My Speech on Southern Africa, 1986

[In my last post I made reference to a speech I gave to the annual conference of the National Urban League in 1986. As some readers have expressed an interest in it, I post it here in its entirety. I believe the ideas it contains clearly have a relevance that goes beyond the situation in South Africa at the time. I will address this further soon. For now, some historical food for thought:]

Does South Africa

Have a Future?

Policy No. 857 United States Department of State

Bureau of Public Affairs

Washington, D.C.

Following is an address by Ambassador Alan L. Keyes, Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs, before the National Urban League's annual conference San Francisco, July 21, 1986.

Thank you very much. I especially would like to thank all of you and my hosts of the National Urban League for the opportunity to speak with you this evening about a topic which I think is one of the most important and pressing on the agenda of the United States today and the topic on which it has always been important and becomes increasingly important that there should be extensive public dialogue, discussion, and understanding as we try to work in common amongst ourselves an approach that will assure that the United States makes the best possible contribution to the struggle against injustice in South Africa and to the efforts to build in its place a truly just
society.

I guess the motto of my thinking about this subject has always been twofold. The first is to remind myself of the quote from The Federalist Papers: James Madison, when he said that "justice is the end of government, it is the end of civil society, it will be pursued either until it be obtained or until liberty be lost in the pursuit." You know Madison and how much he was attached to liberty: you know he was saying something very profound there. He's saying that justice in politics is the single most important motivating factor. It is one thing that can never be neglected or forgotten because if you neglect it or forget it, you will lose the most precious political thing.

The other is a sentiment that Martin Luther King was fond of: "True peace is not merely the absence of some negative force, tension or war; it is the presence of some positive force, justice,
good will, brotherhood."

And the two things together mean that justice
is of overriding importance but that it must also be conceived of as a positive good.

An Escalating Cycle of Violence

In the past few months, Americans have become more intensely aware of the violent and tragic situation in South Africa. We have witnessed an escalating cycle of violence and repression accompanied by mounting international pressure for effective action against the apartheid regime. Calls for severe economic sanctions against South Africa, once confined to the halls of the UN General Assembly, are being sounded from platforms around the country and world. After an abortive effort to mediate among the opposing factions the Commonwealth's Eminent Persons Group joined the rising crescendo. Some weeks ago, in response to these pressures, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that would impose severe economic sanctions against South Africa.

People everywhere are outraged by the reprehensible abuses inherent in the South Africa Government's efforts to maintain the unjust apartheid system. Many regard punitive sanctions as the only way to express this outrage, despite persistent doubts about whether they will. In fact, help to achieve the desired goal of justice
in South Africa. Because the injustice is so great, because the anger and frustration in the face of repression is so strong, it seems almost a travesty to employ deliberate, patient, careful analysis to devise an effective strategy for promoting justice in South Africa. The heart cries out for action, impatient with the trammels of thought. The heart says that repression must end, no matter how. The heart says that injustice must cease, no matter how. The heart says that apartheid must go-not in a year, a decade, or a generation, but now.

The heart cries out, the heart speaks, the heart demands-but cries are not enough, speech is not enough, demands are not enough; defiant outrage, anger, and condemnation are not enough without an effective strategy for action. The world today is burdened with the tragic consequences of righteous passion undisciplined by careful thought. Not every crusade against evil and injustice leads to the Promised Land. Many instead are lost in a wilderness of violence, a violence circle of repression, retribution, and revenge. Will this be the fate of South Africa? Will the just demands and hopes of a people long oppressed end in a quagmire of civil war--black against white, black against black, white against black , White against white--until equality in suffering and atrocity grimly refutes the hateful premises of racism?

In a world beset by so many ills and host to so many deadly and intractable conflicts, it is awfully hard to see through the ugly realities of present-day South Africa to a better day. Why should South Africa fare better than Lebanon, North Ireland, Cyprus, Chad, Ethiopia, Angola, Iran, and Iraq? What will keep it from this tragic roll of countries burnt out with conflicts no one in the world knows how to end? The South African situation has all the qualifications for inclusion. On the one hand, people determined by any means to throw off the yoke of physical oppression and indignity imposed upon them by the heinous apartheid system. On the other, people too crudely arrogant or terrified to share power or to use it well. Bound together now by the iron bands of a long and bitter history; they must live and let live or kill and be killed together. On the one side, the advantages of just, angry, and unquenchable determination to be free; On the other, the advantages of technology, organization, and the residue of a stubborn and bigoted national spirit, crystallized in bitterness after the Afrikaners suffered defeat at the hands of what was then the world's most powerful empire. The one side will never give up, for suffering only sharpens the thirst for justice. The other will not easily yield, since fear and misbegotten pride are often willing partners in self-destruction.

As these antagonists come to grips, not only South Africa but the whole southern African region will be embroiled in conflict. The states around South Africa surely will not sit passively by. The South African Government has repeatedly demonstrated that respect for boundaries and the rule of law will not constrain the death throes of apartheid. The defenders of the present regime will lash out at the surrounding states, making them choose between insatiable war and ignominious passivity. In each neighboring states, they will fan the flames of internal conflicts, vindictively determined that if their power is to be broken then the hopes of all southern Africa will be reduced to ashes.

Now there are some who contemplate this prospect with grim resignation. I think they feel that if this is the price that must be paid to end the long nightmare of apartheid, then so be it. Yet no one can guarantee that the nightmare of war and mutual atrocity has established itself as a permanent reality. No one can say that the whirlwind of violence will not give birth to a tyranny of violence, rejecting racism only so that it may oppress all equally. Is this justice for whose sake apartheid is condemned? Is this the future for which they oppressed victims of apartheid have suffered and struggled and died and are dying today?

Apartheid and the Struggle for Justice

Apartheid is the evil against which we fight, but we do not fight against evil for the sake of evil. We fight against evil for the sake of present and future good. Without the sense of a positive good to be preserved and realized, the struggle against evil is determined and defined by evil itself. The oppressed see themselves only with the eyes of the oppressor. They fear as he would have them fear; they hate as he would have them hate; they kill as he would have them kill. They react according to a logic determined not by their own good but by the violence, fear, and hatred at the heart of the evil they seek to undo.

Such logic can be the basis of struggle but not a victory, for true victory is achieved not when the present enemy is vanquished but when a better destiny is won. To achieve that destiny, it is not enough to know what evil we fight, we must know the good we seek to achieve. It is not enough that we seek to destroy apartheid unless, in the process, we see and help to build the foundations for a South Africa that is just, democratic and free. Yet how is it possible to see the ingredients for such a future in the present welter of stubborn discrimination, injustice, physical brutality, and oppression.

Clearly, it is impossible if we allow the reality of apartheid to blind us to the complex reality that is South Africa itself. It is unfortunate that among the chief victims of apartheid is the ability to see beyond the premises of racism that apartheid represents, to see without racial blinders the problem of governance and nation building that confronts the whole South African people. Apartheid is not unjust only because it is racist; it is unjust because it manipulates racism in order to achieve the arbitrary domination of the whole society by one group of faction within it.

