Friday, July 7, 2017

The Reflections and Warnings of Aaron Russo



Before he died in August of 2007, Aaron Russo gave an interview to Alex Jones. He wanted to give warning about the "New World Order" to the public.

Detractors who want to deny, debunk, or disbelieve him will be able to do so. He makes errors in this interview, he believes some things that are false to be true, and he has used several misleading techniques in his America: Freedom to Fascism documentary to boost its appeal — to make it more compelling he has been dishonest in several places.

Thus, to those who want to find and seize on errors in his narrative, his worldview, or his fact base, and use those errors to categorically dismiss him and his "reflections and warnings", I promise you will be able to do so.

But
 — be careful if you do think you can categorically dismiss him. People are quick to spot the errors and bias of others, and to be merciless in their condemnation of others for having a false or erroneous worldview, yet people are often not so quick to spot or condemn their own errors and bias. In fact, people are amazingly blind to their own bias and errors.

Do we not all know a Republican who can gleefully recite ten contradictions in the mind of the average Democrat and yet simultaneously be amazingly blind to the contradictions in his own party? And of course likewise in the reverse, and of course likewise for any third-party enthusiast — they all are generous to themselves and blind to their own contradictions, even as they so easily see contradictions in others.

. . .

I made this full transcript so that I could share the highlights of Aaron Russo's words with anyone. Even if he wasn't wholly right, I think he is right on the whole.

And if his story about what Nicholas Rockefeller told him is true, then this is an absolute bombshell of an interview, and would be the basis for prosecution.
           Full Transcript:https://sites.google.com/site/themattprather/Reading/aaron-russo/reflections-and-warnings-full-transcript
         
Below are the highlights of the interview. I have edited and abridged them considerably, to make them more readable and coherent. The full transcript contains the quotes without edition and in their full, original context.


On philosophy and morality:
One should be able to respect one's self and one's actions. You have to take actions that you'd respect if somebody else did them. What's the point of living if you don't like who you are? You can have all the money in the world, and if you look in the mirror and you don't like what you see there, what's the point of it?

The most important thing is that I like who I am, and that I take actions that I would respect if somebody else did them, and live a life of character, honesty, and truthfulness.

I believe that a person has the ability to mold their character like a sculptor molds a piece of clay. There's an old saying that "a leopard never changes its spots" — I don't believe that. I believe people have the total ability to mold their character into what they choose to be in their life, what their ideals are.

And that's what I try to do with my life. I am not the same person today as I was thirty years ago. I've changed a lot. Because I wanted to be something better than I was before. And my philosophy is that you have to like yourself, you have to be a decent person, with character and integrity and honor. And that's what's important.

* * *

People don't seem to have the courage to do what they have to do.

[Q: I want to say you've got a lot of courage.]

Well, thank you. I don't know if I have a lot of courage, I just have a sense of conscience and I have a sense of justice. I get nervous about what I do, but I do it because there's no other choice. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do it.

But the fact of the matter is — I've ostracized myself pretty much out from Hollywood. People are afraid to deal with me in Hollywood a lot, because of what I do, and the things I say. I don't go along with routines. A lot of people in Hollywood know the truth, and they're not willing to stand up and speak about it. I know many of them have seen my movie, and they know I'm right, and they won't talk about it — because everybody's afraid.

Everybody's afraid because they think that this money they get, these Federal Reserve Notes, are really money, and they think they have a comfortable life-style, and they're afraid to change. They're afraid to stand up for what's right.

And until people are willing to stand up and have the courage to do what they need to do, it's not going to change. And hopefully what you're doing, what I'm doing, what other people like us are doing, can effect the change that people will stand up and say: "Hey. I've had enough."

* * *

The thing is, we have one advantage: they need us to co-operate. See, if we don't co-operate with them, they can't win. And so they always need our co-operation to go along with their programs.

Once we learn not to co-operate with them, then we win the game. And that's the point. Don't co-operate with them. Don't go along with the program any more. Stop it.

* * *

The only way to stop it is for good men to stand up. Was it Edmund Burke said: "Evil can only thrive when good men do nothing"? We've got to do something. That's what it is. "Silence is golden, but what it comes to your freedom, it's yellow."

We have to stop being scared, we have to stand up and do what's necessary, to take back the country, to stop these bankers, these elite, this government.

* * *

We're dealing with complete evil. We're dealing with complete evil. And until the American people wake up, and say "We don't want this evil in our country any more, and we want to come back to being a country of decency, and goodness, and integrity, and honor," we're going down that road.

And that's what it going to take, it's going to take people standing up and saying: "We don't want to live in this kind of a world anymore."

I believe we should pull all our troops out of Iraq. I believe we should leave other countries alone. Let other countries live their lives the way they choose to. Stop trying to spread democracy around the world, which is the worst form of government there is anyway. Restore our Republic to what it's supposed to be, and go back to what the Founding Fathers gave us. And try and restore that. Restore the Republic.

Look, the point of everything is: that we have to mobilize. Each one of us. You and I can't do everything. You and I may be leaders, we may be out there and people listen to us, to what we have to say, and follow us, but the truth of the matter happens to be that it takes all Americans to stand together, to stand tall, to mobilize and say "I'm mad as hell. I'm not going to take it any more. We're going to stand up and fight the battle."

And you and I can't do this alone, we're just leaders of the thing, but other people have to join in with us, and stand side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, and say "I'm not going to take it any more." That's what it's going to take to win this effort.

And to stop co-operating with the government. And with all their rules and regulations. And to wake everybody up. To educate everybody to what's going on.

* * *

Well, freedom, or liberty, is what people really want. And it's time to stop the duplicity of the government in lying to us. You see, many many people know the truth of what's happening in this country. They know the truth. But they're afraid to stand up. People have to find their courage, and stand up and say "I'm not going to take this anymore; I know the truth."

* * *

It's like they create a situation where if you tell the truth, you're considered a lunatic. In other words, if someone goes on a TV show and says "9/11 is an inside job," — "Oh, you're an idiot! You're crazy!" They call you names. You can't be afraid of that.

Don't be afraid to be ridiculed by these people. You know?

If 9/11 was a phony — and I know it was — then stand up and say it's a phony. Don't be scared to tell the truth. Don't allow their powers or trying to make you look silly to frighten you.

* * *

[Q: What do you think happened with Alan Greenspan? In the late '60s he wrote a section, in a book for Ayn Rand. And he talked about how horrible the Federal Reserve was, how we needed a gold standard, and how the bankers are robbing us. And then someone offered him something, and now you see somebody who basically made a deal with Beelzebub.]

Exactly. It's a deal with the devil. It gave him a chance to be one of the most powerful men on the Earth. And it gave him a chance to accomplish things he never thought he would have accomplished in his life, other than that.

And it's very seductive. It's a very attractive perfume. I mean, I was attracted when they came to me and spoke to me about it. I thought about it. I was attracted to it. They asked me if I wanted to open up a chain of bay-watch nightclubs, you know? — and "we'll do this, we'll do that. We can do this—"

I mean all these things were proposed to me. Business ventures.

But I can't do that to people, and I just can't be in a position where I can do that to other people. I have a conscience. And my conscience would not permit me to do that.

You know, people say I'm very courageous. I don't think I'm courageous. I think I have a conscience. And my conscience doesn't allow me to do that to people. I just — it makes me feel sick. I just don't believe in it.

[Q: Oh, I agree. When I do bad things, I feel bad. When I do good things I feel good.]

Yeah, exactly. And I feel the same way.

* * *

If you don't fight the corruption, and you don't stand up for what's right in life, you're going to end up being a serf and a slave and you're leaving your children a world that you wouldn't want to live in yourself.

So how can you, in decency, behave that way? You have to stand up for what's right in life. And unless you do that, you're nothing.
          Full > https://sites.google.com/site/themattprather/Reading/aaron-russo 

THE STRAWMAN CONSPIRACY THEORY



It is an interesting conspiracy theory that I’ve heard bandied about for years but ultimately I think it is just that: an interesting conspiracy theory, and an utter waste of time. Here is a good primer that sums it up:
For an article that explains in detail the intricacies of this conspiracy theory, you’d think they could fact-check the one verifiable piece of information not subject to tin-foil hypotheticals: The Federal Reserve act of 1913 happened 5 years BEFORE the armistice, therefore WWI could NOT have “depleted the treasury” and could NOT have been an impetus for the Fed.
Moving on…

Why is your name in all capital letters on government documents?

