Big Government lives on the public believing in Big Lies. The lies are all meticulously maintained by a gargantuan propaganda apparatus that encompasses government schools, government-licensed mainstream media, Hollywood, major sports, and on and on...From time-to-time heroic individuals slip through the cracks and alert the public about the truth. Needless to say, Big Government and its propaganda apparatus never takes it well. Ron Paul discusses on today's Liberty Report!
By Liberty Report Staff
One of the biggest lies that Americans have accepted as truth is that we can't have a free market and we must have government regulations. The propaganda is understood be that if we had a free market, corporations would become monstrous monopolies. No one would be able to keep them in check. What's needed is big government to "regulate" and prevent such a thing from happening. A bigger Mother Goose fairy tale couldn't have been told. But Americans swallowed it, and now we're greeted with the results. The U.S. federal government is the biggest government in all of mankind's history. Over the last 100+ years, Americans gave up their freedom for the "government regulation" lie. Because of government regulations, we have corporations the size of which would never (ever) exist if there was a free market. Government regulations created the massive corporate monopolies that exist today. Patrick Wood gives us the results of the countless regulations: Today, four companies produce 84 percent of our beef. Four companies control the world’s grain market. Six corporations control 90 percent of the media. Ten companies control everything you buy. Three companies completely dominate the farm equipment market. Fourteen companies control the entire global auto industry. You get the idea.
"Government regulations" are easily one of the greatest scams ever pulled off by those who want to cement their businesses in place, and keep all competition permanently away. Government regulations prohibit the breaking up of this "system."
And to top it off... Today, Americans are petrified of freedom! Americans are scared to death of living free! Every burp that happens anywhere causes the same exact knee-jerk reaction: "We need more government regulations!" Now that is how you get people to voluntarily give away their freedom and chance for prosperity.
If NATO were a person, it would be five years past retirement age. In fact NATO should have retired back in the early 1990s when its reason for existence - the Warsaw Pact - ceased to exist. Instead, new missions had to be created and new enemies had to be made to justify the massive behemoth that provides lush jobs for the well-connected and vast fortunes for the weapons makers. NATO must die and the sooner the better.
By Liberty Report Staff
Let's say you're out for a night on the town, and you turn the corner of a crowded city street. You notice right away that there are big problems on this street. On the left side of the street, you spot a criminal picking people's pockets and stealing women's purses. On the right side of the street, you see another criminal spraying bullets everywhere. He's not defending himself, but just aggressively shooting away. You decide that you're not going to run away, but will do what you think is best to stop this rampant criminality. But you have to choose. You can't stop both criminals at the same time. You're only one person. You have to pick one to tackle first. The higher priority is to tackle the shooter. He's the one who is inflicting the most reprehensible harm on others. This doesn't mean that you're OK with the pickpocket purse-snatcher. You'll deal with him next. But first, you tackle and put a stop to the shooting. Now let's take this exercise to the real world. The two major crimes of government (even though man-made laws have made them "legal") are aggressive warfare and welfare. The government does the most damage to individual rights and private property with these two legalized crimes. Obviously, they are both wrong, and both have to be put to an end. But which is the higher priority? It's warfare, of course. That doesn't mean welfare is off the hook. Welfare is theft, is immoral, reprehensible, and exploitive in every sense. Not another penny should be stolen and transferred to anyone else. But...if you're forced to choose where your limited resources should be applied to do the most good, warfare has to be tackled first. Welfare will be dealt with next. If you watch the Ron Paul Liberty Report, you'll notice quickly that every week there are 4 shows dedicated to America's failed foreign policy of endless war.....and 1 show dedicated to America's failed domestic socialism and government interventionism. This isn't by accident. War is government at its very worst, and is always Enemy #1.
Should middle America be thankful for all the "jobs" provided by the military in areas like the National Guard? That's the argument of some pro-war progressives. It's dead wrong. The massive military budget is driven by the idea that "debt doesn't matter" - a false notion that is leading us to economic devastation.
