Just the other day I was having a discussion with my dad, where I said I don’t trust either party. I  said both parties want to take our liberties and control us. They are both bought and paid for by some special interest group. To this, my dad said I was becoming too cynical. In typical Neo-con fashion, he told me how evil the Democrats are and how Republicans are so much better.

A couple days later, I come across Bob Murphy’s post highlighting how George W. Bush and Barack Obama, a Republican and a “anti-war” Democrat, can care less about our Constitution. Despite the Bill of Rights, they believe all they have to do is label someone a terrorist, and they have the right to imprison the person without cause or trial. Now to take it one step further, they have the right to kill that person (could be you one day) based on their judgement alone. All they have to do is label you a terrorist or say you are helping terrorists and put you on their “hit list”. Considering how horrible they are at the no fly list, I hate to see how this list pans out.

Here’s Bob’s post.

What Would It Take For Americans to Realize They Are Not Free?

I was having lunch with someone today (name being withheld in case he doesn’t want this broadcast) and we were musing over the contradiction in the average American’s mind. On the one hand, if you asked Americans to rate professions in terms of their morality or decency, politicians would come in at or near dead last, and if they beat out lawyers, that wouldn’t be much help–most politicians are lawyers.

But at the same time, when it comes to the life-and-death decisions that U.S. politicians make, most Americans give them the benefit of the doubt–often ridiculously so. Sure, they might have made a mistake in, say, invading Iraq, but it really was always about protecting Americans and freeing Iraqis from a brutal thug. The CIA guys just goofed, that’s all.

So anyway, my buddy asked something like, “At what point are Americans going to wake up and realize they can’t trust their government?”

My answer, “When it’s too late for them to do anything about it.”

Note that I wasn’t just trying to say something dramatic, at which point the snare drums kick in and lightning cracks in the background. I meant it quite seriously: The people in charge have to keep up appearances so long as it’s necessary for the overwhelming majority to actually trust that the system basically works. In contrast, in more totalitarian regimes, a large portion of the population knows full well that the rulers are evil, and they are kept in place by fear and helplessness. (They also might think there are no better alternatives.)

So with that in mind, let’s quote from today’s post by Glenn Greenwald. We have already learned that Americans won’t revolt–heck, won’t even vote against an incumbent–just because of worldwide CIA secret prisons and systematic torture of POWs. OK fine. What about this?

The Washington Post’s Dana Priest today reports that “U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people.”…

But buried in Priest’s article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret “hit list” of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed…

Read the full post at Free Advice: What Would It Take For Americans to Realize They Are Not Free?.

So back to the question Bob posed in his title, “What Would It Take For Americans to Realize They Are Not Free?”  I am hoping that people are waking up to what our government has become, a corrupt, over grown, oppressive government of the bankers, by the bankers, and for the bankers.

It’s funny how people like my dad (his counterparts on the left do the same thing) will ascribe the most horrendous intentions to Democrats (some are justified), but he does not see the intentions of the Republicans. When I mentioned this article to him today and how easy it would be to label anyone a terrorist, he said, “Yeah, I can’t see that ever really happening.” Do you think it is just coincidence that our government found the perfect boogie man to get US citizens to give up their liberty, condone the suspension of habeas corpus and now kill off Americans at the President’s behest?

Like I said in my post about us living in the real world Matrix, this Democrat vs Republican scam is setup to get people to ignore what is really happening. By cheering on your team, you become too invested in winning to notice your team has the same intentions. Both teams want to take your liberty, enslave you to Washington and Wall Street, and all the while make you think it’s your choice.

So are you really free just because you get to choose between one party or the other, but you get the same result from both? Imagine if I said the following to you.  “You are free, baby. I don’t want to take your rights away. You are free to choose. I don’t care what three days a week you work for me, it’s your choice. Oh, and don’t worry about this gun pointed at you. It’s here to protect you from those evil people trying to harm what we got going on here. You sure are a lucky sum bitch to have me here protecting you like this. Ok, decide which days and get to work. I know I had to shoot one of our workers, but he was helping those evil people. I just know it. It was completely justified. Trust me.”

