Lies the government told you (42 page)
President George W. Bush asked for, received, and signed the American Dream Downpayment Act in 2005. Though I have always believed that the American Dream involves hard work and dedication, apparently in 2005, it was for sale to the lowest bidder. This Act in essence gave the government the authority to provide those in the lowest income brackets with down payments on homes that they could not afford. No longer did people have to save for the American Dream; the government decided to give it away, but of course only to those who had
not
worked hard and
not
saved from their incomes until they could afford to buy. That is perhaps the most stupefying consequence of this Act, because free down payments meant more people could buy, which in turn meant more demand, which in turn meant housing prices soared. So those who had saved enough to buy a house no longer had enough, because prices had climbed, and therefore so did the amount required for a down payment from those who did not qualify for the American Dream.
Still, once the housing bubble burst and the system collapsed, no one wanted to take the blame. Those who had bought houses they could not afford ran to the government for help, clamoring about the unfairness of the system. Those who invested in mortgage-backed securities and lost billions cried that they needed money from the government or else they would collapse, and the market would spiral out of control. The government blamed laissez-faire capitalists and the greedy bankers with their grubby hands. There was blame to go around, but no one would take it. And not only would they not accept it, but they also wanted payment from the taxpayers—from those who could still afford to pay the taxes. Of course, the government gave them all money.
The lesson learned was that as long as you did not take responsibility for your actions, then you would receive more money. The government bailed out the banks, it bailed out the people who could not afford their mortgages, and it continues to bail them out. The American Dream, which once rested on personal responsibility and hard work, now rests on getting the most for the least amount of work. And if the climate continues this way, pretty soon there will be nothing left of America or the Dream.
Before you finish reading this book, return to those quotations at the beginning. Did I prove my case? If you believe in God, you believe He is Truth. But a Roman governor asks if anyone can know the truth, and a modern-day American vice president marvels at its debasement by the government. And two philosophers claim we are ripe for being plucked into the baskets of the deceivers.
As I finish writing this book, the country is consumed with a great public debate over proposals for the federal government to take over and manage the delivery of health care to every person in America.
During that debate, Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) was disciplined by his colleagues in the House of Representatives because he called President Obama a liar during the President’s address to a joint session of Congress. The statement that the President made, which provoked the Congressman’s ill-timed outburst, claimed that illegal aliens would not receive health care benefits under the President’s government option proposal, which essentially establishes a Medicare-type program for everyone in America under the age of sixty-five.
When the Supreme Court last looked at government attempts to deny social benefits to certain groups, the Court held that the Constitution protects all “persons”; persons are citizens as well as strangers, people born here and people who end up here, people here lawfully and people here unlawfully; and in the area of social services, whatever benefits the government makes available to the general public cannot be kept away from a class of persons based on their immigration status or that of their parents.
Did the President know this when he stated the contrary to the Congress? Did he lie? And if he did lie, wasn’t that lie in the tradition of his forebears?
We know where his forebears’ lies have brought us: war, fear, power, loss of innocent life, loss of liberty, and loss of property. My friend Llewellyn Rockwell, an astute philosopher and commentator whose Web site, LewRockwell.com, is the best monitor of government excess in America today, is fond of reminding me that we are all susceptible to temptation; we all have lusts within us that we must suppress. And the most pernicious of those lusts is
libido dominandi
, the lust to dominate.
This lust is in the heart of all in government who lie, who break the laws they have sworn to uphold, and who violate the Constitution they are committed to preserve. They lie to enhance and retain their power over us. Justice Antonin Scalia has commented that courts should refrain from reading what members of the legislative branch have publicly stated about a law when the courts are endeavoring to interpret the meaning of that law. It doesn’t matter, he has argued many times, why they say they voted for any given law. They only do so, he maintains, for one reason: To get reelected— the Natural Law, the Constitution, the laws of the land be damned. They want to dominate us.
I don’t personally know this lust, but it must be overpowering.
My own lust is to challenge illicit authority, to break the chains of slavery with which the government has bound us, and to liberate all persons to fulfill their lives as they see fit, by pursuing happiness.
How can we do this?
We will need a major political transformation in this country to rid ourselves of persons in government who kill, lie, cheat, and steal in our names. We will need to recognize some painful truths.
First, we must acknowledge that through the actions of the government we have lost much of the freedom that we once all thought was guaranteed by the Constitution, our laws, and our values. The lost freedoms have been cataloged in this book and need not be restated here. In sum, they are the loss of the primacy of the individual’s inalienable rights and the concept that government is limited in its powers. We have lost the diffusion of power between the states and the federal government. We have lost a federal government that stays within the confines of the Constitution.
Second, we must recognize that we do not have a two-party system in this country; we have one party, the Big Government Party. There is a Republican version that assaults our civil liberties and loves deficits and war, and a Democratic version that assaults our commercial liberties and loves wealth transfers and taxes.
Third, we must acknowledge that there is a fire in the bellies of millions of young people who reject both wretched visions of the Big Government Party. These millions of young folks need either to form a Liberty Party or to build on the libertarian base in the Republican Party by banishing Big Government conservatives, neocons, and so-called social conservatives who want to use government to tell others how to live their lives back to the Democratic Party from whence they came.
