"…when all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
—Thomas Jefferson
If you are an American, there is a 72 percent chance that you haven’t read the US Constitution in its entirety.1 The Montpelier Center for the Constitution’s latest study found that most Americans haven’t read every word of the very document that lays the foundation for their government and their way of life. We can only speculate as to how many of the 28 percent who did read the Constitution fully understood not only the language but also the intent of the men who wrote it. It’s a sad state of affairs, but I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising considering that the American government has eliminated the vast majority of the most important part of that document—the Bill of Rights.
Think of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as a brick building. The greatest collection of architects and masons in the nation gathered to build a structure that would be free from the flaws that plagued past buildings. They meticulously laid each brick and each wall according to a specific plan. Each wall of the Constitution—namely, the amendments in the Bill of Rights—has limited politicians’ control by keeping them out of certain areas of the building, such as the personal lives of citizens. Those walls have also kept out terrorists and other enemies, both foreign and domestic.
Just as with any other well-built structure, if one brick is removed, the entire building does not collapse. If the brick is removed from an obscure part of the structure, no one will even notice. When five bricks are removed, the building still stands. People start to notice that bricks are missing, but the managers of the building—in the case of the Constitution, our politicians—tell them that it’s not a big deal and won’t really affect them or the building. They say these things, of course, because they want to keep getting re-elected. The politicians even tell people that it is safer to have a few bricks removed, as occurred with the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act.
Over time, people get used to the missing bricks, and subsequent generations assume that those holes have always been there. There are so many, in fact, that they don’t even notice when another brick is removed. As this goes on, the strength of the building becomes severely reduced, though it is still stronger than European structures, which were built on worse foundations with worse materials (such as socialism and fewer individual liberties). Still, the managers want their structure to look more like the European ones. The notion of strict equality overtakes them, and they appropriate bricks from the building and give them to poor people to build their own houses. The managers even tear down a wall (the Tenth Amendment) to make a back door so the disabled, children, the elderly, and the unemployed can have easier access to the roof, where the managers have built a soup kitchen, a hospital, and a school.
Even though such additions were not part of the building’s original blueprints, most of the public rejoices at how much progress has been made. What they don’t know—or refuse to realize—is that the missing bricks, the collapsed walls, the back door, and the added weight on the roof have increased the likelihood that the building will collapse (comparable to a government debt default) and that this will hurt everyone, including those they are trying to help.
Unfortunately, the few who recognize what is happening don’t know how to fix the building. Its original architects have long since died, and these new managers don’t understand the original plans (the Constitution).
Today, this is our government. We had an amazing structure in the beginning, but we have slowly been removing bricks from it ever since. Unfortunately, we have removed a few too many, and the structural integrity of our building is now threatened.
In its original state, the Constitution protects Americans from a government that burdens them with excessive debt, engages in unnecessary foreign wars, conducts unreasonable searches and seizures, levies high taxes, redistributes working people’s wealth to pay for wasteful government programs, and attempts to monitor and control its citizens. The removal of certain bricks and walls has removed these checks and balances, and our once-great nation is threatened with a myriad of problems because of it.
The United States of America is now the largest incarcerator in the world. You read that right: the United States of America, the land of the free, puts more people behind bars in sheer numbers and on a per-capita basis than any other nation in the world. The government passes new laws every day that infringe on our rights; rarely is any law repealed. The result is that more than 3 percent of the adult population is under some form of correctional supervision.
There are only two conclusions that one can draw from this: Either America has more bad people who break a lot of laws, or American laws and sentencing have become Draconian. American politicians obviously believe the former or they would start repealing unnecessary laws, but I intend to prove the latter.
America has morality laws, victimless crimes, and federal and state criminal codes that are so vast no human being could know even half of them, and every day the government makes matters worse by legislating away constitutionally guaranteed protections for the accused. The government hands out ten-year prison sentences as if they were lollipops, and Americans wonder why their nation is broken.
Much of America’s lead in incarceration rates is attributable to drug policies that have been proven to be ineffective. Countries, such as Portugal, that have legalized the consumption of drugs have been rewarded with lower addict counts, reduced incarceration rates, and decreased incidents of HIV among drug users. Instead of adopting a humane, practical approach to drugs, the United States has chosen to spend over $2 trillion since the 1970s to put people in prison for the possession of plant products all while studies have shown that alcohol, a legal drug, is more harmful to society than other drugs, the possession of which can garner an American a life sentence in prison.
Somewhere along the way, Americans forgot that the government is not set up to be a babysitter. The federal government was not meant to fund our retirements or provide medical care, food stamps, welfare, or unemployment benefits. America and the rest of the world have a proliferation of government at a time when a worldwide reduction in government is needed. The planet is facing some very serious threats that could destroy the environment and the global economy and restrict human rights. I’m not talking about nuclear war or a deadly disease, although those are also very serious threats. I’m talking about issues such as overpopulation, the loss of individual liberty, and sovereign debt. These new threats—all consequences of people’s own actions—have slowly crept up on the world for years, and we are just beginning to feel their effects.
These topics don’t receive half of the news coverage that a potential terrorist threat does even though their ramifications are so much greater. With overpopulation, for example, a perfect storm is brewing. The United Nations has projected that in 2040 the human population will reach 10 billion people for the first time, with a greater percentage of elderly than ever before. New medical technology in conjunction with socialist programs, including health care and welfare, are increasing life expectancies and lowering mortality rates. And organized religions’ ideologies force their followers to abstain from the prudent policies that constrain worldwide population expansion. Be fruitful and multiply and repopulate the earth…2
Most governmental humanitarian efforts, humanitarian organizations, and individuals who contribute to and raise money for humanitarian activities are funding programs that contribute to population growth, which exponentially increases the damage to the environment and puts further strain on already limited resources such as fresh water. We should respect their noble intentions and recognize that they are doing what they think is right. But we should also question why there are so many organizations that are willing to spend vast amounts of time and money to “help” others but are so reluctant to spend a few minutes on preliminary planning to evaluate the global ramifications of their actions.