Would you still think you are free?

While commenting on Paul D. Ryan’s op-ed, I was told “The perfect is the enemy of good.” The op-ed was talking about cutting taxes, having tax credits for health care insurance purchases, moving towards medical savings accounts, and other Republican ideas. While I think these ideas are better than Obama’s if I have the false choice of one or the other, they still are based on the premise that government has a role of telling or enticing us into living life the way they believe we should live. This is the problem I see with the Republicans. By saying we should have these other policies and programs, they have already conceded defeat to progressives that government is empowered to tell us how to live. From that point, progressives have already won. The argument then comes down to who has the best policies to force society into the stated policy goal.  Here was the comment and my response.

Lloyd Morton replied: Jason, read the above post, The perfect is the enemy of good.

Jason Vanzin replied: (your comment) Lloyd, saying we should be free from coercion is asking for perfection? It is asking for what is moral. It used to be what this country was based on.

If someone robs my house, and the police know who it is and that he has my stuff, would you say the perfect is the enemy of the good when I say I want it all back? Should the police say, just be happy the robber is giving you your toaster back? That robber sure is a good guy.

Perfect is not the enemy of good. Evil is the enemy of good, and government becomes evil when it moves from protecting liberty to coercion.

Grant Ellis replied: Well said!

Carlos Sierra replied: I wish I’d said that. Well done, Jason Vanzin!

via Paul D. Ryan: A GOP Road Map for America’s Future – WSJ.com.

I must say it was nice to see two people approving my comment, since it is a libertarian comment.

If you just ate lunch, do not look at this link. It will probably make you sick.

The Stimulus Tracker on CNNMoney.com – Track the economic stimulus package in detail.

George Washington warned us that “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force.”, but we Americans forget that. Government is nothing but a gun. It maintains a monopoly on force, and it uses that monopoly on anyone who would challenge it.

We don’t realize that all our elections are is different special interest groups fighting it out in the polls to gain control of the gun. Each special interest group runs commercials, writes op-eds and trys to convince the general public that the gun is better off in their hands. They will use the gun to make things right, to make them better for everyone. Do not pay attention to who they are pointing the gun at, because they promise not to point it at you.

This warning should have been ingrained in us, coming from a man who could have been King. Our founders knew the government was a gun, so they wrote the constitution to limit the instances in which that gun could be employed. This is why they wrote the constitution in the first place. There were issues under the articles of confederation that made it extremely hard to be a nation. These were things like trade wars between states, states printing their own currency making it impossible to have a medium of exchange, etc. The founders reluctantly handed a gun to the federal government and said, “Here is the gun, and we want you to only address these specific items with this gun.” In order to protect citizens from the gun, they wrote specific rights that could not be trampled by the gun, which we know as the Bill of Rights.

Fast forward to the early 1900s, and you have a group of people, progressives, with ideas that they think they can create society based on their ideology. They realize they can achieve their vision, despite the fact that most people do not want to live out their vision. People prefer to live life as they themselves see fit, but the progressives know that if they can gain control of the gun, the people will have no choice.

This vision has come from both sides of the isle, and both sides love wielding the gun in the direction that they see fit. It has become unfathomable to them and increasingly to us as a people to think that people can possibly make intelligent, rational decisions for themselves. They have convinced us, through government schools, propaganda and their media accomplices, to believe that the gun is there to protect us. They are only pointing the gun as us to make sure we aren’t harmed. It is not government that needs to be limited as the founders believed, but it is freedom that needs to be limited to make sure no irresponsible decisions are made. People don’t even questions who’s defining responsible.

We let the government, an immoral institution if you believe violence is immoral, define our morals. If government says milk is now illegal, we automatically would assume all milk farmers are criminals if they continue milking cows. Then when government decides that they can coerce more taxes by allowing some government controlled milking, they tell us they will allow some milking with strict regulation and licensing. If this sounds far fetched, how is this different than alcohol and gambling. You can’t play a card game in your basement, but you can go to a government sanctioned casino to feed your money to their rich friends.

