Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Celebrating a Century of Tyranny

Happy New Year everyone!  I would’ve preferred to have celebrated the new year in Spring, but the majority (and the Catholic Church) has spoken, so I guess we have to celebrate it on the coldest season of the year, rather than a much warmer season.  This, combined with the passing of the Christmas season and vacations, will mark the days that follow as some of the most depressing days of the year.

But I have other reasons to depress you.  This year marks 100 years of the beginning of new tyrannies and the reign of the progressive movement.  Now, it could be argued that President Theodore Roosevelt was the first progressive president, and indeed he did start a policy of foreign intervention, government regulation, and majority rules, but this year marks four significant changes in United States policies that have largely destroyed this country.

First of all, the US House of Representatives was limited to 435 seats.  This meant that the Constitutional requirement of having 1 representative per 30,000 people was essentially invalidated.  Now, it has been argued that Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 was merely establishing the initial ratios of the House.  But that’s a stupid argument because I see no language in that section to indicate that this was the initial intention as it reads “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative”.  So today, we should have 10,000+ members in the House that represents the majority.  Because it has been so diluted, your vote no longer counts as it is only one in about 700,000.

In conjunction with the first problem, we have the ratification of the 17th amendment.  This replaced the selection of Senators by their respective state legislatures to direct voting of Senators by the people of their states.  Unfortunately, this has a similar effect to the first problem in that the individual’s vote is diluted and the only people who are able to influence those representatives are those with lots of money.  Indeed, these days, if you were to approach any representative of either hallowed house of Congress, you’d better have either lots of money or a very influential group of moral busybodies with you.  And good luck getting enough people to follow you.  In short, this year marks the dilution of the individual vote in Congress and the rise of the elite, political class we all know and hate.

Another thing that happened was the ratification of the 16th amendment, which allowed Congress to tax the productive income of responsible, hard-working citizens.  While whole books have been written on how this was wrong, I’m going to dumb down the long-term effects of this: when it was first passed, it was assured to the people that it would only affect the rich.  These days, it affects roughly 50% of Americans and has helped create an elite group within the power structure who take liberties with the tax code in order to avoid paying taxes at the expense of the middle class and their descendants.

Finally, and probably the most insidious and nasty, was the passage of the Federal Reserve Act.  This, in effect, created a monopoly of the supply of currency in America just two decades or so after the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.  Again, books have been written on the effect of the Federal Reserve on the value of the dollar and its effects on the economy, but I’ll sum it up for the dumb masses: the Federal Reserve was officially created to prevent depressions and recession in the economy.  Two decades later, the country suffered the greatest economic depression to date, one that we only escaped by bombing Europe, Japan, and allowing our allies to be bombed into a temporary stone age.

I know I’ve discussed these things before, but I think it is high time we reflect on what the results of these events have been to our society and nation in the past century.  These were not insignificant events as they have all worked together to rob the people of their everyday rights.  Indeed, many of the current tyrannies committed by our ruling class against the common man can be traced to these four events.

So remember the anniversaries of these events and understand their effects on all of us.