Wire Report

None Dare Call It Tyranny

(WIRE/FFF/SR) – 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.

Sheldon Richman, Editor “The Freeman”

Sheldon Richman is editor of The Freeman, published by The Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington, New York, and serves as senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is the author of FFF’s award-winning book Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families; Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax; and FFF’s newest book Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State. Calling for the abolition, not the reform, of public schooling. Separating School & State has become a landmark book in both libertarian and educational circles. In his column in the Financial Times, Michael Prowse wrote: “I recommend a subversive tract, Separating School & State by Sheldon Richman of the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank… . I also think that Mr. Richman is right to fear that state education undermines personal responsibility…” Mr. Richman’s articles on population, federal disaster assistance, international trade, education, the environment, American history, foreign policy, privacy, computers, and the Middle East have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Washington Times, Insight, Cato Policy Report, Journal of Economic Development, The Freeman, The World & I, Reason, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Liberty magazine, and other publications. He is a contributor to the Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics. A former newspaper reporter and former senior editor at the Cato Institute, Mr. Richman is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia.

Wire Report

(WIRE/Ind.Inst.) – The U.S. Justice Department is apparently considering prosecuting Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, which is a Web site that publishes classified documents from governments, under the rarely used Espionage Act of 1917. Such a prosecution would have adverse effects on the American people’s right to know what their government is doing in a republic that is supposed to be run by them.

Ironically, the U.S. government may have leaked the threat of prosecution to coerce Assange into giving back 76,000 classified documents on the war in Afghanistan and deleting them from his Web site, which the Pentagon has demanded. More important, this threat may be meant to intimidate Assange from making public another 15,000 documents that he says will be even juicier than the previous release.

The Espionage Act, originally passed during World War I, was designed to prosecute spies from foreign powers. Yet Assange, who is Australian and spends most of his time in Belgium, Iceland, and Sweden, is hardly a foreign spy. While spies operate in the shadows and try to help foreign governments against the United States, Assange gets documents employees of various governments willingly give him and publishes them widely so citizens can see what their governments are up to.

The threatened prosecution may be just a bluff, because the Justice Department recently was forced to drop a similar case against two American pro-Israel lobbyists for taking documents from Larry Franklin, a Department of Defense employee who was successfully prosecuted for violating his secrecy oath. It is probably kosher, although somewhat hypocritical, for the government to prosecute government employees, such as Franklin and Pfc. Bradley Manning, a U.S. intelligence analyst who allegedly leaked a video of U.S. helicopter gunships killing a Reuters journalist in Iraq and who is suspected of leaking the treasure trove of documents from Afghanistan. The hypocrisy comes in because the Justice Department leaked the threat of prosecuting Assange, intentions that are usually kept secret, and high-level government officials regularly leak highly classified information to further their own policy agendas during bureaucratic turf battles. However, prosecuting people who just publicize leaks threatens all journalists who regularly publish stories using leaks from government officials.

Such journalistic stories are valuable and necessary, because much hush-hush information is overclassified, is kept under wraps only because it is embarrassing to the U.S. government, or is classified to keep the public in the dark about questionable government policies or actions. During the Cold War and continuing to this day, the American public is often the last to know information that is common knowledge among intelligence agencies of adversarial nations. Excessive government secrecy is a serious and underrated problem in a republic and has been exacerbated by the spike in clandestine government actions in the Bush-Obama war on terror.

If the government of a republic is going to keep secrets from its own people for their own good (faith is required here), they should keep the restricted information to the minimum. If the government drastically reduced its vast storehouse of secrets to what was truly needed to protect intelligence agents and troops in the field, whistleblowers such as Manning would have much less reason to leak and would likely have more respect for the necessity not to disclose the remaining vital information.

Most important, if a republican government cannot keep its secrets secret, it should not prosecute third-party, non-governmental recipients of the material, but should concentrate on plugging the leaks in its security system.

