1) Dr. Charles F. Stanley's 30
Life Principles –
A Life of Obedience
Scripture: Acts
5:14-29
I. Introduction: How
do you make decisions? Do you try to determine
what will benefit you the most, or perhaps you strive to please or impress
others? Maybe you let emotions take control or attempt to make a logical
choice. Wise men and women learn to obey God, and leave all the
consequences to Him. There is nothing more important in life than
following Jesus and trusting Him to care for your needs.
II. What does the
Bible say about obeying God?
A.
Biblical Example: When the apostles were told to stop
preaching in Jesus’ name, they responded, “We must obey God rather than men”
(Acts 5:29).
B.
Sowing and Reaping: Galatians 6:7 says, “Whatever a man
sows, this he will also reap.” Every action has an impact, for good or evil.
Our decisions, and the choices of others, determine the quality of our lives.
C.
Disobedient Biblical Characters: The Bible says, “Be
sure your sin will find you out” (Num. 32:23). Imagine how different the
stories in Scripture would be if mankind knew what disobeying God would cost:
1. Adam and Eve would never have eaten the forbidden fruit.
2. The nation of Israel would have chosen to fight for the Promised Land the
first time around instead of wandering 40 years in the desert.
3. After seeing Bathsheba bathing, David would have turned away and walked back
inside.
4. Jonah would have willingly traveled to Ninevah to preach the Word of God.
D.
Faithful Biblical Characters: The Lord rewarded those
who were willing to follow His commands:
1. Noah was asked to build a massive boat—which made him the
laughing stock of his commnity. But he was ready when the flood came.
2. Moses, a desert nomad, had to appear before Pharaoh, the leader of a
powerful civilization, and demand freedom for the Israelites. Ultimately, the
people were allowed to go.
3. Joshua was told to march around Jericho for seven days instead of relying on
the military tactics he knew. And God destroyed the enemy.
4. Nehemiah boldly asked the Babylonian king for supplies to rebuild Jerusalem
and received all he needed, including guards to help him safely reach the city.
5. In captivity, Daniel and his three friends refused to eat meat because it
was not prepared according to Hebrew dietary laws. Yet they were healthier than
all the other young men.
6. Peter and the apostles refused to stop preaching about Jesus, even though
they were threatened with flogging and imprisonment.
E.
The Requirements: As believers, we must:
1. Believe that God is sovereign—He controls all things at
all times (Ps. 103:19).
2. Trust that He will work for our good in every situation and circumstance
(Rom. 8:28).
3. Love the Lord. The Bible says we show our love for Him by obeying His
commands (1 John 5:3)—and not just when they are convenient and desirable.
4. Listen to Him. When you pray, make time to hear what He has to say.
5. Be courageous. Obeying God takes courage because following His will often
leads to conflict. You must be willing to do what is right anyway.
6. Fully surrender to Him.
F.
The Results of Obedience
1. You will experience personal victory if you follow His
will, even if the world does not consider you a success. (See Josh. 1:8.)
2. Obedience leads to supernatural peace and joy in every circumstance.
3. Spiritual growth and maturity results when believers continue to walk with
God in the midst of suffering.
G.
Application
1. God may ask you to do something that doesn’t make sense
from a human perspective.
2. The Father may lead you to give up a hobby or donate a valuable item.
3. He may prompt you to give financially when money is scarce.
4. The Lord might want you to serve in your church or take a leadership role
although you feel inadequate.
III. Conclusion:
When you need to make an important decision, don’t rely primarily on your own
reasoning, the opinions of others, or even what worked in the past. Get on your
knees before the Lord and pour out your heart. Spend time prayerfully reading
His Word. Listen for His voice, and then follow His specific guidance for your
life.
Obey God and leave all
the consequences to Him. If you will take to heart this one
principle, you will have the awesome privilege of watching the Lord accomplish
great things in and through you.
2) The
30-Day Reading List That Will Lead You to Becoming a Knowledgeable Libertarian
by Robert
Wenzel
The Fascist Threat
by Llewellyn
H. Rockwell, Jr.
This talk was delivered at the Doug Casey conference,
"When Money Dies," in Phoenix on October 1, 2011.
Everyone knows that the term fascist is a pejorative, often
used to describe any political position a speaker doesn’t like. There isn’t
anyone around who is willing to stand up and say: "I’m a fascist; I think
fascism is a great social and economic system."
But I submit that if they were honest, the vast majority of
politicians, intellectuals, and political activists would have to say just
that.
Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the
private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the
police State as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to
individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master of society.
This describes mainstream politics in America today. And not
just in America. It’s true in Europe, too. It is so much part of the mainstream
that it is hardly noticed any more.
It is true that fascism has no overarching theoretical
apparatus. There is no grand theorist like Marx. That makes it no less real and
distinct as a social, economic, and political system. Fascism also thrives as a
distinct style of social and economic management. And it is as much or
more of a threat to civilization than full-blown socialism.
This is because its traits are so much a part of life – and
have been for so long – that they are nearly invisible to us.
If fascism is invisible to us, it is truly the silent killer.
It fastens a huge, violent, lumbering State on the free market that drains its
capital and productivity like a deadly parasite on a host. This is why the
fascist State has been called The Vampire Economy. It sucks the economic life
out of a nation and brings about a slow death of a once thriving economy.
Let me just provide a recent example.
The Decline
The papers last week were filled with the first sets of data
from the 2010 US Census. The headline story concerned the huge increase in the
poverty rate. It is the largest increase in 20 years, and now up to 15%.
But most people hear this and dismiss it, probably for good
reason. The poor in this country are not poor by any historical standard. They
have cell phones, cable TV, cars, lots of food, and plenty of disposable
income. What’s more, there is no such thing as a fixed class called the poor.
People come and go, depending on age and life circumstances. Plus, in American
politics, when you hear kvetching about the poor, everyone knows what you’re
supposed to do: hand the government your wallet.
Buried in the report is another fact that has much more
profound significance. It concerns median household income in real terms.
What the data have revealed is devastating. Since 1999,
median household income has fallen 7.1 percent. Since 1989, median family
income is largely flat. And since 1973 and the end of the gold standard, it has
hardly risen at all. The great wealth generating machine that was once America
is failing.
No longer can one generation expect to live a better life
than the previous one. The fascist economic model has killed what was once
called the American dream. And the truth is, of course, even worse than the statistic
reveals. You have to consider how many incomes exist within a single household
to make up the total income. After World War II, the single-income family
became the norm. Then the money was destroyed and American savings were wiped
out and the capital base of the economy was devastated.
It was at this point that households began to struggle to
stay above water. The year 1985 was the turning point. This was the year that
it became more common than not for a household to have two incomes rather than one.
Mothers entered the workforce to keep family income floating.
The intellectuals cheered this trend, as if it represented
liberation, shouting hosannas that all women everywhere are now added to the
tax rolls as valuable contributors to the State’s coffers. The real cause is
the rise of fiat money that depreciated the currency, robbed savings, and
shoved people into the workforce as taxpayers.
This story is not told in the data alone. You have to look at
the demographics to discover it.
This huge demographic shift essentially bought the American
household another 20 years of seeming prosperity, though it is hard to call it
that since there was no longer any choice about the matter. If you wanted to
keep living the dream, the household could no longer get by on a single income.
But this huge shift was merely an escape hatch. It bought 20
years of slight increases before the income trend flattened again. Over the
last decade we are back to falling. Today median family income is only slightly
above where it was when Nixon wrecked the dollar, put on price and wage
controls, created the EPA, and the whole apparatus of the parasitic
welfare-warfare State came to be entrenched and made universal.
Yes, this is fascism, and we are paying the price. The dream
is being destroyed.
The talk in Washington about reform, whether from Democrats
or Republicans, is like a bad joke. They talk of small changes, small cuts,
commissions they will establish, curbs they will make in ten years. It is all
white noise. None of this will fix the problem. Not even close.
The problem is more fundamental. It is the quality of the
money. It is the very existence of 10,000 regulatory agencies. It is the whole
assumption that you have to pay the State for the privilege to work. It is the
presumption that the government must manage every aspect of the capitalist
economic order. In short, it is the total State that is the problem, and the
suffering and decline will continue so long as the total State exists.
The Origins of Fascism
To be sure, the last time people worried about fascism was
during the Second World War. We were said to be fighting this evil system
abroad. The US defeated fascist governments but the philosophy of governance
that it represents was not defeated. Very quickly following that war, another
one began. This was the Cold War that pitted capitalism against communism.
Socialism in this case was considered to be a soft form of communism, tolerable
and even praiseworthy insofar as it was linked with democracy, which is the
system that legalizes and legitimizes an ongoing pillaging of the population.
In the meantime, almost everyone has forgotten that there are
many other colors of socialism, not all of them obviously left wing. Fascism is
one of these colors.
