Watching the presidential tussle, I swing between utter terror and wry amusement. On the one hand, terror fills me as I watch the transition from (the pretense of) elections to unabashed mob rule. On the other hand, it’s bitterly amusing to watch newscasters act as if it made any difference which stooge seats himself in the Oval Office.

IN ANCIENT TIMES

Think back. Once upon a time America was a constitutional republic. Legislation worked political changes. The people chose representatives who debated issues publicly and then passed statutes. If the people didn’t like their handiwork, at the next election they threw them out and elected representatives who more faithfully and nearly reflected their principles. In any event, the legislature made the laws. The executive put them into effect. The judiciary abided by them.

THE GREAT SHIFT

At some point (pick your own date – the War Between the States, World War I, certainly the New Deal) we ceased to rule ourselves and fell under the unchained power of the judiciary and the executive. The fiat of judges and the ukase of presidents usurped both the rule of law and the constitution. Never mind, we had to submit because "it was the law of the land."

Joined to this ruse at the hip was mob action, i.e., massive and often violent protests in the street. Wise historians unanimously decry the decline of "democracy" in Germany during the Weimar Republic, and point to communist versus Nazi street violence as proof German democracy was terminally ill. When the same thing happens in the United States, well, here it’s different. Somehow mob action doesn’t threaten the rule of law and constitutional order here.

So what did Lefty Al Gore do when he lost the election? Why, the same thing social revolutionaries have been doing for the last 200 years and more (but especially the last 50 years in this country). They took to the courts and to the streets. The comrades have loads of programs to perfect mankind (according to their own image & pattern). Unluckily for them, the mass of the people doesn’t want their programs. When they can’t ram them through legislatures, they start breaking windows or bringing lawsuits. Violence and litigation, that’s their modus operandi, and always in the name of "democracy" – in the name of "the people." Were you surprised when the Florida judiciary practically suspended the state’s election laws to force a recount for Gore? Why? By now, executive and judicial tyranny have been perfected. Why shouldn’t the supreme court decide who will be the next president? Why bother to have elections any more?

THE ONLY SURPRISE IS YOUR SURPRISE

The only surprise in all this is that it could still surprise anyone. That’s when the wry amusement takes over my attention. Ahh, what a practical people Americans are! Only half of the electorate bothers to turn out. Why? They know it doesn’t make any difference anyway. How could anyone imagine that electing Gore or Bush really made any difference after he had heard them speak? What did they debate? How fast they were going to take you down the road to complete socialism. How much of your money they were going to steal. How many choices they would rip from you, in everything from health insurance to gun control. How much more power they would seize over your life, and how fast they would seize it.

REALISM, NOT CYNICISM

Stop. Don’t misunderstand me here. I write neither as a cynic or a curmudgeon. I’m a realist, and I’m here for the long haul. You know that because I raise children, seven of them. I know what that means. I read the book (Psalm 127:3-5; Habbakuk 2:14; Rev. 2:7). That’s why I openly admit that the meaningless fiddling Gore and Bush promise can’t compare to the fundamental surgery America needs. If those two were doctors, they’d be trimming toenails on corpses and congratulating themselves on the success of their wise course of treatment.

THE DISEASE, NOT THE SYMPTOMS

In the first place, Bore & Gush only have solutions to problems we don’t have. America’s problem is systemic. Even if you could attack the most central issues – the money issue, right to life, property rights, genuine freedom issues –solutions for individual evils will do no good by themselves because the evils they address make up an entire organism, a system of control. The entire nation has been converted into one vast corporate commercial enterprise. All the parts fit together into one organic system.

REFORM THE MONETARY SYSTEM?

Take the money issue, for example. A private entity has usurped our constitutional and statutory right to sound gold and silver money. In 1913 the US government conferred upon a private corporation (the Federal Reserve) the power to force you to accept its notes as money. You can’t enforce your rights to hard money in court, because, as I have so painfully learned over 20 years, no court will countenance your plea. What’s more, if you dare to make your claim, somebody in government will punish you.

But the money issue is only the jugular vein of state power, not the entire body. Without central banks and fiat money, governments could never have waged the massive wars seen in this century. Without control of money creation and interest rates, governments/central banks could not control the national economy. Without addicting individuals to borrowing money and paying interest, they couldn’t control individuals and households economically. Fiat money also requires an income tax, to periodically drain off purchasing power and prevent the system exploding, but most of all, to control your behavior.

PAY OFF THE NATIONAL DEBT?