Historically, I think apartheid had the twin purposes of neutralizing the power of the English-speaking whites in South Africa while guaranteeing the political supremacy of the Afrikaners. It achieves these purposes by isolating whites within the false solidarity of racist enclaves. Within this all-white enclave, the political power of the more numerous Afrikaners counterbalances the economic power of the more wealthy English-speaking community. At the same time, the resentment engendered by racist practices prevents cooperation, and has prevented it, between the English and the nonwhites to challenge Afrikaners domination.

In South Africa, therefore, the injustice is not simply racism; it is the arbitrary domination of one faction of society, skillfully manipulating and employing racism to keep all its other elements in check. But if the injustice lies in factional domination, justice cannot be achieved simply by substituting the tyranny of one faction for that of another, even if the new faction is a majority of the population. Justice, therefore, I believe, is not simply majority rule. As an American, but especially as a black American, nothing is more evident to me than this oft-neglected truth. I often think about it- if simple majority rule had prevailed in the United States, I certainly would not be sitting up here today as an official of the U.S. Government. In history of the United States, simple majority rule meant slavery. Simple majority rule meant Jim Crow. Simple majority rule meant the unjust repression of a vulnerable minority.

Fortunately, the basic principles of American Constitution did not sanction unlimited majority rule. They demanded respect for individual rights whether the individuals composed a majority or a minority of the population. What we often forget, however, is that guarantees for individual rights were not originally intended to protect the welfare of poor, vulnerable minorities. They were intended to prevent the personal and property rights of the wealthy few from being invaded and expropriated by the more numerous majority. They were part of the overall system of checks and balances through which a political system based upon the authority of the people avoids tyranny, demagoguery, and endless factional strife. As it turned out, the same principles that protected the wealthy few from the arbitrary abuse of government power could later be invoked to protect a poor, black minority.

The American experience suggests therefore, that when rightly conceived the constitutional protections afforded a privileged minority can become bulwarks for all against arbitrary and tyrannical uses of government power. What seemed at first to be limits on democratic freedom were revealed instead as guarantees of that freedom. Justice, therefore, is not the simple assertion of the political power of a majority. In a just society, whether a small minority or a large majority, no one is allowed arbitrarily to dominate the whole. The power of each must be balanced and limited by protections for the power of the other.

Toward a Democratic Future

Now I hope you all excuse me for that slight digression into political theory, but I thought it was necessary because we talk a lot about justice, but we don't think about it in great detail, despite the fact that it is a very difficult thing to achieve and understand sometimes. Injustice, not so; we all know what injustice is. We just have to watch out TV sets to know what injustice is, to know what brutality is—the oppression, the jailings of the black leadership in South Africa—just watch that, and you know what injustice is.

But justice requires some further thought; but as you can see when you think about it, it is not impossible to conceive of. It shouldn't be impossible for the whites in South Africa to conceive of either because, on the basis of concept of democratic justice I have just outlined, it is quite possible to envisage a democratic future for South Africa need not be afraid of. It is a future in which all have an equal vote but in which the power of the majority is limited and constrained by law s and practices which protect the persons and property of minorities. It is a future in which the archaic or artificial division of race and tribe are gradually replaced by the more productive and useful divisions of economic, professional, and social interests. It is a future in which whites and blacks understand that human beings may have more in common than language or race or even the shared experience of oppression and the struggle to overcome it. It is a future in which the long-repressed but undying spirit of black Africa joins with the stubborn pride and careful industry of white Africa in the crucible of a new national identity-one that could point the way toward the brighter future of the entire continent.

Strange as it may seem, in that future, South Africa-the very community that today maintains a system to repress freedom in South Africa-could be the anchor and shield against repression. In the new South Africa, the white community would retain the advantages of economic power, of technical and managerial expertise, of skills invaluable to the maintenance and progress of society. Too few to dominate, they would nonetheless, be too powerful to be oppressed. Individuals and groups that would otherwise be exposed to the arbitrary abuse of power could, by forging alliances with whites, successfully thwart efforts to rule by fear or brute force. The pattern of arbitrary rule by one man or a race or a party that prevails in so many other parts of Africa and the world could be successfully brought to and end if the whites could be brought to play a constructive role ion the political system.

I believe that a just constitution for South Africa will protect property but accord no privileges to race. It will allow a certain influence to economic interests, but without recognizing such interests as the privileged possession of any race or ethnic group. By respecting the balance of public and private forces within the society it will guarantee that all have the instruments with which to protect their interests while none has the power to destroy or dominate the interests of the rest. Taking advantage of geographic as well as economic divisions, it will aim to prevent tyranny and to compel shifting patterns of cooperation along non-racial, non-tribal lines. It will aim to preserve the existence of a thriving private sector in South Africa. This sector will serve both as a refuge and a base for Afrikaners no longer able to enjoy the privileges of the present racially exclusive welfare state, It will also avoid reliance upon government power as the exclusive engine of progressive social and economic change.

Without the racist blinders of apartheid, such a future for South Africa is easy to imagine. Given the ugly realities of apartheid, it will be difficult to achieve. Yet the effort to conceive of it can help us to discern better and worse ways of working for justice and against the apartheid regime, Once we conceive a positive future for the country, we realize that our efforts now must help top build the new, more just society even as we support those forces working to dismantle the present unjust regime. Justice in South Africa cannot wait until the campaign against apartheid is over. Laying its foundation must be an integral part of that campaign. In a campaign of destruction, bombs and bullets and negative pressures might suffice, but in the effort to construct a just society we must seek to transform the pillars and walls of oppression into the bricks and mortars of a new mansion of freedom.

If we wish to foster such a process of transformation, the first step is to realize that it is a process that must involve all the people of South Africa. The common error that is made on all sides in the current discussion of the South African tragedy is the assumption that the white government and the white community are the arbiters of the country's future. Whether the goal is pressure or engagement, the primary object of every existing approach is to influence a change of heart among South Africa's whites. The nonwhite population id often perceived either as victim of threat, the target of repression or the source of angry violence.

The tragic irony of apartheid lies precisely in this insidious triumph of its racist presumptions. When shall we come to see in the angry faces of striking students not only the desperate hatred of oppression but the desperate passion for learning and truth? When shall we come to know in the grim determination of striking workers not just the burning reaction to repression but the deep will to labor with dignity, rise with merit, and pass on to a future generation a legacy of achievement? When shall we be able to see beyond the "necklaces" and battling shantytown gangs to perceive the unquenchable spirit that can light a hearth fire in the deepest poverty, maintain the bonds of family through long years of separation keep home and even hope alive, despite every brutal blow of degradation? When shall we see beyond the categories of victimization to the strong, resilient human beings whose passion, will, and spirit are the constructive flame in which the better future of South Africa can be forged and tempered?

Despite every effort of the apartheid system, these people have already been the makers of a profound revolution in South Africa's life. We speak glibly of South Africa's mineral wealth, of its agricultural plenty, of its developed industrial economy. But whether; on the land, or in the mines or in the factories, the hands and sinews that have made such progress possible have been drawn primarily from South Africa's black community. Blacks comprise over 75% of South Africa's labor force, and without them hardly a crop would grow, hardly a drill or screw would turn. They are the indispensable builders of present-day South Africa, the positive power of its economic life. If they have been weak, it is only because until now, they have not been fully conscious of this power or fully capable, through organization, of transforming it into an instrument of change.

