervention in saving Air Force One with the president on-board from being struck down by a terrorist ICBM or al’Qaeda orbital particle-beam weapon or other possible calamity, and cited the intervention of faeries when the president and his entourage were briefly lost on their visit in Ireland late last year.

In the lead up to the invasion of Iraq earlier this year, administration officials cited information gleaned from several Middle Eastern genie’s on Iraq’s arsenals of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

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Mr. Bush spoke only hours after the entire 83rd Armored Company had been captured by American malcontents, on a day when bombings in Washington killed hundreds of federal employees.

"The more progress we make on the ground, the more free Americans become, the more electricity that’s available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more things are gonna blow up," Mr. Bush told reporters. "That’s just the way life in the New America is sometimes."

Internal Defense Department officials said loyalists of the organization Sons of Liberty were likely responsible for taking the 83rd hostage, and for the bombings Monday at twenty-three neighborhood police stations, the offices of ten federal aid organizations, and at the headquarters of the District of Columbia provisional government. "It’s incredible that the Sons of Liberty loyalists we haven’t yet captured could wreak so much havoc, but there you have it," commented one official.

Internal Defense Department officials conceded that there was some possibility that the recent wave of violence was coordinated. For example, they admitted it was hard to argue that the pattern of bombings spelling out "Leave Us Alone, Uncle Sam" was entirely coincidental.

Bush said those who are continuing to engage in violence "can’t stand the thought of a free society. They hate freedom. They hate cute little babies. They hate kittens and puppies and hamsters, but they love terror. They love cockroaches and fingernails squeaking on chalkboards. I hate those guys."

But Bush said he remains "even more determined to work with the few remaining patriots" to restore peace and obedience to our war-torn nation.

Said Paul Bremer, recently appointed as Sheriff of the Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western Occupied Districts: "We’ll have rough days, days where these terrorists may capture several hundred U.S. troops and assassinate the entire local puppet regimes… but the overall thrust is in the right direction and the good days outnumber the bad days. For example, on no other day this week did we lose an entire company of troops!"

As they have said following previous attacks, U.S. officials vowed that the newest wave of violence would not deter them. Major General Rodney Grass said, "Nothing will prevent us from systematically rooting out remnants of the former political philosophy and training Americans to accept responsibility for their previous thought crimes."

Grass said that since September 10, his forces have conducted offensive raids and other missions that netted the capture of 6,231 Americans on suspicion of disloyalty, 143 underground publishers and 19 "extremely bad" George W. Bush impersonators. Grass said they also confiscated $1.5 million and plan on giving it to President Bush as tribute.

Adam Young Archives

COMPTON, Cal. — Some people are turning to an expensive and controversial way of customizing their cars: paying to riddle your car with bullet holes.

"Since they’re real you don’t have to worry about anyone flipping you the finger on the street. They’ll know better," says the company’s website RiddleMeThis.com, which offers a customized house-call service to apply .50-caliber and smaller .22-caliber holes to the family sedan or minivan.

"Dude" Rock, 25, hires family members and members of his organization to customize a customers car, often while they are at home or at night. He said he’s working his way through nursing school and has "accessorized" dozens of cars in the Compton area since 2001.

"They’re a great accessory," Rock said. "I guess it’s just for the look, it’s like a fad, y’know. I honestly don’t think it will fade, I mean, my business is doing nothing but growing. I personally shot up three cars last Friday night."

"My cousin Rudy, down the way, he’ll shoot a car up anywhere. I mean, fenders, windshields, doors, even tires, because authenticity is what he’s all about. He’ll do it all."

On their website, they announced their intention to expand their service to other areas.

"Yeah, now that we’ve tapped out the local market, we’re looking to branch out into different styles, you know, different designs because I’m an artist, not just a business man. Maybe buckshot or somethin’ in the rural areas, and semi-automatics for that urban look, if you know what I’m sayin’. Yeah, I’ll even shoot our name or corporate logo into the doors, or into the hood or roof. And the holes go pretty good with a ground effects package."

"This new look clearly has benefits for me, ’cause it’s an all cash business and brings in a lot of loose cash."

"This is clearly an expression of the rage and anger at capitalism by the ghetto in artistic form. This is modern, anti-capitalist, post-modern revolutionary art at its finest," said urban culture theorist, author and Rap poet, Harvard Professor Cordell Johnson, who was asked to comment on this growing trend. "Its a beautiful thing, if you think about it."

Danielle Merton, 21, was surprised one morning to find her 1994 Honda Accord riddled with 10 bullet-holes.

"A lot of people ask me about them and why my car got shot up," Merton said Monday. "I don’t know, but I like it. I’m going to try to be different from now on, too. My car getting shot up was the best thing to happen to me all year."

Merton, who works for a rubber and plastics manufacturer, said it was cheaper than, say, customized wheel rims.

"And it didn’t even cost me anything. Other people have to pay thousands of dollars to a bunch of thugs when their car is shot up" she said.

However, not everyone welcomes the new fad.

A random passerby suggested that these people shouldn’t be allowed to do this. "I don’t know why someone just doesn’t come up with, like stickers or something that you could put on instead. I can see shootin’ up someone else’s car, you know, but why shoot up your own?"

"It sends the wrong message to our youth," said Gregor Winn, Director of the Victims’ Deserve Rights Foundation in Maryland. "It’s like a badge of honor. It sends the wrong message. What’s next — drive by shootings? I mean, their just running around shooting up people’s cars and extorting money. What’s wrong with this country?"

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The videotape shows Lt. Gen Muhammad Talal making speeches to several mosques and prayer dinners that portray al-Qaeda’s actions against the United States as a religious war between Muslims and Christians.

NBC News broadcast videotapes of Muhammad Talal, a fundamentalist Wahabi, giving a number of speeches while wearing a captured U.S. military uniform at Muslim functions around Asia.

In one speech, Muhammad Talal recalled the story of a U.S. Christian soldier in Somalia who said Muslim forces would never get him because Christ would give him protection. "Well, brothers, you know what I know, that our God, the Merciful Allah is bigger than his. I know that my Allah is a real God, and his is an idol," Muhammad Talal told his audience.

In another speech, Muhammad Talal said God had chosen Osama bin Laden as his agent to lead this fight against evil.

"Why is this man the Commander of the Faithful? The majority of Muslims did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he’s the Commander of the Faithful because Allah put him there for a time such as this. He was appointed by Allah," he said.

"Brothers and sisters, this is your enemy," Muhammad Talal said. "It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that Allah revealed to me as the enemy."

Describing Islam’s fight with American extremists, Muhammad Talal also said, "The enemy is a spiritual enemy. He’s called the prince of darkness. The enemy is a guy called Satan."

In a statement, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, noted that a verse in the Quran says Muslims believe in the same God as Jews and Christians.

Muhammad Talal has a long military record and has been involved in noteworthy military operations in the past, serving in covert operations alongside the CIA in Afghanistan and in Bosnia and Kosovo before joining al-Qaeda.

With additional reporting by Lt. Gen. William Boykin, Will Dunham and Matt Kelley.

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The assessment was based on a technical analysis of the videotape, which was first aired over the weekend, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The CIA can’t be certain but believes the person on the videotape is Vice-President Dick Cheney, the No. 2 official in George W. Bush’s GOP-Neoconservative network, the official said.

The English-language recording, obtained by the American satellite station CNN, showed a pale and tired looking Cheney who promised that future operations will provide the faithful with vast opportunities for war profiteering. "When faced with hard choices, we choose to make war, not peace," Cheney said, chopping the air with his hand for emphasis.

"Instead of losing hundreds or thousands of lives, we choose to lose tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands," Cheney said. No matter the cost in American or foreign lives, Cheney announced that the movement, "whether in the TV studios, on the lecterns, in print ads and on the op-ed pages, or in your wallets and on your backs, in your computers and in your houses, we will never surrender."

Warning that "our ultimate nightmare could bring devastation to our Party on a scale we have never experienced," Cheney threatened retaliation and advised his followers to never relent in denouncing opponents as anti-patriotic, traitors and limp-wristed wimps. Speaking on behalf of God, Cheney warned those Americans who would collaborate with the opponents of the War Party. "Let it be clear, that all those who demean, criticize, comment on or otherwise pay attention to our plans and activities will find no mercy with the Merciful, Almighty God and his instrument, Better-Than-The-Original-Moses, the Hand of God, George W. Bush."

The video footage was considered likely to inspire the willing coalition faithful.

"This tape will be a morale boost for (Dispensationalist and Neoconservative) fighters," said Luke Warm, Pennsylvania Democratic Party State Chairman. "It shows that one of their leaders is still alive."

Cheney’s whereabouts are not known. He is believed to be in hiding in the mountainous border region between West Virginia and Maryland, beyond the reach of the American Taxpayer.

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Flanked by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Housing Secretary Mel Martinez, the president indicated his intention to bring forward plans "for the happy day when Castro’s regime is no more and free trade comes to the island."

President Bush announced his intention to submit legislation to Congress entitled the Tobacco Patriot and Assistance Act of 2003, which would offer a combination of production and education training subsidies, tax breaks and military threats to revive the production of cigars within the continental 48 contiguous States of America.

The president said this legislation would allow small American producers of "Laurencio Double Corona, La Eminencia Premier, President, Torpedo, Wilshire Maduro and Churchill cigars to compete against the influx of illegal Cuban imports by encouraging expanded production and the training and employment of dozens of new domestic, American cigar rollers."

Mr. Bush cited 9/11 as an example of the foreign dangers that threaten Americans, dangers Mr. Bush believes are presented by the current policies of the Cuban government. Encouraging Americans to support his latest initiative, the president recalled the words of Todd Beamer, a passenger on United Flight 93, telling the assembled audience "lets roll."

Bush also said the United States would step up enforcement of existing restrictions against the communist government, such as banning tourism by Americans, and cracking down on what he called the trafficking of women and children in Cuba, who are widely believed to act as smugglers, known as "tobacco mules" within the trade. The United States also will launch a public outreach campaign to identify and create safe routes to legal entry for skilled Cuban cigar rollers who try to flee their homeland, the president said.

"We’ll increase the number of new Cuban immigrants we welcome every year," Bush added. "We are free to do so, and we will for the good of those who seek freedom fags." The latter is a reference to the growing patriotic designation for all tobacco products grown in the United States.

"I will not stand-by while the worlds worst cigar-producing regime continues to addict the world’s freest people." the President emphasized as he thumped the lectern. "America and its coalition allies will not rest while the safety of the American people and the world is threatened by the Fidel Castro tobaccoist regime."

The president predicted dire consequences if Congress did not act upon his recommendations. "The dire threat to the American way of life posed by the Cuban regime is a constant and pervasive threat."

"The American people know the peril that confronts the imbibers of Cuban tobacco products, and I will not allow this country and our people to be threatened by any hint of temptation."

"The American people can’t give into negativism and defeatism. We need to get ready, to get together and get rolling!"

Several of Mr. Bush’s most ardent supporters, in particular Wilhelm Krystal, Franklin Gaffer and television personality Bill O’Malley have publicly criticized "those countries that allow the sale of Cuban tobacco products," singling out for emphasis Canada and France, who are known opponents of the Bush administrations tobacco policies.

Representatives from Congress, the Miami community of exiled tobacco rollers in that vote-rich swing state crucial in the 2004 presidential election, and other anti-Castro, pro-tobacco groups were briefed in advance of Friday’s official announcement.

Secretary of State Powell has been trying to enlist other countries in the administrations efforts to curb Cuban cigar smuggling, most recently in a June speech in Chile to an assembly of Organization of American States foreign ministers.

Asked for comment, the head of Cuba’s diplomatic mission here, Dagoberto Rodriguez, said Thursday that Bush should "stop acting like a lawless cowboy, start listening to the voices of the nations of the world, take a smoke and relax a little."

In speeches in Miami and Washington last year, Mr. Bush said the 40-year-old U.S. embargo against Cuba will remain in force until the island ceases its attempts to undermine American cigar production and cracks down on the smuggling of cigars and cigar rollers.

In the questions that followed the press opportunity, the President pointedly criticized the tobacco trade media, which he characterized as the "tobacco leaf rags," for "creating out of thin air the ridiculous notion that Cuban cigars are superior to American-made cigars."

In remarks later that day, leading Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean remarked that this "smacked of another payoff to the Bush administrations big tobacco backers." Congressmen Richard Gephardt criticized the proposed legislation as "potentially a miserable failure" while arguing that the level of subsidies did not go far enough. Well-known cigar smoker Rush Limbaugh was unavailable for comment.

Adam Young Archives

Well-known the world-over for his performances as "the Terminator" in three films, Mr. Schwarzenegger began his Golden Globe award-winning career from humble roots in his native Austria. Patterning himself after the bodybuilder Charles Atlas, Mr. Schwarzenegger pursued bodybuilding as a platform for breaking into the movies. Winning several championships while still a young man, including Mr. Olympia and Mr. World, and five times Mr. Universe, Mr. Schwarzenegger went on to graduate from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in business and economics. Later, in 1986, he married Maria Shriver, with whom he had four children. He became a U.S. citizen in 1983.

Arnold Schwarzenegger made his screen debut in the forgettable film Hercules in New York in 1970 under the screen name Arnold Strong, but achieved stardom with the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron. With the Conan the Barbarian franchise, Mr. Schwarzenegger established himself as an action film star, and achieved superstar status with his portrayal of a cyborg assassin in the title role in 1984′s The Terminator, which established one of the most identifiable catch phrases in film history, "I’ll be back."

Appearing in some of the hits of the 1980′s, with such films as Commando, The Running Man, Red Heat and Predator, Mr. Schwarzenegger also appeared in comedic roles, such as 1988′s Twins, where he appeared with Danny De Vito, and 1991′s Kindergarten Cop. Also in 1991, Mr. Schwarzenegger reprised his most memorable role in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, using his box-office clout to recast his character into the good guy and adding "No problemo" and "Hasta la vista, baby" to the lexicon of "Arnoldism’s." His 1992 follow-up, Last Action Hero was a critical and box-office disappointment, but 1994′s True Lies was the summer blockbuster. Mr. Schwarzenegger returned to comedy with 1995′s Junior, co-starring with Emma Thompson and again with Danny De Vito, where the actor portrayed a pregnant man.

Mr. Schwarzenegger’s subsequent films, 1996′s Eraser and Jingle All the Way, 1997′s Batman & Robin, 1999′s End of Days, 2000′s The 6th Day and 2001′s Collateral Damage, which was pre-empted by the terrorist attacks of September 11th, met mixed results.

In 2003, the actor returned to the role which made him a household name, starring again as the Terminator in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, but soon before the film was released, rumors abounded that the actor was showing symptoms of a debilitating disease, which has been known to affect actors and other celebrities in their later years.

Commentators became concerned for Mr. Schwarzenegger during his media tours promoting Terminator 3, as the actor began to speak in broken clichs and stale bromides, which are unmistakable traits of the disease.

Many commentators noted that early symptoms of the disease were first observed during Mr. Schwarzenegger’s tenure as chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. And unmistakable symptoms were again on display in late 2002 during the actor’s public events in support of Proposition 49, the citizen initiative for taxpayer-funded after-school programs in California.

However, since then the disease appeared to be in remission.

Mr. Schwarzenegger shocked everyone last August by appearing on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" to announce that his condition had taken a turn for the worse, likely leading to the end of his unique and successful career in Hollywood.

After that, Mr. Schwarzenegger’s condition deteriorated rapidly over the following two months, leading many to regret the revelations at this time and preferring to remember him as he was. Arnold Schwarzenegger passed away late Tuesday evening at 8:00PM PT.

Mr. Schwarzenegger is survived by his memorable one-liners and countless amateur impersonators.

On September 18th, Ted Kennedy bull horned "There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud." Who could disagree with that? It’s all pretty much the truth, except that the invasion was planned in Washington, D.C. years ago. But what I found interesting was the response from Tom Delay, who accused Kennedy of "the most mean-spirited and irresponsible hate-speech yet." Hate-speech!?! Mean-spirited?!? I thought we were in the Age of George W. Bush, the latest self-anointed other son of God, where adults returned to the White House. Instead, Delay sounds like the mindless drones trotted out to kill the messenger of the latest scandal during the Clinton 90′s. And this wasn’t the first time Delay whined like some PC thug.

Delay’s response illustrates neoconservatism’s true nature. It is not a school of thought, a creed, a philosophy or any other mature system of thought. Instead, neoconservatism is merely a name given to political strategy and tactics. And tactics adopted from the Left, at that. Adopting the rhetoric of thought crimes like hate speech, "mean-spiritedness" and of course the Left’s long-used slur against anyone who questioned them, that you must be an anti-Semite which the neocons now brandish with glee (Joel Molbray used it again on CNN last Thursday afternoon), to the legitimization of "compassionate conservatism" (i.e., "Big Government Conservatism") in place of State’s and local rights and federalism, to centralized education, to embracing the Civil Rights assault on individual self-ownership, Medicare and other entitlement expansion, eye-popping deficits, acquiescence to affirmative action quotas, abortion and gay marriage, and of course the adoption of the same nation-building ambitions and big-spending they used to deride during the 90′s. Just what does today’s neoconned conservative Republicans believe in anyway? Certainly its not liberty.

The Republican Party is now the Party of omnipotent government ambition now that the conventional Left is a spent force, but it still might take a generation or two for right-thinking Americans to hold their noses and migrate to the Democratic Party and return it to its libertarian roots.

Neoconservatism is a malleable approach to politics that fogs the air with rhetoric about liberty while at its root they have one and only one goal — to get and keep exercising coercive power. The paeans to liberty are merely "boob-bait for the Bubba’s."

Maybe Jonah Goldberg was right after all and Neoconservatism doesn’t exist. They’re just plain vanilla political opportunists.

Media Objectivity?

Tuning in to CNBC’s Capital Report (not its lead-in program Crudlow & Clymer — anyone catch the obscure reference to the 2000 election?) on Tuesday, I was interested to hear that former weapons inspector Scott Ritter would be interviewed, even if it probably would be the usual blather about the War Party’s lies and deceptions being the exception instead of the norm as most discussions go on these beltway-type shows. Scott Ritter was introduced as the only man in America who still defends Saddam Hussein, and later in the interview was asked if the world is safer with Saddam out of power. (The entire world? Really?) Ritter said, "No, it isn’t." And you could hear the audible gasp from the hosts. I guess they swallowed Bush’s wiggling worm of lies hook, line and sinker. So much for objectivity. At least with the Butcher of Baghdad we knew that if he did indeed have the dreaded WMD they were in Iraq. Now where are they? Who has them? Before we knew, or thought we knew. Now we don’t. Some success.

El Pillbo in Deep Caca

What else is there to say about Birch Barlow’s predicament, except maybe, that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. It’s always nice to see the drug warrior, total warrior, super (false) patriot brought down low by their own hand. Now, if only similar events could discredit the rest of the desktop infantry of pundits. Oh wait… the cakewalk in Iraq has already done that.

The Crawford Mussolini in Deep Caca

Good news. Bad news. The good news is yet another poll shows support for Bush’s imperial project is on the u201Ctipping pointu201D towards life support. But the bad news is that whoever would replace the Crawford Mussolini would be no better (Dean) or possibly even worse (Clark).

The poll found confidence in Bush’s foreign policy performance sliding to just 44 percent. 50 percent lacked confidence in Bush’s ability to handle an international crisis and 53 percent said they now believed the invasion of Iraq wasn’t worth the cost.

"Landing on the carrier, declaring the conflict over, this Romanesque sort of victory parade, certainly did raise the stakes," historian James T. Smith told CBS News. "And now those expectations are falling because people are seeing that the Iraq situation is not going according to plan."

And some people thought reforging Iraq into the 51st State would *ahem* "be a cakewalk."

Oh well. Live by the poll numbers, die by the poll numbers. But even though times change, principles don’t. Of course, it helps to first have principles.

Man of the Year

The Jerusalem Post (owned by Conrad Black, professional ex-Canadian, paid-up member of the smear bund and one of the many Dr. Strangelove’s in the neocon camp) has declared Wolfowitz of Arabia their Man of the Year.

LRC needs its own Man of the Year. But who could it be?

Could it be Aristotle? After 2300 years, is Aristotle still the man? What about the gangster-in-chief himself, George W. Bush, for drawing back the curtain on the essential nature of the U.S. government of war, war, and more war (and all the opportunities for personal and societal corruption that supplies)? Or maybe Ron Paul should be LRC’s Man of the Year from the fact that he was attacked by neocon tyrant Michael Ledeen for daring to quote Ledeen’s own words calling for total war on societies that do not practice "creative destruction." A strong contender is Justin Raimondo, for doing the labor of ten men in publicizing the myths, lies and bizarro ideological migrations of the War Party.

However, there is one man who’s been instrumental to disturbing and exposing both wings of the War Party in these times. From applying the path blazing insights of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard to current events and making available to readers their writings both on LRC and Mises.org, providing individuals around the world with ideas they have never before encountered, to exposing the War Party and counteracting the effects of the War Channel, Lew has given all of us a worldwide forum to critique, ridicule, lampoon and otherwise comment on the fantasies of the neocons, their statist allies and fellow travellers.

Lew is far too humble to nominate himself, not like he has a website named after him or anything, so for doing all this is why I nominate Lew himself as the first annual LRC Man of the Year.

Adam Young [send him mail] writes from Ontario, Canada.

Adam Young Archives

Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1787, asked

" . . .what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms . . . ."

The benefits of an armed citizenry had such a consensus in the liberated ex-Colonies that even an old Nationalist like James Madison acknowledged in the Federalist no. 46 that

"Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."

But if the people were armed and organized "the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it."

(There is no mention, however, that Americans should be enserfed to fund the conquest of foreigners to provide them with fictitious "liberty.")

In media reports, Iraqi’s appeared to have ready access to handguns, shotguns and AK-47′s and the ammunition for each, seemingly fulfilling the classical ideal of an armed citizenry advocated by both the founders and American opponents of the United States, so the question remains why did Iraqi’s submit to Saddam’s tyranny?