Take the national debt. (Ignore the recent hoopla about a balanced budget. That’s nothing but accounting sleight-of-hand. The budget’s "balanced" the same way a 400 pound woman "balances" on a bathroom scale. She may not be falling off the scale face-first onto the floor, but she’s still really fat). Everybody lip-whips the national debt as a terrible burden on the next generation, but nobody really tries to pay it off. Why? Because to pay it off would precipitate an economic collapse. The government is the largest debtor in an economy founded on money that is borrowed into existence. If the government stops borrowing, then the money supply shrinks. As it shrinks more and more people become unable to pay their own interest burden, let alone their principal. The fait-usury money system must keep expanding or die.

Viewed altogether, no one could "reform" this system by tinkering with individual knobs and dials. Unless the entire system is reformed, the re-introduction of gold and silver money in isolation would only precipitate an economic disaster.

REFORM EDUCATION?

Or consider education. If you are a troglodyte who still believes education has something to do with training individuals how to think and live nobly and beautifully, you have missed the point. You complain in vain that schools and universities are dumbing children down and don’t even teach them to read, write, and cipher, let alone think. The point of public education is to train complaisant future workers: a docile, well-trained workforce for the vast corporate enterprise. The purpose of public education has never been to conform its victims to some noble idea, but rather to conform them to happy servitude, to disable their thinking mechanism. To teach them to think happy team-thoughts. To make them fit in productively with the least fuss and muss. What do you think all the community colleges and state technical institutes and proliferation of "universities" is all about? Creating intellectuals? My chickens know better than that.

TWO FUNDAMENTAL BOOKS

Two books furnish a key to understanding how the system fits together, and how intimately interlinked are its parts. One was published in the late 1960s, Report From Iron Mountain, and the other in the early 1850s, Cannibals All! I mention them not because I necessarily accept their premises as moral or even correct, but because I believe they portray the thinking of what we might call the Board of Directors of the Vast Commercial Enterprise.

THE REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN

When first published anonymously in the 1960s, The Report From Iron Mountain created quite a stir. It purports to report on a mid-1960s meeting of "wise men" -- movers, shakers, and government policy makers. Now whether the meeting actually took place makes no difference. Rather, we should ask whether it accurately (if fictionally) presents the American elite’s thinking.

The Wise Men (oh, how I want to type "wise guys") met to consider an answer to the horrifying question, "What would we do without war?" Since "war is the organising principle of the state," how could we run things without it? In broad terms they answered, "Without war, we can’t run anything. The state becomes superfluous." In order to maintain the state’s power (and their own), they must find some substitute for war. Why? Politically and socially, the "emergency" of war forces individuals into conforming to the state ("Necessitie, the tyrant’s plea," John Milton called it). Economically, war burns up at least ten percent of the national production. Another shallow presupposition underlies this idea, namely, that all capitalist societies inevitably ‘overproduce" to a crisis. This is silly, but it’s evidently the way they think. (Be merciful towards them, they are laboring under the strong delusion of Keynesianism and the errors of the Great Depression.)

The Wise Men offered a number of substitutes for war, from a wacky alien invasion from outer space to environmental crisis. Looking around, you can see that the welfare state was another solution. Any "moral equivalent of war" will do, as long as (1) it burns up at least 10% of the national production yearly, and (2) it can be marketed as an emergency overriding all other rational considerations.

Now we judge a theory valid when it explains the most facts, right? Here you have two explanations for the last 50 years’ worth of government action in this country:

1. Certifiable morons are in charge, or
2. the real purpose of most government programs is to burn up – waste – part of the national production.

The point here is that an inner circle has enforced on the nation a pervasive system of political, economic, and social control. To survive, this system must eventually extend control to every human endeavour. Logically, the tyrant must control everything.

CANNIBALS ALL!

In 1850 the Virginian George Fitzhugh wrote A Sociology for the South as a defense of slavery. Two years later he reworked his arguments in Cannibals All! (By the way, Harvard’s Belknap Press keeps this obscure book in print. Hmmmm.) Fitzhugh argued that freeing the serfs in England had created more problems than it solved. It freed the master from caring for his laborers in youth, old age, and sickness, but created at the same time an "overpopulation" problem. This change altered the master/servant relation from a familial relation ruled by the Golden Rule to an economic relation ruled by greed. Economic power, naturally tilted toward the owner of capital anyway, would tilt his way even more as workers were forced to compete more fiercely for ever-lowering wages. That in turn would constantly increase the workforce as lower wages forced more marginal workers (women, children, and the elderly) into the workforce just to survive. Inevitably masters would bid wages down to starvation levels. Ironically, Fitzhugh refers to himself as a "communist." Marshalling copious contemporary evidence of labour abuse from England and the industrialised North, he fairly proves his case.

