You can’t be a free country unless the great majority of the people WANT to be free.

If the majority of people want to take other people’s money — or to accept money from the government based on fiat currency debt, which was never earned by anyone — then the majority of people will become dependent on that government. The government becomes its “sugar daddy”. The relationship between the government and the people will be no different than the relationship between a “kept” wife and her husband. It will be cynical, lacking in respect, lacking in authentic loyalty. Each side will know the other has compromised his or her basic character, and each side knows the other is living a sham — and knows that he or she knows it.

That’s the state we’re in today. If it wasn’t true before 2020, that year surely marked the tipping point. The government now pays members of the job market to stay home. The government matches and slightly surpasses the “market” rate, giving people who stay home no economic reason to leave. Their character rots, their sense of independence and motivation decay, and the government exploits these weaknesses more and more, for as long as it can. Thousands of businesses struggle to survive without employees, and as those businesses falter and collapse, their former owners become dependent on the government too. It’s a brilliant racket.

Because the government is based upon fraud, deceit and the moral/psychological decay of its victims, it cannot carry itself on with even the minimal strength of a sugar daddy relationship. Eventually it will resort to raw fear, intimidation and brute force. While in its weakened position that government and former sugar daddy will be in a better position to be challenged, the people it has undermined will be in less of a position to challenge it than ever before. This explains the hold of Soviet Russia on its Communist victims for generations, and the continued hold that North Korea, China, Cuba and Venezuela have over their people today: They have been conditioned into subservience.

The tragic error made by Americans of both parties was the assumption that “it can’t happen here.” Whenever you see people interviewed after a natural disaster or medical crisis, they’ll always say something like, “You think it can’t happen to you. But it can, and it does.” America was a special and unprecedented place. But it was never an impossible place. The only thing that makes it impossible now is the increasing unwillingness of a growing number of people to separate themselves from their sugar daddy. On both sides, I see and sense a resignation to the inevitability of government control over every aspect of our lives. People who oppose the lockdowns created by government panic resign themselves to the payments offered in compensation for those lockdowns. They see themselves as having little choice other than complying with “vaccinations”, allegiance to woke ideas and the forthcoming mandatory green revolution which will destroy capitalism and industrial civilization as we have known it since the 1800s at least.

Nothing is inevitable. Human beings will always have free choice. As totalitarianism overtakes our society, people will remain free to fight it. The fight will be much, much harder than it would have been earlier. But it’s too late for that part. We’re all underground now, unless we choose to comply with not just lockdowns, but with everything from critical race theory and felony imprisonment for calling someone by the incorrect pronoun. Senator Rand Paul recently made the astute comment, in favor of resistance against the government, that they cannot jail ALL of us. That’s so true. But too many of us want the imprisonment, especially when under the delusion that it’s a sugar daddy who will take care of us in the manner to which we have become accustomed. Many will soon learn, the hard way, that the sugar daddy doesn’t come by his wealth honestly; and the manner to which you have become accustomed cannot go on forever.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The enabling tool of what we call “cancel culture” or “wokeness” is language.

People are put in categories to which names are assigned, and this supposedly captures who they are and what should be done with them politically.

Unfortunately, the whole business of racial identification and categorization is not about advancing the quality of the human condition and human dignity but about progressive politics.

The left puts people in racial categories as instruments toward their political agenda.

In 1977, the Federal Interagency Committee on Education produced a five-race classification for the American population: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, White and Hispanic.

These categories, over time, continued to undergo changes and refinements.

The Hispanic category emerged in the 1970s, and the legislation described this group as “Americans who identify themselves as being of Spanish-speaking background and trace their origin or descent from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and other Spanish-speaking countries.” So, an American with roots in Spain and an American with roots in Peru wind up in the same category because their country of origin was Spanish-speaking.

Hispanic is neither race nor ethnicity. It is a category of political design, including individuals from 20-plus countries, with no commonality other than the language their grandparents spoke.

In the 2020 census, there are 19 different possibilities for self-categorization.