There can be no question of its origins. It is tied up with
the history of post-World War I Italian politics. In 1922, Benito Mussolini won
a democratic election and established fascism as his philosophy. Mussolini had
been a member of the socialist party.
All the biggest and most important players within the fascist
movement came from the socialists. It was a threat to the socialists because it
was the most appealing political vehicle for the real-world application of the
socialist impulse. Socialists crossed over to join the fascists en masse.
This is also why Mussolini himself enjoyed such good press
for more than ten years after his rule began. He was celebrated by the New
York Times in article after article. He was heralded in scholarly
collections as an exemplar of the type of leader we need in an age of the
planned society. Puff pieces on this blowhard were very common in US journalism
all through the late 1920s and the mid-1930s.
Remember that in this same period, the American left went
through a huge shift. In the teens and 1920s, the American left had a very
praiseworthy anti-corporatist impulse. The left generally opposed war, the
state-run penal system, alcohol prohibition, and all violations of civil
liberties. It was no friend of capitalism but neither was it a friend of the
corporate State of the sort that FDR forged during the New Deal.
In 1933 and 1934, the American left had to make a choice.
Would they embrace the corporatism and regimentation of the New Deal or take a
principled stand on their old liberal values? In other words, would they accept
fascism as a halfway house to their socialist utopia? A gigantic battle ensued
in this period, and there was a clear winner. The New Deal made an offer the
left could not refuse. And it was a small step to go from the embrace of the
fascistic planned economy to the celebration of the warfare State that
concluded the New Deal period.
This was merely a repeat of the same course of events in
Italy a decade earlier. In Italy too, the left realized that their anti-capitalistic
agenda could best be achieved within the framework of the authoritarian,
planning State. Of course our friend John Maynard Keynes played a critical role
in providing a pseudo-scientific rationale for joining opposition to old-world
laissez faire to a new appreciation of the planned society. Recall that Keynes
was not a socialist of the old school. As he himself said in his introduction
to the Nazi edition of his General
Theory, national socialism was far more hospitable to his ideas
than a market economy.
Flynn Tells the Truth
The most definitive study on fascism written in these years
was As
We Go Marching by John T. Flynn. Flynn was a journalist and scholar of a
liberal spirit who had written a number of best-selling books in the 1920s. He
could probably be put in the progressive camp in the 1920s. It was the New Deal
that changed him. His colleagues all followed FDR into fascism, while Flynn
himself kept the old faith. That meant that he fought FDR every step of the
way, and not only his domestic plans. Flynn was a leader of the America First
movement that saw FDR’s drive to war as nothing but an extension of the New
Deal, which it certainly was.
But because Flynn was part of what Murray Rothbard later
dubbed the Old Right – Flynn came to oppose both the welfare State and the
warfare State – his name went down the Orwellian memory hole after the war,
during the heyday of CIA conservatism.
As We Go Marching came out in 1944, just
at the tail end of the war, and right in the midst of wartime economic controls
the world over. It is a wonder that it ever got past the censors. It is a
full-scale study of fascist theory and practice, and Flynn saw precisely where
fascism ends: in militarism and war as the fulfillment of the stimulus-spending
agenda. When you run out of everything else to spend money on, you can always
depend on nationalist fervor to back more military spending.
In reviewing the history of the rise of fascism, Flynn wrote:
"One of the most baffling phenomena of fascism is the
almost incredible collaboration between men of the extreme Right and the
extreme Left in its creation. The explanation lies at this point. Both Right
and Left joined in this urge for regulation. The motives, the arguments, and
the forms of expression were different but all drove in the same direction. And
this was that the economic system must be controlled in its essential functions
and this control must be exercised by the producing groups."
Flynn writes that the right and the left disagreed on
precisely who fits the bill as the producer group. The left tends to celebrate
laborers as producers. The right tends to favor business owners as producers.
The political compromise – and it still goes on today – was to cartelize both.
Government under fascism becomes the cartelization device for
both workers and the private owners of capital. Competition between workers and
between businesses is regarded as wasteful and pointless; the political elites
decide that the members of these groups need to get together and cooperate
under government supervision to build a mighty nation.
The fascists have always been obsessed with the idea of
national greatness. To them, this does not consist in a nation of people who
are growing more prosperous, living ever better and longer lives. No, national
greatness occurs when the State embarks on building huge monuments, undertaking
nationwide transportation systems, carving Mount Rushmore, or digging the
Panama Canal.
