If you want to know what tyranny is like, look around.

The national government — specifically the executive branch — can do pretty much what it wants. It could bomb Iran tomorrow without a declaration of war from Congress. It can — and does — conduct secret wars and covert operations against countries that have done nothing to us. Of course, they are secret only to the ignorant taxpayers who must finance them and perhaps suffer when the provoked retaliation occurs. It can have men behind PlayStation consoles in Nevada fire Hellfire missiles from aerial drones on people in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

This tyrannical government can send any foreigner picked up anywhere in the world to third countries known for torturing prisoners. It can hold people accused of nothing indefinitely in prisons in Cuba and Afghanistan and torture them into making false confessions. It can conduct a war crimes trial in a military kangaroo court for a man, Omar Khadr, held captive for eight years after he was picked up at the age of 15 during a U.S. assault on villagers near Kabul. His torture-induced “confessions” will be admissible. All this is in violation of commitments under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict not to treat children in war as though they were adults.

It can assassinate even American citizens abroad without a scent of due process.

It is a government that can write its own warrants without judicial review — and call them national security letters — in order to conduct fishing expeditions in anyone’s electronic records. But that isn’t enough power for the present Progressive administration, which wants the freedom to examine our browser histories and email correspondents’ names. The Bill of Rights, like the Geneva Convention, has become “quaint” and obsolete.

Like any self-respecting tyranny, it tries to keep the truth from its subjects. Comforting words camouflage the 50,000 armed and combat-ready troops that will remain in Iraq after “withdrawal.” Their “primary” mission is to train an army whose own general says won’t be ready for years. This gross deception follows on the heralded “surge,” which supposedly turned things around in Iraq. What “worked,” however, was not U.S. military prowess or Gen. David Petraeus’s brilliance, but the spreading of American taxpayers’ cash to buy off Sunni insurgents and the denouement of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.

And, again, like any self-respecting tyranny, it bridles at leaks of classified documents that tell the people the truth. Solemn administration officials condemn Wikileaks and its sources for supposedly jeopardizing U.S. troops and Afghan collaborators, while adding that nothing new had been revealed. With no sense of irony, the same officials find blood on the hands of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, ignoring the rivers of blood their policies and weapons have produced in the Middle East and South Central Asia. Without those policies, there would be nothing to leak. Some call for the assassination of Assange, and for all we know he is on President Obama’s kill list. Meanwhile a courageous young soldier, Bradley Manning, who apparently leaked video of American troops committing cold-blooded murder in Baghdad, faces 52 years in prison.

Now we are being softened up for the next war, against Iran. As in 2002 with Iraq’s phantom WMDs, the empire advance men tell us Iran is building nuclear weapons, and Obama and Secretary of State Clinton say “all options are on the table,” which phrase includes hydrogen bombs. Once again a Big Lie is repeated without proof. The reason is simple: all evidence runs the other way. The government’s own intelligence agencies say Iran has no nuclear-weapons program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency is on the scene. But no matter. If it suits the tyrannical administration or its partner in empire, Israel, bombs of some kind will fall. The consequences all around will be horrible.

Can it really be tyranny if we get to vote? Yes. Thomas Jefferson warned of “elective despotism.” How valuable is your one vote when the government manipulates and distorts the flow of information, when Congress capitulates, and when the “adversarial” mainstream media act like government press agents, if not adoring lapdogs. The ugly truth is out there, but you have to want to know it.

As one who is opposed to centralization, I am wary of attempts to turn a grassroots movement against big government like the Tea Party into an adjunct of the Republican Party. I find it even more worrisome when I see those who willingly participated in the most egregious excesses of the most recent Republican Congress push their way into leadership roles of this movement without batting an eye — or changing their policies!

As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign countries. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for cutting a few thousand dollars from a nature preserve or an inner-city swimming pool at home while turning a blind eye to a Pentagon budget that nearly equals those of the rest of the world combined.

Our foreign policy is based on an illusion: that we are actually paying for it. What we are doing is borrowing and printing money to maintain our presence overseas. Americans are seeing the cost of this irresponsible approach as their own communities crumble and our economic decline continues.

I see tremendous opportunities for movements like the Tea Party to prosper by capitalizing on the Democrats’ broken promises to overturn the George W. Bush administration’s civil liberties abuses and end the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A return to the traditional U.S. foreign policy of active private engagement but government noninterventionism is the only alternative that can restore our moral and fiscal health. I am optimistic, and our numbers are increasing!

War Is the Health of the State – Randolph Bourne

‘To the Size of States There Is a Limit’: Measurements for the Success of Secession
by Kirkpatrick Sale

Yes, Aristotle declared there to be a limit to the size of states: “a limit, as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large…, but they either wholly lose their nature, or are spoiled,” so he said. But, really, what the hell did he know? He lived at a time when the entire population of the world was somewhere around 50 million people – about the size of England today – the population of the Greek-speaking city-states, which were not united in a nation, in all may have been 8 million, and Athens, where he lived, considered a large city, would have been under 100,000 people. Limits? He couldn’t even imagine a world (ours) of 6.8 billion, a nation (China) of 1.3 billion, or a city (Tokyo) of 36 million. How is he going to help us?

It is because, firstly, he did know that there are limits: “Experience shows that a very populous city can rarely, if ever, be well governed; since all cities which have a reputation for good government have a limit of population. We may argue on grounds of reason, and the same result will follow: for law is order, and good law is good order; but a very great multitude cannot be orderly.” And it doesn’t matter if that city is 1 million or 36 million – political entities at such sizes could certainly not be democratic in any sense, could not possibly function with anything approaching efficiency, and could exist only with great inequities of wealth and material comfort.

And because, secondly, he did know that human beings are of a certain limited size of brain and comprehension, and that putting them in the aggregate does not make them any smarter – or as another philosopher, Lemuel Gulliver, once said, “Reason does not extend itself with the bulk of the body.” There is a human scale to human politics, defined by human nature, that functions well only in such aggregations as do not overstress and overburden the… quite capable and ingenious but limited human brain and human capacity.

So political units, Aristotle said – he thought mostly in terms of cities, not knowing nations – but even if we may extend those units with the experience of 2000 more years to larger units such as nations, they have to be limited: limited by human nature and human experience. And it is with that maxim of Aristotle’s that we now may start contemplating what in today’s world would constitute the ideal, or let us say the optimum, size of a state, with these two overriding criteria: “sufficient,” in Aristotle’s words, ” for a good life in the political community” – that would be some form of democracy – and “the largest number which suffices for the purposes of a good life” – that would be efficiency. Democracy and efficiency.

And hark – this is not some sort of idle philosopher’s quest. It is, or could be, the foundation of a serious reordering of our political world, and a reordering such as the process of secession – indeed, only the process of secession, as I see it – could provide. We have abundant evidence that a state as large as 305 million people is ungovernable – some scholar said in the paper just this past Sunday that we are in the fourth decade of the inability of Congress to pass a single measure of social consequence. Bloated and corrupted beyond its ability to address, much less solve, any of the problems as an empire it has created, it is a blatant failure. So let us be bold to ask, what could replace it, and at what size? The answer, as will appear, is the independent states, that is to say nations, of America.

Let us start by looking first at real-world figures of modern-day nations to give us some clue as to population sizes that actually work.

Of all the world’s political entities – there are 223 of them, counting the smallest independent islands – 45 are below 250,000 people, 67 below 1 million, 108 below 5 million; in fact 50 per cent of nations are below 5.5 million, and a full 58 per cent are smaller than Switzerland’s population of 7.7 million (Wikipedia: World populations by rank). That says right there that it is obvious that most countries in the world function with quite relatively small populations. And looking at the nations that are recognized models of statecraft, there are eight of them even below 500,000 – Luxemburg, Malta, Iceland, Barbados, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and San Marino – and the example of Iceland, with the world’s oldest parliament and an unquestioned beacon of democracy (troubles of its banking aside), suggests that 319,000 people is all you would need. Going up a bit in size, there are another nine models of good governance below 5 million, including Singapore, Norway, Costa Rico, Ireland, New Zealand, Estonia, Luxembourg, and Malta.

Next, let’s look at the size of the most prosperous nations ranked by per capita Gross Domestic Product (Wikipedia: List of countries by GDP, CIA Factbook). (Parenthetically let me say that I realize GDP is a crude and entirely uncritical measure of economic worth, and reflects all kinds of growth, much undesirable, but until we have nations devoted to steady-state economies instead this is the best way to gauge economic performance.) Eighteen of the top 20 by GDP rank (a total of 27 countries because of ties) are small, under 5 million, and all but one of the top ten are under 5 million (that’s the U.S., at ten, the others being Liechtenstein, Qatar, Luxembourg, Bermuda, Norway, Kuwait, Jersey, Singapore, and Brunei in order); the average size of those nine is 1.9 million. The average size of all 27 of the top economic nations, excluding the U.S., is 5.1 million.

You are beginning to get the picture.

Let’s take another measure – freedom, as reckoned by three different rating sites, Freedom House, the Wall Street Journal, and The Economist, using measures of civil liberties, open elections, free media, and the like. Of the 14 states reckoned freest in the world, nine of them (64 per cent) have populations below Switzerland at 7.7 million, 11 below Sweden at 9.3 million, and the only sizeable states are Canada, United Kingdom, and Germany, the largest, at 81 million.

There’s one other measure of freedom that is put out by Freedom House, ranking all the nations of the world according to political rights and civil liberties, and there are only 46 nations with perfect scores. Of those 46, the majority of them are under 5 million in population, and indeed 17 of them are even under l million. That’s rather astonishing in itself. And only 14 of the 46 free nations are over 7.5 million. Excluding the United States, whose reputation for freedom is fully belied by its incarceration of 2.3 million people, 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners, and excluding the United Kingdom, Spain, and Poland, the average population of the free states of the world is approximately 5 million.

Let me finally take several other national rankings. Literacy: of the 44 countries that claim a literacy rate of 99 or better (I say claim, since it is hard to verify), only 15 are large, 29 (66 per cent) of the 44 below 7.5 million. Health: measured by the World Health Organization, 12 of the top 20 are under 7 million, none over 65 million. In a ranking of happiness and standard of living last year by sociologist Steven Hales, the top nations are Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Canada, Ireland, Denmark, Austria, and Finland, all but Canada and Australia small. And a “sustainable society index” created by two scholars earlier last year, adding in environmental and ecological factors, ranks only smaller countries in the top 10 – in order, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Austria, Iceland, Vietnam, Georgia, New Zealand, and Latvia.

Enough of that – the point I trust is well and simply made. A nation can be not only viable and sustainable at quite small population sizes, a model of more-or-less democratic and efficient government, but in fact can provide all the necessary qualities for superior living. Indeed, the figures seem to suggest that, though it is certainly possible to thrive at sizes under a million people, there is a more-or-less optimum size for a successful state, somewhere in the range of 3 to 5 million people.

Next, let us take a quick look at geographic sizes of successful nations. A great many nations are surprisingly small – underlining the point, often missed by critics of secession, that a nation does not have to be self-sufficient to operate well in the modern world. In fact there are 85 political entities out of the 223 counted by the U.N. that are under 10,000 square miles – that is to say, the size of Vermont or smaller – and they include Israel, El Salvador, Bahamas, Qatar, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Andorra.

And if we go back to that measure of economic strength, the Gross Domestic Product per capita, small nations prove to be decidedly advantageous: of the top 20 ranked nations (27 in all including ties), all but eight are small in area, under 35,000 square miles, the global median (the size of South Carolina), and two of those eight include Norway and Sweden, technically large but excluding their empty northern areas effectively small; in other words 77 per cent of the prosperous nations are small. And most of them are quite small indeed, under 10,000 square miles (Liechtenstein, Qatar, Luxembourg, Bermuda, Kuwait, Jersey, Singapore, Brunei, Guernsey, Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Andorra, San Marino, British Virgin Islands, and Gibraltar).

All this is proof positive that economically successful nations needn’t be large in geographic size, and to the contrary, this is the important point: it is strongly suggestive that large size may in fact be a hindrance. The reason for this is that administrative, distribution, transportation, and similar transaction costs obviously have to rise, perhaps exponentially, as geographic size increases. Control and communication also become more difficult to manage over long distances, often to the point where central authority and governance become nearly impossible, and as all the lines and signals become more complex the ability to manage efficiently is severely diminished.

Small, let’s face it, is not only beautiful but bountiful.

[Once that important idea is understood, a further logical argument can be derived from it: that in many cases a smallish nation might find it desirable to divide up even farther so as to take advantage of smaller areas for more efficient economic functions. This might be outright secession in some places, where it would simply be good economic sense – and more, places where it would make political and cultural good sense as well. But it might also take the form of economic and political devolution, giving smaller areas autonomy and power without outright secession, much as Switzerland is the model of.]

In fact, I wish to propose to you, out of these figures and even moreso out of the history of the world, that there is a Law of Government Size, and it goes like this: Economic and social misery increasers in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation.

In testing this law in history – Sale’s Law, as I like to think of it – let me begin with Arnold Toynbee’s great and justifiably classic study of human civilization, whose primary conclusion is that the next-to-last stage of any society, leading directly to its final stage of collapse, is “its forcible political unification in a centralized state,” and he gives as evidence the Roman Empire, and the Ottoman, Benghal, and Mongol empires, and the Tokugawa Shogunate, and ultimately the Spanish, British, French, and Portuguese empires. The consolidation of nations into powerful empires leads not to shining periods of peace and prosperity and the advance of human betterment, but to increasing restriction, warfare, autocracy, crowding, immiseration, inequality, poverty, and starvation.

The reason for all this is not mysterious. As a government grows, it expands both its bureaucratic might over domestic affairs and its military might over external ones. Money must be found for this expansion, and it comes either from taxation, which leads to higher prices and ultimately inflation – result, as Mr. Micawber might say, social misery – or from printing new money, which also leads to higher prices and inflation – result, again, social misery. Wealth is also thought to come from conquest and colonization, enlarging spoils through warfare, but it comes at the price of imposing increased government control and military conscription at home (“War is the health of states,” as Randolph Bourne put it) and increased violence, bloodshed, and misery for one’s own army and civilians and opposing forces abroad. Result, economic and social misery.

I have detailed much of this in my book Human Scale (available on request from New Catalyst Books), but let me just give a capsulated version here, concentrating on Europe. There have been four major periods of great state consolidation and enlargement in the last thousand years:

1.From 1150 to 1300 AD, with the establishment of royal dynasties replacing medieval baronies and city states in England, Aquitaine, Sicily, Aragon, and Castile, resulting in rampant inflation of nearly 400 percent and almost incessant wars, with increasing battle casualties from a few hundred to more than 1 million.

2. From 1525 to 1650, with the consolidation of national power through standing armies, royal taxation, central banks, civilian bureaucracies, and state religions, saw an inflation rate of more than 700 per cent in just 125 years and an unprecedented expansion of wars, a war intensity seven times greater than Europe had seen before, warfare casualties increasing to maybe 8 million, maybe 5 million in the Thirty Years War alone.

3. From 1775 to 1815, the period of modern state government over most of Europe, including national police forces, conscripted armies, centralized state power à la the Code Napoleon, there was an inflation rate of more than 250 per cent in just 40 years, in 1815 the highest at any time until 1920s, and war casualties up to 15 million (maybe 5 million in the Napoleonic Wars) in that short period.

Finally, in period 4, from 1910 to 1970, familiar to us, all European nations consolidated and expanded power, known in many places as totalitarianism (though known in the U.S., though we had all the components of totalitarianism – consolidated central power, national bank, income tax, national police, conscription, imperial presidency – known as freedom and democracy), resulting in the worst depression in history and inflation of 1400 per cent, and of course the two most ruinous wars in all human history contributing to casualties, mostly deaths, of 100 million or more.

Conclusion inevitable: the larger the state, the more economic disaster and military casualties. The Law of Government Size.

Now that we have established the virtue of smallness worldwide, let’s apply these figures to the United States and see what it tells us.

Of the 50 states, just over half (29) are below 5 million people. Half the population lives in 40 states that average out to 3.7 million people; the other half is in the 10 largest states. There are 10 states and one colony in the 3-to-5 million population class that I’m suggesting would be ideal secession candidates – Iowa, Connecticut, Oklahoma, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Colorado, and Mississippi – another 13 between 1 to 3 million – Montana, Rhode Island, Hawai’i, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Kansas, and Arkansas – and another eight below a million but larger than Iceland, and that includes beloved Vermont. In other words, 30 of the states (plus Puerto Rico) fall in a range where similar sizes in the rest of the world have produced successful independent nations. Those are the candidates for successful secession.

Add to that the lessons from geographic size. We’ve already seen that 84 political areas in the world are smaller than Vermont, the second smallest U.S. state. Now let’s see how the states measure up to the world figures. The median size of U.S. state area is roughly 58,000 square miles – 25 states are smaller than that, 25 bigger. If all of those under 58,000 were independent, they would match 79 other nations in the world, among them Greece, Nicaragua, Iceland, Hungary, Portugal, Austria, Czech Republic, Ireland, Sri Lanka, Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Taiwan. In other words, size is no hindrance whatsoever to successfully operating as a nation in the world – and, as I’ve suggested, small size seems indeed to be a virtue.

It needn’t be all about population or geographic sizes – one might factor in cultural cohesion, developed infrastructure, historical identity, and suchlike – but that certainly seems to me to be the sensible place to start when considering viable states. And since the experience of the world has shown – indeed, over and over again in the formation of nations since the 19th century – that entities in the 3 to 5 million range may be optimum for governance and efficiency, and some within a 1-to-7 million range, that is how to begin assessing bodies for their secessionist potential and their chances of national success.

I hope all this is Aristotelian examination is not regarded as a mere academic exercise, though a great deal of exercise, I assure you, has gone into it. I believe that it establishes something in the way of propellant impetus for Americans who understand that their national government (no oxymoron intended) is broke and can’t be fixed (there were 70 per cent of them in a national poll not long ago), and who realize that the only hope to re-energize American politics and recreate the vibrant collection of democracies that the founding generation of the 18th century envisioned, is to create truly sovereign states through peaceful, popular, powerful secession.

Let me underscore that conclusion: the only hope is secession.

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. – Plato, 347 B.C.

FDR and Crisis
by Karen De Coster

Robert Higgs, in his masterful 1987 book Crisis and Leviathan, asserts the facts so precisely: “the institutional revolution of the 1930′s depended crucially on the existence of national emergency, a condition that was partly real, partly contrived, enormously exploited for political purposes.”

The thesis of Crisis and Leviathan elucidates the explanations for the growth of government. That is, government creates crisis or exacerbates an already existing crisis that brings forth a shift in the ideology of the masses. The ideology of the masses, after all, tends to follow opinions conveyed by government leaders. This shift in ideology tends toward “Nannyism,” or the notion that extensions of government power are both necessary and legitimate to maintain order and economic stability. Hence, under the guise of crisis, the power grabs look less menacing to the masses. Therefore, big government has succeeded in getting bigger at the expense of individual liberties and in spite of Constitutional limitations.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt presided over two of the most austere crises in American history – the Great Depression and the Second World War. FDR, more than any other American president before him, unjustly exploited the country’s economic crisis to put his death-grip on the Constitution and those whom it was intended to serve.

Economy of Despair

An economic crisis loomed large just prior to FDR taking his oath of office in March of 1933. State governments – nationwide – were declaring bank holidays to prevent runs on the banks, and Roosevelt, just days after taking office, initiated a national banking holiday under the semblance of “national emergency”. This action suspended all banking transactions and created the opportunity for FDR to follow-up with the Gold Reserve Act, which meant the demise of the gold standard, and ultimately, a bonanza of runaway inflation for big government.

A result of this action was the prohibition of the private ownership of gold, except for jewelry and certain commercial/industrial uses. The government reneged on any and all promises to pay out gold, and also forbade private contractual commitments to pay in gold. It was thievery on a grand scale. Roosevelt’s first fireside chat resulted from this banking predicament, as he assured the public – in his charming aloofness – that he could lead a nation through this drama intact. Washington bureaucrats, with FDR in command, had successfully hoarded gold, devalued the dollar, and created a cry from the public for even more government intervention.

The Two “Deals”

Creating “emergency” became the stratagem for Roosevelt and his “Brain Trust” as he took the country from one zero hour to the next. The first New Deal addressed the crises blamed on the Hoover administration: economic isolation, monopolies run amok, unemployment, and problems regulating competition. Roosevelt urged that the federal government was the only solution to these crises, and only his New Deal legislation could save the country.

The labor crisis, assured FDR, could be solved if the government could put more people to work and raise the prices of products and services. After all, as Tom DiLorenzo points out in Reassessing the Presidency, the crisis presented by Roosevelt was “a Depression caused by low wages and prices”, requiring the “obvious solution of government-mandated price and wage increases”. How to do that? First, under the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the National Recovery Administration was set into motion to thwart the impending crisis. This managerial-state nightmare allowed every industry to be organized into a “Code Authority” or federally-managed type of cooperative. Under this, the business work week would be shortened and hours of labor would be reduced to better disperse employment and drive down production output. Then, a minimum wage was set, as well as minimum prices.

The National Recovery Administration, in effect, cartelized every American industry and regulated distribution, production, prices, wages, and hours worked. Effectively, Roosevelt’s power grabs had managed to socialize American business, for the market system was almost entirely under government authority. Higgs tells us:

The industrial recovery act emerged from a grand compromise. The most prominent parties included businessmen seeking higher prices and barriers to competition, labor unionists seeking government sponsorship and protection of their organizational activities and collective bargaining, do-gooders concerned about working conditions and child labor, and proponents of massive governmental spending for public works.

All of the above were accomplished by a president who alleged that his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had allowed government to grow to such absurd proportions, that it was he who would have to cut it down in size. Truth is, Hoover’s big government was dwarfed by Roosevelt’s bloated tyranny.

Then, government public works programs would invade the scene, supplying even more jobs in the name of forestry, flood control, soil protection, and general infrastructure. American workers welcomed these measures. After all, a fragile population craves the safety net of big government when they are convinced that their way of life is threatened, which was the implied effect of the Depression era. No jobs meant a poor standard of living. New jobs, even government jobs created at the expense of sound economics, were welcomed with open arms. The populace was timorous, and they believed their standard of living to be in jeopardy. The crisis mentality had successfully wormed its way into the American psyche.

Roosevelt went for the throat during his Second New Deal. Here, what may be considered to be one the most corrupt government programs ever, the Social Security Act, was forged. Essentially a fund to pay pensions, it doubled as a Treasury reserve fund for the purpose of lending for spending. Author John T. Flynn explains:

The plan was to make the payroll tax big enough to pay the benefits, plus enough more to create a so-called reserve of $47,000,000,000 in 40 years. It was given the fraudulent name of Old-Age Reserve Fund. The Security Board would collect the taxes each year, use a small part of it to pay the pensions and put the rest in the “Fund”. That is, it would lend it to the Treasury and the Treasury would then spend it for any purpose it had in mind. At the end of 40 years, Roosevelt was told, this money could be used to pay off the national debt.

Security was the crisis, and old-age was the hook. And what better way to ensure security than to guarantee monetary payment from an “insurance” fund beyond the age of 65? Roosevelt clearly had endeared himself to a generation that was being ravaged by Depression and unemployment. The freedom-for-security trade-off seemed a good deal at the time. Still and all, Roosevelt’s Nipple-in-the-Sky offering had assured his constituency of prolonged government intervention on the basis of need, and unfailing indemnity against any and all hardship. What more could the people ask for?

The populace wanted jobs, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) promised jobs. In April of 1935, the Roosevelt régime put this program into motion, one that employed over eight million people on the dole of the national government. Public projects were undertaken on everything from building bridges and recording music to establishing federal writing projects and theatre projects. With a twenty-percent unemployment rate looming at the time, the masses were jobless and restless, and were unwilling to turn down handouts of government jobs and makeshift careers. FDR had successfully entrapped the populace behind a wall of fear and vulnerability; they had become disciples of the New Deal dominion, embracing government appropriations beyond that which had ever been seen before. They were trapped and begging.

Nonetheless, not everybody had to beg for work. Those who had jobs met up with the “security” of Roosevelt’s National Labor Relations Act, which empowered labor union monstrosities using coercion and extortion to collectively bargain, and essentially gave unions the license for violence under the guise of “right to organize”. This kind of empowerment had the appearance of providing for the well-being of the common worker, however, it was merely a ploy to further centralize and expand government control over industry, gain the favors of big business, and empower a leading democratic political force. Only government decree could put such power into the hands of an elite few. And only government can create such a monopoly on labor. The heavily appeased unions became a powerful political force and permanent fixture in perpetual support for the Democratic Party, and remains so to this day. The labor unions, after all, had been on the decline – in terms of both membership and might – prior to Roosevelt’s political gratuities. FDR had managed to stimulate this declining movement and turn the unions into a useful and influential force.

Conclusion

As a whole, Roosevelt’s fabricated crises – banking, labor, wellness, old-age subsistence – gave birth to a centralized, planned economy, one that began an irreversible encroachment on individual livelihood. The masses fully consented to government usurpation while falling under the spell of “crisis”. Government acted in ways that, typically, without a crisis hanging overhead, it could not get away with. Even when each crisis was over, we were left with remnants of this big government that weren’t there before the crisis. Robert Higgs refers to this as the “ratcheting effect”. We ratchet back some of the “new” big government usurpation, but keep the majority of it long after the bogus “crisis” is over. Each ratchet leaves us with more government and less freedom.

Mainstream historians, journalists, and commentators often speak of the vast legacy left behind by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In reality, the only legacy left behind by this tyrant is the residuum of his departure from the gold standard, which gave us a managed currency system producing massive inflation and destructive business cycles; gigantic welfare state programs for the aged and for the unwilling; sanctioned malignancy of unionism; collectivization of industry; unconstitutional shift of unmitigated authority to a hand-assembled judicial branch; and a public takeover of formerly private business endeavors. And he used economic depression – and later, war – as the crises that required his heavy hand.

The crisis-mongering Roosevelt, like Lincoln and Wilson before him, aided in paving the way for the czarism that was to permeate our modern executive branch of government.

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. – Edward Langley

More Government Equals Fewer Jobs

by Peter Schiff

With today’s unexpected decline in December payrolls, the cry for more job-related stimulus will grow even louder. But the sad truth is that any new stimulus or jobs bills will ultimately swell the ranks of the unemployed, thereby raising calls for an even bigger federal effort. If we are not careful, government regulations, subsidies, and spending, all designed to fight unemployment, could push the labor market into a death spiral.

Regulation acts like a tax on job creation. By subjecting employers to all sorts of extra expenses when they hire people, regulations increase the cost of employment far beyond the wages employers actually pay their workers. In fact, some regulations are specifically tied to the number of workers employed. This provides some employers with a strong incentive to stay small and not hire.

The minimum wage law, which is really just a very visible workplace regulation, actually makes it illegal for employers to hire certain individuals and destroys entire categories of jobs. For instance, faced with high labor costs, some restaurants will avoid hiring dishwashers by switching to plastic utensils and paper plates. On a larger scale, factories may decide to switch to robotic assembly lines if human labor gets too expensive.

Other types of regulations, such as those that prohibit discrimination, create incentives for employers not to hire individuals that fall within the protected class. This is the result of potential litigation costs that may result from wrongful termination lawsuits. In other words, the more expensive government makes it to fire workers, the less likely they are to hire them in the first place.

Subsidies produce the opposite effect of regulation, but sometimes the results can be just as harmful. Government subsidies divert resources towards politically favored activities, resulting in more jobs in areas such as health care and education, but fewer jobs in other sectors such as manufacturing. The net effect of this transfer is to diminish the productive capacity and efficiency of the economy, which lowers real economic growth and diminishes employment opportunities.

Although not as visible as regulations and subsidies, government spending also plays a large role in job destruction. The more money government spends, the more resources it drains from the private sector. The fiscal 2011 budget proposed by President Obama contains $3.8 trillion in federal spending. Think of government as a cancer feeding off the private sector. The larger it grows, the more jobs it kills. Unfortunately, most politicians follow the misguided advice of economist John Maynard Keynes, who advocated government spending as a means of job creation. In reality, government spending merely results in government jobs replacing more efficient private sector jobs.

Some economists point to taxes as the primary job killer, and argue that lower taxes will boost employment. While I have sympathy for this view, it misses the larger issue that the burden of government is not what it taxes but what it spends. The proposed fiscal 2011 federal budget contains “only” 2.4 trillion of taxes. The remaining 1.4 trillion of spending is borrowed (incredibly, for every dollar the government collects in taxes, it now spends almost $1.60). I would argue that a dollar borrowed kills more jobs than a dollar taxed. Therefore, cutting taxes and borrowing the shortfall kills more jobs then it creates. This is true because jobs require capital and government borrowing more directly crowds out private capital investment than taxes do.

In the end, I fully expect the government to directly provide make-work jobs to the armies of the unemployed. This will accelerate the pace of private sector job destruction and make our economy even less productive than it is today. This means that while the government may be able to provide people with jobs, the wages they pay will provide little in the way of purchasing power. In the end, we will become a nation of government employees, with plenty of work but little to show for it.

from: lewrockwell.com

There’s never been a good government. – Emma Goldman

The Myth of Good Government

Mises Daily: Monday, November 17, 2008 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

One of the great and most persistent errors of classical liberals is to believe in “good government,” a government that does “what it is supposed to do.”

There is nothing the state can do, and which society needs done, that cannot be done far better by the market. Another point that is just as telling: no state empowered to do what is supposedly necessary will restrain itself to those things. It will expand as much as public opinion will tolerate.

Sometimes the point is easier to see when looking at foreign governments, such as the tragic case of China. The government is embarking on an explosive venture to dump $586 billion into “infrastructure” over two years. The reason is the classic Keynesian excuse: the spending is needed to stimulate investment. Never mind that this trick has never worked in all of human history. This is instead a grand plan to loot the private sector on behalf of the Communist Party, which will then spend the money bolstering its power.

No country knows more about the failures of this type of central planning than China. Every form of collectivism has been tried out on these poor souls, and tens of millions lost their lives in the course of Mao’s insane collectivist experiments. That this new plan is being enacted in the name of Lord Keynes rather than Karl Marx is irrelevant. The effects are the same: expand power and reduce liberty.

China’s recovery from communism is one of the most inspiring stories in the history of economic development. The country went from being a suffering and impoverished land of catastrophe to being modernized in just 15 years. The state shrunk in scope nearly by default as the private sector grew and grew. This wasn’t the plan. It was the de facto result of the new tolerance of free economic activity. The state went into protective mode to keep its power, and did nothing to stop the swell of private enterprise. The result was glorious.

Keep in mind this critical point: China’s restoration as a civilized society came about not due to some central plan, but by its absence. The fact that the state did not intervene led to prosperity. Again, it wasn’t a policy or a constitution or a law that made the difference. There was no switch from a communist-style government to a night-watchman state. Because the state abandoned its posts under public opposition and contempt, society could flourish.

But the state never went away. It’s just that its depredations have been spotty and unpredictable. Had history taken a better course, the central state would have melted away completely, and law would have devolved to the most local levels. Sadly for the Chinese, the state persisted in its old structure, even as the private sector grew and grew. The state still had its hand in the large industries such as steel and energy, and, of course, it controlled the banking sector.

“China’s restoration as a civilized society came about not due to some central plan, but by its absence.”
The government never became good (an impossibility). It was and is bad. It was just less bad than in the past, because it did less. But all states lie in wait for a crisis. The earthquake in the southwest provided one great excuse for intervention. There is no greater excuse for state expansion than an economic crisis—except perhaps war. Chinese officials can count on support from Western “experts” here, and the thoroughly disgusting US response to our own economic downturn has provided an awful model for the world. Think of it: the Communist Party in China is now citing the United States as the main reason for its plot to loot the private sector and bolster its own power at the expense of the country.

So much for being a beacon of liberty in a dark world! Instead, the United States is helping to shut out the lights and bolster decrepit despotisms. This is surely one of the great ironies of the current political moment. Instead of teaching the world about liberty, the United States’ newly empowered unitary executive is christening various forms of dictatorship.

There can be no question that China’s spending will not improve economic growth. It will instead extract $586 billion from the private sector and spend on political priorities. Never forget that no government has wealth of its own to spend. The money has to come from taxation, monetary inflation, or debt expansion that must be paid later. And government’s spending choices will always be uneconomic relative to how society would use that wealth. That is to say, the money will be wasted.

But won’t the spending spur investment? It can create local boomlets, but they will be temporary. To the extent that the new spending causes a spending response from investors and consumers, this is more evidence of an uneconomic use of scarce resources. If the money is used to prop up failing companies, that’s particularly bad since it is an attempt to override market realities, an attempt that is about as successful as trying to repeal gravity by throwing things up in the air.

The nature of the state — and the core of its rationale for existence — is the conviction that it stands apart from and above society, to correct the failings of the market and individuals. A presumption of superiority is at the very heart of the state, whether it is minimal or totalitarian. Who is to say when and where it should intervene? Well, think about it. If the state is inherently wiser than and superior to society, standing in judgment over what is working and what is not working, the state alone is also in a position to decide when it should intervene.

No government is liberal by nature, said Ludwig von Mises. This is the great lesson that people who advocate “limited government” have never learned. If you give the government any jobs to do, it will presume the right to police its own conduct and then inevitably abuse its power. That is true in China and it is true in the US.

It was the science of economics that first discovered the radical incapacity of the state to make any improvements in the social order. It turns science on its head to invoke economics as a reason for the government to loot and pillage in the name of “stimulating investment.” Stimulation here, there, and everywhere amounts to a diminution of freedom, security of property, and prosperity.

Keynes famously praised Nazi economic policies in the introduction to the German edition of his worst book, the General Theory. After a century of horrors, free men and women in China, the US, and the world surely deserve better.

The true danger is when Liberty is nibbled away, for expedients. – Edmund Burke

What Must the Afghans Think?
by Karen Kwiatkowski

We have been given few opportunities to see and understand how Afghanis view Americans and the U.S. government’s foreign policy toward their country. Malalai Joya offers her views, to a filtered American media that attempts to drown out her criticisms. We may watch a variety of documentaries, including the current Rethink Afghanistan series by Robert Greenwald. But we really do not know, and perhaps cannot know, how it feels to be on the receiving end of a grasping military empire that seeks control without authority, ownership without purchase, and righteousness through arrogance.

If we were to put on a pair of Afghan moccasins and begin to walk that mile, in these weeks before Kabul celebrates the 52nd birthday of the American satrap, in these days before a winter bloom of 30,000 more soldiers and Marines from a far-off and dangerously unstable country, a country that will soon have a national debt equal to 97.5% of its GDP, a great fallen country gone to seed, if we were to walk in those shoes we may begin to understand.

We may think that the rest of the world has lost its way acclaiming an American president for the color of his skin but not the content of his character.

We may begin to believe that occupation and conflict is a way of life, and that we are a cursed people.

We may marvel at hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, insincerity, the blatant fraud of raw force clothed in words of liberation mouthed hotly by the soft-handed denizens of a far off capital.

We may wonder at the hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, insincerity, the blatant fraud of raw force as delivered by an army of robot soldiers who put fresh paint on the walls of schools each morning even as they maim children and murder mothers each afternoon.

We may become tired of being lectured by foreigners about what it means to be us, and how we might become a more supplicating us.

We are intrigued that the satrap demands American troops stay on for the slaughter until his 67th birthday, whereupon we wonder where he will flee, or how his life will be ended.

As we walk along, we may begin to see the positive side of our situation.

We may consider our history, our geography, our culture and our tradition as assets, golden.

We may practice our rage, build upon it, feel comfort in our collective anger, that empowering antidote to helplessness and fear, that key to a different future.

As we recognize the eventual leaving of the occupiers, belied by the lies of D.C. can-kickers, we may think on how to accelerate this certain end.

We may determine that the arrival of more ill-trained and unmotivated Americans in country can be used to our advantage.

We may determine that the return of angry veterans from the bankrupt country, those wise to the sanctimony of their own leaders, the faithlessness of their blood-eating generals, some even awakened to the joys of graft and murder and torture – all these may be used to our advantage.

As we walk, we may plan to live rather than to die. We may decide to die so that our children can live. We may decide to persist rather than to submit.

We may consider the numbers: 26 million of us, millions in even the smallest groups of us, to 200,000 foreigners and not all of them armed.

We may muse at how cheaply and creatively we may kill an American, and how expensively and unimaginatively they kill us.

If we are young, we may consider the feats of our grandparents and parents against the Soviets, and wonder if we have become yet the men and women they were. We may wish to prove something, if we are young.

And we may be drawn to the fight knowing it is winnable and will only ever be won by us. We know that the tender underbelly of a globally despised, morally decrepit and monetarily collapsing empire is exposed, showcased and spotlighted in our own backyard. A great sacrificial lamb awaiting our knives, on a table watched by the entire world, salivating and greedy for what comes next.

We may feel the irresistible urge to make a spectacle of the American empire, and we may entertain ourselves, as we walk, with thoughts of the myriad of ways we will do that.

December 9, 2009

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for MilitaryWeek.com, hosts the call-in radio show American Forum, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com and Liberty and Power. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here.