American Fascism - Bailout Edition

NEW YORK, Dec 21 (Reuters) - U.S. banks that spent more money on lobbying were more likely to get government bailout money, according to a study released on Monday. Banks whose executives served on Federal Reserve boards were more likely to receive government bailout funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, according to the study from Ran Duchin and Denis Sosyura, professors at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

link: Banks with political ties got bailouts, study shows | Reuters

Does this surprise anyone? In an economy where the government creates regulations, whimsical laws, oppressive taxes, and then bails out companies that are deemed "too big to fail," does it really surprise anyone that the criteria for receiving taxpayer dollars depends on political back-scratching? This is pure, classic fascism. Just like Hitler used to do, the American Federal Government has played favorites, throwing our stolen wealth at companies who's lobbyists payed off the right people in the right amounts. Instead of stealing the wealth from the "undesirables" of society (as Hitler labeled Jews, Homosexuals, Gypsies, anti-Nazis, etc), our government is stealing from all of us.

You see, the bailout money didn't materialize out of thin air, it was stolen from "we the people" indirectly, and in a couple of ways. First: the money was tacked onto our national debt. If you've never looked into the federal reserve and international currency dealings, I'll make this simple: The government takes out lots of huge loans on the international market and uses us as collateral. Our future tax payments are the income source the government uses to guarantee that debt. Obviously, when you tack on trillions of dollars overnight, those tax payments have to go up.

Second: those trillions of dollars also deface the value of each one individual dollar. So the money you make or have now is worth less that is was previously. If you look at the price of gold in comparison, when the DOW was around 14,000 in the 90's, gold cost $300 an ounce. A few weeks ago there was a big celebration because the DOW got back over 10,000... only what people didn't realize is that the price of gold has shot up to over $1000 an ounce. In other words, DOW 10,000 today is like DOW 3,000 in the 1990's... not all that great. Tragic, in fact.

The problem here is that we have a government which has ruined the American spirit of individualism. This is not just some nostalgic reminiscing on my part, because I identify Americanism as the recognition of individual rights: the right to your own life, the right to use your own mind to reason and communicate, the right to act on your conclusions, and the right to keep the produce of this activity. This is how we were as a young country, when people had actual freedom. Today we have a government that thinks its role is to take the produce of your life and distribute it as they see fit. Since they can't always fully accomplish this out in the open, they create mountains of legislation to control how we can use the property that we are "allowed" to keep. This is something that has been going on in ever increasing amounts since the first days of our conception, which can be clearly seen in the battles between Jefferson and Hamilton around the turn of the 19th century. For more on this, I refer you to Hamilton's Curse.

Whenever the government allows people to own property, yet controls its use either directly or indirectly, that is fascism. This is exactly what has gone on with the banking industry. The government allows us to "own" real estate, meanwhile they have tons of laws and regulations controlling our real estate and controlling the loans and the terms of the loans. They also have the ultimate control through the Federal Reserve of controlling the supply of money and therefore the value of our property.

Socialism is the system where the government owns the property and distributes it as it sees fit. America has been operating under a mix of Socialism and Fascism since about 1913, with the inception of the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax. This was made worse with the "American Society" and the "New Deal" and has grown worse and worse since. As a result, what used to be a country of laissez faire was turned into a country of special interests and perpetual civil war. You see, when the government controls and confiscates our property, it creates a situation where different people or groups of people fight over who gets the payouts. Instead of fighting with weapons, they fight with bribes. Instead of one side winning or losing, we all lose.

An unfortunate side effect of the way these events have played out is that the majority of the people in this country still believe we are the land of the free, and that the spirit of individualism still holds up as the standard of law. It does not. However, whenever the supposed "right" argues for less regulation and less property confiscation (taxes), the "left" immediately accuse them of being capitalist fascists (an oxymoron.) Whenever the "left" argues for more government programs (healthcare) the "right" argues against cutting socialism (medicare.) The issues are muddied and confused to the point that nobody stops and realizes that nobody is standing up for freedom, for the right to decide what to do with your own life and nobody else's.

It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of “Freedom or dictatorship?” into “Which kind of dictatorship?”—thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice—according to the proponents of that fraud—is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism).

link: Fascism and Communism/Socialism — Ayn Rand Lexicon

If we don't break the mold and elect politicians who stand up for complete laissez faire capitalism (freedom) then we will suffer the same fate, no matter what we call it: slavery. We're already there according to some, but hopefully there is still time to change the course of history.