MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘federal government’

Americans Are Fighting for Control of Federal Powers That Shouldn’t Exist

Posted by M. C. on January 20, 2024

Today’s federal government is almost entirely unconstitutional

By Brian McGlinchey
Stark Realities

https://starkrealities.substack.com/p/americans-are-fighting-for-control

It’s no secret that politics in the United States is growing increasingly acrimonious — to the point that a 2022 poll found 43% of Americans think a civil war is a least somewhat likely in the next decade.

But here’s what few people realize: The intensity of our division springs from a federal government operating far beyond the limits of the Constitution — fueling a fight for control over powers that were never supposed to exist at the national level.

To put it another way, if the federal government were confined to its actual granted authorities, federal elections would be of little interest to the general public, because the outcome would be largely irrelevant to their everyday lives.


America’s founders drafted the Constitution with great trepidation. Having just escaped British tyranny, the people of the separate states that would comprise the proposed union were wary of centralizing too much power at the federal level, and thus sowing the seeds of a new tyranny.

They therefore set out to create a federal government to which the states delegated only certain limited powers, with all other subjects of governance reserved to the states.

Those powers — only 18 of them — are listed, one by one, in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. They include such things as the power to raise armies, maintain a navy, declare war, borrow money, coin money, establish punishments for counterfeiters and pirates, set standards of weights and measures, secure patents and establish post offices.

Reassuring those who were considering the enormously consequential decision of whether to ratify the Constitution, James Madison wrote,

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. [Federal powers] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce…The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people.”

To win over those would-be ratifiers who still feared the proposed federal government would undercut state sovereignty and infringe individual liberties, ten amendments were drafted — the Bill of Rights. The 10th Amendment codified Madison’s previous assurance about the division of authorities between the federal and state governments:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

We arrive then at a hard fact: Today’s sprawling federal government, which involves itself in almost every aspect of daily American life, is almost entirely unconstitutional.

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The Lockean Delusion

Posted by M. C. on September 25, 2023

The state generally does not cede power back to the people. The influx of the power-hungry into lofty positions prevents that. Continuous political battle between passionate ideological factions wastes the people’s time and energy, impoverishes them, and gives the state opportunities to usurp even more power.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-lockean-delusion/

john locke

John Locke known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician. Locke’s theoriesillustration, drawing, sketch, engrawed were usually about identity and the self. Locke thought that we are born without thoughts, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience.

The classical liberal revolution, starting in the 1600s and continuing through the 1700s, created a new ideal for government. Instead of hoping for just rulers who limited the use of their sovereign power, thinkers like Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and many of the American Founding Fathers aimed at a different goal: government derived from the idea of a sovereign people and carefully established to serve their interests. Many of these thinkers saw government as a necessary evil: a coercive force with just enough power to deal with criminals, enforce contracts, and defend the people from foreign attack.

The American founders envisioned a federal government strictly limited by powers enumerated in a written constitution, held in check by the more powerful (yet still limited by written constitutions) states and the people. These states created the federal government to ensure free trade across state lines and military cooperation against other encroaching governments. At least, that was what they told the people at the time.

A government with such limited powers can serve diverse peoples because it legislates on few issues, and no issue it touches presents significant disagreement. This was the Lockean ideal.

However, the incentive for any coercive state is to grow its power. The ways it does so are numerous, ranging from the simple incentive for power-hungry individuals to seek power and abuse it to whatever limit they can get away with, to the tendency for the words in any written constitution to be reinterpreted, redefined, and even ignored as time goes on. When a state decides its own limits, it will expand them whenever it can. As its power grows, special interest groups clamor for legislation providing them rents or giving them control over various issues. The body of laws grows, and self-contradictions become rampant, allowing judges to reach any desired conclusion by selective interpretation.

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The Federal Government Should Not Be Held Hostage for Ukraine Funding

Posted by M. C. on September 22, 2023

Simply put: We have no extra money to send to Ukraine.

If that’s not bad enough, Senate leadership has prevented the implementation of effective oversight mechanisms to ensure that hard-earned American tax dollars don’t fall prey to waste, fraud, and abuse. As a result, besides the colossal costs of the war, we will end up paying a corruption tax.