In other words, national greatness is not the same thing as
your greatness or your family’s greatness or your company’s or profession’s
greatness. On the contrary. You have to be taxed, your money’s value has to be
depreciated, your privacy invaded, and your well being diminished in order to
achieve it. In this view, the government has to make us great.
Tragically, such a program has a far greater chance of
political success than old-fashioned socialism. Fascism doesn’t nationalize
private property as socialism does. That means that the economy doesn’t collapse
right away. Nor does fascism push to equalize incomes. There is no talk of the
abolition of marriage or the nationalization of children.
Religion is not abolished but used as a tool of political
manipulation. The fascist State was far more politically astute in this respect
than communism. It wove together religion and statism into one package,
encouraging a worship of God provided that the State operates as the
intermediary.
Under fascism, society as we know it is left intact, though
everything is lorded over by a mighty State apparatus. Whereas traditional
socialist teaching fostered a globalist perspective, fascism was explicitly
nationalist. It embraced and exalted the idea of the nation-state.
As for the bourgeoisie, fascism doesn’t seek their expropriation.
Instead, the middle class gets what it wants in the form of social insurance,
medical benefits, and heavy doses of national pride.
It is for all these reasons that fascism takes on a
right-wing cast. It doesn’t attack fundamental bourgeois values. It draws on
them to garner support for a democratically backed all-round national
regimentation of economic control, censorship, cartelization, political
intolerance, geographic expansion, executive control, the police State, and
militarism.
For my part, I have no problem referring to the fascist
program as a right-wing theory, even if it does fulfill aspects of the
left-wing dream. The crucial matter here concerns its appeal to the public and
to the demographic groups that are normally drawn to right-wing politics.
If you think about it, right-wing statism is of a different
color, cast, and tone from left-wing statism. Each is designed to appeal to a
different set of voters with different interests and values.
These divisions, however, are not strict, and we’ve already
seen how a left-wing socialist program can adapt itself and become a right-wing
fascist program with very little substantive change other than its marketing
program.
The Eight Marks of Fascist Policy
John T. Flynn, like other members of the Old Right, was
disgusted by the irony that what he saw, most everyone else chose to ignore. In
the fight against authoritarian regimes abroad, he noted, the US had adopted
those forms of government at home, complete with price controls, rationing, censorship,
executive dictatorship, and even concentration camps for whole groups
considered to be unreliable in their loyalties to the State.
After reviewing this long history, Flynn proceeds to sum up
with a list of eight points he considers to be the main marks of the fascist
State.
As I present them, I will also offer comments on the modern
American central State.
Point 1. The government is totalitarian because it
acknowledges no restraint upon its powers.
This is a very telling mark. It suggests that the US
political system can be described as totalitarian. This is a shocking remark
that most people would reject. But they can reject this characterization so
long as they happen not to be directly ensnared in the State’s web. If they
become so, they will quickly discover that there are indeed no limits to what
the State can do. This can happen boarding a flight, driving around in your
home town, or having your business run afoul of some government agency. In the
end, you must obey or be caged like an animal or killed. In this way, no matter
how much you may believe that you are free, all of us today are but one step
away from Guantanamo.
As recently as the 1990s, I can recall that there were
moments when Clinton seemed to suggest that there were some things that his
administration could not do. Today I’m not so sure that I can recall any
government official pleading the constraints of law or the constraints of
reality to what can and cannot be done. No aspect of life is untouched by
government intervention, and often it takes forms we do not readily see. All of
health care is regulated, but so is every bit of our food, transportation,
clothing, household products, and even private relationships.
Mussolini himself put his principle this way: "All
within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."
He also said: "The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of
the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State
is absolute, individuals and groups relative."
I submit to you that this is the prevailing ideology in the
United States today. This nation conceived in liberty has been kidnapped by the
fascist State.
Point 2. Government is a de facto dictatorship based on the
leadership principle.
I wouldn’t say that we truly have a dictatorship of one man
in this country, but we do have a form of dictatorship of one sector of
government over the entire country. The executive branch has spread so
dramatically over the last century that it has become a joke to speak of checks
and balances. What the kids learn in civics class has nothing to do with
reality.
The executive State is the State as we know it, all flowing
from the White House down. The role of the courts is to enforce the will of the
executive. The role of the legislature is to ratify the policy of the
executive.
Further, this executive is not really about the person who
seems to be in charge. The president is only the veneer, and the elections are
only the tribal rituals we undergo to confer some legitimacy on the
institution. In reality, the nation State lives and thrives outside any
"democratic mandate." Here we find the power to regulate all aspects
of life and the wicked power to create the money necessary to fund this
executive rule.
