One might call this democracy in action, or the modern American republic, but at the risk of repeating myself, it’s just another episode of Mob Wives.   On the one hand, it’s an ugly, slutty, angry story without an ethic to share.  On the other hand, there’s a real story here of continued survival and growth of the DC bandit gang writ large, in a time of real threat to its continued existence.

Brian Wilson asks “Where is the outrage!?”   I agree!  But there has been outrage.  Most of it, spectacularly, has been on the government side, and it’s an entertaining joy to behold.   The government is more outraged than we are, and its fear that we won’t notice the temporary 17% reduction in non-essential services (smile) is really freaking them out. 

OK, I confess.  Last night the hubby and I watched The Hunger Games, again.  In the context of friendly and unfriendly fascism already inside the gates, I have to admit it got me thinking about what a citizen-serf is to do, short of shooting arrows deep into the heart of our fellow citizen-serfs, in some choreographed and controlled public spectacle to maintain the status quo.

I recall vaguely the so-called government shutdown during the Clinton years.  Neocon Gingrich, even then obsessed with becoming the first American philosopher king facing off against Billary, imagining a global velvet-fisted police state with wealth for all, especially for those wearing the gloves and centrally administering the Glorious Humanitarian Peace.

In the 1990s, the Internet was toddleresque and the economy was pre-internet. Today, however, despite government heavy-handedness and arrogance, technology allows everyone to see, know and utilize ideas and assets almost instantly, and at ever-reduced transaction costs.  We citizen-serfs know how easy and cheap it is to have and maintain a website, to connect with and serve out family, community, customers and friends.  We have simultaneously witnessed an ever-expanding and obese government, and we as a society, really are beginning to find it all a bit annoying.  We can’t understand CDC zombie fighting manuals or why they used our tax dollars to produce them, and we don’t comprehend why the NSA is eavesdropping on all of us, all the time, spending trillions to do so.  We care about food and health, and yet the nanny state response to our healthy choices has been wholly misguided, and misses the point.  Instead of liberty and information and a healthy marketplace, we see the FDA and USDA aggressively interfere with us, dictating to the microscopic level what we grow, buy, store, process, consume and market.  With so many sources of information to check out facts, we are shocked – shocked – at the constant and incessant, compulsive and predictable, outright lying done by the men and women in government, and those in their employ.

So why am I so elated by this fake shutdown, so far?  Truly, it has surpassed my expectations, as a simple observer of the decline of the American state.  I can explain it best by referencing a new TV show that has debuted on the Oxygen channel.  It’s called “My Big Fat Revenge.”  Now, we could analyze this show, but as I haven’t watched a single episode, I’m not qualified to participate in that.  However, I know the show’s premise tracks with the Fedgov’s reaction to their non-essential paychecks being delayed by legislators with the temerity to ask for infinitesimal reduction in future spending.

Somebody called Nanny fat, and by God, she was.  Feelings were hurt, so it’s time for governmental revenge.  The elaborate schemes for revenging the “insult” are required.  Lots of planning and energy will go into getting even, and Nanny hopes to feel a lot better afterwards.

In the past few weeks, Nanny has exacted her revenge – on the very citizen-serfs she despises, and has hated for so long.  Want to drive on a road or visit a structure you already paid for many times over, on land you own and which was confiscated from other serfs decades ago, to spend your money in a privately owned business on that road?  Can’t do it.  Shouldn’t have called Nanny a fat pig.

Fat Nanny has shut down websites that contain historical information that we already paid for, and services we are still paying for, to the extent of even faking blockages to “trick” citizen serfs into a feeling of panic. The list is long and growing.

The central state has over reacted – certainly the arrogance and ignorance of the central state as it “prices” its services and values its “resources” are the heart of the problem.  It’s old news, but we are seeing it in a fresh way today, with the king publicly dictating to his minions that “to make the people suffer”, all for calling Nanny an obese disgusting and useless porker.

In this government over-reaction, we glimpse the panic of the central state.  We should be laughing out loud at Nanny’s games, at her venality, and for all of her national mood readings and lone wolf terrorist tracking software, her extreme stupidity.  I can’t suppress my own chuckles, and I’m seeing a lovely light wink intermittently from behind the statist cloud.

What is concerning in the ongoing contrived drama, and what must inform us as the advocates and practitioners of liberty, is the speed and aggressiveness of the unnecessary state reaction to what is really nothing – nothing – at all.  Obamacare can’t sign anyone up, and isn’t going to be able to do so in any significant way until 2014 anyway.  Technical problems plus serf resistance.  Between now and then, much can happen to expose and derail this corporate crony-pleasing federal tax on the poor and producing classes.  The debt ceiling and the 17% getting delayed paychecks is not a budget (and there will be no more budgets, ever!); the locomotive of the overloaded parasitical state continues to accelerate lemming-like over the cliff.   So why the PTSD-style over-reaction, to what can only be described as little more than verbal insult to the state, and one that threatens the bandit gang not at all, in the grand scheme of things?

The nanny state has made a huge tactical error in its response to the fake shutdown, and has revealed to hundreds of millions of Americans a fundamental vulnerability.  If we stop believing, valuing, and obeying the state, it crumbles.  If we believe only what is true about it, value only what is essential in it, and obey only its constitutional mandates, it also crumbles. The stupidity and gracelessness of its ongoing threat response also reveals a far higher than (I, anyway) presumed level of intellectual decay among bureaucrats, and deep internal strife.

Talking and laughing about the uselessness, wastefulness, wrongness, and fatness of government threatens Fedgov.  It flutters and shimmies the house of cards that is Washington, its surrounding counties and supporting institutions everywhere.  It enrages the king and his courtiers and his sponsors.  When we begin to understand that we don’t really need a big fat nanny state, and begin to mentally and spiritually wake up to the mathematical fact that more government means less freedom and prosperity, less joy, less happiness – we accomplish much more than is immediately visible.

Watch for falling rocks.  I do watch, but I’ve never seen it happen.  Sometimes, you see rocks that have fallen, and sometimes you see the debris after a rockfall cleanup.  But I personally have never yet seen the rocks actually falling.  Honestly, it’s on my bucket list.

The conditions that lead to falling rocks in nature are several, but fundamentally it’s just gravity and weak foundations.   It’s a slow process, until it isn’t, and then, I imagine, it can be terrifying.

Or exciting.  Butler Shaffer wrote recently that the state system in the United States is dying before our very eyes.

A system that insists on controlling others through increasing levels of systematic violence; that loots the many for the aggrandizement of the few; that regulates any expressions of human behavior that are not of service to the rulers; that presumes the power to wage wars against any nation of its choosing, a principle that got a number of men hanged at the Nuremberg trials; and finally, criminalizes those who would speak the truth to its victims, has no moral energy remaining with which to sustain itself.

There are so many signs of imminent death of the state, beyond the aggressive immorality it displays 24/7 towards its own citizens and pretty much the rest of the world.

If poor foundations and gravity lead to rockfall, then bankruptcy (both moral and economic) and government hoarding lead to state-fall.   I think we are watching this today, in our lifetimes.

The state consumes over 50% of all productivity, to the extent of arrogantly collecting raisins from farmers, and that doesn’t begin to address the productivity destroyed by government regulation, crony capitalism, and their associated anti-freedom agendas.   Even as it has accumulated an unpayable debt of $220 trillion, intervention within the state through political elections and public action has been and remains largely ineffective.   State bankruptcy (and the compulsive lying that precedes it) is all around us.  The municipal crashes and collapses in places like Stockton and Jefferson County and Detroit are good examples, but the strangeness of the “budget” and “spending” in DC over the summer also transfixes and fascinates.  The fact that Federal Reserve notes are truly play money for regime politicians and their extended clan is evident to anyone looking.

When we look up at the seemingly solid edifices of a global money system anchored by a flapping-to-distraction U.S. printing press, we need to remember the road sign.  Watch for falling rock.

The state at all levels builds fences, jails and schools, prisons and universities, but guards and teaches less than ever before.  Increasingly, public schools are acknowledging both home schoolers and illegal aliens (if they can count the heads for subsidy purposes) and allowing non-criminals who use the ubiquitous weed to stay out of jail.  Counting invisible students and taxing marijuana are seen as ingenious “revenue streams” for the pseudo-creative closet socialists and central planners who overwhelmingly occupy elective office.

As if to bring the decrepitude of government institutions to light, just today, the Republican governor of Virginia has commanded an inventory of statewide school buildings with an eye to “the elimination of the “prior use” rule to allow private investors to utilize the Federal Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit in the process of renovating aging school buildings for future use in the same capacity, would have a positive impact on Virginia’s students, teachers and parents in communities all across the state.”   In simple language, Richmond wants a state “rule” change to allow more “free money from Washington” to refurbish unused and unneeded old buildings rather then simply divest of unused state infrastructure and let the actual free market decide if they are worth saving, or razing.

Richmond looked at the costs of maintaining unneeded infrastructure and associated state employees – and came up with a really cool plan to inject life support.  The fact that government, at local, state and federal levels knows it needs emergency life support is good to know.  I am on the watch for falling rock.

State bankruptcy is endemic.  Beyond that, the US government meets every criteria of clinical hoarding.

I first noticed this when I served in the Pentagon between 1998 and 2003.  The original design of the Pentagon once had five “rings” of wide, spacious well-lighted hallways.  In my five years there, these hallways were systematically reduced into rabbit warrens, complete with countless jigs and jags, and many impassable areas blocked not by piles of newspapers and broken fans but by cubicled bureaucrats.  This coincided with new and expanded federal facilities in Crystal City and Rosslyn, and all around the Beltway.  This hoarding of property, the obsessive counting of needs and wants, this unbalanced habit of never-ending construction extends to federal monuments and innumerable federal departments.  Sure, DHS, NSA, and IRS growth are in the news, but we are also watching the country-wide maturation of a federally administered hospital network, a federally subsidized higher education system, and a federally driven policing complex – all feverishly built, acquired, and collected for several decades now.  While military spending is not seen as growing as much, in fact the Pentagon budget now exceeds in real terms what it was at the peak of World War II, so this sector of the over-consuming state is no slouch as it competes for collectibles.

The hoarding extends to human agency and individual liberty.   State excess vis a vis the concept of limited self government, and the capricious yet systematic making of executive war against citizen and stranger alike is evident almost daily, from big cities to small towns and rural areas.  The Marxist left and the Progressive right, the Tea Party and the Occupiers, the pacifist and even the neocon have all noticed this – and yet only the Rothbardians can explain it, and in fact predicted it.

It is not logical to expect those invested in the system, those very hoarders of material and buildings and power, to self-diagnose, or to correct the behavior.  The state, at this stage in our own country, is very sick.  Just as with an individual hoarder, the state can’t see the problem, and becomes angry and even violent at any sign of an intervention or worse, the hard truth about what it has done. It believes it needs all these things and more, and it must have “control” of everything in order to feel safe.

While most normal people would not begrudge the state a certain sense of safety, most normal people also understand that the internal decay, the lost property values and productivity, the filth and the rodent population endemic to the state’s hoard is not healthy, nor sustainable.

Collapse is inevitable.  Watch for falling rock.

In words, government at all levels helps us do “things” we couldn’t or wouldn’t do otherwise.   In reality, government is parasitical in the way of the tapeworm or tick, consuming what we produce, feeding itself, and growing larger, until it becomes unsustainable and is gracelessly shed by an exhausted population.

In words, the United States is at war with her enemies.  In reality, there is no “war” with any US “enemies.”  Rather, the US government is a war-loving and warfare-dependent organization that seeks internal and external conflict using two key and opposing criteria:  1) conflicts and wars it may involve itself in without attracting any domestic attention, and 2) conflicts fomented to attract the “right” kind of domestic attention, i.e. against “terror” and for “democracy” or “justice.” This is precisely why there is such rage in the machine against truthtellers Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden.

Manning was subjected to institutionalized torture, mistreated, and labeled a “guilty traitor” by bureaucrats for nearly four years before his date with a kangaroo court.  He faces up to 90 years of prison for what has already been shown in the court to be a crime without a victim.   In reality, his actions did little more than embarrass State Department lackeys and reveal the real nature of America’s modern day “fighting men” to people around the world. Many who watched the incriminating video of US soldiers killing civilians and laughing about it were already familiar with America’s high tech and soulless wars against fourth rate militaries or no-count insurgencies in far away countries filled with poor brown people.   Having a conscience, a backbone and faith in the good of mankind has gotten Manning nowhere in his government career, and if he is not a martyr, he is certainly a posterboy for why every good and honorable person should tread lightly around the snake of state.

Snowden seems to have particularly infuriated the head of state in this country – by ingeniously honoring his oath to the Constitution and acting on his own faith that government works for us, not the other way around.  He was mistaken in this belief, but by acting nobly he exposed the nefarious lying hypocrite that is the President, the executive branch and the warfare state, and as we no doubt will see in coming years, the welfare state as well.  Because he is mild mannered and polite, intelligent and honest, he makes a perfect superman to the USG villains.  That he wisely sought personal safety and freedom of speech outside of the United States (in Putin’s Russia!) is a further source of enragement to our “government” – viscerally and fundamentally exposing its hypocrisy and lawlessness to the patriotic masses.

In words, Washington seeks democracy and fights terrorism.  In reality, the US government funds Islamic fundamentalism around the world, subsidizes tyrants and dictators, and actively trades with and works with al Qaeda places like Libya and Syria.  In reality, US tax dollars funds murder of innocents and those of good will.  The US government funds and facilitates the murders of Christians in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere and has done so for years with the reliable, predictable, and entirely indefensible support of “pro-Christian values” Congressmen and Senators.

A few days ago, in a parking lot picking up supplies from our regional organic supplier, I was reminded that Obama policies in Syria (and our own tax dollars) have directly caused a recent atrocity that is similar to many others, none of which seem to make mainstream news in the “heartland” or to shift state policy.

In that parking lot, my Catholic neighbor was frustrated that our own conservative Congressman for the 6^th Virginia district had continually voted to support the foreign policy of aid to tyrants and al Qaeda linked groups.  He has written repeatedly to the Congressman’s office, recently on the US-funded murder of Friar Murad in Syria, and he has garnered no response.  Silence.  Checking this conservative Congressman’s voting record finds that he also recently voted to continue funding the illegal domestic monitoring and data collection ongoing by NSA, unconstitutional programs that Ed Snowden helped us better understand (building on the truths told by James Bamford and Russ Tice.)  The Democrats are no better — they support murder and monitoring at home and abroad as predictably as the Republicans.    New fractures along the lines of state and anti-state seem to be emerging, and this is at once a sign of hope, but also a harbinger for the centralized state’s larger ongoing battle against the rest of us for its survival, a battle that increasingly forces all of us to choose sides, to clarify our values, and to prepare.

Truthtellers like Manning and Snowden have impacted the world of lying and wordsmithing governments in ways that may not have been initially seen.  The unraveling of the government storyline is irreversible.  From knowledge of our government’s ability and intentions to know everything about us have come demands from defense attorneys, corporations, and interest groups for the data “they paid for.”  From this data we get a closer semblance of “justice” in individual cases, and from this we open the door more widely to recognizing broad government stupidity, excess and overreach.  From widespread recognition of stupidity, excess and overreach we get a new confidence from the nether regions and otherwise unempowered rubes (present company included).  We get resource flows away from government.  We see that the IRS can’t enforce Obamacare, IT guys buy government-allied newspapers for pennies on the dollar, and private sector engineers design space, time and transportation solutions as government bureaucrats gaze helpless, speechless, doe-eyed.

A small but perfect intersection of these concepts is demonstrated by “parallel construction,” as defined by the FBI, DEA and dozens of other agencies that share “sources.”   Simply put, the government recreates a fact stream to hide the actual facts, as a matter of longstanding policy.

It’s always done for a “good cause,” to protect the paid stooges, narcs and government informers so critical to the government “making its case” and justifying its activities. Except, now that we know more about how the government operates, and we see how the government works not for us, but for itself and its connected corporate or bureaucratic “friends,” we the people don’t really like “parallel construction.”  We the people don’t like being taken for idiots, being lied to, getting the runaround, funding their own
accusers and paying bureaucratic peeping Toms.

The Constitution bound no man, and the Founders knew it wouldn’t.  However, its language offers a grappling hook for those who value liberty and honesty – and inevitably it is language today that powerfully arms us against the state.    As in any guerilla war, we systematically acquire our enemy’s cache and use his techniques and weaponry against him.   The concept of parallel construction – a weapon of the state – is so understandably in violation of the law in a way that touches so many people – that we who oppose the state must chuckle and celebrate.  The government’s admission and embrace of a policy of “parallel construction” in the ongoing era of the Panopticon is one more revelation of the utter lawlessness of the state, and it has great potential to increase mass intolerance of state “authority.”

Idiocracy – rule by idiots – isn’t something we will have in the future.  We have it today.   The premise of the movie is right out of H.L. Mencken, in the early 20^th century when he wrote,

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Mencken also is known for saying, “For every complex problem there is a simple solution …and it is wrong. “  The collapse of a large governmental system, the transformation of a corporate state sustained by global military aspirations and meddling into what comes next, it is a complex problem.  Devolution from an independent-minded people who instinctively distrusted kings and their armies into an atomized anti-social throng of democratic egalitarian thugs eager to slaughter what is left of liberty in hopes of getting all the golden eggs at once didn’t happen overnight.  It won’t be corrected overnight, either.

I spent twenty years in the Air Force, getting my education and starting my family.  My simple dream all through that time was probably like that of many people of my era who have spent years in vaults and behind desks in air-conditioned buildings.  I wanted land, a garden, an orchard, chickens, dogs and cats.  This was “America” to me, and my husband fortunately shared the vision.  We had no real idea of what it would really be like, but in 2003 we moved to a rundown farm 14 miles from town in the upper Shenandoah Valley and started bushhogging multiflora rose and Russian olive, pulling up rusty barbed wire and digging new postholes for new fences, and trying to restore sagging buildings.  We rototilled the old garden space for the first time in 15 years.

We had it in mind that this would be for the children – and in so many ways it was, but the impetus, the driver for our activities, was our personal obsession with being able to do things for ourselves.  But while I had grown up on a small farm, I look back and am amazed at how little I knew about anything and how much I learned, and how much I am still learning.   My teenagers at home in the beginning also learned, and in some ways the best thing was that instead of going off to various jobs that were largely intangible and unexplainable, we could work on projects that we could understand and talk about, debate, critique, succeed and fail, tangibly and visibly.   My children and grandchildren will expect that what people do in life have a certain rationality and transparency.  This hopefully will keep them from working in government, or if they do, doing so with a healthy cynicism and a qualified contempt.

Failures on a farmstead are visible, in your face, and everything is experimental.  It’s a learning laboratory.  The internet – for content and for networking and for supplies and books and feedback and education – partially makes up for what we might have learned if we had grown up like our 86 year old neighbor who has spent his whole life here except for a stint in the Navy in World War II.  We don’t feel our age here, because we are just starting out on a path, that ten years later is still new.  We learn new things about making a living in the country every day.  My children and grandchildren know that learning and experimenting and trying new things does not stop because you have grown up, or passed a certain calendar age.  We I hope are demonstrating to our children that starting over can be done on a daily basis, and that this can be a good thing.  A radically larger sense of the possible will serve them well as our larger economy and government faces death throes and destructive transitions.

I could list the many things we’ve tried and accomplished, tried and failed, and haven’t tried yet.  It would take a book with many chapters to capture it all, but the Paul Harvey article in 1975 “What It Is To Be A Farmer” is meaningful to us in a way it wasn’t before, and we sometimes wonder what we are doing and why.

We aren’t solving a complex problem, per se.  But what we are doing, for ourselves and for our children and the grandchildren I have been blessed with in just the past five years, is observable, if not measurable.

Unlike how it was when we worked in a government bureaucracy or a large corporation, we are demonstrating to our kids how not to be afraid of making mistakes.   Embrace them, dissect them, analyze them objectively, and move on.  Mistakes happen, things don’t always turn out the way you would like, but you do learn what works and what doesn’t, and sometimes doing things unsuccessfully leads to new discoveries that would have remained unrevealed otherwise.  In the Marines, this might be overcome, improvise and adapt, every day with big things and small things.   Persistence, without stubbornness and without arrogance, pays dividends.  I think we are living that, and it’s an example to our children and grandchildren.  I’m not saying we are not stubborn and arrogant!  I’m saying, our kids and us together are learning and eyewitnessing that those traits don’t help!  Humility – earned and practiced – is awesome.

We know where a lot of our food comes from, and while it is a simple thing, there is a logic that is imparted to our children on the farm and in the garden that is fundamental and necessary in a world where Newspeak has declared a two-minute hate on the current Enemy of the People.  Or to leave Orwell behind, just watching our Congress conduct its “business” or listening to the President talk about his plans for our health care, our economy, our lives is surreal to them.  We live in an environment where things happen for a reason, and where husbanding resources and creating value takes hard work and pays real dividends.  I like to think that even though my grandchildren don’t yet know what a Federal Reserve Bank is, when they find out they will consider it ludicrous, illogical and corrupt.  Not because I say so, but because they understand how work and value and capital and trade relate.  My babies are Austrian economists, and the absurdity of state capitalism and empire and Paul Krugman will amuse, not convince.

On the farm, far from imperial battlefields with high-powered computerized weapons, we have learned a lot about life and death, and we take it seriously.   Death is waste, and the loss of a calf or a cow, chicken, turkey, piglet or lamb, from accident or sickness or predators is a concern to us.  The whole idea of not wasting the gift of life is inherent in farming, yet strikingly different from the driving motivation of a state-driven society, like that of the US empire.  My children and grandchildren will instinctively find Obamacare, war-loving preachers in pulpits, and standing armies all on the same plane of existence, at direct odds with the fundamentals of love and life.

So Mencken says that complex problems can’t be solved with simple solutions.  He’s absolutely right about the arrogance of the central planners, and their pretensions.  But in a complex world, exposing our children to life and raw fundamentals is a simple solution.  Showing them that we create and cultivate and husband and care for our material resources and the life around us is a simple solution.  Being in a place where liberty can be lived and clocks don’t drive time, where ownership and responsibility can be practiced, where our kids can see how value is created, how problems are solved, how things are made and how they are destroyed – these are simple solutions.

Imagine if one of ten children today absorbed even some of these lessons.  Trusting their eyes, their logic, their knowledge of how things really work – what a powerful step we’d be taking to having a country filled with independent minded people.  We’d be simply unrulable by faraway kings, and understanding the heavy responsibility of husbandry, we’d be hesitate to seek that kind of power over large numbers of people.  We’d think it was wrong to steal and murder, and we’d not tolerate a government that did so.