Rand Paul

Today I am putting leadership of the House, the Senate, and the President of the United States on notice. I will not consent to the expedited passage of any spending measure providing more American aid to Ukraine.

Simply put: We have no extra money to send to Ukraine. Our deficit this year will exceed $1.5 trillion. Borrowing money from China to send to Ukraine makes no sense. 

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Since the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the American taxpayer has provided Kiev $113 billion. Over the 583 days of war between February 24, 2022 and the end of this month, that average will come to $6.8 billion per month—or $223 million per day. 

This week, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington to lobby Congress to approve the Biden administration’s $24 billion supplemental aid request. 

When will the aid requests end? When will the war end? Can someone explain what victory in Ukraine looks like? President Biden certainly can’t. His administration has failed to articulate a clear strategy or objective in this war, and Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive has failed to make meaningful gains in the east. 

With no clear end in sight, it looks increasingly likely that Ukraine will be yet another endless quagmire funded by the American taxpayer. That’s why public support for the war is waning. A CNN poll from August shows that a majority of Americans now oppose Congress authorizing additional funding to Ukraine. 

The Senate leadership of both parties know this. That’s why they are trying to hold the federal government hostage by inserting the $24 billion aid request in a continuing resolution: to force our hand. Either we fund an endless war in Ukraine or the uniparty will shut down the federal government and make the American people suffer. 

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This is a clear dereliction of duty, and I will not stand for it. My colleagues: As representatives of the American people, you should not stand for it. The bill that comes before us should be about funding our own government, not anyone else’s. I will do everything in my power to block a bill that includes funding for Ukraine.

As elected officials, we have an obligation to pursue a foreign policy that advances the security and prosperity of the American people. Funneling billions of dollars into the meatgrinder in eastern Ukraine does neither. 

The longer this conflict continues, the greater the risk that miscalculation or purposeful escalation draws the United States into direct conflict with Russia. Russia’s military may have a bloody nose, but Moscow still maintains the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Let’s not pretend that American involvement in this war comes without risks. 

If that’s not bad enough, Senate leadership has prevented the implementation of effective oversight mechanisms to ensure that hard-earned American tax dollars don’t fall prey to waste, fraud, and abuse. As a result, besides the colossal costs of the war, we will end up paying a corruption tax.

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It’s Time to Walk Away from a Hopelessly Corrupt Federal Government that Facilitates Biden’s Destruction of America

Posted by M. C. on May 23, 2022

We need to start walking away now because we no longer have the luxury of time, waiting for salvation from another potentially rigged election and depending on feckless politicians, who abuse their power and ignore the needs of their constituents.

By Lawrence Sellin
Gateway Pundit

Historically, all “revolutions” arise from societal disruption, chaos, if you will.

Case in point is the rise of Nazism.

In the 1928 German elections, the Nazis received 2.6% of the vote. In 1930, a year after the 1929 Wall Street crash, the Nazis received 18.3% of the vote. By November 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, the Nazis were the dominant party with 33.1% of the vote.

What we are now witnessing in the U.S. is planned chaos to lay the foundation for “revolution.”

That is, the Biden regime wishes to impose a global one-party totalitarian state, a retrograde hybrid governance model combining the most tyrannical aspects of the Chinese Communist Party and the World Economic Forum, in which there are no nations, but only land and people to exploit.

It is Neo-Feudalism, a world of lords and serfs.

It is possible because the American ruling class no longer identifies with the American people, but with other global elites.

In my December 2013 article “A Government Separated from the People Cannot Stand,” I described what many Americans now recognize, that the United States has become a Totalitarian Democracy, one step short of Neo-Feudalism.

The federal government is an entity unto itself operating outside of Constitutional constraints and unaccountable to the American people.

It is a system in which “elected” representatives rule a nation state whose citizens, although granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of government.

Power rests with a relatively small group of politicians and financiers, who enhance their personal wealth and privilege by looting the country through a self-serving legislative process. They maintain their authority by adjusting the levers of government and using the media to manipulate public perception and opinion.

There is now a sharp division between the bipartisan ruling class and the rest of the American populace, the “deplorables,” who are considered retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly controlled by the dictates of a central authority.