As for the leadership principle, there is no greater lie in
American public life than the propaganda we hear every four years about how the
new president/messiah is going to usher in the great dispensation of peace,
equality, liberty, and global human happiness. The idea here is that the whole
of society is really shaped and controlled by a single will – a point that
requires a leap of faith so vast that you have to disregard everything you know
about reality to believe it.
And yet people do. The hope for a messiah reached a fevered
pitch with Obama’s election. The civic religion was in full-scale worship mode
– of the greatest human who ever lived or ever shall live. It was a despicable
display.
Another lie that the American people believe is that
presidential elections bring about regime change. This is sheer nonsense. The
Obama State is the Bush State; the Bush State was the Clinton State; the
Clinton State was the Bush State; the Bush State was the Reagan State. We can
trace this back and back in time and see overlapping appointments, bureaucrats,
technicians, diplomats, Fed officials, financial elites, and so on. Rotation in
office occurs not because of elections but because of mortality.
Point 3. Government administers a capitalist system with an
immense bureaucracy.
The reality of bureaucratic administration has been with us
at least since the New Deal, which was modeled on the planning bureaucracy that
lived in World War I. The planned economy – whether in Mussolini’s time or ours
– requires bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the heart, lungs, and veins of the
planning State. And yet to regulate an economy as thoroughly as this one is
today is to kill prosperity with a billion tiny cuts.
This doesn’t necessarily mean economic contraction, at least
right away. But it definitely means killing off growth that would have
otherwise occurred in a free market.
So where is our growth? Where is the peace dividend that was
supposed to come after the end of the Cold War? Where are the fruits of the
amazing gains in efficiency that technology has afforded? It has been eaten by
the bureaucracy that manages our every move on this earth. The voracious and
insatiable monster here is called the Federal Code that calls on thousands of
agencies to exercise the police power to prevent us from living free lives.
It is as Basiat said: The real cost of the State is the
prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don’t exist, the technologies to which
we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the
bright future that is stolen from us. The State has looted us just as surely as
a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love.
Point 4. Producers are organized into cartels in the way of
syndicalism.
Syndicalist is not usually how we think of how our current
economic structure. But remember that syndicalism means economic control by the
producers. Capitalism is different. It places by virtue of market structures
all control in the hands of the consumers. The only question for syndicalists,
then, is which producers are going to enjoy political privilege. It might be
the workers but it can also be the largest corporations.
In the case of the US, in the last three years, we’ve seen
giant banks, pharmaceutical firms, insurers, car companies, Wall Street banks
and brokerage houses, and quasi-private mortgage companies enjoying vast
privileges at our expense. They have all joined with the State in living a
parasitical existence at our expense.
This is also an expression of the syndicalist idea, and it
has cost the US economy untold trillions and sustained an economic depression
by preventing the post-boom adjustment that markets would otherwise dictate.
The government has tightened its syndicalist grip in the name of stimulus.
Point 5.
Economic planning is based on the principle of autarky.
Autarky is the name given to the idea of economic
self-sufficiency. Mostly this refers to the economic self-determination of the
nation-state. The nation-state must be geographically huge in order to support
rapid economic growth for a large and growing population.
This was and is the basis for fascist expansionism. Without
expansion, the State dies. This is also the idea behind the strange combination
of protectionist pressure today combined with militarism. It is driven in part
by the need to control resources.
Look at the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. We would be
supremely naive to believe that these wars were not motivated in part by the
producer interests of the oil industry. It is true of the American empire
generally, which supports dollar hegemony.
It is the reason for the planned North American Union.
The goal is national self-sufficiency rather than a world of
peaceful trade. Consider, too, the protectionist impulses of the Republican
ticket. There is not one single Republican, apart from Ron Paul, who
authentically supports free trade in the classical definition.
From ancient Rome to modern-day America, imperialism is a form
of statism that the bourgeoisie love. It is for this reason that Bush’s
post-09/11 push for the global empire has been sold as patriotism and love of
country rather than for what it is: a looting of liberty and property to
benefit the political elites.
6. Government sustains economic life through spending and
borrowing.
This point requires no elaboration because it is no longer
hidden. There was stimulus 1 and stimulus 2, both of which are so discredited
that stimulus 3 will have to adopt a new name. Let’s call it the American Jobs
Act.