Then we need a political fever that consumes the careers of all in government who voted for the Patriot Act, the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the TARP and stimulus programs, the federal takeover of education, spying on Americans without warrants, and all other unconstitutional monstrosities that have tethered lovers of liberty to Washington, D.C.
We should abolish the federal income tax, prohibit eminent domain, impose term congressional limits, make Congress part-time, return the power to elect senators to State legislatures, abolish the Federal Reserve system, and prosecute for malfeasance any member of Congress who cannot articulate where the Constitution authorizes whatever he or she is voting for or who has voted for any law that he has or she has not certified under oath that he or she read and fully understands. And we must reject the nice smiles and easy ways and seductive promises of anyone in government who lies to us.
The Big Government Party crowd is obviously not afraid of lying or being caught in a lie. Its members do not fear their own lawlessness or our loss of freedom. They only fear the loss of their own power. So let’s use that fear against them. Jefferson understood and articulated this best when he wrote: “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.”
If we fear our own government, if we accept its deceptions, its lies to us, if we take no action to redress them, our freedoms are doomed.
Though my name is on the cover and title page of this book, it has actually been a collaborative effort. My personal producer at Fox, George Szucs, Jr., who runs my professional life, ran it so that I had the time and temperament to work on this book. My researchers, Magda Hanebach and Jaclyn Sakow, provided terrific material from which this book grew. My researcher and intern, James Spithogiannis, was tireless as a sounding board who refined much of my work. My friend James Conley Sheil, who has edited all my published works, and did so very skillfully on this book as well, has provided invaluable and irreplaceable assistance. And to my boss at Fox, Roger Ailes, who created out of whole cloth a media network that has become a voice for those who sought one and a balance in the national discourse and a home for freedom—and who found a place in that home for me—I owe much for whatever good I may have done in my public work.
Lie #1
1
. Today, the word
unalienable
has the same meaning as the word
inalienable
. Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence used the word
inalienable
, but the Continental Congress chose to use
unalienable
in the final draft.
2
. Floor Statement of Senator Barack Obama on the Nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, Feb. 3, 2005.
3
. Gordon S. Wood, “Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves,”
New York Times
,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/books/review/14WOODLT
.html?scp=3&sq=never%20forget%20they%20kept%20lots%20of%20slaves&st=cse (Dec. 14, 2003).
4
. Matthew Spalding, “How to Understand Slavery and the American Founding,” The Heritage Foundation,
http://www.heritage.org/research/ americanfoundingandhistory/wp01.cfm
(Aug. 26, 2002).
5
. Wood, “Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves.”
6
. Spalding, “How to Understand Slavery and the American Founding.”
7
. Ibid.
8
. Denis Henderson, and Frederic W. Henderson, “How the Founding Fathers Fought For an End to Slavery,”
The American Almanac
, http://american_
almanac.tripod.com/ffslave.htm
(Mar. 15, 1993).
9
. Spalding, “How to Understand Slavery and the American Founding.”
10
. Ibid.
11
. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Article 6.
12
. Spalding, “How to Understand Slavery and the American Founding.”
13
. Alan Dershowitz,
America Declares Independence
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003), 124.
14
. Ibid.
15
. Ibid., 127.
16
. Ibid., 128.
17
. Ibid.
18
. Ibid., 129.
19
. Ibid., 130–31.
20
. Ibid., 135.
21
. Ibid., 135–36.
22
. Ibid., 125.
23
. Ibid.
24
. Ibid., 126.
25
. “Legacy—Thomas Jefferson,” Library of Congress,
www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffleg.html
( Jan. 26, 2007).
26
. Ibid.
27
. Wood, “Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves.”
28
. Ibid.
29
. Ibid.
30
. Ulrich Boser, “The Sorry Legacy of the Founders,”
U.S. News and World Report,
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/040112/12slave.htm
( Jan. 4, 2004).
31
. Wood, “Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves.”
32
. Ibid.
33
. Ibid.
34
. Ibid.
35
. Spalding, “How to Understand Slavery and the American Founding.”
36
. Ibid.
37
. Ibid.
38
. Ibid.
39
. Ibid.
40
.
The Federalist
, No. 54.
41
. Spalding, “How to Understand Slavery and the American Founding.”
42
. Ibid.
43
. Ibid.
44
. Ibid.
45
. Ibid.
46
. Aside from the debate with Garrison, libertarians today consider Frederick Douglass a hero. In a well-known speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Douglass, a former slave, proclaimed that “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a
Glorious Liberty Document
” (emphases in original). Douglass was also a staunch proponent of the free market, as well as private property. Furthermore, Douglass condemned government affirmative action programs, believing that government aid to blacks after slavery merely showed African-American inferiority. (The source of the information contained in this endnote is Ronald Hamowy’s
The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism
(2008), published by SAGE Publications, Inc., at pages 127–28.)
47
. . . . though some have tried. For a collection of essays supporting the institution of slavery, see
Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South
, by Paul Finkelman.
48
. Michael Knox Beran, “‘Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves,’”
The National Review Online
,
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/beran200312290000.asp
(Dec. 29, 2003).
49
. Paul M. Angle, and Miers, Earl Schenck, eds.,
The Living Lincoln: The Man in His Times, in His Own Words
(Fall River, MA: Fall River Press, 1992), 203.
50
. Ibid.
51
. Ibid.
52
. Letter to Horace Greely, editor of the
New York Tribune
, Aug. 22, 1862.