"Dishonorable and foolish people claim the existence of terrorism essentially gives license for the rest of us to become criminal, willfully trampling on individuals’ rights to privacy, property, free speech, due process, civic participation, etc. Mass criminality against the individual in the name of social safety is the glue that holds together all tyrannical systems, triggering a catastrophic cycle of moral relativism that eventually bleeds a culture dry."
Several "dignitaries" have paraphrased that those who are ignorant of history will either participate in the repetition of history or just permit the devastating history of the past to repeat without any action to prevent it.
{Editor's Note: Most notably George Santayana is known for famous sayings, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it",[2] and "[O]nly the dead have seen the end of war." (a quote often wrongly attributed to Plato).}
History has shown that when those who endured the pain of past historical failures, who continued to fight against repeating those failures, die, then the young who did not experience the wars and economic devastation of the past invariably seem to move politically in the very direction that will repeat the devastation.
The US Government, mostly because of war, depression, and misguided 'leaders', has evolved from the 'limited' government desired by the authors of the Constitution to prevent the tyranny of a king into a collusive, conspiratorial conglomerate of the three branches --- Legislative, Executive and Judicial --- which over 125 years have devolved into today's perversion of liberty.
During 125 years CONgresses, Presidents, and the Courts have created an impenetrable, faceless, unaccountable bureaucracy whereby almost any violation or infringement of the Constitution can occur without eventually isolating the bureaucrat(s) ultimately responsible for the failure. The bureaucracies of hundreds of agencies are NEVER ELIMINATED and NEVER REDUCED in size even if the original purpose is now obsolete!
There is an inherent tendency in all governmental power to recognize no restraints on its operation and to extend the sphere of its dominion as much as possible. To control everything, to leave no room for anything to happen of its own accord without the interference of the authorities--this is the goal for which every ruler secretly strives.
Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, p.67
The PRIMARY thrust for the government agenda to expand incessantly is the socio-progressive mindset of many elected officials (Sen. Chuckie Shoeshiner for one) and their lackeys, the permanent bureaucrats who remain after elections, the government employees who pay forced-dues to UNIONS. The bigger government gets, the more FORCEFUL control government can exert on its citizens. After all, government bureaucrats need something to do on the job besides playing games, viewing porn on their computers, or talking on the phone.
BIG government continues to get bigger almost ENTIRELY because government employee unions implicitly threaten elected officials into a quid-pro-quo deal, i.e. unions will donate their union's dues to candidates who support the expansion of government. Expansion includes higher pay, automatic raises, automatic promotions, and more new hires to expand the union's dues revenue. Examples of recent expansions are Homeland Security (Big Brother), the TSA, the NSA's new Utah Data Center and ObamaCare's 16,000 new IRS employees who, in the end, will be destructive of our civil rights in their futile attempt to enforce the 'individual mandate' just as the DEA has been and is incapable and unable to stop 'illegal' drug trafficking.
The Legislative-Executive-Judicial Cabal with our Marxist Dictator leading the Cabal
Obama loves America to death.
"Extortion and thuggery are good things when they're called law!"
Below is one of many tyrannical crimes of the Monster created since the Civil War !
Becky Gerritson: "...government is out of control!" and "...our representative government has failed us."
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the IRS to detail under oath how some of former agency official Lois Lerner’s emails went missing, as well as any potential methods for recovering them.
Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington gave the Internal Revenue Service exactly a month — until Aug. 10 — to file a report, which he demanded as part of a lawsuit from a conservative watchdog, Judicial Watch, against the agency.
Judicial Watch is seeking a wide range of documents from the IRS, including Lerner’s emails, as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. It has complained that the IRS didn’t tell it that the agency couldn’t recover all of Lerner’s emails from 2009 to 2011.
Sullivan cast his ruling as a compromise, and a potential way for Judicial Watch to get answers without the court wading any deeper into the matter. Judicial Watch had asked the court to potentially compel IRS officials to testify about the lost emails, through a process called limited discovery.
