News ‘Journalists’ Shill for the State

by Scott Lazarowitz

Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: How Statism Is a Sickness, and Not Just a Destructive Political System

It’s bad enough the possibility that there might have been some hanky-panky going on regarding the vote count at the Iowa Straw Poll this week, in which Ron Paul received 4,671 votes to Michele Bachmann’s 4,823, a difference of just 152 votes. But to see one national media outlet after another completely ignoring Dr. Paul’s virtual tie for the #1 spot, and others who continue to dismiss Paul as "fringe," despite Paul’s being the most mainstream and commonsensical of all the candidates, is amazing.

The shills for the State do not see how obvious they are now. And the shills aren’t just the left-biased news media, but on the right as well. In his loving devotion to the State, Rush Limbaugh said, regarding the GOP’s giving Ron Paul any actual attention, "This is nuts on parade."

Oh, really, Mr. Limbaugh? And whose "Operation Chaos" scheme was it that helped give us the tyrannical President Obama? Hmmm?

"Nuts," indeed.

I dare any of the Iowa or national news reporters to interview people on the street and ask if they were of the 4,671 people who voted for Ron Paul, and, if so, ask them why they voted for Paul. You will find answers not in the "fringe," or in the land of ignorance and fantasy as with supporters of some of those other candidates. No, you will find people who believe in and understand the ideas of freedom and peace, and who want there to be a free and prosperous America for their future generations.

So many Americans now have been cradled by Big Daddy Government. Economically and culturally Americans have become infantilized, and their coma-like passivity is being disturbed by this Ron Paul person, who dares to advocate independence, and that people grow up and be responsible for their lives and stop being babies.

The idea of the fiat money way of life, the use of value-less paper as the sole government-mandated medium of exchange, has been so ingrained, its century-long status quo being challenged makes people very uncomfortable. Ron Paul has been exposing the instability of the whole system, and that frightens people.

So, rather than deal with reality as Paul suggests, the pundits and the government groupies of mainstream news would prefer to just continue sucking their thumbs and hope for some magical cure, as the Limbaugh-Romney-Obama-Krugman statists hope for.

The people who snub those who advocate a challenge to the status quo and a challenge to government-controlled money and banking, government-controlled medicine, and a challenge to the U.S. government’s immoral and bankrupting wars of aggression – aggressions that do nothing but provoke foreigners to act against us – the people who close the door to the challenger and keep it open for the statists, despite all the destruction the State has wrought, is further confirmation of my assertion that statism is a sickness.

But why do we – the people who just want to live our lives and be left alone, and who mind our own business and do not support acts of aggression against others – why do we have to suffer at the hands of these statists? Ron Paul is advocating for our freedom and independence, that we have a right to live our lives, without aggression and intrusions into our lives and businesses by our neighbors and by the government. We have a right to trade freely with others without Big Daddy Government’s permission, we have a right to travel freely without being cancer-scanned and groped by sickos or asked to show our papers, and we have a right to earn a living without being harassed and having our labor enslaved by the State.

The media act as though that’s too much for us to ask and too much for Ron Paul to advocate, so the media babyishly snub him and his unapologetic message of freedom and peace.

Ron Paul wants to remove the government’s monopoly in money production and distribution, allow for competition in currencies, and have money that is backed by something of actual value, like gold and silver. Dr. Paul understands that paper money leads to tyranny. Paul wants to undo the current institutionalized irresponsibility of letting banks engage in risky investments and not being held accountable, that allows the banks to get bailed out by the taxpayers and by future generations via the government’s perpetual debt machine.

Paul understands that GM should have been made to go bankrupt. All businesses that are run irresponsibly or unprofitably need to restructure themselves or close, including banks as well. The problem with "Too Big To Fail" is that the whole banking and monetary system is a government-corporate cartel that protects the top bankers from accountability, and restricts entrepreneurs’ right of free entry into the field.