Where is John Galt?  Well, he’s everywhere we are.

I’m eternally grateful that curious and justice-minded Edward Snowden grew to adulthood without becoming jaded, wedded to power and position, or prescribed into numbness by ubiquitous authority.

His less than stellar performance within the public schooling machine was an early cause for celebration. Despite his nonconformity in state schools – or perhaps because of it, Snowden was and is very interested in serving his country and fellow man.

Believing his country needed him in the military, he enlisted and tried to get through some serious combat training. Perversely, his broken legs in training probably preserved his moral compass. Early on, he noticed his military instructors were more interested in getting trainees to enthusiastically kill Middle Easterners than in preserving and securing the country. This makes sense. Expeditionary volunteer forces, mercenaries for an empire, whatever you want to call the modern American standing army, must emphasize the attractiveness and the excitement of the fight rather than the necessity of it. To do otherwise would be self-defeating and hypocritical. To admit the truth beforehand would be harmful to recruitment, as much as record suicide rates do after recruitment.

Snowdon has confirmed what has already been reported and published in books by James Bamford and others. The aims and workings of the US Congress and Executive branch have studied and reported for years, and we understand the agenda both in terms of bureaucratic tendencies as well as specific executive goals in the post 9/11 era. So far, nothing really new has been revealed, and all neoconservative state worshippers of both parties have to complain about is that Snowdon confirms the existing suspicions and expectations of the majority of Americans.

What angers the D.C. elitists is that one more serf stood up and publicly denied the commands of the government father figure.

Implicit in the phrase “to suspect” is a sense that all this government surveillance and data capture and storage is bad. A minority of Americans suspect their government. On the other hand, “to expect” is somewhat value neutral – and sadly a majority of Americans expect the government to own its citizens, their communications, their written and verbal commentary, their networks and friends, their very thoughts and imagination and dreams.

Many Americans seem willing to give away our fundamental humanity to empty bureaucrats, hated federal representatives and even employees of the widely despised IRS and TSA. They lie back and take it, so to speak. Being repeatedly raped in this way – invaded, owned, subdued and frightened – is not just what so many “law and order” types and state-loving neoconservatives advocate with a wink for prisoners in our many penitentiaries, it is apparently what they advocate outright for every man, woman and child in the country, every day.

Perhaps Americans don’t mind this daily rape by the state because they have become used to it, or perhaps, like abused wives and children, they feel there is nothing they can do – the state also supplies so much that they need, so they feel they must endure the bad side of being a citizen.

Perhaps they are afraid. At least what is being done today is survivable, endurable; perhaps what could happen may be worse.

Perhaps they feel they deserve no better. They already give it away all the time already, so who would believe their claim of rape so late in the game?

For a country and a government so intensely concerned about the treatment of far away Afghani women by a patriarchal clan system, it has little problem with the same kind of state-enforced ownership of the daily communications activities of 300 million average Americans – real-time collection of metadata plus content storage for years – without consent or court order.

Clan leaders in Afghanistan justify their traditions as safer for women, and in their best interests. Curiously, that’s the same excuse given by the ruling goons in D.C.

Ron Paul is right. “The government does not need to know more about what we are doing. We need to know more about what the government is doing. We need to turn the cameras on the police and on the government, not the other way around.”

Of course, the U.S. government is so large that it is impossible to know what it is doing, and if we could know, it would be impractical to monitor it. The better choice is to drastically limit it, and current trends show us that this is already happening. Law and constitutions certainly haven’t worked, but happily the federal government borrows or prints 46% of what it spends, a percentage that has been inching up for years. We the people are not directly financing the growth of government, even as we the people seem to demand more and more government spending. Inflation, currency collapse, and peaceful secessions of the productive parts of the country will ultimately comprise “payment due”, and it will be traumatic. But we have already stopped directly funding nearly half of our excessive government.

As Gary North points out, government monitoring of everyone is relatively cheap, efficient and technologically easy. Further, it supports the driving state objective of continuing government growth and borrowing by ensuring taxes are gathered, property annotated, and opposition voices punished, quelled, and silenced.

The fevered obsession of our rulers with everything we are doing, writing, saying and thinking is simply one more sign that the clay foundation of the corporatist state is crumbling. The ongoing bankruptcy of the state, financially and morally, is on display and it is to be celebrated. The very overreach of government is its undoing, and the fact that Russia and China are both publicly condemning the behavior of the United States government is sweet icing on the cake.

Much as in Russia and China, we the people in America don’t exercise positive power over our government. Elections are kabuki dances, entertaining but we know how the story ends. Like serfs everywhere, we only have the negative power of consent – we get what we tolerate. Edward Snowdon decided to withdraw his consent, and his action offers each of us multitudinous opportunities to withdraw our consent as well.

He is an enemy of the state. May he live long and prosper!

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

We citizens of the US are represented by the very best of us. The Senate, in particular the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is filled to the brim with humanitarians, deep thinking wise men, and just good folks.

Surely, that must be true.

Why, only yesterday, most of these fourteen fine gentlemen and two fine ladies voted to provide aid to freedom fighters in Syria, including training and lethal weapons now, plus a $250 million starter fund for their government once Assad is hung or assassinated. While the committee is dominated by peace-loving Democrats, they are certainly channeling Ronald Reagan and who can say he would not be proud! As another testament to the era of the 1980s, the vote was a model of transparency and clear thinking!

I detect a bit of disbelief. Doubters need go no further than the membership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, filled as it is with the great military minds of Barbara Boxer and Marco Rubio, environmentalist and professional politician Ben Cardin of Maryland, and clean water activist and leader in various Iran sanctions legislationBob Casey of Pennsylvania. Check out the great record of public service, government efficiency, and tax-fighting of New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen – who simultaneously fights to maintain “her” two military bases and unhindered funding thereto, who happily voted “Yes, God, Yes” on the bill.

And who can forget union and public school fighter Bob Menendez, who chairs the committee, and his wise words yesterday,

The greatest humanitarian crisis in the world is unfolding in and around Syria…Vital U.S. interests are at stake including the stability of the Middle East, loose chemical weapons, and the danger that Syria becomes a safe haven for extremists. The United States must play a role in tipping the scales toward opposition groups and working to build a free and democratic Syria.

Of course, doubters among you might suggest that greater humanitarian crises exist, and have for far longer, and with greater human cost. Perhaps you are thinking of the little you know about eastern Congo, or one of the many places the US is already “aiding” with “training and lethal weapons,” such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Mali, Sudan, Somalia, etc. Perhaps you have some vague idea about suffering and death relating to the blockaded and sanctioned Palestinians, or those starving in North Korea, or even the US-funded prison for suspected terrorists in Guantanamo! If you are thinking that these cases even approach the ethical scope, importance, urgency and actionable-ness of Syria, you are sadly mistaken.

Why, even calm and clear thinking Republican Marco Rubio became emotional and “insisted that it was critical to help groups battling the well-armed, pro-Assad forces and radical jihadists.” Vital and critical, to the US as we know it, and as we believe her to be – that shining city on a hill, arms open, and always ready to help those seeking to throw off the yoke of an invasive, unelected, and unaccountable government led by a despot who doesn’t share the vision of the people and is arming against them.

I’m only surprised that more money and assistance was not immediately approved by the Senate committee, and can only say godspeed to this bill in the Senate, and in the House.

It is amazing that the three naysayers in the Foreign Relations Committee were not publicly marched out and held in stocks for the rest of us to laugh at! I mean seriously, Senator Udall (New Mexico) was suggesting that weapons given to the rebels in Syria might end up in the hands of our enemies! Like when has that ever happened? What a fool!

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky commented, “…the U.S. is war weary and reluctant to get involved in a murky conflict with so many factions. …There is no assurance that the weapons would end up in the hands of “liberty-loving, Jeffersonian-type of democrats.” He went on to point out that the existing law forbids the passage of this bill, specifically that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force does not allow intervention in Syria and another bars weapons to Syria.

I can imagine the jeering and the laughter in the room when these idiotic ideas were voiced! Thank goodness we could count on the highly respected public servant Senator John McCain to be appropriately derisive.

Of course, behind the scenes, we have the active support in this effort to militarily aid the Syrian rebels, even the al Qaeda connected ones such as Jabhat al-Nusra, by both the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Pentagon. Of course, neither of these groups benefit from war, chaos, confusion, and a vibrant military intelligence, arms, and public commentary marketplace in the Middle East, and no one would ever be so stupid as to suggest that. Nonetheless, they both reluctantly came on board with this proposal to aid Syrian rebels because indeed, this is a humanitarian crisis, not a political one, and it can only be dealt with militarily.

Everybody knows that.

Suggestions that members of the Senate Committee take some of their considerable private wealth and influence and raise the funds to train, arm and transition a new government into Syria were shrugged off, with one Senator saying “What good would that do?”

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

The federal government is now faced with a small reduction in its rate of growth over the next ten years. The “sequester” is nothing more than $880 billion dollars in “on paper” reductions from projected spending in the next decade. As Forbes Magazine recently pointed out, the sequester deal put forth by Obama and accepted by the Republican majority in the House is actually a $110 Billion spending INCREASE!

Silly us. We complain that the Republicans don’t work with the Democrats, and the President never compromises. Pay no attention to the whines and moans coming from Congressmen, Senators, Presidents and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. These fat cats are smiling, chubby and Cheshire-style.

I had breakfast yesterday with several retired military people, like myself. Between the three of us, we came up with a handful of spending cuts the military could take right now that would save hundreds of millions of dollars, and we never even got to the antiquated weapons system lines, the unnecessary overseas bases, or the troubled and “too big to fail” F-35 fighter aircraft. By the way, the F-35 multi-role fighter aircraft is seven years behind schedule, 70% over budget, and is already the most expensive weapons system in US history.

But what are we hearing from Washington? Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, coming fresh from the bloated CIA where he expanded the mission there, said that the sequester will make us “less safe,” “badly damage our national defense” and “undermine the people in the military.”

I spent 20 years in the military, working communications, acquisition and military political affairs. I can unequivocally say that Leon Panetta is either a bald-faced liar and an idiot. Take your choice.

Let me explain my assumptions here. First, I am assuming that Leon Panetta actually cares about this country’s defense, and he actually cares about the people in the military – and will determine what programs to grow less fast wisely. I’m also assuming that Mr. Panetta knows something about managing large organizations, and he knows which unproductive and antiquated programs deserve a slower rate of growth in the next decade.

Not that there is any real cutting going on. Government grows, and the Pentagon grows, largely unimpeded. Money the government spends is money that has been extracted by force from the private sector or borrowed without our permission from foreign speculators and from our unsuspecting children and grandchildren.

Government spending is always at the expense of something else. Government created and administered jobs are 30-40% more expensive than private sector jobs – higher pay and benefits, and a higher overhead and carry cost.

So what is sequester hysteria really about? Well, it’s a lot like pregnancy hysteria. No real pregnancy exists. But an overpowering hope for pregnancy in some cases results in actual symptoms.

While counseling and treatment is available for the victims of hysterical pregnancy, we have no such options to deal with victims of hysterical sequesterism.

Instead, we need to stand firm as our Congressman and our Senators cry and moan about the “senseless cuts.” We need to hold our ground when professional bureaucrats explain to the rubes in the provinces how they cannot manage their business unless we guarantee them predictable and generous budget increases every year.

We need to look these creatures in the eye and be brave as they threaten us with the dire straits of a government that grows less rapidly then they expected.

Finally, we need to introduce a new sequester program every month until we have government that is grateful for the money we allow them to spend and borrow each year, careful and courteous in its expenditures, and mindful of its constitutional role as servant to the people, not master of the serfs.

Good evening. I'm delighted and honored to be here. I want to talk today about liberty, how it is defined in practical terms, and what is required of us to gain and preserve it. I'll talk about a man, dead for centuries, who spent much of his life in exile or in prison. A man who led a movement that inspired and informed our own founding fathers, a man whose ideas and example may well be appropriate for our own era of reclaiming liberty in our own country.

Before we examine the life of this hero of liberty, I'd like to mention another young man, who lived in the mid 1500s, in France. Etienne de la Boetie was still a teenager when he wrote a three-part essay entitled The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. De La Boetie divided his essay as follows:

In Part I he asked simply,"Why do people obey a government?" His answer was that people tend to enslave themselves, and let themselves be governed even if by tyrants. He believed that freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from a simply refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.

In Part I, de la Boetie observed that liberty, not servitude, is the natural condition of the people." Servitude is fostered when people are raised in subjection, when people are trained to adore their rulers. He observes that while freedom is forgotten by many, there are always some who will never submit.

In Part III, he writes that if things are to change, one must realize the extent to which the foundation of tyranny lies in the vast networks of corrupted people with an interest in maintaining tyranny.

De La Boetie was fascinated to find that throughout history, the majority willingly does the bidding of the minority. This obedience is voluntary. He argued that it would have to be, because there would be no possible way for any minority to force any majority to do anything, except by their consent. He noticed that this required consent was often "manufactured," to recall Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's term in their 1988 book on media.

Manufactured consent, in this case, relies on a successful sales pitch promoting the existing status quo government. There is (and there must be) a widely accepted and shared belief, promoted by the minority, that the existing hierarchical system — the existing government — is good, just, and perhaps even divine. To reject the system, and its innate goodness, was certainly treason, and often blasphemy.

This majority consent is constantly reinforced by the majority itself, through group and family pressure to conform, and by group rejection and family criticism of those who would fail to join in with the prevailing paradigm. We are happy to be included, and miserable if on the outside. It is easy to see how this control mechanism works in a family, a tribe or a group — but harder to see how it would work for a whole nation. But remember, in the 1500s, Europe was still a place of kingdoms, with rulers blessed by God, both royal and divine. Merging the political with the religious was very effective, and to reject a king would be to reject your very faith.

I mention Etienne de la Boetie because he had three important things to say to Frenchmen, to Englishmen of the 1600s, to our founding fathers, and to us today. He understood that freedom comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. He could see that tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support. He pointed out that liberty is our natural condition, and that we are born free — free born — but are instead taught that our governments or our kings only allow us freedom. He recognized that to change things we first must become aware of the locus of real and true power (which is at the individual level and not at the state level), and then change our own minds about how we wish to live.

De La Boetie was young, and the young are known for their optimism, enthusiasm, and fire in the belly demands for liberty. We older people nod and smile at the naïve antics of young people who haven't yet learned what we think we know.

But it is true that when the people withdraw their consent, governments fall, whether in ancient Rome, or modern Moscow or Warsaw or Bucharest. It is true that education, whether for freedom or for enslavement, is important. The father of modern American public schooling, John Dewey, wrote, "Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent." This observation is not new.

De La Boetie lived in the 1500s in a society where most people were wholly devoted to their kings and queens, the order of the day, as they were taught. Yet he could see that the individual matters, that liberty is fundamental to our humanity, and the rule of government depends on our belief in it. The moment we stop believing in that order, government begins to weaken.

I wanted to introduce you, or reintroduce you, to a certain radical Englishman of the 1600s. His adult life was marked by a series of civil wars against a tyrannical King spanning 1642 through 1651. It was Parliamentarians against Royalists, Oliver Cromwell against King Charles I, and ultimately the Parliamentarians gained ground. One group that fought on the side of the Parliamentarians against the monarchy became known as the Levellers.

The Levellers were agitators and pamphleteers and soldiers who demanded constitutional reform and equal rights under the law. They believed all men were born free and equal. They believed all men possessed natural rights that resided in the individual, not in the government. They believed that each man should have freedom limited only by regard for the freedom of others. They believed the law should equally protect the poor and the wealthy. They were the liberty agitators of their day, the classical liberals of the 1700s, the Lysander Spooner style abolitionists of the 1800s, the anti-imperialists of the early 1900s, and the Taft Republicans of the 1940s. They would be called libertarians and constitutionalists, and would constitute the liberty wing of the Republican Party today.

A primary leader of the Levellers was John Lilburne, also known as known as Freeborn John. Lilburne was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Parliamentarian Army. He wrote extensively and prolifically, as did his associate Richard Overton. Through their pamphlets and their speeches, and their examples of resistance, they rallied the troops, and the common people, and members of the gentility as well — in the name of liberty.

The revolution against Charles I, the rise of the Parliamentarians and the rapid awareness and articulation of liberty might be instructive for us today. This story is something I wanted to share with you tonight, because 400 years later in our own country, history could be repeating. This revolution started in part because no one was really paying attention to the trendlines.

It was nearing the end of the 30 Year War that began in 1618. Continental Europe's landscape and economy had been devastated. England had been spared, because Charles I could not afford to participate in the War for long. Because he had dissolved and alienated the Parliament in 1629, he had no way of raising revenue from the common people through national taxation. For those next 11 years, Charles I had ruled without a Parliament, and this period became known as the "11 years of tyranny."

Charles did need to raise money during this time — but he did so through fees and creative financial gyrations. For the common people, this meant several decades of growing prosperity, with no growth in their tax burden. Charles I became quite a popular king among this group. Commoners would have had no real voice in the Parliament in any case — remember the creation of the Parliament was an assertion of power by noblemen, to rein in kings who threatened their lands and wealth. On the other hand, the small middle class, property owners, and noblemen increasingly resented the creative financing and tax schemes placed on them alone by the King, and they increasingly felt powerless — they had to pay but they had no voice.

To summarize, English political trends of the day were these: 1) a gradual loss of a political voice for the productive and property owning classes, while the poorer classes were experiencing relative prosperity even as they were not moving up the economic ladder, and 2) The nation's leader is increasingly seen as a tyrant, with his own agenda, unresponsive and contemptuous to the people who built the country. Does any of this sound familiar?

The trigger to revolution was an overt power play. King Charles moved to bring the Presbyterian Church of Scotland under Anglican reforms and rule. In response, the Scots took up arms and invaded England. Charles apparently didn't see this coming, and needed to quickly hire soldiers for the English army. He had no money to pay those soldiers, so he finally convened a Parliament to raise those funds. But when he did, he found the representatives were angry, and more interested in addressing their grievances with the king than funding his war with Scotland. So Charles dissolved it, and convened a new one. But this parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, passed a law saying it could only be dissolved by its own consent. King Charles was angry, but he believed that only a handful of troublemakers were the problem, and he attempted to have these men imprisoned on charges of treason. But when the kings army came to Parliament and demanded that they turn over the five troublemakers, no one would help — no one consented — no one cooperated. Charles left London, and the parliamentary revolution ensued.

Freeborn John and the Levellers fought with Cromwell on the side of the Parliamentarians. Yet they were not the same in terms of goals or principles. In fact, John Lilburne was jailed several times at the discretion of Cromwell, who would later purge the Army of many Levellers. If anyone has been paying attention to the GOP and its liberty wing over the past few years, including at the convention a few weeks ago, this might sound vaguely familiar. Over time, the Parliament itself assumed unprecedented powers, and Cromwell, in some ways perhaps an early neo-conservative, became an expansionist tyrant in his own right. But the Leveller movement was influential in the articulating understanding of the natural rights of people, and the ideal functions of a government that respects and serves the people.

One important work of Freeborn John, first seen around 1647, was "An Agreement of the People." This document was a demand for rights and conditions, among them:

• Equality of all persons before the law
• Trials should be heard before 12 jurymen, freely chosen by their community
• No-one could be punished for refusing to testify against themselves in criminal cases
• The law should proceed in English and cases should not extend longer than six months
• The death penalty to be applied only in cases of murder
• Abolition of imprisonment for debt
• Tithes should be abolished and parishioners have the right to choose their ministers
• Taxation in proportion to real or personal property
• Abolition of military conscription, monopolies and excise taxes
• The right to vote for all men over the age of 21 (excepting servants, beggars and Royalists)
• No army officer, treasurer or lawyer could be an MP (to prevent conflict of interest)
• Annual elections to Parliament with MPs serving one term only

These demands certainly sound familiar, and several are specifically reflected in the anti-Federalists positions as seen in the first ten amendments of the Constitution. Three main concepts of Leveller thought persist at least in our own Constitution. First, we understand the natural right of self-propriety, or as we would say today, self–ownership. Second, we see a clearly stated right of free association. Third, we embrace equality under the law, for rich and poor, the same rules applying to both the politically connected and politically outcast.

In a modern era where we hear of people talking about the 99% and the 1%, when we see government policy favoritism and bailouts directed by both parties to key financial and industrial giants, and when we find massive debt accumulated by the central government while more and more people cannot find productive work, and entrepreneurs are stifled by government regulation and taxation and oversight — the very concept of a "Leveller" may even be appealing. It also sounds a bit communistic, a bit destructive, and not really related to individual freedom. In fact — the "Leveller" name was a pejorative term placed on the liberty advocates by the royalists — John Lilburn and William Overton preferred the term "agitator", but they were known by the people as Levellers nonetheless. Hmmm. Imagine the government labeling the liberty movement as destructive, dangerous, and silly. That's a new one!

Freeborn John and the levelers were jailed and persecuted, not only by Royalists but eventually by the very Parliament they had fought to empower. Just as public schools and collectivist societies cannot tolerate people who think for themselves, overweening massive government cannot function in an environment of property-owning people who are well-versed in the rationality of freedom, and who will boldly question their government.

Our founding fathers were inspired and informed by 17th century libertarianism and they designed a system of government they thought would preserve those values. But much as the evolution of Oliver Cromwell's own parliament, our constitutional republic started out with the right ideas, and then gradually became authoritarian, and eventually, tyrannical. I say tyrannical. Perhaps there is a better word. But how else might we describe $16 trillion in federal debt, millions of pages of laws and regulations, and future unfunded obligations of $220 trillion? How else might we describe a politicized, unelected central bank that creates money out of thin air for the government to spend, and an executive bureaucracy that functions largely outside the constitution, spending billions to monitor and regulate our lives and businesses? We are told each day that we are free, but in fact, we have been made peasants, and our children serfs. Our grandchildren may indeed be runaway slaves, seeking a freer country in which to make their lives and fortunes.

If tyranny might have been predicted, history also tells us that the ideas of liberty remain steadfast and pure, and repeatedly these ideas take form and flight, and agitate the status quo.

Periodically in our own history, we have seen a resurgence of the ideas of Freeborn John. We are seeing them in the Republican Party, most specifically in the person and message of Dr. Ron Paul. We've seen them in the relatively young Libertarian Party.

