Let Go of the Centralized State

May 10, 2011
Frisco City, Alabama



There have been several events in the news this past week that have distracted Americans from the more pressing issues of the day. The distractions have included President Obama’s finally releasing his birth certificate to please Donald Trump, The Royal Wedding, and the Navy SEALs’ carrying out of Obama’s order to kill Osama bin Laden. The news of the bin Laden killing overshadowed the killing of Libyan leader Gadhafi’s son and three grandchildren in NATO’s failed attempt to kill Gadhafi himself. As Rad Geek explains,

Two of the (Gadhafi) grandchildren they killed were toddlers, a two-year-old girl, and a two-year-old boy. The other was a baby girl only 5 months old.

Now we have seen how premier Obama has snubbed the people’s representatives – Congress – by acting on his own executive power like a dictator, to bomb Libya and kill its civilians, and we have seen how the Obama Administration has given many contradictory details about the killing of Osama bin Laden. Only in an Orwellian socialist banana republic would we see these things happening. But Obama is merely taking on the expanded executive powers of Bush that the conservatives and Tea Partiers enthusiastically supported.However, regardless how ghastly our Western governments are in their constant murders of innocent civilians especially children and little babies, and regardless of the constant distractions promoted by the subservient Washington press corps, Americans must face the truth about our current economic ordeal, and about our future: Washington’s runaway spending, debts and, really, the flawed structure of the centralized State itself.
Regarding the spending, conservatives and Tea Party congressmen and senators winced and dodged and brought their pledge to cut $100 billion from the federal budget down to $61 billion, only to then agree with Democrats to cut $38 billion, which it turns out will amount to a mere $353 million in cuts. This is out of a budget of $3.7 trillion.
And in addition to all that, if conservatives and Tea Partiers knuckle under with regards to the raising of the debt ceiling.  If Americans can’t see by now how insincere their representatives in Washington are in fixing the problems, and aren’t willing to consider changing the entire structure of governance, then change has to be up to individuals and organizations who actually believe in morality and our inalienable rights to life and liberty.
Americans must begin to face the hard truth that centralism and central planning just don’t work. The Social Security and Medicare schemes are naturally going bankrupt, and the Federal Reserve continues to produce more valueless paper money and in turn causes price inflation to further impoverish us.
It is impossible for any centralized institution, especially a territorial monopoly such as a federal government in Washington, to oversee a population of many millions and control a society’s daily functions and to provide services from a central authority based thousands of miles away. It is impractical for central planners to carry out such assigned caretaker duties, because they could not possibly know what is needed at any given time in any given part of such a large society.
The main areas of disastrous centralization have been in the U.S. government’s aggression against foreigners and the government’s invasiveness against Americans’ civil liberties and economic matters.
Centralization of Foreign Affairs and Government’s Civil Liberties Violations
The Tea Partiers have been supportive of an unconstitutional national security socialism that – as has been seen in past totalitarian societies – can be used as tools for conniving government bureaucrats to oppress their own people. Such threats to the people’s civil liberties and their due process rights, and invasions of their persons and property, seem to happen most the more centralized governing institutions are. (e.g. Soviet Union.)
But if only the Tea Partiers could connect the governmental encroachments, civil liberties intrusions and property trespasses of domestic policies they oppose (such as ObamaCare and the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies) with the governmental encroachments, civil liberties intrusions and property trespasses of the foreign policies they have naively supported (such as the PATRIOT Act, TSA intrusions etc.),
The Department of Homeland Security, TSA and CIA are not protecting Americans from terrorists – they are increasingly trespassing our persons and property, so we are increasingly threatened and unprotected from the predations of these agents of government, far more than we are threatened by terrorists.
But now, an even more serious warning sign than the TSA’s predations is the government’s implementing new invasive, extortive means of gathering private information, to make it difficult to even leave the country. That is the beginning of the process of the government’s keeping the people in the country, involuntarily. If this newest sinking into totalitarianism isn’t enough to make people finally consider decentralizing America, and secession and nullification, I don’t know what is.
As I have noted here, in contrast to the current centralized monopoly in Washington, which has done nothing but provoke foreigners against us, thus making us less safe, decentralizing and removing any monopoly in security would reduce the possibility of any one U.S. state using aggression against other states and against foreigners, and thus would make us safer. It would also remove the threat against our liberty that the totalcrats in Washington currently pose.
Centralization of Economic Affairs
Economically, in addition to loss of liberty, the trend toward more centralization and bureaucratization has resulted in more severe recessions, distortions of markets and further crises and catastrophes. This trend is due to the increasing lack of willingness to rely on the individual to control one’s own life and be responsible for oneself. In other words, independence – which logically coincides with liberty – has been unwittingly traded in for serfdom.
Now, as if the Federal Reserve were not bad enough, there have been calls for a centralized, global currency and global central bank. For some reason, so many people are just unwilling to admit what the Austrian economists have been trying to demonstrate for a hundred years, that the artificial extreme economic booms and busts have for decades been caused by governmental intrusions into the people’s economic and monetary matters, and that, if left alone by these compulsory governmental forces, markets and economic downturns will be self-correcting. Unfortunately, so many people have a weakness for dependence on authority and the officialdom of State controls, despite the disasters they have wrought.
The Federal Reserve has given the banks the ability to make risk-free loans and investments without the obligations to take responsibility for their actions. The Fed encourages banks to engage in financial recklessness, very much like the ability of Congress to borrow from future generations that enables or even encourages Congress to act recklessly. The centralization of a global currency and central bank are the exact opposite of what needs to be done.
As Ron Paul notes in his book, End the Fed, the federally-protected banks have been able to "privatize profits and socialize losses." This moral hazard of centralization and socialism has been at the heart of economic dysfunction throughout our society and throughout the world for many years. But, as Dr. Paul declares, "The banking industry needs its welfare check ended."
It is because of the Fed’s monopoly on our compulsory medium of exchange that has enabled the growing military-industrial-complex to expand its parasitic grasp on the fruits of the American producers’ labor. And, like the banking industry, the military-industrial-complex needs its welfare check ended.
Compulsory federal legal tender laws, compulsory central bank power and control, fraudulent fractional reserve banking and tax-funded bailouts are all based on government-expropriation of private wealth via back-door schemes and thus create moral hazards, as well as ultimately lead to the impoverishment of the masses. Therefore, the American people must decentralize monetarily and remove the federal government’s monopoly in money production and distribution – the Federal Reserve System – and allow for free, unrestricted banking under the rule of law, and allow competing currencies and money backed by something of actual value such as gold and silver.
Americans and the individual states also need to consider taking back ownership of lands that the federal government has illegitimately taken from them, decentralize their energy sources, and decentralize their utilities including water. It may be the case that Americans will have to use nullification and outright withdraw their consent to being shackled by federal government regulations, taxes, mandates and other intrusions that restrict Americans’ God-given inalienable rights to their liberty and prosperity.
Some people perceive such suggestions of civil disobedience and non-compliance as being an advocacy for "lawlessness" or even violence. But, I must point out that such non-violent acts of individual and group nullification of authoritarian dictates are necessary when the centralized government overreaches and becomes the people’s primary violator of individual liberty, trespasser of private property and expropriator of wealth.
It is the centralized government that has been guilty of the lawlessness and violence, and it must be stopped. As we have seen from the people’s representatives in Washington and their submissive unwillingness to stand up to the executive branch or to even adjust their deficits and debts, the idea of a "limited" government is just not realistic.
When people who are used to being dependent on the authority and power of the always-growing centralized federal government feel apprehensive in implementing such decentralization, they need to revisit the idea of local control, which is the real source of the "power to the people." In contrast to the planned chaos produced by national centralism, it is the local level in which production, efficiency and prosperity are best achieved.
Additionally, at the local level, not only do most people actually know each other, but there is also more of a solidarity and common purpose that just cannot truly exist between centralized government bureaucrats and the rest of a big population. As economist Friedrich Hayek observed,