Google the “All Caps” thing. Nothing but conspiracy theories all saying more-or-less the same thing. The ALL CAPS version of your name is a shell corporation which is owned by the government/NWO/Rothschilds/Illuminati/etc. You believe that it’s you, they use this ruse to extract your productive labor in order to service the national debt.
Is it true? Some people claim you can get out of all sorts of trouble by invoking your individual sovereignty and rejecting the assertion that you and all caps YOU are one and the same. Try it in court, and let me know how it turns out for you. There are two reasons why I think this portion of the conspiracy theory is utter bullshit:
  1. The idea that there’s this secret loophole, the “Strawman corporation” defense basically assumes that, despite whatever ill intentions led people to set up such an elaborate ruse (to circumvent individual sovereignty), these same usurpers would actually respect individual sovereignty when called on it, is inconceivable.
  2. If these laws are in-fact secret, if most of the people (95%+) don’t even know they exist then fact is, these laws could say anything, which negates the intent of drafting secret laws and then secretly adhering to them in the first place let alone the preposterous notion that the slavemasters can rely on an army of patsies none of whom have any knowledge of what they’re supposed to be enforcing, yet all of whom miraculously enforce the secret laws (that they don’t know about and would probably abhor if they did know about) in exact accordance with the conspiracy theory.
The other reason is that capitals seem easier to deal with. Fifty or 60 years ago, hell even 30 years ago you were talking about typewriters and whatnot, why worry about 52 characters in the alphabet when you could deal with only 26? It simplifies things. Not a bulletproof rebuttal by any means, but certainly worth noting.

Is your birth certificate the government’s title to property (i.e., you)

The theory takes great pain to establish an “obvious” link between birth certificates and warehouse receipts. The theory claims these are printed by the American Banknote Company and as a result of this therefore your birth certificate is a bond which indentures you to pay off or service the national debt (that the debt is held by a private banking cartel is basically true, though).
According to this belief, everything printed by the American Banknote Company is  imbued with some magical properties and in the case of your birth certificate, this magic makes it a “bond” and this makes you liable for some amount of federal debt which you pay off during the course of your life. My principle objections to this part of the theory are elementary:
  1. The ABNC is essentially a printer/engraver who specializes in stock/bond paper, banknotes, and other secure documents. In other words, they make very nice and durable paper, the sort you would naturally choose for documents intended to survive the test of time.
  2. The mere fact that some (or even all) birth certificates were printed on paper by a company that also produces banknotes does not necessarily mean that these birth certificates are bank notes, bonds, etc.
  3. I further doubt the ABNC produces all birth certificates – some are printed by Midwest Banknote Company which, founded in 1956 does not appear to be a subsidiary of ABNC, and according to this report, there are over 14,000 legitimate forms of birth certificates in existence, and they are issued and processed by over 6,000 entities) and that makes it even less believable.

The government really does own you, though

Yes, as a matter of fact we are essentially slaves. I just think this particular conspiracy is mental masturbation, that’s all.
Whether your birth certificate is (according to the secret law) a title establishing someone else’s ownership of “you”, is irrelevant.
The fact of the matter is that nations, or rather their ruling classes, have always treated the working classes as a sort of “capital” or productive property which enables their largesse – that is, the ruling classes have always bought them, sold them, and mortgaged them as collateral for their debt. They don’t need a “warehouse” receipt. Propaganda is usually sufficient and when that fails firepower almost always works.

The trick is to overcome the propaganda and misinformation without drawing fire.

When enough people have  swallowed the proverbial “red pill” the threat of violence will not be sufficient. Their weapons are only useful against individuals, not ideas. And when the idea that we should all be free has blossomed, neither bullets nor batons will be able to keep us enslaved.

Warren Buffet's investment in wearables points toward the category's future.



Wearables didn't exactly close out 2016 with a bang. According to an IDC report, the sector only grew 3.1 percent year-over-year in Q3 of 2016. While that statistic, along with reports of wearable companies' struggles (Fitbit recently laid off six percent of its workforce) may signal a problem for the sector, Warren Buffett is actually embracing wearables. The billionaire investor, who has been cautious about investing in the tech sector in the past, is diving into wearables with a new smart jewelry line produced by his company Berkshire Hathaway's jewelry subsidiary Richline Group.

The line, dubbed Ela, will debut this spring, starting with smart wristwear—but don't expect to see a smartwatch from the get-go. According to a report from ZDNet, Ela has been working on elegantly designed smart bracelets and plans to extend into other product categories, including rings and earrings, in the future. Ela devices will connect to both Android and iOS devices and share activity data with Apple's HealthKit and Google Fit, although the specific activity sensors that each device will have are unknown. Ela devices will also receive smartphone notifications, and the user can set gems on the device to glow in different colors and vibrate depending on the alert they're receiving.


Cliff Ulrich, product innovation manager for the Richline Group, told ZDNet that a goal was to create devices that are more than just "prettier step trackers." Ela devices will also have their own mobile app with which users can create "memories" that can be shared with a specific device. Content like photos, voice recordings, and songs can be preloaded to Ela devices so that users who are given the device as a gift can open up the content on their smartphones and relive "special memories" they have with the gifter.

"Jewelry is a lot about sharing special moments," Ulrich told ZDet. "We wanted to create the modern-day locket and allow people to store memories in their jewelry.... If someone wants all the features in the world, they'll get a smartwatch. But we tried to create a much more emotional connection with a product, rather than being purely about the functionality."

Buffett and Richline Group are taking a different approach to wearables than we see from most tech companies. Richline Group specializes in jewelry, and Buffett sees investing in wearables as an extension of the jewelry business. "Jewelry is a centuries-old business that isn't going anywhere, so it's a safe bet," Buffett told CNBC in an statement. "With the addition of technology, we're simply updating something everyone knows and loves to better fit our modern age."

This is just another example of a fashion and accessories company figuring out the best way of incorporating wearable technology into what it knows best. Fossil Group is the fashion company that has made arguably the biggest investment in wearables so far, starting off by making a few Android Wear watches and smart bracelets. Now, most of Fossil Group's brands, including Michael Kors, Emporio Armani, and Diesel, have hybrid smartwatches that look like regular watches they would have produced anyway but with fitness tracking and smart notification features.

We'll likely see more companies, like Richline Group, experiment with this strategy in the future, trying to determine how they can fit wearable technology into their business model. Instead of trying to make the best wearable or smartwatch (like Apple, Google, and other companies are competing to do), these companies are going to focus on how technology can work within their current business structure. And there's room for both methods in the wearable space: some people will want the most high-tech smartwatch available, but others are going to want a device that speaks to their sense of style and also offers a few complementary tech features. Richline Group's Ela jewelry line will debut sometime this spring and will start with stainless steel, silver, and gold bracelets priced between $195 and $295.


There never was a great depression, people are just greatly ignorant

The Jekyll Island duck hunt that created the Federal Reserve


By Tyler E. Bagwell
 
In October of 1907 several banking firms, starting with the Knickerbocker Trust Company of New York, collapsed as depositors withdrew funds for fear of unwise investments and misuse of money. Lines of people waited in front of the Knickerbocker to close their accounts. Days later, the Trust Company of America had droves of depositors removing their money. Then, shortly thereafter, a run took place at the Lincoln Trust Company. Across the country apprehension that the panic would continue to spread occurred. In the fall of 1907 the United States was in a recession, it's banking system lacked a lender of last resort mechanism, and an intricate network of directorships, loans, and collateral bonded the fate of many financial institutions together.
Several banking leaders including Jekyll Island Club members George F. Baker, president of the First National Bank, and James Stillman, president of National City Bank, met with financier J. Pierpont Morgan and began examining the assets of the troubled institutions. A decision was made to offer loans to any of the banks that were solvent. The secretary of the treasury George B. Cortelyou was eager to divert the situation and offered the New York bankers use of government funds to help prevent an economic disaster. President Theodore Roosevelt, while the panic of 1907 transpired, was on a hunting trip in Louisiana.
 