These ideas — of self-ownership, of religious toleration, of the right of free association, and of equality under the law, and ideas that oppose government influenced, government created, and government subsidized monopolies — these are old ideas, and they are right ideas.

Today, we live under a constitution that in words, embraces liberty. And yet what we have in terms of a government, a president, a Congress, and a judiciary is arrogant and unrestrained. Just this week, we witnessed a mild example of actual constitutional process. A federal judge permanently blocked the detention of Americans by the executive branch. Section 1021 of the NDAA provides for the detention of any American indefinitely without habeas corpus or trial on executive order. It clearly contradicts the Constitution. Yet, when a federal judge explained this and blocked the practice, within hours of the ruling, the Obama administration filed an extensive and panicked appeal.

Judge Napolitano wrote a scathing article this week, wondering what our choices were in terms of a change of national leadership. He basically asked, "What if the principal parties' candidates for president really agree more than they disagree?" He concluded with another question: "If elections change nothing, what do we do about it?

These observations are not from a nihilist or an anarchist — they are from a seasoned judge and constitutional scholar, a Fox News advisor and host. And this same question: "What do we do about it?" was on the mind of 16th century Frenchmen like Etienne de la Boietie, and 17th century Englishmen like John Lilburne and Richard Overton. These were indeed the questions that our own founders, from Patrick Henry to Thomas Jefferson to George Washington asked. These questions were also asked by the anti-imperialist league at the beginning of the 20th century — and what all of these men discovered about their own roles is what I believe we must rediscover today.

I believe we must take an active and even aggressive role in the effort to restore liberty. This is accomplished first in our hearts and our minds, but that won't be enough. Like John Lilburne and Richard Overton, and like our founders and thousands more who stood with them — we must be ready to face a king's wrath, social disfavor, and the criticism of our group or our party. We must be ready to face arrest and imprisonment keeping our eyes on the long-term goal of liberty for all of us.

Just last month, federal and state law enforcement officers detained and arrested a former Marine just outside of Richmond because they didn't like what he said in a private Facebook chat. This man had committed no crime, but a criminal and a nut he was made out to be, until valiant resistance by his mother, his friends, and the Rutherford Institute out of Charlottesville publicized his case. Thanks to their swift and bold action, Brandon Raub of Chesterfield was not locked away forever in a mental institution on the command of a government bureaucrat. Instead, Brandon Raub, former Marine and solid citizen whose only crime was to annoy and agitate the federal government, was released free of charges. This release would never have happened without the publicity and the bold defense by John Whitehead. John has written in the weeks since he garnered Raub's release, that he has heard from hundreds of people all over the country with similar stories, that didn't end as well.

If that can happen in Virginia today, then the time is long past for us to get over our concern that we will stand out from the crowd if we demand liberty too loudly — and that we will be rejected by our political party if we argue for the rights of the people to self-ownership, freedom of association, private property, and equality under the law. These are simple demands reflect natural law and they don't require an Ivy League education to understand. They are not newly invented, but have been a rallying cry for centuries against overweening government and against tyranny. We did not invent these values of liberty! All we are being asked to do, all we must do today is stand up for them.

I doubt many of us really consider what it means to demand liberty, at the cost of death. Patrick Henry's famous words are well known to us. In the beginning of his famous "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" speech, he says this,

…it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.

I believe the challenge before us today is not an election, or even many elections. The challenge before us is rather to be willing to know the truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it. It is in that providing that we will give up comfort and wealth, embrace our fears, trade away our former dreams and lay it all on the line to live free, and to never submit to tyranny. We are on that path now — as those who went before us — because we have indeed been willing listen, and to see, the terrible truth that a republic of these United States no longer exists — it has been destroyed and transformed into a social welfare dictatorship in which voters trudge angrily to the polls hoping to change things, and yet the only change we see is the continued growth of a centralized security state, an indebted and bankrupt nation that seeks wars abroad, suppression of liberty at home, and preaches a deformed and alien interpretation of the Constitution to sustain its existence.

We want a map, we want to understand how we should be organized to restore a Republic, and to restore liberty in the hearts and the lives of Americans. I've mentioned some historical figures, and I'll rephrase their advice. First, de La Boetie would advise us to withdraw our consent. Withdraw our consent to tyranny, to statism, to a lack of equality under the law. In other words, we should obey no unlawful, and for us, no unconstitutional, order. Freeborn John would advise us to never compromise on the natural liberty of man. He would tell us that the only just government is one that honors and protects the individual and individualism.

He would advise us to always preach dangerous words to power, even though we may be imprisoned or removed from our livelihood and families. We already know what Patrick Henry advised, and perhaps we must also be reminded of the famous last words of Nathan Hale, who before being hanged on September 22nd, 1776 by the British: “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”

This is what liberty means, and it cannot mean other than lives lived free, and given freely. If government, as George Washington wrote, is force, and dangerous like fire, our very survival and our children's survival, depends on keeping that fire in check, keeping that fire limited, strictly useful, always our servant, and never our master. If we must learn, teach others, risk everything to resist tyranny, and fight and die for liberty, then that is what we must do. That is our instruction. That is our mission. For those who ask, as we all have, as Judge Napolitano did this week, what can we do, this is your answer.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She ran for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district in 2012.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

One of these fat men is John Sununu. Watching him on Tuesday afternoon steamroll the wishes of half of the delegate floor, and destroy what was left of the integrity of the GOP, I was strongly reminded of Nurse Ratched running the floor at the Salem State Hospital. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ratched dominates her fiefdom sternly, with her contempt for her charges oozing with her every smirk, and every command. This evil queen saw criminality in a raised eyebrow, revolution in a meek request for equality. Punishment for dissenters would be quick, overwhelming, and comprehensive. John Sununu's totalitarianism was on display, and his goal seemed obvious: the literal and figurative lobotomy of the constitutional and liberty movement within the party.

As with the Salem State Hospital, the world of the RNC convention, the world of ten fat men, their sycophants and enablers, is a small place, removed from natural law, and removed from the reality of America. This is the real blessing — we can and are walking away. Millions of us are literally and figuratively walking away from the kabuki theater of neoconservative statism posing as a popular problem solving. We can do this!

If our own party's Nurse Ratched didn't frighten from the stage, we have Romney campaign lawyer and strategist Benjamin Ginsburg orchestrating totalitarianism from behind the curtains. He has been called a bête noire of the Tea Party, but he's really just a lawyer — the very kind of lawyer that Clint Eastwood was talking about.

Romney's advisors include all manner of warfare-welfare statists. I'm not naming all the names here, but I think the flat and poorly received speech by head neoconservative statist John McCain said it all. The GOP media, notably on talk radio, carefully avoided all mention of McCain after his dismal and eye-darting display of war promotion as republicanism. If he isn't the original Manchurian Candidate, he'll certainly do.

The ten fat men in the room rarely get up in front of the people, and they certainly don't take questions. The convention speakers were instead front men and women, and except for Clint Eastwood, all heavily scripted and controlled. I have one thing to say about the presentations given by the array of bright, handsome, pretty, clean and coiffed "conservative" speakers paraded before the podium for four days. They didn't build that! The lack of passion in the speeches, and the restrained audience response to them, indicated that they knew that none of them really owned the message. That's how democratic centralism works.

Observers, attendees, and the media frequently noted that the convention wasn't all that fun. It certainly wasn't entertaining. It lacked positive energy, and the attempted decapitations of the liberty wing of the party fostered a generalized anxiety, rather than loud cheering around the cage. The "two will enter, one will leave" mentality engineered by the ten fat men seemed instead to result in a ragged fracturing of the GOP, with too many people recognizing that we can't do this.

The liveliest presentation of the four days was Eastwood's own act on stage, a dash of honesty and fearlessness that boldly slapped the GOP establishment as evenhandedly as it slapped the Obama administration. He had an RNC vetted speech — and he chucked it. This simple act of nullification sent waves of fear and anger throughout the establishment controllers. I don't know if they lobotomize 82 year olds, but I imagine the thought crossed Nurse Sununu's mind. I've no doubt the Romney team was assessing its medical options in real time as Clint charmed and educated those watching.

This convention convened nothing and decided nothing. Onerous security, unhealthy and overpriced concession food in the Forum, the moment-by-moment scripting of the convention speeches, and the pervasive fear of the liberty and constitution segment of the crowd is what we will remember. Ten fat men in a room built that.

These devils dancing on the head of a pin ultimately amount to very little. What these men built isn't good, doesn't work, and won't sell. Their so-called conservative message — saving welfare programs to be paid for by unborn Americans, fighting wars on the other side of the world on borrowed money, cutting imaginary out-year federal budgets and calling that constitutional government — is falling flat.

When in a rare moment over the four days we heard about a flawed monetary policy, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution — cheers roared out. Oh, wait. Flawed monetary policy, our shredded natural rights, a trashed Constitution were not discussed from the stage — the best the ten fat men could do was suggest we might be able to balance the budget in 27 years (Ryan's "plan") and point out that "everything was free but us" — and then go on to the next topic before we could really think about what that means, and what the GOP's position really is on that lack of liberty.

Real people are the majority — let's start with the 23 million men and women in this country who want to work and produce and currently cannot because the government is in the way, or the 100 million who don't vote because Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber offer no real change, or the 200 million who deeply cherish their children and grandchildren. We matter, we count, and ultimately we do rule. We built it, we can do it, and ten fat men in a room better stay out of our way. The Democratic Party establishment has their own ten fat men in a room, and we know they won't have Ron Paul on stage either. The GOP establishment clearly has no idea how to restore the Republic, and these bureaucrats are not interested in learning how.

Happily, that's our job and we started without them years ago. The anachronistic statist party they built, like an old factory that would not adapt to technological and market reality, will be boarded up and lights out within a decade. If there is one thing I learned at the 2012 GOP Convention, it is that the liberty movement is vibrant, fearless, and unstoppable.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She ran for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district in 2012.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

I hope our children will innately remember liberty, and somehow understand that it is indeed their birthright.

There are three things we might be able to do now to help the upcoming generations. The republic has already fallen, as thousands of pages of laws have replaced fundamental rule of law, and every citizen today is no more than a felon in waiting. A new American culture of dependency on the state has replaced healthier cultures of personal independence and market productivity.

The past eras, when both rich and poor boldly rejected European and third world statism and took a one-way trip to America, are long gone. They will not return. Today, no more geographic new worlds exist for those who value freedom more than security, or risk-taking and creativity over fascistic centralized control. The task at hand is to recreate republics outside of top-heavy militarized socialism, underneath the ahistorical and moronic state media, and above state educational systems.

We and our children have one overarching mission today. We must ride out the failure and ragged collapse of national and global socialism with our lives and souls intact, and with the skills and vision to rebuild a better system of trade and governance, one that is liberty-oriented, decentralized, and inexpensive.

We have some of the tools we need already — we are human and love freedom. In some ways we are addicted to liberty — when we have a little, we envision more, we accomplish and produce more, and we want more freedom to do so. Freedom is dangerous to the state. With neither force or fear, freedom motivates and rewards every human action in a single moment. Freedom produces value, and it creates its own demand.

First and foremost, we ought to create in our children and grandchildren a taste for freedom.

For the past thirty years, the emphasis in public schools and in society has been to foster the development of "self-esteem" in young people. This has been and continues to be done by avoiding hard knocks and adventure, discouraging strongly held opinions, replacing logical judgment with authoritarian mandates, and promoting groupthink. The self-esteem movement is part and parcel of a broader strategy of feminization in public education. Feminization of public schooling de-emphasizes the role of individualism and liberty in creating and fostering peaceful productive communities, while creating habitual followers. This was not done by hiring women in the school system, but rather by systemic and pharmaceutical promotion of "feminine" qualities of submission, obedience, cooperation, compromise, and avoidance of passion that are considered culturally acceptable feminine qualities. Students (many of our own sons and grandsons, as well as daughters and granddaughters) failing to sufficiently demonstrate these qualities are punished, held back, medicated and even incarcerated.

The feminization of the public school and university system creates exactly what the state needs — a marriage of a feminized population with the masculine state. But thirty years of public school feminization was predated by what the welfare and entitlement system has done to American families. Senator Patrick Moynihan complained nearly 50 years ago, in 1965, that the welfare system was already having the measureable effect of replaced human husbands with the husbandry of the state. The state would be pronounced breadwinner, rulemaker, and guarantor of safety and survival, till death.

To state as "father" and state as "husband," add in state as "mother." This has been subtly achieved through the friendly and cooperative yoking of media and the state that began before World War II. Americans today have consumed nearly 70 years of streaming state propaganda that encourages us to believe and accept that unrepublican and unconstitutional government in Washington, D.C. is in fact both republican and constitutional. With rare exceptions, we have been told that the warfare-welfare state is not an empire, but instead a shining city on a hill that the rest of the world envies and admires.

When I reflect on what socialism in American has wrought — I worry less about the next four years of Obama and more about the last 75 years of American statism's unarguable success in shaping the bulk of the population into passive, weak, unimaginative slaves and serfs.

Yet — for this unending diet of socialistic illusion a percentage of Americans have remained awake, and many more are awakening today to the fundamental realities that socialism isn't free, and that our government lies, cheats, and steals as a matter of policy.

The abundant and rapidly growing home school movement has been one response to the counter-logical and anti-liberty message of the state to our children. Today, over 5.5 million young people are in private schools, and another 1.5 million are homeschooled. Beyond that is adult self-education being pursued by tens of millions as a result of the Internet. Ironically, this self education is aided by the state fostered underemployment that has created a troika of frustration, curiosity, and time to pursue interesting ideas from people all over the world and from past generations. I would suggest that we have more Rothbardians today than when the great man was alive, and we probably have more Randians today than when Ayn held court. I wonder if we also don't have fewer true Marxists than when Marx and Lenin were alive — because the Internet and modern events have put forth the failed record of Marxism for all to see. Certainly, countries that suffered lost decades and generations under Communism and subsequently transitioned to something slightly more market based and libertarian are not filled with Marxists any more, if they ever were.

This is cause alone for hope — statist systems collapse but people don't. Our children — and ourselves — should aspire to be not just survivors but rainmakers and change agents. This means we must, as soon as practical, divorce the state as husband, reject the state as mother, and abandon the state as father. We do all of this much as we would divorce a real husband, reject a real mother, or abandon a real father. Prepare, consider strengths and options, and then leave the state family to go out into the world and test ourselves, produce for ourselves, and take on for ourselves those wonderful qualities of father, mother, and husband. This means we exercise courage, work hard, learn rapidly, and become more alert and aware of both past and present, and more willing to boldly look over the horizon to an unpredictable future.

This is what the state currently attempts to do for us. It is "courageous" so we don't have to be. It works, as Obama has said, and it builds our businesses. It learns while dumbing us down, and it looks to the future and plans our role in that future. Today, as the political mouthpieces have been saying, the state is taking us over a cliff, at full speed ahead.

We must give ourselves and our children an awareness and understanding of real freedom, and real independence. We must divorce the state, as individuals and as extended families. To survive, we and our children must be prepared to jump off the speeding train, leap out of the back seat of that car being driven over the cliff by Red Thelma and Blue Louise.

Beyond fostering a sense of freedom's possibilities and demands, we must prepare physically and economically for the collapse of the state-led family — and that means, much as the collapse of any family, uncertainty, doubt, economic hardship, new kinds of jobs and even relocating. We would do well to revisit George Carlin's famous "stuff" skit. The stuff we have ought to be useful for the next phase — meaning an era of independence, creativity and survival, self-education, production and provision of what we and others people need, and NOT what the state needs.

The state needs your payroll income, it needs you driving to and from state-approved activities, and it needs centralized control. Divorced from the state, and post-state, we ought to examine what it is that people and communities really need. I would submit that centralized control, payroll income, and state approved activities are going to be low on the list of what we will be needing — so think on these things and start practicing now. Help our children differentiate between community and market self-perpetuating order and the heavy-handed controls of the state that poses as "order."

If we help our children and those around us to understand freedom, seek it, if we take steps to divorce the state's many assumed roles in our lives, and if we prepare physically and educationally for living and producing above, below and beyond state awareness and control, we have done much. Unplugging from the state can be done, slowly and bit by bit, while we have the chance and the choice. Unplugging may also give us more time to think, to learn, to study to practice new skills and most importantly, to strengthen our relationships with people. Our networks and extended families, and our like-minded communities will be critical in surviving and thriving the metastasizing cancer of present-day American fascism. They will be imperative if we intend to thrive in the coming post-socialism era.

We crave and need liberty, and liberty is our God-given birthright. We must divorce the state, unplug from socialism, and prepare for the collapse that always occurs when debt and poverty collapse a government semblance of order. Humans are strongest and healthiest with a combination of active intellectual growth and hard physical work. My advice for my children is to embrace both with equal enthusiasm.

This originally appeared on Freedom’s Phoenix’s e-Zine.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She ran for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district in 2012.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

By launching and running a insurgent liberty-oriented campaign against an entrenched, big spending and big borrowing establishment hack, I believed we were doing something useful. Many agreed with me. Many helped and I thank everyone who gave us time, talent, money and best wishes.

There were costs, and I want to reflect on these, because many of these costs weren't what I'd expected. Certainly, I spent my own money (and yours), wore out my transmission and my tires, and consumed a lot of time that otherwise would have been spent on work and family. That happens to every candidate.

But beyond that, my contributions to LewRockwell.com dropped off in the year I spent campaigning. Instead of writing what I loved to write, I wrote less rewarding short essays relating to liberty and paleo-conservatism aimed specifically at the 6th District audience. I missed my LRC readers. I missed their attention to detail, their deep grasp of history and economics, their insight and their ability to explore difference of opinion deftly and without alienation of affection. Writing for a generally uninformed public on the proper role of the state, on real liberty, and the true nature of the free markets and free exchange was not easy. The lack of a shared language of liberty and a shared contempt for the state was sharply evident.

The campaign connected me and likeminded people to our peers and partners; the Remnant recognized its membership, grew it, and groomed it. But the effort to go beyond liberty's enlightened minority was difficult, and I have yet to figure out the key to influencing the so-called "masses." There may be no key at all — and convincing the majority may, of course, be entirely unnecessary. But it was disheartening to learn that most people are uninformed about, unaware of, uninterested in and unconcerned by either liberty or statism. It was disheartening to find that most people are driven by feelings rather than facts, emotions over critical evaluation.

Those who actually vote often seem driven by fear, voting to allay that fear. Our campaign certainly leveraged that. We promoted fear of the unpayable federal debt, of hyperinflation, of war, of economic collapse, of gun and property rights being stripped away by overweening government. Bob Goodlatte's campaign leveraged fear as well, advocating the terror of an unknown candidate, and conducting telephone push polling and email whispering campaign throughout GOP party channels that painted me as an anti-Semite and a 9/11 truther.

Enough fear can chip away at voter apathy, but is that a reason to vote at all? We are seeing this on a national scale in the GOP campaign to defeat Obama in November. We are told the country will be destroyed by four more years of Obama, and that this is the "most important election ever." That nearly every president since Lincoln has consistently grown centralized government power and expanded executive rule is somehow ignored, as the party systems fight for supremacy and, you guessed it, more power over the people and their assets. And they all need "voters" for top cover.

My past writings ridiculing voting as a mystical state ceremony, symbolic rather than truly functional, were curiously not brought up by my opponent, perhaps because of all the things I may be correct about, I am most correct on this. On the other hand, I found myself in the curious position of valuing a voter's symbolic rite, and encouraging it as a means for real change — and this seemed inconsistent with my own beliefs. Happily, I could point out that nearly 95% of the voters in the 6th District disapprove or couldn't care less about Bob Goodlatte — 92% didn't show up at all to the open primary, and of the 8% who did, only 5% voted for his continued reign. Could we embrace that contempt and fundamental disregard of the DC political class, and somehow transform it into real liberty, and into individual and collective refusals to fund, support and obey that state? By doing that, would we be able to witness a richer and more dynamic society and more decentralized market-based solutions? And what political party would — or could — embrace the people's anti-vote?

I found that our campaign caused me to compromise my own values in an attempt to appeal to my conservative base. When asked about the drug war, I naturally blasted it for cost, counter-productivity, corruption, abject failure of the mission, the massive growth of the military police state in this country, and I called for its end. But I didn't lead with this as the first "war" or set of agencies to eliminate, and I never talked openly about my goal of seeing agricultural hemp legalized, in Virginia and across the country. Next time I run, I'll be more bold.

I've written extensively on unnecessary and unconstitutional war, yet I didn't run on an antiwar platform — but rather an anti-nation-building one. Yet nation-building is indeed war, and endless expanding war is fundamental to state power. As my campaign progressed, this country engaged in war on three continents without pause. It conducted cyber war, economic war, and direct action in foreign countries — all without any Congressional declarations of war, and all with repeated votes by my opponent to fund these unconstitutional activities. My opponent, even during our campaign, voted to expand the military, to further incorporate drones into American policing in every state, and he even refused to support the Smith-Amash Amendment to strip the NDAA of its egregious citizen military detention clause. My lack of boldness on the issue of illegal war and expansion of the national security state was a gift to status quo nationalism, and my opponent's sorry voting record continued unabated and largely unquestioned.

During our campaign, we constantly criticized the incumbent for his tendency to support the best compromise he can get, rather than opposing evil and unconstitutional legislation straight up. I have since concluded that such compromise is not only rotten, but indeed futile. Better to go with a full frontal assault, the yes or no, up or down. Better to unleash the truth, fire the kill shots, and never compromise. Yet, politicians by their very nature are appeasers and deal makers. After completing this race, I increasingly see political campaigns as battles in what must be understood as a war with the state, and certainly a war between the people and Washington, DC.

Our campaign was also a beautiful experiment in the nature of spontaneous cooperation and free exchange. Many talented people came together, often just in time, and offered their special talents and skills to create great value that blessed more than just our campaign. We grew, as Tom Woods eloquently points out, a remnant of sorts in our own district, and we planted seeds for a geography of liberty in this part of Virginia that will not be denied.

I'll stand again in opposition to the soon-to-be-eleven-term incumbent. A few years ago, I called out the neocon pack in the midst of their carcass-feeding war lust, and faced their nips and whines, their bared fangs and bad breath, with amusement and chuckling. Taking on a single lousy politician — who waivered when I shook his hand after the election, and literally quaked when I impulsively gave him a bear hug — is child's play. It's not to my credit, but it could be my area of specialization. The politics of liberty and attitudes of pure contempt for the jack-booted state will be expanded, more widely considered, and more viable as a result of my continued public resistance.