All this craziness in our society and every societal ill we have comes from this gun being wielded about and forcing upon society decisions and values that would otherwise not be what people would choose for themselves if they were free to choose for themselves. To rephrase Reagan, “The gun isn’t the solution, it is the problem.” It’s time freedom makes a come back, and it’s time we start taking bullets out of the gun. No person or institution is moral if it uses violence to coerce you.  No one weilding a gun can make better decisions for you and your family than you could. It’s time for us get back to what our founders believed, which is people should be free to live out their lives in pursuit of happiness free from coercion.

This is a must read. Click the link at the end to read the entire article. It is definitely worth the time.

I’m finding it ever more difficult to describe to people the kind of world that the Mises Institute would like to see, with the type of political order that Mises and the entire classical-liberal tradition believed would be most beneficial for mankind.

It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It is a fascinating thing to behold.

* People can no longer imagine a world in which we could be secure without massive invasions of our privacy at every step, and even being strip-searched before boarding airplanes, even though private institutions manage much greater security without any invasions of human rights;

* People can no longer remember how a true free market in medical care would work, even though all the problems of the current system were created by government interventions in the first place;

* People imagine that we need 700 military bases around the world, and endless wars in the Middle East, for “security,” though safe Switzerland doesn’t;

* People think it is insane to think of life without central banks, even though they are modern inventions that have destroyed currency after currency;

* Even meddlesome agencies like the Consumer Products Safety Commission or the Federal Trade Commission strike most people as absolutely essential, even though it is not they who catch the thieves and frauds, but private institutions;

* The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sounds outlandish, even though we have a long history of both;

* People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didn’t create in America the world’s most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom – the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself – is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration.

This has profoundly affected the political culture. We’ve lived through regime after regime, since at least the 1930s, in which the word freedom has been a rhetorical principle only, even as each new regime has taken away ever more freedom.

Now we have a president who doesn’t even bother to pay lip service to the idea of freedom. In fact, I don’t think that the idea has occurred to Obama at all. If the idea of freedom has occurred to him, he must have rejected it as dangerous, or unfair, or unequal, or irresponsible, or something along those lines.

To him, and to many Americans, the goal of government is to be an extension of the personal values of those in charge. I saw a speech in which Obama was making a pitch for national service, the ghastly idea that government should steal 2 years of every young person's life for slave labor and to inculcate loyalty to leviathan, with no concerns about setting back a young person’s professional and personal life.

How did Obama justify his support of this idea? He said that when he was a young man, he learned important values from his period of community service. It helped form him and shape him. It helped him understand the troubles of others and think outside his own narrow experience.

Well, I’m happy for him. But he chose this path voluntarily. It is a gigantic leap to go from personal experience to forcing a vicious national plan on the entire country. His presumption here is really taken from the playbook of the totalitarian state: the father-leader will guide his children-citizens in the paths of righteousness, so that they all will become god like the leader himself.

To me, this comment illustrates one of two things. It could show that Obama is a potential dictator in the mold of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, for the presumptions he puts on exhibit here are just as frightening as any imagined by the worst tyrants in human history. Or, more plausibly, it may be an illustration of Hannah Arendt’s view that totalitarianism is merely an application of the principle of the “banality of evil.”

With this phrase, Arendt meant to draw attention to how people misunderstand the origin and nature of evil regimes. Evil regimes are not always the product of fanatics, paranoids, and sociopaths, though, of course, power breeds fanaticism, paranoia, and sociopathology. Instead, the total state can be built by ordinary people who accept a wrong premise concerning the role of the state in society.

If the role of the state is to ferret out evil thoughts and bad ideas, it must necessarily become totalitarian. If the goal of the state is that all citizens must come to hold the same values as the great leader, whether economic, moral, or cultural, the state must necessarily become totalitarian. If the people are led to believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning.

via The Misesian Vision by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr..