More than anything else, the growth and expansion of the South Africa's modern economy have impelled the development of this consciousness. The very economic arena in which blacks were unjustly deprived of their arable land, discriminated against in wages, unjustly denied promotion for their skill and merit nevertheless provided the framework for developing the most potent form of power in the hands of South Africa's blacks today. It is not their power to destroy that offers the most potent threat to the apartheid system. It is the indispensable necessity to South Africa's existence of their power to labor and to build. And what people should realize, I think, is that blacks do not have this power because the South African Government permits them to enjoy it; they have it because neither the government nor the country could long survive without it. Those who talk of power sharing in South Africa as if it were only a future goal have been duped into forgetting that, despite every effort of repression, black South Africans have begun to make it a present reality. The question is not whether whites and blacks will share power but, rather, how blacks effectively using the power they have, can work toward the justice they have been denied.

U.S. Influence in Promoting Positive Change

Seen in this light, the question for Americans and for others in the international community is not with what well intentioned gestures we can show our hatred of apartheid and our sympathy with the suffering of its black victims but rather how, with concrete acts, we can support the expansion and used of their power. Will we serve the latter through a campaign which, in order to bring pressure to bear on the white South African Government, sacrifices the modern arena in which this black power is today emerging in full force? Will we serve that purpose by withdrawing our effective presence from South Africa, leaving a weakened black community alone with an armed oppressor, facing the desperate choice of combat or surrender? The proponents of punitive economic sanction claim that such sanctions are the last means of avoiding an all-out civil war. I believe that, on the contrary, by depriving South African blacks of their most potent nonviolent tool for change, there sanctions will, in fact, make such a war inevitable. Given the future for which we hope, given the positive goal of justice for which we strive, we should oppose such sanctions-not because they will hurt South Africa's blacks but because they are not the most effective way to help them.

Our goal should be to help South African blacks transform the economic revolution that could not have occurred without them into the political revolution that is their moral right. To achieve this goal, we must not dismantle or withdraw from our role in South Africa's economy. We must seek broadly and effectively to develop and use that role in ways that explicitly enhance the actual power of South Africa's unjustly oppressed black majority. Our efforts should not be undertaken in the token spirit of reformers but in the spirit of peaceful revolutionaries. Even Marx acknowledged that man has never invented a more potent tool of revolutionary historical change than the capitalist economic system. Its insistence upon profit and efficiency has little tolerance for the archaic categories of feudal tradition or the invented classifications of racist delusion. It is no accident that the South African business sector has gradually come to be among the most outspoken opponents of apartheid repression. It is no accident that South Africa's modern economic sector has yielded an ever-stronger antiapartheid labor union movement, which continues to grow, despite repeated efforts at repression and destruction of its leadership by the South African Government.

Now this does not mean, and I am not arguing, that on their own, economic forces will bring an end to apartheid. Even if this were true, it might take several generations, and we don't have several generations. What is needed is conscious efforts to harness and accelerate the effects of the financial and organizational forces of the modern private sector. We must continue and intensify the sharing and use of power in the economic sphere as a base and instrument for change in the political arena.

Now I think this could be addressed in three broad areas:

• Within the modern corporations and enterprises themselves and in their relations with the black community, and I think, for those of you who are from the private sector out there, what you should understand is that what I am talking about here is actually harder than what the proponents of sanctions are asking you to do. They are asking you to withdraw your power. In fact, I am asking you to share it now in effective ways with the black people of South Africa, to share it now by means that will involve black people in the decision making structures that are in the hands and within the power of corporate structures that can be influenced today by people in the American community and other parts of the international community.
  

  
  

• In addition to this kind of action, there should be massive support for the increasingly effective South African labor movement.
  

  
  

• I would see, as well, a novel suggestion but one that bears thinking on-- a program of Expanded Capital Ownership by black South African workers of shares in firms doing business in South Africa so that they will directly derive benefit from the operation of those corporations, directly see their financial and organizational power base increased by the activities of those corporations.
  

In line with the spirit of quiet revolution, efforts in these areas must go beyond reformist schemes to improve the conditions of life for blacks. The aim should be effectively to incorporate the black community within the power structure of the economic sector and to use some portion of the resources of that sector to support black efforts to build and sustain effective bases of economic social and political organization. Corporations should consciously seek to become the wellsprings of expanding oases of transformation in South Africa—the focus of peacefully revolutionary communities in which the new South Africa ceases to be a dream and becomes a powerful, incorporate reality competing with the allegiance of South Africans, white and black, who dare to believe in the better destiny of their country.

The American corporations in South Africa, as well as those of other foreign states, should be the best available positive leverage the international community has in that situation. If we throw this leverage away in order to create pressure, we will deprive ourselves of the ability to create change ad to make the future happen now. This is not to say that these corporations or the private economic sector are the only instruments of change in South Africa, but they are the ones over which we, as outsiders, can have the greatest influence and through which we could hope to achieve the most immediate and direct effects. In a world prone to facile gestures and easily disposable moralism, it may seem better to use these instruments once and throw them away. But I believe that such a course would be cheap, self satisfying, and morally wrong.

I do not mean to suggest, either, that using America's position in South Africa in the way I have outlined will bring about immediate political change in South Africa, but then again, what will? I do believe it is the best way to make maximum positive use of America's important influence in bringing about the conditions for change. Because we all know the final analysis: it's not going to be outsiders who decide the future of South Africa. That future will come about only as the result of negotiations among all South Africans of good will—black and white.

It's also clear that such negotiations are unlikely to occur, and even more unlikely to occur, and even more unlikely to bear good fruit, in acclimate of violent state repression, with the most important leaders of the nonwhite community jailed and the leaders of the South African government barring the gates against peaceful agitation for change. Free from the racist assumptions and effects of the apartheid system, we can see the way clear to a future==a secure future for all South Africans.

But between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, there falls the shadow of violence--violence to preserve evil, violence to destroy evil, violence feeding upon itself to block out the vision of a better day. Violent repression and the violence it foments are the chief enemies of South Africa's present and future hopes. If international pressure serves a useful purpose in this situation, then it should be as a means of discouraging such violence on all sides, beginning with the repressive violence of the South African state. This, not the destruction of the economic engines of change, should be America's immediate aim and the aim of all people of good will in the world at large.

Zimbabwe in America's Future?

This morning one of the media lookouts at AIPnews.com drew attention to an article in the Washington Times about the awful conditions in Zimbabwe. In the article images of prison conditions there are likened to photos of inmates just after their liberation from the Nazi death camps. In addition to the horrid prison conditions, the country as a whole is in a state of collapse. "UN agencies estimate that up to three-quarters of Zimbabwe's estimated 12 million people are malnourished and dependent on food aid. Critics blame bad governance and a land-distribution program that began in 1999 and has left a majority of farms idle. Until 2001, Zimbabwe was a net exporter of food."

