www.thornwalker.com/ditch/ut38_flue_find.htm
 


That truth should be silent I had almost forgot.
Antony and Cleopatra,  Act 1, Scene 2


Unsilent Truth
January 29, 2018
 

The coming tyranny
 

After finding the flue
 

By RONALD N. NEFF

 
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A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, "let us flee!"
"Let us fly!" said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

— Ogden Nash

 
It is likely that the flea and the fly each knew where to go after it had escaped from the flue.

Is the matter so happy for Americans?

The opposition to Donald Trump as president is quite unlike anything we have ever seen in America — with the exception, of course, of the opposition to Abraham Lincoln, who, no matter what else he was, was never president of united States.

Hardly a day goes by without some screed from a major news outlet bewailing the enormities of his administration or an account of something said or done that is either false or childishly distorted. And when there is no news along those lines to report, one or another of them will reflect on previous outrages.

The gathering of women the weekend of January 20, one of whose organizers was a Muslim woman who has been accused of enabling sexual assault in the workplace against another Muslim woman by a Muslim man, was promoted and attended by women who were outraged by Trump's unknightly speech about women and their pudenda — though hardly one can be found who ever uttered a word against a president who has actually assaulted, and probably raped, numerous women.

(For a reason that escapes this writer, their protest includes the wearing of caps that draw attention to the very pudenda Trump spoke of. But then the Left can always be counted on, in their outrage and in what passes for their humor, to invoke indecent and obscene images.)

The general hysteria (if I may use the word) against him has really been quite extraordinary. Cries for impeachment fail to name a single impeachable offense. (Perjury and suborning perjury will, of course, not be cited, even if they are committed, since the U.S. Senate has already found those crimes not to "rise to the level of impeachment.") Demands that the Twenty-fifth Amendment be invoked because Trump is mentally unstable — as though the previous three presidents were models of mental and social adjustment — seem not to have been made by anyone who has actually read that Amendment.

No, their rage has taken the form of almost boundless tantrums that exceed anything that the most intemperate bigot in the country ever uttered on television, radio, or possibly even the Internet against the Luo Barack Obama. I think that it is not too far wrong to describe the current state of the Left as madness. To quote G.K. Chesterton, "They are speaking nonsense and they cannot stop."
 

Let us contemplate what it all might mean for the future.

At some point, very likely within the next 12 years, the people who now are reduced to stammering and spitting their rage and fattening the accounts of psychotherapists will once again hold political power. How long is 12 years? Well, 12 years ago, George W. Bush was still president and Antonin Scalia had not yet "died under mysterious circumstances." There was no Supreme Court ruling that homosexual men — who were already free to marry — were free to marry one another, and certainly no one was thought to be required by anti-discrimination laws to agree that they should be free to do so. Twelve years ago, no one imagined that boys could be allowed to urinate and shower with girls in elementary-school restrooms, and certainly no one imagined that any school could be required to permit it. Twelve years ago there was no Black Lives Matter. And 12 years ago, auto manufacturers were still permitted to build Pontiacs.

In short, 12 years are not a very long time, and a terrible amount of totalitarian tyranny can be imposed on people within that span of time.

It may well be that because of the repeal of regulations and the lowering of capital-gains taxes — to say nothing of measures not yet taken — most people in the country will be wealthier. It may be that the wealth will result in a sounder tax base for the federal government. As I have pointed out, any tax policy that sends more money to Washington — even if it means each taxpayer is somewhat better off — will cause the government to be more powerful. So unless there is some major political shift in this country, we should expect to be less free when the hysterical Left take over than we are now. And surely there is no plausible agent for such a shift.

Supposing that a political party could serve as such an agent, what party would it be? The only (even minimally) freedom-oriented parties are the Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party. The Constitution Party has yet to get on the ballot in all 50 states — not a propitious state of affairs for an effective freedom-producing political party.

As for the Libertarian Party, in 2016 it nominated a former governor who had made it perfectly clear during debates with other candidates for the LP nomination that he would enforce anti-discrimination laws. Faced with the question of whether he would have voted for or signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he alone said unequivocally that he would have. None of the other four candidates would unequivocally say that they would not have, but they did indicate their displeasure with the Act. Even so, the LP Convention, with, as I say, four other candidates — at least one of them quite well-spoken — to choose from, selected as their standard-bearer a man who was less libertarian on this point than Barry Goldwater had been in 1964.