In both the white and Black categories, filers are now asked to respond to additional questions regarding their country of origin.

The strangest part of the emergence of this movement as a political force is that it constitutes everything that supposedly is undesirable that we want to eliminate. Racism.

Is it any less racism if I conclude who a person is and what they are about based on whether they are white or Black?

Yet, here we are with a good part of our nation mobilized, adopting the disease that we all thought we were trying to eliminate as its cure.

Last weekend, I came across a beautiful short video of the great Nobel laureate in physics, Richard Feynman, talking about knowledge.

Feynman began his legendary career working on the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, and finished as a member of the commission that investigated the cause of the fatal explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

The video starts with the headline “Names Don’t Constitute Knowledge.”

Feynman recalls walking through a park with his father and his father telling him the names of different birds in different languages. In the end, notes Feynman, you know what different people around the world call the same bird, but you know absolutely nothing about the bird.

Consider what Feynman tells us in his observation that “names don’t constitute knowledge.”

If we look in the Bible in the Book of Genesis, it says, “God had formed out of the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call each one; and whatever the man called each living creature, that remained its name. And the man assigned names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky.”

Man does not create reality. He just names it.

Politics is the opposite. Rather than naming a reality that precedes him, of which he is a part, the progressive political man pretends to create reality with his language and names.

America was founded to be a free nation under God. Our government was not designed to replace God, but to be subservient to God.

The so-called enlightened theory of wokeness will reduce America to a weak, balkanized country where everyone is at his neighbor’s throat, rather than unique individuals cooperating in unity to produce greatness.

Speech must be free — not politically canceled — and used in the pursuit of truth.

Star Parker

The question that keeps occurring to a confirmed regime opponent like myself in this First Year of the Great Biden Era is this: What is really going on? Is the ruling class executing a brilliant strategy to transform the political landscape for the next generation? Are they just fumbling along, trying to keep ahead of their wokist crazies? Or are they executing another of Baldrick’s Cunning Plans that will inevitably blow up in their faces?

Let’s look at Option One. The closest thing I have ever seen to a brilliant strategy is Bill Clinton’s 1992 “New Democrat” campaign: nobody here but us moderates. But HillaryCare proved that a lie, and so the voters gave us the first Republican Congress in 50 years. So “New Democrat” was just a tactic to win an election. Then there was the Emerging Democratic Majority from Judis and Teixeira in the early 2000s about the inevitable Democratic majority of the educated, the young, the women, and the minorities. How’s that coming along, dear Democrats, down on the border?

Of course, then there is Sundance’s Fourth Branch of Government theory, that ever since Obama, the U.S. has been ruled by the intelligence community that knows everything about us, and can send a Donald Trump to hell any time it wants. Maybe the lefties and the gumshoes think this is brilliant. I don’t. The whole point of politics is to have a safety valve to avoid civil war. So the whole place doesn’t blow up.

The Biden U-Turn on the COVID rent moratorium and the student loan relief extension and the continued unemployment bonuses suggest Option Two: trying to keep ahead of the peaceful protesters. If I were Mr. Big I would be saying to my aides that the longer these handouts continue the harder it will be to eliminate them. This is because the longer the checks go out the more people will adjust their lives around the monthly check and be really angry if it ever goes away.

See, if I were president I would be trying to get the economy back to normal as soon as possible because I would be worried that all the handouts would distort the economy, and unleash inflation, asset bubbles, and recessions that would wreck my presidency. I would bark at my aides that despite the narrative, FDR really screwed the economy in the 1930s, and the Great Society programs set up the inflation of the 1970s, and the slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 was a prime reason why the voters have been turning to Republicans in recent years, and that the massive spending proposals of my administration were bound to cause economic and political trouble in the near future, certainly before 2024. That’s what I’d be thinking, for all that I’m no genius.

The question that keeps occurring to a confirmed regime opponent like myself in this First Year of the Great Biden Era is this: What is really going on? Is the ruling class executing a brilliant strategy to transform the political landscape for the next generation? Are they just fumbling along, trying to keep ahead of their wokist crazies? Or are they executing another of Baldrick’s Cunning Plans that will inevitably blow up in their faces?

