U.S. History

The government can conscript you into its army, can cause your death or mutilation in some war that has nothing to do with national defense, and execute you if you resist.

From its earliest decades, the defenders of freedom — known historically as “classical liberals,” “radicals,” and “libertarians,” have sought to reduce and limit the war-making powers of the state. Here is a sampling of thoughts from these liberals. 

James Ronald Kennedy is right that the policy of centralized despotism that Lincoln instituted has continued down to the present and has enslaved us all.

The presidency—by which I mean the executive state—is the sum total of American tyranny. A world with any superpower at all is a world where no freedoms are safe.

The growth of the state through war included not only developing new technologies for making war, but also coming up with new financial techniques such as inflation and other wealth transfers to the government, which made the increasingly expensive wars possible.

The flurry of post-Watergate “reforms” supposedly were passed to counteract government abuse of citizens. Not surprisingly, the FISA program, which was aimed at reducing internal government spying became the means of massive growth of the surveillance state.

While Kamala Harris has not said much about her proposals for US foreign policy, her associations and likely appointments speak very loudly for the continuation of promoting international conflict and domestic surveillance against dissent.

Although John Kenneth Galbraith promoted socialism and Keynesianism, at least he was an entertaining writer. His book, The Great Crash, 1929, provides a readable history of the stock market crash that helped bring on the Great Depression.

While many are celebrating the Chevron decision that limits the power of federal bureaucracies to interpret federal law, it also may provide an opportunity to change federal policies regarding land ownership in the West.

The U.S. government is spending trillions of dollars to prop up military ventures around the world. This kind of spending and exhausting of military resources cannot be sustained much longer.