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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 726, June 23, 2013 Governments are worse than anything they pretend to protect us from. They are worse, in fact, far worse, than anything you can imagine.
Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise For reasons far too complicated to explain, I have been without the Internet for much of the past week. And to increase my sense of isolation from my fellow goodguys, the miserable statist cowards who run a local radio station I won't name finally found an excuse to take the one guy off the air who had (and presumably still has) the oysters to stand up to the bullies and thugs of the Obama regime, Colorado Division. Nevertheless, it has been impossible to avoid hearing about and seeing the ... well, "scandal" is too small a word for what's going on. It's like describing what happened at Hiroshima as a fireworks display. Obama's government is rotten at the core, where it appears that an illegal alien with a completely fictional background was set in power by a criminal gang of Marxists and their accomplices and hangers-on. Taking advantage of massive corruption that had already permeated the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, and the federal judiciary, they began working on a long-range agenda that, if fully carried out, could end in the extermination of nine tenths of the human race, ostensibly in the name of arresting global warming and saving lovely Mother Gaia from a species that is regarded by the most psychopathic among its own, as no more than a kind of skin disease on a ball of dirt. If that strikes you as insane, you're absolutely right. If you believe that it's impossible, I urge you to take a good, hard look at recent Cambodian history. Exactly the same sub-species of demented vermin that were in charge there and then are back in charge here and now. But what has impressed me most (maybe "appalled" would be a better word) is the utter astonishment with which all the revelations—of the government's illegal spying, ideological biases in the enforcement of taxation, and other deeply criminal activities—have apparently been received. It looks, at last, like the thrill is gone; all Chris Matthews is left with is the last two drops he couldn't shake or dance away. And yet, unless they're newborn babies, or hermits dwelling in some unknown caverns in New Guinea or Tierra del Fuego, nobody living on this planet today is entitled to a single nanosecond of surprise. What we're dealing with here is a government and if the last hundred years of unabated butchery and slaughter have proven nothing else, it's that governments are worse than anything they pretend to protect us from. They are worse, in fact, far worse, than anything you can imagine. The Founding Fathers knew it was a snake when they took it in. I'm just saying. And if saying that gets me on some government list of individuals to be watched (on the absurd assumption that I haven't already been on that list for years) that simply demonstrates that what I'm saying is correct. But—and this is important—it is nothing new. When I was only a third of my present age, and knew only half of what I know now about politics, I was astute enough to understand that Lyndon Johnson's war in Vietnam was immoral and illegal, serving no purpose other than enhancing his power and prestige and that of his cronies, and filling the coffers of corporations that supplied him with things, not only to beat people up and kill them, but to ruin their land for generations to come. More bombs were dropped on that little country than were dropped all around the planet during World War II, and each of those bombs cost money that went in somebody's pocket. Incidentally, especially if you're one of my handful of readers on the left, it is important to understand that there is a difference—moral and legal—between companies that supply the Second Amendment right of individual Americans to own and carry weapons (an essential positive element in preserving and maintaining civilization), and the monstrous, amoral corporations that feed the wholesale destruction of civilizations. But as usual, I have digressed. What I'd intended to write about is the fact that, in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, nobody who opposed the prosecution of that war expected any kind of privacy whatever, or any safety from government surveillance. I don't know what people learn about Lyndon Baines Johnson these days. I was there: he was a bad man, as bad as bad men can get, as bad as any chieftain of the Mafia, as bad as any dictator or usurper in history. Johnson and his collectivist henchmen spawned the so-called "Great Society", with its evil, family-destroying "War on Poverty", a welfare scheme of historically unprecedented proportions which was in reality nothing more than a plantation breeding program intended to produce a perpetual supply of Democratic voters—at the involuntary expense of an increasingly drained and deliberately impoverished Productive Class. It is pretty widely accepted by historians that Johnson, an East Texas politician with a Chicago way of doing things, murdered his way into Congress, where he became butt-boy to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the fullness of time, he became Senate Majority Leader, and finally forced himself somehow onto the Presidential ticket