“Politics, as hopeful men practice it in
the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in
substance,” as the incomparable H.L. Mencken observed more than 80 years ago.
His observation applies to the United States of today in two ways. On one
level, and the level Mencken intended, it reminds us of the fact that any form
of government, whether democratic- republican or monarchical, is ultimately
oppressive at heart. Every state is, qua state, a central depository of
legalized violence, and thus stands in direct and unending opposition to
individual freedom. Or, in the words of Ludwig von Mises: Government is
essentially the negation of liberty.
But Mencken happened to use the words
‘hopeful’ and ‘change’ in this sentence, and the choice of words brings us
quickly to the administration of Barack Obama and his promise – proclaimed
particularly noisily for his first term – that his policies would mark a
distinct change from the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Assessing
the situation now at the start of his second term, there is no escaping the
fact that whatever change Obama brought was predominantly in appearances rather
than in fundamentals, and that the most worrisome and offensive trend that
characterized the Bush administration not only continued under President Obama,
it even accelerated.
This trend is the rise of the American
leviathan, the rapid expansion of state power and the ubiquitous curtailment of
individual rights, whether they are rights to fair and open trial, property
rights, or rights to privacy. The trend, everywhere in U.S politics, has been
and still is towards big and interventionist government. While the media keep
droning on about the apparently insurmountable divisions in US politics, the
fact remains that a substantial de-facto consensus exists in Washington when it
comes to giving the state more power. The increasingly expansive and expensive
warfare-welfare state has been growing under Republican and Democrat presidents
alike and is the one project that enjoys vast support across ‘the aisle’. The
idea of limited government under the rule of law, historically a defining
feature of America’s image of itself, lies dying, critically wounded by Baby
Bush and now finished off by Obama. What Americans are destined for is an
increasingly unconstrained government largely accountable to nobody but itself.
Leviathan
rises
After 9/11, the Bush-Cheney White House
considerably expanded the powers of the executive branch, mainly via the
Patriot Act, arguing that the nation was now at war and that specific
war-powers had to be granted, among them detention without trial and
surveillance without warrants. These enlargements of state authority coupled
with the hyper-interventionist economic policy that began after the financial
crisis hit in 2007, have fundamentally changed the relationship of the American
state with its citizenry.
Under Bush, Americans witnessed the
weakening, if not outright suspension, of habeas corpus, the
legal requirement that a prisoner be brought in front of a court or judge. This
essential safeguard against unlawful detention without evidence has been a
cornerstone of English common law for 800 years and of American law since the
birth of the nation. Furthermore, Americans saw their country engage in new
overseas wars, saw the launch of a new major federal agency, the
unapologetically-Orwellian named ‘Department of Homeland Security’ which now
has a staff of 240,000 and an annual budget of $60 billion. They witnessed the
arrival of the $1 trillion dollar federal deficit, the ongoing expansion of the
federal payroll, massive bank-bailouts and the nationalization of car companies
and home finance, the injection of taxpayer funds into Wall Street, in some
cases by force, they witnessed the arrival of zero interest rates and
large-scale debt-monetization by the US central bank.
This vast accumulation of state power
came with a slogan, the belligerent ‘We will do whatever it takes’. Hardly any
proclamation could be more at odds with the American tradition of a strictly
limited state, of individual freedom and free markets. Besides, all the grave
problems facing America today are the result of politics, of previous policy
errors committed by the very same Washington elites that are now robustly
demanding more power from the American people ‘to fix this,’ and that want us
to believe that ‘the ends justify the means’.
Any hope that Obama would take a
different road, or any notion that, as his numerous supporters keep telling
themselves, he simply needs more time to fix the mess that Bush left behind,
now lies in tatters, destroyed by four years of actions that tell a different
story: In the case of habeas corpus, the Obama administration has generously
granted itself the wide interpretation of powers that Bush-Cheney had probably
implicitly assumed but never spelled out. Since Obama signed the National Defence Authorization Act of 2012, it should be clear to every American
that the U.S. military has indeed the right to indefinite detention — or
detention until
the end of hostilities, but as the War on Terror is as open-ended
as ‘quantitative easing’ or
the War on Drugs – or, as Doug Casey calls it more accurately, The War on Some
Drugs – this means for all practical purposes indefinite detention without
trial. Americans must also realize that this includes detention of American
citizens on American soil. Additionally, the Obama administration has granted
itself extensive freedoms for the surveillance of
U.S. citizens. Thus, dear reader, 11 years after 9/11
and with Osama bin Laden dead, the US government keeps giving itself more
powers to spy on its citizens, to detain them and interrogate them.