Ron Chernow in his book The Death of the Banker offers this account of the 1907 Panic, "In the following days, acting like a one-man Federal Reserve system, [J. Pierpont] Morgan decided which firms would fail and which survive. Through a non stop flurry of meetings, he organized rescues of banks and trust companies, averted a shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange, and engineered a financial bailout of New York City." In the end, the panic was blocked and several young bankers including Henry P. Davison and Benjamin Strong Jr. were recognized for their work organizing personnel and determining the liquidity of the banks involved in the crises. In 1908 J. Pierpont Morgan asked Henry P. Davison to become a partner in his firm J. P. Morgan & Co. and in 1914 Benjamin Strong Jr. was selected to be the first president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Soon after the 1907 panic, Congress formed the National Monetary Commission to review banking policies in the United States. The committee, chaired by Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, toured Europe and collected data on the various banking methods being incorporated. Using this information as a base, in November of 1910 Senator Aldrich invited several bankers and economic scholars to attend a conference on Jekyll Island. While meeting under the ruse of a duck-shooting excursion, the financial experts were in reality hunting for a way to restructure America's banking system and eliminate the possibility of future economic panics.
The 1910 "duck hunt" on Jekyll Island included Senator Nelson Aldrich, his personal secretary Arthur Shelton, former Harvard University professor of economics Dr. A. Piatt Andrew, J.P. Morgan & Co. partner Henry P. Davison, National City Bank president Frank A. Vanderlip and Kuhn, Loeb, and Co. partner Paul M. Warburg. From the start the group proceeded covertly. They began by shunning the use of their last names and met quietly at Aldrich's private railway car in New Jersey. In 1916, B. C. Forbes discussed the Jekyll conference in his book Men Who Are Making America and illuminates, "To this day these financiers are Frank and Harry and Paul [and Piatt] to one another and the late Senator remained 'Nelson' to them until his death. Later [, following the Jekyll conference,] Benjamin Strong, Jr., was called into frequent consultation and he joined the 'First-Name Club' as 'Ben.'" This book as well as a magazine article by Forbes is the only public mention to the conference until around 1930, when Paul Warburg's book The Federal Reserve System: Its Origin and Growth and Nathaniel Wright Stephenson's book Nelson W. Aldrich: A Leader in American Politics were published.
 


Nathaniel Stephenson, in the Notes section of his biography on Senator Aldrich, suggests that B.C. Forbes learned of the Jekyll conference from an incident taking place at the Brunswick train depot. Stephenson writes, "In the station at Brunswick, Ga., where they ostentatiously talked of sport, the station master gave them a start. 'Gentleman,' said he, 'this is all very pretty, but I must tell you we know who you are and the reporters are waiting outside.' But Mr. Davison was not flustered. 'Come out, old man,' said he, 'I will tell you a story.' They went out together. When Mr. Davison returned he was smiling. 'That's all right,' said he, 'they won't give us away.' The rest is silence. The reporters disappeared and the secret of the strange journey was not divulged. No one asked him how he managed it and he did not volunteer the information." From the Brunswick train station the men boarded a boat and traveled on to Jekyll Island.
The Jekyll Island conference offered a secluded location to discuss banking ideas and enabled the development of a plan that eventually became the Federal Reserve Banking System. The Federal Reserve System is the name given to the twelve central banks regulating America's banking industry and it insures that depositors will not lose their money in the event of funds mismanagement from an accredited bank. Paul Warburg in his book The Federal Reserve System: Its Origin and Growth explains the reason for secrecy behind the meeting. He states, "It is well to remember that the period during which these discussions took place was the time of the struggle of the financial Titans- the period of big combinations [of businesses], with bitter fights for control. All over the country there was a deep feeling of fear and suspicion with regard to Wall Street's power and ambitions."
Obtaining permission from J. Pierpont Morgan to use the facilities of the Jekyll Island Club, the conference attendees most likely resided in the clubhouse for about ten days. The meeting required long days and late nights of contemplation and reflection. European banking practices were assessed and numerous conversations held regarding the best way to craft a non-partisan banking reform bill. Paul Warburg in the book Henry P. Davison: The Record of a Useful Life recalls, "After we had completed the sketch of the bill, and before setting down to its definitive formulation, it was decided that we had earned 'a day off' which was to be devoted to duck shooting." The Jekyll Island Club was originally formed in 1886 as a hunting preserve and in the 1910s was well stocked with animals such as pheasants and wild hogs. Several ponds on the island attracted numerous game birds and wild ducks.
 


William Barton McCash and June Hall McCash in the book The Jekyll Island Club: Southern Haven for America's Millionaires offers this narrative of the Jekyll conference. They mention, "How long the surreptitious meeting lasted is uncertain, although the group spent Thanksgiving on the island, where they dined on 'wild turkey with oyster stuffing.' They worked throughout the day and night, taking only sporadic time out to explore Jekyl and enjoy its delights. Aldrich and Davison were both so taken with...[Jekyll Island]... that they joined the club in 1912."
For years members of the Jekyll Island Club would recount the story of the secret meeting and by the 1930s the narrative was considered a club tradition. The conference's solution to America's banking problems called for the creation of a central bank. Although Congress did not pass the reform bill submitted by Senator Aldrich, it did approve a similar proposal in 1913 called the Federal Reserve Act. The Federal Reserve System of today mirrors in essence the plan developed on Jekyll Island in 1910.

America Has Fallen Victim To The Normalcy Bias



 The Normalcy Bias condition is well known to psychologists and sociologists. It refers to a mental state of denial in which individuals enter into when facing a disaster or pending danger. Normalcy Bias leads people to underestimate and minimize both the possibility of a catastrophe actually happening, as well as its possible consequences to their health and safety.

   The Normalcy Bias often results in situations where people fail to prepare for a likely and impending disaster. The Normalcy Bias leads people believe that since something has never happened before, that it never will happen. Therefore, like an infant with a security blanket we cling to our habitual, repetitive, and normal way of life, despite overwhelming proof that serious danger lies ahead.

   The Normalcy Bias is part of human nature and, to some extent, we are all guilty of participating in it. Unfortunately, the Normalcy Bias inhibits our ability to cope with a disaster once it is underway. People with Normalcy Bias have difficulty reacting to something they have not experienced before. The Normalcy Bias also leads people to interpret warnings and to inaccurately reframe information in order to project an optimistic outcome which leads to the person to infer a less serious situation. In short, it is kind of a pain-killing drug which numbs a person to an impending danger.

   Do you suffer from Normalcy Bias. Could you become a victim of the “my people parish from a lack of knowledge?”  If you are being honest with yourself, and do not see a threat in the existing power structure, then you do indeed suffer from Normalcy Bias.

   The Nazi Holocaust provides the best example of Normalcy Bias in a way that is most applicable to what is beginning to happen in America.

The Normalcy Bias explains why so many Jews ignored and underestimated the omnipresent signs of danger even after they were forced to wear identifying yellow stars, possess a J stamp Identification card and discriminatory laws were passed which targeted the Jews and their businesses of which many were destroyed in The Night of the Broken Glass.

Many of the Jews could have afforded to move out of the country, but stayed, and were subsequently exterminated. It could be accurately stated that they ultimately perished because of their Normalcy Bias.



   Bill Ayers, the leader of the 1960′s Weatherman Underground terrorist organization, the man who financed Obama’s Harvard education and launched his political career in his Southside Chicago home, told FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, that his people would have to murder 25 million Americans which could not be re-educated after these “Read Diaper Babies” had taken over the government.

I hate to be the one to bring cognitive dissonance to your Normalcy Bias party, but the communist thugs of Ayers, his convicted criminal spouse, Bernardine Dohrn, Senior White House Advisor,Valerie Jarrett, Frank Davis and his real son, Obama, have taken over this government and they have the means, the motive, the opportunity and the desire to commit genocide against you and other freedom-loving American.

For example,  Valerie Jarrett, has stated that the Obama administration is going to enact revenge against their opponents in a “there is going to be hell to pay” threat. Have you ever criticized the President using any form of electronic media? Did you vote for Obama in both elections? Remember, they actually know if you have been naughty or nice!

   The sad fact remains, that most of us will not even know what has hit us until it is too late. Part three will examine the factors which will determine if your fellow countrymen will acquiesce to authority and carry out the globalist genocidal plans and fire on you and your family when ordered to do so.

Knowledge is power. My hope is that you will use this information to empower yourself and your family for protection in emergencies. Decide today that you will not be a victim of normalcy bias. Sit and make a plan for a few scenarios that you think could take place. Familiarize yourself and your family with escape routes at home, at work, and at school. Decide on places where you can meet should something occur when you’re apart.