An argument could be made that facing several well-armed standing armies of regular and special forces (just like Americans do), as well as the cadres of secret police and informers, that any Iraqi plotting against the regime could be singled out and eliminated in the dead of night, and tens of thousands were, in fact, disappeared in this way. A de-moralized citizenry is always the aim of every tyranny, but that doesn’t explain how Saddam’s tyranny came to be.

The answer lies in the genius of Western Civilization, which reformed politics on the basis of decentralization and autonomous private organizations. In Iraq, like in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and other regimes, and increasingly in America itself, these two principles were destroyed as the 20th century model of the total state invaded and controlled virtually all areas of life and community. In Iraq, reformers lacked the ability to form organizations and peacefully assemble to formulate ideas and strategies to reform or replace the regime. Without this ability to communicate for fear of spies and informers, and the feared secret police and torturers, the ideas available to Iraqi’s were limited and probably favored the familiar and tested, rather than the unfamiliar, even if the familiar was the centuries old model of dictatorship common in the region’s history. Who or what would replace Saddam? Fear of the unknown is a powerful and constant brake on progress. Anyone attempting to explain the superiority of the stateless society has quickly found that out.

So even though the Iraqi’s held the means to act, to what would they put purposeful action towards? Lacking the ability to organize, and living with the ever-present fear of minders and informants, and not having the ideas of what the end goal should be, the reason Iraqi’s could be well armed yet live under a tyrannical regime is that few could conceive of a better system. They likely lacked the essential ideas of change. Who has it? Who will lead it? How to achieve it? Realize it, structure it and implement it, and all the other questions of reform. Without the ideas necessary to improve the conditions of life, the status quo looks acceptable. Even now, the lack of liberal-libertarian ideas among Iraqi’s goes far in explaining the deterioration in the quality of life there, as most, if not all Iraqi’s, believe that the state, in this case, the US military and its provisional authority, just like the regime that preceded it, are responsible for employment, security, electricity, food, water, and the other necessities of modern life. The chaos in post-invasion Iraq did not disprove libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism. The chaos only showed that Iraqi’s lacked the ideas necessary to be a free people. Do Americans still have these ideas, for that matter?

As Ludwig von Mises wrote

The choices a man makes are determined by the ideas that he adopts. . . . The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas engender social institutions, political changes, technological methods of production, and all that is called economic conditions. . . . Ideas determine what are to be considered more and less satisfactory conditions and what means are to be resorted to alter them.

This also explains why Iraqi’s are fighting American troops when they failed to fight against Saddam’s armies. With the demise of Saddam’s regime and the establishment of a somewhat more liberal military dictatorship under U.S. auspices, Iraqi’s are now able to meet and organize, to formulate plans and strategies and issue appeals for reform and manifestos for change. And many Iraqi’s, likely the vast majority, have decided the foreigners must leave. The only difference is that some aren’t willing to act on their decision, and others are.

By now, finally, it’s no secret (and no thanks to the mainstream media, who slept through the buildup to the invasion of Iraq), that the motives of the central planners who conned and schemed Americans into the invasion and occupation of a third-world country, were enthralled by their grand scheme to transform the Middle East through violence and terror. The goal, as neoconservative tyrant’s like Michael Ledeen, Bill Kristol and the other neocon’s repeatedly tell us, is to create by force — both military and bureaucratic — new national cultures in these areas that will embrace as their own the values imposed by the new overlords. The marketing slogan of neoconservativism seems to be Better Living Through Military Despotism.

The neocons claim that the values they wish to impose are political and social liberty, equal rights and free markets, although the neocon concept of these ideas leaves the usual meaning of these words left behind in the dust, but in any event it is the "historic mission" of the United States government to "advance" them. But it should not surprise anyone that the neocons take a favorable view towards the welfare state, FDR and the return to LBJ’s guns-and-butter welfare-warfare statism. For the U.S. to attempt to reconstruct the world you would have to believe that central control and central planning, and the resulting mass violations of individual and property rights, has been great for American culture and civilization.

To change a foreign culture would require forcibly altering what those people — those individual persons with inalienable rights to life and liberty — believe and think. This is not what could be called a conservative project. Libertarians would suggest that rather than those of the Western intellectual tradition, these invaders, occupiers and central planners are adopting the anti-liberal cultural values of their victims in these "failed states."

The neocons claim, illegitimately, to be the vanguard of the tide of liberty. The reality of the neoconservative creed is that while very good with the rhetoric of liberty, free markets, limited government, and federalism, their practice of these tenets of Western thought is virtually non-existent as they champion greater and greater domestic and foreign centralization and militarism. At the core of their great plan for humanity is the destructive killing power of the permanent military complex, but how on earth could a socialist bureaucracy like the U.S. military bring about a free society, in Iraq or in America for that matter?

Unfortunately for the neocon project, cultures and civilizations differ, and change only slowly, over generations, and imposing new ideas at gunpoint cannot transform a society overnight. In the unlikely case that the neocon project succeeds, it will require occupying and dominating these foreign lands and cultures for generations. By now it is obvious that the neocons did not even consider the economic cost and consequences of such a foolhardy crusade for even a few years, let alone for generations. The British could stamp out certain practices and introduce parliamentary systems and socialism in India after 150 years of occupation, but Indians did not have access to automatic weapons, RPG’s and 100 years of guerrilla strategy theory.

The neocon view, which so favorably grades the United States federal government, which they incorrectly call America, as an ideological force comparable to the Soviet Union (as Irving Kristol recently reminded us), ignores the role of culture in developing, disseminating and preserving the Western (liberal) ideas of individualism and liberty. Instead, the neocons see America as an artificial society, like the USSR, with no indigenous cultural contribution to developing and maintaining a culture of personal liberty and free enterprise. In the neocon view, the liberties of America are a creature of the bureaucracies of Washington, D.C., rather than the remnants of America’s early libertarian culture and history, and can be transferred by these same bureaucracies anywhere in the world. This is the argument of the neocon project and Mr. Ledeen’s non-Schumpeterian version of "creative destruction." Just as the Soviet Union was imposed on a defeated Russia by the Bolsheviks in Moscow, the neocon Washington project of World War IV will attempt to impose a new culture by redefining and reconstructing Islam and contemporary Muslim society at gunpoint.

Neocon protestations to the contrary, they appear to have a near limitless faith in violence. And in this way resemble al Qaeda and other terror and political groups. But it is not violence, whether the armed might of an evil cabal of invaders or the resistance of an armed citizenry that wins the day, but rather ideas that change the world for ill or for the better. And although they favor military force as the preferred method to advance ideas, contact and exchange, rather than invasion and destruction bring forth constructive social change.

The neoconservatives and the project of a benevolent global hegemony and reconstruction of third-world societies at gunpoint is clearly based on very bad and discredited ideas. Discredited not just by the fallout from their latest adventure, but throughout history their ideas have born nothing but terror and despair. Writing about the rival socialist sects of his time Frdric Bastiat commented on their similarities:

"They quarrel over who will mold the human clay, but they agree that there is human clay to mold."

Classical liberals and libertarians, both present and past, challenge the planners, whether they call themselves Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, Republicans, Democrats, liberals, progressives, or neoconservatives. As Bastiat wrote "The plans differ; the planners are all alike . . ." But in response we say that men are not clay, that Man is an end in himself. Only the individual is great. Everything else on Earth pales in comparison. Even the dream of "National Greatness."

Adam Young [send him mail] writes from Ontario, Canada.

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A typical representative of the former is Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and recurrent panelist on CNN’s “Moneyline.” Professor Krugman has on several occasions floated the standard old Keynesian standby explanation that recessions are caused by evaporating consumer demand, which in turn causes rising unemployment and the rash of bankruptcies and liquidations that signal a recession. The obvious remedy is to artificially stimulate demand by encouraging the accumulation of additional consumer debt.

An example of the latter is Lawrence Kudlow, the National Review columnist and television financial commentator, who wrote, “The shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand points. We will know that our businesses will stay open, that our families will be safe, and that our future will be unlimited.”2 In Mr. Kudlow’s view, companies can recover their bottom lines by joining the war effort, supplying goods and services to the expanding state. And taxpayers can rebuild their hollowed out portfolios by piggybacking on tax-funded defense contractors.

These two examples are not isolated cases. The collapse of the stock-market bubble, the 9/11 terror attacks, and the ensuing “war on terror” have brought forth among Americans a broad approval for renewed statism. Pundits and commentators in particular have followed this reversal of fortune with serious claims about the failings of a society with too much freedom, as if there could be such a condition, and have drawn from the collapse of Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom the conclusion that trade and enterprise are inherently corrupt and pose a danger to the public.

As many libertarians have struggled to explain, the boom and bust are the results of previous monetary interventions, but the diagnosis of the mainstream intellectuals misses the fact that the Federal Reserve, the central bank, was the silent and unacknowledged partner in the excesses now coming to light.

In his essay, Hayek described intellectuals as “second-hand dealers in ideas,” by which he meant propagators of ideas, rather than the original discoverers of new knowledge — in essence, those who guide and educate, or miseducate as the case may be, public opinion. Hayek described the pervasive influence of the intellectuals by noting that “(t)here is little that the ordinary man of today learns about events or ideas except through the medium of this class; and outside our special fields of work we are in this respect almost all ordinary men.” Hayek noted the power of the intellectuals in deciding what views, opinions, and facts we’re to be told of, and what slant they will be told from: “Whether we shall ever learn of the results of the work of the expert and the original thinker depends mainly on their decisions.” Those familiar with the Austrian tradition are fully aware of the truth of this statement. The pioneering work of Ludwig von Mises and Hayek himself are virtually absent from the ideas discussed and advocated by mainstream intellectuals. Why is it that the intellectual class is so hostile to genuine free market ideas?

Hayek speculated that the reason lies in the occupation of the commentator itself. He simply lacks the direct knowledge that experience provides from what Hayek called “the administration of property.” Consequently, intellectuals lack firsthand knowledge of direct responsibility for business matters, and this distinguishes the intellectual from others who make a living from speaking and writing.3 Most intellectuals would counter that, far from being a handicap, this alleged absence of economic self-interest allows commentators to be selfless and neutral observers, besides being able to exercise good citizenship.

How interventionist ideas came to predominate can be more or less traced back to the Progressive Era in American history. In two essays, “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals” and “Origins of the Welfare State in America,” the late Murray N. Rothbard described how the turn of the twentieth century came to be characterized by a movement for state intervention throughout the economy.4 Certain ideas about society and the state were combined with a secularized religious fervor that saw in an expanding interventionist state the instrument to counteract the alleged evils of laissez faire. These ideas were propagated by the dominant intellectual class.

As Hayek pointed out, the commitment to a worldview, or Weltanschauung, is what first motivates the intellectual. And the origin of the Progressive, or collectivist, worldview is the error that is the source of the horrors of the twentieth century, namely, that as “man has learned to organize the forces of nature . . . [he has come to believe] that a similar control of the forces of society would bring comparable improvements in human conditions.” With this belief, it was only a short step to apply engineering principles to devise “a single coherent plan [for] . . . the direction of all forms of human activity.” And so central planning was born.

Hayek thought that intellectuals were attracted to interventionism because they mistakenly believe that man is no different from the clay the sculptor molds to create his art. The analogy was first used by Frederic Bastiat. In believing this, interventionists mistakenly apply the empirical method to human action and are able to convince others using the prestige of mechanical engineering that their schemes for social engineering are truly humane and just.5

The current mainstream intellectual worldview is still one that views the economy as a human version of a Rube Goldberg contraption: inexplicable in operation, but prone to endless tinkering. And with this worldview in place, not surprisingly, intellectuals favor those ideas that reinforce their desire to advise, manipulate, and tinker. As Hayek explained: “the intellectual . . . judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.” And: “his criterion must be consistency with his other views and suitability for combining into a coherent picture of the world. Yet this selection from the multitude of new ideas presenting themselves at every moment creates the characteristic climate of opinion, the dominant Weltanshauung of a period.”

But it doesn’t end there, of course. This worldview has long since spread far beyond merely the media. Hayek linked its spread to the proliferation of pressure lobbies and their associated incentives and interests. A major consequence of this is the widespread devaluation of expert knowledge in favor of general knowledge. As Hayek said, instead of experts in a field, “It is rather the person whose general knowledge is supposed to qualify him to appreciate expert testimony, and to judge between the experts from different fields, whose power is enhanced.” And being generalists, these intellectuals “judge all issues not by their specific merits but, in the characteristic manner of intellectuals, solely in the light of certain fashionable general ideas.” Since they are not experts, intellectuals are easily swayed by ideas that are already popular with their friends and colleagues.

So while the number of pressure organizations and their influence increased, the actual knowledge and expertise of their members declined. “Even though their knowledge may be often superficial and their intelligence limited, this does not alter the fact that it is their judgement which mainly determines the views on which society will act in the not too distant future,” Hayek wrote, and because of their influence as “opinionmakers” “it is their convictions and opinions which operate as the sieve through which all new conceptions must pass before they can reach the masses.”

With this role in society today, the intellectuals have come effectively to steer debate by their de facto control over who becomes famous as a thinker. Hayek alludes to those who have undeservedly achieved reputations “solely because they hold what intellectuals regard as ‘progressive’ political views.” And this control over reputation has had other effects. “This creation of reputations by the intellectuals is particularly important in the fields where the results of expert studies are not used by other specialists but depend on the political decision of the public at large.” That is, the choices of intellectuals in turn influenced the choices presented to the electorate by politicians during elections.

Using their influence on the culture, intellectuals have been able to exert a degree of control over what information about current issues the public is exposed to. And using the ideas picked up from the intellectuals, politicians have advocated reforms for education, especially higher education, where the process is reinforced. (Hayek believed that the majority of university teachers have to be classified as intellectuals rather than as experts.6)

The education establishment for several generations now has produced new intellectuals firmly indoctrinated in the worldview of interventionism and “market failure.” As a result of the social influence of intellectuals in regulating the ideas that students and the general public are exposed to, Hayek noted that “in most parts of the Western World even the most determined opponents of socialism derive from socialist sources their knowledge on most subjects on which they have no first-hand information.” A man, he said, “cannot disagree with a socialist analysis in a field in which he has no knowledge.”

Secure in their tenured positions, academic intellectuals are free to indoctrinate students in the same manner as intellectuals indoctrinate the general public, by restricting ideas and applying erroneous knowledge. Ostracism and fear of failure keep any dissenters in check. As Hayek put it: “The forces which influence recruitment to the ranks of the intellectuals . . . help to explain why so many of the most able among them lean towards socialism.” He described this phenomenon of interventionist peer pressure like this: “although outside intellectual circles it may still be an act of courage to profess socialist convictions, the pressure of opinion among intellectuals will often be so strongly in favour of socialism that it requires more strength and independence for a man to resist it than to join in what his fellows regard as modern views.”

While intellectuals today generally no longer advocate any school of orthodox socialism, they still are largely motivated by the same myths that motivated the socialists of the past. All mainstream commentators on the ups and downs of the economy interpret these events through the miseducation they received from mainstream economics training. For example, behind their calls for artificially low interest rates is the belief that the business cycle is a natural unavoidable phenomenon of the free-market system of savings, investment, production, and consumption. In particular, their prescription to prevent another Great Depression are formed by the mainstream interpretation that the welfare/warfare-state schemes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal saved capitalism from itself and that World War II, with its controls, quotas, rationing, and super-patriotism, brought the country out of depression.

This is the mainstream view of the history of the twentieth century, taught in high schools and college economics courses, and repeated by columnists and pundits far and wide whenever the downward slump of the business cycle comes around. The “failures” of capitalism are ingrained in the interventionists’ worldview, and the unfortunate effect of this interpretation of history is that the same mistakes are repeated again and again, year after year, decade after decade. Generations of intellectuals and the public have been indoctrinated with the myths of statism.

Hayek concluded his essay with an appeal for a libertarian program that sticks to principle, for intellectual leaders committed to resisting the lure of power and political influence, and for those who will have the courage to fight for libertarian ideas against all odds.7 In the years since he wrote “The Intellectuals and Socialism” there have been many setbacks, but the idea of liberty has grown in prominence. As Hayek noted: The intellectual revival of [classical] liberalism is already underway in many parts of the world.” But he could still ask, “Will it be in time?”

Unfortunately, it is still possible to ask this question. Yet thanks to Hayek’s inspiring example and labors, many have been brought over to the idea of liberty, just as he himself was by reading Ludwig von Mises. It is up to us to continue their work.

This article originally appeared in the January, 2003 issue of Ideas on Liberty.

Notes:

1. F. A. Hayek, The Intellectuals and Socialism (London: St. Edmundsbury Press, Institute of Economic Affairs, 1998 [1949]).
2. Lawrence Kudlow, “Taking Back the Market-By Force,” National Review Online, June 26, 2002.
3. Hayek, p. 13.
4. Murray N. Rothbard, “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Winter 1989, and “Origins of the Welfare State in America,” The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Fall 1996.
5. Hayek, p. 18.
6. Ibid., p. 20.
7. Ibid., p. 26.

Adam Young [send him mail] writes from Ontario, Canada.

Adam Young Archives

Lew
himself called attention to Jonah
Goldberg’s commencement address this year at Hillsdale Academy,
in which Jonah regaled his captive audience, along with his
awkward misunderstanding of the visual metaphor of the slippery
slope and aphorisms detailing the importance of justice and individual
rights, with these plums of ‘conservative’ wisdom:

I
hear that Princeton moral and legal political philosopher Robert
P. George spoke at the Hillsdale College graduation. That’s great.
Dr. George is a brilliant man.

He
taught me a great deal when we were in prison together. He taught
me:

• How
  to chill pruno in the toilet bowl.
• How
  to make, and conceal, a shiv.
• He was
  even the one who taught me that if you let another man steal the
  apple brown betty
  off your cafeteria lunch tray it means you’re engaged.

That’s
a very important lesson.

I
mention Dr. George because I thought it might be fun to beat Mr.
Philosopher Man at his own game and hence make the college kids
green with envy. So, I do hereby solemnly swear to make more off-color
prison jokes than he did in his address.

As
some of you may know, I’m a conservative and proud of it. I spend
quite a bit of time encouraging young people like you to become
conservative or to be true to their conservative principles. But
since you went to school in the shadow of what many liberals consider
to be a leading madrassa of the Vast-Right-Wing Conspiracy, maybe
it would be better to put ideology aside.

First,
don’t ever date anybody in your dorm for at least the first semester.
It won’t work out and it will make your life really complicated.

Second,
don’t buy a mini-fridge until you’re sure your roommate hasn’t got
one.

While
not someone I regard as a particularly robust thinker, I can’t imagine
NR’s old court thinker Russell Kirk giving “advice” quite like these
“humorous” examples offered up by Jonah. I stopped reading NR sometime
in the mid-nineties, and only years later discovered how much it,
and I, had changed since then.

Besides
his class clown humor, Jonah Goldberg is another example of a trend
imported from the totalitarian Left, although thankfully, not present
in his address cited above. Jonah, as well as the far more egregious
example of David Frum, and others in the neoconservative movement,
trot out without apparent hesitation the old smear tactic of the
left of impugning the motives and character of critics of their
writing by accusing them of anti-Semitism, and of using neoconservative
as a euphemism for Jew, though neocon godfather Irving Kristol popularized
the word in many books and articles. Conservatives used to complain
about the Left’s smearing of conservatives and conservative ideas
as anti-Semitic, even as fascist. Now, it is the Right that uses
this line of attack, for the simple reason that it is expedient,
rather than profound, and is designed not to illuminate, but rather
in the Orwellian fashion of abusing the language, to intimidate
and silence inquiry and criticism. It's a sad day when the American
Right acts as the thought police.

More
evidence of the collapse of American conservatism was highlighted
on the LRC blog where Professor Ralph Raico called attention to
Ann Coulter’s recent little chat. Professor Raico recounted the
scene:

“On
June 3, the columnist Ann Coulter addressed a Republican women's
club in Jacksonville, Florida (see Anthony Gancarski, "An
Evening with Ann Coulter"). In the course of her diatribe
… Coulter proclaimed that the Middle East is now ‘George Bush's
bitch.’ ‘Bitch’ in this sense is prison talk for the victim of homosexual
rape. There are probably some who get a frisson from hearing a woman
speak in this over the top, disgusting way. But, aside from that,
wasn't the idea to bring ‘democracy’ to Iraq and the rest of the
Middle East? How? By treating the whole of the region and tens of
millions of Arabs as the personal ‘bitch’ of the White House Half-Wit-in-Chief?
And speaking of this particular ‘bitch,’ … Republican ‘dignitaries’
paid up to $75 a piece to listen to her spout this stuff. Welcome
to the citadel of freedom and civilization, ‘conservative’ America
in the year 2003.”

How
generous of Ms. Coulter – last known for describing Messrs.
Goldberg and company as "girly boys" – to let us
in on the obvious, which is, the “liberation” of Iraq is, as Professor
Raico pointed out, a semantic fraud, as all Iraqis now, as before,
live under an absolute military dictatorship. George W. Bush is
the latest dictator of Iraq, the Arab socialist Ba’ath Party has
been supplanted by the military socialism of Bush’s own war party,
and Saddam’s Republican Guard has been replaced by the Republican
Party’s bodyguard of lies.

Once
upon a time, conservatives praised the dreary era of the 50s and
Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Now their cultural role
models might be the welfare state’s urban war zones and prisons.
Somehow, the thought intrudes that the “culture” inside prisons
or the urban blight created by the welfare state is not the civilization
that conservatives are supposed to be defending.

What
the neocons like Coulter, Goldberg, and the rest fail to see, is
that assault may be an appropriate metaphor for what their fellow
statists have done to Americans over the decades. And neoconservatives
continue the job. Thanks to the work of deception and smear from
the likes of Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg, and their power mad clones
throughout politics and the media, we all are victims now. Of the
warfare state and the welfare state. And of the central planners
who now reside so comfortably within the pages of National Review
and the other print and broadcast outlets of the official conservative
movement who, instead of working to restrain the state’s voracious
appetite for destruction, tirelessly urge it onwards with flippant
comments about flooding cities, drowning millions, and obliterating
Mecca with a US nuclear attack.

