Harry Fox, Jr. spent the past few decades becoming a successful land developer in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. (Fox generally does not build but instead acquires large tracts of land and goes through the necessary steps in order to subdivide the land into lots and bring them to market.) He mentioned to the newspaper that if he had tried getting into the land developing business today he would have a much harder time doing so because of all the government regulation that exists. I wanted to know what he meant by this so I contacted him and conducted an interview of my own.

South-central Pennsylvania on a foggy, autumn day. Photograph © Paul Hair, 2011.

I wanted Fox to explain to me all the steps needed to bring a piece of land to market in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. However, government regulations and requirements are so extensive that we couldn’t go through all the steps in just a few hours. So we focused on just one area: what a developer needs to do to bring a piece of land to market with that piece of land having a private septic system. The description that follows pertains only to Pennsylvania. Any errors made are mine and mine alone.

A developer who wants to sell a piece of land as a building lot (with the intention of using a private septic system on it) must spend thousands of dollars and deal with multiple layers of bureaucracy just to determine if he can install a private septic system on it.

The bureaucracy in the case of trying to install a private septic system is the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The Pennsylvania government has enabled the DEP to implement and enforce sewage planning and management throughout the Commonwealth. This means that the DEP can (like the federal government) bypass the state legislature and unilaterally institute binding laws through regulation, thus giving it extraordinary power with little to no accountability to the public (since DEP officials don’t face elections, and because bureaucracies rarely undergo reform and almost never disappear).

The first step in the septic-system-authorization process generally is a preliminary hydro-geology study. The necessity of a preliminary hydro-geology study varies somewhat from region to region, but is quite prevalent in south-central Pennsylvania (where Fox operates) and mandated in all areas with a limestone geology. The hydro-geology study determines if nitrate levels on the land are within acceptable levels to install a private septic system. If they are, the developer then must perform a perc (percolation) and probe test to determine if there is sufficient depth of limiting zone. Sufficient depth of limiting zone means that the perc and probe test is checking to see if there is sufficient depth of permeable soil (48 inches needed) between effluent and the limiting zone (i.e. bedrock, etc.). Local municipalities require this perc and probe test based on DEP mandates.

If the developer passes these tests he then must submit a sewage planning module to the local municipality and the DEP. This will take additional time and may cost more money if the DEP decides that additional steps are necessary. Even after the DEP approves the sewage planning module the developer must go through further steps with the local municipality to get final permits and approval for the septic system installation.

Fox mentioned that a lot of people who want to subdivide a piece of their own land to sell to their child or other relative often have no idea how difficult it is to do so. I’d imagine that the steep price necessary to do all the tests needed to determine if one can install a private septic system on the land would be enough to turn off many people from trying to use their own property as they wish. If not, there still are all the other tests, bureaucratic regulations, and thousands of dollars that might stop someone from trying to sell his own land.

Fox told me the most interesting part of our conversation when our meeting had just about ended. He said that government regulation (through existing environmental and statutory constraints) has restricted the supply of approved building lots and land that is capable of being developed (hereafter simply referred to as approved building lots). And while he favors deregulation, he said that this extensive government regulation actually benefits him in the long run. Here’s what he meant.

Just a few decades ago the average person could subdivide and sell a piece of his land rather easily and without spending a lot of money. Less bureaucracy meant there were fewer tests and expenses. Therefore, if a person wanted to sell some of his land he simply did it. This in turn meant that there were more approved building lots on the market and thus an acre of an approved building lot was cheaper since there was a greater supply of it.

Now, however, with all the bureaucracies, expenses, and time needed to bring a piece of land to market, less people are attempting to sell land, meaning that there are less approved building lots on the market for purchase. This means that those who do invest the money and time needed to bring land to market now can charge more per acre of an approved building lot than they could have ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years ago.

Fox called this, “restriction of supply by regulation.” And he said that while deregulation would allow more people to enter the land market and profit from it, the heavy hand of government regulation actually benefits him by keeping many people out of the land market, thus allowing him to sell more land and being able to reap the benefits of the higher cost of land per approved building lot acre. Thus, the profits from selling land are increased for those who can afford to enter the land selling market while those who don’t have the money to do so cannot profit at all from their own property.

In this day and age when totalitarians and would-be tyrants scream about the need for more government regulation, the evils of the free market, and the need for big government to rule our lives in order to eliminate so-called wealth inequality, the truth is that it is these same totalitarians and would-be tyrants (through their massive bureaucracies and regulations) who are responsible for the true inequality—the inequality that eliminates a level playing field and promotes the consolidation of money in the hands of the few.