With a prime-time speech, Obama argued in favor of this
program with some of the most asinine economic analysis I’ve ever heard. He
mused about how is it that people are unemployed at a time when schools,
bridges, and infrastructure need repairing. He ordered that supply and demand
come together to match up needed work with jobs.
Hello? The schools, bridges, and infrastructure that Obama
refers to are all built and maintained by the State. That’s why they are
falling apart. And people don’t have jobs because the State has made it too
expensive to hire them. It’s not complicated. To sit around and dream of other
scenarios is no different from wishing that water flowed uphill or that rocks
would float in the air. It amounts to a denial of reality.
Still, Obama went on, invoking the old fascistic longing for
national greatness. "Building a world-class transportation system,"
he said, "is part of what made us an economic superpower." Then he
asked: "We’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and
faster railroads?"
Well, the answer to that question is yes. And you know what?
It doesn’t hurt a single American for a person in China to travel on a faster
railroad than we do. To claim otherwise is an incitement to nationalist
hysteria.
As for the rest of this program, Obama promised yet another
long list of spending projects. Let’s just mention the reality: No government
in the history of the world has spent as much, borrowed as much, and created as
much fake money as the US. If the US doesn’t qualify as a fascist State in this
sense, no government ever has.
None of this would be possible but for the role of the
Federal Reserve, the great lender to the world. This institution is absolutely
critical to US fiscal policy. There is no way that the national debt could
increase at a rate of $4 billion per day without this institution.
Under a gold standard, all of this maniacal spending would
come to an end. And if US debt were priced on the market with a default
premium, we would be looking at a rating far less than A+.
Point 7. Militarism is a mainstay of government spending.
Have you ever noticed that the military budget is never
seriously discussed in policy debates? The US spends more than most of the rest
of the world combined.
And yet to hear our leaders talk, the US is just a tiny
commercial republic that wants peace but is constantly under threat from the
world. They would have us believe that we all stand naked and vulnerable. The
whole thing is a ghastly lie. The US is a global military empire and the main
threat to peace around the world today.
To visualize US military spending as compared with other
countries is truly shocking. One bar chart you can easily look up shows the US
trillion-dollar-plus military budget as a skyscraper surrounded by tiny huts.
As for the next highest spender, China spends 1/10th as much as the US.
Where is the debate about this policy? Where is the
discussion? It is not going on. It is just assumed by both parties that it is
essential for the US way of life that the US be the most deadly country on the
planet, threatening everyone with nuclear extinction unless they obey. This
should be considered a fiscal and moral outrage by every civilized person.
This isn’t only about the armed services, the military
contractors, the CIA death squads. It is also about how police at all levels
have taken on military-like postures. This goes for the local police, State
police, and even the crossing guards in our communities. The commissar
mentality, the trigger-happy thuggishness, has become the norm throughout the
whole of society.
If you want to witness outrages, it is not hard. Try coming
into this country from Canada or Mexico. See the bullet-proof-vest wearing,
heavily armed, jackbooted thugs running dogs up and down car lanes, searching
people randomly, harassing innocents, asking rude and intrusive questions.
You get the strong impression that you are entering a police
State. That impression would be correct.
Yet for the man on the street, the answer to all social
problems seems to be more jails, longer terms, more enforcement, more arbitrary
power, more crackdowns, more capital punishments, more authority. Where does
all of this end? And will the end come before we realize what has happened to
our once-free country?
Point 8. Military spending has imperialist aims.
Ronald Reagan used to claim that his military buildup was
essential to keeping the peace. The history of US foreign policy just since the
1980s has shown that this is wrong. We’ve had one war after another, wars waged
by the US against non-compliant countries, and the creation of even more client
states and colonies.
US military strength has not led to peace, but the opposite.
It has caused most people in the world to regard the US as a threat, and it has
led to unconscionable wars on many countries. Wars of aggression were defined
at Nuremberg as crimes against humanity.
Obama was supposed to end this. He never promised to do so.
But his supporters all believed that he would. Instead, he has done the
opposite. He has increased troop levels, entrenched wars, and started new ones.
In reality, he has presided over a warfare State just as vicious as any in
history. The difference this time is that the left is no longer criticizing the
US role in the world. In that sense, Obama is the best thing to ever happen to
the warmongers and the military-industrial complex.
As for the right in this country, it once opposed this kind
of military fascism. But all that changed after the beginning of the Cold War.