Let’s look at Option One. The closest thing I have ever seen to a brilliant strategy is Bill Clinton’s 1992 “New Democrat” campaign: nobody here but us moderates. But HillaryCare proved that a lie, and so the voters gave us the first Republican Congress in 50 years. So “New Democrat” was just a tactic to win an election. Then there was the Emerging Democratic Majority from Judis and Teixeira in the early 2000s about the inevitable Democratic majority of the educated, the young, the women, and the minorities. How’s that coming along, dear Democrats, down on the border?

Of course, then there is Sundance’s Fourth Branch of Government theory, that ever since Obama, the U.S. has been ruled by the intelligence community that knows everything about us, and can send a Donald Trump to hell any time it wants. Maybe the lefties and the gumshoes think this is brilliant. I don’t. The whole point of politics is to have a safety valve to avoid civil war. So the whole place doesn’t blow up.

The Biden U-Turn on the COVID rent moratorium and the student loan relief extension and the continued unemployment bonuses suggest Option Two: trying to keep ahead of the peaceful protesters. If I were Mr. Big I would be saying to my aides that the longer these handouts continue the harder it will be to eliminate them. This is because the longer the checks go out the more people will adjust their lives around the monthly check and be really angry if it ever goes away.

See, if I were president I would be trying to get the economy back to normal as soon as possible because I would be worried that all the handouts would distort the economy, and unleash inflation, asset bubbles, and recessions that would wreck my presidency. I would bark at my aides that despite the narrative, FDR really screwed the economy in the 1930s, and the Great Society programs set up the inflation of the 1970s, and the slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 was a prime reason why the voters have been turning to Republicans in recent years, and that the massive spending proposals of my administration were bound to cause economic and political trouble in the near future, certainly before 2024. That’s what I’d be thinking, for all that I’m no genius.

Then there is Option Three: Baldrick’s Cunning Plan that turns out to be not so cunning after all. How about this:

Colorado federal magistrate judge, N. Reid Neureiter, “sanctioned lawyers who challenged the 2020 presidential election results, calling their election claims ‘fantastical.’”

Because if a lowly “magistrate” is doing this, then he is getting the word from on high. Imagine the outrage from high and low in our beloved ruling class if, back in the day, federal magistrate judges started sanctioning Democratic lawyers for pushing Hillary Clinton’s Russian Collusion fantasies. I mean, really! You guys want to go down that road, denying the courts to crazy Republicans? Surely, it would be much better to give them full rein to rummage around and come up with nothing and prove the regime narrative that there is nothing to see here.

And that is to say nothing of the Five Year Plan to get rid of Donald Trump. Earth to Ruling Class: Donald Trump was not an insult to the noblest ruling class that ever bent the arc of history towards justice. It was a message that you guys got trouble, right here in River City, if you keep trashing and humiliating and utterly ignoring the religious and cultural and political and economic needs of the ordinary middle class.

You guys would get the picture if you just thought for a moment about your sacred Ally narrative: that you are Allies of the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors. If you were real Critical Theorists you would at least try out a Critical Ally Theory: what if the Allies are really the most conceited and dumb-as-a-post ruling class in history; what if the Oppressed Peoples are just recent migrants to the city that haven’t yet built the skills to master life in the city, no thanks to the Allies; what if the White Oppressors are just the ordinary middle class that wants to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law? And how would you brilliant educated critical theorists know which witch is which?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

In The Great Fiction, author Hans-Hermann Hoppe starts where any discussion of government should begin, with the defining attributes of a state.

Why this approach?  Governments that populate the earth are all states, though there is no good reason they should be.

What are these attributes, exactly? The most salient feature of a state is its self-appointed monopoly powers.  If it declares it can’t be sued, it can’t be sued.  If it or its agents decide to tax its subjects, it will fleece them.  If it decides to go to war, it will unleash its war machine. If it decides to outlaw market-derived money, which has been gold and silver, and replace it with easily-inflatable fiat currency, everyone must begin accepting the state’s money in trade.  Any violation of these laws is subject to punishment, enforced by the state’s badge-carrying thugs.