of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Some of the same historians are at long last beginning to believe that Johnson—who was pretty much ostracized by the rest of a mostly Northeastern administration that, despite its family roots in the deep sleaze of Prohibition-era bootlegging, and questions about trading with Nazi Germany, saw itself as vastly more cultured and refined than the Texican Veep—had Kennedy murdered, too, so that he could become President. The idea seemed obvious to many of us at the time, and, under the rhetorical doctrine known as "Occam's Razor", which asserts that the simplest explanation is usually the best, made a lot more sense than the myriad of much more complicated theories that found their way into circulation after Kennedy's assassination. There was an off-Broadway play called MacBird that couched the notion in the style of William Shakespeare. Like any would-be dictator, Johnson feared and hated the American tradition of private gun ownership, and did what he could to destroy it. (Kennedy had largely been pro-Second Amendment.) With Johnson's encouragement, the shady Senator Thomas Dodd, who exactly like so many gun-hating politicians, later left government "service" under a cloud of corruption, had the Library of Congress translate the body of Nazi-era German firearms laws, and used them to draft the 1968 Gun Control Act, the second federal assault on the right of the individual to own and carry weapons after Roosevelt's National Firearms Act of 1934. Naturally, like any illegitimate ruler—like Joseph Stalin, for example—Johnson had many real enemies, and paranoiacally imagined he had many more. He had his own enemies list, which included Singer Eartha Kitt, who used an invitation to perform at the White House to lecture the man about his war—and had a very tough time ever finding work again. Johnson's FBI and other agencies infiltrated anti-war organizations until, it was joked, there were campus peace groups that consisted of nothing but federal agents, reporting on one another. Between Vietnam and the drug war (which, contrary to popular belief, was not invented by Pat Nixon or Nancy Reagan) nobody ever lifted a telephone in those days, without taking into account the likelihood that somebody besides your mom or your girlfriend might be listening. We were all aware—probably thanks to some postal worker who wisely retained his anonymity—that Johnson was having the mail X-rayed and its contents sorted out by puzzle experts well before computers. I have always believed that this kind of thing continued after that particular war, that particular administration. I don't believe that Nixon did anything his predecessors or his successors didn't do. He just made the wrong enemy, who arranged for him to get caught at it. And that makes me wonder who Barack Obama's most powerful enemies are. Almost entirely absent from any conversation you'll hear, either in the establishment media, now turning like feral curs on Obama, or in alternative media that sprang up in response to their failure, is any notion of how to do away with this totalitarian nonsense once and for all. Remember, there is no emergency clause in the Constitution, no provision for martial law, or for the suspension of the Bill of Rights. Anyone who tries to act as if there were, is a criminal and a traitor, under federal laws already long established, but seldom ever enforced. A real answer lies in my award-winning book Down With Power: Libertarian Policy in a Time of Crisis, a weapon I fashioned for you and our fellow Americans to get our country back. It is also at the bottom of each piece of e-mail I send. It's something that should have been included in the Bill of Rights to begin with, but which I suspect Alexander Hamilton and those who thought like Hamilton had a hand in omitting. It is this:
Under this law, every Senator and Congressman who voted for the Patriot Act, whether he read it or not, would be behind bars. Every snooper in the CIA, FBI, NSA, or any other alphabet agency would be their cell-mates. The renditioners would be renditioned, and the torturers—well, the test of real civilization is what it does with torturers. Isn't it? If you want to do something for individual liberty, for yourself and for America, circulate this penalty clause as widely as you can. Send it to every official and demand it be passed into law. Believe me, they are all such low, crawling, craven finger-in-the-wind cowards that the effort alone, whether it ever passes or not, will have an effect. Join and contribute to Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, not the only trustworthy gun group (I also like Gun Owners of America) but the only organization dedicated to preventing the next Holocaust. Last but not least, buy, read, and recommend Down With Power which includes a simple program for restoring peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity to a nation being deliberately destroyed by socialists. Make it the kind of unwelcome bestseller that John Ross's Unintended Consequences became, despite the best efforts of those socialists. Yes, it will contribute to my family coffers, but that's what free-market capitalism is supposed to be all about—and I can cause a hell of a lot more trouble than I do now if I have the money to do it. Choose a path and take it—your grandchildren will thank you.
TLE AFFILIATE
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