This is a paragraph out of Paul's 1988 book, Freedom Under Seige, page 24 of the pdf. The book is free to read at Mises.org, linked below.
Today it is usual to assume that the government owns all that we
produce, and through government generosity we are permitted to retain a
certain portion. We routinely hear that if a particular tax is reduced, it will be
a "cost" to government. This concept must be changed if the idea of
individual liberty is to survive. There is no such thing as cost to government.
There is only cost to people. Government cannot grant to us our right to life
and liberty, it would mean that government controls all that we produce.
Sadly this is essentially the situation in which we find ourselves today.
http://library.mises.org/books/Ron%20Pau....
There is nothing more counter to this idea than the recent widely publicized speech of Barack Obama, chiding the small businessman for claiming success, as if the government produced, out of thin air all that went into his success. A slave holder might have bought and paid for his slave, but he had to take care of him and punish him if he stepped out of line. Is our government acting any differently toward the productive people of the US? Wasn't the slave conditioned to believe he was there for the master?
There are people that say we need to take our government back. I think it is more than that. We need to get rid of most of the government and what we keep largely needs to be in our own counties, home towns and states. What we need to do is get our shit back, get our individual rights back, including our rights to defend ourselves, rather than wait for the police to leave the donut shop to respond to a theft, mugging or murder that has already happened. We need to end this banker monopoly, the herding of all of us under regulation written to prefer a small group at our expense. This line of thought might be painted as wacko, but if it is wacko, so was the overturning of slavery in the 1800's, because this is what in essense it is.
The idea of Libertarianism isn't to get the government to do something, but to stop the govenment doing a lot of what it is already doing. There is no liberty in coercion and not only in coercion, but in taking actions to coerce others to do something. Stopping the looting of the productive forces, whether it be capital or labor, as capital comes from labor and little else has to be the force of government. Protecting the life, liberty and property of all. The problem is once we enter into the sphere of regulation, we are regulated, thus we face the broad swath of the commerce clause, well beyond where its lines were meant to be.
I, for one, have never read anything Paul wrote. I have been busy reading the modern libertarian thought of Rothbard, learning who is who in modern economic thought and finding if their public record is equal to their real record. Guys like Friedman are painted as free market, when in fact they are merely statists of another color, put there to aid and abet big government and bankers at the expense of individual creativity. Today, I decided to get in the Ron Paul section of the literature and picked the above book, as it was written on the 200th anniversary of the Constitution.
If any of us are going to get involved with the Libertarian movement, we need to learn what the whole philosophy is, not what we hear as lip service. A good place to start is probably Albert Jay Nocks, "Our Enemy the State" or the followup written by Frank Chodorov's "Rise and Fall of Society" to get a clear idea what statism of any philosophy is. Until it becomes plain what the state does, who it serves and how it works, there is little to do but join in on the circle of bullshit that plays out on the typical election cycle. In the meantime, the state shovels more of our production into the hands of bankers and other cronies, foreign and domestic. There needs to be a lot more negative action in government, that is, they shall not instead of we have to.
The USA is still the richest country on Earth. Otherwise it couldn't support so many leeches sucking blood from its core. The problem is the entire system is now based on more leeches sucking off the body and through continually weaking the body, it becomes more susceptible to a fatal disease. Ideas like we can gain by debasing our currency or they must be cheating because they are giving their stuff away defy plain old country logic. Poor countries can't get rich by giving their shit away any more than a country can prosper by destroying the value of its income. This is merely the philosophy that took Rome down the tubes over 1500 years ago.
Ideas like ending the Fed will never gain widespread support until the detriment to the average productive person through the Fed's actions is understood. When it becomes clear the purpose of the Fed is to allow the cartels, the banks and protected big business to gain possession of more of our future income and not for economic growth, to grease the skids of government to spend more of our future income to buy influence and our property in the present, what to do will become clear. Fortunes less than mid 8 figures are not in position to take advantage of these actions and only a few with skill and luck are going to join this group. It is class warfare of the state at its best. When people begin to realize the reason they can't get ahead is the government and the bankers have already spent our ahead, things will change.
This was posted on Karl Denningers Market-Ticker site, July 19th.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=208821
