Government spending is out of control, robbing the American people blind to fund the endless excess of a ruling class drunk on power.
Kleptocracy: [klep-tok-ruh-see] / klɛpˈtɒk rə si / – noun – “A government or state in which those in power exploit national resources and steal; rule by a thief or thieves.”
The state of the American economy is something that is increasingly on the minds of Americans these days. With life getting more expensive millions of Americans are feeling the squeeze getting tighter and tighter. And it seems with every passing day that the so called “leaders” of the American empire further demonstrate their disconnect from the fiscal reality of the average citizen.
The Grand-Canyon-sized wealth gap in this nation is staggering, with a classism characterized by despotic decadence on the one hand and dire desperation on the other, with most people falling into the latter category while the former flaunt their obscene opulence.
This of course isn’t just prevalent among the political predators, but throughout the entirety of the parasitic one percent, political and cultural elitists stretching from the halls of Congress to corporate power centers, to the Hollywood Hills.
A prime example of this being the annual Met Gala earlier this month. While politically unimportant, the cult of celebrity was on full display as these supercilious snobs laud over themselves for the world to see in grandiose fashion, grandstanding with multimillion dollar outfits and accessories. Meanwhile much of the population struggle to make ends meet.
And let us be clear, this is not a condemnation of the rich for the sake of being rich. Rather, it is a condemnation of a society in which self proclaimed elitists enrich themselves through the institutionalized exploitation of the average person, profiting from systems deliberately designed to oppress the many for the benefit of the few.
This permeates throughout the entirety of America’s power structure, observable on federal, state, and even local levels, as demonstrated by The Free Thought Project’s recent reporting on the continued criminalization of homelessness.
Fiscal recklessness is running rampant through American legislature. As recently reported by The Daily Economy, the US debt has now crossed 100% of GDP for the first time since the end of World War II.
In 1946, the United States emerged from a global war with high debt, but also with a young population, strong growth prospects, and a political commitment to fiscal restraint. Today, America faces the opposite: an aging population, structurally rising entitlement spending, and persistent deficits with no credible plan to rein them in.
Recently, resurfaced video has gone viral on social media of comments made last May by Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson asserting that the six figure salary enjoyed by lawmakers simply isn’t enough for them to live on. According to Johnson, due to inflation it’s a struggle to get by on $175,000 a year, which is more than double that of the average American household, according to Newsweek, even with taxpayer funded perks like top notch healthcare and paid for travel expenses. Therefore, says Johnson, Congress members should be allowed to partake in some insider trading on the stock market to further line their pockets.
The audacity is palpable.
What’s more, Johnson himself, as Speaker of the House, enjoys an exorbitantly higher salary than the rest of Congress, receiving $223,500 dollars a year.
Ironically, as Johnson complains about the stagnant wages of lawmakers, he has been at the forefront of the campaign to block any increases to the federal minimum wage. Granted, in an economy built on debt based fiat currency and the scam of fractional reserve banking, an increase to the minimum wage while the currency itself still lacks any tangible value will only provide a temporary reprieve before ultimately exacerbating economic instability further. Still, with the trajectory of this nation’s mismanaged monetary policy, we’re headed downhill either way.
We have a government that spends with wonton disregard, with a national debt rapidly approaching $40,000,000,000,000 at the time of this writing, and a president that maliciously enriches himself through citizens expense who openly admits he doesn’t care about the financial struggles of the American people, largely caused by the foolish imperialist war that he started. A war that the overwhelming majority of Americans are against.
On Tuesday’s episode of The Liberty Report, Dr Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams discussed the burgeoning consequences of Trump’s war on Iran and the impact of rising fuel costs.
This was further elaborated in a recent piece by the Mises Institute: Price Inflation Accelerates As Wars and Deficits Expand ―
Not only is the Iran war causing a decline in global output, but the world’s central banks continue to embrace easy-money policies. This will result in more dollars (or sterling, euros, or yen, etc.) chasing fewer goods. This will further fuel rising prices. This is why we continue to see a general rise on prices. If rising prices were merely a result of falling output in Persian Gulf related goods, then we’d see rising prices in some areas result in falling prices in other areas. In other words, if the money supply were reasonably stable, consumers would respond to rising prices in some areas by cutting spending in other areas. But the CPI suggests that’s not happening. Thanks to continual infusions of new money through loose monetary policy, consumers are able to continue bidding up prices in all areas, even as price increases in the energy sector rise to multi-year highs.
And while the consequences of said war are only just beginning to be felt, the spending isn’t slowing down. In fact, in spite of all of this, the warmongers of the military industrial complex continue to demand more and more. Insisting upon a $1.5 Trillion military budget that the Secretary of Defense can’t even justify as it tries desperately to cling to a dying unipolar hegemon established on ailing hard power and a deteriorating petrodollar.
As Ron Paul recently wrote,
This is the business of transferring massive amounts of wealth from the struggling middle and working classes to the well-connected Beltway elite based on lies and scare tactics.
Meanwhile, these same political entities work continuously to enrich themselves by siphoning wealth and resources off of the working class. Gutting social safety net programs and slashing benefits relied upon by hundreds of thousands of disabled adults, while creating a nearly two billion dollar presidential slush fund plundered from taxpayer dollars in what is one of the most egregious acts of corruption in modern American history.
And while some may call for reform as the solution, it should be painfully obvious by this point that attempts to reform the welfare-warfare state do not bring about optimal conditions for liberty.
In an ideal world the problems can be solved with the right people in the right positions, with policy changes such as ending the income tax and the personal property tax thus allowing Americans to retain the full fruits of their labor and gain true ownership over what is theirs; simultaneously taxing mega-corporations such as Palantir which has paid no federal income tax and has effectively taken over the US government; a tax on churches since Christian nationalist movements have so deeply embedded themselves in right wing politics; and increased taxes on billionaires who acquired their hoarded wealth not through voluntary free market exchanges but via government subsidized and monopolized coercive corporatist exploitation.
But we do not live in an ideal world. Such concepts are idealistic but largely unrealistic. We cannot ask the state to fix the problems that the state caused. Such a concept is oxymoronic. And moronic in general. Statism is the cancer from which all other societal diseases fester.
And as Tuesday’s AIPAC funded coup in the Kentucky Congressional primary ousting Thomas Massie demonstrates, electoral politics will never provide legitimate solutions to the issues that we face. The state is a leviathan, a ravenous vampire that sucks the lifeblood from the people that cannot, will never, be reformed from within ― as any who challenge the power structure are removed.
We must recognize that political saviors will never be the answer. Deferring your individual power to someone else will never be the answer. Coercive systems of control will never be the answer. The very existence of the state, in any form, is predicated upon systemic oppression and institutionalized exploitation. It is what feeds kleptocracy, it is what feeds imperialism, it is the essence of everything that is wrong with our civilization.
The only way that liberty and liberation is realized is through revolutionary action that renders the state obsolete, a refusal to participate within the system, engagement with counter economics and agorist markets, the incentivization of voluntary cooperation and mutual aid systems, the development of parallel alternative societies based on non-coercive non-hierarchical organization, and ultimately the abolition of the state itself.
