America Is Exactly What It Was Designed to Be

Stop romanticizing the past. (DN 1.21)

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 | 1.20 | 1.21

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Chapter 1: WHY

1.21 — There Is Nothing to Return to, Part 3

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The only way out is forward.

There is no realistic way to return to some previous condition of American (or any other) governance. But even if there were, you should not want to do so.

There is much wisdom to be gleaned from our ancestors and their experiences. But there is no system we should wish to restore. No government to whose authority we should aspire. Not even the “original” American one.

The system cannot be reformed. The system is the problem.

There are only so many different ways to say it, and I worry that I am repeating myself too much. And yet, after each installment, after each argument, someone will inevitably say, Yeah, you’re right! That is why we need to reform the system. That is why we need to get back to the Founders’ original vision!

*deep breath*

As I have said many times before…I get it. These are tough concepts. They are swimming upstream against lifetimes of programming and patriotism. Against hope and fear. They are outside of nearly everyone’s Overton Window.

You are allowed to question whether one candidate is better than another. But cue the harrumphing and shrieking if you dare question democracy itself.

You are allowed to talk about the Constitution. But the piano will stop playing and everyone in the saloon will turn and stare if you question whether the Constitution was a good idea in the first place.

You have to be brave to get where we need to go. You have to have vision.

This is the penultimate installment of Part 1. We will make this and one final addition to the case, and then we’re moving on. Because moving on is what we need to do.

The grift

To help with our final arguments, we will enlist some of the thoughts and writings of other Substackers who have insights into this topic.

For example, in Debunking Democracy, Tereza Coraggio reminds us that

democracy was invented to quell a revolt against the archons, who were the landowners. Smallholders had joined with the landless, the colonized, women, barbarians and slaves to demand…an end to the archon system. They wanted anarchy: rule by rules, not by rulers.

Instead Solon created hierarchy where small landowners could climb the ladder by contributing their wealth (from others’ labor) and their later-born sons to the military. Instead of overthrowing the archons, we got democracy: ‘an insipid milksop inoculating against real change,’ which has kept us complacent for over 2000 years.

Even if this does not describe the formation of every democracy that that ever existed, it is useful shorthand for the phenomenon in general: people who want power and wealth find a way to control and exploit us, and somehow get us to thank them for it.

For a glimpse of just what a grift it really is, here is Brent Naseath:

On top of all of this, in the very first Congress after the Constitution, Hamilton proposed and they voted to purchase all of the continental script at face value. Previously, Hamilton and his banking cronies had purchased almost all of the script from bankrupt farmers for a few pennies on the dollar. So Hamilton and other bankers made a 50 to one return on their investment in a very short time with no risk. Remember that the entire nation, over 95% of the people, were farmers. They have been paid in script to serve in the Continental army and when food and other goods and services were purchased for the revolution. After the war, Hamilton and other bankers refused to accept the script to pay taxes or to make payments on property or loans. Essentially, their banking and government policies made it worthless. Then they bought it for pennies. Then they sold it to the government under the new law they just made for full face value funded by tax dollars. And that's how our nation began with one big scam of the American people by the bankers.

That is 100 times sleazier than the bailouts of 2008.

First, Hamilton and his buddies engineered the impoverishment of huge swaths of people—including many who had fought for the Revolutionary cause. These were men who had lost their farms, their limbs, and their loved ones fighting for freedom and independence.

This impoverishment inspired some of them to fight back (Shay’s Rebellion), which Hamilton and his cronies used as an excuse to call for a constitution to replace the ‘unstable’ Articles of Confederation.

Once they had killed the Articles and gotten the central government they always wanted (by lying through their teeth in the Federalist Papers), Hamilton and his cadre were free, as Montgomery Burns once said, to wallow in their own crapulence. They had impoverished the people by refusing to accept, and thus devaluing, the scrip. Then they bought up the scrip for pennies. Then they used their power in the newly created Congress to revalue the scrip, sell it to the government, and make a fortune.

America was born on the wings of a giant scam. A gorgon of grift. A griffon of graft.

No wonder, as Freedom Fox notes, John Jay felt that “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” He was trying to ensure that they got to rig the game in their favor.

Your ancestors got played. And by continuing to worship at the feet of this false idol, you are getting played just like they did.

You don’t want to hear this because it pulls the rug out from everything you’ve believed. It undermines the foundation you thought we might yet still build upon. But you must hear it. By cowering within the shadow of a false hope, you doom us to an endless, desperate waiting—year after year, decade after decade—for a savior in a tricorne hat who will never Ever EVER come.

There is nothing to go back to.

There was no point when things were okay

After the grifty scam that killed the Articles, centralized the government under the Constitution, and enriched the scammers, the Federalists struck again: John Adams gave us the Sedition Act—early evidence of how things were going to go.

Next, Marbury stole from the states the power to nullify unconstitutional acts, and gave it to unelected men in black robes.

After a few years, we got the Missouri Compromise. Then the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Then the Civil War, the death of 650,000 people, and the end to any notion that the states had created the union in the first place.

Hamilton’s dream was complete: the states had finally been subdued and converted into neutered administrative units of the central authority.

Soon thereafter, Texas vs. White drove the final nail: states are never allowed to leave. Thus, the notion that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it” was finally turned into the legal irrelevance that the Federalists always wanted it to be.

All of this was less than a hundred years after Washington’s first term. The lifetime of one grandma.