I plan to be more bold, more principled, and will shoot to kill (so to speak) without compromise. Will this approach get a majority vote among the minority who show up in primary elections? Will we dominate in a convention, or will an aggressive campaign to save the country from Washington professionals drive people to defend the status quo even more vociferously? Will the voting behavior of our targeted representative improve in the interim?

I suspect that campaign professionals will despair that I haven't learned the "right" political lessons. They would surely advise to go mild, broaden the base, and never attack directly. But that's no fun, and for me, it wouldn't be honest. I'd rather be an outlier square in the path of where political action is going, rather than where it has been. That may make me as self-serving and arrogant as the career politician I'm targeting, but knowing exactly where I want to be in a long war against DC may also be a strategic advantage. Having completed a political campaign, and lost, I've gained a new awareness of the nature and vulnerabilities of incumbent politicians in the current era of American national socialism. More importantly, I've glimpsed the unlimited possibilities and glorious impact of individual decisions to challenge the illusion of central authority and to live free, by no man's leave and as we wish.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She ran for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district in 2012.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

When I contributed to the recently published Why Liberty, the assignment was easy. After all, liberty is a condition that men and women everywhere instinctively love and need, even if it isn't always well-articulated. Liberty speaks to a way of self-government that is human-centered and fundamentally humane. Liberty defines human rights in a way that is supremely just, and liberty, by its very nature, is antithetical to force. Liberty is the natural condition of man, and most Americans share this ideal. Peace, on the other hand, for Americans born in the past 70 years, and for the millions of foreign subjects of the modern American empire, has not been part of their ideals, their ethics or their collective experience.

When we think of the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his work on individualism, libertarians and logicians alike chuckle at his claim that "Men must be forced to be free." Rousseau likely meant that we tend to be voluntarily enslaved by our governments and kings, and by our cultures and traditions. He was right on one aspect of human nature. We are often reluctant to give up our fantasies of the justness of our rulers, and the righteousness of our traditions.

Americans, in particular, embrace the language of liberty, even as the American state itself has become ominously and voraciously antithetical to liberty. The state pursues its wars in the name of liberty, and the government constantly reminds us that it maintains a large standing army, a massive military establishment, and a heavily integrated domestic police apparatus — all in the name of freedom. We cannot go far in the United States without being reminded that "if we like our freedom, thank a soldier."

To talk about peace in the 21st century, as fresh as we are from the deadly outcomes of the 20th, is a challenge. While it is natural to love liberty, it seems that peace is often argued to be unnatural, uncommon, and unlikely in the human condition. While the claim to liberty is granted by the Creator, claims to peace are not. But practiced liberty, with its prohibition on the use of force to take a man's time, his children, his property and labor, his movement, is the fundamental precursor to peace. A truly free society is one that embraces a culture on the value of individual lives, a respect for their property, and aversion to the use of force. It is one that is comfortable in the art of trading and deal-making based on marketplace choices, not government edicts. A truly free society is a peaceful society.

In the United States, we once had a vocal combination of thinkers who advocated nonviolence, and opposed the use of force, by individuals and by states. For many decades in our history, the primary opinion in the country was that government was to be limited in size and scope. Statesmen referenced the Constitution as a guide for this limited government, and limiting government (and by extension, war) was considered both valuable and normal. In these previous eras, serious public debate on war and peace was tolerated, and one could read about both war and peace in the newspapers.

But gradually, the state as a source of both assistance to and identity for individuals (increasingly thought of as "citizens") emerged in part with the emigration of the German and other national populists after the failures of the various 1848 Revolutions in Europe. These immigrants, unlike previous waves of Europeans seeking freedom of religion and opportunity to farm and produce, embraced ideas of the importance of national unity, and the supremacy of democracy, political ideas that elevate the importance of the state. They were urban-oriented and industrial-minded immigrants, who valued the state as a legitimizer of individuals, and desired a powerful and egalitarian welfare state. They became important political blocs in the country, supporting a strong central rule, workers rights over property rights, majority rule over rule by the more staid and limited Constitution.

Meanwhile, the role of religionists and philosophers in the United States also increasingly saw the state as the mechanism of virtue. The era of Christian progressivism looked to the state to aid sinners in their fight to resist sin, and this very powerful and popular abdication of individual and community responsibility for diktats of state on the individual culminated in the 18th Amendment in 1919, banning sales and consumption of alcohol across the land. From political, economic, and religious perspectives, American as a great state was increasingly valued over America, land of liberty. These Europeans in general opposed Southern slavery, they generally did so as a means to higher paychecks and full employment rather than because they believed in equality of African Americans, or substantially embraced the fundamental concepts of human liberty. Slavery was enforced more effectively in the non-slave North than it had ever been in the South, in part due to racism, and in part due to the widely held view of slaves as economic units of competition.

The state centralized as a result of the Civil War, and militarized as a result of Reconstruction and the professionalization of civil servants. Dehumanization, destruction of property, unlimited post civil war takings but both the state, and its friends and allies, all challenged constitutional ideas of liberty. Without liberty, and the innate justice that comes from respecting property of others, peace is impossible. That many in the Christian churches condemned their more peaceful advocates in the abolition movement, and came to see the state as an ally in pursuit of common goals of social order, the hypocrisy of those who worshipped the Prince of Peace became more and more obvious. The rise of the Yankee Leviathan, as phrased by historian Richard Bensel, and the statist/church Battle Hymn of the Republic, written at about the same time illustrates the nature of the perversion.

Mark Twain's famous "The War Prayer," published in 1923 but believed to be dictated in 1904 or 1905, and referring to the Christian calls to reconvert the failing Spanish Empire from Catholicism to Protestantism, even as the public school movement at home was attempting to do with the waves of impoverished Catholic Irish and Italian immigrants, indeed captures the hypocrisy of Christians who long for war, death and destruction, often overseas or in another's backyard, and usually the name of the state. This lust for war, equating support for the state for love of country and government-led collective hate confused with patriotism, was not something the founders envisioned for the new and free Republic. They certainly understood both the nature of mob thinking as well as the nature of ruling elites, the latter of which were in a position to profit from war. To prevent the nation from adventuring into wars abroad without the full awareness and support of the people, and without a concluded public debate on the justness of the war or military adventure, they specified the Congress, at that time representing the people and the several states, as the branch of government that could declare and authorize such a war or military adventure.

This seemed to work with few exceptions until the late 1800s. Was it a desire for war, or a desire for global relevance, or just the evolving nature of the American state that caused this shift? Had Americans thrilled to the idea of peace, it seems we would have heard more in the public sphere about how we could achieve it. Instead, we got a 20th century of state wars on the indigenous, state wars on other states, cold war militarism and fearmongering, and the positioning of global alliances against global alliances. There were also wars on drugs, wars on cancer, wars on illiteracy, and wars for "humanitarianism" and human rights.

War is organized in vertical authoritarian structures, and entails force against one's own people through regulation, drafts, and economic mandates from the state. War requires great collective fear of an enemy, as well as great personal fear of one's own state. When Randolph Bourne wrote "War Is the Health of the State" he explained how the state is fully realized only in war:

The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become – the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s business and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, toward the great end, toward the “peacefulness of being at war,” of which L.P. Jacks has so unforgettably spoken.

And what is that "peacefulness of being at war?" Jacks observed that in the early years of the First World War.

…the individual is not more gloomy. He is brighter, more cheerful. He worries less about himself. He is a trifle more unselfish and correspondingly more agreeable as a companion or neighbor. … This feeling of being banded together, which comes over a great population in its hour of trial, is a wonderful thing. It produces a kind of exhilaration which goes far to offset the severity of the trial. The spirit of fellowship, with its attendant cheerfulness, is in the air. It is comparatively easy to love one’s neighbor when we realize that he and we are common servants and common sufferers in the same cause. A deep breath of that spirit has passed into the life of England.

In a sense, there is no way to speak about peace to a 21st century American, except as the absence of war. There is no way to collectively think about the absence of war, because the language of modern America is filled to the gills with talk of war, and a reactionary embrace of the centralized state. War is what we do. War sustains a significant portion of our government, gives our presidents manliness and makes our men and women aggressive and longsuffering patriots. War and munitions makes up over half of our global exports and employs over three million people, not counting men and women in uniform. The US government is obsessed with war, and in war, both seeks and finds its political and economic identity. This war obsessed government employs today over 22 million Americans, twice the number of people employed in manufacturing.

Yet, for all of this, Americans themselves do value peace, and are increasingly tired of war, and the endless lies and prevarications about the wars that seem to constantly engage us. Happily, the latest flurry of news from the White House about the final end of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Ladin is not producing the presidential political "bump" in the polls that past similar announcements have done, and instead of loud celebrations, Americans seem newly interested in what bin Ladin's death can tell us about our own country's prospects for real peace, and a contraction of our global military empire.

Peace takes on a more concrete meaning when people are struggling to feed families, buy gas, get and keep a job, and make their mortgage payments. As the productive capacity and civil liberties of Americans are shrinking, as they have done radically since September 11, 2001, the idea of living in a constitutional republic rather than an empire or global military enforcer becomes more compelling to the average American. Increasingly Americans are expatriating, and if not fully disengaging from the American state, are seeking second homes in places that truly, seem to embody peaceful living.

We are reminded today, almost three generations later, of the emerging prosperity-oriented ideas of the late 1950s. Barry Goldwater called for smaller more accountable government, in the face of a growing and ever more confiscatory state. President Dwight Eisenhower questioned the burgeoning growth of the military-industrial complex, and warned all Americans that unless checked, we as a nation would sacrifice both peace and liberty. In 1957, Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged, posing a last ditch solution to the monster war-loving state, a "shrugging" off of individual productivity by simply disappearing from the purview of the state.

These ideas — all related to peace, all related to prosperity, founded on Renaissance revelations of the intrinsic value of the individual and resting on the Founders' ideas of a Creator-granted organic right of liberty — have persisted, even as the government of the United States has morphed into a war-addicted, liberty-offending, debt-ridden global empire.

Why peace? And why now? We have become a country that cannot afford the luxury of killing human beings and destroying economies around the world. Americans are slowly waking to the ongoing destruction of our own economy, due largely to government spending abroad and government malinvestment in a military sector that dwarfs anything existing anywhere else on the planet. Americans are beginning to separate in their own minds their government's unending interest in military force and intimidation around the world, and their own interest in living a profitable and peaceful life, and seeing their children prosper in their own great land, not die miserably or be damaged irreversibly in some barren mountaintop or miserable desert inhabited by people we simply do not care about. Americans are slowly recognizing that the rule of law in this country has been usurped by a new imperial model, where presidential assassinations of enemies of the state around the world are standard, and where American citizens in general are viewed as threats to the state, not as free and valuable individuals, for whom the state must necessarily be submissive and subordinate. Peace is the only way we can to resolve and reduce the state's grip on the lives and economies of Americans, even as peace will resolve and reduce our government's rip on much of the rest of the world.

Many Americans increasingly sense that economic hardship and limited freedom is the new 21st century reality for them and their children. They correctly associate hardship and a kind of citizen servitude with the United States global military empire, even as this empire has been slowly evolving, in some ways surreptitiously, for nearly 100 years. We require peace because we can no longer afford war. More importantly, Americans are beginning, thanks in part to vastly and immediately available access to a wide variety of information, both historical and real-time, to recognize and even laugh at our prevaricating and parasitic political masters in both parties. When major public polling entities begin to regularly pose questions for the "political class" as opposed to "the people" as Rasmussen did in 2010, it is a major sign of impending revolution — or, if we are fortunate, a peaceful evolution towards a value set that will publically and commonly criminalize war and war-mongering, and celebrate peace, liberty and prosperity at home, and everywhere.

In the dystopian future imagined by George Orwell in 1984, Winston is advised,

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

In this simple description, we see the answer to the question "Why Peace." War is intoxication, addiction, and destruction. It is sensation, compulsion, and sin — the enemy not of peace but of humanity itself. Randolph Bourne correctly observed, "War is the health of the state," and we can clearly see that the converse is also true. Peace is the health of the individual, the family, the community and the land.

We don't have to accept the boot of the state and its wars stamping on a human face forever, even as it is served up daily by the ever-ravenous political class, sitting atop a sand-based pyramid of state paranoia. Peace trumps the zero sum game of war, and peace is additive, creative, infinitely inventive, and just. Only in peace can a true "spirit of fellowship" be experienced. To use the language of war with which Americans have become so comfortable, peace always wins, even as states inevitably collapse under the weight of their hubris and criminality.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

I will share that chapter at a later time, and I encourage you to buy and widely share this fantastic collection. Marc, a friend and a great activist for liberty, has really achieved something special and important in Why Peace.

It occurs to me that when we speak of war, we often confuse justifiable resistance of people to evil with the propaganda-driven fiascos pursued by governments in order to consolidate or expand power, or to satisfy the corporate demands placed on politicians by the organizations, industries or cabals that helped elect them.

In American history we have many examples of this, and the American government, even in its early and more innocent years, was no stranger to state-financed war for this or that friend, ally, or economic interest. Gary North even makes a case that the concept of tax resistance embodied in the Boston Tea Party and sparking the American war of independence, was indeed less a justified popular tax revolt than a war for trade monopoly joined by the nascent American government.

German socialists, fresh to American by tens of thousands as they fled their failed 1848 socialist revolution in Germany, were key in the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Their philosophy and statism demanded Lincoln's prosecution of the war between the states. Lincoln's efforts to redefine federalism, to nationalize, to stand above the Constitution, and to politically satisfy both his industrial monopolist and European socialist backers created that deadly war, where none was desired by the vast majority of people, in either the North or the South.

This history, and the Indian Wars as well, lend credence to the idea of war as corporate strategy, implemented by governments through force, largely against the will or common sense of the people, and therefore creating a need for centralized nationalist propaganda. War and its storyline both emanate from the state. On the other hand, rebellion, resistance and a renewal – evolutionary political change – tends to emanate from the people, through a leavening and a changing of their hearts and minds over time.

The Protestant progressivism in the late 1800s embraced the idea that a sinning and sinful men and women could be forcefully reformed, and that a Protestant American state should be God's instrument in this human reform. The merger of church and state instead brought more war, at home and abroad. At home, surges of immigration by large uneducated Italians and Irish Catholics were dealt with by the public school movement, mandatory schooling by the state (at the time, religiously influenced) was advocated. The attempted prohibition of alcohol, and the growth of the state it created, was also a point of progressivism. Abroad, the collapse of the global Catholic empire was seen by these same progressives as an opportunity for the state, and fueled Washington's push for extended global wars.

It would be remarkably generous and entirely naïve to suggest that the progressive wars against papists, alcohol, and laziness were popular rebellions, or that they constituted some focused resistance by the average people of the country. It would also be naïve to consider that the goals of the progressives of the late 1800s and the early 1900s were not in sync with the goals of larger and increasingly global corporations of the major cities of the United States. It was this harnessing of the language and propaganda of the Christian progressives with the corporate capitalism that spawned and encouraged American's participation in the great wars of the 20th Century, and the lesser ones.

After having fought some of these wars, in the Philippines and elsewhere, retired Marine General Smedley Butler wrote his famous 1934 speech "War is a Racket." It was in the early 1930s, an age of widespread hardship, and Butler was capitalizing on both his understanding of corporate-driven wars and on popular sentiment, in a Senatorial primary campaign that he would lose.

Butler had also had a falling out with Grayson Murphy, on whose behalf Butler claimed to have been approached in 1934 to lead an army of 500,000 men to install a dictatorship in the White House. The would-be dictator was identified as Brigadier General Hugh "Iron Pants" Johnson, a member of FDR's brain trust, a FDR speechwriter and a New Deal planner. At the risk of repeating myself, the proposed dictatorship was fascist in orientation. A Congressional committee reviewed the Butler's charges, and confirmed that indeed, such a plan existed, "… and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient." Grayson Murphy was a co-founder in 1919 of the American Legion (the purported source of the proto-army of 500,000), and a board member of organizations such as Morgan Bank, Goodyear and Bethlehem Steel.

I mention this because among many other organizations, the American Legion still takes a strong stance for wars of the state, and suggests in its language, tone, and advertisers that to oppose state wars is to oppose and disrespect the draftees and volunteers who are the foot-soldiers of these wars.

Eisenhower's farewell speech, familiar to many, echoes no more than the contemporary understanding of the embedded industrial, military and political networks of his own era. Those networks have grown, intertwined, and subsumed the policies and actions of the two major political parties in the subsequent decades. Today, as for several past decades, the warfare state benefits whether the elected President of the United States is a Democrat or a Republican.

I think this connectedness of the state, state corporations and appointed and elected warmakers is the only way we can define the term "war." Who can deny that bailed out banks and carmakers, subsidized, taxpayer-nurtured defense, technology, energy, agricultural and pharmaceutical industries are not state corporations? Who would claim today that the incursions of the state into space, into the Internet, and into our backyards, front yards, kitchens, bedrooms, gun cabinets, bank accounts and safe deposit boxes is not a war conducted by the state?

War — its funding, its design, its conduct and pursuit, as Randolph Bourne observed, is always the health of the state. We who resist, rebel, and seek renewal, whether by Jefferson's blood of patriots or though a new and peaceful understanding of the Constitution, of God, of duty or of humanity – what we do, what we fund, what we design, conduct and pursue is not war.

Because it isn't war, we may not have a single leader, or any leader at all. We may not raise a large army, nor will we need to field massive and complex weapon systems. The bulk of rebellion and resistance, and even renewal in a community, a state, a country, and even a nation, is silent and hidden. Like a massive iceberg, the resistance, the rebellion and political and social renewal occurs hidden from the state's view, underneath the substrate, a powerful and indestructible keel.

We use the word "war" too much today, and we fear its "power" perhaps more than we should. Wars are just the wasteful, deadly and destructive spasms of fearful kings and dictators, created largely by the laziness and greed of those who control and drive the overweening state. Conservative and Progressive alike, the so-called left and the presumed right, those who love the Constitution as God's inspired guidance and those who believe as Lysander Spooner did, that it is no law at all — all of these believers should boldly hold state war in profound contempt.

As we treasure peace, freedom, and self-ownership, community and family, we should not teach our children to revere state war, and to become patriotic robots and passive foot-soldiers of a lying, corrupted, and spendthrift government. Instead of studying the histories of wars, written by the surviving governments, we should, through example and practice, teach our children the art of resistance to evil, the power of peaceful rebellion against tyrants, and the current and very real possibilities of political and personal renewal.

This originally appeared on Freedom’s Phoenix’s February 3 e-Zine.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

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That's not news. It's actually quite typical. After the nauseating passage of the National Defense Authorization Bill last month, with its Constitution-shattering military detention provisions for any American who falls out of the President's favor, or who has crossed his minions, what might not be passed into law?

The Senate's Protect IP Act, PIPA, and its House companion Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA, is now seeping through the congressional sewage system. This legislative pollution is purported to reduce global data piracy and illegal copying of digital content by regulating American ISPs and the Internet. Entertainment industry moguls and "too-big-to fail" content producers are demanding it, and it's designed by paid-off, power-hungry establishment lawyers in Congress who don't understand internet architecture, information technology, or the nature of the free market.

SOPA in particular is written by the fascist-leaning central controllers in Washington, who believe a better America will be one with an RFID chip in every creature, four legs and two, federal tracking of every person from birth to death, and exquisite knowledge of their every transaction, in real time. Lavrenti Beria and the East German Stasi chief Markus Wolf must be dreaming of reincarnation into such a totalitarian jewel — the United States in the 21st Century.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers an easy to understand explanation of SOPA — aka the "Internet Blacklist Bill," and the dangers of its intended, and unintended, consequences. The reaction by the sleeping tiger of American small businesses, youth, techies, and advocates for free speech and the remnants of the Constitution indeed illustrates the Daily Bell's concept of the Internet reformation.

But it isn't fair to say that all of us together are that "sleeping" tiger. The tiger has been rousing for several decades, corresponding with increased access to knowledge, and the living, growing network of this knowledge. When Ron Paul says, "We are dangerous!" it is indeed true — but not to each other, not to capitalism and freedom, nor to society or peace — but we — unleashed, informed, angry and connected — are deadly dangerous to the state.

There is a Mussolini-esque idea shared by many in Congress today, and by current and past Presidents. They believe that a modern America is realized when "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." This ideal of bureaucrats and centralists is antithetical to the classical liberalism of the founders. It is antithetical to liberty, and it is a fundamental reason for the modern growth of the state — to the extent that the current account borrowing has exceeded the entire annual GDP of what was once the greatest, most productive and most admired nation on the planet. Bureaucrats and centralists in Washington have created in America a modern socialist Greece, writ large, minus the tourism.

SOPA represents the national socialism that taints every D.C. government "solution" offered in the 21st century. That PIPA and SOPA won't work to end or even reduce data piracy goes without saying. The Japanese faced down Chinese data piracy years ago — with a combination of technology, software and creative business and distribution models. Content producers in the United States have absolutely no excuse not to meet the challenge — but instead they seek to rent-seek, to shape the business environment not through competition, but through favorable laws and government-granted aid and benefits — with the complete and greedy cooperation of the central state in DC.

There is a reason the founders limited the role of the federal government, and had the Congress meet infrequently. To allow otherwise requires our constant alertness, our instant and unleashed rage, our profound and constantly communicated contempt for the Congress. We must reject their idiocy, condemn rent-seeking, and crush the bureaucratic confidence of our so-called representatives.

The story of the PIPA and SOPA — and what we hope will be its imminent legislative desiccation and death — is indeed remarkable. Free market, pro-technology, free speech and Constitutional arousal in opposition to the blacklisting, technology-opposing, constitution-offending, rent-seeking and liberty-hating legislation has been powerful. Congressmen and Senators are fleeing like surprised cockroaches from these bills. Further, several congressmen associated with the top down interference and control of technology and communication — in the name of keeping all of us "safe" and "honest" face, primaries or general elections, and many will lose these elections.

Americans failed to sufficiently oppose the Patriot Act, jammed down out throats a decade ago in the name of safety and security. Instead, we face a Catch-22 between fear of travel in our own country, and fear of publicly complaining about the security state, lest we be named enemy combatants, and are disappeared into a Constitution-free zone of endless, unwarranted federal incarceration.