Prepare an emergency bag/bug-out bag. You may never have to use any of these skills, but should you have to, its better to be able to act without having to think. Better to be able to take the information you prepared and be ready to go within the shortest amount of time possible instead of walking in circles making phone calls. 
It could make all the difference.
Original article > http://tinyurl.com/z5ue9xn

Thursday, July 6, 2017

Fear: The Foundation of Every Government's Power

*You may wish to slip on something comfy, this was quite a bit.


[S]ince love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513
All animals experience fear—human beings, perhaps, most of all. Any animal incapable of fear would have been hard pressed to survive, regardless of its size, speed, or other attributes. Fear alerts us to dangers that threaten our well-being and sometimes our very lives. Sensing fear, we respond by running away, by hiding, or by preparing to ward off the danger.

To disregard fear is to place ourselves in possibly mortal jeopardy. Even the man who acts heroically on the battlefield, if he is honest, admits that he is scared. To tell people not to be afraid is to give them advice that they cannot take. Our evolved physiological makeup disposes us to fear all sorts of actual and potential threats, even those that exist only in our imagination.
The people who have the effrontery to rule us, who call themselves our government, understand this basic fact of human nature. They exploit it, and they cultivate it. Whether they compose a warfare state or a welfare state, they depend on it to secure popular submission, compliance with official dictates, and, on some occasions, affirmative cooperation with the state’s enterprises and adventures. Without popular fear, no government could endure more than twenty-four hours. David Hume taught that all government rests on public opinion, but that opinion, I maintain, is not the bedrock of government. Public opinion itself rests on something deeper: fear.[1]



The Natural History of Fear
Thousands of years ago, when the first governments were fastening themselves on people, they relied primarily on warfare and conquest. As Henry Hazlitt ([1976] 1994) observes,
There may have been somewhere, as a few eighteenth-century philosophers dreamed, a group of peaceful men who got together one evening after work and drew up a Social Contract to form the state. But nobody has been able to find an actual record of it. Practically all the governments whose origins are historically established were the result of conquest—of one tribe by another, one city by another, one people by another. Of course there have been constitutional conventions, but they merely changed the working rules of governments already in being.
Losers who were not slain in the conquest itself had to endure the consequent rape and pillage and in the longer term to acquiesce in the continuing payment of tribute to the insistent rulers—the stationary bandits, as Mancur Olson (2000, 6-9) aptly calls them. Subjugated people, for good reason, feared for their lives. Offered the choice of losing their wealth or losing their lives, they tended to choose the sacrifice of their wealth. Hence arose taxation, variously rendered in goods, services, or money (Nock [1935] 1973, 19-22; Nock relies on and credits the pioneering historical research of Ludwig Gumplowicz and Franz Oppenheimer).


Conquered people, however, naturally resent their imposed government and the taxation and other insults that it foists on them. Such resentful people easily become restive; should a promising opportunity to throw off the oppressor’s dominion present itself, they may seize it. Even if they mount no rebellion or overt resistance, however, they quietly strive to avoid their rulers’ exactions and to sabotage their rulers’ apparatus of government. As Machiavelli observes, the conqueror “who does not manage this matter well, will soon lose whatever he has gained, and while he retains it will find in it endless troubles and annoyances” ([1513] 1992, 5). For the stationary bandits, force alone proves a very costly resource for keeping people in the mood to generate a substantial, steady stream of tribute.



Sooner or later, therefore, every government augments the power of its sword with the power of its priesthood, forging an iron union of throne and altar. In olden times, not uncommonly, the rulers were themselves declared to be gods—the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt made this claim for many centuries. Now the subjects can be brought to fear not only the ruler’s superior force, but also his supernatural powers. Moreover, if people believe in an afterlife, where the pain and sorrows of this life may be sloughed off, the priests hold a privileged position in prescribing the sort of behavior in the here and now that best serves one’s interest in securing a blessed situation in the life to come. Referring to the Catholic Church of his own day, Machiavelli takes note of “the spiritual power which of itself confers so mighty an authority” ([1513] 1992, 7), and he heaps praise on Ferdinand of Aragon, who, “always covering himself with the cloak of religion, ... had recourse to what may be called pious cruelty” (59, emphasis in original).[2] Naturally, the warriors and the priests, if not one and the same, almost invariably come to be cooperating parties in the apparatus of rule. In medieval Europe, for example, a baron’s younger brother might look forward to becoming a bishop.

Thus, the warrior element of government puts the people in fear for their lives, and the priestly element puts them in fear for their eternal souls. These two fears compose a powerful compound—sufficient to prop up governments everywhere on earth for several millennia.



Over the ages, governments refined their appeals to popular fears, fostering an ideology that emphasizes the people’s vulnerability to a variety of internal and external dangers from which the governors—of all people!—are said to be their protectors. Government, it is claimed, protects the populace from external attackers and from internal disorder, both of which are portrayed as ever-present threats. Sometimes the government, as if seeking to fortify the mythology with grains of truth, does protect people in this fashion—even the shepherd protects his sheep, but he does so to serve his own interest, not theirs, and when the time comes, he will shear or slaughter them as his interest dictates.[3] When the government fails to protect the people as promised, it always has a good excuse, often blaming some element of the population—scapegoats such as traders, money lenders, and unpopular ethnic or religious minorities. “[N]o prince,” Machiavelli assures us, “was ever at a loss for plausible reasons to cloak a breach of faith” ([1513] 1992, 46).



The religious grounds for submission to the ruler-gods gradually transmogrified into notions of nationalism and popular duty, culminating eventually in the curious idea that under a democratic system of government, the people themselves are the government, and hence whatever it requires them to do, they are really doing for themselves—as Woodrow Wilson had the cheek to declare when he proclaimed military conscription backed by severe criminal sanctions in 1917, “it is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling: it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass” (qtd. in Palmer 1931, 216-17).

Not long after the democratic dogma had gained a firm foothold, organized coalitions emerged from the mass electorate and joined the elites in looting the public treasury, and, as a consequence, in the late nineteenth century the so-called welfare state began to take shape. From that time forward, people were told that the government can and should protect them from all sorts of workaday threats to their lives, livelihoods, and overall well-being—threats of destitution, hunger, disability, unemployment, illness, lack of income in old age, germs in the water, toxins in the food, and insults to their race, sex, ancestry, creed, and so forth. Nearly everything that the people feared, the government then stood poised to ward off. Thus did the welfare state anchor its rationale in the solid rock of fear. Governments, having exploited popular fears of violence so successfully from time immemorial (promising “national security”), had no difficulty in cementing these new stones (promising “social security”) into their foundations of rule.


The Political Economy of Fear
Fear, like every other “productive” resource, is subject to the laws of production. Thus, it cannot escape the law of diminishing marginal productivity: as successive doses of fear-mongering are added to the government’s “production” process, the incremental public clamor for governmental protection declines. The first time the government cries wolf, the public is frightened; the second time, less so; the third time, still less so. If the government plays the fear card too much, it overloads the public’s sensibilities, and eventually people discount almost entirely the government’s attempts to frighten them further.

Having been warned in the 1970s about catastrophic global cooling (see, for example, The Cooling World 1975), then, soon afterward, about catastrophic global warming, the populace may grow weary of heeding the government’s warnings about the dire consequences of alleged global climate changes—dire unless, of course, the government takes stringent measures to bludgeon the people into doing what “must” be done to avert the predicted disaster.

Recently the former Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge revealed that other government officials had overruled him when he wanted to refrain from raising the color-coded threat level to orange, or “high” risk of terrorist attack, in response to highly unlikely threats. “You have to use that tool of communication very sparingly,” Ridge astutely remarked (qtd. by Hall 2005).



Fear is a depreciating asset. As Machiavelli observes, “the temper of the multitude is fickle, and ... while it is easy to persuade them of a thing, it is hard to fix them in that persuasion” ([1513 1992, 14). Unless the foretold threat eventuates, the people come to doubt its substance. The government must make up for the depreciation by investing in the maintenance, modernization, and replacement of its stock of fear capital. For example, during the Cold War, the general sense of fear of the Soviets tended to dissipate unless restored by periodic crises, many of which took the form of officially announced or leaked “gaps” between U.S. and Soviet military capabilities: troop-strength gap, bomber gap, missile gap, antimissile gap, first-strike-missile gap, defense-spending gap, thermonuclear-throw-weight gap, and so forth (Higgs 1994, 301-02).