© 2010 The Independent Institute

Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty, The Independent Institute

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. He also has served as Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the U.S. General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), and has testified on the military and financial aspects of NATO expansion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on CIA oversight before the House Government Reform Committee, and on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Dr. Eland is the author of Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy, as well as The Efficacy of Economic Sanctions as a Foreign Policy Tool. He is a contributor to numerous volumes and the author of 45 in-depth studies on national security issues. His articles have appeared in American Prospect, Arms Control Today, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Emory Law Journal, The Independent Review, Issues in Science and Technology (National Academy of Sciences), Mediterranean Quarterly, Middle East and International Review, Middle East Policy, Nexus, Chronicle of Higher Education, American Conservative, International Journal of World Peace, and Northwestern Journal of International Affairs. Dr. Eland’s popular writings have appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, Sacramento Bee, Orange County Register, Washington Times, Providence Journal, The Hill, and Defense News. He has appeared on ABC’s World News Tonight,  NPR’s Talk of the Nation,  PBS, Fox News Channel, CNBC, Bloomberg TV, CNN, CNN Crossfire,  CNN-fn, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC), Canadian TV (CTV), Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, BBC, and other local, national, and international TV and radio programs.

Allison Bricker

Dr. Paul Cites Growing Momentum to Abolish Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but will government make Smaller Banks Act as New Proxy?

In his weekly Texas Straight Talk address, Representative Ron Paul discusses the growing momentum to abolish Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Nevertheless, Dr. Paul points out that this would be only the first step to allowing the housing market to normalize and that unless the people speak up, the Central Authority will merely seek to put indenture smaller banks to act as proxy agents to continued government backing of mortgage loans regardless of the borrowers ability to repay. [TRANSCRIPT]

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	Representative Ron Paul Texas Straight Talk for August 23rd, 2010 _TRANSCRIPT (PDF 252kb)

Allison Bricker

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA – The Republican faithful gathered at the Riverside Hilton hotel in New Orleans for their quadrennial conference SRLC 2010, to discuss election strategies, attend workshops and listen to the Republican party’s s most public figures. Further, the conference’s most highly covered event the straw poll, featured a tie for first place this year between former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney and Texas Congressional Representative, Ron Paul both receiving 24% of the vote.

Representative Paul who failed to place whatsoever in the previous conference in 2006 and who was widely mocked by the Republican status-quo during the 2008 Presidential campaign is finding an ever-growing audience due to his consistent promotion of Constitutionally limited government as well as his dedication to a humble foreign policy more in line with that of the Founding Generation.

This is Representative Paul’s second straw poll victory having placed first by a wide margin during the CPAC conference held this past February. He credits the growing acceptance of the message to both the explosion in information via the internet and the energetic youth who see that their economic liberty is on the hook thanks to promises made by the federal government regarding Social Security, Medicare, continuing imperial wars, and the new massive health care bill signed into law by President Obama.

Nevertheless, even as Representative Paul and the message of Liberty continue to gain momentum, the old-media as the LibertyMaven points out⁽¹⁾ is none to thrilled and spare no chance to minimize the statesman or the prospect of greater Liberty in our lifetime.

Source(s):⁽¹⁾Liberty Maven ^“Straw Poll Media Bias: Ron Paul vs. Mitt Romney” by: Marc Gallagher, published April 10th, 2010 • MinnesotaChris YouTube Channel

The Smoking Argus

— BEGIN OFFICIAL STATEMENT—

Hello. I’m Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona.

The effects of the ongoing economic slump have been severe and have touched all Americans. Too many people have lost jobs; others are working reduced hours or for lower pay. The latest report shows that unemployment has stubbornly stayed at just below 10 percent. Nearly four million workers have lost their jobs since President Obama took office.

The American people have been telling Washington that promoting job growth must be the first priority. But, for more than a year, Congress and the President have focused instead on a controversial health spending bill which a majority of Americans said they didn’t want. [FULL TRANSCRIPT]

—END OFFICIAL STATEMENT—

Related Material(s)
	GOP Weekly Address, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona: Economic Recovery and Creating Jobs TRANSCRIPT (PDF 40.8KB)

Source(s): Republican National Committee • GOP Weekly Address YouTube Channel

Allison Bricker

It may not be televised but its participants will indeed be educated.