The national reaction to SOPA and PIPA legislation should give us all hope that peaceful change is indeed, for the moment, still possible. I am delighted to be at the forefront of a political war, as the congressional primary challenger to Bob "Il Duce" Goodlatte. This chief author of SOPA, and defender of an imaginary U.S. government right to manage the Internet, and its billions of users, is paid handsomely to do it. It's par for the course. Goodlatte is widely known for implementing legislation to ban and punish Internet gaming through federal seizure and lockdown of related financial transactions — all while actively supporting the domestic horse racing industry, which had heavily donated to his war chest.

My challenge to Bob Goodlatte is founded in my opposition to his long and hypocritical history of centralizing, regulating, spending and subsidizing. I believe that liberty and freedom, free markets and peace, will ultimately succeed and predominate in America. As my readers already know, I am a long-term optimist. But we can do a lot more than just sit around waiting to be proven correct. A politically vile ten-term RINO needs to be sent a message, and he needs to be sent packing. Our June 12th primary is eminently winnable, and we intend to win it. The fighting 6th District of Virginia will do its part, and our plan, in addition to killing SOPA in its crib, is to send another Dr. No to Washington in November. Join us!

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

2012 will be a bad year for rats. Technocrats, bureaucrats, kleptocrats and other central planners of the superfamily Muroidae will be rightfully credited for the persistent global economic and political malaise. People around the world will ever more rapidly recognize — and dislike, disdain, and hold in contempt — the u2018rats that plague us. Whether the tax-eating voles of municipal governments, the hamsters and pouched rats of state government, rattus norvegicus in D.C. or the New World Order lemmings, members of the u2018rat family will be increasingly viewed negatively. Ways to avoid the u2018rat, to starve the u2018rat, disrupt the breeding cycle and nest-building activities of the u2018rat, and to recover from u2018rat-bites will dominate the airwaves and the Internet. u2018Rats themselves will become more cautious and avoid publicity, while storing food and attempting to reinforce their most important nesting and feeding areas. Reports and viral videos of aggressive u2018rats will increase in 2012, even as Americans and others successfully avoid and in some cases, eliminate u2018rat centers of control.

2012 will be a bad year for a good old-fashioned D.C.-devised war. As governments everywhere go bankrupt, print money, and fail to deliver the goods domestically, historians will justifiably predict war. In previous eras, the wars associated with the collapse of empires arrived as apocalyptic and mysterious surprises to the people. But in 2012, the serfs have Internet. The young people are not loyal to the nation-state, and often see politicians and state employees as self-serving, arrogant, and parasitical. If educated by them, they've learned to hold the state authorities in contempt. If educated outside of the state, they've adopted a classical liberalism that doesn't trust or believe in central state apparatchiks. Of those who do not fight our wars, the old are embarrassed at what has been already wasted, and have lost enthusiasm for war. The middle-aged are frightened and confused, feeling the financial pinch. It won't be easy to march to war with other countries, and even another Pearl Harbor or 9/11 style event won't be enough, not after what veterans and citizens alike have learned from Washington's failed and costly occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

2012 will be a year of progress towards truly free markets, sound money, and government so small you can drown it in a bathtub. Knowledge of and respect for liberty is growing. Every day, more Americans understand how liberty functions in a society, and they embrace self-ownership, sound money and limited government as working to secure that liberty. Some of this knowledge comes through teachers like Ron Paul, Tom Woods, Judge Napolitano, sites like Lewrockwell.com, the Future of Freedom Foundation, and the Foundation for Economic Education, and hundreds of other organizations dedicated to classical liberalism, free-market economics, limited or even no central government. The impact of these people and organization is approaching critical mass. But people are also learning naturally from their own experiences in this long great depression of the 21st Century. Through un- and under-employment, people are indeed rediscovering the value of family, community, and neighbors. By increasingly dependence on government largesse, contempt for the stupidity and arrogance of the state is inculcated. Even financial dependence on government jobs, so many of which are despised by the very occupants for a thousand different reasons, breeds a kind of disgust for the state. As governments at all levels begin to cut services and pass on costs for past debt and spending to the taxpayers while bureaucrats continue to spend the money of other's and promote their own interests, a force for freedom in the hearts of the people is nurtured. The central government in the United States franticly accuses Americans who prepare for reduced government, move outside of government influence, reduce their tax burden, and withdraw from state number-crunching systems to be "domestic terrorists." Yet, for all that, the central state will be the last to recognize the real changes taking place, and will be unprepared for the energized and widespread demand for liberty we will see in 2012.

2012 will be hard on the political establishment. Establishment Republicans and Democrats alike are discredited by their chosen ones who seem to blankly echo the failed European statists. Americans and voters of all ages are thrilling to Ron Paul's message — a message that rings back to the great anti-federalists of the Founding of this country, and a message that rings true to our hearts, our faith, and the natural law so many of us have rediscovered in only the past fifteen or twenty years. The elections will be fun to watch, to enjoy, and to challenge in every way we can. The establishment candidates, whether Democrat or Republican statists, whether Romney or Obama, or even the ambiguous statist Donald Trump, have become aging pole dancers, naked political queens relying on equally aging fans for a ever shrinking payout. In no way do I mean to offend aging pole dancers with a loyal retinue. But politically speaking, this establishment is going bankrupt, desperately looking for buyers before the bank calls in the note.

2012 will be fun. Americans are seeking alternative economic, social and societal structures as we work through the government-caused investment, war, educational, health care, and security-state bubbles. We will increasingly, as a people, exercise our freedoms of speech, gun ownership, movement, and property ownership in part as resistance, and in part because we know the state really can do little to stop us. This attitude will be seen at all levels of society, and it will be exhibited by organizations, churches, businesses and even lower levels of government. Municipalities will reject state mandates, states will reject and even nullify federal mandates. Juries will increasingly be unable to be seated, and those seated will increasingly critique the state of government law, and nullify the stupidity. If the so-called "99 percent" can demonstrate without permission and designated free speech zone, certainly the Tea Party and anti-government groups can do the same. The nature of fun usually includes some healthy competition, some thinking in new ways, some personal challenges and skill development, and a bit of risk-taking. 2012 will be a year of fun.

I've been played it safe and spoken in generalities. To summarize my five predictions for the coming year, let me share a specific local story from a friend of a friend. A young man of 20, who happens to be a Ron Paul supporter, on his way home from his job in a local restaurant is stopped at a police "checkpoint" in our small town. Without cause, the cop asks a lot of question, to which the young man answers honestly. "No, I don't have any drugs or alcohol. I work and am driving home." The cop, ignorantly believing that the convoluted law he "enforces" resembles the Constitution, states that [suddenly] he smells marijuana. The car and the young man are thoroughly searched, and temporarily detained. The cops eventually become bored, and the young man is released. The next morning, his mother, who lives in another town, calls the local police department and makes a vociferous complaint. The department spokesperson said, "Yes, ma'am, of course we found drugs on your son. Isn't your boy the African-American kid?" 50 years of civil rights flushed, stupidity and arrogance on display, and white and black equally insulted by a state which seeks to divide generations and races. We are made one in persecution, united in a desire to own ourselves, our property, our time and our productivity, and to live unobstructed by a grasping and lying state that no longer serves or protects.

Leading edge 2012'ers will hold u2018rats and government lies and liars in full-blown contempt. They will learn and practice liberty for themselves, their families, and their communities in ways they tried in 2011, and also in ways they never dared. They will laugh at the charades, tirades and costumes of the writhing and twisting political establishment. They will take risks that will lead to real change, and they will find risk-taking not only liberating, but a fun and long-forgotten part of the American tradition. So, in these ways, I part company with the doomsayers, even as I believe every word they say, and don't dispute their data. For liberty and community, I think 2012 will be a very good year.

This originally appeared on Freedom’s Phoenix’s e-Zine.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

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Tomasky has been at this for a while, calling Herman Cain "… too self-absorbed to see that he made it as far as he did only because he is black," a "haughty horse's ass" and a "buffoonish peacock." The contradictions and curiosities evident here are worthy of an entire book, but we simply don't have the time.

Before we examine what the dear man has to say about Ron Paul, it's important to look at how and where this "progressive" has slung the proverbial monkey poo. Of Newt, he rails, "The idea that he's a serious presidential candidate is preposterous." Rick Perry was "a bubblehead." He has been dismissive of other candidates, and surprising gentle on Mitt Romney, seeing him as a beleaguered yet suitable GOP candidate, and even "feeling sorry for him."

Tomasky's tendency to belittle and be disgusted by a GOP presidential aspirant relates to a clearly mathematical calculation. No emotional tirades, no incoherent outbursts of political toddler rage. Rather, he's all business. The math looks like this: Likelihood of getting the GOP nomination times the odds this guy can really beat Obama in November 2012 equals Tomasky's fear factor.

He has paid little attention to those candidates who do not threaten Obama's second term as Supreme Ruler over the American Kingdom. He likes Romney just where he seems to be, as the default GOP candidate as determined by the GOP kingmakers and their media talking heads. Romney, as Tomasky and I agree, would be easily beatable by Obama, as Obama is simply a far more electable Romney than Romney himself.

When Cain and Perry rose and fell, Tomasky's calculation was rapid — these candidates had the potential to be both likable and unique from the Obama Persona — and as such both could have won election. When their numbers crashed, and Newt gathered steam, his rage against the Newt was muted, because Newt most certainly would be unable to distinguish himself as a true conservative and rally Republicans in a way needed to send Obama back to Chicagoland.

But steady wins the race, and Ron Paul is the real threat now, and one that has the organization, the cash, the grassroots, and the conservative passion to represent the party. Paul is a clear alternative to the inexperienced and overwhelmed Obama and Paul alone will be able to gain not only the GOP voters, but independents, libertarians, youth and even clear-thinking progressives — gutting the Obama electoral edge, and replacing the Hope and Change charade with solid constitutional rule of law, liberty and peace.

But let's take Tomasky apart, and assess.

He calls Ron Paul a batty old reactionary, and then tops all that by saying Ron Paul's not cool. Apparently Tomasky hasn't been to a Ron Paul event on a college campus — you pick the state, the college and any year in the last five. Batty is a word I haven't seen used recently, but seriously, I think of only two reasons he would use that word — Ron Paul is the only Congressman to ever hit a home run in the annual Congressional Baseball Game, or else he's creating a new word play as in "Batty like Lou Gehrig." It's a weak linguistic construction, but after reading Tomasky's work, I'm seriously thinking he'd go there.

He says Ron Paul's projected strong showing in Iowa on January 3rd will create a "temporary tornado." Notwithstanding that tornadoes by the grace of God are all temporary, I think what our angry young progressive means here is that Ron Paul's success will gain him even more momentum. Ron Paul's conservative and constitutional message has been an attractive and culminating force on Americans of all political stripes and flavors. This is the fundamental energy of the Ron Paul campaign, and this is the source of the political momentum. It is this energy, led by the oldest and kindest man in the race, that is bitterly envied by all of the presidential candidates, and never more so by Obama and his increasingly panicked advisors.

Tomasky favors Romney, and his real concern about Ron Paul's showing in Iowa seems to be how it will impact the Massachusetts Republican who would be a sure loser to Obama a year from now, all else being equal. Tomasky envisions a two party race in which conservative Republican voters stay home, write in a real conservative, or vote Constitution Party – something they would do in droves if Romney were the nominee. Ron Paul would instead pressure the GOP towards the traditional right, and in doing so would be an ideal candidate who could bring together every conservative voter who held their nose and voted for McCain, plus every passionate voter who cheered for Palin. Ron Paul has the advantage over all other Republicans in the primary in that he simultaneously can draw into the GOP corner large numbers of urban, young and non-Republican voters who understand that a return to the constitution and a restoration of our Republic — financially and politically – will not happen unless we elect a president who not only gets the Constitution, but has several decades of experience of voting in accordance with this supreme law of the land. Tomasky fears Ron Paul precisely because he favors Romney as Obama's most predictable and easiest to beat opponent.

Tomasky considers Ron Paul to be an iconoclast — a breaker of false theories, like Keynesianism and progressive and moral government, I presume. George Washington believed government not to be reason, but force, like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Maggie Thatcher is credited with the quip that "Socialism fails, because eventually you run out of other people's money." I suppose George Washington and Maggie Thatcher too were Tomasky iconoclasts. In this era of the American experiment, a new awareness of the nature of the state is demanded if we are to long endure. Ron Paul may be just the iconoclast we need, just in time.

Tomasky brings up recycled charges of politically incorrect thought in the 1960s and 1970s based on newsletter articles written by others and apparently taken out of context. It is true that no amount of context would interest an angry progressive, but to ridicule Paul's admiration for Rosa Parks and the peaceful resistance of Dr. Martin Luther King is going just a bit far, even for the ill-informed Tomasky. As early as the late 1970s, Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan publicly condemned the measured and calculated government destruction of African Americans, their families and their economies, through the application of the uber-progressive Great Society welfare state. Others have observed that historically the co-existing warfare state did little for people of color and the poor. Americans of all colors, ethnicities, race, and even parties join together in admiration for those who peacefully and boldly resist government tyranny, at any level, from township to city to state and federal levels. It doesn't make them libertarians — it makes them Americans.

Tomasky concludes this frantic tirade with, "Even if Paul is not a racist, he is on this point a complete idiot or propagandist or both." In this, we must pity the fool who wrote these words. Of all the terms one might use to describe Ron Paul — even his philosophical enemies recognize that he is an intelligent, well-educated man, congressman, and medical doctor. And propagandist? Ron Paul is stylistically faulted by political advisors and observers for his fact-based, thorough, and conversational engagement with interviewers and voters alike. He is the only candidate including Obama who can and will explain exactly how he thinks, and who lays out the logic of his conclusions for anyone to see, to hear, to debate or refute. Dr. Paul would have been an ideal candidate in Athens in their great era of Republicanism, and he is an ideal candidate today in a democratic society where we believe all men are created equal. Ron Paul believes in and embraces this concept of equality, and he lives it daily. I suspect that an ill-informed, arrogant and class-sensitive journalist like Tomasky knows exactly what he means by both "idiot" and "propagandist" because he is intimately — even innately — familiar with these epithets.

Tomasky refers repeatedly to hipsters. I remain confused as to who or what these "hipsters" are, this purported class of people in America who have been sucked in by Ron Paul's rhetoric or slick and polished delivery. That may be because Tomasky is specifically aiming his ire at droves of defecting young democrats who are attracted to Paul's small government and no nation-building message. Could it be the young statist clinging to the outdated and self-destructive liberalism of Clinton-Obama nanny state is upset to find himself in the political wilderness, increasingly abandoned by his peers and pals? The very trees and shrubs in the forest seem to be singing, "Come down from that socialist tree, Tom-fraidy-cat, and join the Ron Paul revolution!"

I'm just saying.

It's worthwhile to explain one last spear weakly tossed by the clearly exhausted Tomasky in his [somewhat entertaining] hit piece. He writes, "The idea of virtually no state is just silly," and he seems to think Ron Paul advocates this concept. The Paul proposal to save a trillion dollars in one year and his "Restore the Republic" economic plan are nowhere near no-state, or even small state. With $15 trillion in debt, and over $70 Trillion in unfunded state liabilities — Ron Paul seems to be saying cut some unneeded federal spending in order to SAVE the state and allow it to make good on its promises to the old, the middle aged, and the young. Frankly, many young people are about ready to expatriate, and give up on saving the republic. In this way, Dr Paul is pro-state. I have to admit, I'm on the fence as to what to advise my own children — stay and take a chance the American republic can survive, or leave and start anew much as my great-great-great-great-great grandparents did.

Tomasky longs for the day when he no longer has to think about "this pestilential little locust." This particular statement comes on the heels of a mini-tirade about the nature of the free market, capitalism, and how government would be just fine if it wasn't corrupted by …uh.. well… people. The great unwashed, the gritty competitive and living world of humanity — always so hard to rule from the central planner's roost, the serfs and knaves always so ungrateful for their naked king. Tomasky is a sliver of intelligentsia, that as Hayek once observed, "need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas.”

Yes, Tomasky is exactly that kind of functionary — limited in knowledge, not particularly intelligent, performing his role. And if I may be so bold, he's shaking in his boots because Obama will be the last American socialist dictator-in-chief if Ron Paul and his great and growing army of patriotic, passionate, small-government constitutionalists get their way.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

Then, before we've even cleared the dishes and packed away the leftovers, we are out looking for all of the things we didn't have yesterday, and need now, everything we want for Christmas, and at a price that feels good.

This is the beautiful way of the marketplace. Buyers and sellers meeting each others' needs, without coercion, force or intimidation. It exists, it thrives, and it doesn't need permission or regulation by the state to work at its maximum potential. And all I want for Christmas is a free and peaceful market.

The persistent protesters in cities all over the country have been ridiculed and pepper-sprayed. Yet, there is a great goodness in standing up against fascism. Believe it or not, fascism is what we see in America today. It's been evolving here for some time.

In 1944, John T. Flynn put forth eight points that he considered the main marks of the fascist state. They include: 1) government acknowledges no restraint on its powers, 2) government is a de facto dictatorship, with one sector dominating, 2) a capitalist system is administered by the government using an immense bureaucracy, 4) Producers are organized into cartels with special politically-granted privileges (syndicalism), 5) Economic planning is based on autarky (requiring extremely large territory and trade hegemony), 6) Economic life is sustained through spending and borrowing, 7) Militarism is the mainstay of government spending, and 8) Military spending has imperialist (global) aims.

How does this apply to the United States today, 67 years of rapid government growth, spending, borrowing, and warfighting later? Well, the restraining force of the Constitution is dead, and we live at the command of an executive state, with a politically obedient judiciary and a supine and corrupt Congress. Most American production and service corporations, including financial services and banking, are cartelized and enjoy tax-funded subsidy and periodic government bailouts. We constantly hear the twin political parties speak of self-sufficiency in energy, food, materials, justifying continental economic zones, global wars for resources, and the occupation of weak energy-producing countries. Military spending is excessive, yet it is broadly justified as necessary for both security and industrialism, and to maintain global influence.

It's fascism. The pepper spraying jackbooted thugs in state uniform are just icing on the cake.

All I want for Christmas is for more people to see American fascism for what it is, and start thinking about defunding it and rejecting it.

This time of year is ripe for reflection, for reading a good book, studying something new, and thinking about what we have learned, and what we want to learn. Many Americans are ready to learn new things, and to throw out some old assumptions about the economy, government, their own career paths, and the usefulness and appropriateness of their life choices. I hope that the external pressures on many Americans today — the appearance of stubborn and demoralizing financial constraint, lost opportunities, and wasted educations — will cause us to search for answers in new places — from our friends, families and communities, from the very old and from the very young, from knowledge centers that are outside of and far beyond government-stamped and state media approved messages.

All I want for Christmas is a new storyline of sweet liberty and proud independence, to be heard by a hundred million jaded Americans, of all ages, for the first time.

Christmas is a Christian celebration, but it is truly something that should be celebrated each day, in peace, in forbearance, in humble joy and gratefulness for God's love, His generosity and His guidance. I'd like to think that we Christians might someday be able to show that Gandhi was wrong about us – that we do indeed follow the Prince of Peace in our daily lives, in our relationships at home and at work, and through our participation in politics. It is impossible for a true Christian to cheer war, to celebrate death, disease, destruction and poverty, to wish ill on others. It is downright devilish for Christians to claim their faith while exalting human governments that seek war on the basis of lies, that sow fear and loathing in the name of empire or government survival, and governments that would steal the very future from their own children in the name of patriotism. All I want for Christmas is a glimpse of real Christianity, in our lives and in our politics.

It may be too much to ask that Americans rediscover liberty and newly cherish the freedom to buy and sell, to trade and to create. It would require a certain measure of courage for Americans, in the millions, to rise up, denounce the fascist state and refuse to support it any longer. To wake up on Christmas morning and find that Americans thinking for themselves would be an astonishing gift. To witness Christians all over the country following Jesus in the way He asked us would be a wonderful gift, and would lead to a fundamental and rapid change for the better in our economy and our government.

God knows what we need even before we ask Him, so I've been taught. That being the case, maybe I should see to it that I love liberty more passionately. I'll add a grain of pure courage to my morning coffee, and I will try to think more independently, and step away from the party lines. I'll see if I can live my Christianity in a more honest way. All that would make for a lovely Christmas, and it would be more than enough.

But Santa, if there is room for one more gift, please give me the opportunity to vote Ron Paul for President in 2012. Merry Christmas, America!

This originally appeared on Freedom’s Phoenix’s e-Zine December 2, 2011.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

Most have not yet noticed the profound urgency of what is upon us, but there exists a sharpness in the air, beyond the new normal of a November morning.

It is difficult to comprehend the massive pent-up force potential of a hundred years of war and state-ordered theft, a hundred years of global nationalism, a hundred years of the voracious passion of the state for the bones and marrow of free-thinking people. Barriers to the state's inevitable metastasis have begun to fall away, and what was once hidden from view is now partially revealed. The zombification of the United States is upon us. Our generations will witness and experience the transmogrification of something we thought we knew and trusted into a walking-dead centralized horror intent on our personal destruction.

But it's not all bad.

Humble gratitude and community appreciation prevail in many parts of the country. The nationalization of a "day" for gratitude and community solidarity must of course be suspect. We are told that Thanksgiving traces back to the Pilgrims, but its dedication by the state in midst of a bloody confederation crisis in 1863 was neither humble nor community oriented. It was the "great Union Festival of America."

In that spirit, all week we will hear posers in houses of worship share their gratefulness for soldiers that the American president and his unelected advisors have, for decades, sent around the world to kill, defraud, and steal. Politicians, state historians, and even otherwise honest people will tell us that we are the freest nation on the planet and that we should thank our past and present political classes for this freedom. Some will vaguely recall the official spirit of the first Europeans to North America, and many more will eat, drink and watch football. In carb and tryptophan-induced comas, we will fall asleep and dream.

Here are a few things I will do this week.

I will remember that my liberty exists not because I deserve it, nor because someone else fought for it. My liberty — and that of my children, my grandchildren, and my neighbors – is a birthright from the Creator.

I will recall that my Christian faith consistently teaches that Jesus, even at an early age, stood wholly without fear in front of kings, princes, high priests, wealthy men, and powerful bureaucrats.

I will marvel that despite every state centralized effort to dumb us down, to make us feel less and fear more, to destroy our intellectual, moral, and economic independence — for all of that, the fundamental sense of justice in this country has not yet been murdered by the state. No American truly believes that the government has the right to hunt down and destroy their child or brother on an executive command and a rumor. No person in this country celebrates a social welfare state that consciously and enthusiastically increases poverty and dependence. No person in this country believes that the freest nation in the world would also be the one that incarcerates 1 of every 100 of its citizens.