They
and the Left represent a criminal attack. They reduce the citizen
and the middle class as a whole into a statist hierarchy of humiliation
and subjugation; of domination of the strong over the weak. Conservatives
once would have been embarrassed at the disparity of power demonstrated
by the easy conquest of a poor, weak country by the greatest military
empire in history, and questioned the claims of what just occurred.
The neocons and the other state apologists, on the other hand, revel
in the demonstration of power. In any fight, they cheer on the bully.

The
Associated Press recently published an early calculation of civilians
killed by the invasion of Iraq based on records from 60 of Iraq’s
124 hospitals. At least 3,240 people were killed, including 1,896
in Baghdad alone.

Maybe
among these Iraqi’s murdered by the connivance of conservatives
the likes of Jonah Goldberg and Ann Coulter, was the future Arab
Thomas Jefferson the neocons claim to desire. We’ll never know.
We do know they were children of God.

The
official conservative movement has degenerated into a gang of thugs.
They revel in death and destruction, drifting along towards nihilism
in their convoluted defence of the legitimacy of the neocon program
of total and perpetual domestic and foreign war.

Paleolibertarians
realize that the greatest threat to the principles of the West,
and especially the social achievements of the West, is that monster
that entrances the Left and neoconservatives with its myths and
lies, the state itself. Its wars, its taxation and welfare statism,
and its corruption of language, and of people.

June
16, 2003

Adam
Young [send him mail] writes
from Ontario, Canada.

This
commitment to liberty cost Flynn much, both financially and professionally.
In his life, Flynn would find himself blacklisted, first by the
Progressive-Left, then later by the Buckleyized/Trotskyized New
Right. But this persecution only seemed to clarify his insights
and commitment to liberty, much as similar blacklisting did to Ludwig
von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Gregory Pavlik, the editor of
Forgotten
Lessons, a book of essays by John T. Flynn, summed up his
career: “When Flynn died in 1964 he was an outcast from both the
then-fashionable varieties of liberalism and conservatism. His life
was a testament to his character – he refused to compromise his
deepest convictions for the affection of trendy demagogues of any
political stripe.”

John
Thomas Flynn was born in 1882 in Washington, D.C., into a middle
class old Irish Catholic family, and went to school in New York
City. During his formative years, the ramifications of the Spanish-American
War created in him a life-long opposition to imperialism, whether
European or American. He entered Georgetown to study law, but was
irresistibly drawn towards a career in journalism. After serving
as the editor of papers in New Haven and New York, he began a career
as a freelance writer, focusing on political influence and corruption
on Wall Street. In particular, he later worked as the chief researcher
for the Nye Committee of the U.S. Senate investigating the role
of New York banks and the munitions industry (the putative military-industrial
complex “merchants of death”) in involving the United States in
World War I. Although a staunch supporter of a free economy, Flynn
was also a populist, and viewed the rich and powerful as conspirators
for war and preparations for war against the interests of the middle
and lower classes.

Flynn
was a critic of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and of Roosevelt’s motives
and personality traits virtually from the start, viewing the entire
program as a copy of Mussolini’s Fascist State corporatism. Key
to Flynn’s critique of New Dealism was the similarity between the
Code Authorities of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration,
and Mussolini’s state-supervised industrial cartels. Flynn observed
and documented in his critique that many American intellectuals,
politicians, and businessmen greatly admired Mussolini and his policies.

It
was Benito Mussolini, after all, who wrote “If the nineteenth century
was the century of the individual ([classical] liberalism implies
individualism),” then “this [the twentieth century] is the ‘collective’
century, and therefore the century of the State. …Fascism spells
government.”

In
response to Flynn’s unremitting criticisms of him, Roosevelt personally
wrote a letter to a magazine editor suggesting that Flynn “should
be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper,
monthly magazine, or national quarterly.” Shortly thereafter, Flynn
was fired from The New Republic and found it increasingly
difficult to find outlets for his work. The New Dealers’ inside
and outside the government had begun a smear campaign against all
critics of the New Deal, and of Roosevelt in particular, as Nazi
sympathizers.

In
the postwar period Flynn began a career as a staunch Old Right radio
commentator and authored several books. Unlike the so-called New
Right, Flynn remained an anti-interventionist during the Cold War,
opposing the Korean war and the creeping Vietnam quagmire, and predicted
that the Soviet leviathan would collapse on its own, as every Misesian
knows it did. At the age of 79, he ended his public career in 1960.
John T. Flynn died in 1964.

On
Roosevelt the Man:

He
had little interest in books. Friendly biographers say, as if it
were some sort of special genius, that what he knew he “absorbed
from others” rather than from books. However, one does not “absorb”
history or economics from others in chats. They must be patiently
studied over long periods out of the only sources that are available – the appropriate books. Miss Perkins, who knew him from his early
manhood up to his death, says he was not a student, that he knew
nothing of economics and that he admitted he had never read a book
on the subject. Edward J. Flynn, his campaign manager in the 1940
election and closely associated with him as a friend and as Secretary
of State of New York while he was governor, says he never saw him
reading a book. Three men who worked closely with him in the White
House and one of them previously in Albany, also say they never
saw him interested in a book, save an occasional detective story.

His
career as a lawyer was extremely sketchy. He began as a law clerk
with Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. Later a junior in that firm found
an old memo addressed to the office manager and signed by Mr. Ledyard
directing him “under no circumstances to put any serious piece of
litigation” in the hands of “young Mr. Roosevelt.”

At
this point Roosevelt could not be tagged as a man with any indispensable
qualifications in any field of life. He was 40 years old. He had
the reputation of being a snob. In the legislature, says his devoted
follower Frances Perkins “he didn’t like people very much … he
had a youthful lack of humility, a streak of selfrighteousness and
deafness to the hopes, fears and aspirations which are the common
lot.” Democrats like Bob Wagner and Al Smith and others “thought
him impossible and said so.”

…
some of his intimates [said] he was a complex character. There was
really nothing complex about Roosevelt. He was of a well-known type
found in every city and state in political life. He is the wellborn,
rich gentleman with a taste for public life, its importance and
honors, who finds for himself a post in the most corrupt political
machines, utters in campaigns and interviews the most pious platitudes
about public virtue while getting his own dividends out of public
corruption one way or another. In any case, they are a type in which
the loftiest sentiments and pretensions are combined with a rather
lowgrade political conscience.

Roosevelt
was a stamp collector all his life and like all stamp collectors
he got to know the location on the map of all the countries whose
stamps he owned. He loved to display this special knowledge. But
this simple and rudimentary subject of geography is not to be confused
with the far more formidable subject of European and Asiatic economic,
social and political movements. In setting all this down, I am not
accusing Roosevelt of being a wicked man because he was not a good
student, did not read books on economic or social science or law
or politics and knew less about foreign affairs than William Borah
or Herbert Hoover or Key Pittman or Carter Glass. I merely seek
to set the picture straight and to frame Mr. Roosevelt within the
more or less narrow limits which bound his intellectual energies
and interests.

However,
he did believe that he knew a great deal about these subjects, although
occasionally he admitted he did not understand financial and economic
questions too well. But he had a way of doing a little bragging
about his intellectual equipment, about which he was secretly a
little sensitive. For instance, he wore the purely honorary Phi
Beta Kappa key given him while he was governor by William Smith-Hobart
College, a girls’ school in New York State, leaving visitors to
suppose he had got it at Harvard. He used to tell a story about
how he humiliated a legal antagonist before a jury. The weakness
in the story was that it was an old courtroom joke told about lawyers
time out of mind, that he took credit for it personally and that
he had never tried a jury case in his life. Another time he explained
to Emil Ludwig some course he had just taken by saying he had learned
that technique “when he was a teacher” and his superior had taught
him how to handle pupils. Of course he had never been a teacher.
When he was President he told a room full of senators, all of whom
had gone through World War I while he was in civilian clothes, that
he had “seen more of war than any man in the room.” And in one of
his speeches when he was assuring the audience of his horror of
war, he explained it by the terrible things he had seen on the battlefield,
describing the regiment he had seen wiped out, the thousands of
young soldiers he had seen choked with blood in the mud of France,
although he had never been in a battle in his life. And though he
had never served in the Army or Navy, he got some local post to
make him a member of the American Legion, after which he went around
on occasion wearing a Legion cap.

In
the case of Roosevelt, with his somewhat easy approach to official
virtue, his weakness for snap judgments, his impulsive starts in
unconsidered directions, his vanity, his lack of a settled political
philosophy, his appetite for political power and his great capacity
as a mere politician, the Presidency became in his hands an instrument
of appalling consequences.

There
was a wide streak of egotism in Roosevelt which made it impossible
for him in some circumstances to perceive the fine line that divides
correct from improper conduct in public office particularly in so
exalted an office as the presidency. For instance, Roosevelt had
been all his life an ardent stamp collector…. When he became President
he found himself the actual head of the Post Office and of the Bureau
of Printing and Engraving. Very early in the game he got Jim Farley,
his Postmaster General, who knew nothing of this seemingly harmless
pastime, to get for him the imperforate first sheets (that is, sheets
minus the usual perforations) of a number of new stamp issues. Farley
got the sheets, paid face value for them, gave one sheet of each
issue to the President, one to Mrs. Roosevelt, one to Louis Howe
and a few others. Shortly after, an authority in the field called
on Farley and explained to him that these imperforate sheets were
great rarities, because so difficult to get, that they would have
immense commercial value and this was an act of dubious ethical
value. Farley assured him that the sheets would not get into commerce,
that they were merely given to the President for his personal collection,
etc. Shortly after a sheet turned up in Virginia. The man who had
warned Farley wrote to the owner and asked a price on it. He wanted
$20,000.

On
Roosevelt’s Monument:

There
remains an incident unique in national political history. It is
the singular story of the Roosevelt estate and the schemes he personally
managed to create a shrine for himself with government money and
funds extorted from federal officeholders. So far as I know our
political annals reveal no comparable example of personal vanity
completely unrestrained by any sense of shame.

Statues
are built by the hundreds to all grades of celebrities. But shrines
are reserved for those few whose records, strained through the sieve
of history, provide the evidences of greatness which merit this
extraordinary tribute. In good time the candidate for such honors
will have his claim recognized. The greatest of our shrines – Washington’s
home at Mount Vernon – was restored and is maintained by a private
group, the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association. After Jefferson’s death,
his estate was saved for his heirs by some friends and his home – Monticello – is operated by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation,
a private organization…. Franklin D. Roosevelt took no chances
on being neglected. He personally conceived the idea of a shrine
for himself, organized and promoted the movement himself and personally
pushed it through. And he did this long before the war – before
he had been enlarged by events and propaganda for good or evil into
a world figure.

The
idea took form in Roosevelt’s mind in 1938. By this time the depression
had returned to his doorstep. Over 11,000,000 people were unemployed.
He had just told Henry Morgenthau that the best course for them
was to rock along for the next two years on a two or three billion
dollar a year deficit and then go out of office, turn the mess over
to the Republicans and wait for the people to call them back to
power in 1944. It is incredible but true that it was at this moment
of frustration he should have cooked up this plan for a national
shrine for himself. He now conceived the plan of having built on
his Hyde Park estate a library and workshop which he would use as
his place of business when he left the White House. The next stage
in this scheme was to make it a “memorial library,” the funds for
which would be put up by the thousands of party workers who held
office in his administration. And so it turned out in this first
stage – a Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Library. He would give
the land out of his mother’s estate. The Democratic officeholders
would pay the bills to build and furnish it. As a “memorial library”
it would be exempt from taxation. And there he and his staff would
work, as later proposed, for Collier’s at $75,000 for himself, plus
three of four of his staff on the Collier’s payroll. All this was
managed by a committee to raise the money and complete the project
consisting of his law partner, Basil O’Connor, Joseph Schenck, later
sent to jail by the government, Ben Smith, a Wall Street operator
and several others. They raised $400,000 from those elements of
the “common man” who held Democratic jobs.

By
the time it was finished the idea had expanded…. The United States,
through the National Archives, became the owner and maintainer of
the “library,” thus taking that burden off his hands. The “library”
was to house his papers and collection of ship models, etc., as
well as provide him with a completely free workshop for the rest
of his life and become a monument after his death.

If
Roosevelt in retreat, harried by the return of the depression in
1938, repudiated by the country on the Court fight and by his party
in the purge fight and faced with a grave revolt and split in his
party, could envisage himself as the only American president to
have a government-built and supported shrine, to what dimensions
would the emanations of his ego swell after America got into the
war, when, like a Roman emperor, he was throwing around unimaginable
billions all over the world, when ministers, kings, dictators and
emperors from everywhere were covering him with flattery as they
begged millions at his hands?

By
the end of 1943, flattery, applause, sycophancy had literally rotted
the nature of Franklin Roosevelt. In December of that year he decided,
like an Egyptian Pharaoh, to transform his home into a great historic
shrine – a Yankee pyramid – where his family might live in a kind
of imperial dignity, where he might retire if he survived the war
as a kind of World Elder Statesman and Dictator Emeritus, and where
he would be entombed. In December, 1943, he deeded to the government
“as a national historic site” his Hyde Park estate, with the proviso
that he and the members of his family would have the right to live
in it as long as they lived…. Secretary Ickes asked Congress for
$50,000 a year for maintenance of the estate. An admission fee is
now charged and it is estimated that the maintenance cost will be
around $100,000 a year.

Thus
Roosevelt is not merely the only president whose home and grave
are maintained by the government as a national shrine, but the government
was doing this even before he passed away and all in accordance
with a project he thought up all by himself and put over before
he died.

On
the New Deal:

… as those around him at the time have testified, he showed not
the least concern about doing anything to arrest the onset of the
panic. What he wanted was a complete crash. He wished for the panic
to sweep on to a total banking disaster. He wished for the public
to see his predecessor [Herbert Hoover] go out in a scene of utter
ruin, thus setting the stage for him to step upon it as the savior
who would rebuild from the very bottom.

[H]e
accepted his high office as one taking over the command of an army
– an army organized for attack. He would recommend measures “that
a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.”
But – ah, but! – if Congress should fail to go along with him –
“I-shall-not-evade-the-clear-course-of-duty-that-will-confront-me.”
There was an ominous accent of the resolute captain on every word.
He would ask for the one remaining instrument – a grant from Congress
of “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as
great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded
by a foreign foe.”

It
can be truly said that the nation responded to the ringing utterance
of the inaugural address. Congress was prepared to go along in an
extraordinary effort. Partisanship sank to its smallest dimensions.
Everywhere the new President was hailed with unprecedented applause.
In spots the acclaim rose to almost hysterical strains. Rabbi Rosenblum
said we see in him a Godlike messenger, the darling of destiny,
the Messiah of America’s tomorrow. Next morning the New York Times
carried only a single frontpage story that had no connection with
the inauguration. It had to do with another of those Messiahs of
tomorrow. The headline read: VICTORY FOR HITLER EXPECTED TODAY –
Repression of Opponents Makes Election Triumph inevitable.

Roosevelt,
once he got into power, began, in complete violation of his Number
One pledge [to decrease government spending], to spend money like
a drunken sailor and then to promise the earth and the fullness
thereof. He asked nothing of the people but that they vote for him.

In
the Agricultural Department a vast bureau was set up with a wilderness
of checkwriting machines and amidst thundering mechanical noises,
was pouring out a flood of checks to farmers in return for killing
their stock, plowing back crops and burning grain in their fields.

[E]ach
day Morgenthau and Roosevelt met, with Jesse Jones, head of the
RFC, present, to fix the price of gold. They gathered around Roosevelt’s
bed in the morning as he ate his eggs. Then “HennyPenny” and Roosevelt
decided the price of gold for that day. One day they wished to raise
the price. Roosevelt settled the point. Make it 21 cents, he ruled.
That is a lucky number – three times seven. And so it was done.
That night Morgenthau wrote in his diary: “If people knew how we
fixed the price of gold they would be frightened.”

[The]
curious epidemic of grotesque notions sponsored by shallow and in
some cases dangerous men is, of course, not an unknown phenomenon.
When little men think about large problems the boundary between
the sound and the unsound is very thin and vague. And when some
idea is thrown out which corresponds with the deeply rooted yearnings
of great numbers of spiritually and economically troubled people
it spreads like a physical infection and rises in virulence with
the extent of the contagion. The spiritual and mental soil of the
masses near the bottom of the economic heap was perfect ground for
all these promisers of security and abundance. Roosevelt prospered
on that.

Actually
the one thing he did that was based on a very definite philosophy
was the program that consisted of the NRA and the AAA. This was
a plan to take the whole industrial and agricultural life of the
country under the wing of the government, organize it into vast
farm and industrial cartels, as they were called in Germany, corporatives
as they were called in Italy, and operate business and the farms
under plans made and carried out under the supervision of government.
This is the complete negation of [classical] liberalism. It is,
in fact, the essence of fascism. Fascism goes only one step further
and insists, logically, that this cannot be done by a democratic
government; that it can be done successfully only under a totalitarian
regime. Of course, Roosevelt did not know that he was indulging
in a fascist experiment because he did not know what fascism was.
In those days fascism was not defined as anti-Semitism. It was a
word used to describe the political system of Mussolini. Roosevelt
merely did something which at the moment seemed politically expedient
because it satisfied a vast mass of farmers and business men. He
never examined the fundamentals of it because that was not the way
his mind worked. The NRA did not fully satisfy the technocratic
groups represented by the Tugwells and their disciples in spite
of the many points of resemblance. The NRA left too much control
in the hands of business whereas they would have preferred to see
that control in the hands of the technicians – preferably the professors.
As for the Reds, they did not move in heavily until the second term
and not en masse until the third term, although the entering wedge
was made in the first. And then the point of entry was the labor
movement.

The
test of fascism is not one's rage against the Italian and German
war lords. The test is – how many of the essential principles of
fascism do you accept and to what extent are you prepared to apply
those fascist ideas to American social and economic life?

When
you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America
the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the
state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic
government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution
of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the
nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes
to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to
alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible
the unrestrained, absolute government – then you will know you have
located the authentic fascist.

But
let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that we are dealing by
this means with the problem of fascism. Fascism will come at the
hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler
and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present
economic system is washed up and that the present political system
in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this
country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the
affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management
of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great
national banker and investor, borrowing millions every year and
spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government
can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great
armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war
and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry;
and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning,
regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority
of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will
hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role
of a debating society. There is your fascist. And the sooner America
realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make
an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion
of democracy.

It
should be equally clear that all this is in no sense communism….
[A] reason for the confusion is the character of the men who are
authentic and honest New Dealers but who were not communists….
They began to flirt with the alluring pastime of reconstructing
the capitalist system. They became the architects of a new capitalist
system. And in the process of this new career they began to fashion
doctrines that turned out to be the principles of fascism. Of course
they do not call them fascism, although some of them frankly see
the resemblance. But they are not disturbed, because they know that
they will never burn books, they will never hound the Jews or the
Negroes, they will never resort to assassination and suppression.
What will turn up in their hands will be a very genteel and dainty
and pleasant form of fascism which cannot be called fascism at all
because it will be so virtuous and polite.

As
the year 1941 dawned, the experiments of Roosevelt had been under
observation for eight years. There can be no dispute as to the commission
he held from the people. He was not elected to substitute a new
system of government and economy, to set up a socialist or fascist
or communist system or any form of state-planned capitalism. His
promise was to restore conditions under which the American system
of free representative government and the free system of private
enterprise could function at its highest efficiency.

The
word “business” is well understood by our people. It refers to that
collection of great and small enterprises which produce goods and
services for the population. It does two things. It produces our
food, our clothes, our luxuries and necessities; it provides, also,
the jobs by which the people earn the income with which they can
purchase these things. As Roosevelt came into power one might have
supposed that business was some gigantic criminal conspiracy against
the welfare of the nation. He began with a sweeping attack upon
business and he kept it up until the war. Even during the war, in
such moments as he could give to the subject, he was making plans
for further assaults upon business.

On
Roosevelt and the War:

In
January, 1938, I talked with one of the President's most intimate
advisers. I asked him if the President knew we were in a depression.
He said that of course he did. I asked what the President proposed
to do. He answered:

“Resume
spending.” I then suggested he would find difficulty in getting
objects on which the federal government could spend. He said he
knew that. What, then, I asked, will the President spend on? He
laughed and replied in a single word:

“Battleships.”
I asked why. He said: “You know we are going to have a war.” And
when I asked whom we were going to fight he said “Japan” and when
I asked where and what about, he said “in South America.” “Well,”
I said, “you are moving logically there. If your only hope is spending
and the only thing you have to spend on is national defense, then
you have got to have an enemy to defend against and a war in prospect.”

Apparently
the best hope of a war at that moment for popular consumption was
with the Japanese, who had just sunk the Panay, and as there was
little chance of arousing the American people to fight around Japan,
South America seemed a more likely battleground to stimulate our
fears and emotions. There is nothing new about this. Kings and ministers
have toyed with this device for ages and convinced themselves they
were acting wisely and nobly.

Here
he was with a depression on his hands – eleven million men out of
work, the whole fabric of his policy in tatters, his promise only
a few months old to balance the budget still fresh in the minds
of the people and yet pressing the necessity, as he put it himself,
of spending two or three billion a year of deficit money and, most
serious of all, as he told Jim Farley, no way to spend it.

Here
now was a gift from the gods – and from the gods of war at
that. Here was the chance to spend. Here now was something the federal
government could really spend money on – military and naval
preparations.

On
The Roosevelt Myth:

[D]uring
the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt I was an active journalist
and as such very close to the events…. For most of the time I
wrote a daily column which appeared in a large number of American
newspapers, a weekly column in an American magazine of opinion and
I contributed to numerous national magazines literally hundreds
of articles dealing with these events.

As
to the … image projected upon the popular mind which came to be
known as Franklin D. Roosevelt [i]t is the author’s conviction that
this image did not at all correspond to the man himself and that
it is now time to correct the lineaments of this synthetic figure
created by highly intelligent propaganda, aided by mass illusion
and finally enlarged and elaborated out of all reason by the fierce
moral and mental disturbances of the war.

Part
of the Roosevelt legend is the concept of a fine old aristocratic
family that became the friend of the common man. It is unimportant,
perhaps, but it serves to illustrate the glittering crust of fable
which overlays this whole Roosevelt story.