THE REGION, INDIANA – The desire which compels me to write and speak in strong opposition towards the oppressive expansion of the American government, whether under Democrats or Republicans, owes its genesis to the firm imploration by my mom that education does not end upon graduation, and instead must be a continual process throughout the course of one’s life. As it is often said, knowledge is power.

The illuminated truth, motivated by my infatuation with the founding of this Republic, came to me through the worn and sometimes crumbling pages of books, not the endless memorization and standardized testing advocated in government schools.

Unencumbered by whitewashed lesson plans and the sometimes-evident pro-statist bias of my teachers and administrators, the ability for me to sit and soak up the words of those dusty essays, journals, letters, and notes is in my opinion, one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments, id est. the Gutenberg Press.

The proliferation of movable-type in the colonies spurred forth the “Challenge of Ideas”, giving rise to the radical Questioning of the absurd notion that rule over mankind came from divinely appointed kings, queens or parliamentary superiority, the “central planners” of their day. Further, its unique place in our history whereby it aided the distribution of both Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence, cements a fondness in my soul for both it and the enlightened distribution of information.

Unfortunately, the business of news, information, and debate had become increasingly consolidated during the course of the last 100 years. As government intervened into the market via absurd licensure schemes under the guise of promoting “fairness”, “public” ownership of the airwaves et cetera, its endless volumes of regulations succeeded only in raising barriers to entry and creating media oligarchies to the benefit of the state. Government sanctioned soap-boxes have proved mightily their efficient processing and packaging of news and information into simplified talking points, but at what cost?

The result of this corporate protectionist media racket; is to have given rise to the sound bite intellect, thereby imbuing legions of collectives charged with half the facts and all the passionate rhetoric once reserved for a Finney tent revival.

Yet we see throughout history that humanity’s yearning for information is as perpetual as a sunrise. Undiscouraged by the darkness, she eternally dawns over the horizon pushing back the shadows and nefarious K-Street deals that go bump in the night, providing her warmth and illumination to the dual pillars known as the trees of Liberty and Knowledge, which to the utter dismay of the D.C. pull-peddlers shan’t be felled.

Indeed the central authority’s arrogance will lead to its own most necessary undoing. Nevertheless fellow readers, windows do not remain in perpetuum. However, our patient suffering at the hands of the old-media spoon-feeders has in large part been relieved via the propagation of citizen journalists and institutions dedicated to the pursuit of Reason and human Liberty.

How many amongst us gave pause just a decade prior to entertain a contrary view on economics outside the Keynesian philosophy, which dominates the airwaves and halls of academia? Further, what is the rise in percentage of Americans who now know that the FEDERAL RESERVE is a private for-profit bank who charges interest to the government in exchange for loans collateralized by our and our posterity’s wages as opposed to just five years previous?

Whereby even just a decade past many swam in a sea of noise almost exclusively dominated by the 24-hour cable news cycle, perhaps unaware of what questions to even ask, let alone where to look, our present station finds us on the familiar yet long undisturbed grounds of our forbearers.

Americans today are questioning the answers like no time in recent memory. The floodgates of knowledge have burst open providing us the gift of distributed learning via wonderful institutions such as the Mises Foundation, which has its entire catalog available for the taking on iTunes university, free of charge. We the People are gathering under varied banners unified solely by dissatisfaction of government intrusion into all spheres of our lives.

The airwaves are humming with talks of finding Constitutional solutions to the present Crisis, such as the symposium being held by Mike Church in Washington tomorrow to discuss the possibility of a remedy at the hands of an Article V convention.

It makes me smile to know that despite the Central Authority’s best efforts to squeeze out dissent, the tighter they grasp, the more we awaken.

Long Live Liberty and let us raise a glass in celebration of the coming Second Age of Reason.

The Smoking Argus

Government and Gasoline

As we head into the summer driving season and gasoline prices are again creeping up, the administration has announced plans to explore opening up more off-shore areas for exploration and drilling. On the one hand this can be lauded as a positive step. On the other hand, it is too little, much too late to have any meaningful or long-term effect on what Americans pay at the pump any time soon, if at all.

