On Saturday, March 1, 2003, at 08:40 AM, lcs Mixmaster Remailer wrote:
The Republican ideology of limited government, of fiscal conservatism, and of not running around doing "nation-building," all of this is now in the dustbin of history. Republicans now stand for empire.
Oh, come on now. The Republican rhetoric of smaller government was always just that, rhetoric. Where you do you think the Republicans came from? Most came from the Whig Party who central platform was mercantilism. After the Union put down the Southern Rebellion the size of the federal government grew by leaps and bounds, under Republican hegemony, until at least the end of Reconstruction.
Since the time of Franklin Roosevelt, post-FDR Republicans have preached the free-enterprise, private-property, limited-government line of their pre-FDR Republican predecessors. In real life, however, post-FDR Republicans have lived the life of the lie. For they have embraced and supported every single socialistic, welfare-state scheme that has been implemented in America in the 20th century.
The congressional elections of 1994 flushed Republicans out into the open. Once the elections were over, the fatal flaw the life of the lie was exposed for all to see. Not only was nothing of substance abolished or dismantled, there was not even an attempt to do so. The lie of the Republican fiscal conservatism is like the lie of moral justifications for wars. Despite the free-enterprise rhetoric, the Republican "revolution" was never about freedom for the American people. Rather, it was what it has been since 1932 a way to win Republican control over the lives and fortunes of the American people, mostly to serve their aspirations of empire and as
What would a real revolution look like? It would be a libertarian revolution. And it would be one of the most exciting events in history.
An example might involve new amendments to the U.S. Constitution. For example:
1. No law shall be passed by either the national or state governments respecting the regulation of peaceful activity, including commerce, or abridging the free exercise thereof.
2. No subsidy, grant, welfare, aid, loan, or other special privilege shall be provided to anyone, domestic or foreign, by either the national or state governments.
3. Neither the national government nor the states shall engage in any business or commercial enterprise, including the delivery of mail.
4. No law shall be passed by either the national or state governments respecting the establishment of education or abridging the free exercise thereof. Compulsory school-attendance laws and school taxes are prohibited.
5. No law shall be passed by either the national or state governments respecting the ownership of weapons or abridging the free exercise thereof.
6. No law shall be passed by either the national or state governments respecting the establishment or regulation of money or banking. Legal-tender laws and a central government bank are prohibited.
7. Trade and immigration controls, by both the national and state governments, are prohibited.
8. The imposition of taxes by the national and state governments is prohibited. All governments shall be funded voluntarily, or not at all. To fund the national government, the government of each state shall be required to remit ten percent of gross revenues to the national government.
9. Conscription is prohibited. Governmental involvement in foreign wars is prohibited.
10. Except for the White House, the Capitol, and the Supreme Court building, and the corresponding buildings in the respective states, governmental ownership of real property is prohibited.
And liberals are no better. Where are the Dems in this debate? In fact, where's Congress? Where are the heated floor debates about going to war? Where's the resolution for war? "Congress shall have the power to declare war." seems to have been forgotten, conveniently.
Yes, its true they do have that power but it seems, like much else in the Constitution, the word shall has been twisted through "textural interpretation" to mean may.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