In
the beginning, of course, was Roosevelt. And then came the Brain
Trust. After that we had the Great Man and the Brain Trust. The
casual reader may suppose this is just a catch collection of syllables.
But it is impossible to estimate the power these few words exercised
upon the minds of the American people. After all, a crowd of big
business boobies, a lot of butterfingered politicians, two big halls
full of shallow and stupid congressmen and senators had made a mess
of America. That was the bill of goods sold to the American people.
Now amidst the ruins appeared not a mere politician, not a crowd
of tradesmen and bankers and congressmen, but a Great Man attended
by a Brain Trust to bring understanding first and then order out
of chaos.

After
the war in Europe got under way and Roosevelt began to assume the
role of friend not merely of the common man but of the whole human
race, after he began to finger tens of billions, after he finally
put on the shining armor of the plumed knight and lifted his great
sword against the forces of evil on the whole planet – then the
propaganda took on formidable proportions. The most powerful propaganda
agencies yet conceived by mankind are the radio and the moving pictures.
Practically all of the radio networks and all of the moving picture
companies moved into the great task of pouring upon the minds of
the American people daily – indeed hourly, ceaselessly – the story
of the greatest American who ever lived, breathing fire and destruction
against his critics who were effectually silenced, while filling
the pockets of the people with billions of dollars of war money.
The radio was busy not only with commentators and news reporters,
but with crooners, actors, screen stars, soap opera, comedians,
fan dancers, monologists, putting over on the American mind not
only the greatness of our Leader but the infamy of his critics,
the nobility of his glamorous objectives and the sinister nature
of the scurvy plots of his political enemies. The people were sold
first the proposition that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the only man
who could keep us out of war; second that he was the only man who
could fight successfully the war which he alone could keep us out
of; and finally that he was the only man who was capable of facing
such leaders as Churchill and Stalin on equal terms and above all
the only man who could cope successfully with the ruthless Stalin
in the arrangements for the postwar world.

The
ordinary man did not realize that Hitler and Mussolini were made
to seem as brave, as strong, as wise and noble to the people of
Germany and Italy as Roosevelt was seen here. Hitler was not pictured
to the people of Germany as he was presented here. He was exhibited
in noble proportions and with most of those heroic virtues which
were attributed to Roosevelt here and to Mussolini in Italy and,
of course, to Stalin in Russia. I do not compare Roosevelt to Hitler.
I merely insist that the picture of Roosevelt sold to our people
and which still lingers upon the screen of their imaginations was
an utterly false picture, was the work of false propaganda and that,
among the evils against which America must protect herself one of
the most destructive is the evil of modern propaganda techniques
applied to the problem of government.

People
who supposed he wrote his own speeches acclaimed him as a great
orator. People who knew nothing of finance and economics extolled
him as a great economic statesman. But over and above this some
cunning techniques were industriously used to enhance the picture.
For instance, Mrs. Roosevelt took over the job of buttering the
press and radio reporters and commentators. They were hailed up
to Hyde Park for hamburger and hot dog picnics. They went swimming
in the pool with the Great Man. They were invited to the White House.
And, not to be overlooked, it was the simplest thing in the world
for them to find jobs in the New Deal for the members of their families.

Roosevelt
was built by propaganda, before the war on a small scale and after
the war upon an incredible scale, into a wholly fictitious character.

Conclusion:

The
quotes presented here are only a sampling of the wit and keen observations
made by John T. Flynn about that period in American history when
liberty almost died. Throughout his works, Flynn exposes Roosevelt’s
lack of principles, his lies and corruption and nepotism, the shocking
flippancy in his approach to social and economic issues, the turn
towards militarism to obscure the absolute failure of the New Deal
to "solve" the Depression, and punctures the myths surrounding
the whole sordid disaster for Americans and the world that was the
Roosevelt administration.

Today,
as America and the rest of the world faces a President and his advisors
as prone to deceit and statist “solutions” as FDR, libertarians
should follow the great example of John T. Flynn. In our pursuit
to defend and protect individual liberty, we should never cease
telling the truth about the nature and motivations of those who
seek to manipulate tragedies, at the expense of Americans and the
peoples of the rest of the world, for their own personal power,
success and privilege.

January
31, 2003

Adam
Young [send him mail] writes
from Ontario, Canada.

Just
as with the latter-day followers of Karl Marx, Lincoln apologists
ignore what he actually said and offer us what they presume he “really”
meant to say, but didn’t. Accordingly, due to the great mythology
surrounding Lincoln’s words and deeds, it would be appropriate to
quote him directly, to allow him to explain his motivations and
thoughts for himself.

Additional
quotes from others are also included to provide context.

On
Laissez-Faire:

“My
politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in
favor of a national bank … in favor of the internal improvements
system and a high protective tariff.” ~ Lincoln, Campaign Speech,
1832.

“[Free
trade is a system whereby] some have labored, and others have, without
labor, enjoyed a large portion of the fruits…. To secure to each
laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible,
is a most worthy object of any good government.”

“[International
trade] is demonstrably a dead loss of labor… labor being the true
standard of value.” ~ Lincoln, Feb. 15, 1861

“The
legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people
whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot
do so well, for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities.”

“I…
would continue (trade) where it is necessary, and discontinue it,
where it is not. As instance: I would continue commerce so far as
it is employed in bringing us coffee, and I would discontinue it
so far as it is employed in bringing us cotton goods.” This starkly
illustrates Lincoln’s dictatorial mentality. He will place his subjective
impressions over the decisions of individual consumers. Lincoln
proposed that he, rather than consumers, would determine which goods
and services would exist. This is Lincoln as amateur Soviet-style
central planner.

There
is a myth that Lincoln’s administration helped the development of
capitalism, but his own comments reveal his anti-free trade and
mercantilist statism.

On
Taxes:

“[I
cannot] tell the reason… [but high tariffs will] make everything
the farmers [buy] cheaper.”

“I
was an old Henry-Clay-Tariff Whig. In old times I made more speeches
on that subject than any other. I have not since changed my views.”
~ Lincoln, in a letter to Edward Wallace, Oct. 11 1859

“If
I do that, what would become of my revenue? I might as well shut
up housekeeping at once!” ~ Lincoln, in response to the suggestion
by the Virginian Commissioners to abandon the custom house of Fort
Sumter. Housekeeping is a euphemism for federal spending, in otherwords,
taxing consumers to subsidize special interests, or what we would
call today, corporate welfare.

“But
what am I to do in the meantime with those men at Montgomery [meaning
the Confederate constitutional convention]? Am I to let them go
on… [a]nd open Charleston, etc., as ports of entry, with their
ten-percent tariff. What, then, would become of my tariff?” ~ Lincoln
to Colonel John B. Baldwin, deputized by the Virginian Commissioners
to determine whether Lincoln would use force, April 4, 1861

Above
all else, Lincoln was a tax and spender, and loved the Union because
it would allow him to tax the South to spend on “internal improvements”
in the North.

On
the Constitution:

“Allow
the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem
it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever
he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose –
and you allow him to make war at pleasure…. If, today, he should
choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent
the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say
to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’ but he
will say to you ‘be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’ The provision
of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was
dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had
always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending
generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object.
This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all
Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution
that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression
upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our
President where kings have always stood.” ~ Representative
Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to his long-time law partner William
H. Herndon, denouncing the trickery of President Polk in provoking
the Mexican War of 1848. The claims of the current president in
regards to the alleged threat posed by Iraq are a fulfilment of
Lincoln’s warning about presidential despotism, which he later had
the leading hand in bringing about.

“The
power confided in me, will be used to hold, occupy, and possess
the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect
the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these
objects, there will be no invasion – no using of force against,
or among the people anywhere…. You can have no conflict, without
being yourselves the aggressors.” ~ Lincoln’s ultimatum to
the South: basically it states, pay tribute to the North or failure
to do so will be interpreted as a declaration of war, by the South,
against the North.

“A
union is made up of willing states.” ~ Wendell Philips, Abolitionist,
in a speech in New York, 1860.

“While
the people retain their virtue, and vigilance, no administration,
by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure
the government, in the short space of four years.” ~ Lincoln’s first
Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.

“You
will take possession by military force, of the printing establishments
of the New York World and Journal of Commerce… and prohibit any
further publication thereof… you are therefore commanded forthwith
to arrest and imprison in any fort or military prison in your command,
the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforesaid newspapers…
and you will hold the persons so arrested in close custody until
they can be brought to trial before a military commission.” ~ Order
from Lincoln to General John A. Dix, May 18, 1864, two examples
among many of newspapers shut down on Lincoln’s fiat, and the establishment
of his military dictatorship over the First Amendment.

“I
reiterate that the majority should rule.” ~ Lincoln, Feb. 14, 1861.
Said the 40%, sectional president.

“And
I do further proclaim, declare, and make known that whenever, in
any of the States of Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee,
Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, a
number of persons, not less than one-tenth in number of the votes
cast in such State at the Presidential election of the year A.D.
1860, each having taken oath [of loyalty to Lincoln and the Union]
aforesaid, and not having since violated it, and being a qualified
voter by the election law of the State existing immediately before
the so-called act of secession, and excluding all others, shall
reestablish a State government which shall be republican and in
nowise contravening said oath, such shall be recognized as the true
government of the State, and the State shall receive thereunder
the benefits of the constitutional provision which declares that
“the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union
a republican form of government and shall protect each of them against
invasion, and, on application of the legislature, or the EXECUTIVE
(when the legislature can not be convened), against domestic violence.”
~ Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, December
8 1863, demonstrating Lincoln’s unique definition of democracy,
which, generally believed, is rule by 51% or better. A republican-form
of government is generally believed to mean self-government, rather
than the imperial model of rule by conquerors and their native collaborators.
The emphasis on the State executive -the military governors –
is particularly notable, as the 10% Union Loyalists provided the
basis of Lincoln’s military dictatorship in the conquered States.

“Governments
are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent
of the governed.” ~ Declaration of Independence, 1776.

Through
thought and deed, Lincoln shows that his rhetoric at Gettysburg
was one hypocrisy after another from the mouth of the chief destroyer
of self-government and constitutional government throughout the
States.

On
Secession:

“…they
[the South] commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind.
They invented an ingenious sophism which, if conceded, was followed
by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete
destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is that any State of
the Union may consistently with the national Constitution, and therefore
lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the consent
of the Union or of any other State.” ~ Lincoln, in his Special Message
to Congress July 4 1861.

“Any
people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the
right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form
a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most
sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the
world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people
of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion
of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own
of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority
of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a
minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose
their movements.” ~ Lincoln January 12 1848, expressing the near-universally
held Jeffersonian principle, before Lincoln unilaterally destroyed
it, that no state could claim its inhabitants as its property.

“[I
am] determined . . . to sever ourselves from the union we so much
value rather than give up the rights of self-government . . . in
which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness.” ~ Thomas Jefferson,
author of the Declaration of Independence and a man whom Lincoln
himself considered “the most distinguished politician in our history.”

“…
a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, & as necessary
in the political world as storms in the physical … a medicine
necessary for the sound health of government.” ~ Thomas Jefferson,
in a letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787

“If
there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union… let
them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error
of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat
it.” ~ Thomas Jefferson, first Inaugural Address, 1801.

“If
any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation…
to a continuance in union… I have no hesitation in saying, ‘let
us separate.’” ~ Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to W. Crawford, June
20, 1816

“To
coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised….
Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which
makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself –
a government that can only exist by the sword? ~ Alexander Hamilton,
during the Constitutional Convention.

“The
Union, in any event, won’t be dissolved. We don’t want to dissolve
it, and if you attempt it, we won’t let you. With the purse and
sword, the army and navy and treasury in our hands and at our command,
you couldn’t do it…. We do not want to dissolve the Union; you
shall not.” ~ Lincoln, in a campaign speech in Galena, Illinois,
Aug. 1 1856.

“…
the right of a state to secede from the Union [has been] settled
forever by the highest tribunal – arms – that man can
resort to.” ~ Ulysses S. Grant’s theory of constitutional law. Organized
murder replaces reason.

“A
policy of violent opposition to secession is a policy of forced
association. As with all forms of forced association, the stronger
party will tend to exploit the weaker. Such is the case with the
master-slave relationship. Such is the case when a state is forced
to remain in the Union against its will. Both forms of forced association
are immoral.” ~ James Ostrowski ‘Was the Union Army’s Invasion of
the Confederate States a Lawful Act? An Analysis of President Lincoln’s
Legal Arguments Against Secession’ in Secession,
State, and Liberty.

“Even
though unionists have placed great stock in the Preamble, their
recitations rarely extend past the first 15 words… the presence
in the Preamble of the phrase, “We, the People of the United States”
was an accident! It originally read: ‘That the people of the States
of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New
York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North
Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia do ordain, declare and establish
the following constitution for the government of ourselves and our
posterity.’ It was amended, not for the purpose of submitting the
constitution to the people in the aggregate, but because the convention
could not tell, in advance, which States would ratify it.” James
Ostrowski ‘Was the Union Army’s Invasion of the Confederate States
a Lawful Act? An Analysis of President Lincoln’s Legal Arguments
Against Secession’ in Secession, State, and Liberty.

Lincoln’s
view of the Union as irrevocable and inescapable is both ahistorical
and immoral. His notion that the Union created the States is as
absurd as someone claiming a child fathered its own parents. The
federal government is not a partner in a marriage, but rather the
offspring of a marriage between the sovereign States.

On
Slavery:

“…
when they [slaveowners] remind us of their constitutional rights,
I acknowledge them, not grudgingly but fully and fairly; and I would
give them any legislation for the claiming of their fugitives.”
~ Lincoln, speaking in support of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

“…in
nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you…
I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that ‘I
have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution
of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful
right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.’ ”

“I
have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.” ~ Lincoln, speaking in regards to slavery and in support of a proposed
Thirteenth Amendment to explicitly guarantee slavery.

“Servile
labor disappeared because it could not stand the competition of
free labor; its profitability sealed [slavery's] doom in the market
economy.” ~ Ludwig von Mises, explaining why an institution that
had been a universal feature of all societies throughout recorded
history could finally be abolished by laissez-faire economic liberties,
which unfortunately, could not prevent politicians from stealing
the credit for it.

As
his own words demonstrate, Lincoln was willing to accomodate slavery.
As was shown in the taxation section above, it was only the tariff
that he would never compromise on.

On
Blacks:

“The
whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these
territories. We want them for the homes of free white people.” ~ Lincoln, on whether blacks – slave or free – should be
allowed in the new territories in the west, October 16, 1854.

“I,
as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong
having the superior position. I have never said anything to the
contrary.” ~ Lincoln, Aug. 21, 1858, in remarks stating his
belief that blacks were naturally inferior to whites, which was
a nearly universal belief on the part of whites in both the North
and South long before and long after the Civil War.

“Root,
hog, or die” ~ Lincoln’s suggestion to illiterate and propertyless
ex-slaves unprepared for freedom, Feb. 3, 1865.

“They
had better be set to digging their subsistence out of the ground.”
~ Lincoln in a War Department memo, April 16, 1863

“Send
them to Liberia, to their own native land.” ~ Lincoln, speaking
in favor of ethnic cleansing all blacks from the United States.

“I
cannot make it better known than it already is, that I favor colonization.”
~ Lincoln, in a message to Congress, December 1, 1862, supporting
deportation of all blacks from America.

“President
Lincoln may colonize himself if he choose, but it is an impertinent
act, on his part, to propose the getting rid of those who are as
good as himself.” ~ America’s preeminent immediate Abolitionist
and advocate of free trade, William Lloyd Garrison.

“[Lincoln]
had not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins.” ~ William Lloyd
Garrison.

The
comments shown here illustrate that abolition was not what motivated
Lincoln. The coldness in Lincoln’s remarks, the lack of thought
and preparation about the process of emancipation, and how the freedman
would cope without the necessary skills is readily apparent.

On
the Emancipation Proclamation:

“What
good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially
as we are now situated? I do not want to issue a document that the
whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s
bull against the comet! Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot
even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States?… Now, then,
tell me, if you please, what possible result of good would follow
the issuing of such a proclamation as you desire? Understand, I
raise no objections against it on legal or constitutional grounds;
for, as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, in time of war
I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue
the enemy; nor do I urge objections of a moral nature, in view of
possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South.
I view this matter as a practical war measure, to be decided on
according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the
suppression of the rebellion…. I will also concede that emancipation
would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by
something more than ambition…. Still, some additional strength
would be added in that way to the war, and then, unquestionably,
it would weaken the rebels by drawing off their laborers, which
is of great importance; but I am not so sure we could do much with
the blacks…. I think you should admit that we already have an
important principle to rally and unite the people, in the fact that
constitutional government is at stake. This is a fundamental idea.”
~ Lincoln’s reply to a Committee from Religious Denominations of
Chicago asking for a Proclamation of Emancipation, on Sept. 13,
1862. Less than four months later he would decree what he would
term a “war measure,” the Emancipation Proclamation, on Jan 1, 1863.

“It
had got to be midsummer, 1862. Things had gone on from bad to worse,
until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan
of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our
last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game. I now
determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy; and without
consultation with, or the knowledge of, the Cabinet, I prepared
the original draft of the proclamation, and, after much anxious
thought, called a Cabinet meeting upon the subject. This was the
last of July or the first part of the month of August, 1862. [The
exact date was July 22, 1862.]” ~ Lincoln, to the artist F.B. Carpenter,
Feb. 6 1864. Almost two months before his meeting with the Chicago
Committee. Ol’ Honest Abe, indeed.

“The
original proclamation has no… legal justification, except as a
military measure.” ~ Lincoln, in a letter to Treasury Secretary
Salmon P. Chase.

On
the War:

“My
paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not
either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without
freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing
some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about
slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to
save the Union.” ~ Letter to Horace Greeley, Editor of the New
York Tribune, August 22 1862. This more than anything else demonstrates
that Lincoln’s centralist superstitions derived from Daniel Webster
and Joseph Story about “the Union,” rather than the immorality of
slavery, were his motivations in plotting war. This letter also
contradicts Lincoln’s sentiment expressed in his first inaugural
address, that he had neither the “lawful right,” or the “inclination”
to abolish slavery.

“If
the lord would only give the United States [i.e., the North] an
excuse for a war with England, France, or Spain, that would be the
best means of reestablishing internal peace [by uniting Northern
opinion].” ~ Secretary of State William H. Seward, April 1, 1861

“The
Sumter expedition failed of its ostensible object, but it brought
about the Southern attack on that fort. The first gun fired there
effectively cleared the air… and placed Lincoln at the head of
the united people.” ~ Secretary of State Seward’s opinion about
Ft. Sumter.

“You
and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced
by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should
fail, and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation
is justified by the result.” ~ Lincoln to Gustavus Fox, in a letter
dated May 1 1865. The phrase ‘even if it should fail’ is a tip off
to Lincoln’s real motivations.

“President
Lincoln in deciding the Sumter question had adopted a simple but
effective policy. To use his own words, he determined to “send bread
to Anderson”; if the rebels fired on that, they would not be able
to convince the world that he had begun the civil war.” ~ The account
of John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln’s trusted confidential
secretaries.

“He
told me that the very first thing placed in his hands after his
inauguration was a letter from Major Anderson announcing the impossibility
of defending or relieving Sumter…. He himself conceived the idea,
and proposed sending supplies, without an attempt to reinforce giving
notice of the fact to Governor Pickens of S.C. The plan succeeded.
They attacked Sumter – it fell, and thus, did more service
than it otherwise could.” ~ Senator Orville H. Browning, Lincoln’s
close friend for twenty years, and staunch supporter of Lincoln’s
dictatorship, in his daily diary that Lincoln didn’t know he kept,
July 3, 1861.

If
the plan Lincoln refered to was to resupply Ft. Sumter, then that
plan failed, since the ships never approached the fort. But if the
plan was to get the South to fire first, then that plan succeeded.
Lincoln’s own words reveal his deceit, contrary to his claim the
next day in his message to Congress to have proceeded “without guile
and with pure purpose” in pursuit of a peaceful solution to the
crisis.

Northern
Editorials Against Him:

“…the
mask has been thrown off, and it is apparent that the people of
the principle seceding States are now for commercial independence.”
~  Boston Transcript newspaper, March 18 1861.

“Mr.
Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing
in the character of an aggressor.” ~ Providence Daily Post,
April 13 1861

“We
are to have civil war, if at all, because Abraham Lincoln loves
a [the Republican] party better than he loves his country…. [He]
clings to his party creed, and allows the nation to drift into the
whirlpool of destruction.” ~ The Providence Daily Post, April
13 1861

“If
this result follows – and follow civil war it must – the
memory of ABRAHAM LINCOLN and his infatuated advisors will only
be preserved with that of other destroyers to the scorned and execrated….
And if the historian who preserves the record of his fatal administration
needs any motto descriptive of the president who destroyed the institutions
which he swore to protect, it will probably be some such as this:
Here is the record of one who feared more to have it said that he
deserted his party than that he ruined the country, who had a greater
solicitude for his consistency as a partisan than for his wisdom
as a Statesman or his courage and virtue as a patriot, and who destroyed
by his weakness the fairest experiment of man in self-government
that the world ever witnessed.” ~ The American Standard,
New Jersey, April 12, 1861, the very day the South moved to reclaim
Fort Sumter.

“The
affair at Fort Sumter, it seems to us, has been planned as a means
by which the war feeling at the North should be intensified, and
the administration thus receive popular support for its policy….
If the armament which lay outside the harbor, while the fort was
being battered to pieces [the US ship The Harriet Lane, and seven
other reinforcement ships], had been designed for the relief of
Major Anderson, it certainly would have made a show of fulfilling
its mission. But it seems plain to us that no such design was had.
The administration, virtually, to use a homely illustration, stood
at Sumter like a boy with a chip on his shoulder, daring his antagonist
to knock it off. The Carolinians have knocked off the chip. War
is inaugurated, and the design of the administration accomplished.”
~ The Buffalo Daily Courier, April 16, 1861.

