Where do you stand?

Where Are YOU?

Here you have crusaders dancing alongside sleazy profiteers coupled with more than a fair sampling of idiots and intellectuals, with the former, unfortunately usually holding higher positions of power. It is the only city in the United States that can declare war, raise your federal taxes, or reduce your Social Security benefits.

The decisions reached in these few square miles of monuments and mockeries make legions of people either furious or euphoric, and those sides keep switching depending on who is in control of the government at any given time.

And the fights, spins, and conspiracies concocted and then carried out to hold or regain power consumes every ounce of energy that enormously bright and talented people can give it. The swirling, ever-changing mosaic has too many frenetically moving parts for any outsider to even come close to comprehending what is really going on. It is like a lethal kindergarten that never ends.
-The Collectors by David Balducci

The right and power rest in the individual

It is when passions and cupidities are thus unleashed and, at the same time, the sense of public duty rides high in the hearts of all men and women of good will that the handcuffs can be slipped upon the citizens and they can be brought into entire subjugation to the executive government… I hold that governments are meant to be, and must remain, the servants of the citizens; that states and federations only come into existence and can only be justified by preserving the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, in the homes and families of individuals. The right and power rest in the individual. He gives up his right and power to the State, expecting and requiring thereby in return to receive certain advantages and guarantees.”
–Winston Churchill

Capital and Credit should be honored and cherished partners

THEN AND NOW AS WELL AS TOMORROW.
Reality does not change
“The millionaire or multi-millionaire is a highly economic animal. He sucks up with sponge-like efficiency from all quarters. In this process, far from depriving ordinary people of their earnings, he launches enterprise and carries it through, raises values, and he expands that credit without which on a vast scale no fuller economic life can be
opened to the millions. To hunt wealth is not to capture commonwealth…meanwhile great constructions have crumbled to the ground. Confidence is shaken and enterprise chilled, and the unemployed queue up at the soup kitchens or march out to the public works with ever growing expense to the taxpayer and nothing more appetizing to take home to their families than the leg or the wing of what was once a millionaire…It is indispensible to the wealth of nations and to the wage and life standards of labor, that capital and credit should be honored and cherished partners in the economic system.”
–Winston Churchill

The Pillars of Virtue and Intelligence

“The improvement of the mind should be the first care of the American statesman, and the dissemination of learning and knowledge ought to form one of the principal objects of his ambition. Virtue and intelligence are the only appropriate pillars upon which a Republican government can securely rest; without these, liberty itself would soon degenerate into licentiousness, and our free and liberal institutions, so highly cherished by ourselves and so much admired and respected by the wise and patriotic of other nations, would be engulphed in anarchy.” *
-GEORGE WOLF.

* To The Citizens and Legislators of The United States of America, February 23, ] 833, George Wolf *Govemor Wolf brought about a general revision of Pennsylvania’s statutory laws and new taxes to satisfy the enormous loans by which the State Works program for new railroad and canal routes had been financed. In 1834, a long awaited Common School Law established the first statewide system of publicly financed education. Following his reign as Governor, President Jackson appointed Wolf the first comptroller of the Treasury of the United States.

Morals and Politics

“Nothing can be politically right that is morally wrong; and no necessity can every sanctify a law that is contrary to equity. Virtue is the soul of a Republic. There is but one method of preventing crimes and of rendering a republican form of government durable;
and that is, by disseminating the seeds of virtue and knowledge through every part of the state by means of proper modes and places of education … I would add, as the best proof of my affection for her, my parting advice to the guardians of her liberties, to establish and support PUBLIC SCHOOLS in every part of the State.”
-BENJAMIN RUSH.

Education is the guardian of liberty

“For wherever liberty is firmly established, knowledge must be a necessary concomitant And if we desire to occupy this exalted ground—if we wish to improve, to extend and perpetuate the blessings of freedom, it is essential, absolutely essential, to improve, to extend, and perpetuate the blessings of education. Education is the guardian of liberty and the bulwark of morality. A republican government is certainly most congenial with the nature, most propitious to the welfare, and most conducive to the dignity of our species. Man becomes degraded in proportion as he loses the right of self-government. Every effort ought therefore to be made to fortify our free institutions; and the great bulwark of security is to be found in education; the culture of the heart and the head, the diffusion of knowledge, piety and morality. Upon education we must therefore rely for the purity, the preservation, and the perpetuation of republican government.”
-DE WITT CLINTON.

The Federal Farmer-An Oxymoron

The Federal Farmer
An Oxymoron

It is natural for men, who wish to hasten the adoption of a measure, to tell us, now is the crisis – now is the critical moment which must be seized, or all will be lost: and to shut the door against free enquiry, whenever conscious the thing presented has defects in it, which time and investigation will probably discover. This has been the custom of tyrants and their dependents in all ages But it is deliberate and thinking men, who must establish and secure governments on free principles. Before they decide on the plan proposed, they will enquire whether it will probably be a blessing or a curse to this people.
The present moment discovers a new face in our affairs. Our object has been all along, to reform our federal, system, and to strengthen our governments – to establish peace, order and justice in the community – but a new object now presents. The plan of government now proposed is evidently calculated totally to change, in time, our condition as a people…
This consolidation of the state has been the object of several men in this country for some time past Whether such a change can ever be effected in any manner; whether it can be effected without convulsions and civil wars; whether such a change will not totally destroy the liberties of this country – time can only determine
I believe we ought still to leave some of those powers in the state governments, in which the people, in fact, will still be represented …
A wise and honest administration may make some people happy under any government; but necessity only can justify even our leaving open avenues to the abuse of power, by wicked, unthinking or ambitious men.

The Federal Farmer. October 1787.
Excerpts, http://www.constitution.org/afp/fedfar01.htm

The Final Act of Socialism and Tyranny

As the various forms of tyranny run out of internal wealth to plunder, they turn outward:

An American statesman, John Jay, accomplished the respectable feat of compressing the whole doctrine of conquest into a single sentence. “Nations in general,” he said, “will go to war whenever there is a prospect of getting something by it.” Any considerable economic accumulation, or any considerable body of natural resources, is an incentive to conquest. The primitive technique was that of raiding the coveted possessions, appropriating them entire, and either exterminating the possessors, or dispersing them beyond convenient reach. Very early, however, it was seen to be in general more profitable to reduce the possessors to dependence, and use them as labour-motors; and the primitive technique was accordingly modified.
-Our Enemy, the State, Albert Jay Nock, pg 12

The principle was known well before Nock:

James 4:
1 ¶ From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?
2 Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.
3 Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.