[4] Lately, a succession of official warnings about possible forms of terrorist attack on the homeland has served the same purpose: keeping the people “vigilant,” which is to say, willing to pour enormous amounts of their money into the government’s bottomless budgetary pits of “defense” and “homeland security” (Higgs 2003b).

This same factor helps to explain the drumbeat of fears pounded out by the mass media: besides serving their own interests in capturing an audience, they buy insurance against government punishment by playing along with whatever program of fear-mongering the government is conducting currently. Anyone who watches, say, CNN’s Headline News programs can attest that a day seldom passes without some new announcement of a previously unsuspected Terrible Threat—I call it the danger du jour.

By keeping the population in a state of artificially heightened apprehension, the government-cum-media prepares the ground for planting specific measures of taxation, regulation, surveillance, reporting, and other invasions of the people’s wealth, privacy, and freedoms. Left alone for a while, relieved of this ceaseless bombardment of warnings, people would soon come to understand that hardly any of the announced threats has any substance and that they can manage their own affairs quite well without the security-related regimentation and tax-extortion the government seeks to justify.

Large parts of the government and the “private” sector participate in the production and distribution of fear. (Beware: many of the people in the ostensibly private sector are in reality some sort of mercenary living ultimately at taxpayer expense. True government employment is much greater than officially reported [Light 1999; Higgs 2005a] .) Defense contractors, of course, have long devoted themselves to stoking fears of enemies big and small around the globe who allegedly seek to crush our way of life at the earliest opportunity. Boeing’s often-shown TV spots, for example, assure us that the company is contributing mightily to protecting “our freedom.” If you believe that, I have a shiny hunk of useless Cold War hardware to sell you. The news and entertainment media enthusiastically jump on the bandwagon of foreign-menace alarmism—anything to get the public’s attention.

Consultants of every size and shape clamber onboard, too, facilitating the distribution of billions of dollars to politically favored suppliers of phoney-baloney “studies” that give rise to thick reports, the bulk of which is nothing but worthless filler restating the problem and speculating about how one might conceivably go about discovering workable solutions. All such reports agree, however, that a crisis looms and that more such studies must be made in preparation for dealing with it. Hence a kind of Say’s Law of the political economy of crisis: supply (of government-funded studies) creates its own demand (for government-funded studies).

Truth be known, governments commission studies when they are content with the status quo but desire to write hefty checks to political favorites, cronies, and old associates who now purport to be “consultants.” At the same time, in this way, the government demonstrates to the public that it is “doing something” to avert impending crisis X.

At every point, opportunists latch onto existing fears and strive to invent new ones to feather their own nests. Thus, public-school teachers and administrators agree that the nation faces an “education crisis.” Police departments and temperance crusaders insist that the nation faces a generalized “drug crisis” or at times a specific drug crisis, such as “an epidemic of crack cocaine use.” Public-health interests foster fears of “epidemics” that in reality consist not of the spread of contagious pathogens but of the lack of personal control and self-responsibility, such as the “epidemic of obesity” or the “epidemic of juvenile homicides.” By means of this tactic, a host of personal peccadilloes has been medicalized and consigned to the “therapeutic state” (Nolan 1998, Szasz 2001, Higgs 1999).

In this way, people’s fears that their children may become drug addicts or gun down a classmate become grist for the government’s mill—a mill that may grind slowly, but at least it does so at immense expense, with each dollar falling into some fortunate recipient’s pocket (a psychiatrist, a social worker, a public-health nurse, a drug-court judge; the list is almost endless). In this way and countless others, private parties become complicit in sustaining a vast government apparatus fueled by fear.

Fear Works Best in Wartime
Even absolute monarchs can get bored. The exercise of great power may become tedious and burdensome—underlings are always disturbing your serenity with questions about details; victims are always appealing for clemency, pardons, or exemptions from your rules. In wartime, however, rulers come alive. Nothing equals war as an opportunity for greatness and public acclaim, as all such leaders understand (Higgs 1997). Condemned to spend their time in high office during peacetime, they are necessarily condemned to go down in history as mediocrities at best.
Upon the outbreak of war, however, the exhilaration of the hour spreads through the entire governing apparatus. Army officers who had languished for years at the rank of captain may now anticipate becoming colonels. Bureau heads who had supervised a hundred subordinates with a budget of $1 million may look forward to overseeing a thousand with a budget of $20 million. Powerful new control agencies must be created and staffed. New facilities must be built, furnished, and operated. Politicians who had found themselves frozen in partisan gridlock can now expect that the torrent of money gushing from the public treasury will grease the wheels for putting together humongous legislative deals undreamt of in the past. Everywhere the government turns its gaze, the scene is flush with energy, power, and money. For those whose hands direct the machinery of a government at war, life has never been better.

Small wonder that John T. Flynn (1948), in writing about the teeming bureaucrats during World War II, titled his chapter “The Happiest Years of Their Lives”:
Even before the war, the country had become a bureaucrat’s paradise. But with the launching of the war effort the bureaus proliferated and the bureaucrats swarmed over the land like a plague of locusts. ... The place [Washington, D.C.] swarmed with little professors fresh from their $2,500-a-year jobs now stimulated by five, six and seven-thousand-dollar salaries and whole big chunks of the American economy resting in their laps. (310, 315)
Sudden bureaucratic dilation on such a scale can happen only when the nation goes to war and the public relaxes its resistance to the government’s exactions. Legislators know that they can now get away with taxing people at hugely elevated rates, rationing goods, allocating raw materials, transportation services, and credit, authorizing gargantuan borrowing, drafting men, and generally exercising vastly more power than they exercised before the war.
Although people may groan and complain about the specific actions the bureaucrats take in implementing the wartime mobilization, few dare to resist overtly or even to criticize publicly the overall mobilization or the government’s entry into the war—by doing so they would expose themselves not only to legal and extralegal government retribution but also to the rebuke and ostracism of their friends, neighbors, and business associates. As the conversation stopper went during World War II, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” (Lingeman 1970).
Because during wartime the public fears for the nation’s welfare, perhaps even for its very survival, people surrender wealth, privacy, and liberties to the government far more readily than they otherwise would. Government and its private contractors therefore have a field day. Opportunists galore join the party, each claiming to be performing some “essential war service,” no matter how remote their affairs may be from contributing directly to the military program. Using popular fear to justify its predations, the government lays claim to great expanses of the economy and the society. Government taxation, borrowing, expenditure, and direct controls dilate, while individual rights shrivel into insignificance. Of what importance is one little person when the entire nation is in peril?

Finally, of course, every war ends, but each leaves legacies that persist, sometimes permanently. In the United States, the War between the States and both world wars left a multitude of such legacies (Hummel 1996, Higgs 1987, 2004). Likewise, as Corey Robin (2004, 25) writes, “one day, the war on terrorism will come to an end. All wars do. And when it does, we will find ourselves still living in fear: not of terrorism or radical Islam, but of the domestic rulers that fear has left behind.” Among other things, we will find that “various security agencies operating in the interest of national security have leveraged their coercive power in ways that target dissenters posing no conceivable threat of terrorism” (189). Not by accident, “the FBI has targeted the antiwar movement in the United States for especially close scrutiny” (189).
Such targeting is scarcely a surprise, because war is, in Randolph Bourne’s classic phrase, “the health of the state,” and the FBI is a core agency in protecting and enhancing the U.S. government’s health. Over the years, the FBI has also done much to promote fear among the American populace, most notoriously perhaps in its COINTELPRO operations during the 1960s, but in plenty of others ways, too (Linfield 1990, 59-60, 71, 99-102, 123-28, 134-39). Nor has it worked alone in these endeavors. From top to bottom, the government wants us to be afraid, needs us to be afraid, invests greatly in making us afraid.

Conclusion
Were we ever to stop being afraid of the government itself and to cast off the phoney fears it has fostered, the government would shrivel and die, and the host would disappear for the tens of millions of parasites in the United States—not to speak of the vast number of others in the rest of the world—who now feed directly and indirectly off the public’s wealth and energies. On that glorious day, everyone who had been living at public expense would have to get an honest job, and the rest of us, recognizing government as the false god it has always been, could set about assuaging our remaining fears in more productive and morally defensible ways.