Moreover, the Party did not later repent of their choice and meet in Convention to withdraw the nomination. In 2016, of course, certain Republicans were talking about doing just that to Donald Trump, and for less cause, but such a course seems never to have crossed the collective LP mind. Such a party, I say, is not likely to serve as the agent of shift necessary, or to produce a Tribune of the People able to stand firm and heroically against so much as the droning monotony of a Charles Schumer, let alone against an hysterical outpouring of hate and insanity as we see directed against Trump.

So I think it would be folly to count on either of those parties to protect us.

And that means that we should prepare ourselves to be ruled by a company of liberals so full of fury against the American people that they will surely not rein in their madness to further enslave us, and will enslave us in dire ways that I, at least, cannot bring myself to imagine.

Robert Higgs, among others, has urged listeners (in 2016!) to consider moving from the United States. Although nearly all other countries are socialistic, he pointed out that most of them lack the capital necessary to put as much socialism as they desire into practice. The United States, however, does possess the capital to effect as much surveillance and other measures of state tyranny as it wishes, and he therefore urged his listeners to consider getting out (starting at 51:00).
 

To his reasons I add my own observations. Throughout history, ordinary people have been governed by evil men. But we can think of their evil as a kind of familiar evil, a human evil, an evil we can recognize, and perhaps understand — an evil perhaps into which we know we could fall under the correct conditions. What I wish to suggest is that in our age, so many people have discarded the value of reasoning thought — and replaced it with something they think are feelings — that the evil that surrounds us now is no longer quite human. The thoughts or at least utterances of our rulers are not recognizably human. They are somehow alien to humanity.

To take just one example, the recent government shutdown — however welcome it may have been on other grounds — was brought about because the Democratic Party had blocked a bill to fund the government, and their sole purpose was to force the Republicans to pass a measure that would benefit a mere 800,000 people. And those 800,000, you understand, are not even constituents of either party. They are not even citizens. Since when do rulers bring hardship on their own people in order to benefit foreigners? It makes no human sense.

Another example is the fuss over boys who think they are girls and girls who think they are boys. And, apparently, there are dozens of other categories related to these two. How can people think that an entire society must be upturned in order to accommodate the deranged thinking of a few minors who should probably just be spanked? Clearly, to do so is the logical implication of the anti-discrimination laws, but that merely suggests that they, too, are deranged.

In case anyone should say, "Is that all? So much fuss over just two political developments?" I insist that the examples I just cited are by no means the worst that I could have chosen. I chose them because they are familiar, and could be multiplied over and over. What I experience on a daily basis is nothing less than insanity. Most people believe that there is no objective difference between right and wrong (which is the meaning of the question "Who says?"), which is tantamount to admitting that they themselves do not know — have made themselves incapable of knowing — the difference between the two, which is the legal definition of insanity. And that, in turn, implies that we shall be ruled by insane people for the benefit of insane people.

And it should not be forgotten that those examples are to some extent acceptable not merely to liberals but also to too many conservatives who claim to oppose liberalism and to support liberty. Their intellects are to be characterized by those created by H.G. Wells in The War of the Worlds: "vast and cool and unsympathetic."

For now, and I suppose for the next few years, it is still possible for us to escape. We should not be so complacent as to think it will always be the case. In other words, the flue is open; we are not trapped in it or by it. Yet.

But ... always the "but." But where shall we go. Each of us, no doubt, will have his own idea of where the best place to go may be. Mexico? Hong Kong? Singapore? Dubai? Russia?

Like many of my ideas, this one is admittedly incomplete. I cannot advise. I am at sixes and sevens over the matter. But what little charity I have for my fellow man (such is my own sinfulness) impels me to urge my readers to think along similar lines.

We can still get out of the flue. But where shall we go? Ω
 

Editor's note: I invite all TLD readers to send in their own suggestions about possible refuges, with their reasons for choosing them.

January 29, 2018

Published in 2018 by WTM Enterprises.


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