“We
have no doubt, and all the circumstances prove, that it was a cunningly
devised scheme, contrived with all due attention to scenic display
and intended to arouse, and, if possible, exasperate the northern
people against the South…. We venture to say a more gigantic conspiracy
against the principles of human liberty and freedom has never been
concocted. Who but a fiend could have thought of sacrificing the
gallant Major Anderson and his little band in order to carry out
a political game? Yet there he was compelled to stand for thirty-six
hours amid a torrent of fire and shell, while the fleet sent to
assist him, coolly looked at his flag of distress and moved not
to his assistance! Why did they not? Perhaps the archives in Washington
will yet tell the tale of this strange proceeding…. Pause then,
and consider before you endorse these mad men who are now, under
pretense of preserving the Union, doing the very thing that must
forever divide it. ~ The New York Evening Day-Book,
April 17, 1861.

Foreign
Editorials Against Him:

“Democracy
broke down, not when the Union ceased to be agreeable to all its
constituent States, but when it was upheld, like any other Empire,
by force of arms.” ~ The London Times.

“With
what pretence of fairness, it is said, can you Americans object
to the secession of the Southern States when your nation was founded
on secession from the British Empire?” ~ Cornhill Magazine
(London) 1861.

“The
struggle of today is on the one side for empire and on the other
for independence.” ~ Wigan Examiner (UK) May, 1861.

“The
Southerners are admired for everything but their slavery and that
their independence may be speedily acknowledged by France and England
is, we are convinced, the strong desire of the vast majority, not
only in England but throughout Europe.” ~ Liverpool Daily Post,
11 March 1862.

Conclusion:

As
the attorney and legal scholar, James Ostrowski commented, for Lincoln’s
actions and his creative interpretation of the Constitution to have
actually been legal, the Constitution would have had to state that:
1) No state may ever secede from the Union for any reason. 2) If
any State attempts to secede, the Federal Government shall invade
such State with sufficient military force to suppress the attempted
secession. 3) The federal government may coerce all states to provide
militias to suppress the seceding state. 4) After suppressing said
secession, the Federal Government shall rule said State by martial
law until such time as said State shall accept permanent federal
supremacy. 5) After suppressing said secession, the Federal Government
shall force said State to ratify a new constitutional amendment
which gives the Federal Government the right to police the states
whenever it believes those states are violating the rights of their
citizens. 6) The President may, of his own authority, suspend the
operation of the Bill of Rights and the writ of habeas corpus, in
a seceding or loyal state, if in his sole judgement, such is necessary
to preserve the Union.

Of
course, if the Constitution actually said this, it would never have
been approved by the legislatures of the sovereign States.

As
Lincoln himself stated, as well as commentators at the time, taxation
and secession were the issues, not slavery. And as many in the North
realized, it was Abraham Lincoln who schemed to launch the most
devastating war in American history.

October
12, 2002

Adam
Young [send him mail]
writes
from Ontario, Canada. Sources and Further Reading: The
Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an
Unnecessary War, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Reassessing
The Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline
of Freedom, ed. by John V. Denson, For
Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization,
by Charles Adams, The
Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, ed. by John V. Denson,
When
in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession,
by Charles Adams, and The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Complete.
1905 Edition.

Not
surprisingly, this evinced reactions ranging from appaluse, to disbelief,
to embarrassment, to cynicism. The statist chorus was given by war
veterans, such as Earl Murray, first vice commander of the American
Legion Post in Harlem, who declared it a “slap in the face” and
resurrected Clinton's draft dodger past as a criticism, “He had
his chance to serve his country, and he avoided it.” One New York
Democratic Congressman, Anthony Weiner, however, expressed his belief
in Clinton's sincerity, and predicted that “when Israel has had
its wars there have always been thousands of Americans that have
made alliyah to go participate in that war. Maybe Bill Clinton will
be one of them.” And an unnamed Republican Congressional aide added,
“He just wants to be loved. Is that so wrong?”

As
the Congressman pointed out there is a long history of foreigners
voluntarily joining other countries’ armed forces. Just a few examples
are, for instance, the nearly 3000 Americans who volunteered as
Stalinist pawns in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, as well as hundreds
of Canadians in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, to fight alongside
rapists and murderers in defense of the brutal second Spanish Republic.
Thousands of Canadians joined the Union invasion of the South, and
Canadians also joined the US invasion of Vietnam. Germans and other
Europeans fought in the American secession from Britain. And, of
course, a certain young American volunteered to fight for the Taliban.

But
not in all the hysteria over Clinton's newfound love affair with
personal combat has there been mention that his statement, like
his youthful draft dodging refusal to go off and murder innocent
Vietnamese civilians, was, at least, a moral and principled position.
Here he is, declaring to the world, his intention to voluntarily
commit his own property to a cause he deems just and right, even
though many conservatives ridiculed this as just another piece of
Clinton pandering and deception. If he is sincere, and Clinton may
not know himself, even know for sure, his statement raises the key
issue of our time, namely the coercive nature of statism, militarism,
and foreign intervention, and their denial of the citizen's self-determination
over his own life.

If
an individual decides he wants to leave his country and join the
armed forces of another, and he is accepted, by what right can anyone
restrain this person from acting? He has expressed his free will
to dispose of his property – his own life – in the way
he has decided he wants to. If he wants to fight and die for what
might or might not be a foolish cause, and no arguments can change
his mind once he has made it, it's his choice and his alone. This
type of foreign “interventionism” can at least be morally defended,
as it is based on the voluntary principle. And it is this same commitment
to voluntary means that defines the libertarian society against
the militaristic and totalitarian one.

In
contrast to the libertarian credo, are those conservatives who in
the wake of 9/11, instead of calling for renewed freedom, called
for Americans to surrender their rights and liberties and advocated
the totalitarian measures of conscription and economic stimulus
through inflation and increased military spending? In the face of
terrorism, many conservatives expressed sentiments that denied individual
self-determination and conflated the people and the country with
the state. 9/11 resurrected calls by the Buckleyites for their all-purpose
solution to every social problem: conscription (or what they call
“national service”).

The
moral character of the up-and-coming generation is deemed by them
to be less than those of the past? Conscription is the answer. Race
relations are bad? Conscription is the answer. High unemployment?
Conscription is the answer. Its not a little bit strange that those
who advocate conscription always argue that it's necessary in order
to train the younger generations to value freedom and be willing
to die to protect it. But conscription, militarism, and the general
statism that accompany them deny individual self-determination and
individual freedom, while at the same time providing a method for
more domestic looting of taxpayers and a means to intervene by force
around the world. Instead of as their fellow citizens, the statists
see Americans as the fodder and resources for their war machine,
and interpreted 9/11 to serve a new burst of domestic looting and
foreign meddling by the state.

In
contrast to the courageous form of voluntary intervening where the
individual volunteers to fight and die for a cause he believes in,
there is the cowardly example of the advocacy of war by many commentators
who will never see combat themselves, but who are content to see
others sent off to die by force. The looming invasion of Iraq, which
seems to barrel down the tracks without reason or debate, is yet
another example of cowardice at work. Those who never would voluntarily
fight their war themselves call for American men and women, with
the looted property of the American taxpayer to fund the enterprise,
to have no choice in the matter of war and peace. The war party,
as Justin Raimondo calls them, believe they can bomb foreigners
into freedom, while at the same time restricting American freedoms
and property rights. In the spirit of this subordination of the
individual to the state was all the talk of the “traitor” John Lindh,
who did nothing more than emigrate to another land and wound up
fighting in its government's army. But when Bill Clinton expressed
a desire to do the exact same thing in Israel, his statement was
met with rapturous applause, rather than accusations of treason.

Everyday
since 9/11, the neoconservative mantra has been that everything
has changed. But have things changed so much that the conservatives
we libertarians thought of as our allies would take such statist
positions that they make Bill Clinton look like a defender of individual
liberties and common sense?

August
9, 2002

Adam
Young [send him mail]
is studying computer science in Ontario, Canada. His
articles have appeared in Ideas on Liberty, Mises.org, LewRockwell.com,
and The Free Market.

by Adam Young

On March 2 it was revealed that for years the government of Canada has been randomly opening the incoming mail of Canadian citizens and copying the contents into a central database – all in the name of fighting illegal immigration. At Canada Post's facilities all across the country, federal agents routinely open letters and parcels originating from other countries that weigh more than 30 grams (1.06 ounces) in the battle against people smuggling and "international criminals."

Customs officials regularly pass along the information they find to other government departments. In some cases customs will confiscate documents and send them to other departments; in others, documents are merely copied and sent along, while the original mail continues on to the addressee. Officers are not required to obtain any warrant before opening and photocopying the material.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) has created a centralized database that catalogs the documents and information passed along by customs; the database can be accessed by Immigration officials all across the country.

Customs Canada officials have admitted that they open packages randomly as they come into the country, and Citizenship and Immigration officials have also admitted that they routinely receive documents from customs inspectors, but continue to claim that the measures are needed to police migration into Canada.

Canada's federal privacy commissioner, George Radwanski, criticized Canada Customs and has now launched an investigation into the way the mail is being "inspected." "Opening people's mail, particularly on a large scale without benefit of a warrant, is not a good or attractive thing." said Radwanski.

To most people, his response should be striking because of what it is missing: namely, a flat-out statement that this sort of activity by government agents is illegal. Sadly, in Canada, it is not. In 1992, the government gave itself the legal approval to open mail at all border and customs checkpoints. It may not be a good thing, or an attractive thing, but in Canada it is a perfectly legal thing.

The federal department of immigration was given the authority to begin collecting such information in a barely-publicized amendment to the Customs Act, which was passed by Parliament in 1992 in a favorite tool of politicians – an omnibus bill. Before 1992 Customs could only seize goods if it suspected their transportation was a violation of the Customs Act. With the new amendment Customs Canada inspectors are authorized to open mail that weighs more than 30 grams without a warrant and are permitted to seize goods, including parcels and packages, if a customs officer suspects a violation of "any Act of Parliament."

This little-known – at least until now – legislative change authorizes Canada Customs officers to act as agents for the intelligence branch of Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) in its business of identifying, intercepting, seizing and/or copying "suspect" mail or courier packages.

A training manual for immigration intelligence officers who record the details of "inspections" explains that the objective is "the creation of a national database relative to documentation being sent in the mails or by courier services internationally." This training manual, which was released with several sections censored, was obtained by Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer, using the Access to Information Act. The 24-page manual instructs them to record the names, birthdates, family information, destinations, travel histories, and to describe any other documents seized. If a package contains travel documents, it recommends recording airline tickets, baggage tags and seat numbers. The manual also says that the database is scheduled to be upgraded with digital scanning capabilities, allowing officials to enter photographs and text images.

Clearly Marked?

Canada Post claims that any letters and packages that have been opened are clearly marked so the recipients know their contents have been inspected. But some immigration lawyers say that they've suspected for a long time that their mail was being opened without notice. Several immigration lawyers from across Canada say they have discovered their mail – especially correspondence with clients – had been opened, and some say that they believe they are being targeted by Immigration Canada. They insist they were never told that their mail was being opened, whether information was kept or copied, or why.

Kurland believes his mail has been opened regularly for years. He says his mail has been opened so frequently that his colleagues would usually gather around him to see how his latest packages had been stamped or repackaged. "We don't let the government tap our phones without permission from a court. Why should it be any different with the mail?" Kurland asked. He said that there is nothing to stop Citizenship and Immigration from expanding their interception of letters to any group of Canadians. "This is not about immigrants; they can open the mail of all sorts of people. How do they choose whose mail to open? Who knows?"

Another immigration lawyer from Montreal said that once when she inquired about a late courier package she was told by customs that they made random checks of mail and photocopied any documents involving immigration or tax issues and then sent them on to the appropriate federal department.

A Vancouver immigration lawyer, Elizabeth Bryson, said that mail from the same client was held up on twice when it was opened by customs officials. On the second occasion the package of letters, applications, photographs, and copies of documents was expressly marked as privileged and confidential communication between a client and a lawyer. She said she was told by a customs official that they opened mail based "on a roster to view documents" and did not target her or her client specifically.

"From what they say, it seems they are on fishing expeditions in the hope of finding something," Ms. Bryson remarked. "How can I promise my clients confidentiality if there is a government agency, without any reasonable basis, that is opening my correspondence?"

"I'm not 100 percent sure what this has to do with [people] smuggling at all, because the documents are being sent to people in Canada," said Joyce Yedid, a Montreal lawyer whose own clients' documents have gone missing or arrived unsealed. "They're not being sent for any other purpose, so I don't see the connection. This is a non sequitur." Ms. Yedid also said that mail addressed to her at her law office had also been opened.

Yedid mentioned years of frustration trying to determine who intercepted her clients' mail and where it went. She also questioned the legality of the whole procedure. "My clients have told me that some of these envelopes were clearly marked as being covered by solicitor-client privilege," she said. "To the best of my knowledge, they have no right to open these things."

The Immigration Act allows officials to seize documents at ports of entry such as airports or harbor ports. But with the release even of the censored version, the intelligence manual acknowledges what immigration lawyers have long suspected – that the federal government has been seizing personal mail and keeping it on file.

An Immigration Canada spokeswoman, Danielle Sarazin, admitted the department regularly receives documents seized by customs officials, but defended the whole practice with the claim that it was a necessary measure against the increasing frequency of document fraud and false refugee claims. "The whole purpose of seizing mail is to preserve program integrity," she said. "What we want to do is take fraudulent documents out of circulation. We also want to seize documents that can be used to effect the removal of people who should not be in Canada."

Questionable Packages

Sarazin went further and reassured Canadians that "Immigration knows what kinds of packages are questionable, so we'll share that information with Customs." She claimed that only immigration staff members with special clearance are allowed access to the central database and that CIC provides customs officers with the profiles of suspect pieces of mail. She could not, however, identify the precise criteria which Customs uses to seize immigration-related mail. She also said she didn't know if correspondence between clients and lawyers, or others, were kept by the Immigration Department, but she insisted that there is no attempt to interfere in or subvert the legal process.

The spokeswoman for the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, Colette Gentes-Hawn, said she couldn't comment specifically on the allegations made by the lawyers, but acknowledged that Customs regularly opens mail at random. "Most packages that are opened at the border are those that seem suspicious for one reason or another, but "we do enough of a plain random [search] so we know what's going on," she said. "No warrant is necessary and a report is filled out only if something illegal is found. Otherwise, the contents are repackaged and stamped opened by customs."

She said letter-sized envelopes weighing less than 30 grams usually go untouched, but that some larger ones are opened with an attempt to screen out contraband. "If the package is from Colombia, obviously that says something. If it's from France or Holland, there could be ecstasy in there."

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the cabinet minister responsible for Customs, the National Revenue Minister Martin Cauchon, couldn't explain to reporters why some mail was being copied and sent to other government departments. He walked away in the middle of an interview returning about five minutes later with an explanation. Cauchon said his agents refer the contents of packages to other government departments if they find any evidence of criminal activity.

This discovery of criminal activity follows the invasion of property required to make the "discovery" in the first place. One crime legitimizes another. Supposedly, Customs officers can open mail only if they "feel" that it might contain something illegal, like drugs, but the Act requires that officials have only "reasonable grounds" to believe the contents of a parcel "might" be illegal. Why then even bother to specify that only parcels above 30 grams are fair game?

Private-Sector Collection

For comparison, consider how the government treats the information that it controls with the way the government requires the private sector to treat its consumer information. On January 1, the act of governmental hypocrisy called the Personal Information and Electronic Documents Act became law. It requires airlines, telephone companies, banks, and other federally-regulated organizations to specifically ask customers for permission before taking down their personal information. They must also tell customers exactly why they need it and who will see it, and also ensure the information is protected.

This legislation allegedly establishes the right in Canada of protection of personal information. Except when it comes to mail apparently.

Originally created to instill consumer confidence in the security of electronic commercial transactions, the Act is so strict that an organization is forbidden to use personal information for anything other than the purpose originally specified. If the organization wants to use the data for something else, it has to ask permission again.

This Act sets up a system of policing to protect consumers from the dire consequences of junk mail. First, a person must take a complaint to the organization in question. If that doesn't work, then the complainant can write to the federal privacy commissioner, who then has an entire year to file a response report with his recommendations to the organization about what it should do. To make this recommendation, the privacy commissioner has the power to subpoena witnesses or obtain search warrants. From there, a person can decide to take the matter to Federal Court.

There is no dollar limit on the amount of the fines the court can impose on a business or institution.

Shouldn't all this apply to the state's vastly more pernicious collection and cataloging of data on its citizens?

One has to ask what is the greater threat to privacy: the latest AOL carpet bombing of North America or the state's confiscating your mail and copying the contents into a centralized state database.

Perhaps what is worst of all is that this invasion of privacy and confidentiality by the state was a one-day news story. Where is the outrage? This is just proof yet again of Canadians' timid and obedient submission to the dictates of political power.

Adam Young [send him mail] is studying computer science in Ontario, Canada. His articles have appeared in Ideas on Liberty, Mises.org, LewRockwell.com, and The Free Market. This article originally appeared in the August 2001 issue of Ideas on Liberty.

© 2001 LewRockwell.com

The Truth Needs Your Support Please make a donation to help us tell it, no matter what nefarious plans Leviathan has.

by Adam Young

On May 6, 2001, The New York Times published the results of a poll of 1,000 Germans conducted between April 25th and 26th by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. This survey found that 60% of Germans feel neither guilt nor responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust and that 80% believed that only a small minority of Germans are actually anti-Semitic. 45% flatly said they were fed up hearing about the crimes of National Socialism and are tired of being judged in relation to the Holocaust. 68% of the respondents said Germans could use a little more national pride, and while 61% agreed with the statement that one should not always poke around in the old wounds of the Nazi era, 85% agreed that discussions about the Third Reich remain necessary to learn from the past.

However, as the AP put it, "a full 46% said Nazism had not only bad but good sides, and 28% said Hitler would have been a great statesman had he not instigated World War II and the Holocaust."One can almost imagine the staff of the New York Times shaking their heads that these Germans just won't learn.

Yet, by the standards of the Left – the measurements of the Leftish world community who define "progress" and the inevitable u2018direction' of history – Adolf Hitler would've been deemed a "great statesman" had he died before he started the war (or had won it too). Its sometimes said that if Hitler had died in 1938, he would've been the greatest German who ever lived (if one chooses to measure greatness by the amount of land and number of people under one man's thumb).

For those Germans who believe Nazism had a good side, namely socialism/interventionism in the name of the common man, conclude this to be "good" because this same interventionism is the foundational principle of today's social morality. In the Nazi regime was present the same trends of political, economic and social interventionism and centralization that are lauded by today's social elites and are the object of all governments and political parties before and since.

Since the Germans surveyed are basing this belief on the pre-war Nazi era of 1933-1939, it would be helpful to take a closer look at this period. In the post-war Weimar Republic in order to counterbalance the Reichstag, the President of Germany was given broad powers – he was directly elected, could make treaties and alliances, was supreme commander of the armed forces, and could dissolve the Reichstag and submit any of its laws to a referendum, and under the infamous Article 48, he had the power to suspend civil and political liberties "in case of emergency." This was done in 1933 and remained the basis of Hitler's "legality" throughout the Nazi period when he succeeded Hindenburg as president in 1934. Hitler occupied both the Presidency and the Chancellorship and their powers were combined into the "office" of Fuhrer. The Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which transfered to the Cabinet the Reichstags' legislative functions.

Decrees abolished the states parliaments or diets, abolished their flags and symbols and reduced them to provincial status and mere administrative divisions of the central government. Where are efforts like this happening today one might ask? With the stabilization of the regime came the sprawling tentacles of the state octopus – an alphabet-soup of executive administrative agencies – 42 in all (which, by the way as of 1992, the United States government has 52 such executive agencies). And in addition to these 42 agencies were the regular Cabinet, the Secret Cabinet Council, the Reich Defense Council and its many working committees; the Ministry of Education, the Office of the Deputy Fuhrer, the Office of the Plenipotentiary of War Economy and the Office of the Plenipotentiary of Administration, the Office of the Delegate for the Four Year Plan, both a Ministry of Finance and a Ministry of Economics and so on and on and on. Where does this sound familiar?

In 1933 Germany had an estimated 6 million unemployed, and like his contemporaries in the capitals and governments of the world – and like so many politicians today – Hitler had little interest in economics and in fact was totally ignorant of economic theory. But, although economic centralization had to wait until political opponents and organized opposition was suppressed or liquidated, the Nazi's "New Deal" began almost immediately.

For instance, in October 1933, Hitler declared that "the ruin of the German peasant will be the ruin of the German people." New farm programs were instated along with propaganda about "Blut and Bloden." Hitler appointed as head of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture Walther Darre who in 1929 published a book "The Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race." Darre wished to "reform" the production and marketing of food and to raise prices for farmers. Darre's entire program was designed with one objective in mind: to insulate the peasant farmer from the market. To this end Darre issued the Hereditary Farm Law in 1933, which had the purpose of preventing forclosure on or the sale of farmland – at the expense of the peasant farmers liberty. This "law" established that only Aryan Germans who could prove the purity of their bloodline back to 1800 could own a farm. All farms up to 308 acres were declared hereditary estates – they could not be sold, divided, mortgaged or foreclosed on for debt. With the death of its present owner it would pass to his nearest male relative, who in turn was obligated to provide an income and education for his relatives. The peasant farmer was called a "bauer" or peasant, an "honored title" that he forfeited if he broke the "peasant honor code," that is, if he stopped farming.

To compliment this the Reich Food Estate was established to regulate the conditions and production of the farmers. Its vast bureacracy enforced regulations that touched all areas of the farmers life and his food production, processing and marketing, and was headed by Darre himself as "Reich Peasant Leader." The Reich Food Estate had two goals: to jack up agricultural prices and to make Germany "self-sufficient in food." Darre arbitrarily fixed the prices of agricultural products: within the first two years of the regime, wholesale prices rose 20 percent, and for cattle, vegetables and dairy products the rise was even steeper. But the farming sector is not exempt; the additional costs of these artificial prices were passed on to all consumers. Where is there a country in the world where public opinion doesn't support farm subsidies and regulatory controls?

