THE THIRD CHOICE
October 23, 2010. I guess we have to jump right into this question—are there ANY politicians in Washington who are honest, honorable, balls-to-the-wall Constitutionalists?
Are there two? Three? Twelve? Fifty? A Hundred?
And don’t bother to get back to me with the name of Ron Paul, because that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the question of whether there are ENOUGH Constitutionalists in the Congress after the election to turn things around. You know, turn the big oil tanker around. Turn Washington around. Because the label “Republican” certainly doesn’t do the job.
Individual freedom from government is the keystone of the Constitution. That means, among other things, the government has no right to tax citizens to an excessive degree. It also means government cannot continue to draft enormous budgets just because it decides “lots of people need government help.”
It means government cannot force citizens to buy a product—such as health insurance.
Government cannot rubber stamp a brand of fallacious science called “manmade global warming” and then impose cap and trade and massive lowering of industrial output.
Government cannot demand that companies that manufacture and sell harmless health remedies stop selling them because, in its estimation, such products might sway people away from “real medicines.” Every person can decide how to take care of his/her own health and body—with absolutely no government interference.
Governments cannot permit corporations that do, in fact, produce and sell demonstrably injurious products to avoid severe punishment.
This is just an introductory short list that revolves around the principle of individual freedom—and so I ask you, how many members of Congress, after the election, will do their best to assure these freedoms are protected?
Because this is what we are dealing with: the freedom of the individual from government authority, the sufficient freedom to make a very wide range of choices in life.
In this regard, both major political parties are deficient and corrupt. Any attempt to exonerate one party at the expense of the other, is undertaken blindly, or with the intent to deceive.
Politically and economically, we live in a very complex jungle of corruption, and the North Star to find out way back to sanity is the rediscovered principle of individual liberty.
Under the cynical cover of “an evolving Constitution,” the government of the United States has become an elitist, crony-packed, giveaway machine that takes wealth from citizens and delivers it to other citizens (and non-citizens). In the process, a favored few make titanic profit.
Whether you are talking about the bosses of the Republican or Democratic parties, you are looking at people who have no intention of giving up their inside positions as “benefactors of the people.”
The current sporadic debate about whether the US government has become a socialist entity is a joke. A combination of socialism and state corporatism has been operating for a very long time, and although the current Washington administration has upped the ante, we have been un-Constitutional for decades and decades.
Part of this criminal political program has depended on searching out, inventing, finding group after group that deserves special treatment by the government—sometimes on the basis that the group has been ill-treated in the past. This operation features a principle that was never delivered in the Constitution: the enforced gift of “equality” substituted for “equal protection under the law.” Apparently, most people are too ignorant to make the distinction between the uses of “equal” in those two very different scenarios.
In the former case, the word, when it is unburdened, means wealth redistribution. Some presidents have followed this path with passive acceptance; others have tried to position themselves as prophets of a new Age.
The essence of “share and care” injected into official policy has had, all along, an ulterior motive: the creation of larger and larger groups that depend on government for their survival, in order to exert top-down control over populations. In other words, the notion of altruism, a potent idea, has been co-opted to permit elites to run the people of nations. It worked with organized religions. It would work with governments—and so it has.
As a result, we have seen such a twisting of human psychology that the day is approaching when, armed to the teeth, an invading force at our shores—if they whined and complained enough about discrimination and prejudice and disrespect—would be welcomed in with open arms and given the largest free lunch possible by the federal government.
When George Washington departed the scene at the end of his presidency, his warning about entangling foreign alliances was more than a casual criticism. It was a prediction, and it has been borne out. Through military-industrial-corporate-government-missionary allegiances, America was recreated as an empire. It defaulted on its premise as a republic. Rather than sticking close to the principle of individual freedom, individual power, and self-sufficiency, rather than becoming a shining example to the whole world in that regard, an example that could be emulated, it entered into the meddling game that has derailed every nation in the history of the planet.
And now we have internationalism and the global village and inter-dependency, concepts that are hawked and sold in every boardroom from Tierra Del Fuego to the North Pole. It’s worth noting that this “new paradigm” is boosted to replace the principle of individual freedom and self-sufficiency.
Money itself, through powerful banks and their partner governments, has gone global. Among other features of this designed corruption, American money can no longer operate independently of other currencies. We all sink or swim in the same stench-ridden pool.
From the dawn of time on this planet, the LEADER has been faced with the same basic choices. He can take his people into what amounts to a criminal existence, he can descend to the level of the mob, or he can stand clear of all this as a free man. Rarely has the third choice been made. It was made, to an extraordinary degree, with the founding of the American Republic. That republic was never perfect. The men who wrote and drafted its documents were no angels. But they showed a path to something great.
That something has been pilloried, whenever possible, as isolationism, a term so heinous that no politician wants to be painted with it. But, beneath the Constitution, what is now called isolationism was SELF-SUFFICIENCY. There were enough human and material resources here to allow us to live out individual freedom and, in the process, build a nation that did not need foreign partners—and the full range of machinations and insidious activities that went with such alliances.
Who knows what innovations would have been made in order to bring that dream of national self-sufficency to fruition? It’s a path that history didn’t take.
If it had, the people and government of the United States could have said to every people and government on Earth: “Here we are. This is what we have done. We owe you nothing. We are free. If you want to try the experiment for yourselves, we will offer you the necessary record of what we did. The rest is up to you.”
Instead, our leaders and elites opted for internartional entanglements and the gradual surrender of our own liberty. Of what use is that? What kindness does that represent?
Do you stand above the crowd and offer them the lessons of your hard-won freedom and liberty, or do you sink down into the morass in order to be “more human?”
Do you wrap their chains around your own neck, as a sacrifice to their primacy, or do you shrug off every tainted attempt to drag you down?
Do you act out a life in which the dead-end dreams of the mob become your ticket to power over them, or you find a lucid place that is your own?
This is the story and fable of our time. If we pretend that the mere exchange of the name of one political party for another is the grand solution, we are fools of the highest order.
But we are capable of discovering those who truly want freedom, who know what it means.
There is no telling what we can still do, even at this late date. The middle ground of relative comfort and the vague misery of unfulfilled promise don’t have to be our fate.
JON RAPPOPORT