Those who constitute the state apparatus are a minority in any society, and thus need to convince the rest of the population that their rule is necessary, just, and inevitable.  For this they engage intellectuals, who otherwise would be at the mercy of the market and would largely remain unemployed.  As Hoppe points out, not just some intellectuals but all of them.

Even intellectuals working in mathematics or the natural sciences, for instance, can obviously think for themselves and so become potentially dangerous. It is thus important that [the state secures] their loyalty.

Thus, during the 2020 presidential campaign we witnessed a major American popular science magazine, among others, endorsing the candidate for whom the state is foundational to his programs. 

In education as elsewhere, the state becomes a monopolist.  Importantly, education up to a certain level must be compulsory, to teach people to think as subjects of the state.

Have the intellectuals done their job?  Ask people if they think the institution of the state is necessary, and Hoppe believes 99% of them will say it is.  States have been around so long they seem part of nature, like trees and bees, or floods and earthquakes.  One of the great achievements of the statist intellectuals is never allowing the question of the necessity of the state “to come up for serious discussion.  The state is considered as an unquestionable part of the social fabric.”

But if it is questioned, Hobbes and his “state of nature” argument apparently wins the day.  According to Thomas Hobbes, without a state life is permanent conflict.  As Hoppe writes,

Everyone claims a right to everything, and this will result in interminable war. There is no way out of this predicament by means of agreements; for who would enforce these agreements?

The only solution is the establishment of a third independent party, by agreement, to serve as “ultimate judge and enforcer,” what has been called a state.  But as Hoppe argues, there’s no way this arrangement can come about peacefully, because a prior state must exist to enforce it.

States are conquering parties that have imposed their will on its subjects.

If A and B now agree on something, their agreements are made binding by an external party [the state]. However, the state itself is not so bound by any outside enforcer. . .  The state is bound by nothing except its own self-accepted and enforced rules, i.e., the constraints that it imposes on itself. Vis-à-vis itself, so to speak, the state is still in a natural state of anarchy characterized by self-rule and enforcement, because there is no higher state, which could bind it.

State has the guns, market has the goods

As states grow their agents make deals with major market entities.  In today’s world it is quite easy for a state to purchase anything it wants.  With a monopoly money producer in its ranks, it can always borrow what it needs if there is insufficient tax loot available.  And as its debt grows no one cares, except a few Austrian economists.

Why would a nominally private firm deal with the state?  For legislative or other privileges, in addition to the revenue.  A firm that refuses to deal with the state runs the risk of penalties.  Under state rule, laws are made to be broken, and they’re broken every minute of the day.  As Jeff Thomas writes,

The level of governmental dominance now exists to such a degree that literally everyone is a criminal, whether they know it or not. It’s been estimated that the average American commits about three felonies per day, in addition to many lesser crimes. If, for any reason, the authorities wished to victimize you, they’d find their task quite simple.  (My emphasis)

A cozy and broadening relationship with formerly free-market entities develops, often under the heading of state capitalism.  The entrepreneurial spirit that created companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and others has been corrupted by state interference.

In our ongoing Covid environment, pharmaceutical firms, social platforms, and government agencies are working hand-in-hand.  How can a vaccine be granted an EUA if other safe and effective treatments are available?  If, for example, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are safe and effective, as well as cheap and plentiful, the vaccines get put on hold.  Therefore, not merely dis vaccine alternatives, but threaten and arrest those promoting their use.

Hoppe sums up his discussion of the state with a proposed riddle:

Assume a group of people, aware of the possibility of conflicts between them. Someone then proposes, as a solution to this human problem, that he (or someone) be made the ultimate arbiter in any such case of conflict, including those conflicts in which he is involved. Is this is a deal that you would accept? I am confident that he will be considered either a joker or mentally unstable. Yet this is precisely what all statists propose.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.