In the fall of 1980 I returned from Mumbai, India, my first posting as a foreign service officer, to take up my new chores as "desk officer" for the BLS countries (Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland) and assistant desk officer for the newly minted nation of Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia). On the way, I stopped in New York to witness Zimbabwe's admission to the United Nations (August 25, 1980), and got my first glimpse of the successful insurgent leader, Robert Mugabe. Over the years since, I've tried to keep up with the subject of my former responsibilities. Like some others, I watched with wary hope, then increasing dismay and grief, as stupid leftist ideology and political ambition overcame common sense and love of country to set Mugabe and his cronies on a path that ultimately destroyed Zimbabwe's once flourishing economy and turned its promised constitutional system into a paradigmatic wasteland of tyranny and repression.

The shallow advocates of "majority rule" in southern Africa pretend that this is somehow just the result of the personal flaws and failings of Mugabe and the people around him, but this isn't an adequate explanation. The very idea that the aim of just revolution is "majority rule" has to bear its share of the blame. Of course the socialist mentality that dominates all too many among America's foreign policy elite (including the black elites that professed such burning interest in justice for blacks in southern Africa) tacitly approves the notion that unalloyed "majority rule" is a just and sustainable form of government. The short and tragic history of Zimbabwe is a classic illustration of why, as Artemus Ward might say, that notion is among "the things we know that just ain't so."

From ancient times (see for example Book VIII of Plato's Republic) pure democracy has been identified as perhaps the most unstable form of government. It's like a radioactive element with a short half-life fated to break down speedily into its next form. Under the influence of demagogues pure democracy declines to mob rule which feeds such a collapse of order and security that people literally beg for the iron hand of tyranny to rescue them from calamity. Years ago, as I helped to staff those who were participating in discussions about the political future of southern Africa, this often came to my mind. It tempered my enthusiasm for seemingly quick paths to black majority rule that paid no attention to the need for carefully considered institutions that would avoid the inevitable tendency of pure democracy to give birth to destructive tyranny. Later, as an Assistant Secretary of state, I gave a speech to the National Urban league that reflected these concerns. I was caricatured by the propaganda hit men of the left, derided as some kind of tool of intransigent, racist whites simply because I refused to forget that the productive cooperation of the white minority would be absolutely essential to the success of the new forms of government emerging in the region. (Though events have proven me right, to this day I am slurred by leftist blacks for showing this concern. For some people there is no sin more unforgivable than to see the truth before they do.)

In Zimbabwe this meant avoiding what I thought of as the tragic mistake of the Gracchi brothers, whose precipitous implementation of "land reforms" (redistribution of land from the aristocratic few to the land-poor majority) hastened the collapse of the Roman Republic. No historical parallels are exact, of course, but they can suggest principles to keep in mind. In Zimbabwe's case this meant realizing that the imperative of economic and social success required respect for the demonstrated expertise and success of the several thousand white farming families whose adaptation of modern techniques had produced a little agricultural miracle. In countries large and small, the first prerequisite of economic development seems to be the sustained and efficient generation of large surpluses in the farm economy. The burgeoning urban areas so characteristic of rapidly expanding industrial and technological economies mean that expansive non-farm populations must be fed. Master this challenge, and there's a solid foundation for sustained economic growth. Fail to master it (as for instance the old Soviet Union did) and even great natural advantages (arable land, metal and mineral resources, etc.) resist the possibility of material success.

The framers of Zimbabwe's constitution needed to eschew sloganeered thinking about majority rule and devise ways to assure constitutional mechanisms that gave the white minority enough political clout to hamper any efforts simply to despoil them of their wealth. The result would have done more than avoid economic folly. It would have encouraged white/black coalitions that hampered the implementation of the kind of demagogic mob politics Mugabe has used to fortify his political power at the expense of his country's happiness.

These days, Americans should not think of these reflections on Zimbabwe's plight as curious thoughts about a distant misery. I have frequently made the point that, given his upbringing and ideology, Barack Obama doesn't represent the heritage of Black Americans. In both respects, however, he more than adequately represents the characteristics of tragically failed socialist leaders in Africa, like Robert Mugabe. Can we see his politically motivated orgy of debt financed spending as the demagogue's destructive disregard for the real well being of the nation? Can we see in his bid for dictatorial control of the economic sector preparation for the disastrous subordination of economic sense to political ambition? Though he is not alone in doing so (his sold-out Democrat and Republican colleagues share in his actions) will his calculated acts of "creative destruction" turn the once flourishing strength of the American people into a wrecked and timorous shadow of its former self? On all sides, the political elite in this country seemed ready to abandon the constitutional system of self-government in favor of a mobocratic implementation of pure democracy that temporarily allows demagogues to flourish, while they rape and pillage the hopes of the people they mislead. Is there more than a little Zimbabwe in our future?

Worth considering? Then don't forget to DIGG IT!!!!

Obama's Spending Frenzy and the Cult of Child Sacrifice

"…for the children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children. I will very gladly spend and be spent for you…" (2 Corinthians 12:14)

"For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing… (Matthew 13:15)

By now most Americans not willfully assuming the three monkeys pose acknowledge that the present mad frenzy of bailouts, pork binging and budgetary abandon are driving the nation into the depths of a Mariana trench of indebtedness. Despite the self-serving prognostications of the politicians and purported economic geniuses driving us into this madness, it looks increasingly like the desperate thrashings of a drowning victim compulsively sucking deep into his lungs the water that will seal his fate. Once water fills the lungs the only question is, how long the body can sustain itself without air? For our body politic that means wondering whether the bankruptcy of the nation will hit us now, or not until the overhang of debt breaks off to crush another generation. The dead weight of debt destroys us either way, but our heedless willingness to live on the hope that our children will be the ones destroyed by it reveals the essential nature of our depravity. We have exchanged the parents' natural sense of duty toward their children for an unnatural willingness to make of them an offering to the fierce gods of our ambitious pastimes.

Many people who profess to be Christian are actually supporting and applauding this mentality of child sacrifice. I guess that, with the easygoing smorgasbord mentality too often characteristic of some self-described believers in our time, they choose not to have ears when they get to Scriptural passages like the words of Paul quoted above. Apparently God's lesson to Abraham, most emphatically confirmed in the life and fate of Jesus Christ, has no power to instruct them. It does not warn them against their sacrifice of new Isaacs on the altar of what they claim is dedication to good things like charity, compassion and justice. "We serve the god of love, in this sacrifice," they seem to say "therefore it is righteousness." But if their god demands this of them, what they worship is not truly the God who revealed Himself through the book they profess to believe in. For He made it clear that no offering can save us but only the one that He wills, and has provided, begotten from eternity in the love that informs all of Creation.

Quietly, and perhaps sometimes without being conscious of it, such believers sympathize with those who chide folks like myself for unequivocally rejecting the political idol they have set up as their totem of change and progress. We are unreasoning fanatics who insist upon a false perfection, unwilling to balance good and evil in the scales of rational calculation. They do not remember the wisdom of Solomon, who understood that the willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children gives the lie to our professions of kindness. True human kindness acts with loving respect for their wholesome existence. Like Paul and Jesus Christ true parents would rather lay down their own lives than offer up their children's, even to serve their sense of righteousness.

