Last week Governor Perry of Texas got himself into some hot water not only by supporting a resolution reminding Washington about the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution but by going one step farther and mentioning the possibility of secession. It is interesting that for the past few weeks Mr. Perry has been heralded by many on the right for standing up to Washington but by mentioning secession, most of them believe he went too far and may have ended his political career. By mentioning secession and then not backing down, he has gone from hero to fool in a moment. But should we not consider the issue in light of what to going on in our country? Rather than a knee jerk negative reaction doesn’t it merit serious consideration and discussion? I believe it does.

     First, consider this fact. Before there was a United States of America, there were colonies that became states. Before there was a Federal Government, there were thirteen state governments that were looking for a way to cooperate. Here is a very important fact we all need to understand, particularly in light of this issue. The Federal Government exists to serve the states and the people, we do not exist to serve the Federal Government. The states and the people voluntarily entered into an agreement to create a higher government power to take on specific tasks they were unable to accomplish individually, specific tasks laid out in the Constitution. From the time the Constitution was adopted until the “Civil War”, secession was a constant threat, and not just over the issue of slavery. It was acceptable to consider whether or not the federal government was living up to its billing and if the contract was meeting the needs of the states and the people.   Since the war between the North and the South, however, those who talk of secession have been relegated to the same place in our national consciousness as UFO abductees and the black helicopter crowd.

     The reason for this is the same reason that is bringing up the question of secession in the first place, the metamorphosis of our constitutionally limited government to a centralized state that knows no bounds to its power or sphere of activity. Because so few now question the authority and the ability of the Federal Government to do anything, because most accept the role of the federal government to meet any need or fix any situation, the idea of secession is as absurd as a five year old running away from his parents yet not being able to cross the street. The progressives have changed the role of the Federal Government from one of a referee between the states to a meddling mother-in-law. Over time, we have accepted our role as children to the government’s parent and as the majority’s ability to think critically of the government has waned, secession became an ever more remote consideration.

     I would propose a new analogy, however. Rather than parent/child, I think we have Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. The states got together to create this ‘monster’ called the federal government and they believed that through the bonds of the Constitution and the wisdom and morality of a religious people, the monster could be controlled and made to serve their needs. The ‘monster’, however, is snapping the last of its bonds and is demanding that its former masters now serve it and its voracious appetite. Now in the movies, what do most people do when the monster shows up? They run! If there is no hope of subduing or defeating the monster, vacating the premises is a reasonable option. If the federal government is imposing itself unconstitutionally on the states and the people and it is highly unlikely that its tendency to tyranny is going to change, secession becomes a reasonable option.

     In reality, Governor Perry has shown a lot of courage and foresight. Courage because by simply mentioning the fact that there are states, and large ones at that, that are not going to put up with Washington’s abuse and there are no options left off the table for dealing with it. Foresight because any thinking person can look at the direction Washington has taken over the last several years and realize it is only prudent to have a contingency plan. Consider the fact that Washington is loading us down with debt we cannot repay, is printing trillions of dollars that can only result in hyperinflation at some point, that the Chinese are becoming a little skittish about financing our foolish expenditures and now the Department of Homeland Security is labeling anyone in the opposition possible domestic terrorists while we coddle or ignore real threats to our security. If there is a good likelihood that the Federal Government will destroy our economy and monetary system and become even more tyrannical, it is reasonable to consider all the options available. As an individual, we may need an “escape plan” not just from the oppression of the government but the civil unrest that will result when it can no longer meet the needs of its dependents. Governor Perry is merely doing what he was elected to do, adopt policies and set courses of action that are best for the people of Texas. Unlike the state of California, which like a crack addicted whore is willing to do anything for federal dollars, governor Perry understands the practical and ideological ramifications of federal aid and the strings that come with it. If Washington is going to do things the governor of any state believes are detrimental to his constituents and there is no other remedy, at some point push will come to shove. Either Washington will bribe or bully the state into obedience or the state will stand up and defy the will of Washington. Up to this point it has always been the first option. The question becomes, what happens if Governor Perry or some other governor refuses to obey the dictates of Washington? Will it go as far a secession? Probably not but if more states rise up and say no more, perhaps we can begin to put the genie back in the bottle. If not, we are all going to need an escape plan.        

www.patricksamuels.com

    We have gathered here today to make our voices heard by all our politicians, especially those in Washington, but what is it we are saying?   240 years ago our countrymen dumped the king’s tea into Boston Harbor. Why? Because the king and parliament had adopted policies and imposed taxes that were destroying their ability to pursue their economic happiness. They understood, as we are beginning to understand, that economic freedom is the foundation from which our liberty flows. If the government has the right to our income before we do, we are merely slaves given an allowance. If the government has the right to determine how we utilize and dispose of our property, we are merely caretakers. If the government thinks that it, rather than our Creator, endow us with our rights, then we are mere subjects, dependent upon the whims of those in power. This nation was conceived to remove man from the arbitrary power of kings and despots and allow him to shape his own destiny apart from the dictates of a distant government that knows nothing of his needs and desires.

