Tag Archives: Freedom

Better to Stay – or Go? by Eric Peters

Eric Peters is looking for the last vestiges of freedom within the United States. They’re fast disappearing. A US collapse would make carving out one or more enclaves of freedom a possibility, if enough people are willing to fight for them. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Almost twenty years ago, I did what many people have done and moved from a high-tax/high-tyranny area (Northern Virginia) to a low-tax/lower-tyranny area (rural SW Virginia).

The new place was still in the same state but in many meaningful ways, it was an entirely different place. One could, for example, obtain a concealed-carry permit just by filling out a form – a minor tyranny compared with the major tyranny of being effectively denied the right to carry up north because in Northern Virginia, one had to jump through so many constantly moving hoops it was almost impossible to “qualify” for the permission slip.

The people were less busybodyish, too. You leave me alone, I leave you alone – an ancient Southern thing – still applied, more or less. Or at least, a lot more than it did 240 miles up the road in Northern Virginia, where everything you did was somehow some busybody’s business.

Government was unavoidable up there. Here, it was generally avoidable. One could fill one’s lungs and breath in a way that was denied the people up north.

Now the south is a lot like the north and the question arises: Where to next?

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From 9/11 to COVID-19, It’s Been a Perpetual State of Emergency, by John W. Whitehead

Emergencies frighten people, and when people are frightened, they’ll trade liberty for safety. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.”—Étienne De La Boétie, The Politics Of Obedience

Don’t pity this year’s crop of graduates because this COVID-19 pandemic caused them to miss out on the antics of their senior year and the pomp and circumstance of graduation.

Pity them because they have spent their entire lives in a state of emergency.

They were born in the wake of the 9/11 attacks; raised without any expectation of privacy in a technologically-driven, mass surveillance state; educated in schools that teach conformity and compliance; saddled with a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion; made vulnerable by the blowback from a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies; policed by government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice; and forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands they be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.

It’s a dismal start to life, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, we who should have known better failed to maintain our freedoms or provide our young people with the tools necessary to survive, let alone succeed, in the impersonal jungle that is modern America.

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Duncan Lemp – America’s First Covid-19 Death, by Allan Stevo

The money sentence: “It’s our total ingratitude for the inheritance of freedom.” From Allan Steve at lewrockwell.com:

On 9/11 it took just under 9 hours for two planes to collapse three New York skyscrapers.

As Toby Keith described it in his most jingoistic song “A sucker punch came flying from somewhere in the back.”

“What just happened?” was the dazed sentiment repeated for months. Those were hard times. Many were reminded that you can’t change the past. Eventually, most people snapped out of it.

The corona communism, put in place from the Ides of March 2020, in contrast, has unfolded in slow motion. The magnitude of the destruction takes place in full view around us daily.

“What is happening?” has been the dazed sentiment repeated for months, as people grasp at straws trying to make sense of it. While you can’t change the past, you can change the present. You just stop complying. And despite the insistence of self-proclaimed authorities, life goes back to whatever “normal” it is that individuals demand in their own lives.

Eventually most people will snap out of it.

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In Times of Crisis, We Need Freedom More Than Ever, by Edmund Shieh

Freedom is a necessity, not a luxury, especially in crises and emergencies. From Edmund Shieh at mises.org:

n the past few weeks, all around the world, governments have held their own citizens hostage in the name of “protecting the people.” What they have failed to understand is that, every restriction they put in place comes at a cost. By forcing the lockdown on its citizens, the government has taken away the ability for private individuals to assess that cost for themselves.

The wounds that coronavirus has inflicted on society will only be deepened by the unheralded amount of government intervention. Governments have given the people one more foe to battle with in this war against the coronavirus. Those who argue that the measures taken are necessary to prevent unnecessary death are unable to see that these same measures will no doubt cost a great many their lives and livelihoods in the future. Too often it seems that only one side of the equation is taken under consideration during this crisis. The UN recently released a report stating that due to the economic downturn caused by the lockdown, hundreds of thousands of children could die just this year. They also estimate that 42–66 million children could fall into extreme poverty in the coming years. Although these figures are estimates, it does raise a question for authorities: How much is too much?

The government does not have a good track record of providing an answer to this question. In even attempting to answer it, they’ve already set themselves up to fail. We have seen time and time again throughout history that central planning does not work. Limits such as thirty people to a funeral and ten at weddings are examples of arbitrary restrictions that come as a result of a small number of bureaucrats trying to centrally plan an optimal solution. A government attempting to organise society in this way, is no different from the then Soviet Union’s command economy trying to figure out how many potatoes to produce for the year. Both scenarios have reverberating consequences, and the ramifications of a suboptimal reaction to this virus could haunt us for generations to come. The only solution is to allow individuals to freely decide their own actions based on their own risk preferences.

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The Chinese Mindset in a Hybrid War With the US, by Xiaoran Tong

Sometimes it’s enlightening to hear what foreigners have to say about your country. From Xiaoran Tong at antiwar.com:

I recently came across a Facebook comment from a Hongkonger, arguing that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is nothing communist given China’s prosperous private sector after 1979’s reform. He then linked a video to mock the western electoral democracy that put Trump and Hitler into the office, leading to the conclusion that the West has no credential to criticize the one-party system of China for the lack of democracy. His comment represents the contemporary Chinese sentiment and is quite understandable given the ongoing color revolution in Hong Kong 2019, which is still lukewarm to this day, and the unrelenting blame of COVID19 on China. Although the hybrid war waged on China is unjust, the current Chinese mindset does not help to diffuse but only fuels the conflict even further.