If people truly are concerned with eliminating inequality as much as is humanly possible, then deregulation—not increased regulation—is the correct answer.

Our courts recognize few exceptions for the placing of limits on this exercise of free speech and in fact have themselves studied the issue in cases unrelated to OWS.  Courts recently have been debating whether limits on speech enacted by legislative bodies are constitutional.  As an example, a law prohibiting candidates for public office from lying about their opponents’ voting records during campaigns is drawing judicial scrutiny as an unconstitutional prohibition on protected free speech.  This matter is a serious one and whether we agree or not with OWS protestors (or tea party assemblies) we need to treat the subject based on constitutional principles rather than our own political predilections.  So why have the authorities suddenly stirred themselves to action to clean out OWS sites?

For one thing authorities have suddenly recognized some very important public principles:

First, public facilities are being taken over for the benefit of a few people as part of their attempt to advance solely their cause.  Parkland in central cities is very scarce and has been misused by groups who pitch tents from end to end in these parks and prevent (and in some instances intimidate) ordinary citizens from using public land.  Often these tent cities are abandoned during the day while the occupiers leave and go about their regular lives (going to work, going home, attending entertainment venues, etc.)

Recently, there has been a major spike in violence including shootings.  In Oakland protestors succeeded in shutting down the ports, which are a major, job producer in that city.  According to the San Francisco Chronicle “OWS protestors gathered up for their general assembly meeting and withdrew a resolution calling for future demonstrations to remain peaceful.  A faction of the protest group has advocated violence as a ‘diversity in tactics’ approach to demonstrating.”  Deaths have occurred in other cities as well, including Burlington, Vermont.   Secondly, there is an important public health issue that has arisen.  Protestors have been overwhelming the sanitary facilities at nearby businesses, cleaning and relieving themselves at bathrooms not built for such volume.  Finally, city authorities who have appeared to be looking the other way see that they have to take action.

The Weekly Standard on November 5 noted, “[a real] occupation of Wall Street isn’t going to happen.  Instead, it is something under which the left marches.  For the left, all politics is about occupation.  One country, one class or one group takes from another.  Politics is seen as national warfare or class struggle, or one group grasping for advantages over some other.”

Moreover, Congressman Denny Rehberg summed it all up with an idea to respond to OWS with a call to liberate Wall Street.

We’re over-taxed in small business, over-regulated, and over-litigated, and you can pick and choose which ones you want to address, but the government should be trying to lessen the tax burden, lessen the regulatory burden, and get the litigation out of the way,” Rehberg said.  More broadly, Liberate Main Street provides a rubric for a conservative agenda that contrasts with Occupy Wall Street.  It would be an agenda that works to foster opportunity, not envy; that seeks change through democratic processes, not mob pressure; that encourages enterprise, not resentment; that enlarges the sphere of personal and civic freedom, not big government; that liberates Americans’ energies, rather than pandering to their weaknesses; that acts to fix Wall Street’s problems, not to demonize American business.

That violence has been on the agenda of elements within the OWS movement from the get-go is really no longer debatable.  Ironically, the right peaceably to assemble is being compromised by those who want to turn thoughtful assembly into aimless mockery and occasional violence not just because of Wall Street, but also in support of every demand on every radical wish list from abolishment of all debt to the end of capitalism, corporations and government itself. Throw in a cheering section here and there for Chavez, Castro, and a sprinkling of crude anti-Semitism, and you have a movement that isn’t a movement at all, but rather a grand gripe conclave where those with real concerns and legitimate grievances are elbowed aside by those with agendas that serve no constructive purpose.

The time has come for law-abiding people of the left and the right to prevent peaceful assembly from being hijacked.  Police, as happened in New York, cannot standby and look the other way.  Finally, on November 15^th, the Bloomberg administration stirred itself and closed Zuccotti Park (itself not a public park) because of the threat of violence and serious concern over public health.

We frequently write about American Exceptionalism by which we mean the unique opportunity our citizens have to legitimately pursue their dreams free from interference by government.  This kind of opportunity cannot exist without the rule of law, which in the case of America is grounded in our Constitution, the centerpiece of which is the Bill of Rights.  If we Americans want to maintain and protect our Bill of Rights  (from which our right to peacefully assemble derives), all citizens must respect and vigorously support law enforcement that protects both the rights of the assembled as well as the rights of the communities in which these assemblages take place.