By way of The Business Insider, the New York Times has an article about how Tim Geithner’s Fed wanted to keep the details of the AIG bailout from the people.

The New York Times unearths more documents showing the lengths to which Tim Geithner’s New York Fed went to try to keep the AIG bailout and counterparty details secret.

The Treasury’s response will no doubt be that Tim Geithner had no knowledge of any of these discussions.

And he may not have have been involved in the discussions. But it’s ludicrous to think that his folks weren’t trying to do what he wanted done.

via Tim Geithner’s NY Fed Begged SEC To Keep AIG Bailout Details Secret.

It is amazing the amount of people that still look to government to take care of them and protect them. Our government is supposed to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Yeah right. The only thing our government is is “from the people”. They take from the people to protect their friends. They take from the people to empower themselves. They take from the people to buy votes. The take liberties from the people to prevent a challenge to their power.

If this was truly the people’s government, then the people would have a right to know what their representatives are saying on their behalves. There would be no closed door sessions of congress, back room dealings or secret bailouts.

This is just more proof that the elites of this country view the government not as the protector of the people, but as their personal tool to do as they wish. The government is the nations largest bank ready to write checks to the power brokers as they demand.

Don’t we wish? That’s not quite what he said. He wants to close them down and create a new housing system from scratch. Can you imagine if every time you completely screwed up at work, you just went to your boss and said “We should just abolish the disaster I created and start from scratch. I know exactly how to do it. Oh, don’t worry that I completely destroyed the company with my last attempt and kept telling you to pour more money into that disaster all the while telling you it was going great.” Here an article from the Wall Street Journal about Frank’s comments.

A top House Democrat on Friday said his committee was preparing to recommend “abolishing” mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and rebuilding the U.S. housing-finance system from scratch.

“The remedy here is…as I believe this committee will be recommending, abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

His comments initially rippled through bond markets on concerns that the government might pull away from the mortgage market. Many believe that’s unlikely and that any revamp would include continued government involvement. The government took over the companies in September 2008 as loan losses mounted.

Please. The government would never pull away from the mortgage market. It’s just another way for them to buy votes and redistribute wealth. There is only one reason that the government needs to be involved in the house financing system. That is to force the cost of buying homes for a select group of people onto the population as a whole. When I go to a local bank and get a mortgage, the bank will charge a high enough interest rate to make it worth it for them to lend me the money. If the rate is too high, I’ll pass. If I think it is just right, I’ll borrow and buy a home. We both win. No one else is forced to pay for my home.

Now, how does the government change this? Well, they artificially lower interest rates and standards to allow otherwise unqualified buyers to buy homes. The cost of money has not changed just because the government wants it to. Someone has to pay the difference between what it normally would cost to borrow at the buyers interest rate and the artificial rate the government sets. That someone is the tax payer. As with all government handouts, they spread the cost of a select few over the entire populace.

Some Republicans have argued that the companies should ultimately be reduced in size and privatized, while at other end of the spectrum, some analysts have recommended turning the companies into government agencies. But several industry groups and academics have suggested that the government is likely to continue playing at least some role in the future of the companies.

One such report came from analysts at Standard & Poor’s this past week. “It’s hard for us to imagine” how enough capital could be attracted to replace Fannie and Freddie with stand-alone private companies that would be able to offer low-cost funding for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, the analysts wrote.

Thanks Standard & Poor’s! It’s hard to imagine because you are trapped in our currently reality. Capital will be attracted if it is rewarded properly by the market. If interest rates are allowed to be set by the market instead of being set by our economic emperors, capital will come. Of course they stipulate “low-cost funding”, which goes right back to forcing the cost on all tax payers.

Some analysts have argued that starting from scratch could create more problems than they would solve, in part because Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee around half of the nation’s $11 trillion in home mortgages. “Blue sky ideas are great, but they take a long time to happen,” said Mahesh Swaminathan, senior mortgage strategist at Credit Suisse, at a conference last month. “When you have $5 trillion of agency mortgages, you can't really orphan them.”

