Our Electoral Serfdom
Reminder: Our online Zoom conference on open borders continues this Monday evening, November 11, with Richard Ebeling and me. We wrap up our series on open borders with a session that addresses all the common objections to open borders. 7 p.m.-8 p.m. Eastern Time. Register here.
Reminder: I’ll be speaking at the JFK Lancer conference and also at the CAPA conference. The Lancer conference is being held on November 22-24 in Dallas. The CAPA conference is apparently now being held online. There is also another excellent JFK conference on the same weekend sponsored by the JFK Historical Group. All three of them are fantastic JFK-assassination-related conferences. I highly recommend registering for all three and then picking and choosing which sessions you would like to attend at all three conferences. The registration prices are moderate and it’s a great way to support three great conferences. I will have some of my JFK books at my presentations at the Lancer conference to autograph and sell at a discounted price. I hope to see you all there!
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Regardless of who wins the presidential election, one thing is certain: We will continue to live our lives as serfs under the welfare-state/warfare-state/regulated-managed economy way of life under which we have all been born and raised. That’s because the only thing we are doing in this presidential race is the same thing we have always done in presidential races all of our lives. We are electing someone who will preside over the system that makes us serfs.
Longtime readers of my blog know that for many years I have strongly recommended a book entitled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, who is a professor of law at Tufts University and who served counsel to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Every American who cares about freedom and the future of our nation should read this book. Its thesis is a simple but profound and ominous one: It is the national-security branch of the government — that is, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — that is ultimately in charge of the federal government, especially in foreign policy. That includes the war against Russia in Ukraine, which has brought us perilously close to nuclear war.
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If Glennon’s thesis is correct — and I am 100 percent convinced that he’s right — it doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is elected president today. Neither one of them will be calling the shots. It is the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA who will continue to call the shots. Whether it is Trump or Harris, he or she will be answering to the national-security branch of the government, just as the Congress and the Supreme Court do.
For example, Trump has vowed that if he is elected this time around, he will do what he vowed to do last time — order a release of the long-secret JFK-assassination-related records of the national-security establishment, specifically the CIA. No, he won’t — unless they permit him to do so. In my opinion, that’s why he didn’t release them last time — because they wouldn’t let him. They could let him do so this time to enable him to have the appearance of being in charge, but the matter is entirely up to them. And make no mistake about it: Both Trump and Harris will defer to whatever the national-security branch wants.
It’s not enough to be “antiwar,” as some libertarians profess. As long as America remains a national-security state, there will always be continuous war, conflicts, tensions, crises, and official enemies, adversaries, competitors, and opponents that are generated by the national-security establishment itself. Opposing this war or that war is nothing more than playing a game of whack-a-mole. To end the forever wars requires a dismantling and termination of the national-security state and a restoration of a limited-government republic.
Our job as libertarians is not to elect someone who is going to preside over our serfdom. Our job as libertarians is to lead America to freedom. A necessary prerequisite for achieving a genuinely free society is to dismantle the national-security establishment and restore America’s founding system of a limited-government republic. There is no way that anyone who lives under a national-security state form of governmental structure can be considered free.
But that’s not all. There is also the welfare state under which we live. There is no way that people can be considered free under a welfare state, no matter whether Trump is elected president or Harris is. While not as bad as a national-security state, a welfare state is a close second. It is based on notion that the state wields the authority to take whatever amount of money from people to whom it belongs and give it to people to whom it does not belong.
Thus, the welfare state is inextricably bound up with our serfdom. As serfs, we exist to serve the state. We produce wealth so that we can pay the taxes that they impose on us, which they they then deliver to others. In the process, we are supposed to be considered good, caring, and benevolent, thanks to the IRS and the welfare-state bureaucratic departments and agencies. Social Security and Medicare, the two crown jewels of American socialism, are the best examples of this welfare-state phenomenon of “care, compassion, and benevolence.”
There is the drug war, the infamous decades-old program in which the state wields the authority to punish us for ingesting bad substances. Imagine that: We put something bad into our mouths and our governmental daddy sends us to our room. How can any adult be considered free living in a society in which the state punishes people for doing nothing more than engage in a purportedly unhealthy act? How can that be any business of the state in a genuinely free society? This massive deadly and destructive program will continue under Trump or Harris.
There is the decades-old, failed system of border controls and the massive immigration-police state that comes with it. Death, suffering, and the destruction of liberty and privacy. It is tempting to think that this abusive, failed system only harms foreigners. But the fact is that it harms us as well, in that it destroys such fundamental rights as freedom of association, liberty of contract, freedom of travel, and economic liberty, all in the name of “keeping us safe.” As long as Americans live under an immigration police state, they will continue to be serfs. It will continue under Trump or Harris.
The Federal Reserve and paper money. These too will continue regardless of who is elected president. The government will continue to spend trillions of dollars for its welfare state, its warfare state, its regulated/managed economy, its foreign and domestic military bases, foreign aid, foreign interventions, its drug war, and its border police state. The Fed will continue to accommodate that massive spending with ever-increasing amounts of printed paper money. Officials will continue to blame the ever-increasing prices on private businesses rather than on the Fed’s debasement of the currency. Federal control over money will simply reinforce the serfdom under which we live. This monetary system will continue under Trump or Harris.
It is not enough to simply end the U.S. Department of Education, as right-wingers have been maintaining since Ronald Reagan called for the demise of this department. We libertarians must continue making the case for the end of all governmental involvement in education — a separation of school and state. Leaving the state in charge of education, including at a local level, simply leaves children to be indoctrinated into believing that their serfdom is freedom, an indoctrination that oftentimes lasts for the rest of their lives. This educational system will continue under Trump or Harris.
Can we libertarians lead America — and the world — to a genuinely free society? You bet we can. It’s not easy, but if freedom was easy to achieve, everyone in history would have lived in a free society. Of course it’s difficult but we can and should do it. But there are no short-cuts, including by electing Donald Trump or Kamala Harris to preside over our serfdom.