By Hal Gershowitz and Stephen Porter

Civil forfeiture threatens the property rights of all Americans.  These laws allow government officials to seize your home, car, cash or other property upon the mere suspicion that it has been used or involved in criminal activity.

In an attempt to ensure civil forfeiture is subject to public scrutiny, Georgia law requires local law enforcement agencies to annually itemize and report all property obtained through forfeiture, and how it is used, to local governing authorities.

But many—perhaps most—local Georgia law enforcement agencies fail to issue these forfeiture reports.  Today, the Institute for Justice issued a report of its own: Forfeiting Accountability: Georgia’s Hidden Civil Forfeiture Funds. It finds that among a random sample of 20 law enforcement agencies, only two were reporting as required.  Of 15 major agencies in Georgia population centers, only one produced the required report.  Yet federal data show Georgia agencies taking in millions through forfeiture.

Civil forfeiture expert Anthony Sanders, an Institute for Justice attorney involved in today’s lawsuit, explains:

Law enforcement should follow the law.  Yet many Georgia law enforcement agencies simply choose to ignore Georgia law.  This is a breach of the public trust and a betrayal of taxpayers.

Predictably, Big Government + Civil Forfeiture = Abuse. We found a Georgia sheriff that spent $90,000 in forfeiture funds to purchase a Dodge Viper, and a Georgia district attorney’s office using forfeiture funds to purchase football tickets.

IJ Client Anna Cuthrell cannot believe that law enforcement has been allowed to keep forfeited property and not report it to anybody.  As she puts it:

The purpose of requiring law enforcement agencies to report forfeiture proceeds is to make their budgets more transparent.  Through failing to account for this money law enforcement effectively creates its own slush fund.

Anna teamed up with Ryan Van Meter, Joseph Kidd, Josiah Neff and Tsvetelin Tsonevski, all taxpaying residents of Atlanta and Fulton County.  Specifically, their lawsuit seeks to force the head officers of the Atlanta Police Department, Fulton County Police Department and Fulton County Sheriff Department—all of which regularly fail to produce mandated forfeiture reports—to disclose the property they have seized under applicable Georgia forfeiture statues along with how they have used that property.

As a practicing attorney, Ryan Van Meter understands how his state’s civil forfeiture laws threaten his and his fellow citizens’ property rights.  He also understands how law enforcement flouts the minimal reporting protections Georgia law provides:

Civil forfeiture is one of the greatest threats to private property rights in our nation today.  Law enforcement can take your property without even charging you with a crime.  For law enforcement to fail to even account for what they seize only makes this already bad problem worse.

The Institute for Justice also released a comprehensive report, Policing for Profit, which examines and grades the civil forfeiture laws of all 50 states and the national government.  How did Georgia score?  Check out the answer here.

For more on today’s lawsuit and report, which are part of IJ’s nationwide campaign to protect private property rights from abusive forfeiture laws, please visit www.ij.org/GAForf.

The Institute for Justice is the nation’s leading legal defender of liberty. We sue the government to protect your rights. Are you a fan of IJ on facebook?  Join Team IJ today!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hytkAaoF2k&feature=channel_video_title

The video above was just released by the Institute for Justice. It begins with an elderly woman lamenting:

When my son came back from Kuwait he couldn’t believe it.  He said, “Mom, what’s going on?” And I said, well they want to get rid of us and they’re finally doing it.  He was upset.  He said, “I’m sorry, I’m halfway around the world to help other people and I can’t even help my own mom keep her own home.”

For the past ten years, township officials in Mount Holly have been destroying a close-knit community called the Gardens.  They’ve been recklessly bulldozing select individual row-houses — even when they are attached to occupied homes — to make way for fancier homes for richer people.  The current owners have never been offered a place in the new redevelopment, or enough money to buy comparable home nearby.

A new Institute for Justice study, available here, shows that this redevelopment project may result in a loss of one million dollars every year, one tenth of the township’s budget.

Despite these terrible conditions, the community never gave up hope.  They continued to fight against all odds for their cherished neighborhood.   And on Wednesday, a federal court came to their defense.

The Third Circuit issued a ruling that prohibits the city from moving forward with eminent domain against the homeowners involved in the lawsuit until they have a chance to let their voice be heard in court.  The ruling likely means that the neighborhood has another year to fight for and save their community.

Without this ruling, the neighborhood would have likely been completely destroyed before the end of the month.