Here’s an idea. Don’t start from scratch. We are in a hole, so stop digging. Discontinue all future operations, and either let the current mortgages pan out (foreclose, payoff, etc) or sell off the mortgages to the highest bidder. We’ve already been screwed by the government here, so get it over with and quit dragging it out. At least then we’d be on a path to the free market. By the way, did anyone find the clause in the Constitution that says the Federal government can even be involved in housing finance. Yes Mrs. Pelosi, I’m serious.

Mr. Frank, who didn’t elaborate on forthcoming recommendations, said last month that one possible revamp could merge some functions of Fannie and Freddie that overlap with the Federal Housing Administration into the government mortgage-insurance agency.

The Obama administration said it will weigh in on how to revamp the companies—and the entire housing-finance system—when it releases its budget next month. Republicans have increasingly criticized the administration for moving to overhaul the financial sector without spelling out plans for Fannie and Freddie.

In a PBS interview on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the legislative process to overhaul Fannie, Freddie and the housing-finance system was unlikely to begin this year. “It’s just a complicated thing to get right,” he said. “But we are completely supportive and agree completely with the need to make sure that we take a cold, hard look at what the future of those institutions should be in our country.”

via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Should Be Eliminated, Barney Frank Says – WSJ.com.

Thank God Geithner and Obama will weigh in on this soon. They have just been so great up to this point on economic matters.  I am sure our socialist President will come up with a great market based system, right? Be ready for a new welfare program, created from scratch by the most socialist government we’ve had in my life time.

Everytime Democrats lose elections, they default to the same line. “We didn’t get our message out.” Lanny Davis didn’t take long at all. He had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning, just hours after the loss in Massachusetts. (bold letters for emphasis)

Liberal Democrats might attempt to spin the shocking victory of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts by claiming that the loss was a result of a poor campaign by Martha Coakley. Would that it were so. This was a defeat not of the messenger, but of the message—and the sooner progressive Democrats face up to that fact, the better.

It’s the substance, stupid!

According to polls, fears about the Democrats’ health-care proposal played a prominent role in Mr. Brown’s victory yesterday. In the last several months, the minority congressional Republicans have dominated the message on health care—and stamped on the Democratic Party the perception that we stand for big government, higher taxes, and health insecurity when it comes to Medicare.

How is that possible? The Democrats have a simple message on health care that has still not really gotten through: If our bill passes, you never have to worry about getting, or losing, health insurance for the rest of your life. How is it that so few people have heard that message?

Then there were the two “deals” that put congressional Democrats in a worse light than the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”—as impossible as that might have seemed—as an emblem of the special interest politics Barack Obama ran against. We Democrats had to explain to Massachusetts voters and other Americans why non-Nebraskans and nonunion members have to pay more taxes, while Nebraskans and union members get to pay less. Those two deals seem to have alienated most people across the political spectrum. That’s not easy.

via Lanny J. Davis: Blame the Left for Massachusetts – WSJ.com.

There you have it. The Democrats have a simple message, but Americans are just too stupid to get it. NO LANNY! They did hear it. People are finally waking up to realize there is no free lunch from either party. They get that in order to get your health care handouts from your master, you must be subservient to your master. You must re-elect your master and continue to empower him. You must give him your liberty.  It is no different with the war on terror and the Republicans (Confession: I’m a registered Republican). They think they can keep the threat of terrorism over our heads, so that we have to keep empowering them.

WE GOT THE MESSAGE! DID YOU GET OUR MESSAGE BACK? Let’s hope Scott Brown got it too.

I know this is going to come as a complete shock, but a government panel said that the private companies cannot ferry astronauts into space as safely as government. Geewiz! I cannot believe a government panel would say that government is best.

A key federal aerospace panel warned that NASA could run into serious safety challenges if it relies on private companies to ferry astronauts into space in the near future.