Governments around the world have taken responsibility for the health care of their citizens at a time when the aging, fattening, and increasing growth of the population astronomically inflates the costs. Health care is currently one of the most significant government expenditures in every Western nation. Even though Americans don’t think of themselves as socialists, their government has redistributed wealth and borrowed money it can never hope to repay in order to provide at least some form of health coverage to the population. Unfortunately, Americans have decided to combat this problem—and, indeed, all of their problems—with more government, more laws, more credit, and more debt to pay for social programs that contribute to the population growth of the most unproductive members of society. It is a vicious and reinforcing cycle that threatens America’s economic stability.
Many Americans have forgotten the Tenth Amendment, which limits the federal government’s power. Instead, Americans have allowed the federal government to control, misuse, and waste their resources. No matter how just governments claim to be, they always try to increase their power and to waste money. Most government expenditures, including those for excess military, health care, welfare, the war on drugs, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are unconstitutional and a drain on the nation’s resources.
Americans have become so accustomed to government handouts and comfortable living that they can’t even contemplate what must be done. What America needs is a solution that will enhance personal freedom, and that solution is individual responsibility. We already have the perfect road map. It’s called the US Constitution. If we can return to its principles of limited government, we can eliminate wasteful socialist programs that unduly increase the population, burden our nation with debt, and infringe upon on our freedom.
Unfortunately, the consequences of combating America’s problems are so unpopular that these issues don’t get the airtime they deserve. Due to consolidation, there are only a few conglomerate media giants left, and they have all been derelict in their duty to present unbiased, truthful information to the American people. Instead, these companies sell popular falsehoods to boost ratings. They pretend the American government abides by the Constitution and that America is a democracy, which it is not and was never intended to be. America is a constitutional republic, and the Founding Fathers were quite adamant about preserving the differences. Liberal news stations tell Americans that laissez-faire capitalism is responsible for the financial crisis when the facts prove the opposite. They tell Americans that European universal health care is an efficient system that won’t bankrupt nations that employ it, even though every European nation has accumulated unsustainable debts to provide it. They neglect to mention the real reason terrorists attacked Americans on September 11, 2001: our support for Israel. They also neglect to mention that the criminalization of drugs has financed countless criminal organizations, including terrorist groups.
Current news stories are based on the faulty assumption that governments can borrow an infinite amount of money to fund welfare, bailouts, and unemployment benefits without defaulting on their debts. Liberals in our universities and our media push their ideology of strict equality on us at the expense of the evidence and the truth. Studies have been manipulated and opposing viewpoints snuffed out.
More than anything, this book is about such governmental and societal inconsistencies and hypocrisy. In it I will reveal historical facts that will make you question your long-standing beliefs about the fabric of our society and our Constitution. I will identify and discuss the Supreme Court rulings and legislation that have degraded our Bill of Rights. I will expose anti-gentileism and racism against non-minorities that stifles political discussion in our once-great nation. It has long been speculated that Jewish Americans control the media and that they use this control, along with providing the majority of campaign funding for American politicians, to push Zionist policies. In order to clarify this issue once and for all, I will list the names of the heads of every major American media outlet.
In addition, this book contains outrageous facts, such as the Pentagon’s paying nearly $1 million to ship two nineteen-cent washers,3 marijuana first becoming illegal in the United States because “reefer makes darkies think they are as good as white men”4 (quoting Henry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics), and that it is still illegal in seven states for unmarried couples to live together.5
I advocate a utilitarian approach that separates emotion from humanitarianism and governance and replaces it with practicality. Over the course of this book I will analyze laws, social programs, and religious humanitarian efforts and policies and delineate recommendations on ways to improve them. I am primarily concerned with the net effect of governmental and organizational policy rather than the quality of any individual effort. It is clear that governments are spending more money than they have to save far more lives than this planet can handle. Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars to prolong a seventy-year-old person’s life only to have him suffer for another year in a hospital bed, or to go to great lengths to save children with birth defects, who will only spend their lives in wheelchairs or as wards of the state, we should be redirecting our humanitarian care to more practical and, depending on your conception of morality, more humane causes. We must have more respect for natural selection. Cheating this process seems humane to many people, but we are only stunting human development and increasing the risk to our environment.
There is hope, however, when it comes to overpopulation. Most of the Western world has reduced its rate of population growth. If it weren’t for immigration and certain social programs, the US population would be stable as well.
The West also has some control over the Third World’s population, which is the source of the real growth. Western nations’ foreign aid and humanitarian contributions actually finance the population explosion in the Third World.
The picture for sovereign debt, on the other hand, is a bit bleaker. Almost every Western nation, including America, has dug itself into a hole that will require either some form of default or the elimination of almost all entitlements and government waste to get out of.
This book is about freedom, its relationship to America, its effect on sovereign debt, and the current population/environmental problem. Although almost every country in the world faces the problems examined in this book, I have chosen to focus on the United States because it was once an international symbol of freedom, and hopefully will be again someday. My hope is that this book will start a rational discussion of issues that many people think about, though they lack the courage to express their opinions on them. I realize that there are valid reasons for people to be afraid to voice unpopular opinions, but the stakes are too high to sit back and do nothing.
*The disparity between the incarceration rates in the United States and the rest of the world are too significant to be attributed to environmental or economic factors, as many Western countries have similar environmental and economic conditions but one-seventh the United States’ incarceration rate. The only conceivable difference is gun ownership, but studies show it does not account for the discrepancy in incarceration rates.