Tragically for these idol worshiping believers, the chief distinguishing feature of their new age totem openly flaunts this abandonment of wholesome respect for life. He advocates and consistently promotes the cultish ritual of abortion, appointing to power those who have assiduously promoted and proclaimed its central mystery, the redemptive efficacy of child sacrifice. Women are blessed by it with relief from the punishment of carrying their offspring. Health is blessed by it, with the specious advances promised by embryo destroying stem cell research. The world is blessed by it, through U.S. funding of programs that promote abortion for population control and social engineering.

If we could resurrect our offspring, as God did, perhaps we might excuse with power our rejection of His redemptive offering. But for all its Dr. Frankenstein pretensions, our technological prowess can destroy, distort and exploit human life, but its creation remains beyond our capacity. We deny, but cannot solve, its mystery. However if, as Christians profess to believe, God's Word reveals truth, there is no mystery about the evil involved in the destruction of innocent life. Are the Christian idol-worshipers like the Israelites, falling down before a golden calf in the very presence of God's Word? Perhaps they are, even down to the treasure they borrow to enamel it, secured by the aborted hopes not just of one child, or even a multitude, but of our whole posterity. "Who hath ears to hear, let him hear." (Matthew, 13:9)

Real Change: Rebuilding the Dream (Part 1)

In the 2008 Presidential election, America's so-called two-party system offered the voters no real choice. Obama offered empty rhetoric that masked a lifelong commitment to the treacherous allure of shiftless communism. McCain offered empty rhetoric that masked his total abandonment of the American principles the Republican Party pretends to uphold. Both candidates joined in support of the so-called bank rescue package that is now acknowledged by all to have been America's fateful leap into full fledged socialism. (As usual, when we said so at the time, people like me were ridiculed by the thought enforcers in the media, who exist to make people timid and ashamed of their own common sense.) The election was a stage play of phony fisticuffs, like some of the wrestling matches we see on TV. The two parties are like baseball teams or racing cars held by the same owners. Despite the appearance of competition, they are two puppets moved by one pair of hands, sharing a common goal- to maximize profits for the self-serving special interests that pull their strings. America doesn't have two parties, but one party with two heads. Their lips feign disagreement, but they sit atop a body whose feet move only one way- toward government dictatorship that once and for all overthrows the sovereignty of the people.

Of course, many people who support the Democrats have no problem with this outcome, so long as the government dictators promise a job (though for all too many a reliable handout will do), a roof over their heads and the freedom to fornicate in whatever manner they choose. They even applaud mass slaughter, so long as it's directed against human life in a way that flatters their timidity and pride to exempt them from immediate harm ("not to worry, you're in no danger, only your inferiors"). But some Democrats and a large number of Republicans have enough self-respect to reject the small pride that fearful prejudice makes possible. They want to feel part of something noble, something that invokes a better destiny than survival, a better hope than simply being spared the butcher's knife. Some of these give in with pleasure to empty words of hope and change, spoken in tones that smack of something grand, they know not what. Some surrender to slogans that exalt liberty; promise greater responsibility; that even (dare we say it) mention God and imply that yes, there's more to life than passing fantasies of never lasting pleasure. These latter mostly vote Republican. They long for the real substance of that old American dream, our liberty. I like to believe that there are still enough of them to constitute a governing majority, if ever they would come together in earnest to vote for what they say they long to see. But even now, faced with the prospective triumph of everything they profess to deplore, they remain passive, hesitant, divided, confused- filled with noble appetites but all unwilling to risk moving toward the highlands where nobility can be satisfied. They hear with pleasure the echoes of Ronald Reagan, calling to America as that 'city on a hill'. But mired by love of pleasure in their suburbs on the plain, though they hear, they will not climb.

Such people have a decision to make, not unlike the one that faced Lot's congregation when the Lord gave them leave to escape the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Will they be Lot or Lot's wife? They must choose between the steep path to hope that dwells in the highlands, or the memories of pleasure tugging at their heartstrings, pulling toward the plains and hope's destruction. It is of course only the memory of pleasure that beckons: a vain delusion. For us the surest indication of this is the little grain of truth in the alleged usurper's State of the Union address. Amidst improbable promises of future messianic wonders, he admitted that the likely and immediate prospect was one of debt, dearth, and government inflicted discipline. The real question therefore is not whether we will suffer, but whether we will do so to help Obama overthrow our liberty or to help ourselves restore it.

In slavery times some masters' prized possession was a dark skinned overseer whose appearance lent some color of legitimacy to the brutal reality of enslavement. Their greatest nightmare was one who rose to be a rallying point against this clever deception. Against this nightmare, the most clever and enslaving deception of all was the preacher who appealed to the longing for freedom in order to enmesh the enslaved in a soulish disposition that sings hymns to freedom in the land of bye and bye, but does nothing here and now to assert or pursue that freedom. Such was the caricature of Christianity often encouraged amongst their "chattel" by skillful slaveholders. Such sadly is the role the Republican Party now plays in the drama that depicts the fate of America's liberty.

Happily, the best antidote to the false Christianity used to facilitate the tyranny of earthly masters, is the true faith that represents the liberty of God's creation. God's liberty offers every human being the chance to be their own master with no provision except that they respond to the goodwill that God offers them by accepting it themselves and extending it to all others. In doing so they constitute a self-governing community for which God's goodwill becomes the law. This is the clear, straightforward vision of republican liberty that America's founding generation sought to implement. In the Declaration of Independence they eloquently set forth its principles. In the war for Independence they proved their dedication to its truth. In the Constitution of the United States they strove, as best they could, to fashion a framework for its construction.

Abraham Lincoln's legacy has been falsely played upon and manipulated a good deal in recent weeks. But are there really any Americans left truly committed to government of, by and for the people, the form of government to which Lincoln dedicated all the sacrifice, suffering and death of the American Civil war? If so, the most critical and desperate need of our times is a vehicle for their action that is truly, faithfully, wholeheartedly committed to its preservation. Yet, though by name the Democrats invoke the people's strength, they embrace an ideology that betrays that strength for the sake of government power. Though by name the Republicans invoke the common good that is the people's liberty, they have sold out the faith and fear to act on the creed that is the foundation of our free republic. If we mean to restore it, then we must reject the betrayal of the Democrats and the sold-out timidity of the so-called Republicans. We must cease to be the consumers of their political lies, wallowing in the throes of the nightmare they have brought upon us. We must become instead the re-builders of a fresh republican hope, the real American dream.

In light of this challenge, it is surely providential that contemporary science and technology now offer tools exactly suited to the practical challenge at hand. Next, we'll take a look at the characteristics of a structure of political action that makes use of these tools. It must be designed from the ground up to be consistent with the goal of rebuilding the ark of liberty. Otherwise it will not survive the flood of lies, debt and delusions that now threatens to overwhelm our freedom. As background for this discussion, pay a visit to http://AIPnews.com. Explore what you find there. After all, the old saw is sometimes right on. A good illustration saves more than a thousand words.

Worth considering? Then don't forget to DIGG IT!!!!Worth considering? Then don't forget to DIGG IT!!!!