For its first year the regime concentrated on a program of government grants of loan credit and stimulus bills for public works, such as road building and forrestation, and "targeted tax cuts" to enterprises that increased capital expenditure and increased their number of employees. But from 1934 onward, the implementation of the Wehrwirtschaft, or war economy, became the model, to which business and labor were subordinated and which was designed to function not just in time of war, but in the period before war began. The economy of total war was based on rearmament – the construction and maintenance of an enormous war machine, to which all of society was subordinated. To do this the regime resorted to inflation. Hjalmar Schacht, the Minister of Economics, printed Reichmarks, manipulated their official exchange value so that at one time it was estimated by contemporary economists to have 237 different official values, arranged barter deals with foreign governments, and invented financial instruments which were issued by the central bank and "guaranteed" by the government, and which were kept "off-budget" to pay for rearmament. German banks were required to accept them and they were discounted by the central bank. The Minister of Finance explained to Hitler that these were merely a way of "printing money." In 1936, Goering's Four Year Plan was inaugurated and which made Goering, almost as ignorant about economics as Hitler, Germany's economic dictator. In the drive for a total war economy, protectionism was decreed and autarchy the desire – the so-called "Battle of Production." Consumer imports were nearly eliminated, price and wage controls were enacted, vast state projects were built to manufacture raw materials. The bureacratization of the economy necessarily followed suit. Walther Funk, who replaced Walther Schacht as Minister of Economics in 1937, admitted that "official communications now make up more than one half of a German Manufacturer's entire correspondence" and that "Germany's export trade involves 40,000 separate transactions daily; yet for a single transaction as many as forty different forms must be filled out." Are there any doctors and physicians reading this who find it sounds familiar?

Businessmen and entrepreneurs were smothered by red tape, told by the state what they could produce and how much and at what price, burdened by taxation and forced to make "special contributions" to the party. Corporations below a capitalization of $40,000 were dissolved and the founding of any below a capitalization of $2,000,000 was forbidden, which wiped out a fifth of all German businesses. The cartelization of industry – which began before the Nazi regime – was made compulsory and the Ministry of Economics was empowered to form new compulsory cartels or to force firms to join existing ones. The maze of business and trade associations created to lobby the Weimar Republic for various considerations in the law, now under the Nazis were nationalized and made compulsory for all businesses. The Reich Economic Chamber was established on top of all these associations and consisted of seven national economic groups, twenty-three economic chambers, seventy chambers of handicrafts and one hundred chambers of industry and commerce. From these bureacracies, and the numerous offices and agencies of the Ministry of Economics and the Office of the Four Year Plan rained down a flood of decrees and laws, which in turn created for businesses the need on the one hand for lawyers and a legal department to understand these rules, and on the other, for a systematic regime of bribing officials.

Then in february 1935 all employment came under the exclusive control of government employment offices which determined who would work where and for how much. And on June 22, 1938, the Office of the Four Year Plan instituted guaranteed employment by conscripting labor. Every German worker was assigned a position from which he could not be released by the employer, nor could he switch jobs, without permission of the government employment office. Worker absenteeism was met with fines or imprisonment. All in the name of job security. A popular Nazi slogan at the time was "the Common Interest before Self!" Does all this sound familiar in any "western democracy" today?

And in his foreward to the 1936 German language edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes wrote: "The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire."

Social life too, was centralized by the Reich. Under the organization "Strength through Joy" the leisure time of the people was regimented. Recreational life – everything from chess and soccer clubs to bird watching to adult education, to the theatre, opera, and music concerts – no organized social, sport or recreational group was allowed to function without the oversight of the state. Besides the social costs of not trusting in people to be able to look after themselves, there were the enormous costs of this vast bureacracy that policed the private activites of the citizens.

Local traditions were attacked and eliminated, private firearms were outlawed and confiscated, and the amalgamation of the various Christian Churches and the elimination of Christian symbols from public places and schools was attempted. Education too came under central control under the Reich Minister of Education, which designed the curriculum, rewrote textbooks, and licensed teachers.

Last but not least, and perhaps the Nazis' true unspoken legacy, is their doctrine of collective guilt which is now so fashionable to deploy not only against the Germans themselves, but also against Catholics and against both Palestinians and Jews alike, and against Muslims and so many others. And which is the basis for the claim of reparations for black slavery, and has been most recently used against the Serbs as well as the Chinese. Collective guilt has returned as central state policy in relation to official victim groups and their alleged victimizers and has become the central feature of political ethics debates today.

Reinhardt Stiebler, president and co-founder of the Liberale Akademie Berlin, a German libertarian think-tank, commented on today's Germany: "… everyone assumes that all political questions are to be settled within political circles. Even the idea of providing private solutions to a problem is virtually unknown." He traces this to "the Enlightenment [which in Germany] was not so much an era when the idea of liberty was advanced but rather a time of Enlightened Absolutism. The idea was that we should have a brilliant leader and a highly educated bureaucratic class that would govern society with no egoistic intentions. This thinking, which survives to this day, eventually led to the political economy of the Third Reich."

In Germany, Britain, France, and the United States, amongst so many others, we still hear the same old calls for protectionism, for national development and "national policies," for price controls and wage and farm subsidies, greater central control over and funding for education, wealth redistributionism schemes and moral justifications, and the resolute maintenance of a war economy in peacetime. We see that what all these so-called progressive causes lead to is social waste, grief and mounting anger.

Ludwig von Mises reminded us in Human Action, and he would know, was that the Nazis used "Jewish" as a synonym for "capitalist." What these 46% of Germans who said that Nazism had not only bad but good sides – and indeed vast majorities in all nations – don't see is that it is these very same so-called good policies – which put "people before profits" – that inevitabily result in the drive to war and total control. The latter necessitates the former as the inevitable proposed remedy for economic decline and impending collapse.

It is unfortunate that the 85% of Germans who believe that it is necessary to learn from the past have not learned the true lessons. But what is even more tragic is that citizens of the countries that conquered the National Socialist German Workers "paradise" have also not learned those lessons from the past and are advocating the same Nazi ideas that lead to – and will lead to – so much evil: conscription, militarism and war, increasing centralization and government control of the economy and the private lives of all citizens, belligerent nationalism, ethnic demagoguery, foreign adventurism and occupation.

Adam Young [send him mail] is studying computer science in Ontario, Canada. His articles have appeared in Ideas on Liberty, Mises.org, LewRockwell.com, The Free Market and Pravda (Yes…THAT Pravda). Note: an earlier version of this article appeared in the September 2001 issue of The Free Market.

© 2001 LewRockwell.com

by Adam Young

The career of Juan Trippe and the rise of Pan-American Airways is an educating example of the nature of the "public-private partnership". Most do not know the story of how the legendary Pan Am grew into the world's largest airline by being a defacto private tax-funded branch of the United States government.

Named after his mother's Cuban stepfather, Juan Trippe began by cofounding Colonial Air Transport in 1925, with the sitting Governor of Connecticut, John Trumbull, and the aid of some of his Yale alums and the requisite government contacts. The United States Postal Office had that year been forced to give up its own monopoly on airmail by an act of Congress and it was in airmail contracts that Juan Trippe saw his big opportunity. The Post Office would now contract out routes to private carriers and pay a set amount of dollars per mile. Colonial Air secured the coveted and lucrative airmail route of New York to Boston, but before Colonial even had planes delivering that route, Trippe was already eyeing expansion, specifically the Key West to Havana route. Juan Trippe devised a plan to arrange a promotional flight in the only multi-engined plane then in the United States, a Fokker Trimotor and flew with its inventor, Antony Fokker, to Havana to impress then Cuban President Gerardo Machado. When he landed back in Florida, he had the landing privileges in Cuba securely in his pocket.

Back in New York the other partners in Colonial Air opposed Trippe's new push for the New York to Chicago route. Believing that this route was essential to the future of the company and to his own plans, Trippe attempted a boardroom coup and lost.

Undaunted and using his experience in winning one contract already, he called on his Yale friends again and formed a new company, the Aviation Corporation of America, and set his sights on winning the Key West to Havana route. But he soon discovered that he had two competitors: Pan American Airways, founded by Major Henry H. Arnold, and another company called Atlantic, Gulf and Caribbean Airways, Inc., which was a Wall Street funded company pieced out of the remains of a bankrupt Florida carrier.

Not one of these airlines was flying planes between Florida and Cuba – or any planes at all – but each had a piece of the whole that was needed for success. Trippe had the Cuban landing rights. "Hap" Arnold's outfit already had the contract for the route (without owning a single plane), and the Atlantic consortium had access to financing. It was the financier of the Atlantic consortium, Richard Hoyt, that engineered a deal. He assembled the directors of the three companies for a cruise on his yacht, along with Assistant Postmaster General Irving Glover, and in the spirit of the times, a solution was hit upon. The three competing firms would be coerced into one – or else.

Following orders, Trippe's Aviation Corporation of America merged with the Atlantic consortium, which was set up as the new holding company and took over Pan Am as its operating subsidiary. Trippe was named president and general manager of Pan Am and on October 19th, 1927, the new company finally began its Havana delivery. But by then, Trippe's eyes were already wandering. New routes were calling, and the only thing that stood in the way was the need for new legislation.

Juan Trippe was eyeing the airmail route for Mexico, the Caribbean and all of South America, but in all three areas there were already established carriers. Undeterred, Trippe looked to Washington for help. During his lobbying efforts, he approached an old fraternity brother, Alan Scaife, who introduced Trippe to Melville Kelly, the author of the Contract Air Mail Act of 1925, and who was now drafting the Foreign Air Mail Act of 1928. Trippe appointed himself the industry spokesman and worked with Congressman Kelly to work out the details of the bill. Included in the new Act were provisions that Juan Trippe would build his career on.

The Foreign Air Mail Act of 1928 gave the Postmaster General the power to grant routes to "the bidders that he shall find to be the lowest responsible bidders that can satisfactorily perform the service…." With the stroke of a pen, the Postmaster General could now toss out the lowest bidders solely on his own authority that they were not "responsible".

With this new instrument in his back pocket, Trippe eyed the route from Cuba to Puerto Rico and down the West Indies to South America. A small outfit called West Indian Aerial Express was already flying this route and could be expected to be given the US Mail contract. But Trippe now had something his rival bidders did not: a friendship with the Assistant Postmaster General, Irving Glover, who helped him win the Florida to Cuba route. Trippe indicated his desire to bid for the Puerto Rico route… and Irving Glover showed him West Indian's bid application.

Two weeks after submitting its bid, West Indian was turned down, and lacking a mail contract, soon went out of business. Its owner summed it up succinctly: "While we were developing an airline in the West Indies, our competitors had been busy on the much more important job of developing a lobby in Washington."

Integral to the developing Pan Am system was the two routes through Mexico. Under Mexican law only a Mexican company could deliver mail inside the country, but such a company already existed – the Compania Mexicana de Aviacion, although it was completely American -its founders, capital, pilots, and planes all originating from north of the Rio Grande. Trippe offered them a scheme to secure a US Mail contract, which would provide much needed revenue for the firm. Next, Trippe called on his old Yale chum Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, to lobby the President of Mexico, who was a friend of Whitney's.

The president of Compania Mexicana, George Rihl, agreed to a buyout. With this and the agreement of the Mexican President, Trippe would achieve his fait accompli. When in 1929, the Postmaster General solicited bids for the route to Mexico City, American bidders found the door to Mexico closed as George Rihl indicated he would only subcontract for Pan Am. Trippe entered the higgest bid possible under the law – two dollars a mile – and he was the only bidder that had the legal privilege to deliver mail in Mexico. With this contract Trippe now had his airmail monopoly over Central America and the Caribbean, controlling all US Mail routes between Panama and the Rio Grande River.

Juan Trippe next laid his eyes on the eastern coast of South America and its cities of Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, but a potential opponent was lying in wait – the New York, Rio and Buenos Aires Line, or NYRBA, which already held airmail contracts for the governments of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. But NYRBA was badly overextended after October 1929 – losing $400,000 a month operating its current routes. A US Mail contract would've saved the company, but Juan Trippe was in a position to make sure that would never happen.

The new Postmaster General, Walter Folger Brown, threw out the competive bidding process and split Latin American airmail routes between Pan Am and NYRBA. Needless to say, Trippe was determined to prevent this. In his view Pan Am should be the sole American overseas airline, arguing that its real competitors were the national airlines of Great Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands. All enjoyed lavish subsidies and state favors and were – as Britain's Imperial Airways was officially described – "the chosen instrument of the state."

To rig the system to produce his desired monopoly on overseas flights, Juan Trippe decided to use his connections in Washington to push the company into bankruptcy. George Rihl summarized the plan like this: "If we can keep the contract from being advertised for eight or nine months, I believe the NYRBA will disappear or make any kind of agreement we want." As 1930 rolled around and NYRBA was bled dry, Trippe offered NYRBA's investors a buyout of 33 cents on the dollar. The deal was concluded on August 19th. The next day, the Postmaster General solicited bids for NYRBA's routes. Pan Am was the only bidder and got them all. Trippe scorned his NYRBA adversaries: "They were nice young men who thought that they would like to run an international airline. But they really didn't know what it was all about." Maybe. Or maybe they were just honest businessmen.

So over the course of just three years, Juan Trippe had parlayed his Washington connections to grow a 90-mile route to Cuba into the world's largest carrier, with routes totaling 20,308 miles of airway in 20 countries. And on most of these the Post Office would pay 2 dollars a mile. Funded by taxation, Pan Am would sail through the Depression era.

Pan Am grew into a military contractor during World War II as Pan Am and Juan Trippe met up again with Pan Am's founder, now General Hap Arnold, the head of the U.S Air Force. Out of this wartime role would come the price-fixing scheme called the IATA. Even before the war was over, Trippe was at work building this post-war cartel, the International Air Transport Association. The cartel would unanimously fix fares, which the member's governments would then ratify and enforce. No matter which airline a passenger traveled on between countries, he would pay the exact same fare. Although Pan Am was the largest international airline in the world and in passenger miles carried more than its British, Dutch and French rivals combined, there was a problem. The terms of the IATA violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. No matter what he said, US officials refused to budge on concessions, so Trippe turned to the British government to run interference for him. The British were strong supporters of the IATA scheme and the United States government dropped its objections and accepted the IATA cartel. Juan Trippe won again and gave a new dimension to the u2018Special Relationship.'

But by the 1980's deregulation would pull the rug out from under Pan Am's comfortable privileged position, and beset by astronomical fuel prices in the late 70's and a crushing burden of debt service rates, Pan American Airways began shedding pounds and collapsed into liquidation at the end of 1991.

For six decades Pan Am dodged market competition through advantageous political connections and regulations, all the while imposing public expenses to serve private gain.

Adam Young [send him mail] is studying computer science in Ontario, Canada. His articles have appeared in Ideas on Liberty, Mises.org, LewRockwell.com, The Free Market and Pravda (Yes…THAT Pravda).

© 2001 LewRockwell.com

by Adam Young

On July 18th, PBS debuted their latest documentary, The Roman Empire in the First Century. While all-to-briefly detailing the events that lead up to the Civil Wars and Caesar crossing the Rubicon, the role of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, and the triumph of Augustus and his regime (which was barely sketched over. One would think this would've been a major focus of a 4 hour series – exactly how a single man managed to cloak his despotism in centuries old non-monarchical institutions), Rome is repeatedly described as the world's first superpower, which is an interesting unacknowledged commentary on the modern world. Halfway through the first two hours the intermission directed viewers to the PBS website, where one could try their hand as Roman Emperor against the whims of Fate.

To play the game you first choose to play either as the Emperor Tiberius or as Fate with the computer as your opponent. A series of situations are presented that will determine the Fate of Tiberius, regardless of which side you play. The outcome varies each time you play the game so you should choose your strategy based on how you expect the other side will react.

There are five possible outcomes to the game, no matter which side you play:

1. Tiberius Deified
2. Tiberius Successful
3. Mixed Blessing
4. Fate Tarnishes Tiberius
5. Fate Finishes Tiberius

All in all, I played 5 games as Tiberius. The first two I earned Mixed Blessings, the third I achieved my only Deification, and the final two Fate finished me off.

The first situation presents two choices that are essentially the same choices for the subsequent situations: Principled Leadership, or Ruthless Leadership. The first time I played I followed a carrot and stick strategy – a mixture of force and compromise depending on the situation. The second attempt I choose strickly carrots, the course of Principled Leadership, and I was killed by Sejanus after adopting him as my successor. The third game I deliberately choose the path of brutality and despotism – and was deified for my profile in courage. With Games 4 and 5, I sought to correct the choices I made in the previous games that led to setbacks, but Fate is a cruel mistress, and I was killed by Drusus, and again by Sejanus.

Beginnings:

The game opens with an overview of the situation. Tiberius is trying to secure the succession to Augustus' regime after having been named in Augustus' will as his successor, but his choice has not been met with overwhelming support. The Roman army of Germany is clamoring for Germanicus to succeed, and many of Rome's provincial legions have mutinied. There is also internal discontent, including rumers that Lucius Scribonius Libo may be plotting a revolt. Tiberius first must secure his role as Rome's emperor, then attempt to successfully navigate his way through all of the problems that Fate will place in his path.

As Tiberius, you are presented with the choice of what to do with Agrippa Postumus, your stepbrother and the grandson of Augustus by his daughter Julia. The first alternative is the route of Principled Leadership: To spare the life of Agrippa, reasoning that he may be satisifed simply to receive treatment consistent with his royal rank, while the choice of Ruthless Leadership anticipates that Agrippa will attempt to rally support to oppose Tiberius' rule.

In my third game, I was playing for keeps. Remembering that Augustus himself was deified, and that Tiberius was adopted but not biologically related to the now Divine Augustus, any direct descendent of his would pose a potent everpresent threat to my regime, I decided to exterminate any links to the previous regime.

Luck was with me and as it turns out Agrippa was indeed plotting against me, and Rome respects my shrewd handling of the situation. Fate shines on me.(Whether the evidence was true or manufactured isn't part of the game, and in any case lies become the true lesson of politics here, the coldblooded murder of a potential adversary being merely the means to an end. In real life, Agrippa Postumus was indeed murdered. Either by Tiberius or his mother Livia. Tiberius out of fear, Livia out of spite.)

Early Rivalries:

Next, Tiberius faces a potential conspiracy by the Roman nobleman Lucius Scribonius Libo. The two courses presented are to Bide Your Time; in order to gather evidence on Libo's plotting before going to the Senate, or to Have Libo Killed; to act swiftly by ordering the secret police to kill Libo and find evidence implicating him.

I decided to kill Libo. The secret police sneak into Libo's home in the middle of the night and assassinate Libo and foil his plot. They find among his papers plans to overthrow Tiberius. The Senate is satisfied that I acted properly, and Tiberius gains in popularity. (Ruthlessness and swiftness wins the day again. In the real world Tiberius in fact bided his time and had Libo tried for treason in the Senate, and he commited suicide before a verdict was rendered.)

Internal Issues:

The next situation deals with internal issues of the empire, specifically keeping the Roman people happy. Small bands of thieves roam the countryside and Tiberius must decide whether to build new military posts to suppliment the existing network of outposts. The new camps will close the distance between each base and should help to protect citizens from these roaming bands of thieves. Or, instead, I can choose to hold more gladitorial games in order to entertain and pacify the Roman citizenry.

I decide to construct new military posts throughout the country and to raise more troops to man the bases. I reasoned that not only will this increase the ability to punish raiders, but should the conquered lands rebel, forces can be more quickly deployed to put them down. Fate smiles on Tiberius as the timely construction of military posts provides the means to hunt down and exterminate these bands of men.

Questions of Economy:

Then I had to confront questions of economy. Tiberius must choose price fixing or land reform. Fixing prices makes the people happy, but could curtail production, while Land reform could alienate important Senators, and alter the existing social power structure. Reasoning that fixing prices will affect more individuals than the smaller number who would actually benefit from a grant of free land to farm, like all good politicians I placed my own short-term popularity over the long-term needs of the people, and choose to impose price controls on food. I decide to overrule property rights to favor my own popularity, and take the chance that famine will not result. I send my agents to the markets to insure the price standards are followed.

As usual, price controls have dried up the supply of food. There is not enough food to feed all of Rome's populace. There is great misery, and many starve. Many curse the name of Tiberius. Fate has turned against me. (It is strange that I would achieve eventual deification even though my actions deliberately caused many deaths amongst the people I am supposed to protect – -or so the fiction goes. Of course, as the tale of many dictators shows, this type of paternalism often leads to sacrificing innocents on behalf of their own aggrandizement and popularity. Maybe the real lesson of politics throughout history is that in order to save them, you must first destroy them. Just like that old Roman saying "They make a desert and call it peace.")

Dealing With the Provinces:

Moving on it seems the provinces are near a state of rebellion and they must be dealt with. Many in the outlying provinces have never been loyal, but what conquered people ever are. Some provinces are slipping towards outright revolt, and taxes often go uncollected. My alternatives are to either strengthen the armies in the provinces in the hope that the increased military presence will frighten the provincials back into obediance, or to act to quickly stamp out any potential revolt. I order my most conscientious general Germanicus to lead an army to punish both rebels and the towns harboring them. Fate returns to me. (The real Tiberius did indeed face a rebellion in the north, but by the legions in Pannonia and Germania, while Germanicus enacted a retributive campaign against the German tribes on the Rhine.)

Trouble With the Neighbors:

Now I'm having trouble with the neighbors. I have reports that marauding parties of Germans have crossed into Gaul plundering towns near the border and their king, Maroboduus, is threatening to invade. Unless something is done, the attacks will only increase and lead to a full-scale invasion and it's likely that other neighbors of Rome will take their cue from how this situation is resolved.

I'm given two choices. Personally lead the legions north and destroy Maroboduus and stamp out the German threat or I could lure Maroboduus into a trap. I decide it would be best to use deceit against Maroboduus, so I send an invitation for him to come to Rome to negotiate our differences. Once Maroboduus arrives, I plan on detaining and holding him until he agrees to my demands. I reason that a live hostage king is better than an occupied people, and this course of action will also allow me to remain in Rome so to more effectively deal with any uprisings elsewhere.

As it turns out, upon hearing about Maroboduus' capture, the Thracians invade nearby Roman territory, but because I stuck around in Rome with my home legions I quickly put down their attack. And I make significant progress with Fate.