Obama has, of course, continued the
overseas wars and maintained the Guantanamo Bay detention and interrogation
camp. He ordered the killing of at least one American citizen
without trial.
In the field of economic policy we also
see nothing but a continuation of the policies of hyper-active interventionism.
Zero interest rates and debt-monetization by the US central bank have, of
course, continued, and not only have they continued they are now officially
declared ‘open-ended’. Continued, too, has the mad Keynesian
‘stimulus’ policy of deficit-spending with Democrat hack, Paul Krugman, formerly
known as a Nobel-prize winning economist, shouting, ‘more, more, more’ from the
sidelines. Naturally, the $1 trillion budget deficits have continued, also.
Indeed, Obama implemented even bigger ‘stimulus’ packages than Bush.
Of course, none of this has ended
America’s depression, although short-term statistical growth spurts of barely 2
percent that persistent 8-10-percent deficits may help generate from time to
time have allowed bean-counting economic statisticians to proclaim that a
recovery was indeed in place. Only a handful of die-hard Keynesians, such as
Krugman and Richard Koo, and a few financial writers believe in
this absurd policy. Most business people know better, which is why they keep
hunkering down. These policies are as likely to end America’s economic malaise
as the War on Terror is likely to end terrorism, or the War on Drugs to end
drug taking and thus the creation and distribution of drugs.
However, I suspect that the ends are no
longer what matters. The means have become ends in themselves. Vast federal
bureaucracies obtain resources, power and influence through the pursuit of
these policies. These policies will not end because the people who are in
charge of them do not want them to end. Their income, their power, their
prestige, their careers depend on them.
Appearances
I do not want to advance conspiracy
theories here but if you just imagine, simply as a mental exercise, the
existence of a Big-Government-War-Party that operates in the background, you
would have to agree that, if such a party existed, it would be the party that
had been calling the shots in the United States for the past 11 years and the
party still in ascendancy today. Furthermore, it seems that such a party does
better in many ways when fronted by a well-spoken cool African-American lawyer
from Chicago than a rich, white and angry born-again Christian from Texas, or a
white, rich Mormon ex-Wall Streeter. After all, there are many people to whom
appearances seem to matter more than substance, not least among them the
‘liberal’ Hollywood crowd.
About 8 or 9 years ago, I was invited to
the Baftas awards ceremony in London. For those of you who are not into movies,
the Baftas is an awards ceremony as close to the Oscars as Britain got.
Filmmakers and actors from Europe and plenty of movie royalty from Hollywood
were in attendance, and as the Iraq war had just started, it was fashionable
among the glitterati to demonstrate their sorrow, concern and disapproval at
every opportunity. Pedro Almodovar treated us to a rendition of his most
beloved Spanish poem. I think you get the idea. But all of this self-important
indignation has now stopped. Since the Obamassiah has landed and has taken over
the war effort, Hollywood has made peace with American militarism. George
Clooney is a fan, so is Sarah Jessica Parker. Obama enjoys the support of Jay-Z
and Beyonce. In 2010, at a time when Obama had already received the Nobel Peace
prize for not being George W. Bush, the Washington Post reported that “Obama has ordered a dramatic
increase in the pace of CIA drone-launched missile strikes into Pakistan in an
effort to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban members in the ungoverned tribal areas
along the Afghan border. There have been more such strikes in the first year of
Obama’s administration than in the last three years under President George W.
Bush, […].” But let us not quibble over such detail. For Hollywood, Obama is
still our ‘Lord and Savior’, as actor Jamie Foxx proclaimed only
last week.
