QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; You have worked with politicians worldwide and both sides. What is your opinion of the politics that has emerged post-Great Depression?
LM
ANSWER: The major difference between the socialism supported by the Democrats/Labour in Western Society is that to them the individual has no value, it is the collective society, which they then elevate themselves to rule. Conservatives believe in the individual has rights and value and that the state is to serve the people. In the eyes of socialism, it is not the individual but the collective society which is the value and they are qualified to rule from above. The socialist always seeks to control others and in so doing, the individual is always sacrificed for the collective state. It is not what your country can do for you personally, it is the teaching that you as the individual are to be sacrificed for the greater good of the whole which is controlled by the politicians – i.e. former the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, the socialist always pretend that they are on your side. They have flipped everything upside down. Your personal well being is only possible by surrendering your individuality to the state. It is what they have done with Death Insurance. The insurance companies could not sell Death Insurance, so the reversed it and called it Life Insurance. Like fire insurance protects against fire, life insurance does not protect you from living forever. They reversed the label to make you feel proud how much Death Insurance you own. Socialist did the exact same thing. They get people to surrender their individuality to the state and always blame the rich when your quality of life declines.
Keep in mind that career politicians even on the right also support the government against the individual. Thomas Paine in Common Sense took the position. “Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.”
This to me is the ultimate struggle. We are talking about our freedom which the Founding Fathers made clear – it was to be We the People, not the people as economic slaves to support the state as the tax burden constantly always rises. The average person pays about 50% of their income to support the government on all levels. When politicians want more, they point to the rich but amazingly taxes always rise for everyone. They have never taxed the rich and lowered taxes for everyone else.
Just look at Venezuela. A country with the highest oil reserves turned left and its people are starving, fleeing the country, and retired people’s pension will buy them perhaps one cup of coffee. Meanwhile. identical to what they found in Russia after the collapse of the government, those in power live lavishly and never starve. The people are outraged by the latest story of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro dining on expensive steak at a “Salt Bae” restaurant in Istanbul during a stop-off returning from a visit to China. Red meat is a rare luxury.
You cannot pursue personal security and happiness when you are subservient to the State. Civilization was not created to make economic slaves out of the people to serve the state. This is why the Founding Father prohibited DIRECT TAXES, which the socialists in the rising era of Marxism embraced at the start of the 20th century. Career Republicans do not support this position either for they have indeed confounded society with themselves and have lost sight of what was the original spirit of freedom.
Once they created the income tax, every individual was now required to account to the state what they possessed and what they did. Since then, all we have are laws that constantly remove our freedoms because they assume we are all hiding money. They constantly lower the definition of the “rich” from $5 million in 1940 to now $250,000 and made it total household income not even individual.
It is now money laundering to keep cash in a safe deposit box for the new interpretation is hiding money from the government is a crime even if you paid your tax. We have Australian boasting “Cash is for Criminals” and they now follow your children to school and interrogate the school how you pay for your children. All of these laws, including confiscating cash when you travel, are all justified because the collective society is more important than the individual.
I am glad I am personally closer to my expiration date for this life than my birth. I feel sorry for my family who I will leave behind because they will NEVER know the freedom that I grew up under. With each passing year, we lose more and more of our human rights and individual security. This can only end in civil war as it has always done throughout history when these two philosophies confront each other. One just wants to be left alone and the other cannot sleep at night if others have what they do not. Their interpretation of “We the People” is the collective state comes before the individual.
Unfortunately, go to the far left and the far right and you end up at the same place for different reasons. We do not seem to just find a middle ground and cling to it. It seems as if history just is compelled to repeat endlessly in bloodshed. Giving 1/10th of our income to support a government is reasonable – 50% is unreasonable. John Stuart Mills in his On Liberty concluded that the only reason government has any right to deprive a citizen of their liberty is to protect another. Today, less than 4% of the people in prison are there for violence. Mueller’s prosecutions are all about taxes.