Staying Alive:

The final situation I must face is staying alive. A politician never knows just how far he can trust his friends and family. Some time ago I turned to Sejanus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard, to handle internal issues. Over time Sejanus began to develop a popularity and following of his own. His birthday is celebrated throughout Rome and golden statues are erected in his honor. Many believe he will one day replace me.

So I am faced with two decisions. I can have Sejanus killed which will eliminate a potentially powerful adversary. However, Sejanus has been useful in dealing with my other real and imagined enemies in the past, and this course of action could backfire when Sejanus is no longer around to protect me. Or, on the other hand, I can eliminate Agrippina, the grandaughter of Augustus, and Drusus, her son by Germanicus, who are a potential dynastic threat and who also blame me (rightly) for the death under mysterious circumstances of the popular Germanicus.

I reason that as Commanders of the Praetorian Guard would not begin assasinating emperors for a few decades yet, that I can afford to deal with Sejanus later. I decide to spare him long enough to use him to eliminate the more immediate threat, and order Sejanus to arrange their demise. Now two potential adversaries are eliminated. Fate approves. (The real Agrippina and Drusus were indeed arrested. Agrippina was exiled to the same remote island where her mother was exiled and died, and starved herself to death. Drusus was imprisoned in a dungeon for years, finally starving to death.)

Conclusion:

Tiberius Deified! As a reward for a career of unrelenting lying, stealing and murder, Fate has deified Tiberius! Fate reports that Rome has done well under his leadership. The borders are safe and the empire continues. Historians will write that Tiberius was a solid leader and a good emperor.

Rome moves forward into a future enhanced by his leadership.

Although to today's mind, the deification of politicians looks childish and absurd, maybe it had a somewhat rational – if mistaken – basis. It appears that in the ancient world gods were worshipped because they were thought to be unpredictable forces, and only regular gifts and honors could win their favor, though even then one could never be absolutely sure. The Cult of the Emperors followed a familar pattern. Like gods, emperors were powerful, unpredictable beings, capable of both helping and hindering on a very large scale.

Is it really any different with contemporary politicians, who routinely covertly claim a myriad of mystical powers? They use statistics and bureaucracy to claim the carnival art of fortune telling and prophecy. They promise to distribute infinite gifts and favors to the public and their own cronies and claim they can insure against any calamity, and indeed that they can control the individual destinies of billions. Certainly politicians today are powerful, unpredictable beings, capable of both helping and hindering on a very, very large scale. Maybe the really true lesson of politics is the more ruthless you are in politics then the more you are applauded and deified by proxy. The more you lie and steal, the more you smear and corrupt, the more you will be excused and even justified and rationalized, and people will readily speak up to defend the bluring of the differences between private and public morality. Morality will be demoralized. The path to success in the politics of any age, it appears, is to pretend to be superhuman.

Some say that politics is the highest calling, but when you look into politics, the facts, rather than the myths, politics seems to be just organized killing. The old saying about power, that it corrupts, certainly is true. FDR, Stalin, Lincoln, and many other politicians large and minor, all were – and are – corrupted by the temptations to use their power to steal, coerce, and kill all in their own self-interest. The lesson of power is that being ruthless, often brutally so, works.

The lesson I learned from my stint as the fictional Tiberius is to rule for my own benefit. To seek my own security and popularity against the rights of others. To attack minorites in favor of the majority, even if it has disastrous results, and to isolate and eliminate individuals. To lie, cheat and steal. The lesson of politics, as we all know, is that it lives by the myth that what is good for the state is good for the people.

Although my fictional Tiberius was deified for his crimes, the real Tiberius was not so honored. The men of his time revolted against his methods and still held to a weakened – albeit still humane – sense of right and wrong; of innocence and guilt. Where is that sense today?

Adam Young [send him mail] is studying computer science in Ontario, Canada. His articles have appeared in Ideas on Liberty, Mises.org, LewRockwell.com, The Free Market and Pravda (Yes…THAT Pravda).

© 2001 LewRockwell.com

by Adam Young

During the 1950's how did the United States government plan to survive a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union? By sacrificing the people and imposing war socialism, of course.

In an issue of Time Magazine from August 10, 1992, Ted Gup reported on the then newly disclosed plans that the federal government had developed for salvaging the state in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States by the Soviet Union. Mr. Gup served 8 years as a investigative reporter for the Washington Post before joining Time Magazine in 1987, chronicling such stories as the trade in poached ivory, the spotted owl, and the plight of the West Virginia coalminer.

Perhaps reflecting the statist strain of thinking in the 1950's – or perhaps just that of Time Magazine – the story was introduced with this byline: "How times change. Though the Soviet Union is gone, Washington was once convinced that World War III could break out without warning… and in case of nuclear attack the U.S. government hoped to save the President and keep the country running by relying on … THE DOOMSDAY BLUEPRINTS." Unfortunately, if Doomsday had arrived, the idea of a President running the country would have followed the mass devastation and murder of a nuclear war with mass starvation and social extinction from central planning.

Mr. Gup reports that these doomsday plans have not been rendered obsolete even with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union; he writes: "Nor is it a matter only of remote historical interest. Many of these doomsday regulations would still be put into effect after a nuclear attack, and while preparations for rescuing America's leaders and cultural treasures remain in place, efforts to shield the civilian population were virtually abandoned decades ago."

The doomsday planners of the 50's envisioned a post-apocalyptic urban America largely in ruins and darkened under the breakdown of private-sector and governmental services and the imposition of martial law, food rationing, price controls, censorship and the curtailment of individual liberties. They also envisioned outright federal dictatorship, too. In a 1955 top-secret memo to advisors, then President Eisenhower wrote: "We would have to run this country as one big camp – severely regimented." What happens to a country and its people by being run as one big camp should have been uppermost in President Eisenhower's mind from his then relatively recent experience in Germany and Poland after the war. Later on, he asked "Who is going to bury the dead? Where would one find the tools? The organization to do it? We must not assume that we are going to handle these problems with calmness… We will be running soup kitchens – we are going to be taking care of a completely bewildered population. Government which goes on with some kind of continuity will be like a one-eyed man in the land of the blind." Yet this is the same government that was planning on taking over every major activity of society after the nuclear holocaust.

The estimated dead would run into the tens of millions, with the major cities of the United States in ruins or in ashes. But in addition to the millions of civilian casualties, would be another, more prominent casualty. The pretence of constitutional government. The Doomsday Blueprints were developed in the early and mid-50's during the Eisenhower administration and the doomsday central planners were charged with developing a vast and secret comprehensive plan with one single-minded mission – to save the federal government which would then preserve and restore law and order and prime the pump of the devastated economy. To achieve these ends, the doomsday planners labored to create a vast and secret doomsday bureaucracy shadowing their vast and secret master plan. Mr. Gup described their plan's effects with these words: "Confronted with the potential horrors of atomic warfare, they drafted detailed contingency plans and regulations that, while trying to save constitutional government, would have radically tranformed the U.S.'s political and social institutions." Indeed, no where in Mr. Gup's piece – and maybe in the Doomsday Blueprints themselves – is the State and local governments mentioned at all. Presumably they would be steamrolled over in Washington's – or rather the White House's – drive to impose war socialism on the ashes of American society.

The Doomsday Blueprints elaborated a comprehensive national survival plan developed by the President, the National Security Agency and various crisis agencies, most recently the Federal Emergency Management Agency and that encompassed every federal agency and department. The Blueprints were elaborated in a series of regulations – running into several hundred pages-called the Code of Emergency Federal Regulations. Action plans based on them were held by all agencies and duplicates were kept at each relocation site. The plans relied on redundancy. If one location was vaporized, others would take up the slack. Officials were divided into three squads – Alpha, Bravo and Charlie – and one team would remain at headquarters while the other two redeployed at other sites.

In pursuit of its plans, the United States government issued nearly 55 million wallet-sized instruction cards on what to do during an attack. Senior government officials were given a special emergency phone number to call in the event on an attack which bypassed the commercial phone networks and connected directly to crisis operators. Users had a secret codeword – "FLASH" – that indicated to the operators that the call was "essential to national survival." Kept with the President at all times were the Presidential Emergency Action Documents and "Plan D" – a summary of the new dictator's options for responding to the surprise attack – without a Congressional declaration of war, of course.

The doomsday planners secret bureaucracy planned and built a network of relocation sites for the federal government in a ring around the capitol that became known as the Federal Arc. Amongst these there were Raven Rock, code-named "Site R" – or the "Underground Pentagon" as it was more commonly called – a 81,000 sq.ft complex located near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Mount Weather, a 61,000 sq.ft mountain bunker near Berryville, Virginia, where the President and the Cabinet would be relocated, and which was code-named "High Point." The director of Mount Weather was given a simple commission directly from President Eisenhower: "I expect your people to save our government." Buried underneath the 5-star Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, was built the relocation center for the entire United States Congress. Built with its own replicas of the House and Senate chambers – and a vast hall for joint sessions of Congress – this site was code-named "Casper." Only a half dozen members of Congress at any one time knew it even existed. Of course, even the Federal Reserve Board had its own relocation site. A 43,000 sq. ft radiation-proof facility dug out of Culpeper, Virginia which was stocked with a 30-day supply of freeze-dried food to be served up on fine bone china. The facility was also equipped with a cold storage tunnel for bodies until they could be buried. (This facility was not mothballed until July 1992.)

Mount Weather was the primary relocation site for both the cabinet and other bureaucrats and became the de facto relocation site for the President himself. As such, the administration of Mount Weather tracked the men who were in direct line of Presidential succession. In the event of an attack the Cabinet Secretaries, the Supreme Court Justices and the President himself would be airlifted to this bunker. Once past "Bluegrass Tower" (the helipad control tower's code-name) and inside, the passengers were required to present special ID cards before they were cleared passed the 6-ft thick steel blast door. The facility was equipped with a series of radioactive sensors. If the government officals arrived after the attack each would be checked for radiation. Anyone radioactive would trigger alarms – a bell and a flashing light – either yellow or red, depending on the level of radioactivity detected. Decontamination showers and medicated soap awaited those exposed. Incinerators awaited their clothes and their bodies if they died. All occupants were issued military coveralls. The facility was equipped with a subterranean hospital, which would shuttle patients around in electric "ambulance" golf carts.

Following the President's lead to run the country as one large camp, the Mount Weather site would be ruthless. Except for the President and his successor, no individual was deemed to be indispensible. Patients with injuries which were considered to time or resource consuming to treat were to be flagged with a blue toe tag and left to die naturally. And thenafter, cremated. An armory was installed on site stocked with automatic rifles. The security forces in the bunker were instructed to shoot-to-kill to prevent unauthorized people from entering – even the family members of officials and local employees already in the bunker. Suspected saboteurs and any troublemakers were to be thrown outside – no matter what the radiation count was.

The bunker could house several thousand people, but only the President, the Cabinet Secretaries and the Supreme Court Justices had private quarters. Interesting how the Vice-President – the actual constitutional successor – is not mentioned (and it is also interesting to note how the executive and judicial branches were to be housed together, perhaps demonstrating how the Supreme Court's function has long since been as the legal sanctioner for Presidential aggrandizement). In case the ordeal of the attack resulted in mental breakdown, Mount Weather was equpped with a padded isolation cell – that soon was dubbed the "rubber room" – and sedatives and straitjackets.

Mount Weather was also equipped with an underground weather monitoring network that issued daily reports over the decades reporting wind direction and speed, trying to anticipate radiation dispersal patterns. And at the disposal of the President was a television studio which was prepared to provide the President or his newly-minted successor with the ability to annoy a national audience (or what would be left of it and its TV sets) using the Emergency Broadcast System.

And every year the gevernment conducted elaborate test drills with thousands of bureaucrats in mock nuclear strike exercises. As it happened it was during one of these annual drills where Eisenhower and the Cabinet were meeting in Mount Weather when he was presented with a note that the Soviet Union had just shot down a U-2 Spy Plane. (Eisenhower exclaimed: "I'll be a son of a bitch.") Several plans were hatched on how best to evacuate the President and the First Family from the White House. One proposal involved compensating for the total destruction of Washington, D.C. – including the Potomac River. Edward Beach, a Naval aide assigned to devise Eisenhower's escape route, early on realized the results should Washington be hit by a Soviet hydrogen bomb: "It would eliminate the Potomac River, but it would sure raise hell and dig a deep hole where Washington had been. We would have a deep lake there, so shelters in Washington would have been counterproductive. Even if you survived the blast, you'd probably drown." Accordingly, Mr. Beach's agency purchased a refurbished PT boat and docked it at the Washington Navy Yard on the Potomac River. When the time came, President Eisenhower would've been whisked from the White House in a special black Cadillac limosine retrofitted with a tank engine to meet up with the waiting PT boat at a pre-arranged meeting point on the River. Once safely beyond the blast zone, Ike would've been met by Secret Service agents and transported to one of three underground command posts. The PT boat, as well as the secret command post buried underneath Camp David, were secretly maintained by elite commandos under the innocuous sounding name the Naval Administrative Unit. (During one doomsday drill, a Presidential convoy to Mount Weather was halted on the narrow road by the sudden appearance of a farmer's truck loaded with pigs, which was forced to laboriously inch in reverse back up the road until it passed the entrance to the bunker. Such are the best laid plans of central planners overturned.)

One avoided boondoggle was the brief consideration of the idea for retrofitting a Polaris submarine to function as a mobile undersea presidential command post by removing the missile tubes. No doubt the planners scuttled the idea once they realized that the sub would then be useless for any possibility of supersecret presidential revenge sneak attacks on the Soviets from underneath the polar ice caps.

The main plan that was actually settled upon and implemented – and that was in effect until 1970 – was code-named Outpost Mission. In the mid-50's an elite unit of helicopter pilots and crewmen called the 2857th Test Squadron was organized and stationed at Olmsted U.S. Air Force Base in Pennsylvania, diguised as a search and rescue team. Stationed just outside the blast range of Washington, only the pilots and base commander knew their real purpose. When the time came the unit's helicopters would swoop in and whisk the President and other officials and family off the White House lawn and away to Mount Weather or another of the underground command posts, or to a heavily reinforced communications warship, the U.S.S. Northampton, lying off the east coast.

However, the plans called for the team to be prepared to extract the President in the event that Washington had been hit. Under the White House below the East Wing the Presidential White House bunker was constructed, complete with food, communications equipment and cutting torches. The 2857th Test Squadron's rescue plan involved stocking the helicopters with decontamination kits and crowbars and acetylene torches to cut through the walls of the underground Presidential bunker. The unit would fly test runs dressed in full gear – wearing dark blast visors to protect their eyes from the atomic flash, and dressed head-to-toe; boots, gloves, and rubber bodysuits saturated with lead – a total of 20 lbs per man. Extra radiation suits were included for the President and the First Family. In the event that the helicopter units couldn't penetrate the rubble to reach the bunker a backup unit stood ready with heavy equipment – including cranes – to extract the President. In the 1960's the squadron was moved to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware – a sure sign of the increase in the destructive yield of state weaponry – and was decommissioned entirely in 1970. Yet another sign that there would be no survivors – and no bunker left at all. Indeed, a 1962 Pentagon study tracked the day-and-nightime locations of the dozen men in line to the Presidential succession and all were well within the kill zone of a nuclear strike on Washington. The study found that with a 100-megaton weapon, any helicopter within 50 miles of the White House would be vaporized in flight.

One sceptical commentator about the ability of the government to work miracles was a government man himself. Bud Gallagher was a Strategic Air Command pilot and was Squadron Commander of Outpost Mission from 1958 to 1962 and three years later was appointed as director for Mount Weather – a post he held for 25 years. Gallagher was what was known as an "atomic-cloud sampler." In 52' and 53' he flew straight through 13 mushroom clouds to test the amount of radiation passing through his body. To do this, he was given a small X-ray plate coated in vaseline to swallow – to be removed with a string that hung out of his mouth. Commenting on the preparations he spent his life being a part of in Mount Weather and elsewhere, Mr. Gallagher stated:

"Through the years, we always reacted like we could handle an all-out nuclear attack. I don't think people – even our top people in government – have any idea of what a thousand multimegaton nuclear weapons on the U.S. would do. We'd be back in the Stone Age. It's unthinkable."

Yet these top government people believed they could work miracles. The same government that had just brought the human race to the brink of extinction. In 1956, Mr. Gallagher sat in the cockpit of his F-84 Thunderjet on the airstrip of Bentwaters Royal Air Force Base in England. Strapped under the plane was an atomic bomb. In the middle of the Suez crisis, Mr. Gallagher sat waiting for the order to launch, and the target was a Finnish airfield assumed to be one that the Soviets would otherwise use to launch a first strike. "I don't think people realize how close we were to nuclear war." he later said.

So, what would've happened? How did the Doomsday central planners envision their plans would unfold? What would the government do in its new blank slate utopia in the late 1950's after they dropped the big one?

DOOMSDAY

From coast-to-coast the top-secret Bomb Alarm inside Mount Weather would register impacts from nuclear strikes. The Bomb Alarm's network of sensors and copper pressure wires that crisscrossed the country and registered heat, light and pressure changes would display these changes on a giant map of the continental United States. Hundreds of tiny red light bulbs would light up to mark the sites of atomic impacts. Washington. New York City. Chicago. Los Angeles….

Once the attack commenced the Doomsday Blueprints would come into full effect. Before leaving the White House the President would have removed the executive orders from the vault, already signed and authorized long before, that would impose martial law.

Using the Emergency Broadcast System, recorded messages from both President Eisenhower and entertainer Arthur Godfrey would be broadcast to the people. The message would be stark: "The country has come under nuclear attack, but the government continues to function." In an attempt to sooth the psyche's of a shattered people, celebrity newsmen who agreed beforehand to accompany the President in retreat would lend their voices and names to the effort to calm the survivors, testifying to the heroism of the fourth estate.

Later the Presidential address would most likely inform the people on how the government was going to work to improve their quality of life through martial law, state planned production and rationing. And maybe that the American people have two-out-of-three branches of government still working for them, which isn't too bad. Options for a counterstrike would be decided upon almost immediately.

Atop the mountain of the Mount Weather bunker, remote cameras and radiation detectors would monitor the air. If destroyed in the attack backup portable units would be pushed outside the bunker and men from the security force would venture outside insulated in rubberized radiation suits to probe the air.

DOOMSDAY: PLUS ONE

From nuclear exile the surviving bureacracy would swing into motion. Publication and distribution to the public of the Emergency Federal Register would begin that would inform the survivors of the emergency laws and regulations now in effect, including martial law.

The Civil Service Commission would enact a regulation to designate government employees who are reported dead to be "on administrative leave until the reported date of death." The Post Office would announce that postage stamps would no longer be needed to send letters and postcards to the recently depopulated areas. Special delivery would be phased out except for medicines and surgical dressings.

The Treasury Department would order surviving banks to remain open during normal hours of business, but would confiscate property by imposing withdrawal limits "to prevent hoarding." The Treasury would move to oversee private-sector price and wage controls for rent and salaries. Following an agreement with private companies "in non-critical target areas," they would begin printing checks. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation would order surviving bank examiners to report at once to the nearest surviving Federal Reserve Bank "where they can assist in the reconstruction of the banking system."

DOOMSDAY: PLUS TWO

The Federal Reserve Governors from the safety of their Culpeper hideout would continue their function as the central counterfeiting agency. Deep inside the Fed's bunker forklift's would begin moving out a mountain of the governments stored worthless paper currency. Inside the Fed's vault sat tons of 5, 10, 50 and 100 dollar bills in shrinkwrapped packages forming a wall of pre-printed fiat money standing almost 9 ft tall. This gigantic vault still housed this wall of the governments currency into the late 1980's – ready at a moment's notice to prime the pump of the hollowed out post-nuclear economy.

The Federal Highway Administration would fan out to attempt to protect motorists from nuclear fallout. The Department of Agriculture would act to implement its national food-rationing program. Establishing decrees on what every person what be allowed to consume, each civilian would be restricted to a maximum caloric intake of 2,000 to 2,500 calories a day. Among the weekly rations for civilians were six eggs and 3 and a half quarts of milk. (Not mentioned is any plans for confiscating surplus food to facilitate rationing and "prevent hoarding," but this would seem, given everything else planned, a sure likelihood.)

The Department of Housing and Urban Development would enact its regulations to relocate and house the surviving population. These regulations were code-named "Asp," "Bear," "Cat" and "Dog." and contained elaborate plans for how HUD planned on housing millions of displaced Americans – defacto refugees. (Mr. Gup makes no mention of the possibility of resorting to forced labor to bury the dead or to build temporary housing for the survivors, but this would also seem like a likely eventuality.)

Long ago established regulations would come into effect for producing goods and services deemed to be vital to national survival. The upper management of major companies from their bunkers – where regularly updated company records were stored and rooms were available for the excutives and their families, along with dining halls, security vaults and radio-communications equipment – would put into effect their "unified emergency plans." Although private producers would be shackled with controls, the plans would prevent outright nationalization of surviving industry, but would subordinate private production to the production dictates of the doomsday bureacracy. What and in what amount and where it would be distributed and at what price would be determined by the state.

And coordinating all of the Doomsday Blueprints activities would be the Wartime Information Security Program, or WISP (as in Whisper) – the national censorship office. CBS Vice-President Theodore F. Koop agreed to act as the national censor with a staff of 40 civilian executives in a secure facility located well outside Washington and stocked with censorship manuals and regulation codes. The site was equipped with its own communications and broadcasting center. (Although the existence of the censorship office was exposed to the public in 1970 and the public was told that it had been shutdown, its duties were transferred to yet another arm of what an internal memo referred to as "the shadow government.")

Who would've thought that the government that came of age in the war against Hitler would end up having more Presidential bunkers – like the Fuhrer bunker where he met his own end – than Hitler could've ever dreamed of.

