An educated vote is one nuanced by the indoctrination we received in the public schools.
Yes, this is getting old but what are our choices? We're told as flawed as the process is it's better than not voting. Not voting is condemned as grossly irresponsible. Not voting is seen as surrendering society to fascists or communists or terrorists or the mega corporations. Not voting means surrendering the country to the likes of Mitt Romney or Barack Obama or one of Bill Clinton's women.
If enough of us stay away from the polls, not voting could even result in anarchism. Unthinkable! And that's true, we don't think about it, so we vote instead.
In honor of our predilection to let others steer us through life, I offer a piece I wrote in 2002 on the nature of the animal people create through suffrage. Remember, without suffrage, we suffer even more than we do now.
At least that's what our overlords have always told us.
I, Politician (2002)
By
George Ford Smith
You all know me well, yet few of you can explain who I am. At last count there were 135 of me vying to run California after the expected departure of Governor Davis. If you believe I can save you, then you must believe your world is in desperate need of propaganda, force, and plunder, for those are my specialties.
I, Politician, speak to you without my confusing labels of Democrat or Republican, Conservative or Liberal. Neither are my gender or race important, though you would be wise to check out my friends. I seek to rule for the glory and the power.
There are those who seek power over nature and others who seek power over man. Need I mention my preference? There’s no mystery to my method; I simply feed your emotions of fear, greed, and envy. I am George W. Bush promising you protection from government enemies; I am Hillary Clinton promising to pay all your medical bills; I am a DOJ prosecutor going after Martha Stewart or Bill Gates because they make loads of money. I can promise these things and more, while making you believe it will cost you nothing.
The law once limited what I could do to help you. But since my declared motive is public service, not private profit, and since you’ve never learned the lesson of the market’s “invisible hand,” [1] you’ve agreed to let me expand the law to be more accommodating.
Do you love the American principle of equality under the law? I am especially fond of it. I have altered it from its original meaning – which is, that no one is privileged -- to a more progressive interpretation: No one is privileged who does not play the lobbying game. The revised meaning is infinitely more useful for my purposes.
No matter what the issue is, I, Politician always discuss it in terms of how government should spend and regulate, not whether it should be doing anything at all. I address problems by perpetuating them in bureaucracies and doling out plums to political supporters.
For me to help you as much as you would like, and bring justice to far-away lands, it is necessary for I, Politician, to claim ownership of your wealth. This I do primarily in two ways: by seizing your income before you even get it and by establishing a system of legal counterfeiting.
Long ago, the paper you call money were once receipts redeemable in gold. The gold standard kept the banks honest, which is to say, it made banks uncomfortable when they loaned out pseudo-receipts not backed by gold. It caused grave problems when depositors demanded their gold and the banks didn’t have enough to go around. So I, Politician, when I was FDR, confiscated the people’s gold and made it illegal to use as money. I seized the gold held in Federal Reserve banks and transferred it to the U.S. Treasury, giving in exchange gold certificates, pieces of paper testifying to the theft. [2]
I declared paper money itself was now money, with government as the monopoly supplier. As one economist observed, “In 1933, the United States government removed the gold restraint on its inflationary potential by shifting to fiat money.” [3] Thus, I can create fiat dollars whenever I need them by cranking up the printing presses. When this causes prices to rise and the dollar to sink, I blame it on the greed of business.
I hasten to add that I, Politician, can only do this on a national level; I have forbidden states from printing their own money. They must feed off their flock in direct ways, through user fees and other taxes.
The only threat I have comes from you. Someday you might fight back, as Vernice Kuglin has done against the IRS. But notice the solitude of her crusade. A woman stands up to the American Gestapo as our founders once did to the king. Is she hailed as a defender of American freedom? No. The Fox TV mouths tell us she is “one lonely soldier who found a sympathetic jury” but has not started a trend. [4] Or they openly attacked her with the flag, as my buddies Hannity and Colmes did. [5] I, Politician, have friends in all the right places.
I, Politician, run a huge wealth-transfer and war-making operation. I achieve legitimacy through controlled elections and the systematic corruption of culture. Take away my revenue and my power goes with it, as well as my incentive to mess in politics. But who wants to see people keeping their wealth and conducting their lives without state regulation? Certainly not I, Politician.
1 Read, Leonard E., “I, Pencil,” http://209.217.49.168/vnews.php?nid=316
2 Raico, Ralph, FDR – The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Part 10, http://www.fff.org/freedom/0700f.asp
3 Rothbard, Murray N., For A New Liberty, quoted in Raico.
4 Woman Beats IRS in Court Over Income Tax Protest
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,94630,00.html
5 Vernie Kuglin and Attorney Larry Becraft on Hannity & Colmes, MP3 audio file, http://home.mindspring.com/~wdtoney/listen.html
