Tag: government overreach

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Persecution Pantomime is now an established part of what is styled “law enforcement” in the United States.

This includes such theater as marching a dog around a vehicle to confect probable cause to search it when it is otherwise absent. The motorist cannot refuse to watch this show – and if the dog “alerts” (i.e., it raises a paw, spins in a circle or whines or cocks its head or some other clearly objective evidence that you have arbitrarily illegal drugs in your vehicle) this provides the armed government workers with the legalized pretext to tear apart your car.

Continue reading “Losing Our Heads”

“More paper money cannot make a society richer, of course, it is just more printed-paper. Otherwise why is it that there are still poor countries and poor people around?”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

“I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.”

H. L. Mencken

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

H. L. Mencken

“For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well organized and armed militia is their best security.”

Thomas Jefferson

Guest Post by John W. Whitehead

“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”—Richard Nixon

Who pays the price for the dissolution of the constitutional covenant that holds the government and its agents accountable to the will of the people?

We all do.

This ill-advised decision by President Trump to circumvent the Constitution’s system of checks and balances by declaring a national emergency in order to build a border wall constitutes yet another expansion of presidential power that exposes the nation to further constitutional peril.

It doesn’t matter that the legal merits of this particular national emergency will be challenged in court.

The damage has already been done.

As reporter Danny Cevallos points out, “President Donald Trump only had to say ‘national emergency’ to dramatically increase his executive and legal authority. By simply uttering those words … Trump immediately unleashed dozens of statutory powers available to a president only during a state of emergency. The power of the nation’s chief executive to declare such an emergency knows few strictures — it was designed that way.”

Continue reading “Rule by Fiat: National Crises, Fake Emergencies and Other Dangerous Presidential Powers”

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Whose interests are served when Pelosi sells out health care and Pompeo sells out peace?

The US health system is the most high cost and dysfunctional health care system in the world. The reason is that it is privatized. In the rest of Western civilization the system is socialized.

The reason health care is socialized in civilized countries is not only to provide health care to citizens who otherwise could not afford it, but also to reduce the cost. In a privatized system, a profit has to be turned at every level: the general practitioner, the specialist, the diagnostic facility, the ambulance service, the emergency room, the hospital, the hospice, the health insurance company. All of these levels of profit build up the cost.

In the hybrid system with which the US is afflicted, regulation drives the cost even higher. It is not only government regulation because of Medicare and Medicaid, but also private regulation imposed by private insurance companies. In America, alone in the world, medical care comes second to paperwork.

Continue reading “Who Does Government Serve?”