     This nation was founded by men who were subjects of a king and who rose up to remove the shackles of tyranny to embrace the privileges and responsibilities of liberty. They believed that it was the individual, not the government, who knew how best to order his affairs for the preservation of his God given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For almost one hundred years we have allowed a government conceived for the preservation of those rights to mutate into a state that has reduced us to subjects once again. We have traded the privileges and responsibilities of individual liberty for the promise of physical and economic security, promises the majority are finally beginning to find empty. We are finally waking up to the fact that the siren song of a state run utopia is merely the prelude to our enslavement. The declaration states that “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while the evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” This has been true for decades but we are finally seeing the writing on the wall and now we realize that our silence will result in the final destruction of the vision of the founders and the nation itself. We find the evils sufferable no longer!

    For too long we have allowed our government to make war on our faith, our values and our liberty. And we have been complicit, allowing them to tax and regulate ever larger portions of our lives in the hope that we will be more secure. We can shout, we can complain but we must also pull ourselves off the government teat and take responsibility for ourselves. If we are going to raise our voices and say that we want our liberty back, we must once again take responsibility for ourselves. It is we who must provide for our retirement, save for a rainy day, take responsibility for our health care and the education of our children. It may seem a sacrifice to us but it was everyday life for our grandparents and great-grandparents.

     We stand on the edge of the abyss. If we allow the final nails to be driven into the coffin that was the founder’s vision, there will be no return. But we cannot merely shout “stop here” for the statist will merely pause until we become accustomed to our new bonds and then move ahead once again to add anew. We must put men and women in office who will dismantle the fascist power that has evolved over the last hundred years and return to us the constitutional republic we were created to be. We are not powerless yet but it is we who must take up the banner once held by Washington and Jefferson and Adams and Madison, the banner of Liberty, not for a moment, but for the duration of the struggle. The fate of our great country rests upon our shoulders. May we not shrink under the burden but stand boldly in the face of tyranny and in so doing, make our selves worthy heirs of the American Revolution.

www.patricksamuels.com

     During his much heralded trip to Europe, our “rock star” president said that America had been “arrogant” in the past but that we were changing. There is no question that we are changing, we are becoming more like European socialists all the time. But it was President Obama’s intent to mean that we were becoming more humble as a nation, another attack on American exceptionalism. During the campaign, candidate Obama said that we must repair our tarnished image in the world, that we must make people like us again.   President Obama and the state department led by “the smartest woman in the world” Hillary Clinton, seem to have made it their mission to change our image in the world as rapidly as possible.

     Unfortunately, instead of changing our image from “arrogant cowboy” to “gentle giant”, they have changed our image from “tough customer” to “class clown”. It would appear that the Obama/Clinton strategy for making people think we are less arrogant it to make us look foolish. Not foolish in the self-depreciating way that some may find endearing, but foolish in the way of an ignorant country bumpkin in the big city. Every time there is a foray into the foreign arena by this administration, it is a disaster. Hillary Clinton telling North Korea to call her on a late night talk show or giving the Russian President a button with the wrong word on it. President Obama himself insulting our staunch allies the British with lame gifts and returning a gift of theirs. He doesn’t kiss the French First lady but gives a deep bow to the Saudis. He gives the Queen an I-Pod and the first lady touches her. In eight years of President Bush, except for a little dancing, I don’t remember any of these kinds of blunders. Now, it is one after the other.

         Now I know there are people in the state department whose sole job it is to make sure the president and his diplomats operate with the greatest cultural discretion. Either those people have all been fired and replaced by people who don’t know what they are doing or President Obama and Secretary Clinton are ignoring their advice. Perhaps it is some of both. The point is that the result of all these blunders in etiquette either make us look amateurish in the world, or supremely arrogant. Why arrogant? Because if we are not ignorant of the customs, and I find it difficult to believe we are, that means we are purposely ignoring the cultures and customs of those we interact with, putting little or no thought into the gifts we give and the words we say. President Obama’s cure for American arrogance just makes us look worse. The real cure for it is to act in the world according to principle and not in ways that are designed just to get the approval of people who are lukewarm to us, or who are our enemies. We may not be adored but we will be respected again. Sometimes that is the best one can hope for and is should be enough. 

www.patricksamuels.com

     In our current era of “globalization”, the current administration's inclination to give the United Nations more say-so in our affairs, Treasury secretary Geithner’s flip flopping on the idea of a global currency and Harold Koh’s desire to see the constitution and our very sovereignty made subservient to a higher, international authority, perhaps we should pause and think about this idea.   As President Obama and other G20 leaders looked for further cooperation and some members pushed for an international financial institution to deal with the economic mess, we should consider what caused this mess in the first place and whether more globalization is the answer.