Of course, none of these policies would
have changed – in essence – if Romney had won. His supporters may tell
themselves that a Romney vote was a vote for liberty and capitalism, as Romney
wanted to cut taxes and attack the budget deficit. Yet, Romney promised to not
cut military spending (of course not), and also to adopt a hard line on Iran, a
potential next step to yet another war. By the same token, Obama supporters
might believe that they voted for tolerance and freedom by rejecting Romney’s
social conservatism. But I fear that political tribalism prevents most voters
from seeing the big-government forest for all the gay-rights and
abortion-rights trees.
If you are of a neo-con persuasion, you
might want to argue that the militarism of presidents of all political stripes
is only proof of the severity of the terrorist menace, that whatever their
previous notions and beliefs, once they get into the White House and receive
their first CIA briefing they realize how grave the threat really is, that all
of us lesser mortals “can’t handle the truth”, and that it is therefore up to
the president and his Col. Nathan R. Jessups to do what is needed, and by the
way, sod those civil liberties.
Maybe. Maybe not.
One thing is certain: that the executive
branch would ever have such vast powers was never part of the original idea of
American government, the concept of a limited state, and of the American people
living under the rule of laws and not the rule of men. If you want to argue
along the lines that the reality of today’s world requires extensive government
privileges, you have to argue that America’s political principles and founding
ideas are now outdated and that they should be openly discarded. I am not
convinced that this is necessary but this is certainly what is happening.
But then ask yourself, if you really
believe that everlasting peace requires everlasting war, and that prosperity
comes from printing money and accumulating debt, and that individual freedom
has to be curtailed to be protected.
But maybe there is another explanation:
The
military-industrial complex
When I grew up in Germany and became
politically aware in the late 70s, I always thought that the term
‘military-industrial complex’ was an invention of the Left, mainly used to tar
capitalist enterprise with the brush of warmongering and war-profiteering. I
was surprised to learn that the phrase had been coined and most effectively
used by an American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was a Republican, a
West Point graduate and a general. Eisenhower was no Lefty and he wasn’t a
small-state libertarian conservative either, having opposed the isolationism of
Taft and then, as president, expanding social security and the interstate
highway system. Yet, when he left office, he warned his fellow Americans in a
televised farewell address of the rise of what he termed the
military-industrial complex, the sizable military infrastructure that the wars
of the 20th century
had bestowed on American society, consisting of the military itself and the
sprawling defence industry. You can see excerpts of his speech on youtube. Here is one quote:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
The recent 18-month, $6billion
mega-version of American Idol, also known as the U.S. presidential election,
had to do without a general, as it pitched the Community-Organizer-in-Chief
against the slick ex-private-equity millionaire. Yet, notably, the military
didn’t have to fear anything from either candidate. At this stage, the US
military is all but untouchable, and I suspect that a majority of Americans are
in sympathy with this. One can easily envision that as America continues to
decline economically, the US public will embrace the military even more, as one
last glorious reminder of the nation’s former vitality and global superiority.
There is a ready analogy in Britain: Although nothing provides better
short-hand for the type of hopelessly statist policies that killed British
industry in the decades after the Second World War than the country’s socialist
National Health Service, born in 1948 out of the then widespread belief that
anything can be solved by the victorious British state organizing it centrally,
the NHS is to this day the one institution that stirs national pride in the
hearts of Britons, even those belonging to a younger generation. It has become
an unmovable part of the British political landscape, and any reform-minded
Prime Minister will attack it at his peril. The US military and the NHS are not
just symptoms of their respective country’s maladies, they are among the
causes, yet have moved beyond the reproach of serious political debate.
Arbitrary
government
Speaking of socialist health services,
the beginning nationalization of health care in America under Obama fits rather
seamlessly into the overall picture of an increasingly assertive, hyperactive
federal government that gets involved in every part of its citizens’ lives. It
is simply another addition to the welfare-warfare-big-state project and not the
‘progressive’ policy outlier and symbol of a more caring and empathic
government that Obamacare supporters want to see in it. This is naïve but maybe
not as naïve as the hope that this project will make health care cheaper for
the public. Nothing ever got cheaper by having the federal bureaucracy take
control of it.
