President Trump is wrong about a lot of things, but he is right about last night’s Democratic Party debate. Despite the excitement and accolades being expressed by the mainstream press, the reality is that last night’s debate between 10 of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates was, as Trump put, boring. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone given that all of the candidates believe in the entire welfare-warfare state system under which we live. Given such, the debate necessarily revolved around how best to reform this crooked, corrupt, and immoral system. It’s the never-ending discussion of which welfare-warfare reform to adopt that excites the mainstream press.
Of course, Trump is in the same boat as his Democratic opponents. He too believes in the welfare-warfare state way of life. He’ll soon be coming up with his reform plans. In fact, he’s already promised that he’s going to come out soon with his own healthcare reform proposal. His welfare-warfare reforms will be just as boring as those of his Democratic opponents.
The presidential race will inevitably devolve into the Battle of the Reforms. That excites the mainstream press. As a libertarian, I find it tedious and boring.
But the real battle between the Republicans and Democrats is not over whose reforms are better. The real battle is over who is going to get to preside over this crooked, corrupt, and immoral system. Whose side will get the power and the largess? Whose side will get the grants, contracts, and welfare? Whose side will get the loot? Whose side will have the power to jail more people? Whose side will have the power to attack and invade other countries and kill more people? Whose side will have the power to impose sanctions and embargoes on foreign citizens? Whose side will have the power to detain immigrants? Whose side will have the power to wage trade wars? Which side will have the power to manage and control the economy?
Lost in all this is the concept of freedom. The fight between Republicans and Democrats is all about power and money.
The welfare state is based on the principle of mandatory charity. That includes the two crown jewels of the welfare state, Social Security and Medicare. Contrary to popular opinion, especially among seniors, no one “contributes” into Social Security. There are no lockboxes at Fort Knox which each person’s name on it and containing the amounts that the person has “contributed”
to Social Security. The program is a straight socialist program, one that takes money from the young and productive through the coercive apparatus of taxation and gives it to seniors. It is no different in principle from food stamps. The idea of Social Security originated among German socialists.
It is impossible to reconcile a system based on mandatory charity with the principles of a free society. When people live under a welfare state, they are not free, no matter how much they have convinced themselves they are free. In fact, believing a false reality oftentimes produces psychosis, which might help explain the mass alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, suicides, and other dysfunctionalities that characterize American society.
It is also impossible to reconcile a system of drug laws with a genuinely free society. When people live in a society in which the government wields the power to jail them for ingesting unapproved substances, make no mistake about it: Those people are not free, no matter how convinced they are that they are free.
It is also impossible to reconcile life under a national-security state form of governmental structure with a free society. North Korea is a national-security state. So is China. Cuba. Egypt. Russia. And the United States. Unlike America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic, a national-security state is a totalitarian type of governmental structure. It consists of a vast, permanent military-intelligence establishment that wields omnipotent power over the citizenry and engages in such dark-side practices as assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, secret surveillance, denial of due process, and denial of trial by jury. With its foreign policy of interventionism, it also encompasses such things as coups, alliances with dictatorial regimes, sanctions, embargoes, trade wars, regime-change operations, foreign aid, invasions, and occupations. There is no way that people who live under a national-security state can be considered to be free, no matter how many times they thank the troops for defending their “freedom” by killing more people overseas.
Freedom is not a subject that is likely to appear in the Democratic presidential debates. That’s because all these people believe that freedom comes the welfare-warfare state way of life—the “freedom” of the government to plunder and loot people in the name of forcing them to be good and caring, the “freedom” of the government to jail people for ingesting the wrong substance, and the “freedom” of the government to assassinate, torture, spy, kidnap, indefinitely detain, invade, occupy, and bomb people and nations.
If enough Americans can break through the indoctrination to which the state subjected them and molded their minds into falsely believing they are free, that’s when things are likely to turn from boring to interesting. When confronted with the conscious choice between liberty and “security,” Americans might well choose liberty.