Twentieth century American Progressives then joined the rest of the world in its leftward turn. Taylorism elevated the technocrat over the individual—a yoke under which we still languish. Wilson and the proto-fascist left set an example for European fascists to follow, and the racism of Southern Democrats earned the Nazis’ admiration and respect.

A few years later, FDR and his braintrust continued the project. In the Soviet Union, they had “seen the future, and it worked.” So they set about transforming the U.S. economy into a socialist-fascist-corporatist Frankenstein monster—a condition in which it remains to this day. Eventually, Mussolini would see a kindred spirit in Roosevelt, declaring, “Ecco—un dittatore!”

In the 1960s, the New Left bombed and assassinated their way to social power. A few decades later, some of those same people oozed their way into political power through the magic of elections and connections.

Today, their “long march through the institutions,” begun in the 1920s, is complete. They wield tremendous power, and we see the results.

Along the way, America abused Indians, prevented the scheduled end of slavery, and interned a lot of Japanese people. And there were periods when the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent.

Do you understand? There. Is. Nothing. To. Go. Back. To.

There was no point at which things were okay. Things were never okay. James Madison was still alive when the Indian Removal Act began the Trail of Tears—the forcible removal and ethnic cleansing of 60,000 human beings over the course of two decades.

Whose “original vision” was that?

You think that things went downhill in 1910 with Jekyll Island and the rise of the Federal Reserve? I got news for you, son—America was controlling and manipulating currency, and punishing competition from free currencies, from the beginning.

H.L. Mencken was writing about the use of the Department of Justice as a political weapon…in the 1920s. Sound familiar?

In the decade before, media outlets were being forcibly shut down, and thousands were being thrown in jail…for speaking out against World War I. The First Amendment? Just pretty words.

In 1927, eight men in robes ruled that people could be sterilized against their will if the government deemed them “unfit” to procreate. This was the inevitable outcome of a eugenics movement that started here—not in Germany, but here in the U.S.—in the late 1800s. Is that something you would like to get back to?

Things were not “better before.”

Nor did they get better after, as that same sterilization craze has marched merrily into our own lifetimes…

Under the euphemistically named Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, one out of every four Native American women were sterilized, most without their knowledge or consent. Oh, and guess what—forced sterilization is still going on. And with current general fertility rates dropping mysteriously, there is a good chance that someone is continuing the project by other means, with the whole of the human population as the target.

Things are not right now, and there is no time when they were.

There are 2000-year-old quotes of Roman adults taking about how the younger generation “have no respect,” and how “things were different back in my grandpappy’s day.” Sound familiar? Romanticizing the past is nothing new.

We need to stop doing that.

A continuation of oligarchy by other means

The aforementioned Brent Naseath further noted that

“The Federalists, Hamilton and those wanting a strong federal government got what they wanted. As a result, the Constitution gave the President of the United States more power than the king of Great Britain had at the time.”

This comports with the determinations of Hoppe and other analysts: that modern-day politicians and bureaucrats have far more power over your life than any king ever did.

Is that what you want?

Is that our only choice—to vote for people who have way too much power over our lives (democracy), or to be ruled by people whom we did not choose, but who will maybe have a little less control overall (monarchy)?

Are we so without vision that we cannot imagine that there might be a third option? Are we so fearful, so mired in inertia, that we won’t even try?

Naseath continues: “The result was an ‘Aristo-Democratical Monarchy’, as suggested by John Adams in a letter to Benjamin Rush in 1790, three years after the Constitution was written….[T]he Constitution did not create a radical new form of democracy. Instead, it created a ‘very traditional mixed monarchy.’”

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson famously said, “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.”

No, Mr. Jefferson…but that is the government you got. And that is the government we empower every time any one of us claims we can fix things with more voting or the ‘right leader.’

We need to stop doing that.

Take your hat out of your hand!

Writing from the Mother Country, Bettina correctly points out that “Our unwritten constitution in the UK protects the government, not the governed, and the oft-cited Magna Carta does nothing more than codify the fact that we have to request our freedoms from a higher authority.”

It can be reasonably argued that Magna Carta was necessary, not only to (try to) tame King John, but also to mitigate some of the tyranny of continental feudalism and the Norman Yoke. It even makes sense to revere it as a watershed moment in the story of Anglophone and human liberty.

But the point Bettina is making must be heard and understood, loud and clear…

The flaw of Magna Carta, and every document that has followed in its wake, is that it codifies the presumption that we must go hat in hand to government to beg for our freedom.

We. Need. To. Stop. Doing. That.

A cruel system that needs to end

Back in 1867, Lysander Spooner identified one of democracy’s worst flaws—its sheer cruelty:

[W]ithout his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former.

Is this what you want for your children, and their children, for all time? An endless battle to gain control of the system before the other guy does?

Spooner continues:

His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing.

None of us chose this. Not a single one of us signed anything.

There. Is. No. Contract.

Voting is not consent—it engineered social and economic warfare. It is a dance we do for our masters’ entertainment, year after, year, decade after decade.

You will recall that in Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished in Hades with the task of pushing a boulder to the top of a hill. The torture, of course, was that the boulder could never reach the top—it would roll back down every time, just as he neared the summit. Thus, he was cursed with never-ending failure and frustration—a pointless exercise for all eternity.

We can do better.

Put down the boulder, Sisyphus. It’s time to walk away.

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