You might want to hire someone to paint your house, but the painters need your permission first. For most people, consent precedes action. In the world of “government as we know it,” an invaluable Robert Higgs expression, the exact opposite is often the case, especially when the action desired implies a disastrous change to American life. Ever wonder why false flags are so dear to government’s heart?
The Gulf of Tonkin lie used to escalate American intervention in Viet Nam, leading to millions of deaths at a cost of over a $1 trillion in today’s dollars, serves as a tragic example of how consent grudgingly followed government action. When consent weakened and threatened to impinge those in office, the government gradually pulled out.
President Trump’s Operation Epic Fury that began with an unprovoked attack on Iran on February 28, 2026 happened following years of demonizing the Iranian government that conditioned the public for its destruction. The public had given the go-ahead years ago—though killing over 100 Iranian schoolgirls in the attack wasn’t in the original bargain.
As Garet Garret points out in Ex America, for the United States government World War II did not begin with Pearl Harbor. The president’s peace message firmly issued for years throughout the war overseas became abruptly shattered on December 7, 1941 when months of provocation paid off, and Americans who would suffer the consequences bought FDR’s “surprise attack” story. The public consent given afterward and to this day is beyond mere approval; it is sacrosanct, the reason we’re not all speaking German and living under a hellish tyranny. WWII stands as the Good War, we’re told, unlike all the others. And it shows government can sometimes take the liberty of doing what’s best for the public.
The war provided impetus for President Truman to create the National Security State under which “national security” is the byword and justification for every government action. Author Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer has identified seven features of a National Security State, as he observed in US client-states:
- The military is the highest authority.
- Democratic elections are viewed with suspicion.
- The military and related sectors wield substantial political and economic power.
- It is obsessed with enemies.
- Enemies of the state are cunning and ruthless. Any means used to destroy or control these enemies is justified.
- It limits popular participation through secrecy or intimidation.
- The church is expected to mobilize all its resources in support of the National Security State.
The US is one with its “clients.” Yet we see people celebrating a country that scarcely resembles the one founded 250 years ago.
The State Corrupts the Currency — Necessarily
The inflation needed to wage WWII and for war continuously thereafter got a critical boost when President Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard in 1933. Garrett writes:
The people did not vote to debase the dollar. Everything that has happened to money was done to it by government, beginning with the deceptive separation of people from their own gold, then a confiscation of the gold, then making it a crime for a private citizen to own gold, together with a law forbidding contracts to be made in any kind of money but irredeemable paper currency, and finally the dishonorable repudiation of the promissory words engraved on its bonds.
How bad has the inflation been? In CPI terms the dollar has lost about 96 percent of its value. If we consider today’s gold price ($4,459) and the 1933 price ($20.67), the dollar has lost 99.56 percent of its purchasing power. In 1933, $20.67 bought an ounce of gold. Today it buys about 1/216th of an ounce. Clearly, even a monetarily-illiterate public would never consent to this. Is this another example of government taking the liberty of acting in our interests?
John Law’s disastrous experiment with fiat money, culminating during his brief tenure as comptroller general of France in 1720, should have served as a permanent warning to every government thereafter. But, if anything, it’s been an inspiration—the US-Fed regime is now over $40 trillion in debt with more on the way. Of 56 documented hyperinflations, including John Law’s and defined according to the Cagan rule, all of them were fiat money economies.
According to prevalent wisdom economic turmoil follows from anarchy. How did government achieve what is usually associated with its absence?
Madison’s Angel Theory of Government
In the summer of 1787, federalists James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay led a coup in Philadelphia against the national government of the Articles of Confederation. Their proposed new government, as Robert Higgs writes in Delusions of Power, had,
. . .the powers to lay and collect taxes and to maintain a standing national army and navy. In these critical regards, the proposed form of government resembled that of other strong states, such as the British Empire, from which the colonists had recently seceded.
As Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51 in 1788, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” When Madison refers to “government,” Higgs writes, he did not mean an organization,
. . .offering to provide services, such as protection of civil and property rights, in exchange for a mutually agreeable fee. It was going to operate as its officers might decide from time to time, and it was going to force everybody subject to the taxes it levied either to pay as ordered or to suffer the violent consequences.
By “government,” Madison meant,
. . .a coercive organization that supports its activities at the expense of all those living in its territory, including those—perhaps a multitude—who have not given explicit, individual, voluntary consent to the government’s activities or even to its existence and may well object to the new state and everything it undertakes to do.
Higgs says that Madison essentially,
. . .begs the greatest question in political philosophy: Under what conditions may some persons legitimately exert or threaten to exert violent force against others who have not violated anyone’s just rights? Madison’s artful construction shoves this question off the table by implicitly assuming that so long as men are not angels, government as we know it constitutes our only effective means for the protection of our rights to life, liberty, and property.
Conclusion
Is it too late to create a government based on free market incentives and principles? Economist-historian Gary North did not think so. The public has become an integral part of the problem with its nearly countless government dependencies, especially Social Security and Medicare. Or as North put it, “The public wants to get in on the loot.”
For now, the Federalists’ authoritarian government has won. Unlike our Founders, who bled and died rather than bowing to the British, most Americans today never question the coercive government they’ve been handed. Most of those who do care are obsessed with trying to tame a Frankenstein monster.