The right was led into a terrible ideological shift, well documented in Murray
Rothbard’s neglected masterpiece The
Betrayal of the American Right. In the name of
stopping communism, the right came to follow ex-CIA agent Bill Buckley’s
endorsement of a totalitarian bureaucracy at home to fight wars all over the
world.
At the end of the Cold War, there was a brief reprise when
the right in this country remembered its roots in non-interventionism. But this
did not last long. George Bush the First rekindled the militarist spirit with
the first war on Iraq, and there has been no fundamental questioning of the
American empire ever since. Even today, Republicans – except, again, Ron Paul –
elicit their biggest applause by whipping up audiences about foreign threats,
while never mentioning that the real threat to American well-being exists in
the Beltway.
The Future
I can think of no greater priority today than a serious and
effective antifascist alliance. In many ways, one is already forming. It is not
a formal alliance. It is made up of those who protest the Fed, those who refuse
to go along with mainstream fascist politics, those who seek decentralization,
those who demand lower taxes and free trade, those who seek the right to
associate with anyone they want and buy and sell on terms of their own
choosing, those who insist they can educate their children on their own, the
investors and savers who make economic growth possible, those who do not want
to be felt up at airports, and those who have become expatriates.
It is also made of the millions of independent entrepreneurs
who are discovering that the number one threat to their ability to serve others
through the commercial marketplace is the institution that claims to be our
biggest benefactor: the government.
How many people fall into this category? It is more than we
know. The movement is intellectual. It is political. It is cultural. It is
technological. They come from all classes, races, countries, and professions.
This is no longer a national movement. It is truly global.
We can no longer predict whether members consider themselves
to be left wing, right wing, independent, libertarian, anarchist, or something
else. It includes those as diverse as home-schooling parents in the suburbs as
well as parents in urban areas whose children are among the 2.3 million people
who languish in jail for no good reason in a country with the largest prison
population in the world.
And what does this movement want? Nothing more or less than
sweet liberty. It does not ask that the liberty be granted or given. It only
asks for the liberty that is promised by life itself and would otherwise exist
were it not for the leviathan State that robs us, badgers us, jails us, kills
us.
This movement is not departing. We are daily surrounded by
evidence that it is right and true. Every day, it is more and more obvious that
the State contributes absolutely nothing to our well-being, but massively
subtracts from it.
Back in the 1930s, and even up through the 1980s, the
partisans of the State were overflowing with ideas. They had theories and
agendas that had many intellectual backers. They were thrilled and excited
about the world they would create. They would end business cycles, bring about
social advance, build the middle class, cure disease, bring about universal
security, and much more. Fascism believed in itself.
This is no longer true. Fascism has no new ideas, no big
projects, and not even its partisans really believe it can accomplish what it
sets out to do. The world created by the private sector is so much more useful
and beautiful than anything the State has done that the fascists have
themselves become demoralized and aware that their agenda has no real
intellectual foundation.
It is ever more widely known that statism does not and cannot
work. Statism is the great lie. Statism gives us the exact opposite of its
promise. It promised security, prosperity, and peace; it has given us fear,
poverty, war, and death. If we want a future, it is one that we have to build
ourselves. The fascist State will not give it to us; on the contrary, it stands
in the way.
It also seems to me that the old-time romance of the
classical liberals with the idea of the limited State is gone. It is far more
likely today that young people embrace an idea that fifty years ago was thought
to be the unthinkable thought: the idea that society is best off without any
State at all.
I would mark the rise of anarcho-capitalist theory as the
most dramatic intellectual shift in my adult lifetime. Gone is that view of the
State as the night watchman that would only guard essential rights, adjudicate
disputes, and protect liberty.
This view is woefully naive. The night watchman is the guy
with the guns, the legal right to use aggression, the guy who controls all
comings and goings, the guy who is perched on top and sees all things. Who is
watching him? Who is limiting his power? No one, and this is precisely why he
is the very source of society’s greatest ills. No constitution, no election, no
social contract will check his power.
Indeed, the night watchman has acquired total power. It is he
who would be the total State, which Flynn describes as a government that
"possesses the power to enact any law or take any measure that seems
proper to it." So long as a government, he says, "is clothed with the
power to do anything without any limitation on its powers, it is totalitarian.
It has total power."
It is no longer a point that we can ignore. The night
watchman must be removed and his powers distributed within and among the whole
population, and they should be governed by the same forces that bring us all
the blessings the material world affords us.
In the end, this is the choice we face: the total State or
total freedom. Which will we choose? If we choose the State, we will continue
to sink further and further and eventually lose all that we treasure as a
civilization. If we choose freedom, we can harness that remarkable power of
human cooperation that will enable us to continue to make a better world.
