INQUISITION NEWS: Replace Austerity With Freedom, Independence, and Prosperity

Replace
Austerity With Freedom, Independence, and Prosperity

by
Scott
Lazarowitz

The Economic
Collapse Blog has this list
of examples of how European-style "austerity" is already
hitting the U.S., including cities closing schools and fire stations,
and states eliminating whole state agencies and raising taxes. That
includes the state of Illinois whose legislature has passed a "temporary"
66% personal income tax hike that the Democrat governor will
sign. Rest assured, this income tax hike will be as "temporary"
as the one in
Massachusetts, still in place since 1989.¹
Such austerity measures may lead to the same kind of social unrest
Europeans have been experiencing.

The Economic
Collapse Blog concludes,

We are entering
a time of extreme financial stress in America. The federal
government is broke. Most of our state and local governments
are broke. Record numbers of Americans are going bankrupt.
Record numbers of Americans are being kicked out of their homes.
Record numbers of Americans are now living in poverty.

The debt-fueled
prosperity of the last several decades came at a cost. We
literally mortgaged the future. Now nothing will ever be
the same again.

To say that
"nothing will ever be the same again" is just pessimistic
and unnecessary. We actually can return to the prosperity of the
past, by replacing debt and austerity with freedom and independence.

There is no
need for Americans to suffer through what European countries are
suffering, because nearly all the problems we face are caused by
governmental intrusions into many aspects of our personal and economic
lives – intrusions by federal, state and local governments. Regardless
of the good intentions that the welfare and military socialism statists
have in justifying their use of compulsory government powers, what
America needs is to cut the shackles of State-imposed dependence,
restrictions, regulations, taxation, all those policies of moral
relativism that involve violations of the Rule of Law: theft, trespass,
denial of Due Process, and other acts of State-initiated
criminal aggression.

Freeing Americans
includes repealing all forms of intrusive presumption-of-guilt regulations
and restrictions that are in place having nothing to do with whether
any individual is suspected of any crimes against others. Regulations
are before-the-fact demands by the government that presume the individual
and one’s business guilty, in which one must submit one’s private
personal or financial information to the government to prove one’s
innocence. Government regulations and arbitrary restrictions are
literally searches and seizures by the government of information
that is none of anyone else’s business, and effect in the stifling
of everyday citizens’ growth and prosperity.

Ending all
personal income taxes, corporate taxes, estate taxes, and capital
gains taxes frees people who own or share in the ownership of businesses
– i.e. employers and prospective employers – to invest in their
own research and development and in the expansion of their businesses,
which is the genuine force behind jobs creation, in both blue collar
and white collar sectors. Ending all personal income
taxes frees people to explore their own ideas and inventions,
and to start their own businesses that will employ more people and
advance society further. Also, ending all personal and corporate
income taxes allows individuals and businesses to donate more of
their own money to worthy charitable organizations, like it used
to be before the intrusiveness of the government entered the scene
and discouraged such charity giving.

Some may respond
to such suggestions, "Well, if we do all that, then how will
government functions be funded?" My response is: do you mean,
how do we fund public employees’ 6-figure
pensions, how do we fund all the extravagant public employee
salaries that are now on average higher
than private sector salaries? Or, for example, do you mean to
ask how we fund the federal Department of Education that has done
nothing but create bureaucracies and turn American education into
a Soviet-style indoctrination
camp for State-worship?
As far as the federal government is concerned, just about every
agency and department in Washington can be eliminated, because they
are unnecessary and have been nothing but parasitic and slowing
America’s growth and progress almost to a halt.

We also need
to be honest about the "War on Terror" and the War on
Drugs, which are not wars on terror or drugs, but wars
on freedom. The war on drugs has been extremely hypocritical,
by going after only "street drugs," but not alcohol and
not prescription drugs, all of which have been just as dangerous
and lethal. The war
on drugs criminalizes victimless behavior, discourages personal
responsibility, and has been a boondoggle for law enforcement agencies
through confiscation
of private
property and through bribery, and has caused a black market
in drugs which incentivizes the formation of drug gangs and cartels
that leads to increased violence, as well as the corruption of otherwise
"good" cops and other government officials. What would
happen if we immediately ended the War on Drugs and required individuals
to be responsible for their actions and decisions? Do we really
need to have costly government "anti-drug" enforcement
agencies?

And regarding
this "War
on Terror," many of the terrorists themselves have expressed
explicitly that their primary motivations for their terrorist acts
have been political, and not religious, responding to the U.S. government’s
many decades of intrusions on those foreign lands as well as the
U.S. government’s intrusive interventionist foreign
policy. Even a top U.S. general has recently stated that for
every one innocent civilian the U.S. military and CIA murders, ten
new terrorists are created.

So, what would
happen if we simply just closed all the U.S. military bases on foreign
lands and brought all U.S. troops, contractors, and bureaucrats
back to the U.S.? Does anyone in his right mind actually believe
that there would be more terrorism against the U.S.?

If we closed
all those foreign bases and brought everyone home and ended the
violence that the U.S. military has been committing against foreigners,
why, that would mean that the military
socialism and welfare redistribution of wealth from middle-class
workers over to defense
contractors would have to stop. And, I’d like to ask, just how
selfish are those defense contractors, knowing how counter-productive
U.S. government aggression in the Middle East has been, knowing
that they are playing a major role in making America less safe and
much less productive, less prosperous and less
free?

And how selfish
are these big corporate-statist
financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs, JP
Morgan, Bank of America, etc., in insisting that their billions
of dollars in bonuses that result from bailouts and quantitative
easing continue, at the expense of poor, middle-class workers
and producers? How selfish will the parasites continue to be, as
America continues to decline economically and morally? How much
longer do we need to suffer at the hands of the most destructive
of political institutions, that Federal Reserve? Because Americans’
inherent, inalienable rights to trade, commerce and contracts with
free, competing
currencies have been unconstitutionally squashed by this voracious
federal Leviathan, we are all becoming poorer, and America is literally
turning into a Third World economy. Which isn’t even an "economy"
anymore because of the intrusive crimes
of the State – America is a State-owned political prison.

In other words,
just how helpful has the federal government been to America’s progress?
What would happen if we just eliminated the federal government,
and restored to the states their constitutionally-recognized inalienable
rights to independence and sovereignty that political
criminals have stolen from them in these 235 years of America?
Is it possible to have an organized country consisting of independent
states, but without a central-planning
compulsory federal government? Of course it’s possible –
and, for us to survive, it is necessary to make such a change,
in addition to the elimination of the theft of taxation, the search
and seizure of regulations, and the counter-productive wars on drugs
and terrorism, and the sooner the better.

In honestly
considering such solutions, one would have to conclude that, without
a central federal government and all of government’s intrusions,
no one would be able to monopolize territorial jurisdictions, monetary
functions or the defense
of others. There would be freedom, prosperity, and yes, much more
security, and with a further assurance of stability for future generations.