By Chris Rossini
Politics and government are the prime residence of demagoguery and hyperbole. The latest episode of demagoguery consists of the argument that the problem with the medical industry is that it is "profit-driven." Such statements should be immediately understood as being absurd, but for many, who have been shielded from understanding what profits actually are, they're not. What are we supposed to have? A "loss-driven" medical industry? That sounds right up the government's alley, doesn't it? After all, when major corporations fail and should go bankrupt, who steps in to save them, and keep them around? The government! When wars are lost, and drag on for years, who keeps shoveling money and lives into them? The government! The government needs to "save face" you know, and the way to "save face" is to just keep doing the wrong thing, over and over again. The problem with the medical industry is not that it's profit-driven. Profits are a signal that consumers really want something. It alerts other entrepreneurs to shift their resources to the profitable area, which then drives prices down. An increase in supply leads to a decrease in prices. Losses provide the opposite signal to entrepreneurs. Consumers do not want it, so resources should be shifted out to areas where the profits are greater, and where consumer demand is higher. The problem with the medical industry (as with other industries) is not profits, but government-protected profits. Government-protected profits hide behind the euphemism known as "government regulations." In other words, the market is not allowed to work, but is instead distorted by government intervention. Americans are brainwashed into believing that "government-regulations" are necessary, and that they protect the consumers. In reality, "government-regulations" protect the major corporations and artificially raise their profits. In case you haven't noticed, major corporations welcome "government regulations." Oftentimes, they are the driving force for the creation of more "regulations." Look at Mark Zuckerberg & Facebook. Do you think he's calling for government regulations because it will hurt his business? NO! Of course not. Government regulations set up high barriers to entry. They keep competitors out, and squash new competition before they can even begin. Entrepreneurs notice the high profits, but they can't get in to compete. They can't increase the supply and drive prices down. Government regulations prevent them! With government regulations, the consumers suffer, and the major corporations get a continuous stream of artificially high profits. The free market is the toughest regulator imaginable. It plays no favorites. It bails out no one. It can't be bribed, because there is no one to bribe. That's why major corporations despise the free market. The last thing that they would ever want is for their competition to be on an even playing field. That would spell the end of their government-guaranteed artificially high profits. Do you know how many major corporations supported Ron Paul's presidential campaigns? After all, if the corporations were suffering from government regulations, Ron Paul was their way out! He would have freed them! Guess how many major corporations supported Ron Paul? ------ ZERO! Major corporations finance the candidates that promise more government regulations, because that's where the artificially high profits come from. If you have an issue with the medical industry, or any other industry for that matter, there is only one solution.....DEMAND the free market. No more government intervention. No more artificially high profits. No more crutches. No more bailouts. The major corporations are betting that you'll do no such thing. And because of that, Ringo Starr's famous quote will continue to ring true: "Everything government touches turns to crap."
By Lawrence W. Reed
On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs. Translation: “One can’t expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs.” With those words in 1790, Maximilian Robespierre welcomed the horrific French Revolution that had begun the year before. A consummate statist who worked tirelessly to plan the lives of others, he would become the architect of the Revolution’s bloodiest phase — the Reign of Terror of 1793–94. Robespierre and his guillotine broke eggs by the thousands in a vain effort to impose a utopian society based on the seductive slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” But, alas, Robespierre never made a single omelet. Nor did any of the other thugs who held power in the decade after 1789. They left France in moral, political, and economic ruin, and ripe for the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. As with Robespierre, no omelets came from the egg-breaking efforts of Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini, either. The French experience is one example in a disturbingly familiar pattern. Call them what you will — leftists, utopian socialists, radical interventionists, collectivists, or statists — history is littered with their presumptuous plans for rearranging society to fit their vision of “the common good,” plans that always fail as they kill or impoverish other people in the process. If socialism ever earns a final epitaph, it will be this: “Here lies a contrivance engineered by know-it-alls and busybodies who broke eggs with abandon but never, ever created an omelet.” Every collectivist experiment of the Twentieth century was heralded as the Promised Land by statist philosophers. “I have seen the future and it works,” the intellectual Lincoln Steffens said after a visit to Uncle Joe Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the New Yorker in 1984, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the Soviet Union was making great economic progress in part because the socialist system made “full use” of its manpower, in contrast to the less efficient capitalist West. But an authoritative 846-page study published in 1997, The Black Book of Communism, estimated that the communist ideology claimed 20 million lives in the “workers’ paradise.” Similarly, The Black Book documented the death tolls in other communist lands: 45 to 72 million in China, between 1.3 million and 2.3 million in Cambodia, 2 million in North Korea, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Vietnam, 1 million in Eastern Europe, and 150,000 in Latin America. Vast and Incompetent Bureaucracies Additionally, all of those murderous regimes were economic basket cases; they squandered resources on the police and military, built vast and incompetent bureaucracies, and produced almost nothing for which there was a market beyond their borders. They didn’t make “full use” of anything except police power. In every single communist country the world over, the story has been the same: lots of broken eggs, no omelets. No exceptions. F.A. Hayek explained this inevitable outcome in his seminal work, The Road to Serfdom, in 1944. All efforts to displace individual plans with central planning, he warned us, must end in disaster and dictatorship. No lofty vision can vindicate the use of the brute force necessary to attain it. “The principle that the end justifies the means,” wrote Hayek, “is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.” The worst crimes of the worst statists are often minimized or dismissed by their less-radical intellectual brethren as the “excesses” of men and women who otherwise had good intentions. These apologists reject the iron fist and claim that the State can achieve their egalitarian and collectivist goals with a velvet glove. But whether it is the Swedish “middle way,” Yugoslavian “worker socialism,” or British Fabianism, the result has been the same: broken eggs, but no omelets. Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly “reforming” their own handiwork? Education reform. Health care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact that they’re always busy “reforming” is an implicit admission that they didn’t get it right the first 50 times. Read the rest of this article at: The Foundation for Economic Education.
In an extraordinary Breitbart profile, progressive US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) outlines the broad-based and bi-partisan peace coalition he is working to build to end the trillions wasted on wars and interventions overseas. Will the neocons try to strangle this baby in its crib?
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