References
Bates, Robert H. 2001. Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development. New York: Norton.
Flynn, John T. 1948. The Roosevelt Myth. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Books.
Hall, Mimi. 2005. Ridge Reveals Clashes on Alerts: Former Homeland Security Chief Debunks “Myth.” USAToday.com. May 11. Available at http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050511071809990020.
Hazlitt, Henry. [1976] 1994. Is Politics Insoluble? The Freeman, September.
Higgs, Robert. 1987. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. New York: Oxford University Press.
------. 1994. The Cold War Economy: Opportunity Costs, Ideology, and the Politics of Crisis. Explorations in Economic History 31 (July): 283-312.
------. 1997. No More “Great Presidents.” The Free Market 15 (March): 1-3.
------. 1999. We’re All Sick, and Government Must Heal UsThe Independent Review 3 (spring): 623-27.
------. 2003a. Impending War in Iraq: George Bush’s Faith-based Foreign Policy. San Francisco Chronicle, February 13.
------. 2003b. All War All the Time: The Battle on Terrorism Is an Excuse to Make Fighting Permanent. San Francisco Chronicle, July 6.
------. 2004. Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society. Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute.
------. 2005a. The Ongoing Growth of Government in the Economically Advanced Countries. Advances in Austrian Economics 8: in press.
------. 2005b. Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis since 9/11. Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute.
Hume, David. [1777] 1987. Of the First Principles of Government. In David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. ed., edited and with a Foreword, Notes, and Glossary by Eugene F. Miller, 32-36. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers. 1996. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War. Chicago and La Salle, Ill.: Open Court.
Light, Paul Charles. 1999. The True Size of Government. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
Linfield, Michael. 1990. Freedom under Fire: U.S. Civil Liberties in Times of War. Boston: South End Press.
Lingeman, Richard R. 1970. Don’t You Know There’s a War on? New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. [1513] 1992. The Prince. New York: Dover.
Nock, Albert J. [1935] 1973. Our Enemy, the State. New York: Free Life Editions.
Nolan, James L. 1998. The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End. New York: New York University Press.
North, Douglass C. 1981. Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Norton.
------. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
------, and Robert Paul Thomas. 1973. The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Palmer, Frederick. 1931. Newton D. Baker: America at War. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.
Robin, Corey. 2004. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. New York: Oxford University Press.
Szasz, Thomas S. 2001. The Therapeutic State: The Tyranny of PharmacracyThe Independent Review 5 (spring): 485-521.
The Cooling World. 1975. Newsweek, April 28, available from the Global Climate Coalition.

Notes
[1] Hume recognizes that the opinions that support government receive their force from “other principles,” among which he includes fear, but he judges these other principles to be “the secondary, not the original principles of government” ([1777] 1987, 34). He writes: “No man would have any reason to fear the fury of a tyrant, if he had no authority over any but from fear” (ibid., emphasis in original). We may grant Hume’s statement yet maintain that the government’s authority over the great mass of its subjects rests fundamentally on fear. Every ideology that endows government with legitimacy requires and is infused by some kind(s) of fear. This fear need not be fear of the government itself and indeed may be fear of the danger from which the tyrant purports to protect the people.
[2] One naturally wonders whether President George W. Bush has taken a page from Ferdinand’s book (see, in particular, Higgs 2003a and, for additional aspects, Higgs 2005b).
[3] Olson (2000, 9-10) describes in simple terms why the stationary bandit may find it in his interest to invest in public goods (the best examples of which are defense of the realm and “law and order”) that enhance his subjects’ productivity. In brief, the ruler does so when the present value of the expected additional tax revenue he will be able to collect from a more productive population exceeds the current cost of the investment that renders the people more productive. See also the interpretation advanced by Bates (2001, 56-69, 102), who argues that in western Europe the kings entered into deals with the merchants and burghers, trading mercantilist privileges and “liberties” for tax revenue, in order to dominate the chronically warring rural dynasties and thereby to pacify the countryside. Unfortunately, as Bates recognizes, the kings sought this enlarged revenue for the purpose of conducting ever-more-costly wars against other kings and against domestic opponents. Thus, their “pacification” schemes, for the most part, served the purpose of funding their fighting, leaving the net effect on overall societal well-being very much in question. Both Olson and Bates argue along lines similar to those developed by Douglass C. North in a series of books published over the past four decades; see especially North and Thomas 1973, and North 1981 and 1990.
[4] One of the most memorable and telling lines in the classic Cold War film Dr. Strangelove occurs as the president and his military bigwigs, facing unavoidable nuclear devastation of the earth, devise a plan to shelter a remnant of Americans for thousands of years in deep mine shafts, and General “Buck” Turgidson, still obsessed with a possible Russian advantage, declares: “Mr. President, we must not allow a mine-shaft gap!”

Robert Higgs is a Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University.