In the fight against fascism, there is no reason to be
despairing but rather to continue to fight with every bit of confidence that
the future belongs to us and not them.
Their world is falling apart. Ours is just being built.
Their world is based on bankrupt ideologies. Ours is rooted
in the truth about freedom and reality.
Their world can only look back to the glory days. Ours looks
forward to the future we are building for ourselves.
Their world is rooted in the corpse of the nation-state. Our
world draws on the energies and creativity of all peoples in the world, united
in the great and noble project of creating a prospering civilization through
peaceful human cooperation.
It’s true that they have the biggest guns. But big guns have
not assured permanent victory in Iraq or Afghanistan, or any other place on the
planet.
We possess the only weapon that is truly immortal: the right
idea. It is this that will lead to victory.
As Mises said: "In the long run even the most despotic
governments with all their brutality and cruelty are no match for ideas.
Eventually the ideology that has won the support of the majority will prevail
and cut the ground from under the tyrant's feet. Then the oppressed many will
rise in rebellion and overthrow their masters."
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. former editorial assistant to
Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and
chairman of the Mises
Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor
of LewRockwell.com.
3) Roger’s
Rangers Rules or Plan of Discipline by Major Robert Rogers
Rule #2
Whenever you are ordered out to the enemy's forts or
frontiers for discoveries, if your number be small, march in a single file,
keeping at such a distance from each other as to prevent one shot from killing
two men, sending one man, or more, forward, and the like on each side, at the
distance of twenty yards from the main body, if the ground you march over will
admit of it, to give the signal to the officer of the approach of an enemy, and
of their number, & c.
4) 52 Weeks to
Preparedness by Tess Pennington
Week
2 of 52: Hardware List
Welcome to week 2 of our 52 Weeks to Preparedness series,
which focuses on finding cost-effective ways to get you prepared for
disasters.
This week we are going to focus on investing in basic
hardware items. In later weeks, we will add additional hardware items to the
list, but this week we are going to focus on laying a foundation.
A good rule of thumb when planning for emergencies is that a person is only as good as their tools.
Good, quality tools are a sound investment and can last a lifetime if they are
properly cared for. When purchasing hardware items such as the ones provided in
the list below, take take to read online product and customer reviews before
you make an investment. Also, avoid these 8 Rookie mistakes often made by
preppers.
Preps to buy for Week 2:
- 32-gallon garbage can or- a sturdy storage
box to hold disaster supplies
- Flashlight with alkaline-batteries
or a hand-crank flashlight for each member of household that is over the
age of 6. (Don’t forget extra batteries for the flashlights). Flashlights
should also be purchased for each car, as well.
- Batteries in multiple-sizes.
- Heavy rope
- Duct tape
- Bic lighter and matches- to be
stored in a waterproof container
- Multi-tool
- For furry friends, purchase a leash, or pet carrier
and an extra set of I.D. tags.
Action Items:
1. Involve your children in your family preparedness efforts.
Educate them on the different types of disasters and on your family’s disaster
plans. Check out websites like Ready
Kids for methods to teach your children about what to do in an
emergency.
2. You should ask your child’s school and/or day care about
what their disaster plans are. Here are a few questions that I asked our
school:
- How will you communicate with a
child’s family during a crisis?
- Do you store adequate food, water,
and supplies for a disaster?
- Are you prepared for a
shelter-in-place situation?
- If you have to evacuate, where do
you go?
3. Find up-to-date pictures of each family member in case one
of them gets separated from you during a disaster event, put the pictures in a
waterproof or Ziploc bag, and place it in your emergency kit.
4. Prepare a personal information card for each family
member.
5. As a family, discuss your emergency meeting places,
contacts, and plans. Give your children the opportunity to express their
feelings and to ask questions so they fully understand the disaster plan.
6. For family members who have special needs, ensure that
those needs are accounted for in your emergency plan.
5) 110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in
Company and Conversation by George Washington
4th –
In
the Presence of Others Sing not to yourself with a humming Noise, nor Drum with
your Fingers or Feet.
5th –
If
You Cough, Sneeze, Sigh, or Yawn, do it not Loud but Privately; and Speak not
in your Yawning, but put Your handkerchief or Hand before your face and turn
aside.
6th –
Sleep
not when others Speak, Sit not when others stand, Speak not when you Should
hold your Peace, walk not on when others Stop.
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