Real Change-Replacing the Federal Reserve

Our thinking about the fair tax approach has reminded us of the fact that in our society money is a commodity generally distributed throughout the land, not in the first instance pooled in the hands of a few. The contrary impression has been created by the centralized banking system, which along with the income tax obscures the simple fact that goods and services (and therefore the money that represents their value) start life as widely distributed as the individuals who actually produce and perform them. The first economic question therefore is not about the distribution of money (the false pretense of socialist and communist thinking) but about the mechanism for gathering it. Just as the income tax gathers money for government without regard to the choice of the people making it, the centralized banking system absorbs money from people that is then used (circulated in channels) without regard for choices they should make based on the actual circumstances of their lives. By disconnecting bankers' choices from the real life conditions of the people whose money they employ, the centralized banking system encourages the existence of the seemingly lucrative, but illusory assets whose corrupting weaknesses have caused its present crisis.

We're told that some banks and other financial institutions are too big to fail. But like a mass of cells growing in a way that burdens and harms the body (we call it a cancer), the question is, what allows the existence of something that continues to grow without regard for any contribution it makes to the real health and strength of the body (in this case the community or society in which it exists)? When the body must tax itself to exhaustion to maintain a tumor, we don't generally rush to rescue the tumor, or re-enforce the processes that encourage its growth. No, we seek to stop and reverse its growth, or by other means to kill it or remove it from the body. Even when dealing with the body's cancers we are finding that the real answer lies in re-discovering and strengthening the healthy functions and processes that respect the organic nature of the whole, rather than, at its expense, nourishing unproductive cancerous growths.

What we need is a fair banking system that, like the fair tax system, would make the flow of money more dependent on the choices of the individuals (and private associations) that produce its value in the first place. Step by step, let's try to envisage it. Private individuals make money. At first they may store it away about their persons, or in their homes, but experience teaches them that as the amount increases their individual ability to ward off thieves can't keep pace with the incentive others have to steal it away. Let's suppose that a family with a very large store of money has built a safe house for it. The neighbors approach them, asking whether, on some terms of mutual advantage and trust they could deposit their money in the safe house. They agree to share the burden of defending it (the cost of its security). Naturally, just as the store of money attracts interest from people willing to steal it, it attracts interest from others who, averse to stealing, are willing to ask for a loan. The owners of the store of money see the advantage of making such loans, on terms that help to defray the cost of its security, and eventually generate a profit. They agree to share in the profits in some way commensurate with the contribution each makes to the store. They also agree to let someone (perhaps the original owner of the safe house) make decisions about the amount and terms of lending, provided always that they make sure enough is available to meet the needs of the depositors as they arise.

Clearly, everyone involved can benefit from these arrangements, so long as sufficient care is taken to keep the lending practice strictly in line with the needs and interests of the depositors. If for example the depositors are farmers, the person in charge of the lending will make sure more reserves are on hand before planting season, when withdrawals will have to be made to buy seed, refurbish equipment and so forth; or at harvest time when more hands may be needed to bring in a particularly abundant yield. Of course those are also times when the demand for loans may rise. Therefore, loans have to be carefully prioritized to help the original depositors maintain their productive capacity, provided they're doing what's needed to make a good harvest more likely. The properly responsive local bank, tied to local needs and realities, has few opportunities to outgrow the health of the community in which it arises. By and large those temptations will be kept within bounds by due regard for the survival of the depositors whose productivity is the mainstay of its existence. Such a bank is like a healthy organ, interacting with the body whose health it reflects and helps to maintain.

A society whose financial life rests on a base composed of such institutions (independent local banks, sanely integrated with the communities they serve) has no special charm to avoid all calamities. Harvests will fail, lending decisions prove wrong, the occasional crooked professional bank schemers more dangerous than thieves in the night. But the impact of failures will be more localized, their effects more contained and transitory. This kind of bank failure was fairly common in nineteenth and early twentieth century America, before the creation of the Federal Reserve set up the conditions for a far more generalized and longer lasting form of failure.

I'm not saying that all more centralized financial institutions are intolerable. In fact, when the realities of life lead to the amassing of very large fortunes (as the discovery of large gold and silver deposits did in the U.S.) the community based banking model proves inadequate. Where one or a few individuals largely capitalize a bank (fill the store with their money), its practices will be driven by their desire for a good (and often a quick) return on their money. But there needs to be a sign marking the region occupied by such banks that says "enter at your own risk". Anyone who deals with them should have to live with that warning, including enterprises willing to depend on them for working capital. Moreover, this region should be hedged about in ways that prevent individuals and families from much involvement with them. People whose lives depend on their income (they live on a paycheck) need banks that keep an eye on conditions close to home. Properly understood, such individuals include business enterprises (including the affiliates of large, diversified corporations) located in a community and structuring a labor force that depends upon their operations. Such locally rooted enterprises should have to store their operating capital and reserves where they live, and get a return for it related to the health of their immediate environment.

In practice such a hedge might involve restricting certain banks to individual depositors above a specified deposit threshold, or to dealings with the corporate entities that float above and tie together locally based outlets and production units. The money available for such investments would be limited to the net profits (after seasonally adjusted local reserves are met) sent on to such corporate entities in return for the services they provide to their affiliates.

Instead of setting conditions that allow banks (or other enterprises) that are too big to fail, we need to structure the system purposefully so that failure is the natural consequence of bad decisions and actions, but no failure is catastrophic for people not directly involved with the institutions whose management decisions occasioned it. We need to structure it so that local communities benefit from the healthy result of their own efforts, rather than seeing those results siphoned off for uses that have little or no regard for their needs and interests. We need to structure it so that the folks who live at the grassroots deal with banks that rise or fall on the strength of the community, and which therefore have a vital interest in making responsible decisions that contribute to its strength. Finally we need to structure it so that the investments available to people who live on their income mainly take the form of equity in the enterprises they themselves depend on, so that they not only profit from their work but from the overall success of the business that makes use of it.

As we consider this kind of banking structure, one question looms: what about the large deposits and flows of money the national government requires to perform its functions. Well, if we think about the reasons people have for putting their money in the bank, instead of keeping it at home, none of those reasons apply to government. The Federal government has the wherewithal to safeguard and manage its own money. It also has a functional imperative (service to the people and national community as a whole) different than the more narrow, profit-oriented perspective of the private banking system. Government money should therefore be placed in a government bank, staffed and run like any other government department or agency. The hybrid monstrosity that is the Federal Reserve (a private system capitalized with public money) is a contradiction in terms that invites the kind of crack-up we're currently witnessing.

The problem of course is that the indebtedness of the Federal government conjures the hybrid monster into existence. At the end of the day, the government ends up being like the house many people live in- because you owe more than you own, the bank owns the house, not you. Unless you can service what you owe, the bank owns the house, not you. This means that unless the American people have a government that lives on the revenues generated by their activities, they don't' own the government, its creditors do. In generations past political leaders who cared about preserving liberty (that is, government of, by and for the people) hated and feared large government indebtedness. Politicians today pretend that they can spend without regard for the indebtedness which results. They seem content to lead the American people into permanent debt slavery, effectively overthrowing the form of government based upon their freedom. Having quietly turned control over to creditors (including potentially hostile foreign governments) they are no longer free to act as representatives of the people.