     It is often said that when the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. Our economic problems become a problem for the rest of the industrialized world. This is a result of our place in the world as the largest economy and the globalization of commerce that has been shrinking the globe for the last hundred years or more.   Trade is important and I am not going to complain about free trade because that is market capitalism at work. The problems result when everyone becomes so interdependent that foolish decisions and policies by one business or nation impact the others catastrophically.

     We have become so enamored of the idea of “community” that we have forgotten how to be individuals. Consider several facets of the crisis that is upon us. As an individual, was it a smart idea to put all your financial eggs in Bernie Madoff’s basket? Of course not, but some people did. Was it a good idea to borrow 110% against the value of your house? No, but some people did. Was it a good idea to run up all your credit cards and put nothing in the savings account? No, but few of us have any savings at all. Regardless of what our exalted president says, spending less and saving more would have spared many the trauma of this downturn because no matter what President Obama says, there will always be ups and downs, there is no way to keep that from happening unless we destroy the economy completely through his freespending socialist policies. Then there will only be down, and no up. Anyway, if people have a years worth of salary saved in case they lose their job, did not have all their money in one type of investment and were not burdened with debt, a downturn is much less traumatic. Few people live that way in America and that is why so many are clamoring for the government to cover their stupidity and excess. Now our government is spending more than it ever has to meet that demand and both the short and long term results of such activity will be negative for all of us. The horrible results of too much government dependency have been covered in other blogs. A well prepared individual is always going to be better off than a dependent slave.

     Now move it up a level. Look at the car industry, “too big to fail”. Don’t look at GM however, look at GM’s suppliers. Some of these businesses have one product and that product is sold to GM. If GM has trouble, those businesses are in real trouble. If my company only makes widgets for Hummer, and Hummers are discontinued under President Obama’s plan, I’m in real trouble. If I did not put some money aside for the costs of retooling and adapting another product line, I’m out of business. Businesses need diversified and adaptable business plans which is why having the government run them is such a bad idea. Government bureaucracy is anything but adaptable.

     Move up one more level. California is on the brink of bankruptcy and failure. New York is going to tax it’s remaining productive citizens to death. Michigan has been in a recession for years. If I am a resident of those states, what can I do? I can move to a state where the business climate is better, the unemployment rate is lower and the politicians aren’t so stupid. If President Obama forces the country farther into a fascist “soft tyranny”, we could leave for places that still respect the natural rights of citizens and the capitalist economic system, if any still exist. If we go for the transnational idea, however, there will be no where to go.   If you think that Washington is “out of touch”, wait until decisions are made by transnational organizations. If those decisions are bad economically, everyone will be affected, there will be no low tax states or nation, no places free from regulation, carbon taxes or any other bad idea dreamed up by such a body. If decisions are made that are soft on crime or terrorists, there will be no where to hide, no justice, no states with concealed carry laws. We will have all our eggs in one basket, the transnational one, and we will have no recourse if that basket is rotten. There will be no containment of economic downturns. Now any nation that “sneezes” will result in all of us catching a cold.

     Think of our lives and our personal, economic and political connections within two analogies. The first is a web. Everything is connected to everything else, there are lots of options, plenty of connecting points. If one option or route around the web is taken away, there will be another. If one support, or even several are removed, the web may sag but it doesn’t fall. There are options in a web, things are decentralized. That is the way this country was set up, decentralized. The individual, not the collective, was emphasized, and that individual had plenty of options concerning how he was going to build his web and what attachment points he would choose. If he chose a few unwisely, it was not the end.

    The statists and the transnationalists want centralized power, analogous to a mobile. In case you don’t remember, a mobile is one of those artistic creations you made in school with string and cut out animals that you hung from the ceiling and it rotated in the breeze. The point is, a mobile has only one attachment point and you, as an individual, cannot go anywhere else on the mobile without first going through that central point.   The whole thing has to balance around that one point. If the powers that be decide that your part of the mobile is unbalanced, it can weigh you down (taxes, regulation) and you will have no recourse because you are on a fixed point. That point of attachment is not determined by you but by the people in charge.   The more severe problem is that in order to keep things balanced, the people in charge need to keep adding more weight here and there to keep balance and sooner or later, the inevitable happens, that one attachment point fails and the whole thing comes crashing down. I say it is inevitable because, as a rule, politicians do more harm than good, that is why our founders limited their power. The more power they have, the more harm they do. Put them in charge of the economy and they will do a lot of harm and it will have a great impact on you and I.

     This economic crisis has demonstrated the perils of being too economically dependent on others and has revealed weaknesses in businesses and individuals that do not plan and are too consumed with greed. It is a correction and this correction is good because the market works and the principles of thrift and forethought need to be reestablished in the business community and among us as individuals. If, however, we force even more dependency by creating new transnational political and economic institutions that reduce our sovereignty as a nation and liberty as individuals and prop up failure, prohibiting the correction, the next crisis will be much worse. There will be no isolating the sick patient, there will be no safe haven, there will be no choice but for all of us to go down collectively with the ship.

www.patricksamuels.com.