As part of Obamacare the state now
boldly assumes the power to force citizens into commercial transactions, the
purchases of health insurance, under a rather generous interpretation of the
constitution that was recently approved by the Supreme Court. And while the
government forces Americans to enter some contracts it also appropriates to
itself the power to arbitrarily rip up others. When Obama bailed out Chrysler
he simply tossed aside the legal rights of a group of bondholders that
– entirely legally and perfectly justifiably – wanted to enact bankruptcy
proceedings to protect their investments. Rather than protecting private
property and securing legally binding contracts, as is one of the acknowledged
primary tasks of any civil government, Obama chose to break contracts and to
take money from bondholders to give it to the auto workers union. Political
expediency and the wishes of the executive branch of government now trump the
sanctity of private contracts in America.
What is
coming
Wars, extensive surveillance, bailouts,
‘stimulus’, nationalized health care – all of this costs money, and the
American state increasingly sees its citizenry as cash cows. The signs are
everywhere. The US is the only country I know that has worldwide taxation for
all its citizens. As long as you are a US citizen you have to file a US tax
return, even if you live abroad and have not set foot in the country for years
or decades. It remains your obligation to keep abreast of all changes to the
tax code and those changes are numerous. As of recently, Americans have to
report all foreign bank accounts – even if they are not income-generating – to
the Internal Revenue Service, the powerful US tax authority. But it doesn’t
stop there. As of next year, the infamous Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act
(FATCA) will come into effect, which requires any bank anywhere in the world
that invests in US securities or conducts business in the US to collect data on
American customers overseas and pass this on to the IRS.
Doug Casey made an excellent observation:
If you want to get an idea of what our future society will look like you can
easily do so by visiting your nearest airport. The modern airport is the
model-village of our society, the Orwellian theme park that gives you a glimpse
into what will take shape in society at large in coming years, not only in the
US, of course, but also in the EUSSR and elsewhere. It is a controlled
environment, pleasingly temperate with lots of opportunities for harmless and
pointless consumption but where you are under constant surveillance, where your
every move is being monitored and recorded forever, increasingly with the use
of face-recognition technology, where you will occasionally be searched, where
you can’t smoke, and where the calming background music is frequently
interrupted by loudspeaker messages that remind you to stay alert and to report
any suspicious behaviour to the authorities.
So far, the public is happy to go along
with this. I am frequently amazed by the sheepish obedience on display at
airports where long lines of travellers stand quietly and patiently, taking off
their shoes, calmly observing security personnel rummaging through their
luggage, carefully making the prescribed moves in the new scanners as if they
are about to enter a nuclear plant. If you see movies of the 1970s or 1980s, or
even 1990s, with scenes at airports in them, you will find that they give you
an impression of almost frivolous free-spiritedness by comparison. These
procedures could not have been introduced in one big swoop. The public would
have objected. They had to be introduced piecemeal, one new regulation and
procedure at a time.
The same procedure applies to tax
surveillance and capital controls. The screws will be tightened slowly so that
the public gets used to ever tighter monitoring and ever closer controls. And
fear remains an important factor. Large sections of the public believe that
their prosperity and their economic future are at risk from unregulated bankers
and tax-cheating millionaires who do not pay ‘their fair share’, and they
believe that their very lives are constantly at risk from terrorist attacks.
They see the government as their guardian and as the necessary regulator, and
being under the democratic delusion that as voters they ultimately remain in control
of the government, they are happy to sign their freedoms away. As Frank Karsten and Karel Beckman astutely
observed, voting is the illusion of influence in exchange for the loss of
freedom.
Maybe this statist nightmare will end at
some point. Maybe Americans will rediscover their tradition of independence,
self-reliance and personal freedom, and of suspicion of any form of state
authority. Germany has not a great sense of personal freedom in its national
DNA. Britain has, and America even more so. Maybe recent developments will one
day look in retrospect as strange as the prohibition era or the confiscation of
private gold in 1933 and the suppression of gold ownership until 1974 do today:
blots on the CV of a nation that sees itself as the land of the free. Maybe.
But for the foreseeable future I remain pessimistic. For our generation the
American Dream may be dead.
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