By abolishing the income tax, we give people back control of the money they make. By restoring a locally based banking system, we give communities back control of the money the people of those communities supply. By establishing a properly public bank for public monies, we restore to the American people institutional control of and responsibility for monies intended for public use. But we will not restore the real liberty all these steps envisage until we discard the notion that the national government must be the servant of all our aspirations. Instead we must limit its activities to those functions directly related to its true purpose. According to our Constitution, the U.S. government's job is to secure (make safe) the blessings of liberty. It cannot produce them. That's our work. The Federal government is somewhat like the security team at a factory. The fact that its activities are vital to the operation of every shop in the factory doesn't mean that the head of security should make decisions best left to the people responsible for those shops. Even where centralization makes sense, it isn't sensible to make the national government the focus of centralization except in those areas (for example, border security, military preparedness, and international relations) where the Federal government rightly claims responsibility based on the provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

I conclude therefore that the current economic crisis requires these bold steps:

1. Abolish the income tax and replace it with a fair tax system such as that proposed in the Linder bill;
   
2. Abolish the Federal Reserve and replace it with a) a locally rooted banking system for people who live off their wage or salary income and for locally rooted enterprises b) a private, at your own risk banking system for rootless corporate investors and individual depositors who live off their wealth, not their income; c) a U.S. government bank for managing the government's money.
   
3. Thoroughly restructure the Federal government's activities so as to eliminate every activity, department and agency not strictly related to its specifically mandated Constitutional responsibilities. We must end, not extend the failed socialist experiments of the last century.

This is not a prescription for populist hand-outs and other lying policy delusions. It implies a return to individual, family and local responsibility. It implies restoration of the central role of private business, and religious and charitable associations. It implies an end to the pretense that government makes money, or progress or prosperity. It implies, in a word, a return to liberty- with all the hard work, risks and challenges liberty entails. But we all know that in many ways the present trends of our political and social life undermine the disposition and virtues people must have to accept these challenges. Therefore, economic restoration cannot occur unless our political system and moral identity are restored at the same time. Otherwise, real change will not come about, and would not be sustainable if it did. We must discard the political system that has failed and betrayed our liberty. We must reclaim the moral character that can produce energy and courage enough for the new politics that must replace it. No more manipulative, so-called Republicans. No more insidiously delusional Democrats. Just Americans striving as best we can to be decent human beings. Strong enough to be independent. Wise enough to stand united. Good enough to be free.
Obviously, we've got a lot more to think through. Stay with me.

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Abolish the Income Tax (Cont'd)

Contrary to the crypto-terrorist rhetoric of creative destruction, there's more to our lives than survival. According to our Constitution, security includes the blessings of liberty. This doesn't mean that we survive and then we enjoy freedom. It means that we survive in freedom, making right use of freedom, with freedom as the path and means to achieving favorable results. Given the dire warnings of impending economic doom being used to herd us toward the communist slaughter pens, this means remembering that freedom isn't our reward for being co-operative sheeple. It's a vehicle that conveys the strength we need to keep ourselves from being shorn, dressed and stewed like sheep.

Like any other conveyance, freedom can't run on empty. The first order of business is to keep it fueled. This takes us back to where we started: the Lindsey Bill to abolish the Federal income tax. At a stroke, abolition assures that freedom runs with a full tank of gas. For people who think the U.S. government has money of its own, this is hard to understand, so we'll take it a step a time. The U.S. government's money comes mainly from taxation. Before it's taxed away, all the money is in the hands of the people, either as individuals or in their private associations (business enterprises, for example.) The Lindsey Bill simply abolishes the system that gives the U.S. government the prerogative to reach into people's pockets and claim as much money as it pleases before they have a chance to decide anything about it.

The Federal government serves some legitimate purposes. No one denies that it needs resources sufficient for those purposes. But instead of amassing them through a supposedly legalized guild of professional pick pockets (the IRS as presently constituted), the fair tax approach first lets people decide for themselves what to do with their money. They may spend it all now (present consumption) or set some aside to serve future needs and purposes (savings). The present income tax system effectively taxes both activities (since the dollars it preemptively claims could be used for either purpose.) The fair tax approach levies taxes only on what people decide to spend.

Before we let the money grabbers distract us with their usual chatter about tax rates, let's focus on the key difference between the fair tax and the income tax. Under the income tax the government decides when and how much of your money it may claim. Under the fair tax, you make that decision. As all politicians and bureaucrats know, decision making is power, especially when it directly controls the activity that results. One person has a dollar. Another person wants to use it. If the person who has it can simply decide to keep it, that person controls the dollar's power. If the other person can at will reach out and use it for some other purpose, that other person controls the dollar's power. The fair tax returns control to the people who have first possession of the dollar. It's that simple.

But still not simple enough for the folks who get power from the present arrangement. Okay, let's try again. I walk into the barber shop with twenty dollars in my pocket. The barber takes twelve dollars and a three dollar tip out of my pocket the moment I cross the threshold. That's not just before I get the hair cut, it's before I finally decide that I want to get it then and there. I'm in the shop, so I pay. That's the income tax. Or alternatively, I walk into the store, look at the cuts they offer, take stock of how the customers look, maybe chat with a couple of them. Then I decide whether to spend some of my money on the haircut. No money changes hands until I pay for what I've decided to get. That's the fair tax.

Of course, we all live as it were on premises serviced by the Federal government in some way. Therefore, whatever we decide to buy, the U.S. government may claim a bit in payment for its services. Under the income tax that claim is preemptive. Under the fair tax, it becomes effective only when we decide to consume some of the goods (understood here to include good service) the U.S. government's services help us to preserve. By necessity, the government can be assured some revenue (we have to purchase food, for example.) In a society as diversely productive as ours, however, we have the luxury of lightening the load borne by necessity (to ease the path out of poverty, for example), spreading it to products and services that pleasure, adorn and entertain our lives.

In any case, we fill the government's resource requirements using a method of taxation that relies on the choices people make for themselves, rather than the choices political bosses and bureaucratic commissars make for them. This approach gives people the greatest possible opportunity to use the money they make to build a little something for themselves and their loved ones. Good decisions, both about their productive lives (what they do, how hard they work, how well they develop and target their talents and abilities) and about their savings and consumption, will allow them to survive, to live well, and/or to amass wealth, depending on priorities they determine (not bureaucrats and politicians.)

Well, almost. As we were reminded last fall, there remains the critical question of what happens to the money people decide to save. Government isn't the only threat to the control people have over what happens to their money. A banking/credit system divorced from their needs and circumstances can effectively erode and even destroy its potential, profiting others while they stand by helplessly. This thought brings us to the next step on the path of real change for the better: replacing our ill conceived and failing financial institutions. Watch this space.

Worth considering? Then don't forget to DIGG IT!!!!

Real Change Step One: Abolish the Income Tax

I saw today that Rep. John Linder (R, GA-7) and 44 Republican co-sponsors have introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to abolish the income tax and replace it with an implementation of the fair tax proposal. As they say, this represents real, positive change. It is a critical element of the agenda that could avert the economic collapse made imminent by our country's long and damaging flirtation with socialism. Unfortunately, with Obama occupying the White House and the Democrats in control of Congress, what we're likely to get at the moment is just the opposite: a short engagement followed by a shotgun wedding that forces America into a Soviet-style marriage of inconvenience, then prolonged depression and a psychotic break.