New from Robert Higgs!TAKING A STAND: Reflections on Life, Liberty, and the Economy
Organized into 99 short, accessible chapters Taking a Stand offers the grand opportunity to make Robert Higgs’ vast insights available to general readers by combining his keen analysis with his engaging wit, humility and compassion.
[S]ince love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved. —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513 All animals experience fear—human beings, perhaps, most of all. Any animal incapable of fear would have been hard pressed to survive, regardless of its size, speed, or other attributes. Fear alerts us to dangers that threaten our well-being and sometimes our very lives. Sensing fear, we respond by running away, by hiding, or by preparing to ward off the danger. To disregard fear is to place ourselves in possibly mortal jeopardy. Even the man who acts heroically on the battlefield, if he is honest, admits that he is scared. To tell people not to be afraid is to give them advice that they cannot take. Our evolved physiological makeup disposes us to fear all sorts of actual and potential threats, even those that exist only in our imagination. The people who have the effrontery to rule us, who call themselves our government, understand this basic fact of human nature. They exploit it, and they cultivate it. Whether they compose a warfare state or a welfare state, they depend on it to secure popular submission, compliance with official dictates, and, on some occasions, affirmative cooperation with the state’s enterprises and adventures. Without popular fear, no government could endure more than twenty-four hours. David Hume taught that all government rests on public opinion, but that opinion, I maintain, is not the bedrock of government. Public opinion itself rests on something deeper: fear.[1] The Natural History of Fear Thousands of years ago, when the first governments were fastening themselves on people, they relied primarily on warfare and conquest. As Henry Hazlitt ([1976] 1994) observes, There may have been somewhere, as a few eighteenth-century philosophers dreamed, a group of peaceful men who got together one evening after work and drew up a Social Contract to form the state. But nobody has been able to find an actual record of it. Practically all the governments whose origins are historically established were the result of conquest—of one tribe by another, one city by another, one people by another. Of course there have been constitutional conventions, but they merely changed the working rules of governments already in being. Losers who were not slain in the conquest itself had to endure the consequent rape and pillage and in the longer term to acquiesce in the continuing payment of tribute to the insistent rulers—the stationary bandits, as Mancur Olson (2000, 6-9) aptly calls them. Subjugated people, for good reason, feared for their lives. Offered the choice of losing their wealth or losing their lives, they tended to choose the sacrifice of their wealth. Hence arose taxation, variously rendered in goods, services, or money (Nock [1935] 1973, 19-22; Nock relies on and credits the pioneering historical research of Ludwig Gumplowicz and Franz Oppenheimer). Conquered people, however, naturally resent their imposed government and the taxation and other insults that it foists on them. Such resentful people easily become restive; should a promising opportunity to throw off the oppressor’s dominion present itself, they may seize it. Even if they mount no rebellion or overt resistance, however, they quietly strive to avoid their rulers’ exactions and to sabotage their rulers’ apparatus of government. As Machiavelli observes, the conqueror “who does not manage this matter well, will soon lose whatever he has gained, and while he retains it will find in it endless troubles and annoyances” ([1513] 1992, 5). For the stationary bandits, force alone proves a very costly resource for keeping people in the mood to generate a substantial, steady stream of tribute. Sooner or later, therefore, every government augments the power of its sword with the power of its priesthood, forging an iron union of throne and altar. In olden times, not uncommonly, the rulers were themselves declared to be gods—the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt made this claim for many centuries. Now the subjects can be brought to fear not only the ruler’s superior force, but also his supernatural powers. Moreover, if people believe in an afterlife, where the pain and sorrows of this life may be sloughed off, the priests hold a privileged position in prescribing the sort of behavior in the here and now that best serves one’s interest in securing a blessed situation in the life to come. Referring to the Catholic Church of his own day, Machiavelli takes note of “the spiritual power which of itself confers so mighty an authority” ([1513] 1992, 7), and he heaps praise on Ferdinand of Aragon, who, “always covering himself with the cloak of religion, ... had recourse to what may be called pious cruelty” (59, emphasis in original).[2] Naturally, the warriors and the priests, if not one and the same, almost invariably come to be cooperating parties in the apparatus of rule. In medieval Europe, for example, a baron’s younger brother might look forward to becoming a bishop. Thus, the warrior element of government puts the people in fear for their lives, and the priestly element puts them in fear for their eternal souls. These two fears compose a powerful compound—sufficient to prop up governments everywhere on earth for several millennia. Over the ages, governments refined their appeals to popular fears, fostering an ideology that emphasizes the people’s vulnerability to a variety of internal and external dangers from which the governors—of all people!—are said to be their protectors. Government, it is claimed, protects the populace from external attackers and from internal disorder, both of which are portrayed as ever-present threats. Sometimes the government, as if seeking to fortify the mythology with grains of truth, does protect people in this fashion—even the shepherd protects his sheep, but he does so to serve his own interest, not theirs, and when the time comes, he will shear or slaughter them as his interest dictates.[3] When the government fails to protect the people as promised, it always has a good excuse, often blaming some element of the population—scapegoats such as traders, money lenders, and unpopular ethnic or religious minorities. “[N]o prince,” Machiavelli assures us, “was ever at a loss for plausible reasons to cloak a breach of faith” ([1513] 1992, 46). The religious grounds for submission to the ruler-gods gradually transmogrified into notions of nationalism and popular duty, culminating eventually in the curious idea that under a democratic system of government, the people themselves are the government, and hence whatever it requires them to do, they are really doing for themselves—as Woodrow Wilson had the cheek to declare when he proclaimed military conscription backed by severe criminal sanctions in 1917, “it is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling: it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass” (qtd. in Palmer 1931, 216-17). Not long after the democratic dogma had gained a firm foothold, organized coalitions emerged from the mass electorate and joined the elites in looting the public treasury, and, as a consequence, in the late nineteenth century the so-called welfare state began to take shape. From that time forward, people were told that the government can and should protect them from all sorts of workaday threats to their lives, livelihoods, and overall well-being—threats of destitution, hunger, disability, unemployment, illness, lack of income in old age, germs in the water, toxins in the food, and insults to their race, sex, ancestry, creed, and so forth. Nearly everything that the people feared, the government then stood poised to ward off. Thus did the welfare state anchor its rationale in the solid rock of fear. Governments, having exploited popular fears of violence so successfully from time immemorial (promising “national security”), had no difficulty in cementing these new stones (promising “social security”) into their foundations of rule. The Political Economy of Fear Fear, like every other “productive” resource, is subject to the laws of production. Thus, it cannot escape the law of diminishing marginal productivity: as successive doses of fear-mongering are added to the government’s “production” process, the incremental public clamor for governmental protection declines. The first time the government cries wolf, the public is frightened; the second time, less so; the third time, still less so. If the government plays the fear card too much, it overloads the public’s sensibilities, and eventually people discount almost entirely the government’s attempts to frighten them further. Having been warned in the 1970s about catastrophic global cooling (see, for example, The Cooling World 1975), then, soon afterward, about catastrophic global warming, the populace may grow weary of heeding the government’s warnings about the dire consequences of alleged global climate changes—dire unless, of course, the government takes stringent measures to bludgeon the people into doing what “must” be done to avert the predicted disaster. Recently the former Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge revealed that other government officials had overruled him when he wanted to refrain from raising the color-coded threat level to orange, or “high” risk of terrorist attack, in response to highly unlikely threats. “You have to use that tool of communication very sparingly,” Ridge astutely remarked (qtd. by Hall 2005). Fear is a depreciating asset. As Machiavelli observes, “the temper of the multitude is fickle, and ... while it is easy to persuade them of a thing, it is hard to fix them in that persuasion” ([1513 1992, 14). Unless the foretold threat eventuates, the people come to doubt its substance. The government must make up for the depreciation by investing in the maintenance, modernization, and replacement of its stock of fear capital. For example, during the Cold War, the general sense of fear of the Soviets tended to dissipate unless restored by periodic crises, many of which took the form of officially announced or leaked “gaps” between U.S. and Soviet military capabilities: troop-strength gap, bomber gap, missile gap, antimissile gap, first-strike-missile gap, defense-spending gap, thermonuclear-throw-weight gap, and so forth (Higgs 1994, 301-02).[4] Lately, a succession of official warnings about possible forms of terrorist attack on the homeland has served the same purpose: keeping the people “vigilant,” which is to say, willing to pour enormous amounts of their money into the government’s bottomless budgetary pits of “defense” and “homeland security” (Higgs 2003b). This same factor helps to explain the drumbeat of fears pounded out by the mass media: besides serving their own interests in capturing an audience, they buy insurance against government punishment by playing along with whatever program of fear-mongering the government is conducting currently. Anyone who watches, say, CNN’s Headline News programs can attest that a day seldom passes without some new announcement of a previously unsuspected Terrible Threat—I call it the danger du jour. By keeping the population in a state of artificially heightened apprehension, the government-cum-media prepares the ground for planting specific measures of taxation, regulation, surveillance, reporting, and other invasions of the people’s wealth, privacy, and freedoms. Left alone for a while, relieved of this ceaseless bombardment of warnings, people would soon come to understand that hardly any of the announced threats has any substance and that they can manage their own affairs quite well without the security-related regimentation and tax-extortion the government seeks to justify. Large parts of the government and the “private” sector participate in the production and distribution of fear. (Beware: many of the people in the ostensibly private sector are in reality some sort of mercenary living ultimately at taxpayer expense. True government employment is much greater than officially reported [Light 1999; Higgs 2005a] .) Defense contractors, of course, have long devoted themselves to stoking fears of enemies big and small around the globe who allegedly seek to crush our way of life at the earliest opportunity. Boeing’s often-shown TV spots, for example, assure us that the company is contributing mightily to protecting “our freedom.” If you believe that, I have a shiny hunk of useless Cold War hardware to sell you. The news and entertainment media enthusiastically jump on the bandwagon of foreign-menace alarmism—anything to get the public’s attention. Consultants of every size and shape clamber onboard, too, facilitating the