Activism expert Christina Walsh of the Institute for Justice has been working with the homeowners in their grassroots fight.   They launched a major billboard campaign (see above), generated positive local media coverage, ran full-page ads, held events, and more.  Christina has visited the residents numerous times over the past year, and described her experience in the Gardens recently in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Nancy Lopez raised five children on her own, and they have since gone on to college and joined the working world. She sometimes worked two jobs to afford the mortgage on her three-bedroom house in the Gardens. And now the township is telling Lopez that her home, her efforts, and her memories aren’t good enough.

Down the block, Leona Wright just turned 92. When she moved into the Gardens, her son was in the third grade. Her late husband was a World War II veteran, and they moved to the Gardens because they thought they could put down roots there. They bought two rowhouses and combined them into one, now meticulously decorated with family photos and memorabilia.

These women and their neighbors loved the Gardens. They relied on one another and helped raise each other’s children. Over the years, they’ve held block cleanup competitions, festivals, and talent shows. Their mutual concern for each other was the lifeblood of this community, and the township has drained it without a second thought.

And yet despite the best efforts of tax-hungry politicians and land-hungry developers, the Gardens will not be completely destroyed anytime soon.

Mount Holly shows us that more work is needed in our nationwide fight to end eminent domain abuse.  But it also shows us that a small band of committed activists, working together, can triumph over Big Government.

We are hopeful that with this week’s ruling the Gardens will ultimately prevail.

Are you fan of IJ on facebook?  Become one today!  Just click here.

What do you want to take in the basement?  Do you want to take the drums and all that (expletive), or no?

The police took three pages worth of property that included a 52” flat-screen TV, a DVD player, two computers, a camera and several DVDs.

Why does this kind of abuse happen?  The answer is civil forfeiture.

In the United States, if the government suspects that you committed a crime, officials can arrest you and put you on trial.  The government must then prove you are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

But if the government suspects that your property was involved in a crime, under civil forfeiture laws officials can take and sell your property.  In most instances, they get to pocket the proceeds.  Importantly, they don’t have to prove you did anything wrong.  This sounds bizarre, but with civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent.

As civil forfeiture expert Scott Bullock explains in the above video:

You cannot give the very people who are out there enforcing the laws a direct incentive to try to take homes, cars, currency, and other property from citizens.  Under the law in over 40 states, police and prosecutors are allowed to keep all or most of the property that they seize.  So this gives them a very direct incentive to go out and take as much property from citizens as possible.

This explains why one of the police officers caught on tape says, “If Luke comes down here, he’s gonna wanna take everything . . . he’s gonna give us a chance to frickin’ take all this stuff.”

Unfortunately, this outrage is far from an isolated incident.  The Institute for Justice released a comprehensive report, Policing for Profit, which examines and grades the civil forfeiture laws of all 50 states and the national government.  The findings are disturbing:

• Most state civil forfeiture laws provide little protection to property owners.
• Public accountability over civil forfeiture is extremely low:  In most states, we know next-to-nothing about the use of civil forfeiture or its proceeds.
• Only three states get a B or better for their use of civil forfeiture.
• Most states range from mediocre to awful.
• A federal legal loophole known as equitable sharing allows police and prosecutors to bypass state protections and keep pocketing forfeiture money.

IJ’s report can be viewed and downloaded for free here.  You can also quickly check to see how your state was graded, and how it compares nationally.   Abuses are found all across the country.  For example:

• GEORGIA: Forfeiture funds paid for football tickets for a DEA’s office.
• LOUISIANA: Police were caught stealing innocent people’s property by making up crimes that never happened.  They used the proceeds to fund ski trips to Aspen.
• MISSOURI: Authorities were caught turning forfeitures over to the federal government in order to avoid a legal requirement that proceeds go to schools.  That way, both groups could split the proceeds without having to share any with the children that were supposed to get the money.
• NEBRASKA: Officials stole over $124,000 from a resident without ever charging, let alone convicting, him of a crime.
• NEW YORK: A police department spent forfeiture funds on food, gifts and entertainment.
• TEXAS: A government official was caught pumping forfeiture funds into his re-election campaign.

The Institute for Justice is committed to ending this abuse.  We have already filed a major lawsuit in Texas, which has some of the worst civil forfeiture laws and practices in the country. We represent a Houston entrepreneur whose American Dream was turned into a nightmare after his property was stolen through civil forfeiture.  He did nothing wrong and was never accused of a crime.

What do you think of civil forfeiture?  Do you have any examples of civil forfeiture occurring in your area?  Please share your thoughts on our Facebook page.