Obama's Soviet-style communist state is a Tyrannosaurus Rex on parade in the Jurassic Park of dangerous political excursions. For a moment it's exciting to get close-up and touchy-feely with something so old that we thought of as extinct. Then we remember that at feeding time, we're on the menu. Okay! That's no fun. But if the prospect means we're ready to end the vacation and get on with real life, what's to do? Well, it would be nice to make sure we get out of the Park alive. For this, just like the characters in the movie, we need to apply the know-how that made our little excursion possible. We need to remember our home address (that may strike you as a gimme, but don't forget how easily the mind goes blank during a life and death encounter with a resurrected monstrosity.) Once we retrieve the address, we need to remember how to get there. Then, we head for home. We open the place up, air out all the rooms and get back to being ourselves, that is, the first and greatest free people in human history. Now, being ourselves is hard work, but doing it well has been a source of great satisfaction in our lives. Smart people take vacations mainly to remind themselves of that. Unfortunately some people voted absentee in the last election, while their brains were still on vacation. Hence, the Obamasaurus hex.

There's been a noticeable spike in hate mail from the Obama worshippers since I called his communist agenda by its right name. I've also gotten a lot of encouragement and thanks from Americans who want to preserve liberty in this country, and the prosperity that goes with it. Typical is this brief comment from someone reacting to a WND.com story on my remarks: "I read your WND article, and I agree with you regarding stopping this mess, my question is what do you propose for a solution to stopping this? Thanks for all you do, and I think we need to start to pull together and get things turned around in a hurry."

In one remark, I see what I love and admire about Americans, but also what I find so frustrating. When we see a problem, immediately we ask the question- "What's the solution?" Wallowing in the mess is thankfully not the disposition of real Americans. On the other hand, we are, quite frankly, an impatient bunch anxious to get to the action in a hurry. Because of the first trait, we want a solution badly. Because of the second, we'll grab at a bad solution. But for the latter impulse, Obama would not be resident in the White House. During the election, people would have stepped back from his empty rhetoric to ask hard questions about just what kind of change he is proposing. They would have examined it long and hard enough to see that it's not change at all- just the same ugly grab for power and control that has marred every socialist movement in the world, and produced the sort of results that toppled the Soviet Empire and that have taken other countries (like Zimbabwe, for example) from prosperity to starvation.

Anyway, African countries provide at least a bit of evidence for the simple truth that electing a leader with a black skin is no guarantee of progress. (No, really, I'm not kidding.) In fact, in Africa it has occasionally been the harbinger of personality cults, repression and economic ruin. (Okay, now I am kidding.) Racial preoccupations have deeply wounded the American psyche, but the guilt induced delusion that we're putting a little pathetic salve on those old wounds hardly warrants national suicide. We don't need a phony savior. What we need is a reminder that, with God's help, ordinary folks built this great land, with government from time to time as their instrument, not their master. Though the socialist minded tinkerers of the twentieth century concluded that industrialization and urbanization meant doom for the culture of liberty, the technological leaps of the last thirty years have produced just the tools needed to prove them wrong. Government of, by and for the people- based on self-confident individuals, the God-ordained family, and other private associations now has more potency for economic and political success than ever before in human history. One person with a good idea can literally reach out and offer their ingenuity to the world. Maybe that's why the forces of elite tyranny are so anxious to get a stranglehold on our economy and government. These days, people motivated by a common cause can form a national network to advance it overnight. The information needed to substantiate their thinking and inform their actions is at their fingertips. Remembering the old Latin motto, "Festina Lente", let's get busy.

So much for introductions: tomorrow, I'll go more fully into the three revolutionary changes we need to get America on the way back home, starting with the one the Linder bill seeks to implement: ABOLITION (of the income tax, that is.)

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The Income Tax Dilemma

Thanks to the reported tax problems of various Obama appointees and nominees, the issue of the income tax system is once again front and center in the public consciousness. The partisan minded attack dogs have predictably added "tax-cheat" to the list of obnoxious traits they mean, rightly or wrongly, to associate with Obama's tenure. The problem is that we can't accuse people of sinning without validating the standard that makes their conduct sinful. In this case, though, the standard involves respect for a system that may itself represent, in its entirety, a violation of Constitutional right. When Rosa Parks sat in the whites-only section of the bus, she broke the laws that supported legal racial segregation. Proponents of segregation eagerly hurled 'scofflaw' epithets at folks who behaved as she did, including of course the civil rights demonstrators who staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Though accurate in one sense, the epithets fall flat in context with the violation of fundamental law involved in racial segregation.

The Federal Income tax system similarly involves violating a plainly articulated provision of the U.S. Constitution. The Fifth Amendment clearly states that "No person…shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself…" Most Americans appear to believe that failure to file their income tax return is a criminal offense. But the return takes the form of sworn testimony as to the amount, source and type of their personal income during the calendar year for which they file the return. If people are compelled by law (that is legally subject to arrest, trial, conviction and punishment) for failing to file the return, it would seem clear that their testimony cannot constitutionally be used against them in a criminal case. But how is it possible, for example, to try someone for the criminal offense of filing a false return without using the false information it contains against them, information they are supposedly compelled by law to provide?

The answer, we are told, is that the tax system is based on voluntary compliance. Filing isn't compelled, it's compulsory. (No, I'm not kidding.) We compulsorily volunteer the information provided in the return, which is therefore usable in criminal cases brought against us. But in what sense is filing a voluntary act? With that question in mind, pause here for a moment to watch the following brief video, featuring Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) Nevada, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7mRSI8yWwg. (My thanks go to a Digg Friend, Webb Smith for the shout that alerted me to this gem.)

To put it mildly, Reid makes no sense. In fact his response puts doubletalk in the shade, with doublethink hidden in its penumbra (right next to the right to abortion.) While you're chuckling, think hard about the fact that the operation of the system that finances the Federal government, including indispensable things like its defense and intelligence activities, relies on this nonsense for Constitutional legitimacy.

I can't speak to the motives or intentions of the Obama picks tagged with tax troubles. I do know that the Federal Income Tax system poses a serious dilemma for anyone (like me for instance) who cares about the integrity of our Constitutional republic. Every time someone fills out and submits a tax return he acquiesces in the systematic destruction of a vital and explicit Constitutional right. Every time someone is prosecuted using information obtained in the environment of systematic coercion created by the Federal tax system, we all of us acquiesce in the destruction of a vital and explicit Constitutional right. The U.S. courts have taken pains to make sure that violent criminals are made aware of their Constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent. Why haven't they bothered to read those rights to the rest of us? Could it be that they wonder what would happen to their paychecks?

It occurs to me that with one simple, fundamental step we could ease their fears, restore our rights and do far more for the economy than anything found in the Alleged Usurper's phony and dangerous so-called "stimulus" package: Abolish the Federal Income Tax and replace it with a means of taxation consistent with liberty. That would be a real change. While you're thinking about it, why not visit www.fairtax.org.