Indeed, if increasing domestic energy production was really a priority, the administration would direct the EPA to remove its many roadblocks and barriers to energy production. In fact, abolishing the EPA altogether would do much to improve our country’s economy. Instead of protecting the environment as they are supposed to do, most of what they do simply chills the economy. Polluters should be directly liable in court to any and all parties they harm, rather than bureaucrats at the EPA. [Full Transcript]

Related Material(s):
	Representative Ron Paul Texas Straight Talk: Government and Gasoline April 4, 2010 TRANSCRIPT

Source(s): Representative Ron Paul’s House Webpage • MinnesotaChris YouTube Channel

Guest Contributor

A Warning to Freedom Lovers.

A friend of mine told me he went to his storage unit yesterday to stash away some items for safe-keeping. While he was there, an employee of the facility told him agents of the state, in this case, employees of Ontario, Inc. had visited him.

These state employees were handing out a paper with the following content:

Illegal Tobacco – Know the Signs

1. Observe tobacco products.
2. Smell associated with tobacco products.
3. Renters who pay cash.
4. Rental of numerous storage units.
5. Delivery of sea container to a newly rented storage unit.
6. Use of rental vehicles. (i.e. 20′ one-ton truck)
7. Visits by many individuals to the storage unit.
8. Numerous visits to the storage unit.

If you suspect that a unit rented from you is being used to store tobacco products, please contact the ministry of Revenue’s confidential tip line at:

(905) 440-4227 – “We want the information not your name.”

ONTARIO MINISTRY OF REVENUE

Ontario Incorporated (or whichever government you wish to use as an example) is a very large business entity. Unlike most legal business entities, like Wal-Mart or McDonald’s etc., many of the employees of Ontario Inc. are allowed to carry guns. You might wonder why Ontario Inc.’s employees carry guns while those of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s Inc. arm themselves with smiles.

Well, the short answer is that while McDonalds and Wal-Mart are evil, profit seeking companies who must compete for your dollars in what is commonly known as the “private sector,” Ontario Inc. is a loving, caring company who knows it’s goods and services are so superior to anything offered by the private sector that it exempts itself from the restrictions that apply to greedy, privately owned concerns.

It’s “products”, and “services”, are so essential that it need not rely upon your voluntary financial support. It “knows,” how valuable it’s offerings are, sets the price independent of any market forces, and demands that you become it’s customer; or else!

Unlike Wal-Mart or McDonald’s, which must use advertising, smiles and competitive prices to persuade you to part with your dollars, Ontario Inc. has something far more effective, men with guns.

Oh! If only McDonald’s Inc. could have the same privileges and powers as Ontario Inc, it could legislate Wendy’s, Harvey’s, and Burger King Etc. out of existence. It would then become the sole supplier of burgers and fries.

After a few years, once the public had forgotten that they used to have a choice of suppliers, McDonald’s could declare itself essential. It could require that all of the citizens within its jurisdiction pay for its burger making services, whether they used them or not. It would have finally discovered the perfect business model; guaranteed profits, guaranteed success.

Citizens would receive an annual bill from McDonald’s. It might be based upon how many burgers the citizen *should have* purchased the previous year (Note: *should have* – based upon the recommendations of highly paid consultants and McDonald’s funded universities etc.) Payment would be mandatory.

Perhaps, McDonald’s management would have been elected by an ignorant mass of easily manipulated voter/sheep (See the current government of the United States of America.) In addition, the majority of them would have voted for the aspiring CEO because he was a “progressive”, who sincerely believed that the price one paid for burgers ought to be based on the ability to pay. Those with higher incomes would be forced to pay a higher price for their burgers. Those with no income would get their burgers subsidized.

The receivables department of McDonald’s would be staffed by a bunch of Happy Cops dressed up as smiling clowns…. with guns… and the legal power to peer into your financial records…. to make sure you had not made any false statements on your burger returns. And as a BONUS… no need to worry too much about the quality of their product since they are immune from any competitive market forces. They could sell you ground rat if they wanted. (See the recent U.S. Health Care Bill.)