President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board is currently considering Roundy’s v Milwaukee Building and Construction Trades, AFL-CIO. The union is hoping to persuade the NLRB that if an employer lets one outside party onto their premises, they have to let everybody in. Since, you know, there’s no real difference between allowing a charity to collect a few bucks and inviting in a union organizer who’s trying to get your customers to boycott your store …

Should the federal government force employers to treat all outside organizations alike, the clear answer for anyone with half a brain is to deny access to everyone equally. One business owner, Brett McMahon, writes at Halt The Assault:

If this new request by union leaders is allowed to become law, its effect will be for many business operators like myself to have no choice but to close doors to any outside groups. The impact to charities ability to operate and reach support would be devastating. Ultimately, unions are trying to make sure that no one wins.

Sorry, Girl Scouts. Sorry, Boy Scouts. Sorry, Red Cross. And the local soup kitchen. This is not hyperbole. This is a direct threat to the ability for small business to say who comes onto their property and how they affect their business.

In response, the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace filed an amicus brief asking the Board to arrive at a “standard which recognizes that no employer should be required to give private property access rights to a non-employee labor organization for the purpose of engaging in activities, such as consumer boycott handbilling, which are plainly harmful to the business of the owner of the property.“

This case is important to watch because 1) it will show whether small business entrepreneurs still get to control some measure of their own private property and 2) it highlights the insanity at the very top echelons of the modern organized labor behemoth.

Photo credit: flickr/Merelymel13

But in order to deal with our current struggles, we must recognize that they are symptoms.  The cure to these symptoms lies in dealing with their root causes.  However, even before dealing with our struggles and their root causes, we must ask, what is our vision for America, and what is the role of government in helping to ensure it rather than dooming us to never reach it?

My view of America is a country in which people are free to pursue their greatest good as they see it, or as the founders put it to create a land in which people can pursue their happiness.  This system presupposes that the people are protected.  Before people can partake in mutually beneficial trade and activity, they must be reasonably secure in their persons and their property.  As such, free markets and the free people that create these markets require strong national defense.

So the vision should be clear — government’s role is to lay the foundation for people to be free, furnishing and preserving prosperity by providing defense for it, both against external aggressors and internal ones by providing a set of stable laws protecting private property and contracts specifically and the individual generally.

Where we stand today is that the government, created to ensure these things is instead imperiling them.  Rather than securing private property it consumes and redistributes it.  Further, at every avenue government creates barriers to the free voluntary exchange of goods and services that heretofore have provided such unparalleled levels of comfort for us all.  Rather than defending us from foreign enemies it cuts deals with them, concedes to them and generally submits to them out of political correctness, moral relativism and an inane commitment to multiculturalism.

As such, in my view we are headed for catastrophe, with the only question being whether it is our economy that completely collapses through the insolvency of our government which will bring down much of the real economy through crippling interest rates and the chaos caused by the collapse of the welfare state, a currency collapse whose effects will be the same or a terrorist attack or attacks that lead to either of these scenarios.  Regardless, business will plod along lethargically as the growth of the state continues to suffocate it.  That the economy has continued to function at all is a testament to the will of people who continue to produce in the face of looters trying to play G-d and centrally plan the lives of the masses for their own good.

On defense, we are at war with enemies that we are unable to identify, even though they clearly spell out their doctrines and telegraph their plays for us.  Islam is at war with us, and perpetually throughout history has been at war with all who refuse to submit to it.  The allies of those Muslims who overtly work to destroy western civilization through the murder of innocents and those who covertly do so through cultural and legal means are the leftists both abroad and in the US who either find in the Muslim world a common enemy in the west, or who are Lenin’s useful idiots.  Islam lays out its battle plan in the Koran, the Hadith and the rest of its canon, and Marx, Lenin, Gramsci and Alinsky lay out very clearly in effect the jihad of the Communists in their own tomes and letters, a vision which includes using subterfuge and other means to allow the west to kill itself from within.

A document on the strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America contained the following:

The Ikhwan [the Muslim Brotherhood's name for itself] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

Lenin is said to have remarked:

The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

Strategic deception, the equivalent of taqiyya in Islam is key to socialist strategy and helps to explain much in the world — it explains why Communist countries have opened their markets to capital from free countries to allow us to build them up, and why these trade partners continue to ally with and fund various outwardly hostile nations, oftentimes Muslim ones.  It gives us a basis for understanding the moves and motives of the Chinese, Russians, North Koreans, Venezuelans and their proxies.  Its success is reflected in the incrementalist move towards socialism in the US as opposed the the failed sudden revolutions of the past, which has been occurring as we have built in part or in full the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto.