When blatant and outrageous lies are no longer sufficient to soothe the electorate into complacency, such a government must begin to curtail freedom and oppress the people in order to remain in power.

Using the false excuse of fighting “domestic terrorism” and “white supremacy,” the Biden regime has turned the U.S. security state against the American people and stripped citizens of their constitutional rights.

That is, the U.S. federal government has de facto seceded from the American People.

Already in 2014, pollster Pat Caddell noted the alienation of the American people from the federal government:

“Eighty-six percent of all voters believe political leaders are more interested in protecting their power than in doing what’s right for the American people. Eighty-three percent believe the country is run by an alliance of incumbent politicians, media pundits, lobbyists, and other interests for their own gain. Further, 79% believe that powerful interests from Wall Street banks to corporations, unions, and PACs use campaign and lobbying money to rig the system to serve themselves and that they loot the national treasury at the expense of every American. … Ninety-two percent say we must recruit and support for public office more ordinary citizens and fewer professional politicians. Not surprising when you consider that 81% believe both political parties do what’s in it for them rather than fix our nation’s problems.”

It was neither conservatism nor liberalism or Vladimir Putin, but that widespread alienation which launched Donald Trump into the presidency in 2016.

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Merry Christmas!

Posted by M. C. on December 24, 2021

Watch “Santa and the Federal Government” on YouTube

At least Santa is good.

https://youtu.be/LxH1U3NYkPE

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The Frogs Have Begun Fleeing the Government’s Boiling Pot – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on December 3, 2021

Now, whom does the government fear most under these conditions?

Rather, it is the person who has no problem walking away from the government’s panopticon to go hunting in the woods, who decides to pay in cash, or who has woken up to the reality that the federal government is in the business of control.  It is the solitary American capable of questioning the government’s official State narrative and willing to think for himself who scares the bejesus out of the powers that be.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/the_frogs_have_begun_fleeing_the_governments_boiling_pot.html

By J.B. Shurk

The federal government spies on every email, text, and call you make.  It uses your phone’s location services to pinpoint where you are at all times.  It knows which I.P. addresses are associated with online comments that have been deemed “politically incorrect.”  Its partnerships with Amazon and Walmart let it know what you’re reading and buying.  Its partnerships with Google and Facebook let it know what you’re thinking.  Its partnerships with Twitter and Hollywood allow it to censor unapproved messages before too many brains have the opportunity to consider new thoughts.  Its alliance with credit card companies allows it to track all your financial transactions and thereby understand your habits, preferences, choices, and addictions.  Its alliance with cellular companies allows it to monitor all your movements, contacts, and associations.  And all of these consumer comforts that are used by the “national security” surveillance state to watch everyone in real time constantly measure every American’s potential for subversiveness, even when that American is engaged in the most mundane things during the course of an ordinary day.  

Now, whom does the government fear most under these conditions?  Hint: It is not the millions of illegal aliens who pour through our uncontrolled borders (during supposedly the greatest pandemic threat in a century), or foreign governments that bankroll American elected officials (How else could Biden and other lifelong politicians be millionaires?), or the threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack taking out America’s aging electrical grid (because Congress’s “infrastructure” spending won’t bother fixing actual infrastructure when there are so many campaign donors and special interest groups to pay off).  

Rather, it is the person who has no problem walking away from the government’s panopticon to go hunting in the woods, who decides to pay in cash, or who has woken up to the reality that the federal government is in the business of control.  It is the solitary American capable of questioning the government’s official State narrative and willing to think for himself who scares the bejesus out of the powers that be.  It is the patriotic grandmother who has the temerity to show up at the nation’s capitol after a heavily disputed election to wave a Trump flag while drinking hot chocolate.  It is the parent who has the gall to believe that the public should be in charge of public education.  It is the humble police officer publicly outed and fired for privately giving a word of encouragement to an innocent teenager politically persecuted for defending his life against a State-sanctioned Antifa mob.  It is the health care worker, firefighter, blue-collar worker, or soldier who refuses to let Big Brother pump him full of experimental gene therapies for the remainder of his life just because people who wear their prestige like crowns proclaim, “You must because we say.”  In other words, governments pretending to protect freedom are most afraid of individuals who insist on being free.  

Does this seem like a system that is destined to survive?  

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