Eventually, organized labor would see the wonderful opportunities available to its members in “representing”, all McDonalds employees. The govern…. excuse me, I meant McDonald’s worker at the drive-thru window asking if you would like fries with your burger would now be making $60, 000 a year. (Irate customers with cell phone cameras might take the occasional snapshot of the McDonald’s order taker snoozing away as the cars sat lined up. People at house parties would proudly proclaim that their son or daughter had just passed the exam and landed themselves a job (for life) at McDonalds.

Clip Courtesy: WGA/Dreamworks/JamesKlanto © 2002 Warner Bros. Pictures

If the above seems far-fetched, I have two words for you … Post Office.

So… back to the tobacco Gestapo… and the company for which they work. It has come to my attention, though I will not say how… that the true market price of a carton of cigarettes is in the neighborhood of $25. However, under Ontario’s monopoly, the price of a carton of cigarettes purchased “legally”, is about $75.00, give or take a few dollars. Government Inc., therefore, is losing about $50 “profit”, on every carton sold outside of its greedy and tenacious authority.

And if one of its gun-toting clowns happens to barge into your storage locker, confiscate your stash and slap you with a nasty and spiteful fine, don’t be confused when he smiles at you and says, “Have a Nice Day.”

Ontario Inc. We will ram it up your butt whether you like it or not. And if you don’t like it, go fuck yourself. Smiles might be free somewhere else, but here; you pay a 5% tax.

Guest Contributor: Freelance Writer and Taxicab Driver

Mr. Weinhold graduated from Mohawk College located in Hamilton, Ontario in 1981 with a degree in Chemical Technology. Passionate about politics and outspoken about the ever-growing largess of government Hans describes himself as a lifelong libertarian. Currently self-employed as a taxicab driver Hans currently spends most of his time loitering, smoking cigarettes, shooting the breeze with his fellow cab-drivers waiting for their next customer from the Hamilton International Airport.

Wire Report

(WIRE/IndInst) – Most Americans just assume that the U.S. government’s actions to protect them from terrorism, if not perfect, are rational, based on sound information and analysis, and undertaken with the intention to protect the most people possible. But the government’s response here to the tragic bombings on the Russian subway should raise questions about such assumptions.

In response to the subway bombings in Russia, the metro subway system in Washington, D.C., increased its security—with transit police and bomb-sniffing canines conducting sweeps through subway stations and railroad yards. Yet the subway bombers in Russia are likely Chechens or other peoples in the North Caucuses seeking independence from Russia. Although the Chechen rebels have relied on funding from al-Qaeda and Doku Umarov, the Chechen insurgent leader, has several al-Qaeda emissaries on his staff, the Chechens are attacking Russia because the Russians continue a brutal suppression of Chechen aspirations for independence.

As with most local groups affiliated with al-Qaeda—for example, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (Iraq), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (North Africa)—the Chechens focus on local issues, rather than attacking U.S. territory. So the Chechens are unlikely to want to attack—and probably don’t have the ability to bomb—the Washington subway system. So why did Washington subway security ramp up after the Moscow bombings? It was either reflexive irrationality that a similar attack might occur here or the government demonstrating that it’s “doing something” to illogically nervous American commuters.

Probably both of these factors had something to do with it. Remember the hysteria after 9/11, when young National Guardsmen were deployed in some U.S. airports with assault rifles? One could only hope they weren’t given any ammunition and that it was all for show. Or how about the short-lived banning of electronic tickets and prohibition on getting out of your seat during the last 30 minutes of every flight into the nation’s capital?

Government action often seems to be reactive, whether rational or not, after a major incident, especially in the very publicly visible realm of air travel. After the shoe-bomber incident, the government required us to take off our shoes and have them X-rayed. After the terrorist plot to mix chemicals for a bomb once on the plane, liquids were limited to three-ounce containers. The Christmas underwear bomber will eventually give us all full-body scanners. Yet one can walk onto an Amtrak train with no security at all and a cruise ship with much less intensive scrutiny than air travel. An easily sinkable cruise ship going down could kill over a thousand people, and a train bombing could kill hundreds, as it did in Spain. In part, airline security gets more government effort because more people fly than take trains or cruise ships, thus resulting in more pubic awareness of security in that sector. Regardless of the threat, politics directs that lots of government attention be paid to air security.