Bureaucracies are ineffective and inept because 1/2 to 2/3 of union employees were hired to do 'make-work' jobs, i.e. they're deadweight! The organization of bureaucracies is completely unmanageable and employees are COMPLETELY UNACCOUNTABLE. A goverment-union employee cannot be fired, reprimanded, admonished, or retrained without the direct and threatening involvement of the union. Action against a government employee that does not meet with union approval can cause 'work slow-downs' and other disruptive work environment problems. The end result might be that the union provides financial support for the opposing candidates in the next election especially if those candidate(s) make an under-the-table deal with the union for union bucks. THIS KIND OF UNION ACTIVITY HAS DESTROYED AND CONTINUES TO DESTROY COMPANIES IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR. Only the government can tolerate this employee insubordination because the government is supported by the TAXPAYER (and the Federal Reserve)! If the Taxpayer won't pay higher taxes (pay-check extraction), then CONgress figures new, sneakier, and more complex means of stealing from citizens or the Fed floods the economy with more money out-of-thin-air to fund these expansions. Government will never go out of business except taxpayer money will disproportionately be redistributed to union workers unless genuinely insulated elected officials can be found who will defund and/or eliminate unnecessary departments/agencies and reduce the entire government to the barest, most efficient form. Government can no longer be a workfare employer of last resort.
Government Employee Unions contribute their forced-dues (compulsory as a condition of employment) to Democrat and sympathetic Republican candidates. The same union members, the staff of elected Democrats and Republicans sit at the contract negotiation table where excessive salaries (40% higher than private sector) and lavish benefit packages (pensions that pay $100-200K a year at retirement) plus multiple sick days, holidays, and vacation days are "negotiated". If any candidate or incumbent stands up against a specific proposal to create or expand an existing agency or generally stands up to cut goverment, all of the financial resources of the unions are used in the next election to defeat the incumbent or a challenging opponent who espouses any government cutting policy. Does anyone see the conflict-of-interest?
I estimate that one-third to one-half of government employees do productive work for only two hours a day. The net result is that GOVERNMENT MUST GROW! In the book Shadowbosses, the author writes that their are only two groups of people in the USA --- Pie-makers and Pie-eaters or Taxpayers and Taxreceivers. In the private sector, most unions are careful not to demand too much for fear of driving their employer into bankruptcy or out of business entirely. In the public sector, the Pie-eaters expand their government gravy train endlessly at will and the Federal Reserve (creates inflation & price increases) and the Pie-makers pay for the never-ending government expansion. More and more union members are hired every year to continue this de facto corruption.
FROM Shadowbosses:
"The percentage of private sector workers in unions has been declining since the 1950s, both because unionized businesses have been failing and because workers in new businesses don't choose to unionize. Basically, private sector unions have been driving themselves out of business for sixty years."
"Government employee unions are a totally different animal. Government employee unions use politics as the central plank of their business plans --- unlike private sector unions, which have far less need for politics to maintain their bottom line."
"Then, these unions keep our government inefficient by preventing it from reorganizing, streamlining, and privatizing government services, because more efficient government would mean less union dues revenue. There will be a tipping point when our government gets so big that the last remaining taxpayers in America will no longer be able to support the enormous cost of running our government. And we are rapidly approaching this point."
NO MATTER WHAT YOU HEAR OR READ about how government can cure all ills --- poverty, starvation, ignorance --- Free Market Capitalism with limited, unintrusive government throughout history always builds a much more prosperous economy in which all have the opportunity to gain liberty, wealth and private property.
Maybe our current government socialists and progressives should take a history class at their nearest college!
The FairTax is a consumption tax unilaterally applied to all Americans at the same rate. For businesses, payroll taxes would no longer exist. Our exports would include a heavy tax for overseas buyers purchasing our products, while our imports would be cheaper for us to purchase. I'm not sure how this would affect GDP, as more information is necessary.
According to the FairTax website, "Under the FairTax, every person living in the United States pays a sales tax on purchases of new goods and services, excluding necessities due to the prebate." The prebate gives every legal resident household an "advance refund" at the beginning of each month so that purchases made up to the poverty level are tax-free.
So a family of four making something like $50,000/year should not have to pay taxes, thus preventing an unfair burden on low-income families. Since the FairTax eliminates both federal and payroll taxes, you get to keep your gross pay amount of each paycheck earned.