So what’s your point, Moneychanger? We haven’t had slavery for 135 years and we’ve got child labour laws now.

I think the Board of Directors actually believes Fitzhugh’s theory. They believe that if left alone, their "capitalism" (I use the word advisedly, distinguishing it from "free enterprise") will inevitably crush labour to an condition so desperate that its only hope lies in violent rebellion. To forestall that rebellious discontent they attack the "overpopulation" problem two ways.

First is a two-fold attack through government. They shift the burden onto government, a.k.a. taxpayers. These schemes include welfare subsidies of every kind (social security, AFDC, food stamps, WIC, etc.) to prevent utter privation among the proletariat. Government also intervenes in the economy to maintain as much employment as possible while simultaneously restricting entry into the workforce (minimum wage laws, child labor laws, Full Employment Act of 1948, licensing, compulsory public schooling, government job training, conscription, compulsory retirement, social security, etc.).

Second is the direct attack on "overpopulation." Both government and non-governmental organizations promote abortion, birth control and homosexuality, all aimed at reducing human fertility. (A third control, which Fitzhugh failed to foresee, is the distraction industry, from football to TV to video games. It all keeps the proles busy, and a busy prole is a happy prole.)

Look, I understand that "with every new mouth comes a new set of hands." I understand that there’s no such thing as an overpopulation problem. I understand that the Scriptures teach that the health and hope of families and nations is children. But after studying these issues for several years, I have concluded that what I outlined above is the rationale that motivates the Board of Directors.

IF FIDDLING WON’T HELP,

WHAT WILL?

I took this long detour trying to paint you the broad picture. Fixing individual evils in the American polity won’t help in isolation, because the system pervades everything. Abolishing one wrong won’t right the whole because it only contributes one part to the system. About this system I can only repeat what Cato the Censor kept warning the Roman Senate about Carthage: Carthago delenda est. The system must be destroyed.

Having reasoned this far, most people conclude that only a gigantic catastrophe could restructure the whole mess. Perhaps – but perhaps not. As resilient as the system has proven over the past 85 years, it is no doubt still fragile. Control depends on public confidence and complacency, not on institutional strength. (The banking system furnishes just one example. It’s reserves as a system are, at my last count, 0.92% of liabilities. For every $100 the banking system owes depositors, it has 92 cents on hand. Thin. Fragile.)

Ironically, if George Bush gets his wish, he may find himself wishing he hadn’t. Perhaps the system will once again dodge the bullet, but an economic firestorm is brewing on the horizon. US stock markets have topped, and this spring’s debacle played only the Nasdaq prelude to a fiercer, longer bear market. Meanwhile foreigners own over 40% of government debt, and have invested massively in US stock markets. Great while the dollar hits 15-year highs, but what happens when it turns down? Whew! and turn down it will, because even in the dollar’s long history of mismanagement, the US economy has never racked up balance of payments deficits like these. When the dollar heads south, will all those foreigners lag far behind? Their pulling out of US stocks and bonds will only accelerate the dollar’s collapse. Uh-oh – did I neglect to mention the debt levels burdening the US economy? The economic debacle could make the Great Depression lose the rights to its name.

WHAT’S THE CURE?

For the economic outlook, our actions are simple. Pay off debt, get liquid, get out of stocks, buy some gold and silver, and lay low until the storm passes. For the political outlook, the prescription is not so easy.

Don’t get me wrong. Nothing I’ve written above means that individuals should not work for individual reforms. On the contrary, I admire every lonely soldier who spends years standing in the gap against gun control or paper money or economic controls or a hundred other freedom issues I could name. If you don’t put hands to these issues, who will?

We don’t have to keep on waiting for some universal crisis to change things. Patient gradualism – not growing weary in well doing, persevering in righteousness, providing and promoting solutions – will establish God’s righteousness in this country and all the earth.

Understand, too, that the rule of very bad government – even one as iniquitous as America’s -- cannot stop Christ’s advancing kingdom. Nor can it prevent my living a sane, productive life, however it oppresses me. If everybody else in the world goes crazy, I don’t have to hop aboard. Our most effective weapon is to raise up godly children, to reach for the promise of Psalm 127 – whether they are your literal children or your spiritual children. Think about it. When they plant me in the ground, look out. I leave behind seven others to take my place.

If God keeps on doing this, before too long this place is going to look like paradise.

-- F. Sanders

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