I will be happy that through family conversations about the so-called "1%," the D.C banksters, the ratchet effect of our warfare/welfare state, the legal evil of congressional insider trading, federal school loan serfdom and a hundred other things — Americans of all ages are beginning to understand that libertarian class analysis is the only way to truly understand American history. Sheldon Richman explains:

The government's coercive taxing power necessarily creates two classes: those who create and those who consume the wealth expropriated and transferred by that power. Those who create the wealth naturally want to keep it and devote it to their own purposes. Those who wish to expropriate it look for ever more-clever ways to acquire it without inciting resistance. One of those ways is the spreading of an elaborate ideology of statism, which teaches that the people are the state and that therefore they are only paying themselves when they pay taxes.

I will be grateful that statism is becoming a dirty word.

I will be humbled and inspired by the wisdom, ingenuity and common sense of my neighbors, both those over the fence, and over the internet. I've learned more philosophy, more history, mastered more skills and spoken substantively with more people in the past decade than in all four of my previous ones. This exponential change in the ownership and access to knowledge and truth is the fundamental strength of our coming revolution. We are winning already, and we haven't even begun to fight.

In terms of politics, I will continue to be profoundly amazed and grateful for the living example of Ron Paul — an honest and humble man of faith and courage who inspires a hundred million Americans. I will be grateful that his words are being borrowed and repeated by every pretender to the Washington Throne.

Thanksgiving — simple, heartfelt gratitude — creates its own bounty, liberates and nourishes individuals, families, and communities, and blesses everyone. As we work towards real liberty in America, and as we wage our long battle to restore the republic, the mindset of thanksgiving powerfully demarcates us from our enemy. That enemy, the ravenous and soulless state, thankful for nothing and coveting everything, is less powerful than we suspect. The real nature of power is an open secret. And if you learned any of this, in part, or in full, because of Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute, like me, you've got one more item to add to your Thanksgiving list.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

I won't keep you waiting. The Republican leadership would like nothing better than to have another four years of Dictator BHO.

Of course, they will never admit it. And I don't doubt that they'd like as many party loyals elected to 2012 state and federal offices, good suits who will do Boehner's bidding, and stay bought. It's just that, well, there's nothing like the Obaminator to rally the party troopers and inspire order.

The Tea Parties have greatly annoyed the Republican establishment with their small government advocacy, their insistence on bringing up the Constitution at inconvenient times, and their pervasive lack of faith in federal solutions, federal justice and federal monetary policy. They are, at the heart of it, just not good Republicans. What's worse, they revel in their independence.

Here in Virginia, at least in local elections, we are seeing lots of dissenting conservatives running in Republican primaries (as I am for the 6th Congressional District) and many hard-core conservatives running as Independents in the general election. They are winning primaries against party-anointed candidates and general elections as Independents over the party's anointed.

Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and several other elected Republicans, were recently excommunicated by the Republican Party of Virginia for endorsing a an Independent over the GOP-preferred Republican. That's a serious crime around here, bucking the party.

That so many people — candidates and voters – are today willing to buck the GOP is a sign of the times, and a sign of GOP decay. The facts have not been kind to the Republican Party over the adult lifetimes of most Americans. We saw an explosion of government growth, illegal wars, and monetary compromise under Nixon. We suffered the Ford administration's elevation of Cheney and Rumsfeld, both of whom would haunt Washington, D.C. and threaten the Constitution for decades. We had the inspiring years of Reagan but were told that conservatism meant deficits didn't matter. We were embarrassed and betrayed by the young Gingrichians and the false promises of their Contract with America. More recently we had a dozen years of Bush mediocrity bringing a flood of spending and borrowing, and the tenacious growth of the neo-conservative warfare-welfare state. Any honest conservative still clinging to the Republican Party in my lifetime must be both philosophically challenged and deeply morose.

Political conditions in the United States are ripe for new alignments, and the fundamental common sense constitutionalist is now found in lots of places they were never found before. Former Democrats, especially those that are antiwar, are increasingly coming to understand that the Federal Reserve and crony capitalism is responsible for both the warfare state and the welfare state. This awareness leads many Democrats to increasingly welcome a smaller, less grasping state.

Independents are increasingly interested in survival, of all kinds, and they too are frustrated with the uniparty spending machine in Washington, and they increasingly see themselves as federal livestock. They are wondering if the grass might be greener with a smaller, more law-biding government.

Libertarians have long recognized the problem with the unbounded state. Most Americans under the age of thirty speak, text and tweet fluent libertarian.

Naturally, the constitutionalists in the Tea Party relish their new and exciting power across the country to be kingmakers in local elections.

These four segments may in fact comprise an emergent voting bloc, and possibly even a nascent party. Beyond a movement, it is these people who most accurately understand what is wrong with this country — "it's the state, stupid!" Consequently, will be able to agree on first principles, and first steps.

The GOP wants and needs four more years of Obamanation in order to continue its plan of corralling and branding intransigent and increasingly sophisticated state's rights-asserting, small government freethinkers. But the GOP cowboys are long in the tooth, and their horses keep coming up lame.

The GOP establishment wants, and needs, more time to work the Republican herd. They'll do this much as they did in 2008. Destroy electable candidates and run losing liberal nominees. Thus, we see the GOP leadership express great satisfaction with Romney and Perry, both big spending statists, while doing everything they can to destroy the reputations of the Republicans with more grass roots appeal, like Cain and Ron Paul. Cain's crossover appeal to the neocon, progressive, and small government wings of the GOP was frightening — he might have actually won, and then try to change the status quo — and thus he had to be taken out. I doubt Cain would ever have attempted real change, but I'm not as paranoid as the GOP establishment.

One — and only one – presidential candidate running as a Republican would bring the White House back to the GOP. He has grass roots, independent, libertarian and conservative support, appeals to all generations of voters, and were the GOP establishment to back him, he would crush Obama in November 2012. Americans are demanding less war, more respect for the Constitution and liberty, less corporate cronyism and Federal Reserve shell games, and more prosperity for the so-called 99%. Why not let us have what we want for a change?

But the GOP is constrained by a paradigm that says animosity and disgust for the Obama Administration, if it could be sustained long enough, will drive those dissenting constitutionalist dogies back into the fold of the Grand Old Party, obedient and branded.

Your guess is as good as mine as to whether the GOP establishment will make use of the secret ballot to pull the lever for four more years of Obama. They'll never tell. But it is clear that in 2012, the GOP is running to lose the presidency, by design. With willful blindness and two teaspoons of wishful thinking, the Republican Party expects that four more years of spending and corruption, of borrowing and Keynesian insanity will all be worth it if the Tea Party can be driven home.

Call it karma, or history repeating, but I'm calling it now. By the time the GOP controllers realize that the Tea Party Constitution Liberty and Peace Train has left the station, the Grand Old Party will have gone the way of the Whigs in 1852.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

Last week's "terrorist plot" — an odd Iranian "caught" by the bold federales in part because they "overheard" him explain in detail his complicated plan to his Mexican gangster "cohorts" has been immediately blown out of the water by state media from the left, right and center — taking their lead from independent media that is, thankfully, growing ever more influential.

Even Hollywood is in on the joke. The very idea of federal "law enforcement" is almost silly in this second decade of the 21st century. If the government of the United States can publically, through the president with justification by DOJ, assassinate Americans around the world and make war without Congressional consultation or approval, it has forfeited any right it ever had to "enforce the law."

One hundred years ago, in the decade before 1920, this country once before experienced government-created prosperity bubbles and widespread public hysteria demanding government solutions to moral and economic security concerns. Ken Burns' three-part series, "Prohibition," provides a valuable reminder. Burns explains in an interview with Stephen Colbert how many disparate sectors of society all sought improved security and morality through state mandates and government action. When these disparate groups — sharing a belief that it was good and just for government to force other parts of society to bend to their desires on a single issue — focused on a single and unlawful federal activity, we got the 18th Amendment.

This amendment, in effect for a dozen years, "cost" the federal government $11 billion in lost tax revenue. In today's devalued money and oversized federal government, that's a loss of $120 billion, less than a fifth of one year of the Pentagon's budget. But in the years leading up to Prohibition, alcohol excise taxes were a major portion of state and federal revenue.

How did the federal and state governments (prior to Prohibition, 75% of the New York state budget came from excise taxes on liquor) make up this lost revenue, and pay for drastic new "enforcement" costs?

This was long before the massive cycloptic Pentagon, long before FDR's transformation of the United States into a Keynsesian disaster writ large, and long before the metasticization of the global corporate state oriented around the petrodollar. You guessed it. Prohibition against devil rum led to drastic increases in the income tax, itself a relatively new concept for the United States, brought into being only a few years earlier in a legislatively questionable way.

Which brings us to the present.

We have another "devil" today. A single powerful obsession unites American moralizers, including both the Christian Zionist movement and religious progressives who wish to see a Democratic President maintained for another term. Their obsession coincides nicely with the global reshaping desires of the neoconservatives, the institutional desires of the corporate state, the profiteering desires of the military-industrial complex, the blame-shifting desires of the U.S. Congress, the territorial security desires of Israel and its important American lobby, and finally, the centralized control objectives of the modern executive state.

For over a decade now, all of these concerns — religious and progressive movements willingly aligning with state power, neoconservatives, the corporate petrodollar-based state, the military industrial complex, the Congress, the executive bureaucracy and the most powerful foreign policy lobby in the world — have been harping, wailing, and whining about a new devil — the state of Iran.

It doesn't matter that Iran really and truly doesn't matter to us. They say you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts. Americans who want something "done" in the Middle East — with their single-issue banner of "Bomb Iran" for Jesus, for democracy, to get Obama re-elected, for oil, for petrodollars, to make money, to justify a bloated military budget, for Israel, to consolidate and strengthen the state and political security apparatus in the U.S. — all freely make up their own facts about why Iran must be prohibited, and destroyed.

Which brings me back to the Justice Department, the nexus for prohibition then and now. The recent "Iranian plot" may help divert attention from DOJ perjury, from federal gun-running, from past fake terrorism plots, and from what may more frightening to the federal state apparatus, the exposure of the inconclusive and sloppy FBI investigation into the Amerithrax case. These plots and stories certainly feed the vision and fuel the fire in the bellies of those religious, political, corporate and state entities bent on attacking Iran in an ecstatic, glorious and emotion-filled massacre.

The American and Israeli collective movement to prohibit Iran from existing will probably not be able to sustain itself, even with the current effort to frighten and coerce the House of Saud into joining it. Holder is no Hoover, and Hoover would never had lasted nor been as politically powerful had average Americans of his era had broad public access to his activities, agendas and abuses as we do with Holder today. The contemporary U.S. dollar is an accident waiting to happen, and our military has been transformed into a hollow shell of hundreds of thousands of unhappy soldiers without an honest mission, and a few arrogant politicians in suits directing drone attacks. Holder will fold, to a derisive hiss of frustration from the bomb-Iran collective.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

It's great to be here. I'm honored and delighted and thrilled all at once to be in the company of such great people and great minds.

Like many of you, I have traveled a long road to get here, philosophically speaking. Many of you have traveled pretty much the same one. I was raised by Goldwater Republicans. I voted for Ronald Reagan. I served in the military. I left the GOP in the 90s, after watching it pay lip service to the Constitution, and watching it lie, spend and borrow like there was no tomorrow. I whistleblew on the neocons and their falsely justified war in the Pentagon in 2003. I embraced the anti-state, anti-war, pro-market message of Lew Rockwell, and the economic perspectives of Murray Rothbard. And today, I'm back inside the GOP challenging a twenty-year incumbent RINO — Republican in Name Only — to represent the 6th District of Virginia.

Along the way, I bought some guns, a little gold, and some land. I rediscovered my agricultural roots, and started learning a few skills of survival. I connected with people who could teach me important things. I signed up my husband to sit on the local Selective Service board — so we'd know if and when a draft was coming. Even though along the way I earned a PhD, it wasn't until afterwards that I started learning about the real American history, and starting to put into perspective the nature of government growth, nationalism, socialism, corporatism and empire.

Today, the empire — foreign and domestic — is ending for America, and I think the state knows this, and is fighting it, and is going to fight it with everything it can muster. Luckily, the state can't muster up like it once could, but I'll get to that!

We are all familiar with the foreign empire — the DoD is the world's largest employer, and there are US bases, installations, and personnel in 150 countries, more or less. We also run drones and computer warfare from basements in D.C. and elsewhere, striking flickering targets around the globe. The hypocrisy of our foreign policy, the criminality and waste of our foreign aid programs, the expense of our undeclared wars, and the damage done to our own country by persistently ignoring the Constitution — any of these is reason enough bring home the troops, stop borrowing money to pay for it, stop taxing the rest of us to pay the interest on the spending. The lenders to our government are themselves finding that America as global policeman is not such a great investment anymore.

Increasingly, Washington, D.C. has become known around the world a big-mouthed, kickback-taking, fat, donut-eating cop with an attitude. Of all the parties in Washington D.C. who are part and parcel of this problem, I find that the U.S. Congress is most accurately described this way. Present company excluded, most of Congress can't find the Constitution with both hands and a flashlight. What's worse, only a few of them are even looking for it. The correction of our American direction, our path into a future of prosperity and peace, will not come from the present crowd of Congressmen and women. The global empire is falling away, collapsing under its own weight, being crushed by its own awful corruption and shattered by its frozen and arrogant ideology. It is sinking like the Titanic in icy water and it is taking down many unprepared and unlucky people down with it. The momentum is on the side of liberty, and for those of us who have read Hayek, and study Mises and the Austrian school, and for those of us who retain an ethical framework that sees the state as an enemy of human society and action, it is a time of quiet celebration. However, we do have some responsibilities to help people around us and everywhere understand what is happening, why it is happening, and helping them wake up. To wake up, as Dorothy meets Oz, to the fundamental truths of human liberty that the state, in its quest for financial and material empire for our entire lifetimes, has worked to distort, hide, and manipulate. Liberty is at first, last and always, a state of mind. We have a lot of work to do in America, for sure.

But something else is happening. As the global empire led by Washington, D.C. is collapsing before our eyes, the domestic empire in this country is also failing. It is getting closer every day to an almost comedic end, even as more money is spent, more human dependencies created, more bailouts conducted, more paper currency printed, more people monitored, bullied, groped, regulated and incarcerated by some part of the government. In fact, if you look only at the surface, you wouldn't know it is failing — budgets increase, hiring continues, the power of the state to control your money, your buying and selling, your productivity, your family, your education, your finances, your person, papers and property has never been greater. Increasingly we must consider the state in every decision we make, from dawn till dusk. To question the state, to challenge the government, is discouraged, and while we the people find it incredibly easy to get in trouble with the state, we are starting to notice that the criminals in the state are always rewarded, never punished, and rarely fired. In fact the only government officials know who have been fired are whistleblowers. The domestic state apparatus seems firmly entrenched.

And yet — things are not as they seem on the domestic front. Many unemployed people who expect government care and feeding are finding that the government lied to them. Government employees, at local and state levels, are finding that their retirement funds have been raided by the state, and that the government lied about it. Thanks to Ron Paul, many presidential candidates talk about the social security Ponzi scheme, one that makes the original Ponzi look almost saintly. Many un- and underemployed people are starting to discover the vast knowledge base that exists outside the official history of our government, and they are actively searching for and awakening to the wide-open possibilities of the marketplace and prosperity outside of a payroll job.

The Washington D.C. response, the Congressional response is to talk about some day balancing a budget, and cutting imaginary future spending levels. But what's really exciting to me, and should be to all of us, is the increasingly palpable fear that is evident in Washington, among the political class and among entrenched politicians there. Their gig is up. The parasitical state has weakened its host so badly that America as a society, and as an economy, is evolving in new directions — outside the state, underneath the state, above the state, around the state. When I was in college, the only kids my age who left the country were part of the government Peace Corps or the military. Today, where I live, way out in the country surrounded by farmers and regular people, many children of my neighbors, and one of my own, today live and work overseas, by choice and not part of any government program.

The next logical phase of the domestic empire is an ugly one. We should expect increasingly public proclamations by the American government that it actually owns us. The state's vision is this: Property as state-controlled, movement of people only as permitted by government, and people themselves as cared-for livestock. All this is coming in the collective mind of the political class. Happily, there's no "real" money to pay for it all. The American foreign empire and our modern American presidents, widely seen by the rest of the world as a collective waste of time and money, and increasingly annoying. I believe the domestic empire is increasingly seen by millions of actual Americans in exactly the same way — as a huge waste of money and time, and increasingly annoying.

The way I see it, on both domestic and international fronts, what's coming next for America is promising and exciting. But getting over our misconceptions, our misplaced trust, and our national habits of politics will not be easy. I think this is why the life and accomplishments of Ron Paul in past decades, and his current and future service to this country is so incredibly essential. And it is why getting liberty and truly small government candidates out in front of Americans, to persuade, and to inspire, and to lead, is so incredibly important.

I'll close with a little story about the guy I seek to replace in Washington. He's a typical politician. He talks like a conservative but always votes to borrow more, to spend more, and to regulate more. He's cozy with lobbyists, and always looks out for his own interests instead of listening to the people in our district. He's just an average Congressman. But one of his constituents asked him a question exactly one year ago, in a private face-to-face moment. My friend asked his ten-term Congressman this question. It went like this: "Be honest. How much longer do we really have in this country?"

Now you might imagine that this Congressman would have not understood the question, or perhaps that he wouldn't have known the answer, or wouldn't have wanted to answer the question. But our Congressman said this: "We have about ten years."

Well, according to my Congressman, we now have nine years left. You'd expect, that if a member of Congress had an idea that the track they had this country on, for decades now, was heading straight into the side of a mountain, that that member of Congress would stand up, say something. Do something different. But we all know that only Dr. Paul and a very few brave souls are telling us the truth, and showing us the way.

I'm running for Congress, in part to try and model the courage and honesty that I admire in Dr. Paul. The future is not coming, it is already here. Right here, right now, in this room, and all over the country. What a blessing and a joy it is to be on the leading side, and to be able to both witness and participate in the reduction of the state, the falling away of empires, and the rediscovery of liberty in America.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

A recent Frontline television program outlined the research effort by two reporters at the Washington Post in describing a "Top Secret" America. The real federal jobs program in the last decade has been in surveillance, monitoring, and intelligence-development — of Americans on American soil.

In the decade after 9-11, Washington, D.C. launched repeated land wars, government takeovers, and nation-building, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, and later in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and now Libya. None of these wars, all sold as "wars against terrorism" were granted any public congressional debate, and none entailed a Congressional declaration of war.

In terms of truly discovering the facts of the events of 9-11, and the subsequent anthrax attacks, we saw a government reluctance to delve deeply, and a government desire to pack up the "stories" as quickly as possible. President Bush opposed and worked to delay the official 9-11 Commission, and its published results were then later partially disavowed by the very political appointees who led it. The FBI's investigation into the Amerithrax case also followed a well-worn path. Select a culprit, publicize the name of the suspect, and harass that individual until they confess. The first FBI target was no coward, nor was he guilty. He successfully sued the federal government and was later awarded millions of tax-payer dollars for the FBI's miscalculation and arrogance. A second FBI target was named and harassed until he committed suicide, and the case was immediately closed.

Farce, gross incompetence, and tragedy is the hallmark of big centralized government, wherever it develops. Big centralized government has developed in the United States year after year since the 1930s, and it has both solidified and metastasized since 9-11. Today, we live at the will and by the grace of a dystopian and grasping government. There is not an exceptional amount of time left before this government collapses, but before it does, we the people will suffer far more than we have suffered to date. Banking collapses, mortgage fraud at the highest levels, government bailouts, currency printing, and inflation in food and energy are just a foretaste of the future, led by the same Washington public-private cartel we have suffered for decades.

Trillions of dollars have been wasted, more trillions in value have evaporated, and many thousands of lives have been needlessly sacrificed, all in the name of a post-9-11 era. The Founders believed that the Creator granted all men the right to a government that they themselves owned, and could hold accountable. The Founders believed that the people had the duty to dissolve that government when it no longer followed the law or conducted itself morally, in the best interest of the people. The Founders believed we could withdraw our consent. Today, you can't even decline to be physically assaulted by a government agent in order to fly on a commercial aircraft using a ticket you bought with your own money.

The federal response to the attacks of 9-11 reflected a real government fear. Not of more attacks, but rather, a fear of average Americans who would begin to see the truth about their government in the 21st century. The truth is that this government does not exist to serve us, and it will not and cannot protect us.

I believe our government — outdated, unrestrained by the Constitution, and soon to default on every debt it has taken on in our name — cannot long endure. But unlike those who run and benefit from our modern American nationalism, corporatism and socialism, I do not fear average Americans seeking self-government, rule of law, and liberty.

That's why on 9-11, I will not be celebrating America's undeclared wars on countries that had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks ten years ago. I will not be attending remembrances of victims of that day, because those remembrances refuse to count American liberty, rule of law, and freedom of trade and movement uppermost on that list of the sacrificed. I will not attend any program offered by a religious or political organization that seeks to ride a federal government bandwagon to confirm some imperative of war against Islam halfway around the world, or that seeks to promote the false concept of a culture war as somehow God's intent for America.

On this ten-year anniversary, I intend to go about my business as usual, and say a prayer of gratitude for the small freedoms I have left. In the afternoon, I'll be in Charlottesville, Virginia, learning about local apprenticeship and crafts demonstrations. In the evening, I'll check the livestock and gather the eggs. I won't allow what I personally experienced that day in the Pentagon, nor the subsequent government drumbeats for war, waving the 9-11 banner, to diminish my awareness of the meaning of liberty.

The real battle for Americans today is a battle to reassert our independence from an overbearing and unsustainable state. Today, we can all celebrate that there are fundamental cracks in the federal state's veneer, and we can be grateful for the options we still have in our own lives to live free, to practice charity and faith, creativity and productivity, and to rediscover our own power as individuals and communities.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

We see this scenario played out, in charade and tentatively, this week with the President's weekly message and the GOP response presented by Virginia's 6th District Representative, Bob Goodlatte. On September 3rd, the President pleaded to an economically shell-shocked nation about a transportation spending bill held up in the Senate. In 2007, when the transportation bill multiyear spending phenom was passed, it was filled with pork. The House sent the extension to which Obama refers over to the Senate back in March, with full Republican support, including a "Yea" vote enthusiastically granted by GOP statist Mr. Goodlatte. The Senate has not acted yet, and time's a' wastin' on this bit o' fat-packed stimulus.

