● Elimination of airport “security” theater—practices that would be comical if they were
not tragic: Currently, Americans seeking to fly
have a choice between being groped and being
virtually strip-searched by a Transportation
Security Administration that is increasingly
attracting thugs and perverts into its ranks.
Those who love their dignity and liberty enough—myself included—have decided to cease flying
altogether. Some, however, have too much of
their livelihoods to lose through such a
decision and so must subject themselves to
humiliation that offends every moral principle
of a civilized society.
● Elimination of government bailouts and
special favors for firms that failed because
of their own risk-seeking strategies: A genuine
end to the heinous notion of “too big to fail”
is needed in order for genuine economic freedom
to even have a chance. Currently, there are two
tiers to the American economic system. The top
tier consists of certain politically connected
large corporations, which thrive off of
subsidies, wealth redistribution, barriers to
entry, and exploitation of structural
inefficiencies which they advocate and entrench.
The bottom tier consists of everybody else.
Today’s political system results in a “tall” or
hierarchical economic system, as opposed to a
“flat” or networked one, which would prevail in
a free market. As ironic as it may seem, removal
of special political favors will end many of the
corporate excesses of which the political left
complains—exorbitant compensation and “golden
parachutes” for CEOs that drive their companies
into the ground, free passes for companies whose
operations impose negative externalities on
individuals and smaller businesses, and
different legal standards for the corporate
elite as compared to everyone else.
● Elimination of inflation: Inflation is
the worst kind of “orderly” theft of the savings
of productive, industrious individuals. For all
other kinds of government revenue generation,
short of outright confiscatory raids, the
government only takes so much, leaving the rest
in the hands of its subjects. An income tax, for
instance, leaves the individual with full
disposal of the after-tax portion of his
earnings. Inflation, however, keeps on siphoning
wealth away from the same units of money. It is
the greatest obstacle to upward social mobility
and long-term economic planning by the majority
of people. At the same time, because, as Ludwig
von Mises showed, money does not enter the
economy as if dropped by a helicopter, some
entities get privileged access to the new money. In
the United States, these entities are the large
financial institutions that sell U.S. debt
securities to the Federal Reserve in return for
bills or electronic deposits that the Fed
creates ex nihilo. Egregiously enough,
the Federal Reserve has recently announced that
this income redistribution to the politically
connected elites from everyone else has not been
occurring sufficiently of late, so the
Fed will engage in more “quantitative easing” to
accelerate it.
● An end to disastrous military occupations:
Nine years in Afghanistan and seven years in
Iraq have resulted in the deaths of many more
civilians than actual enemy combatants by any
definition. They have not produced meaningful
political reform or improved the prospects for
peace in the Middle East. Indeed, as hundreds of
thousands of documents from WikiLeaks
demonstrate, the U.S. occupation has facilitated
egregious infringements of human liberty by
regimes that would not have existed but for the
grace of Bush and Obama. The fruits of these
conflicts have been torture, rape, religious
persecution, killing now and asking questions
later, and the empowerment of certain sadists
who enjoy
gunning innocent people down from helicopters.
● An end to the domestic “War on Terror”:
No terrorist has done or could have done as much
damage to the lives and liberties of innocent
Americans as has the U.S. government in fighting
its “War on Terror”. The outcomes of this loudly
trumpeted but never formally declared war have
been warrantless surveillance, invasive searches,
the abrogation of habeas corpus and the
right to a fair trial, and now the assertion by
the Obama administration that it has the
prerogative to assassinate anyone in the world,
American citizens included, under the mere
suspicion of terrorist affiliations.
Torture, indefinite detention, and the emergence
of a surveillance state are surely developments
of which the terrorists would approve. They have
succeeded in ridding the United States of the
vestiges of personal freedom that once existed
here. The overwhelming majority of us will never
encounter actual terrorism in our lives, but the
“War on Terror” harms us all.
● An end to the “War on Drugs”: Billions
of dollars have been spent; thousands of
innocent people have been killed and imprisoned;
drug lords have prospered in a black market that
rewards violent thugs instead of respectable
businessmen; the United States has come to have
the world’s highest incarceration rate by far;
and everyone has been forced to suffer ludicrous
restrictions on even basic amenities like
cough
medicines. It is time for the U.S. War on
Drugs—a war, indeed, on its own citizens—to
end. No genuine political revolution can allow
this institutionalized persecution and its
attendant evils to continue.
● An end to persecution in the name of
“intellectual property”: Every reasonable
person today—be he for or against the abstract
concept of “intellectual property”—must concede that attempts to enforce this concept
have been nothing short of draconian. The
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
is demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars
per downloaded song from alleged copyright “infringers”.
Meanwhile, entertainment industry associations
and Western governments have been meeting behind
closed doors since 2006 to negotiate the
Anti-Counterfeiting
Trade Agreement (ACTA), which threatens to
fundamentally curtail most people’s access to
the Internet and other personal technologies.
Some organizations, like
Righthaven, have decided to turn the
persecution of “infringers” into big business,
suing small non-profit organizations and
bloggers for reposting even excerpts of
certain newspaper articles—or having the
misfortune of getting those excerpts reposted by
someone else on a discussion board they own. At
the very least, dramatic reductions in the scope
and power of intellectual-property laws are
needed.
● A repeal of the health-insurance mandate:
Among the many problematic elements of the
misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act (PPACA), the worst is surely the mandate for
individuals to carry health insurance. The
nature of the coercive power involved in
requiring individuals to purchase a private
service “for their own good” is unprecedented in
the United States. If this mandate stands, it
will set the precedent for the federal
government requiring the purchase of any
conceivable host of other products—allegedly
out of paternalistic concern for its subjects’
well-being, but in reality due to pressure from
certain special interests who do not wish to
compete for customers in a free market. With
issues of health, which are pivotal to the very
survival of the individual, it is particularly
egregious to restrict choice and compel
inefficient arrangements in this manner.
Of course, if a genuine political revolution
were to occur in the United States, it need not
be limited to the above goals—which are a bare
minimum. To understand how far into totalitarian
territory we have come, it is instructive to
recognize that most of the evils
recommended for elimination above did not exist
until the recent past. Even if only the history
of the United States under the philosophy of
interventionism is considered, during the
majority of the past eighty years, the above
infringements were either non-existent or much
milder than their present incarnations. The
proposals to eliminate them are therefore
completely feasible—even if most of the
other post-New-Deal-Era interventions are
continued. What remains to be seen is whether
the will to implement these changes can arise as
a result of public outrage over the blatant
injustices of the status quo, or whether the
American people will lie down and patiently
absorb more of the beating they have received
from an increasingly unjust system.
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