Agreement about a common purpose between a group of known people is clearly an idea that cannot be applied to a large society which includes people who do not know one another. The modern society and the modern economy have grown up through the recognition that this idea – which was fundamental to life in a small group – a face-to-face society, is simply inapplicable to large groups. The essential basis of the development of modern civilization is to allow people to pursue their own ends on the basis of their own knowledge and not be bound by the aims of other people.

As the necessary process of decentralizing America unfolds, Murray Rothbard addresses the issue of what to do about the national debt. Supposedly, we Americans owe others a lot of money – over $14 trillion – because our Congress has spent wildly, selfishly and irresponsibly. Rothbard states the difference between private debt and this immoral scheme of "public debt."

If sanctity of contracts should rule in the world of private debt, shouldn’t they be equally as sacrosanct in public debt? Shouldn’t public debt be governed by the same principles as private? The answer is no…
If I borrow money from a mortgage bank, I have made a contract to transfer my money to a creditor at a future date; in a deep sense, he is the true owner of the money at that point, and if I don’t pay I am robbing him of his just property. But when government borrows money, it does not pledge its own money; its own resources are not liable. Government commits not its own life, fortune, and sacred honor to repay the debt, but ours…
In short, public creditors are willing to hand over money to the government now in order to receive a share of tax loot in the future. This is the opposite of a free market, or a genuinely voluntary transaction. Both parties are immorally contracting to participate in the violation of the property rights of citizens in the future. Both parties, therefore, are making agreements about other people’s property, and both deserve the back of our hand. The public credit transaction is not a genuine contract that need be considered sacrosanct, any more than robbers parceling out their shares of loot in advance should be treated as some sort of sanctified contract…

With the increasing federal government debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Pakistan, and the economic mess caused by Congress and the Federal Reserve, and the police state intrusions being waged against us by a tyrannical Obama regime, we are seeing that the U.S. federal government is the one institution most at fault and guilty of causing the ruin of the United States of America. This centralized government parasite’s shackles must be removed if we are to return to a civilization of economic solvency and human progress.
Americans are really going to have to seriously consider decentralizing the country and returning to state sovereignty and independence. If Belgium can do it, so can we.
So, just as little boys and girls must let go of their mommy and daddy’s hand eventually, so must the American people let go of their dependence on – and serfdom under – the smothering, punitive and reactionary centralized State, the U.S. federal government.