Hence, Obama's whine. In all things spending, the GOP and the Democratic Party are public frenemies, wholly devoted to each other to the bitter gallows-on-the-horizon end. Our long knives event in the summer of 2011 was a supercilious attack on the big state "left" by the big state "right," and it ended in preserving the good order of the status quo, as expected.

More spending could be counted on, more borrowing was ensured. Again, Mr. Goodlatte and most of his GOP comrades enthusiastically voted for more, more, more! For the proles, trolls, hobbits and livestock across this country, otherwise known as voters, citizens, and Americans, the debt ceiling increase act was titled, "The Budget Control Act." It budgeted nothing, it controlled nothing, and it insults our intelligence. The political class likes the term "no-brainer." But Mr. Obama, we the people mean that term a little differently than you did in your address Saturday morning.

The Congressional long knife charade of right statist block against the left statist block has resulted in consolidation of the state. A solidification of the clueless and corrupt, a fusion of blind bought-off bureaucrats and the visionary vipers of the federal government who know what is coming, and are getting theirs first. The republic is long gone.

Enter the GOP response. It begins with jobs, and blames the President for spending — when it is indeed the House of Representatives that holds and controls the pursestrings. The GOP response is correct in pointing our that excessive government is burdensome and kills private enterprise. It is correct in noting that government spending (robbing both Peter and Paul) is the most inefficient and counterproductive way to put people to work. But then the GOP response goes all Pinocchio on the people, with the finger-pointing at their hapless socialist co-dependent in the White House.

Partway through the GOP response, the tenor shifts and the GOP nose grows visibly larger. The proposed Balanced Budget Amendment proposal is brought up, out of nowhere. The BBA is toothless, unwise and un-conservative as written, and ultimately unratifiable, and everyone in Washington knows it.

Why the lies? Because the proles and trolls like to hear that "something will be done" about the excessive unsustainable borrowing. This borrowing habit has made serfs of all Americans, helots of our children, slaves of our grandchildren. Yet Congress cannot help itself. A Congress that could not even hold the line from borrowing two more trillion dollars in July, now claims that it can truly, really, honestly this time we will, balance the budget if only they could vote for a law, a toothless one at that, and then if, over the next 6-9 years, three-fourths of the states could accept this amendment to the Constitution — an amendment that would eat into their own degree of federal aid, loans, grants and subsidies while guaranteeing increased taxation on the states' citizens and tariffs on its exports.

Meanwhile, Congress is happy that they have blamed everyone but themselves for their reckless, impetuous, compulsive spending habits. Same-old, same-old, and when questioned in coming years about the growing and increasingly oppressive debt burden, Congressional Pinocchios will continue to tell the people that it isn't their fault.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

As we think specifically about our young children or grandchildren, we will find that even these skills will not be enough. An ability to learn, for many, will be learning what government employees and bureaucrats are teaching that day, and that year, and that decade, in an environment of authoritarian smarm. To learn here means to learn dependency on governments and fear of change, and to embrace boredom as the normal human condition, to be relieved chemically.

An ability to adapt, for our youngest little "citizens" means to adapt to arbitrary rules of not only parents, but policemen, teachers, government workers, and even international do-gooders. A child adapting to this environment learns to use the overbearing system of government inspections and demands, the inconsistency of government justice, crime and punishment, and the lack of fundamental truth contained in government pronouncements for his or her own benefit. Adapting to socialized systems, be they Soviet or Chinese style communism or the corporate nanny statism of the United States, means learning to selectively maximize and minimize compliance with arbitrary rules for personal gain. It is a very complex and complicated world, but it is largely unrelated to and completely unhinged from fundamental economics, the natural world, or a spiritual universe. When asked how the soon-to-be-elected President of the United States was going to pay for her mortgage and her car, the young woman in the infamous video of 2008 said, "I don't know! His stash!" This idea of government as an infinite source, a real-life perpetual motion machine unsupported by logic, science or common sense, is a widely embraced way Americans are taught to see government and the state, and certainly, it is the way American government has behaved at the federal level for decades, borrowing from the future with no intention of paying anything back. To adapt to this current non-sensical "reality" is how many of our young people will exercise this otherwise critical and creative survival skill.

The next generation must also have a highly developed ability to communicate. Technology allows new levels of communication, and it is often noted by older generations that the young are constantly "communicating" with each other via ever tinier devices and more powerful technologies. Information has never been more accessible, and this accessibility is taken for granted by the younger generations who have grown up using it. But where does thumb texting your reactions and emotions, and glancing at those of your immediate peer group, fit in the human scale of communication? I cannot speak for my children and grandchildren, many of whom will indeed sit and read a book on occasion, and enjoy philosophical discussions. But I have noticed that the immediate accessibility of information has made me personally less likely to memorize material, less likely to read a long article or an entire book, and more likely to scan everything around me for interesting bits rather than entire messages. In itself, for me at age 50, already interested in many things and informed on several things, this shift in the way I acquire information is probably not harmful. This way of acquiring information, facilitated by the Internet and television, tends to reinforce and focus my past knowledge, rather than broaden my knowledge in any new way. I am interested in what I am interested in, so to speak. Pre-existing interests shape my use of the vast world of information available, and I suspect it does so for other people as well. What many consider the moral and cultural depravation of mainstream media (including the Internet) is just a reflection of what a great many people are interested in — and much of that is puerile and juvenile rather than thought -provoking.

With so much already said and written and filmed, it may be that young people feel less of a need to say something new, and rather, see themselves as atomic observers rather than participants in this world of communication. Communication is becoming more comment and command, rather than exploration of ideas and careful articulation with others, who may see things quite differently. Certainly, what is fast and easy is what gets read and talked about. Our communication skills — in spite of the explosion of blogs and individual validation via the Internet — are becoming narrowed, and subject to manipulation and framing, based on what is easy to discuss, gratifying to see and learn about, and immediately accessible. Were our government not so large and integrated into our lives, this would be a purely educational and social problem. As it stands, government has its own interest in and ability to shape and manage what we think we know, what we gravitate towards in style and content, and the technical availability and usability of the communications network upon which we depend to acquire information. We hear of a centrally controlled on-off switch for the Internet, but we are philosophically and socially unprepared for what this may mean to younger generations who are integrated into this information network. Can we think, adapt and communicate without it? Will they?

Of the basic requirements for human success, to learn, to adapt, to communicate and to work hard, it is the latter that concerns me the most. Certainly, our own memories of hard work have been embellished by time. But it is clear that the physicality of work in the United States has diminished, and the necessity for physical work to satisfy ones' basic needs is greatly reduced. Electricity, not exercise, is fundamental. The interest in and ability to sweat, to get dirty, to be unfashionable, to be physically frustrated, to never give up, and even to bear minor aches and pains is unacceptable unless it is in organized play. And for our children, even such play is confined to the indoors, often staring at a flickering screen and gripping a remote control.

How well our children and grandchildren love, become passionate about ideas and efforts, and reflect on the world around them depends on how they learn, how and to what they adapt, how well and completely they communicate with others, and their practiced tendency to face down mental and physical challenges, time and time again, without quitting. If we want the younger generations to be successful, they must have these skills.

We can turn off the TV, replace passive learning and computer-aided entertainment with active investigation and experimentation, and get our kids away from government schools. We can teach by example, as we ourselves continue to learn, to adapt, to communicate and to work hard. We can create opportunities for children to work hard, to struggle and to overcome — in fact, all of this is simply good parenting and certainly not controversial. We can ensure that our children and grandchildren are capable of self-education, and we can push them and lead them gently to practice that self-education in directions that are wise and beneficial, peaceful and productive.

But if we want to facilitate their success in dealing with what is coming next, we would attempt to foster in them a certain attitude of fundamental skepticism. Most young people and even young children do understand the difference between good and evil, and between the real and the unreal. They understand computer games and television entertainment are not reality, and they recognize the illusion of "reality TV" far more quickly than do their parents. But often, this "Show me" and "Prove it" mentality does not extend to the more fundamental illusion of statist benevolence. Subjected to constant messages of the prevalence and positivity of "government," our independent-minded children have subconsciously accepted that faceless bureaucrats actually work in their interest, for the good of the community, the state, the world. They do not question the contradictory concepts of government charity, or peace through warfare. As with all of us, they are not interested in things they take for granted, and for many of the coming generations, this includes all things government. They have learned to go along to get along when dealing with state "authority." In this, they are no different than people in past generations, including past generations who walked willingly onto government trains taking them to a place they were told by authorities would be safe.

We ourselves, like the coming generations, need personal attitudes of hardy and bold skepticism. We need to be able to bravely switch channels, and to recognize and reject sales pitches and lullabies of our own government. We need children who say "No!" not only to things they don't want, but to many things that they think they do want. Our collective "No" to a government operating without our consent, as our current government does, should be reactive, automatic, and instant. We must as parents and grandparents, create environments that develop this skepticism. We must teach them that what is presented to us by government is often a false choice, the wrong questions, and unrelated to our fundamental interests. We must encourage them to practice and experience struggle and hard work and disappointment — not everyone gets a trophy! We should show them that to challenge state authority doesn't mean alienation, and that love is all-powerful and forgiving. We must ensure that they understand communication between people need not be command-delivered and control-oriented, but rather it is a complex and innovative pathway to a future we consent to and embrace side by side. We must teach them to reason, and to act.

This approach to parenting and grandparenting is radical, by contemporary standards. "Got attitude?" should become the rallying cry for how we ourselves must live, and code for our parenting priorities. Etienne de la Boetie, in the 1500s, wrote that, "…custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude." He goes on,

There are always a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off: … These are in fact the men who, possessed of clear minds and far-sighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future, and compare both with their present condition. These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised.

Our custom, passed through to upcoming generations, must be never be subservience. Always and forever, without compromise, in every way, our custom must be liberty. Our children and grandchildren are gifted and lovely — the best preparation we may provide them, as tyranny creeps and passivity is promoted, is the bold attitude of free men. Liberty in this country is shrinking. If we ourselves are less than successful in our lifetimes in seizing our birthright of peace, prosperity and freedom, it will be our children, in a custom we will have shared today, and with the bold attitude we must inculcate now, who will restore liberty and if necessary, invent it.

This was first published in Freedom’s Phoenix September E-zine.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

Second is not first. Bachmann's and Dr. Ron Paul's 28.6% and 27.7%, respectively — less than a percentage apart, is a great horse race. Bachmann won by a nose, they would say. If this were the Kentucky Derby, we'd be on the edge of our seats focused entirely on Paul and Bachmann, not focusing excessively about horses at the back of the back, or those hoping to race later.

Real horse races start off at the same point in time and space. Bachmann may have had a bit of a head start in Iowa — although familiarity may also breed contempt, so the degree of that advantage is not known. The Bachmann campaign's purchase and distribution of 6,000 straw poll voting tickets (where a third of those went uncast) also sheds real light on the fundamental power of the very different Paul strategy, and the wide and compelling appeal of his liberty, peace, and small government message.

The omission and outright denial of the intense and growing Ron Paul phenomenon is useful because it tells us many things — some we knew, and some we may not realize.

Mainstream media and the GOP itself seems to be ignoring that the Iowa Straw poll showed, for the first time in this poll's history, a whopping 56% of the voters chose budget hawks, with a proven record of voting "No" on more borrowing. The Cut, Cap, and Balance baloney was pushed by the Republicans in Name Only on every other party member. Paul and Bachmann were among a handful that resisted. Iowa voters, in a state as heavily subsidized and dependent on federal largesse as any other state, seem to appreciate the need for Washington to spend less, borrow less, promise less, receive less.

Media analysts are also not talking about the fact that Paul and Bachmann are popular because they are seen as calmly uncompromising. In Dr. Paul's case, we have a wise, kind and gentlemanly statesman who is always gentle in his policy rebukes, preferring to educate everyone he can on the hows and the whys of limited government. Bachmann, to her credit, promotes an image of a politician who will hold to her principles, not bend to the party elders, or to the good old boys in the House of Representatives. She has been ladylike in her reaction to a number of slights from her fellow GOP'ers, the paranoid left, and government-co-opted media. Many of the attacks on Bachmann have been sexist, related to her photogenicism, her aches and pains, her husband's activities, and her similarities to Sarah Palin rather than whether her candidacy can be categorized as neoconservative, social conservative or populist.

The Iowa straw poll also indicates that there is major division in the GOP — conservatives in and out of the Republican Party, independents, constitutionalists and libertarians find themselves searching for representation. These people — the majority of voters in this country when taken altogether — want a kind of honest simplicity in their politicians. This majority of Americans believe that war should be fought only in defense of America, and that lobbyists, massive international banks and corporations should not be creating policy in D.C. This majority of Americans value the idea of independence and self-ownership. They also value the idea of community helping those in need. This majority of Americans want an equal opportunity on an even playing field, and I suspect, more than anything they want their money's worth from our extremely expensive federal government. They want to know that the government won't inflate away their entitlements, but they also want to know that their children and grandchildren will not suffer for decades of baby boomer excess now that the bills are coming due.

This may be a major reason for media and GOP silence – and outright mockery – of Ron Paul and his rock solid and growing constituency across the land. Paul's popularity today is glaring proof of American disgust with years of Republican Party lies about their frugality, honesty, common sense, and good stewardship of the Republic. Of course, many who fell for Obama's program in 2008 are also disgusted, and they now see that most politicians and presidents say whatever they think we wish to hear, only to conform with an inherited status quo, and willingly compromise, sit, roll and beg.

But there is another reason for the noticeable government and mainstream media silence on Ron Paul's repeated success, and his ever-growing popularity. Ron Paul can win, and if he achieved the GOP nomination he would be our next president. Ron Paul can cut short what will otherwise be an eight-year term of Obama, and end what has been a frantic 12 year federal spending spree that will ultimately lead to serious default, renegotiation and writing down of major categories of debt, and an inflation-ravaged entitlement collapse at home. Gold, guns and survival skills, private security forces, underground food networks, and an explosion in decentralized alternate energies — along with a collapse of governing structures, services, and public schools in many rural or otherwise under populated areas — all this is coming. Leaders who understand how this future was constructed, leaders who engender trust and confidence, and leaders who can wisely and quickly oversee the federal retrenchment that must and will occur — such leaders are few and far between.

Ron Paul is such a leader. We see the field — it contains the sadly overwhelmed Obama, as arrogant, as fascist-friendly and as warlike as FDR, and all the strident Keynesians clawing to the microphone, calling themselves Republicans, and Ron Paul. Of all the men or women we could choose to gently deliver this country through its very difficult rebirth into a new constitutionalism, a new liberty, and a new era of prosperity — Ron Paul is the people's choice. If the people were truly free to choose, they would choose Ron Paul. This is the idea that so terrifies the parasitical political class, and its media handmaids. They cannot bear to say his name. But you can trust that they are closely watching the Ron Paul revolution unfold across the country, as they nervously feed on the decimated and rotting carcass of a once proud Republic.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

The national bird of the federal government, wholly dependent upon a system that feeds it, conveyor-belt style, all the precious fruit of the shrinking American working class it can eat, is the chicken.

And not just any chicken, mind you. The federal government, the elected class in particular, is like the chicken grown in the poultry houses all over the Shenandoah Valley and beyond. These guys and gals look all grown up, but are amazingly immature, inexperienced and ill-informed about the real world. They spend their entire lives closely shielded from the outside world, exposed to little more than others like themselves, with a water drip they take for granted, and a never-empty all-you-can-eat free lunch dispenser. These helpless yet blissfully unaware chickens are a testament to the predictable tendencies of applied central planning, and they are the perfect icon for the government of the United States of America today.

They start out running and chirping, but before a few months pass, these guys are crippled by their own weight. By design, these chickens must be harvested early, before they die of heart failure, or fall down and never get up, trampled and pecked to death by their compadres.

Welcome to the Congress of the United States, analogy courtesy of Perdue, Tyson, and Pilgrim's Pride.

The latest spectacle of the chickens who run our country comes from the so-called conservatives in the House — who are currently pushing for a Constitutional Amendment to "balance the federal budget," as part of a "Cut, Cap and Balance" package that doesn't cut, raises the borrowing cap, and continues the ongoing and unsustainable imbalance in government spending. Little of what these Congressmen are doing today, or have been doing for the past twenty years has been even remotely constitutional, so it isn't clear why amending the Constitution is ever necessary. Most Congressmen haven't completely read it, don't understand what they did read, and believe it is a prop best used during election campaigns. Most don't believe it is the law or binding in any way on their votes and actions.

One side of the Janus-state — the so-called left side, is angry that the Cut, Cap and Balance may interfere with their political base and agendas, while failing to raise tax collections on that part of the country that they do not claim. The so-called right side of the Janus-state believes that as long as defense spending for the corporate empire is nurtured, preserved and expanded, their proposal will appear "conservative" and be welcomed as titillating foreplay for the November elections.

It seems like they take us all for fools, but as usual it is the genuflecting Congress and the emperor who are fooling themselves. While the United States as a functional value has been calmly downgraded (again!) to a C-minus and Americans rapidly seek alternative home bases, passports, ways of making a living off payroll and out of sight, conservatives recall the "glory days" of 1994 and 1995, and as the strutting feather-headed duo of Eric Cantor and Bob Goodlatte proclaim, it might have been so different, if only.

The crux of the Cantor-Goodlatte position is that, in March 1995, if only the Congress had sent a federal balanced budget amendment to the states for ratification, all of their congressional overspending, their lack of personal and institutional principle, their paucity of restraint, their blatant inability to comprehend basic economics, their obsession for power over the less worthy, their obscene vote selling and incessant influence whoring – all of these sins would have been washed away, instantly and permanently.

The whole debate is moot, because it has been demonstrated from the beginning that Congress has never met a law that it couldn't ignore, modify, or break, starting with the original Constitution.

It is also moot because these congressmen assume that of the several states would approve such a balanced budget amendment, then, now, or in the future. The states well understand their fundamental relationship to the federal government, that unwritten law of federalism. States exist to bring home the goodies, ideally paid for by other states or by a collective accumulation of shared debt owed by future voters and future taxpayers, again mostly residing in other states. The very idea of a demand to pay the federal bill in a given fiscal year (even 18 months later, as the proposed language has it, allowing time to "measure" the GDP) would be simultaneously laughable and repulsive to state governors and to the people, because they intuitively understand that it would mean both fewer goodies and higher taxation, for the wealthier states first and eventually for even the poorest and smallest of states.

The states would overwhelmingly reject this amendment, even if it had teeth and claws, which it does not. This proposal is the rohypnol in the Constitutional martini, following the tradition of federal government boorishness of the 16th Amendment and the 1973 War Powers Act. Cap, Cut and Balance should be nicknamed the Roofie Amendment.

Given that most prudent states would immediately just say no, I can envision a contrarian movement among some states to consider the risk and actively support the Balanced Budget Amendment. Counting on staying competitive for business and productivity as people flee ever more federally "owned" states, certain governors might support the Roofie Amendment in order to eventually weaken the DC loyalists and set the stage for real secession. North Dakota, with its questionable legal statehood status may want to go slow in correcting their constitution. A balanced budget amendment, if passed, would bring economic slavery to the more federally integrated states of the union, and place North Dakota in a super-cool position of pre-existing independence from Washington. Republic of Texas flag wavers, Hawaiian revolutionaries, and Vermont secessionists, take note!

American states, of course, cannot print their own money. A smaller group of states, with interests in allowing alternative hard currencies, or even those with a tradition of creative community currencies, might join with the hopeful independents in supporting a Balanced Budget Amendment as a means to ultimate monetary freedom from D.C. Utah’s sound money movement and upstate New York community business vouchers, gold and silver holders everywhere, upon ratification of a Balanced Budget Amendment, would become even more valuable, reasonable, popular, and useful.

There are many ways to critique and chuckle at the proposals by Cantor and Goodlatte to somehow rein in federal spending by making a law, but there is one staring God-awful gap in the proposed amendment. No version of the law, past of present, deals with or even mentions the existence and processes of bank of the federal government, the Federal Reserve. For the liars in Washington, D.C., both on the left and right, this failure to address the Federal Reserve is a very good thing. Running out of money? We'll "do you a favor" and print more!

In 1994, the Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was the bank's Bifrons. Feared and powerful, moving corpses here and there, scaring all the chickens. It is unthinkable that a balanced budget amendment in 1994 would have addressed the Fed. Only Ron Paul, writing of gold and liberty and transparency, boldly spoke of the Bifrons, then and now. Today, a less impressive Bifrons exists, and Dr. Paul chairs the financial services subcommittee. He routinely takes on the corpse carrier — but still, Cantor and Goodlatte and the rest of the chicken-hearted, bird-brained "conservatives" in Congress cannot bring themselves to address the Fed in the language of the Cut, Cap and Balance Amendment.

Our feathered friends in Congress do enjoy their water drip and their never-ending free lunch. There is a solution, and it starts by not listening to dim-witted chickens trying to buy you one more drink before the bar closes. End the Fed and its interest rate fixing, repeal the 16th Amendment, repeal the 17th Amendment, bring the troops home, end the empire. Start with just these things, and watch the country's economy and its attitude soar, the young delighted that they actually have a hopeful and peaceful future, the old embraced and cared for, the middle generations employed and empowered. In parts and pieces, we can take back our country, and most of us will survive when the empire ends. I find myself oddly reminded of Hoover's purported campaign promise, and FDR's four freedoms. I, too, see chicken on the menu.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

Terms like "lockbox," as with the words "freedom" and "patriotism" and "progress" have been used by the state for a long time to confirm and communicate the false idea that the federal government is, and has ever been, on solid ground. Gore helped many millions of us create in our minds a vision of a social security lockbox that simply never existed, and one that could never exist, in the context of what George Ayittey described, in several of his books, "the vampire state."

Dr. Ayittey gave an impassioned and entertaining talk at TED a few years ago, entitled "Cheetahs vs. Hippos." In it, he mentions vampire states, and describes a begging bowl that leaks. While these metaphors refer to governments on the African continent, both are well-suited to 20th and early 21st Century American federalism. Ayittey speaks of unleashing the "Cheetah generation," and as a metaphor for what comes next, it is both lovely and powerful.

