We Need a New System, Not a New President

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Unfortunately, the presidential race is devoid of any discussion of what is actually the most important issue facing the American people: whether to continue the political and economic systems under which we have all been born and raised — that is, the welfare state, the national-security state, and the regulated/managed economy — or to replace this way of life with a system based on the principles of economic liberty, voluntary charity, and a limited-government republic.

The assumption is that our statist way of life is now permanent and that we are consigned to living under it forever. Therefore, the mindset is that we just need to elect the best person to oversee and run it.

Thus, it has become standard for presidential candidates to present their plans on how they are going to reform, fix, streamline, and improve this statist way of life. Most everyone gets all excited over what his or her particular candidate is going to do to make things better.

But no matter who is elected president, the system will just keep getting worse and worse, as it has after each presidential election for the past 70 years. That’s because it is an inherently defective system. Everywhere you look there is a crisis.

Consider, for example, the crisis in Ukraine, which the U.S. national-security establishment spent years successfully provoking. It’s not going the way the Pentagon and the CIA wanted and so they are doubling down by essentially daring Russia to respond with limited nuclear warfare. But even if no nuclear war develops, the fact that they are willing to risk it says everything about the national-security-state system under which we have been born and raised and under which we are consigned to live.

Here at home, there is an ever-growing fiscal crisis. The federal debt now exceeds $35 trillion and growing, with an annual deficit approaching $2 trillion. That debt is ultimately owed by American taxpayers. There are statists who lament this growing problem but, at the same time, steadfastly maintain that America must continue with Social Security, Medicare, the welfare state, and the national-security state, which are the biggest components of federal spending and debt that are hurtling our nation toward national bankruptcy and the economic tyranny that will accompany it.

There is widespread dependence on government largess, not only with respect to Social Security and Medicare but also with respect to all other welfare programs. People are convinced that if they repealed the programs, there would be millions of people dying in the streets.

Despite the manifest failure and destructiveness of the war on drugs, American statists steadfastly continue it, with the same measures they have employed for decades, including criminal prosecutions and convictions of drug dealers. The drug-war crisis, along with the violence and corruption it spawns, just continues.

People look for scapegoats for the failures of America’s statist way of life. The most popular one is illegal immigrants. If we could only build our Berlin Wall to the skies, America’s economic problems would disappear, statists believe. Another popular scapegoat is those “foreigners” who are stealing our jobs and flooding us with their products. But it’s not illegal immigrants or other foreigners who are the cause of America’s problems. It is the statist system that Americans have adopted that is the problem.

Look at education. It has produced a society of good little citizens who defer to U.S. officials, especially when it comes to the designation of the latest official enemy, whether it be Russia, China, Iraq, Syria, Iran, communists, Reds, terrorists, Taliban, North Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, terrorism, Muslims, Islam, Palestinians, and others. Americans hate them when they are told to hate them.

Consider America’s culture of violence. The scapegoat here is guns. If only we could adopt a strict system of gun control, the violence would disappear, statists claim. It would never happen because America’s culture of violence is rooted not in guns but rather the the massive violence and death that the U.S. national-security state inflicts on people in foreign lands, not only directly in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam, but also indirectly with its embargoes and sanctions as well as the conflicts it provokes, as it has with Ukraine and Russia, where tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and civilians now lie dead.

We have now had two separate and distinct systems in U.S. history: One that was based largely (but certainly not perfectly) on economic freedom, free markets, and voluntary charity and the statist system under which we live today. What we need in this country is a national debate over which system we want going forward.

Consider, for example, the period 1890-1910, which is my favorite time in American history. It was not a libertarian panacea by any means, especially when one considers such things as the violation of women’s rights, the beginning of Jim Crow, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and the Spanish-American War. But the fact is that most of those statist measures were the beginning of the shift toward the statist way of life under which we live today.

Consider that during that period of time, there was no income taxation, IRS, Social Security, Medicare, welfare state, regulated/managed economy, FDA, Federal Reserve, paper money, drug laws, gun control, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, foreign military bases, foreign aid, foreign interventionism, (minimal) immigration controls, public (i.e., government) schooling, (few) economic regulations, state-sponsored assassinations, torture, minimum-wage laws, price controls, and the like.

That system produced the greatest outburst of economic prosperity in the history of man, along with the greatest outburst of voluntary charity that mankind has ever seen.

That’s the national debate we need to have: whether to maintain our current statist system or to restore the principles of economic liberty and limited government that our Americans stood for in that period of time and build on them. Our freedom and well-being and perhaps even our survival depends on it.