The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy Read Free

security number, or other authentications of his being, birth, nationality, status, beliefs, creed, right to be, enter, leave, move about, work, trade, purchase, dwell…. Many people take private individuals for granted, and they will find what I am saying farfetched. But private individuals do not exist in the Soviet Union or in China where the claims of the state are total and even art and literature must be subservient to the interests of the state….”
    Roberts presented an example of how bureaucracy has begun to erode the liberties of American citizens: “[In the 1970s] US District Judge Wilbur Owens instructed the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia to use involuntary transfers of faculty members between system institutions to achieve racial balance among the faculties. As long as the involuntary transfers of teachers was intra-city and confined to elementary and high school teachers, my liberal colleagues saw it as social progress. But once they faced inter-city involuntary transfers, they called it fascism. It is true that until the liberal progress of the 1960s, government direction of labor in this century was unique to the Hitler and Stalin regimes. As is often the case, people realize the consequences of statist ideas only when their own private individualities are touched.”
     
     
    But the fleecing of America did not merely start in the 1970s. It’s been going on for many more decades. Consider a 1934 editorial cartoon published in the Chicago Tribune, entitled “Planned Economy or Planned Destruction?” In the drawing there are men identified as “Young Pinkies from Columbia and Harvard,” who are shoveling money from a cart. Beneath the cart sits a disheveled Leon Trotsky writing, “Plan of action for U.S.—Spend! Spend! Spend! Under the guise of recovery—Bust the Government—Blame the capitalists for the failure—Junk the Constitution and declare a dictatorship.” This cartoon might well have been drawn by a conservative cartoonist of today.
    A few older citizens may recall the words of Norman Mattoon Thomas, a pacifist who ran for president six times between 1928 and 1948 under the Socialist Party of America banner, “The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism,” he said. “But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”
    In a 1948 interview, Thomas said he was retiring from American politics because both the Democratic and Republican parties had adopted every plank of the Socialists’ platform and there was no longer a need for the alternative Socialist Party.
    If Thomas was possibly correct in 1948, he is undoubtedly correct now. Many people see what once was termed “creeping socialism” in the United States now full-blown policy in Washington. This perception was reflected on the February 16, 2009, cover of Newsweek that declared, “We Are All Socialists Now.” Many Americans cringed at the nationalization of the banking and auto industries. They feared more would follow.
    TEA PARTIES
     
    B EGINNING IN A PRIL 2009, protests against “out-of-control” government spending, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the squabble over health care spread nationwide in citizen meetings termed “tea parties.” The name came from the original Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American colonists tossed shipments of tea into Boston Harbor in protest of the British government’s “taxation without representation.” Many modern wits have pointed out, “If the colonists thought taxation without representation was bad, they should see taxation WITH representation.”
    In 2009, the spirit of protest spilled over into several town hall meetings, where members of Congress, off for the summer recess, were shouted at and, in some cases, chased from the hall by constituents angered by what they saw as President Obama’s socialist