We had much more freedom, and much more prosperity, growth and progress in the years prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve. With freedom there is prosperity. In total contrast, in the past century of government usurpations and intrusions, we have had stagflation, wars of aggression, corporatism, and now the inevitable collapse of the system, a collapse that Paul wants to avoid.

But these ideas apparently are too much for our news media government flunkies. As the State has grown larger and larger by each generation, the news media, the intellectuals and academics have shrunk in their capacity toward intellectual curiosity, discovery and searching for the truth. The State and its compulsory powers tend to stifle questioning and challenging of its authority, and its power has an allure to it that seems to have been just too tempting for the journalistic elites to resist.

In his article, Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State, economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted how the change occurred within intellectuals from being more independent to being State apologists:

If one donor or sponsor no longer supported (intellectuals), many others existed who would happily fill the gap. Indeed, intellectual and cultural life flourished the most, and the independence of intellectuals was the greatest, where the position of the king or the central government was relatively weak and that of the natural elites had remained relatively strong.

A fundamental change in the relationship between the state, natural elites, and intellectuals only occurred with the transition from monarchical to democratic rule. It was the inflated price of justice and the perversions of ancient law by kings as monopolistic judges and peacekeepers that motivated the historical opposition against monarchy. But confusion as to the causes of this phenomenon prevailed. There were those who recognized correctly that the problem was with monopoly, not with elites or nobility. However, they were far outnumbered by those who erroneously blamed the elitist character of the ruler for the problem, and who advocated maintaining the monopoly of law and law enforcement and merely replacing the king and the highly visible royal pomp with the "people" and the presumed decency of the "common man." …

A "tragedy of the commons" was created. Everyone, not just the king, was now entitled to try to grab everyone else's private property. The consequences were more government exploitation (taxation); the deterioration of law to the point where the idea of a body of universal and immutable principles of justice disappeared and was replaced by the idea of law as legislation… and an increase in the social rate of time preference (increased present-orientation)…

…while the natural elites were being destroyed, intellectuals assumed a more prominent and powerful position in society. Indeed, to a large extent they have achieved their goal and have become the ruling class, controlling the state and functioning as monopolistic judge…

Now, this is not to suggest that people such as Rush Limbaugh, Chris Wallace or Candy Crowley are "intellectuals," but they are amongst the so-called news "journalists" of the day, which is part of the crowd of news and pundits, academia, the professional economists and those in pop culture who shill for the State and its constant expanded power over the infantilized lives of the people.

When someone such as Ron Paul says he wants the people to have their freedom – that is, freedom from the State’s reaching into their private personal and economic lives – and who actually speaks in terms of morality (e.g. it’s immoral to start wars of aggression against other countries who were of no threat to us), and if Ron Paul’s proposals result in shrinking the State’s size and power, that seems to be a huge threat to the thumb-sucking apologists of the State. Certainly more than any threat from government’s destroying the economy, forcing future generations into debt slavery, provoking foreigners to retaliate against us, or from the government’s own police state.

As Dr. Paul stated, "We are trying to reverse 100 years of history, the change from a republic to an empire…" Apparently, Paul agrees with Murray Rothbard, who called for an outright repeal of the 20^th Century:

Heaven forfend! Who would want to repeal the 20th century, the century of horror, the century of collectivism, the century of mass destruction and genocide, who would want to repeal that! Well, we propose to do just that.

With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that it can be done. We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the 20th century.

One of the most inspiring and wonderful sights of our time was to see the peoples of the Soviet Union rising up…to tear down in their fury the statues of Lenin, to obliterate the Leninist legacy. We, too, shall tear down all the statues of Franklin D. Roosevelt, of Harry Truman, of Woodrow Wilson, melt them down and beat them into plowshares and pruning hooks, and usher in a 21st century of peace, freedom, and prosperity.

I’m verklempt.

August 18, 2011

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist at Reasonandjest.com.

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