The Obama administration has been devising a plan to outsource a chunk of its manned space program to private companies in order to speed up rocket development, save money and focus federal dollars on longer-term expeditions. But a report released last week by the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, an outside safety watchdog for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, cautioned that the private space companies rely on “unsubstantiated claims” and need to overcome major technical hurdles before they can safely carry astronauts into orbit. It urged NASA to stick with its current government-run manned space ventures, and said that switching to private alternatives now would be “unwise and probably not cost-effective.”

Did I just read that right? Obama, Mr. Socialism himself, planned on outsourcing a chunk of the space program to private companies? Surely, there has to be a payoff in here somewhere?

So the advisory panel said the private sector would rely on “unsubstantiated claims”. Are they telling me government doesn’t do this? You mean like the claim we are going to pay for health care reform by cutting waste out of medicare? How about health care reform will only cost $800 billion? Or maybe we have to bail out our friends on Wall Street to save Main Street?

You have to love the gull this panel has saying that private companies would be “unwise and probably not cost-effective”. Seriously? How many government programs come in under budget? The only thing I don’t like about this is it creates a partnership between government and the private sector. You know what that means. It will be used for political payoffs. No doubt, Jack Murtha already has some favors to return.

But the findings released last week are likely to provide a boost to NASA officials who support keeping nearly all manned space programs in house. In addition, NASA’s largest and longstanding contractors, such as Boeing Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp., are stepping up efforts to generate White House support against outsourcing more programs. As part of that campaign, they have challenged the safety of the start-up ventures, which are proposing to use rockets that haven’t been fully tested and in some cases, haven’t yet flown.

via NASA Urged Not To Outsource – WSJ.com.

Shocking that NASA officials would want to keep it all in house, and then the real culprits come out. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are pushing to keep it in house. Go figure. Who wants to have to compete? It’s so much easier to rip off the government. It’s definitely easier to grease the palms of a slimeball politician than it is to grease an executive’s palms who’s accountable to the bottom line. Behind almost every government regulation, you find some big business trying to stifle competition.

Did you read that last sentence? It’s a bad thing to propose rockets that haven’t been fully tested and in some cases, haven’t yet flown? Isn’t this how innovation is done? If you only propose things that already exist, you would never move forward. Can you image this panel talking about phone service? Apple is proposing this so-called iPhone that hasn’t been fully tested and hasn’t even made phone calls yet! What a waste. Let me stick with my rotary phone. It’s made tons of phone calls. This is exactly why private businesses should be involved in space. They will innovate!

One of my favorite quotes from Ben Franklin is, paraphrasing, “People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both”. Not only does it apply to us giving up our liberties for security from terrorism, foreign nations, or even the local drug dealer. It can also apply to economics. It could easily be…

“People willing to trade their economic freedom for temporary economic stability deserve neither and will have neither.”

Think about it. We have handed over our economic liberty to the Federal Reserve, who is supposed to prevent the business cycle and inflation. How’s that working out? We’ve lost 30% of our spending power just this past decade and had the biggest economic crisis since the great depression. Since the inception of the Fed, the dollar has lost 98.3% versus gold.

We’ve handed over 12.4% our income to the government for social “security” in hopes that we’ll have a decent retirement. As everyone knows, it is bankrupt, already been spent, and for those already on it, it sure does not provide any quality retirement.

Now the government is going to force us to buy health insurance and steal money from some of us to pay for health insurance for others, so that we don’t go bankrupt when we are sick. To provide the economic stability of knowing you have health insurance coverage, we’re giving up the economic freedom to make the best financial decision for ourselves. While it is not enacted yet, I’m sure the same principle will apply. If it works like the UK’s health system, everyone will still have to buy private insurance if they want to see a doctor in this life time. Doctors will be restricted in what they can offer, leading some to travel over seas for restricted procedures. We’ll still be locked into the closed drug market that prevents us from buying drugs outside our borders. All of this will lead to an economic disaster down the road and a massive economic collapse.

In the end, we never get what is promised in exchange for our freedom. We’ve given up our liberty, and as Ben Franklin said, we’ve got neither security nor economic stability.