As we watch the Washington D.C. megalith begin to crumble, and make no mistake, we are watching this today — with its frantic decades-long construction of government facilities and monuments, combined with an even more frantic last ditch effort to control what individuals do, earn, say, and where and how they travel. And, might I remind you, all of this construction, of monuments, prisons, bases and office space (2.2 billion square feet for the U.S. military alone) and all these rules and regulations cost lots of money to be eternally loaned by we the people and from interested investors. Funny, I don't recall signing a contract or even being asked. Perhaps that what they mean by patriotism: my country's spending, right or wrong.

Is it to be a Cheetah's generation, or as The Daily Bell has it, the playing out of the Internet "reformation?" Will we see the ascension of an anti-individual hivemind? Will we become Borg drones or even, as the Federal Government’s medical outreach program has it, zombies in a zombie apocalypse? Will the future belong to those who recognize the acronym TEOTWAWKI and lost to those who do not? Has American been zombified?

From my perspective, while the great futurists and science fiction masters have great metaphors, I believe it will be the metaphors that speak most simply to people in their own lives that will prove the most useful. Along those lines, here are some of my favorites:

For describing the future of the U.S. federal system and its devotees, I can say no more than a single word. Idiocracy. Several Lew Rockwell writers have marveled at this hilarious movie, its only flaw a miscalculation of how far into the future the script purports to be. Rather than 500 years away, we see that Idiocracy is alive and expanding now in America. Idiocracy responds to professional political, social and economic system explainers — the elected politician, his and her corporate sponsors and financiers, the media "experts, and the free-lunch Keynesians – with a dull, uncomprehending stare. The movie celebrates both the rule of the hivemind as well as the degradation of everything government touches, and has a multiplicity of memorable images and quotes, any of which are applicable and helpful today.

To understand how the state functions, in a visceral and fundamental way, I love the concept of Americans not as sheep, or pigs, or even cattle or bees — but as "livestock" farmed by the state. This metaphor captures the human tendency to follow the herd, and promotes the popular and often religion-friendly idea that we are here for some unified and agreed-upon purpose, waiting only to be pointed in the "right" direction. The term "livestock" is powerful because unlike the pejorative "sheep," it allows for subgroups and variation — a form of individuality Americans cherish even as they exist as "citizens" with a productive potential defined by solely by their owner, the state. We look to the state as all-knowing and protective shepherd, as evidenced in both Republican and Democratic circles, and as broadcasted every waking minute by all mainstream media. That we often consider livestock stupid is also a worthwhile aspect of this metaphor. Of course, farmers understand, like Gump, that stupid is as stupid does. On the other hand, livestock define the farmer, as we the people define the state. We should all reflect on what it means to be farmed by the state.

To know the state, the popular emergence of the phrase "political class" is very useful. When we articulate this term, we immediately separate ourselves from the political class, we become critics of the rulers, we recognize the unitary nature of the political system, and we begin to understand how and why it is that we are "farmed" by the state. Even Rasmussen Reports polls with this term, and the citizenry responds predictably well in blaming our rulers for many of our systemic ailments. Of course, it is both herdlike and human to blame others — but when we recognize a political class, we are also recognizing that our conception of electoral politics among a mass of over 300 million people cannot possibly be just and righteous. Surely we did not ask to be farmed like cattle, ruled like serfs, raised and routinely sheared like sheep, trained like obedient dogs and sent forth to die on command by a remote federal state that enriches itself and grows while we wait and wither. Talking about the political class, as in kings and princes, works well as an educational metaphor. And while speaking contemptuously of other powerful classes is often used successfully by politicians, it is invariably transparent and revealing when they do so.

I don't know if Eric Peters invented it, but I love the term "clovers." It describes the anti-freedom and pro-state mentality, the nanny-state mindset, and applies to Americans of all eras who embraced progressivism and state-as-moral-agent since the late 1800s. It doesn't sound exceptionally pejorative, at first glance. It's not an ugly phrase, so it is possible one might actually speak to clovers about their cloverism, in a helpful and constructive way. Cloverism is something we can see in small and routine ways — as Peters waxes eloquently, on the highways. Yet it captures an entire battlefront in the ongoing fight for liberty in America. It's elegant — useful, purposeful, and valuable. To be a clover is to imply government is to be trusted, and obeyed — and yet 99% of clovers probably do not always trust, obey or believe government pronouncements. Accordingly, many clovers are libertarians in waiting, and deserve our care and attention. If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged (safely philosophically within the confines of state-slavery), a libertarian might be a clover who wakes up to find the state's been lying to them.

Will we be cheetahs, nimble and swift, or livestock confined by, dependent upon, and serving the state until we are no longer useful? Are we passionate about our liberty, or fearful unimaginative clovers? Do we embrace the present idiocracy, or fight it, openly laugh at it, and work hard to live beyond and outside of it? Do we own ourselves, or are we serfs who cannot imagine real change? Is it not possible that the real battle has long been analyzed and defined by our betters, and that this decade marks not a battle between human liberty and the state, but a battle already won by libertarian ideas, and now roughly struggling to make the transition to peace and real human prosperity and liberty?

I'll offer another metaphor for this decade — a decade that will pave the way for peaceful secession of American states, regions, counties, and communities from the central state's debt, its political class, its empire, and its arbitrary rules and false ethics. For cheetahs, and for recovering clovers, I can see a faithful unwavering light — an unprecedented era of libertarian reconstruction in North America, conducted person to person, quietly, often underground, and in the language of metaphor.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

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The June 8th report was received with alarm. It's not getting better faster, and it not getting better at all. My, how private economic activity has desiccated in the hot sun of government taking, borrowing, outright lies and Ponzi schemes! Phase I of the economic shakeout is not even complete, and yet we are faced with a whole new Phase II of economic reckoning. After the known known bubbles and the subsequent government buybacks, buy-ins, and bailouts, we will soon face the next generation of the ready-to-burst. These include bubbles and major downward adjustments in the reported value of municipal debt, commercial real estate, the public and federally aided university systems, the War on Drugs and the overbuilt prison system, even technology and health care. And the one mentioned here, the Department of Offense.

Several Federal Reserve regional governors understand something of the nature of these coming collapses, but no one substantially seems to get what's coming. Unless they are all liars, fraudsters, and pranksters extraordinaire, which could indeed be the case. It's really too bad we can't all live in their world.

In the real world, these bubbles will impact and touch each other, government will try and fail to resolve the valuation concerns, as it tries and fails to maintain its own credit worthiness and credibility. As municipal debt becomes unbearable and unserviceable, local government will increase taxes on remaining property and services, and eventually be replaced by a few angry men and women who will renegotiate and repudiate much of that debt. The commercial real estate collapse will remind many that their communities are lacking in community, and the shifting landscape of the marketplace will depress many, even as many will talk of what they could do with that place if only they could save money or borrow it. They will rage at the Fed policy of artificially low interest rates (a nod to the needs of Washington's insatiable past and present appetite for borrowing) for making both avenues for people to access capital impossible.

The public and university education system collapse will be particularly painful to many. Empty buildings, too many professors, too much debt and a lack of demand for what passes for an American undergraduate degree will break the back of these mastodons. Prisons built for government projections of pie-in-the-sky inmate growth (this in a country where we are already at the top of the heap) would have employed lots of unskilled and poorly educated people, except there aren't enough prisoners, and no money to run these facilities. Of course, having places to lock up people may serve a future government interest, but as of now, this is a bubble created by the bureaucratic desires of counties, states and the federal government for a bigger piece of the take and the power to effectively own people. The Drug War likewise will be ended, victim of its own addiction to the dole and corruption at levels high and low, and shocking counter-productivity for over 40 years.

All of these imminent un- and under-employed people, many who worked for the state in some menial capacity, with few marketable abilities or useful knowledge, will wonder why life is so hard, but most will not become exceptionally angry. Sheep usually do not, and most Americans have been cultured, educated and managed to be sheep. As I heard on Freetalklive.com recently, we have become the "livestock" of the political class, who "farm" us. It's very true.

Instead, the newly freed will begin to learn new skills, develop new interests, and new networks, and many will become reacquainted with the children in their lives (even as birth rates will drop). This new interest in the increasingly valuable child will deprive public elementary and high schools of their babysitting value, as the under and unemployed can and will teach their own kids. One of the first lessons will be that if a person from the government moves his or her lips, they are lying. This is the harsh lesson the parents have learned, and it will be passed to the children, with the overall excellent impact of creating independent critical thinking little hoodlums, who will always ask why and never take their Ritalin and Adderol, unless it is to remarket it for fun and profit.

But I digress! The twin enabler of the Washington, D.C. oligarchy, the Samson who holds up the pillars of corporate state, is the Pentagon. Indeed, the defense, offense and intelligence bubbles are near the popping point. Killeen, Texas is called out as a place where unemployment among the military and defense contractor class will increase, and that's one of many across the country. But who really takes this seriously? I mean, it's a big potential bubble, employing people in every Congressional district, and comprising one of our biggest export industries — big war and a multitude of weapons. How could it pop? I mean, even crime doesn't stop these guys from getting their cost plus contracts, year after year!

How could it pop, indeed. At least the Beige Book report admits the trends of contracting economies. Yet, this question is unasked and unconsidered by outgoing SecDef Robert Gates, who recently told NPR that the DoD of the future will have "a full menu" and that "… first of all, you have Iran and North Korea, both of whom are developing nuclear weapons. North [Korea] already has them. You have a very aggressive weapons-building program in China. You have a revolution throughout the Middle East. There are – the U.S. military has never been at a loss in being told to find things to do."

One finds oneself temporarily speechless. Gates sees the reality of executive-directed global war against despotisms and "creating democracies" at the point of a sword on the other side of the planet, as a "good thing," apparently not conflicting at all with his sworn oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the Republic.

We do know that truth and economic reality always prevail, and as Nixon's economic advisor famously said, things that cannot go on forever, don't. Gates shares with Bernanke a stultified brand of last century thinking and a willful blindness to fundamental facts, recorded history, and ethics. "Full Menu" Gates and "Helicopter" Bernanke are the faces of the twin enablers of the Washington establishment, and they are increasingly dysfunctional and out of sync with each other. Any successor to Bernanke and Gates, as Leon Panetta proves now at the Pentagon, will be as wholly unimaginative and as faithful to the empire as their predecessors. These twins casually arrogate the people's present cash and future hope, and they consider these roles their due. They do not realize their days are numbered.

They will not find safe harbor on American shores, come their turn to u2018fess up and apologize. When these final bubbles pop, Republics will rise up again from sea to shining sea. None of them will have use for inflationary and imperial services — and in their youthful zeal, may even arrest and imprison those who publicly propose such anti-republican evil.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page. She is currently running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

What these modern bubbles, and most historical ones, seem to share is government "leadership" and government blessings, and a taxpayer (born and unborn) subsidy of this or that investment. Ponzi schemes of all kinds lead to bubbles, promises of easy gains for low risk that, when they come due or are discovered, collapse swiftly and painfully. Bubbles are the predictable result of lies being told about what is wise, what is worthy, and what is good for this or that entity. We are aware of the housing bubble, the financial bubble stemming from mortgage security swaps, the coming college and the municipal debt bubbles, and the bubble growing around the U.S. Federal Reserve notes.

Some bubbles are bigger than others, of course, and different groups are differently impacted when these bubbles explode and investors sort it out and reallocate any remaining pieces. Certainly, government intervention delays and warps any post bubble recovery. What is simple in many ways is made complicated and difficult to understand, but the fundamental facts will inevitably have their day.

Earlier this week I participated in a panel discussing military aid to Israel, and why it should be reduced drastically. One argument against this aid is that Israel misuses US developed technology by stealing it, selling it, trading on it, and using it to compete against U.S. defense and security firms for global sales. Another argument is that this aid ends up costing American taxpayers far more than the actual dollar amount by fomenting tension in the region, reducing American credibility and options, and by creating unnecessary enemies, and expensive but ultimately unnecessary supplicants and "allies" in the region.

When they are in the United States, Israel's politicians and leaders, most recently Benjamin Netanyahu, pay repetitive lip service to the idea that Israel is a dedicated military ally and reliable friend of the United States. Yet, strangely, the United States and Israel do not have, and have never had, a treaty of mutual defense. Opposition to such a treaty comes largely from the Israeli side (and consequently, from Israel's many standing and genuflecting ovationers in Congress) who tend to see any treaty as a possible limitation on Israeli government's ability to conduct "defense." Certainly, territorial expansion, barrier and road building, and control of human movement and trade far beyond the 1967 borders are seen as "defensive nation building" by many Israelis. For the U.S. to be a legally binding party to such activity would be an obvious and public violation of international law, and an open rejection of the ideas that emerged after World War II. Believe it or not, there was a broad-based recoil around the world at the shocking totalitarian abuses of human rights and liberty conducted by governments on all sides against their own people, and their neighbors, during those wars.

To put it plainly, if the United States president signed such a treaty with Israel, and the Congress ratified it, many elected leaders in the United States would be on record as supporting Israel's "defense" strategy, rather than having it both ways as they do today. A defense treaty with Israel would instantly negate all that President Obama said last week about supporting peace and democratic progress in the Middle East, and specifically contradict his vague statement regarding the 1967 borders as a guide to a two-state solution. A defense treaty would be also a very honest and open thing to do, and it would codify the fundamental and brutal nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship, here and throughout the Middle East. Such a treaty would make the United States less of a hypocrite, and it would help the rest of the world and average Americans fully understand our Middle East basing policies and practices, and our various attempts to puppet-master, promote or topple other regional governments.

One of the key features of a bubble ready to pop is that a small number of intimate observers of the situation begin cry into the wilderness, often pointing to certain fundamental flaws, or unnoticed oversights. These observers and participants who warn of a coming collapse or bursting bubble may be thought of as canaries in a mineshaft. But unlike the humble canary, whose song is welcomed because it means the system parameters are still solid, the naysayers, the cautious critics, and the wise proactive analysts tend to be ignored by the "investors" when they sing, and these canaries are pressured to go silent.

Certainly this is the case of those who challenge the idea that the congressionally forced U.S. taxpayer funding of Israel's defense industry is a worthwhile investment in American security. The $3 billion in annual financial military financing and other military aid, and the other lending of diplomatic and military credibility to the Israeli government, no matter what that government does, or how it does it, is an expensive policy. Unlike most other military aid doled out around the world, the United States attaches no substantive conditions on this and the massive in-kind gifts to, and cached weapons we store in, Israel. We require no U.S. basing rights, no standing overflight rights, and do not require, as we do for all other FMF, that the tax money be 100% spent on U.S.-produced products and services. We do not require that Israel abide by international law or norms in the use of American military products, such that American cluster bombs and white phosphorus artillery shells may end up used on civilians or on civilian infrastructure, incriminating the American taxpayer in collateral maiming and murder, and illegal destruction of habitats and economies. Instead, Israel has been able to game the free money system such that today, 25% of the assistance may be spent solely on the burgeoning Israeli defense industry, which competes with the major American defense sector for customers around the world — without the constraints U.S. companies have in selling goods, services, and technologies to the United States' antagonists and sanctionees of the day.

As we speak of bubbles yet unpopped, I will suggest two. In general, the United States defense industry constitutes a bubble, even as contrarians accurately understand that governments in financial trouble and facing a discrediting national collapse tend to go to war to silence domestic critics and squeeze the last nickel from the collective coffers for their political and corporate friends, and as both parties fight to save the industry as a last ditch "jobs" program for the children. It is the way of all empire, and will be so for us. Thus ultimately, big state debt- and deficit-funded defense spending is a bubble overdue for a collapse, a sputtering and then a raging rush away from this wasteful, unnecessary and over-hyped industry. When during budget debate time, every other radio advertisement you hear in Washington demands you heart Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, overwhelming even the incessant push for antidepressants, one can sense the concern that someone will find out about this house of cards, and observe that it struts upon the stage, as Shakespeare would say, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Far more vulnerable to an imminent pop, with few tears by average Americans, will be foreign financial aid to all countries, including Israel, the largest recipient of such aid. AIPAC is stale and aging, an old man's commiseration club, sufferable only because it is habitual. Christian Zionists, some of whom I witnessed earlier this week engaged in verbal and physical violence towards a CNIF member, are losing their cool in more ways than one. For the first time, I met an infamous supporter of U.S. tax-funded assistance to Israel and its geographical expansion, a retired three star Army general and helpful contributor to our current pro-Israel policy that includes several wars and occupations in the Middle East, and our torture and rendition of detainees. He worked as a second to Stephen Cambone and was part of the neocon cadre so prominent in the Pentagon and Executive corridors in 2002 and afterwards. The portly and emotion-driven Jerry Boykin must have been a weak and angry shadow of his former self, I thought to myself.

But indeed, he is what he is, and what he always was. What changed was my perception of him, my new and concrete awareness that he was a fraud, a walking sale pitch for more war and war spending when, in fact, none was or is necessary. Oil will be pumped, processed and traded, and Israel will survive and prosper, even as the United States withdraws financial aid and symbols of military might from the region. The great build-up of bases in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, in Bahrain and Kuwait, in North Africa and Afghanistan — all without a serious defensive debate or justification is amazingly typical of a bubble in the months and years before it decisively collapses. It's the hurry up and get on board phase of the Ponzi scheme, the mad rush to get in on the deal, because it is almost too good to be true.

Americans are beginning to ask questions, and the answers they are getting from the U.S. Government, the Israel lobby and Israel's political leadership amount to "…move along, nothing to see here, folks." When pressed for details, Americans are getting congressional obsfucation, bumper sticker-style labels, and a bit of self-righteous anger. By now, Americans know all about the nature of bubbles, and hopefully they won't be surprised by these coming collapses.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski

Tom Edwards was talking about the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives, regarding a fire ATF agents accidentally set in Motley County, Texas, practicing detonations in an area locally designated no-burn. The county attorney is now helping Texans whose property was destroyed to apply for damages from the federal government.

The federal government has always had a real corner on stupid. In the early 1800s, and up through the 1860s, discussion about states going their own way and freeing themselves of a costly and unnecessary federal institution was considered conventional, rather than treasonous. Secession was seen as constitutional, legal, popular in many states, and informed by a general understanding of the processes and motivations by which the federation of several states had been established.

That era is gone, and a federally-dominated, centralized and globally combative socialism has taken the place of a U.S. constitutional republic. Non-voters and voters alike sense that some force or factor — unrelated to their desires or ballots — shapes and controls the domestic and foreign policy of the U.S. government. Americans may discuss a republican form of government, but increasingly many believe that relying on the electoral process for progress or change is as superstitious and mystical as a peyote ceremony, without the benefit of inspirational hallucination and deep personal reflection.

War and spending are never the right answer, yet they remain our federal government's favorite mechanisms for fun and sustenance at home and abroad. Happily, we are seeing the evolution of a pervasive and broad-based public opinion that the federal government is just not that bright. Depending on your interest area, you could look at issues of "law" enforcement and emergency response and recall Ruby Ridge or Waco, Hurricane Katrina or the Missouri and Mississippi River flooding response by the Federal Army Corps of Engineers. The recent extrajudicial execution and eradication of Bin Laden is a constitutional, legal, intelligence and government decision-making mess no matter how you feel about premeditated murder in general. You may be curious about signs of intelligent life in the Transportation Security Administration, or seek evidence of either ethical or constitutional behavior in this or that government agency. Maybe you are wondering about federal government plans to RFID tag everyone's livestock and record all details of the animal's life and death to a central government-owned database, as each and every critter in the country is somehow considered by some soft-handed suit in DC as part of his or her "national herd." Perhaps you just consider the war-making, intelligence-gathering, and budgeting skills of Washington a bit subpar.

Justified and widespread contempt for the federal government, in each and every aspect of its presence and existence, is the beginning of what comes next for this country. And what comes next is, in fact, very good, even though the shift will be difficult for many and challenging for most. There are signs already — beyond the very correct articulation of a slow-talking Texan attorney from Motley County.

We see it in the way the state of Utah rejected federal No Child Left Behind mandates, and told the federal government to go ahead and keep its relatively small financial contribution to the state's educational effort. What happened? Like a non-custodial parent desperate to be needed and liked, the Department of "Education" quickly backed down on its demands, and provided the federal cash to Utah, without the disputed federal mandates. Many states are similarly pushing back against federal interference, often because of financial concerns, but increasingly because the federal government has created such a outstanding niche for itself in the "No Value Added" segment of society.

Virginia's Attorney General is making a name for himself and the Commonwealth by suing the federal government for commanding that Virginians purchase health insurance. Most Virginians support the suit, but a wise subset of the people actually think a suit is not necessary — the people simply need to ignore and nullify the law. Why ask the unaccountable Supreme Court for a decision, when we the people already understand what is correct, just and Constitutional for us in Virginia? In so many ways, the Supreme Court is as stupid as the rest of the federal sector. And by stupid, I don't mean to insult. Any of stupid's synonyms — unwise, dull, obtuse, dim, thick and dense — will do.

Recently, a bill was approved by the Texas House of Representatives making it a crime for "public servants to inappropriately touch travelers during airport security pat-downs." The TSA's [stupid, obtuse, missing the point] answer is to quote the Supremacy clause of the Constitution, telling us and the states that we are not allowed to "regulate" the federal government.

Of course! That certainly explains why the ATF can practice blowing things up in an area under drought conditions and at risk for wildfire. States and localities cannot "regulate" the actions, behaviors or "rights" of the federal government. The level of dull-witted leadership in Washington astounds and shocks, even as it entertains.

Here's the thing. The entertainment value of overreaching central government is tolerable, as it is in countries around the world, only so long as it seems to pay its own way. The implications of the U.S federal government's $14.3 trillion national debt, its $1.4 trillion deficit and its half a trillion each year in carrying costs of the ever-growing national debt (at today's fiat-driven and unsupportable low interest rates) takes a lot of the fun out of watching the federal government's incessant missteps.

As the federal evil in Washington, D.C. increasingly attempts to tell states and the people to pay up, put up and shut up, secession will naturally take multiple forms and shapes at state, municipal and individual levels. This reaction — in a sense, our inevitable 21st century American transition from a nation of nanny state dependents and state worshippers towards a new land (or lands) of independent, liberated and free people — cannot be fought with any army, and it will eventually light the way for the dissolution of the federal level, its formal bankruptcy and overdue demise.

Today, the U.S. federal government is flooding the plains, burning the tumbleweed and juniper, killing people around the world without reason or moral constraint, and devaluing its paper currency like it was going out of style. For all of this, in fact, because of all this, it is a promising and exciting time to be an American, and to recall the clarity of our founding fathers on the legitimate size, scope and role of a central government.

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here or join her Facebook page.

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski