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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

The government is the problem

A buddy of mine and I were talking today about the corrupt nature of our officials. In my opinion, most of them are votes for sale. That is the difference between someone with principles (lives up to their promises and their set of beliefs - regardless of how they are viewed - Like Ron Paul) and someone there to play on the team (compromise). Some of those sales involve monetary gain - direct or indirect, the others just blindly follow what they are told to do and sell out to promises of more political clout in the future (still monetary gain). Then those sellouts turn around and invoke legislation at the beck of their masters devaluing the dollar and in turn their piece of the pie that they sold themselves for dwindles. Who is the idiot now? The government might think the masses are stupid - but they are shooting at us through their own foot because of the ineptitude at believing they know more than than our founding fathers did. Their arrogance continues to be our undoing. In an attempt to play God and tip the scales to protect everyone from nearly all imaginable harm they have harmed everyone and in particular they have dashed the hopes of the middle class and the lowest of the low income. Artificial controls of force cannot overcome the natural order of the world, they can just create harm where none was intended and still not fix the problem.

One day people may finally wake up and realize we don't need an official state, but rather voluntarism. Tiny little areas of unofficial self-government. Micro-agreement nations. We need more and varied nations, not less nations under one oppressive empire, in order to thrive as a people. Only in Liberty do people grow wealthy, for only in freedom can people create wealth out of their own labor. This nation proved it in the 1700 and 1800's. The 1900's only coasted along on that prosperity and in the leaders arrogance and ignorance have we finally come to have squandered it away so far that America's government truly owns nothing but debt.

Just because a person is born, it does not subject them to another's rule of law. In a functional society only by choice and agreement (not force or coercion) can one decide what morality or law they will abide by. What they will give up to gain a specific service from a society. Natural law is supreme to regulatory law. Our great experiment in regulatory law has failed and the false "central" government is demonstrating that failure yet again. The masses have no idea what natural/common law are and they believe the government when it tells them they have admiralty law and jurisdiction over them. The lack of this understanding and the false belief in supreme authority of a lawless government is why we are in the mess we are in. People still cling to the false assumption that government is here to solve our problems. Force is not a solution - you cannot force jobs to be created or force people to be happy, yet millions of people believe the government (force) can do this. Why? Because they have been lied to for eons by people who want unearned reward and credit where no credit is due. We make fun of the absurdity in movies constantly ("Cloudy with Meatballs" as just one of thousands of examples) and yet in real life the media that makes those movies clings to using force and political figureheads to force their ideals and concepts on the unwilling and others go to their representatives and demand their fair share or wave a flag of security through power and have us go to war sacrificing thousands of lives. Why? Because today we know better than our stupid founding fathers who warned of exactly these outcomes. The Congress in 1913 knew more than the founders who warned of a central bank and instituted one. The later Congress' saw that the Federal Reserve was not living up to it's primary mandate to control inflation so they changed the mandate to minimizing inflation. Before the federal reserve the dollar was not on a continual decline - it cycled in value as Gold and Silver still due - but with the federal reserve the dollar continues to decline ad nauseum. This is but one program that has failed our country because a few men decided they knew better than the founders and that it was better to cover up a failure with pretty math and twisted words rather than to undo it. Under the Department of Education our nations science and math abilities have continued to go downhill, not uphill - yet the States and Local governments continue to allow their schools to be dictated to by a federal government that provides 6% of the budget for the school.

It is obvious our government serves one goal - one purpose. That goal is to convince us we need government and they do that by messing with natural law and making things that were already working as well as they can, broken (medical care, retirement, mortgages, elections, free speech zones, airport security, and on and on) then they blame everyone but themselves and create more programs that make it even worse and the cycle continues because we allow it to.

Did you know that at any given moment 90,000 federal government employees are traveling via airplane? (this was a statistic from 2001) That's gotta be cheap, yes? In 2009 the federal government directly employed 2,823,777 civilians! That doesn't include the contractors, or the military, folks!! That's one federal goverment employee for every 110 people in the country. Is there not a problem with this? Using the numbers from March of 2009 the average payroll is 64,192 per person. That means that each of the 110 citizens are paying $583 a year in taxes just to cover the salary of civilian government employees. Of course, not all 110 of those people are working or reporting their income, so the others pick up more of the share. Also, as a side note, I know that the military is being completely left out of this average salary.

It boggles the mind to imagine that the federal employees are really just a drop in the financial bucket, though.

What about the entire budget of the DOD & Homeland Security for 2011? 929 Billion Dollars. Oh, but doesn't include the interest on the debt we've incurred to cover these "recent" wars. The interest stands at a paltry $431.5 Billion dollars a YEAR. That's almost half of the entire defense budget! But, then debt is okay, right? Let's just keep raising the ceiling!

Currently we owe more money to foreign entities than we make in a year (GDP) - that doesn't mean more than we give in taxes, but rather more than we as a nation produce in a year that is then taxed.

Some numbers show that the Interest payments on the debt for this year will be only $386 billion dollars. That's money going completely down the drain and doing nothing for us. Not that we need a Department of Education, but it is only $31 billion a year - to give you a contrast on "importance".

So, how did we get here? Oh, yeah, we gave an entity the right to use force to protect our Liberty and somehow that mutated into protecting us from nearly everything that could go wrong in our lives and now we are in a cycle that will take eons to get out of, even if we immediately cut all spending in half - including Social Security. If we did that today, it would lower the budget to 1.91 Trillion and give us 430 billion to put on the principle of the debt. However, since the interest on the debt cannot be halved another set of programs would have to lose funding to total an additional $193 billion in order to actually cut the expenses in half. That actually means that if we halved our total spending for the federal government, then over the next year we could actually only pay down the debt $237 billion.

So, if we cut all spending in half, then we could pay down the US debt at $237 billion a year! That means we could payoff the debt in just 59 years!

Not excited? Me neither. However, folks - this is how big a mess we are actually in. Even if we literally took every dollar our richest people in America have it would not make a tiny dent in the debt. Best case scenario it would lower it down to 12 Trillion dollars - it is believe that our richest only have around 1.3 Trillion combined, however. You see, you can't go based on what they hold in paper on the Stock market, because as soon as they started selling to give that to the government the stocks would fall and they would get much less for each share as it sold.

What else can we do? We can raise taxes. Do I believe that would help? No. I believe it would simply destroy more businesses and result in more layoffs and more unemployment.

How do we get out of this and never come back? We have to start paying off the debt and cut government spending immediately. Unfortunately this will result in layoffs and unemployment too. However, once we can get the burden of wreck-less government spending off our backs then we can begin to work on prosperity again and take the responsibility for ourselves and each other back on our personal shoulders where it belongs.

No, I am not proposing utopia, but then there is no such thing. Liberty is as close as we will get on Earth - and it will include suffering and winners and losers. However, the use of force to help each other is no help at all. As our democrat brothers in Congress have been pointing out recently - the poor are worse off than ever and that is following a War on Poverty by our US government that has only made the poverty level go up.

Government is not the solution - how many more examples do we really need to understand that?

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