The Facebook comment was right about CPP not being Communist that seeks total control of the economy by the state. Yet, China is state capitalism, an oligarchy, or crony capitalism. China is a plutocracy by the marriage between the party leadership (the state), and the monopolizing mega-corporations (the money) like Huawei, Ali, the four state-owned commercial banks, and Sinopec Group. It is far from a free-market where the only way to win a competition is to provide excellent products, where the state has no role in deciding the winner and no ability to finance itself by forcing the circulation of central-banknotes. China does have a private sector – the semi-free-market, the good part of our bad plutocracy. Still, even that part is weatheringafter supreme leader Xi took power, and most Chinese do no realize that we are marching back into a more planned, more communism, more Mao Zedong like system, slowly but surely. In China, life is artificially expensive under the tightening state control that imposes layers upon layers of covert taxation, to the point of causing hesitation to have more children.

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The Resistance Grows! by Allan Stevo

This sort of thing should be encouraged. From Allan Stevo at lewrockwell.com:

It is becoming increasingly evident that the lockdowns are an over-reaction and a power grab by power hungry and sociopathic authorities not being kept in check.

Henry David Thoreau writes “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

As if channeling the spirit of the man who wrote the book on civil disobedience, corona disobedience is on the rise.

Idaho Parents Are Still Taking Their Kids To Parks

Sara Brady, a mother at a local park, wasn’t interested in being pushed around over an illegal and illogical order. Local police trying to control the situation arrested her in a Meridian, Idaho park.

“Police said they made several attempts to get Brady to follow the rules and she refused to comply.” The Rosa Parks of the park can be heard saying to someone “Get Idaho Freedom Foundation on the phone,” as she’s being cuffed, a testimonial to what a recognized advocate for freedom that group must be.

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A Letter to the Future, by James Corbett

The darkness is descending and perhaps our best hope is future generations. From James Corbett at minds.com:

“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”

WWI conspirator Edward Grey

I do not write these words for my contemporaries. We are the damned. It is our lot now to watch as the lamp of liberty is extinguished, our burden to bear witness to the final flickering of the flame of freedom.

No, I don’t write these words for my peers; I write them for those yet to come. The inhabitants of that future dystopia whose birth pangs we are experiencing. The remnant of once-free humanity who might—through some miracle I can’t even imagine—come across this electronic message in a bottle.

I know that it’s almost hopeless. That the chance of these words surviving the coming internet purge are slim at best. That even if—against all odds—this message does wash up on your digital shores, that the chance of these words being understood by you is even slimmer. Not because you don’t understand English, but because you no longer use these words I’m writing: Freedom. Humanity. Individual.

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Is It Time for a New Direction? by Jacob G. Hornberger

The answer is yes. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

If Americans are not doing some serious soul-searching in the midst of this crisis, they need to start. Where America goes from here is not some sort of esoteric debate. What we do at this point has life or death consequences. Get it wrong, and suffer more death, suffering, and impoverishment. Get it right, and America moves toward life, health, liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony.

What everyone needs to recognize is that they are facing a choice of systems, not a choice of people. Either stick with the same systems or switch over to new systems. That’s the choice now facing the American people.

Let’s examine four systems under which we currently live and have lived for decades.

America’s economic system

This is a centrally planned and centrally managed system run by the federal government. Its central aim is to “wage war on poverty” by forcibly taking money from everyone and redistributing it to people in need, such as the elderly and the poor. It is based on massive confiscation of income and wealth by the Internal Revenue Service, in the form of income taxes and payroll taxes.

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Freedom, from The Burning Platform

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Draconian Lockdown Powers: It’s a Slippery Slope from Handwashing to House Arrest, by John W. Whitehead

They never take away your freedoms all at once, they always do it gradually, so that most people don’t even notice. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”—Viktor Frankl

We still have choices.

Just because we’re fighting an unseen enemy in the form of a virus doesn’t mean we have to relinquish every shred of our humanity, our common sense, or our freedoms to a nanny state that thinks it can do a better job of keeping us safe.

Whatever we give up willingly now—whether it’s basic human decency, the ability to manage our private affairs, the right to have a say in how the government navigates this crisis, or the few rights still left to us that haven’t been disemboweled in recent years by a power-hungry police state—we won’t get back so easily once this crisis is past.

The government never cedes power willingly.

Neither should we.

Every day brings a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that are eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.

This is where we run the risk of this whole fly-by-night operation going completely off the rails.

It’s one thing to attempt an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of this virus because we can’t afford to risk overwhelming the hospitals and exposing the most vulnerable in the nation to unavoidable loss of life scenarios. However, there’s a fine line between strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.

More than three-quarters of all Americans have now been ordered to stay at home and that number is growing as more states fall in line.

Schools have cancelled physical classes, many for the remainder of the academic year.

Many of the states have banned gatherings of more than 10 people.

At least three states (Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania) have ordered non-essential businesses to close.

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