The Information Age and the End of the United States of America

You are losing your rights.

I know you probably don’t believe it; you’ve heard it all before, and yet everything has turned out okay, hasn’t it? Sure! If “okay” means a failing currency, hyperinflation, a systematic destruction of the middle class, and the end of the United States’ role as the world’s preeminent financial power — and, indeed, its role as a sovereign nation. Yep. Things are just great.


In reality, of course, things are awful — and they’re only getting worse.

The United States Constitution and Bill of Rights were written — not for those in power, but for those not in power. These are social contracts designed to limit the amount of influence wielded by any human being, or group of human beings. These contracts were created to specifically to prevent the use of complex rhetoric and emotional appeals as masks for depriving people of their liberty. Unfortunately, the documents have failed.

The Soviet Union disintegrated because it was not financially solvent — nor could it be. Central planning doesn’t work. Nonetheless, it took over half a century — and the loss of tens of millions of innocent lives — for the evil empire to collapse. How did they do it? By lying and keeping their citizens uninformed. And it worked for a while, but eventually information got through anyway, and the people would no longer have any of it.

China was much wiser. Sure, they’re a gargantuan centralized communist power, but they’re also smart enough to see what happened to the Soviets. As such, they have embraced capitalism — and even encouraged it — slowly breaking down the imperative to centralize, and providing for a great deal of autonomy among its citizenry and markets. Granted, China seems to be trying to monitor and suppress information — mostly on the internet — but does anyone really believe they’re having any success? The news channels love the story: Insidious, Oppressive Government Seeks to Censor Its Population. Really? Come on. The reality of the Internet is that it is — by design — made to circumvent impediments. The Chinese can’t block the internet! Anybody with even a cursory knowledge of the world wide web can easily find ways to get around any silly governmental attempts to limit information.

Ah, the Internet… the ultimate weapon against propagandist tyranny and oppression. The Chinese know this. They’re not really trying to block the internet; they’re just trying to assert their authority as a paternalistic entity. No; the Chinese are rolling with the punches, and they’re doing a far better job than the United States.

And that brings me to the point of this article. Everyone knows the dollar is failing. Everyone knows hyperinflation is coming. Everyone knows the American consumer is broke, and the government has more debt than any nation in history. The United States federal government flushed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights down the toilet last month when it passed Obamacare — the most unconstitutional piece of legislation ever seen in this country. And while this reform is abjectly, and obviously a blow to everything our great republic once stood for, this is by no means the first time our contracts with our government have been ignored.

As far back as Abraham Lincoln’s tenure as our nation’s Commander-in-chief, executive powers have been flagrantly abused. Indeed, the entire Civil War was an illegal act on the part of the Union — an abusive and irresponsible campaign that relied on the politicization of every topic du jour, and ultimately cost the country over 620,000 lives. And why did this happen? Because some states wanted to exercise their right to leave the Union. What an unbelievable tragedy…

Unfortunately, Lincoln’s unprecedented tyrannical behavior set the stage for a string of equally offensive abuses. You don’t believe me? Where in the Constitution did the Founding Fathers provide for the creation of the following:

1. Social Security?

2. The Federal Reserve?

3. The CIA?

4. The FBI?

5. The NSA?

6. Medicare?

7. Medicaid?

8. National health care?

I’m sure many of you have bought into the rhetoric vomited out of Washington D.C. over the last 150 years — phrases like “national security” and “executive privilege” and “times of crisis.” I, however, have not. These organizations and programs (along with so many more) are illegal. They are oppressive, expensive insults to our freedom and to the very growth of knowledge. Americans have used these organizations to circumvent the core imperatives of the very documents that made the United States of America — ignoring, and even decrying the most fundamental and yet important philosophies contained therein.

These documents were not created to be hung on a wall and forgotten; no, they were created to protect the Rights of Man. But it goes further than that. These documents were created by the minds of people like Thomas Jefferson — building on the foundations created by revolutionary philosophers like John Stuart Mill — not to protect the rights of some men, but of all human beings. Yes, you may wish to fall back on the institution of slavery — an institution loathed by Jefferson and many of his colleagues. Indeed, Jefferson fought hard to write the end of slavery into the tenets that would guide our nation. He was a champion of individuality and freedom, and while the tide of opinion ultimately prevented success in that regard, it is a vacuous argument to suggest that Jefferson and his ilk were champions of slavery. They were not. They were early revolutionaries whose ideas clashed with the tide public opinion at the time — and yet they somehow laid the foundation for universal human freedom going forward.

And now, all of their painstaking work is being threatened by the likes of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, and Paul Krugman.

Our leaders seem to have forgotten about the principles of freedom. When Jefferson was president, he answered the door to the White House personally, and walked alone through the streets of Washington, D.C. Why? Because he didn’t believe his office was powerful enough to warrant a threat to his safety. My, how things have changed.

The U.S. now fights wars all over the globe — wars in which it has no business engaging. Our citizens have tortured other human beings, and our leaders have condoned the behavior! Does that sound like something Jefferson would have approved of?

The United States government will now try to perpetuate its policies by oppressing its own people. And because the legal challenges to the flagrant abuse of the Constitution will almost certainly be dismissed and ignored, the government’s oppression will succeed. For a little while.

Unfortunately, the days of Soviet-style information suppression really are gone for good. The United States government actually invented the internet many decades ago, and I wonder if the minds behind this revolutionary and ubiquitous technology realized it would mean their own undoing? Yes, the U.S. will react to the second wave of the economic crisis with characteristic and militaristic oppression. But it won’t work this time, because people are simply too informed. And you have but to turn on the television to take notice of the growing tide of human beings joining “tea parties” all over the world. We have not forgotten the purpose of the original event, and no amount of propaganda or twisted politicization will succeed in stemming the flood of information available to almost every human being on earth.

I will leave you with this thought: the United States of America is no longer a constitutional republic — simply because, we no longer have a Constitution. None of the elements conspiring to bring us to the current economic crisis were conceived out of respect for the aforementioned social contract — whose purpose was to stop these actors in the first place. And that leaves us with an extremely important and nagging question: if we are no longer a constitutional republic, then what are we? It sounds like a question Roman citizens probably asked themselves over 2000 years ago, as the slow, painful decline of their own empire began with the suffocation of the democratic principles on which it was founded.

But, of course, the Romans didn’t have the Internet. And that changes everything.




Paco Ahlgren

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/339627-paco-ahlgren/62051-the-information-age-and-the-end-of-the-united-states-of-america