This enormous waste of resources, manpower and time. All the unknown lost potential that was destroyed by the statism that the Cold War so vividly represents. The absurdity of the government's assumptions and elaborate planning to treat people like cattle. And although some of the sites are being converted into document storage and office space and some procedures have been rendered obsolete, Mr. Gup winds up his cover story with an admonition from the doomsday planners themselves "that new dangers abound – nuclear proliferation, the resurgence of ethnic nationalism, and the renewed threat of terrorism – and that only the dead have seen the last of war." Obsolete bureaucracy's, as we all know, are only really productive in inventing new reasons for their own continued existence.

How different the 20th Century might have been if people – "the people" – had understood the arguments for peace and freedom. Sacrificing human liberty at the cost of state power has had only disastrous results. The antidote to war – and total war and the total war mentality – is liberty, not slavery. But of course this goes against the entire grain of statist thinking. The goal of the Doomsday Planners – like all central planners and bureaucracies – was the continued survival of the government and its rule over the survivors of the very same holocaust that it brought about. Violence and the destruction of property and human lives is unfortunately, something they understand all to well. The ways of bureaucracy and the even more perverse mentality of total war, which deliberately targets innocents in order to "demoralize" their will and ability to fight, only brings out the very worst in the human spirit.

Recently the musings of the United States government to provoke a third world war in 1952 by launching a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union – with or without the support of the NATO alliance – were revealed to the public in a new book The Hidden Hand by Richard J Aldrich, a Professor of Politics at Nottingham University; musings which simply speak for themselves. Revealed in it is the report of British Vice-Admiral Eric Longley-Cook that was so top secret that only six copies were produced. In it one US general was quoted as saying that the West could not afford to wait until Europe or even America was devastated by a nuclear holocaust. "We have a moral obligation to stop Russia's aggression by force, if necessary, rather than face the consequences of delay. We can afford to create a wilderness in Russia without serious repercussion on Western civilisation."

Adam Young [send him mail] is studying computer science in Ontario, Canada.

© 2001 LewRockwell.com

by Adam Young

Just prior to the second world war, the leftist author Nicolas Calas appealed for "more sadism amoung leftists," and advised "comrades, be cruel." That a communist would say this probably won't surprise many. The stories of the many crimes and atrocities perpetrated by Communist regimes is generally well-known, but what about state-sponsored cannibalism? Time Magazine ran such a story in its January 18th, 1993 issue, titled "Unspeakable Crimes," by Barbara Rudolph. In it is the testimony of a Chinese scholar that during Mao's "Cultural Revolution" local officials of the Chinese Communist Party exhorted their comrades to devour u2018class enemies.'

The details were revealed by Zheng Yi, a fugitive of the Tiananmen Square massacre and once China's most-celebrated young novelist (his first novel, The Maple, about the Cultural Revolution, was used by the Politburo to attack The Gang of Four). His third novel made him a celebrity in the China of the 80's and he and his wife both joined the pro-democracy movement. After the crackdown, his wife Bei Ming was imprisoned for 10 months and he went into hiding for nearly 3 years until both were able to successfully escape to Hong Kong and then onto the US.

Writing while on the run, Zheng Yi managed to write two books detailing the information that he had about state-sponsored cannibalism in the Guangxi Autonomous Region in southern China. Eventually the two manuscripts were smuggled out of China with the aid of Australian tourists. Managing to recover several reports and documents that were prepared in the mid-80's but covered up to spare exposing those involved who were then still in power in Guangxi, even though this ran counter to Deng Xiaoping's orders, designed to discredit Maoism, to publicize atrocities associated with Mao's rule, the documents reveal that local party leaders incited locals to kill "class enemies" and then feast on them in public ceremonies.

The documents refer to "eating people as an after-dinner snack … barbecuing people's livers … banqueting on human meat." Several episodes of this are also recounted: "On May 14th, 1968, a group of 11, led by the Wei brothers captured a man named Chen Guorong and killed him with a big knife before cutting out his liver. They shared the human meat with 20 participants."

Also in May, Wu Shufang, a teacher at the Wuxuan Middle School, was beaten to death and her liver was roasted and eaten. In June, three members of the Li family were killed by their neighbor, Huang Chihuan, who then cut out their livers and brought them to Yu Yuerong, who roasted them, cut them into portions and packed them into nine separate bags to be distributed as medicine.

In 1968, 91 members of the local Communist Party were expelled on charges of involvement in cannibalism, but none were criminally punished.

Zheng Yi first heard the rumors about the cannibalism when he himself was a member of the infamous Red Guards in northern Guangxi, but was skeptical. Years later he began investigating them, even so far as visiting Guangxi twice, where local officials allowed him to read the Party investigation reports on cannibalism in Guangxi, but also to interview eyewitnesses.

Interviewing witnesses in Shanglin county, the residents recounted how one man had his abdomen sliced open and had his liver removed while he was still alive. An old man named Yi Wansheng, told how he had killed a landlord's son. "I used a knife to cut him. The first knife was dull, so I threw it away. With another knife I was able to open his chest. But when I tried to pull out his heart and liver, the blood was too hot for my hand and I had to bring some water to cool it. When I took the organs out, I cut them to pieces and shared them with the people of the village."

Zheng says that he interviewed dozens of people who confessed to eating human flesh, as well as having interviewed the relatives of their victims, hundreds of victims in all.

The TIME story mentions that there is no evidence that Mao himself knew that these acts of Party-orchestrated cannibalism contributed victims to the millions killed during the Cultural Revolution, or that other than Zhou Enlai ordering party officials to put an end to the eating, that any steps were taken to punish the perpetrators or stop the killings, which persisted for much of the decade of the Cultural Revolution.

In fact, in the materials unearthed by Zheng Yi, at the time the Communist inner circle in Beijing is said to have been deeply concerned about what was going on in Guangxi. An old apparatchik told Zheng that he had reported the extent of the murders to Premier Zhou Enlai, who in turn sent word to the provincial army chief to warn the local party boss that "if one more man is eaten, I will kill you."

But the warning was not heeded and in the end, nothing was done, Zheng believes, because the atrocites were too heinous for the Party to even publicly denounce them. But, Zheng Yi believes, "the top leadership has known about it all along."

Need there be any further evidence that the absolute power of the state brings out the absolute worst in human nature?

Adam Young [send him mail] is studying computer science in Ontario, Canada.

© 2001 LewRockwell.com

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d

Churchill
as Icon

When,
in a very few years, the pundits start to pontificate on the great
question: “Who was the Man of the Century?” there is little doubt
that they will reach virtually instant consensus. Inevitably, the
answer will be: Winston Churchill. Indeed, Professor Harry Jaffa
has already informed us that Churchill was not only the Man of the
Twentieth Century, but the Man of Many Centuries.

In
a way, Churchill as Man of the Century will be appropriate. This
has been the century of the State of the rise and hyper-trophic
growth of the welfare warfare state and Churchill was from first
to last a Man of the State, of the welfare state and of the warfare
state. War, of course, was his lifelong passion; and, as an admiring
historian has written: “Among his other claims to fame, Winston
Churchill ranks as one of the founders of the welfare state.” Thus,
while Churchill never had a principle he did not in the end betray,
this does not mean that there was no slant to his actions, no systematic
bias. There was, and that bias was towards lowering the barriers
to state power.

To
gain any understanding of Churchill, we must go beyond the heroic
images propagated for over half a century. The conventional picture
of Churchill, especially of his role in World War II, was first
of all the work of Churchill himself, through the distorted histories
he composed and rushed into print as soon as the war was over. In
more recent decades, the Churchill legend has been adopted by an
internationalist establishment for which it furnishes the perfect
symbol and an inexhaustible vein of high-toned blather. Churchill
has become, in Christopher Hitchens’s phrase, a “totem” of the American
establishment, not only the scions of the New Deal, but the neo-conservative
apparatus as well politicians like Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle,
corporate “knights” and other denizens of the Reagan and Bush Cabinets,
the editors and writers of the Wall Street Journal, and a
legion of “conservative” columnists led by William Safire and William
Buckley. Churchill was, as Hitchens writes, “the human bridge across
which the transition was made” between a noninterventionist and
a globalist America. In the next century, it is not impossible that
his bulldog likeness will feature in the logo of the New World Order.

Let
it be freely conceded that in 1940 Churchill played his role superbly.
As the military historian, Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, a sharp
critic of Churchill’s wartime policies, wrote: “Churchill was a
man cast in the heroic mould, a berserker ever ready to lead a forlorn
hope or storm a breach, and at his best when things were at their
worst. His glamorous rhetoric, his pugnacity, and his insistence
on annihilating the enemy appealed to human instincts, and made
him an outstanding war leader.” History outdid herself when she
cast Churchill as the adversary in the duel with Hitler. It matters
not at all that in his most famous speech “we shall fight them on
the beaches . . . we shall fight them in the fields and in the streets”
he plagiarized Clemenceau at the time of the Ludendorff offensive
that there was little real threat of a German invasion or, that,
perhaps, there was no reason for the duel to have occurred in the
first place. For a few months in 1940, Churchill played his part
magnificently and unforgettably.

Opportunism
and Rhetoric

Yet
before 1940, the word most closely associated with Churchill was
“opportunist.” He had twice changed his party affiliation from Conservative
to Liberal, and then back again. His move to the Liberals was allegedly
on the issue of free trade. But in 1930, he sold out on free trade
as well, even tariffs on food, and proclaimed that he had cast off
“Cobdenism” forever. As head of the Board of Trade before World
War I, he opposed increased armaments; after he became First Lord
of the Admiralty in 1911, he pushed for bigger and bigger budgets,
spreading wild rumors of the growing strength of the German Navy,
just as he did in the 1930s about the buildup of the German Air
Force. He attacked socialism before and after World War I, while
during the War he promoted war-socialism, calling for nationalization
of the railroads, and declaring in a speech: “Our whole nation must
be organized, must be socialized if you like the word.” Churchill’s
opportunism continued to the end. In the 1945 election, he briefly
latched on to Hayek’s Road
to Serfdom, and tried to paint the Labour Party as totalitarian,
while it was Churchill himself who, in 1943, had accepted the Beveridge
plans for the post-war welfare state and Keynesian management of
the economy. Throughout his career his one guiding rule was to climb
to power and stay there.

There
were two principles that for a long while seemed dear to
Churchill’s heart. One was anti-Communism: he was an early and fervent
opponent of Bolshevism. For years, he very correctly decried the
“bloody baboons” and “foul murderers of Moscow.” His deep early
admiration of Benito Mussolini was rooted in his shrewd appreciation
of what Mussolini had accomplished (or so he thought). In an Italy
teetering on the brink of Leninist revolution, Il Duce had discovered
the one formula that could counteract the Leninist appeal: hyper-nationalism
with a social slant. Churchill lauded “Fascismo’s triumphant struggle
against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism,” claiming
that “it proved the necessary antidote to the Communist poison.”

Yet
the time came when Churchill made his peace with Communism. In 1941,
he gave unconditional support to Stalin, welcomed him as an ally,
embraced him as a friend. Churchill, as well as Roosevelt, used
the affectionate nickname, “Uncle Joe”; as late as the Potsdam conference,
he repeatedly announced, of Stalin: “I like that man.” In suppressing
the evidence that the Polish officers at Katyn had been murdered
by the Soviets, he remarked: “There is no use prowling round the
three year old graves of Smolensk.” Obsessed not only with defeating
Hitler, but with destroying Germany, Churchill was oblivious to
the danger of a Soviet inundation of Europe until it was far too
late. The climax of his infatuation came at the November, 1943,
Tehran conference, when Churchill presented Stalin with a Crusader’s
sword. Those who are concerned to define the word “obscenity” may
wish to ponder that episode.

Finally,
there was what appeared to be the abiding love of his life, the
British Empire. If Churchill stood for anything at all, it
was the Empire; he famously said that he had not become Prime Minister
in order to preside over its liquidation. But that, of course, is
precisely what he did, selling out the Empire and everything else
for the sake of total victory over Germany.

Besides
his opportunism, Churchill was noted for his remarkable rhetorical
skill. This talent helped him wield power over men, but it pointed
to a fateful failing as well. Throughout his life, many who observed
Churchill closely noted a peculiar trait. In 1917, Lord Esher described
it in this way:

He handles great subjects in rhythmical language, and becomes quickly
enslaved to his own phrases. He deceives himself into the belief
that he takes broad views, when his mind is fixed upon one comparatively
small aspect of the question.

During
World War II, Robert Menzies, who was the Prime Minister of Australia,
said of Churchill: “His real tyrant is the glittering phrase so
attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way.” Another
associate wrote: “He is . . . the slave of the words which his mind
forms about ideas. . . . And he can convince himself of almost every
truth if it is once allowed thus to start on its wild career through
his rhetorical machinery.”

But
while Winston had no principles, there was one constant in
his life: the love of war. It began early. As a child, he had a
huge collection of toy soldiers, 1500 of them, and he played with
them for many years after most boys turn to other things. They were
“all British,” he tells us, and he fought battles with his brother
Jack, who “was only allowed to have colored troops; and they were
not allowed to have artillery.” He attended Sandhurst, the military
academy, instead of the universities, and “from the moment that
Churchill left Sandhurst . . . he did his utmost to get into a fight,
wherever a war was going on.” All his life he was most excited on
the evidence, only really excited by war. He loved war as few modern
men ever have he even “loved the bangs,” as he called them, and
he was very brave under fire.

In
1925, Churchill wrote: “The story of the human race is war.” This,
however, is untrue; potentially, it is disastrously untrue. Churchill
lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of the social philosophy of
classical liberalism. In particular, he never understood that, as
Ludwig von Mises explained, the true story of the human race is
the extension of social cooperation and the division of labor. Peace,
not war, is the father of all things. For Churchill, the years without
war offered nothing to him but “the bland skies of peace and platitude.”
This was a man, as we shall see, who wished for more wars than actually
happened.

When
he was posted to India and began to read avidly, to make up for
lost time, Churchill was profoundly impressed by Darwinism. He lost
whatever religious faith he may have had through reading Gibbon,
he said and took a particular dislike, for some reason, to the Catholic
Church, as well as Christian missions. He became, in his own words,
“a materialist to the tips of my fingers,” and he fervently upheld
the worldview that human life is a struggle for existence, with
the outcome the survival of the fittest. This philosophy of life
and history Churchill expressed in his one novel, Savrola.
That Churchill was a racist goes without saying, yet his racism
went deeper than with most of his contemporaries. It is curious
how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the
central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation
on “great leaders,” Churchill’s worldview resembled that of his
antagonist, Hitler.

When
Churchill was not actually engaged in war, he was reporting on it.
He early made a reputation for himself as a war correspondent, in
Kitchener’s campaign in the Sudan and in the Boer War. In December,
1900, a dinner was given at the Waldorf-Astoria in honor of the
young journalist, recently returned from his well-publicized adventures
in South Africa. Mark Twain, who introduced him, had already, it
seems, caught on to Churchill. In a brief satirical speech, Twain
slyly suggested that, with his English father and American mother,
Churchill was the perfect representative of Anglo-American cant.

Churchill
and the “New Liberalism”

In
1900 Churchill began the career he was evidently fated for. His
background the grandson of a duke and son of a famous Tory politician
got him into the House of Commons as a Conservative. At first he
seemed to be distinguished only by his restless ambition, remarkable
even in parliamentary ranks. But in 1904, he crossed the floor to
the Liberals, supposedly on account of his free-trade convictions.
However, Robert Rhodes James, one of Churchill’s admirers, wrote:
“It was believed [at the time], probably rightly, that if Arthur
Balfour had given him office in 1902, Churchill would not have developed
such a burning interest in free trade and joined the Liberals.”
Clive Ponting notes that: “as he had already admitted to Rosebery,
he was looking for an excuse to defect from a party that seemed
reluctant to recognise his talents,” and the Liberals would not
accept a protectionist.

Tossed
by the tides of faddish opinion, with no principles of his own and
hungry for power, Churchill soon became an adherent of the “New
Liberalism,” an updated version of his father’s “Tory Democracy.”
The “new” liberalism differed from the “old” only in the small matter
of substituting incessant state activism for laissez-faire.

Although
his conservative idolators seem blithely unaware of the fact –
for them it is always 1940 – Churchill was one of the chief
architects of the welfare state in Britain. The modern welfare state,
successor to the welfare state of 18th-century absolutism, began
in the 1880s in Germany, under Bismarck. In England, the legislative
turning point came when Asquith succeeded Campbell-Bannerman as
Prime Minister in 1908; his reorganized cabinet included David Lloyd
George at the Exchequer and Churchill at the Board of Trade.

Of
course, “the electoral dimension of social policy was well to the
fore in Churchill’s thinking,” writes a sympathetic historian meaning
that Churchill understood it as the way to win votes. He wrote to
a friend:

No legislation at present in view interests the democracy. All their
minds are turning more and more to the social and economic issue.
This revolution is irresistible. They will not tolerate the existing
system by which wealth is acquired, shared and employed. . . . They
will set their faces like flint against the money power heir of
all other powers and tyrannies overthrown and its obvious injustices.
And this theoretical repulsion will ultimately extend to any party
associated in maintaining the status quo. . . . Minimum standards
of wages and comfort, insurance in some effective form or other
against sickness, unemployment, old age, these are the questions
and the only questions by which parties are going to live in the
future. Woe to Liberalism, if they slip through its fingers.

Churchill
“had already announced his conversion to a collectivist social policy”
before his move to the Board of Trade. His constant theme became
“the just precedence” of public over private interests. He took
up the fashionable social-engineering clichu201As of the time, asserting
that: “Science, physical and political alike, revolts at the disorganisation
which glares at us in so many aspects of modern life,” and that
“the nation demands the application of drastic corrective and curative
processes.” The state was to acquire canals and railroads, develop
certain national industries, provide vastly augmented education,
introduce the eight-hour work day, levy progressive taxes, and guarantee
a national minimum living standard. It is no wonder that Beatrice
Webb noted that Churchill was “definitely casting in his lot with
the constructive state action.”

Following
a visit to Germany, Lloyd George and Churchill were both converted
to the Bismarckian model of social insurance schemes. As Churchill
told his constituents: “My heart was filled with admiration of the
patient genius which had added these social bulwarks to the many
glories of the German race.” He set out, in his words, to “thrust
a big slice of Bismarckianism over the whole underside of our industrial
system.” In 1908, Churchill announced in a speech in Dundee: “I
am on the side of those who think that a greater collective sentiment
should be introduced into the State and the municipalities. I should
like to see the State undertaking new functions.” Still, individualism
must be respected: “No man can be a collectivist alone or an individualist
alone. He must be both an individualist and a collectivist. The
nature of man is a dual nature. The character of the organisation
of human society is dual.” This, by the way, is a good sample of
Churchill as political philosopher: it never gets much better.

But
while both “collective organisation” and “individual incentive”
must be given their due, Churchill was certain which had gained
the upper hand:

The whole tendency of civilisation is, however, towards the multiplication
of the collective functions of society. The ever-growing complications
of civilisation create for us new services which have to be undertaken
by the State, and create for us an expansion of existing services.
. . . There is a pretty steady determination . . . to intercept
all future unearned increment which may arise from the increase
in the speculative value of the land. There will be an ever-widening
area of municipal enterprise.

The
statist trend met with Churchill’s complete approval. As he added:

I
go farther; I should like to see the State embark on various novel
and adventurous experiments. . . . I am very sorry we have not got
the railways of this country in our hands. We may do something better
with the canals.

This
grandson of a duke and glorifier of his ancestor, the arch-corruptionist
Marlborough, was not above pandering to lower-class resentments.
Churchill claimed that “the cause of the Liberal Party is the cause
of the left-out millions,” while he attacked the Conservatives as
“the Party of the rich against the poor, the classes and their dependents
against the masses, of the lucky, the wealthy, the happy, and the
strong, against the left-out and the shut-out millions of the weak
and poor.” Churchill became the perfect hustling political entrepreneur,
eager to politicize one area of social life after the other. He
berated the Conservatives for lacking even a “single plan of social
reform or reconstruction,” while boasting that he and his associates
intended to propose “a wide, comprehensive, interdependent scheme
of social organisation,” incorporated in “a massive series of legislative
proposals and administrative acts.”

At
this time, Churchill fell under the influence of Beatrice and Sidney
Webb, the leaders of the Fabian Society. At one of her famous strategic
dinner parties, Beatrice Webb introduced Churchill to a young protu201Agu201A,
William later Lord Beveridge. Churchill brought Beveridge into the
Board of Trade as his advisor on social questions, thus starting
him on his illustrious career. Besides pushing for a variety of
social insurance schemes, Churchill created the system of national
labor exchanges: he wrote to Prime Minister Asquith of the need
to “spread . . . a sort of Germanized network of state intervention
and regulation” over the British labor market. But Churchill entertained
much more ambitious goals for the Board of Trade. He proposed a
plan whereby:

The
Board of Trade was to act as the “intelligence department” of the
Government, forecasting trade and employment in the regions so that
the Government could allocate contracts to the most deserving areas.
At the summit . . . would be a Committee of National Organisation,
chaired by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to supervise the economy.

Finally,
well aware of the electoral potential of organized labor, Churchill
became a champion of the labor unions. He was a leading supporter,
for instance, of the Trades Disputes Act of 1906. This Act reversed
the Taff Vale and other judicial decisions, which had held unions
responsible for torts and wrongs committed on their behalf by their
agents. The Act outraged the great liberal legal historian and theorist
of the rule of law, A.V. Dicey, who charged that it

confers
upon a trade union a freedom from civil liability for the commission
of even the most heinous wrong by the union or its servants, and
in short confers upon every trade union a privilege and protection
not possessed by any other person or body of persons, whether corporate
or unincorporate, throughout the United Kingdom. . . . It makes
a trade union a privileged body exempted from the ordinary law of
the land. No such privileged body has ever before been deliberately
created by an English Parliament.

It
is ironic that the immense power of the British labor unions, the
bu02C6te noire of Margaret Thatcher, was brought into being with
the enthusiastic help of her great hero, Winston Churchill.

Part
2
Part
3

Part
4
Part
5

d

Ralph
Raico is professor of history at Buffalo State College and a senior
scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Due
to space limitations, the 169 detailed footnotes – which thoroughly
document all assertions in Professor Raico’s paperRaico’s paper
– are not included. They are, of course, included in the printed
version of the paper, published in The Costs of War,
available from the Mises Institute.