George W. Bush was correct when he identified an Axis of Evil, but he painted an incomplete picture; it includes far more countries than he knew or would have cared to admit.  If we were to study the doctrines of our enemies, we would see that amongst both adherents to Islam and socialism, not only are the tactics the same — in letting your enemy commit suicide by deceiving him on fronts both cultural to change the perceptions of society and legal to slowly but surely whittle away his foundational institutions, but so too are the goals.  Both devout Muslims and leftists seek to create all-encompassing totalitarian governments worldwide, under Shariah law in the case of the Muslims and under the rule of omnipotent elites in the case of the leftists.  The systems are based on man being a slave to a deity or to his fellow man, from the annoying regulation to the forced labor camp.

While “progressives” have been on the march however, leading to policies that weaken both our economy and our defenses, our failure has been that we have not proposed an alternative vision.  We have not argued the moral case for capitalism, and we have not articulated what a prudent military policy should consist in.

I would argue that the Austrian school of economics, long forgotten amongst the elite is the only school that has consistently explained why economies grow and why they collapse, and how it is government intervention, primarily through the central planning of money and credit in a bank like the Federal Reserve that sows the seeds of ultimate collapse; and secondarily through intervention in confiscatory taxation, subsidization, protectionism, incessant regulation and redistribution of wealth that ends up bankrupting nations and has done so historically, with the central bank as the trusty aid of the politicians who perpetuate this system by helping pay off chosen constituents.

Until we have studied the works of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, F.A. Hayek, Frederic Bastiat and countless others, we will not be armed with the weaponry to begin fighting the disinformation and sophistry of the Keynesians and all others who argue that intervention is not only economically beneficial but moral, contrary to all reason and experience in the history of mankind.  Perhaps this immorality is shown most in the fact that anywhere and everywhere socialism has been tried, ultimately the result has been poverty, misery and in some cases widespread death.  More importantly, the crux of the split between socialists and capitalists again rests on the notion that while socialists believe that man should control his fellow man, capitalists believe that every man is a sovereign king.

History also leads us to understand the proper object of defense.  Defense is not about spreading one’s ideologies or building nations in our image.  Defense is about annihilating those who threaten the blessings of liberty and/or threatening to exact such a punishment on our enemies for their cowardly acts that they will never dare attack us.  In order to properly defend ourselves, we must recognize our enemies without fear of political correctness or hurt feelings.  Evil must be identified as evil and dealt with swiftly and forcefully.

What are the implications on economics and defense?  On the former, that the welfare state is collapsing as less people pay into the system while more people become its recipients, and that central planning in all its forms is further causing the economy to fail, and on the latter that Islam and socialism are united against us and that their doctrines which contain their visions and stratagem are written out for us and have revealed themselves through countless acts — they reveal themselves in the things we are afraid to say even in close company and in the workings and machinations that we see daily overseas and at home, including of course outright attacks.

I feel much more confident that Americans will wake up to the forces of evil in the world as they see more images of a Europe that has allowed Muslim immigration en masse and because of a natural distrust of socialist countries, than in Americans ever begging their politicians to abolish the welfare state, and shudder the countless Washington bureaucracies that plague us (including the Federal Reserve that lies at the heart of the expansion of the state).  Rather, men will argue against the unjust redistribution of wealth or position that the government confers when it is in their own self-interest to do so, but so far as government favoritism towards themselves they will seek to hold it as closely as possible, not realizing that they are contributing to an unjust, economically infeasible system that will collapse, to the detriment of all.

These problems are age old.  Too, their solutions have always laid in understanding their causes.  If our government has run up insurmountable debts, look at the programs causing the debts and eradicate them.  If the economy is sputtering, look at all of the things that are impeding it, including a sound currency, barriers to trade and innovation and the prevention of the price system from functioning, which allows for coordination and the spontaneous order of markets and do away with them.  If we are unsafe, recognize who it is that is making us unsafe, study the enemy and devise a plan to eradicate him or show him that his truculence will lead to his demise.

This can only be effectuated through policy however, which requires all of us to arm ourselves with the right ideas and then to devise a political strategy to propagate them; on this front we can learn much from our opponents.  For the government reflects its people, and as such will require a populace imbued with such views as we have discussed herein.  We have yet to truly begin an ideological fight directed by a clear vision, one which is based on protecting the natural rights of the individual and which represents the Judeo-Christian morals on which our country is based, while our enemies have been doing so for over a century.  We must do so in earnest if we are to have any chance at reclaiming our country.