More important, the government also guards things that are unlikely to be attacked, which should lead the average citizen to wonder if it even understands the threat from al-Qaeda central, which is trying to attack U.S. targets. For example, ironically and tragically in Washington, D.C., concrete barriers and a beefed-up police presence have “bunkerized” the Jefferson Memorial, which is supposed to be a tribute to the rhetorical champion of American liberty. Yet al-Qaeda usually attacks symbolic economic (the World Trade Center in New York) or political (the U.S. national military command at the Pentagon) targets. Despite the propaganda of George W. Bush, al-Qaeda does not attack the United States because of its freedom.

When Bush kept repeating this nonsense, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s heinous leader, put out an angry message denying it and reiterating that he attacks the United States because of its “infidel” occupation of Muslim lands and its support for corrupt Middle Eastern dictators.

Silence concerning or the deliberate muddling of al-Qaeda’s motives for attacking the U.S. by American politicians and media allows the American government to avoid being held accountable for its contributory negligence in causing horrific terrorist blowback, such as the 9/11 attacks. The excessive security at the Jefferson Memorial shows the lengths that the government will go to maintain the charade.

If terrorism is to be stopped, the underlying causes have to be eliminated. In the case of Russia, it has to somehow recognize Chechen self-determination. In the case of the United States, an honest debate has to finally occur about the blowback effects from an unnecessarily interventionist and militarized U.S. foreign policy abroad. A nation’s foreign and defense policies are supposed to make its people and territory safer, not less secure.

© The Independent Institute 2010

Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty, The Independent Institute

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. He also has served as Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the U.S. General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), and has testified on the military and financial aspects of NATO expansion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on CIA oversight before the House Government Reform Committee, and on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Dr. Eland is the author of Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy, as well as The Efficacy of Economic Sanctions as a Foreign Policy Tool. He is a contributor to numerous volumes and the author of 45 in-depth studies on national security issues. His articles have appeared in American Prospect, Arms Control Today, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Emory Law Journal, The Independent Review, Issues in Science and Technology (National Academy of Sciences), Mediterranean Quarterly, Middle East and International Review, Middle East Policy, Nexus, Chronicle of Higher Education, American Conservative, International Journal of World Peace, and Northwestern Journal of International Affairs. Dr. Eland’s popular writings have appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, Sacramento Bee, Orange County Register, Washington Times, Providence Journal, The Hill, and Defense News. He has appeared on ABC’s World News Tonight,  NPR’s Talk of the Nation,  PBS, Fox News Channel, CNBC, Bloomberg TV, CNN, CNN Crossfire,  CNN-fn, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC), Canadian TV (CTV), Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, BBC, and other local, national, and international TV and radio programs.

The Smoking Argus

In this week’s Texas Straight Talk, Dr. Ron Paul discusses the reality of how through the government management of health care, medical costs will only continue to escalate. He also discusses the misnomer of health care being right seeing that the government must first employ force to offer the service to another. Pointing to that health insurance was originally intended to be used in case of serious injury or disease and not routine doctor visits and other non-emergency situations. He continues by posing the hypothetical question, “What if vehicle insurance covered not only major accidents but all routine maintenance and expenses such as gasoline. Stating that with no market force to measure to balance supply and demand the cost of gasoline would skyrocket in as more and more individuals began to rely on their automobile policy to cover the expense rather than budgeting for the necessary consumption thereof.

Further, Dr. Paul takes umbrage with the notion that by wholly removing health insurance from any sort of market restraint that the promise of government to reduce costs is pure fantasy. Continuing, he describes that the already overburdened welfare state may very well collapse as cost begin to escalate and the much touted savings begin pushing the original estimates into the red, just as every previous government program has done especially in the case of Social Security, which this year is projected to pay out more than it takes in through payroll taxes. To Dr. Paul and other student from the Austrian school of economics, this new entitlement will only further erode our economy further delaying any serious recovery in the near future.

Source(s): MinnesotaChris YouTube Channel • Official House Website of Representative Ron Paul (TX)