distribution of billions of dollars to politically favored suppliers of phoney-baloney “studies” that give rise to thick reports, the bulk of which is nothing but worthless filler restating the problem and speculating about how one might conceivably go about discovering workable solutions. All such reports agree, however, that a crisis looms and that more such studies must be made in preparation for dealing with it. Hence a kind of Say’s Law of the political economy of crisis: supply (of government-funded studies) creates its own demand (for government-funded studies). Truth be known, governments commission studies when they are content with the status quo but desire to write hefty checks to political favorites, cronies, and old associates who now purport to be “consultants.” At the same time, in this way, the government demonstrates to the public that it is “doing something” to avert impending crisis X. At every point, opportunists latch onto existing fears and strive to invent new ones to feather their own nests. Thus, public-school teachers and administrators agree that the nation faces an “education crisis.” Police departments and temperance crusaders insist that the nation faces a generalized “drug crisis” or at times a specific drug crisis, such as “an epidemic of crack cocaine use.” Public-health interests foster fears of “epidemics” that in reality consist not of the spread of contagious pathogens but of the lack of personal control and self-responsibility, such as the “epidemic of obesity” or the “epidemic of juvenile homicides.” By means of this tactic, a host of personal peccadilloes has been medicalized and consigned to the “therapeutic state” (Nolan 1998, Szasz 2001, Higgs 1999). In this way, people’s fears that their children may become drug addicts or gun down a classmate become grist for the government’s mill—a mill that may grind slowly, but at least it does so at immense expense, with each dollar falling into some fortunate recipient’s pocket (a psychiatrist, a social worker, a public-health nurse, a drug-court judge; the list is almost endless). In this way and countless others, private parties become complicit in sustaining a vast government apparatus fueled by fear. Fear Works Best in Wartime Even absolute monarchs can get bored. The exercise of great power may become tedious and burdensome—underlings are always disturbing your serenity with questions about details; victims are always appealing for clemency, pardons, or exemptions from your rules. In wartime, however, rulers come alive. Nothing equals war as an opportunity for greatness and public acclaim, as all such leaders understand (Higgs 1997). Condemned to spend their time in high office during peacetime, they are necessarily condemned to go down in history as mediocrities at best. Upon the outbreak of war, however, the exhilaration of the hour spreads through the entire governing apparatus. Army officers who had languished for years at the rank of captain may now anticipate becoming colonels. Bureau heads who had supervised a hundred subordinates with a budget of $1 million may look forward to overseeing a thousand with a budget of $20 million. Powerful new control agencies must be created and staffed. New facilities must be built, furnished, and operated. Politicians who had found themselves frozen in partisan gridlock can now expect that the torrent of money gushing from the public treasury will grease the wheels for putting together humongous legislative deals undreamt of in the past. Everywhere the government turns its gaze, the scene is flush with energy, power, and money. For those whose hands direct the machinery of a government at war, life has never been better. Small wonder that John T. Flynn (1948), in writing about the teeming bureaucrats during World War II, titled his chapter “The Happiest Years of Their Lives”: Even before the war, the country had become a bureaucrat’s paradise. But with the launching of the war effort the bureaus proliferated and the bureaucrats swarmed over the land like a plague of locusts. ... The place [Washington, D.C.] swarmed with little professors fresh from their $2,500-a-year jobs now stimulated by five, six and seven-thousand-dollar salaries and whole big chunks of the American economy resting in their laps. (310, 315) Sudden bureaucratic dilation on such a scale can happen only when the nation goes to war and the public relaxes its resistance to the government’s exactions. Legislators know that they can now get away with taxing people at hugely elevated rates, rationing goods, allocating raw materials, transportation services, and credit, authorizing gargantuan borrowing, drafting men, and generally exercising vastly more power than they exercised before the war. Although people may groan and complain about the specific actions the bureaucrats take in implementing the wartime mobilization, few dare to resist overtly or even to criticize publicly the overall mobilization or the government’s entry into the war—by doing so they would expose themselves not only to legal and extralegal government retribution but also to the rebuke and ostracism of their friends, neighbors, and business associates. As the conversation stopper went during World War II, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” (Lingeman 1970). Because during wartime the public fears for the nation’s welfare, perhaps even for its very survival, people surrender wealth, privacy, and liberties to the government far more readily than they otherwise would. Government and its private contractors therefore have a field day. Opportunists galore join the party, each claiming to be performing some “essential war service,” no matter how remote their affairs may be from contributing directly to the military program. Using popular fear to justify its predations, the government lays claim to great expanses of the economy and the society. Government taxation, borrowing, expenditure, and direct controls dilate, while individual rights shrivel into insignificance. Of what importance is one little person when the entire nation is in peril? Finally, of course, every war ends, but each leaves legacies that persist, sometimes permanently. In the United States, the War between the States and both world wars left a multitude of such legacies (Hummel 1996, Higgs 1987, 2004). Likewise, as Corey Robin (2004, 25) writes, “one day, the war on terrorism will come to an end. All wars do. And when it does, we will find ourselves still living in fear: not of terrorism or radical Islam, but of the domestic rulers that fear has left behind.” Among other things, we will find that “various security agencies operating in the interest of national security have leveraged their coercive power in ways that target dissenters posing no conceivable threat of terrorism” (189). Not by accident, “the FBI has targeted the antiwar movement in the United States for especially close scrutiny” (189). Such targeting is scarcely a surprise, because war is, in Randolph Bourne’s classic phrase, “the health of the state,” and the FBI is a core agency in protecting and enhancing the U.S. government’s health. Over the years, the FBI has also done much to promote fear among the American populace, most notoriously perhaps in its COINTELPRO operations during the 1960s, but in plenty of others ways, too (Linfield 1990, 59-60, 71, 99-102, 123-28, 134-39). Nor has it worked alone in these endeavors. From top to bottom, the government wants us to be afraid, needs us to be afraid, invests greatly in making us afraid. Conclusion Were we ever to stop being afraid of the government itself and to cast off the phoney fears it has fostered, the government would shrivel and die, and the host would disappear for the tens of millions of parasites in the United States—not to speak of the vast number of others in the rest of the world—who now feed directly and indirectly off the public’s wealth and energies. On that glorious day, everyone who had been living at public expense would have to get an honest job, and the rest of us, recognizing government as the false god it has always been, could set about assuaging our remaining fears in more productive and morally defensible ways. References Bates, Robert H. 2001. Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development. New York: Norton. Flynn, John T. 1948. The Roosevelt Myth. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Books. Hall, Mimi. 2005. Ridge Reveals Clashes on Alerts: Former Homeland Security Chief Debunks “Myth.” USAToday.com. May 11. Available at http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050511071809990020. Hazlitt, Henry. [1976] 1994. Is Politics Insoluble? The Freeman, September. Higgs, Robert. 1987. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. New York: Oxford University Press. ------. 1994. The Cold War Economy: Opportunity Costs, Ideology, and the Politics of Crisis. Explorations in Economic History 31 (July): 283-312. ------. 1997. No More “Great Presidents.” The Free Market 15 (March): 1-3. ------. 1999. We’re All Sick, and Government Must Heal Us. The Independent Review 3 (spring): 623-27. ------. 2003a. Impending War in Iraq: George Bush’s Faith-based Foreign Policy. San Francisco Chronicle, February 13. ------. 2003b. All War All the Time: The Battle on Terrorism Is an Excuse to Make Fighting Permanent. San Francisco Chronicle, July 6. ------. 2004. Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society. Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute. ------. 2005a. The Ongoing Growth of Government in the Economically Advanced Countries. Advances in Austrian Economics 8: in press. ------. 2005b. Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis since 9/11. Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute. Hume, David. [1777] 1987. Of the First Principles of Government. In David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. ed., edited and with a Foreword, Notes, and Glossary by Eugene F. Miller, 32-36. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers. 1996. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War. Chicago and La Salle, Ill.: Open Court. Light, Paul Charles. 1999. The True Size of Government. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. Linfield, Michael. 1990. Freedom under Fire: U.S. Civil Liberties in Times of War. Boston: South End Press. Lingeman, Richard R. 1970. Don’t You Know There’s a War on? New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Machiavelli, Niccolò. [1513] 1992. The Prince. New York: Dover. Nock, Albert J. [1935] 1973. Our Enemy, the State. New York: Free Life Editions. Nolan, James L. 1998. The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End. New York: New York University Press. North, Douglass C. 1981. Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Norton. ------. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ------, and Robert Paul Thomas. 1973. The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olson, Mancur. 2000. Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships. New York: Basic. Palmer, Frederick. 1931. Newton D. Baker: America at War. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Robin, Corey. 2004. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. New York: Oxford University Press. Szasz, Thomas S. 2001. The Therapeutic State: The Tyranny of Pharmacracy. The Independent Review 5 (spring): 485-521. The Cooling World. 1975. Newsweek, April 28, available from the Global Climate Coalition. Notes [1] Hume recognizes that the opinions that support government receive their force from “other principles,” among which he includes fear, but he judges these other principles to be “the secondary, not the original principles of government” ([1777] 1987, 34). He writes: “No man would have any reason to fear the fury of a tyrant, if he had no authority over any but from fear” (ibid., emphasis in original). We may grant Hume’s statement yet maintain that the government’s authority over the great mass of its subjects rests fundamentally on fear. Every ideology that endows government with legitimacy requires and is infused by some kind(s) of fear. This fear need not be fear of the government itself and indeed may be fear of the danger from which the tyrant purports to protect the people. [2] One naturally wonders whether President George W. Bush has taken a page from Ferdinand’s book (see, in particular, Higgs 2003a and, for additional aspects, Higgs 2005b). [3] Olson (2000, 9-10) describes in simple terms why the stationary bandit may find it in his interest to invest in public goods (the best examples of which are defense of the realm and “law and order”) that enhance his subjects’ productivity. In brief, the ruler does so when the present value of the expected additional tax revenue he will be able to collect from a more productive population exceeds the current cost of the investment that renders the people more productive. See also the interpretation advanced by Bates (2001, 56-69, 102), who argues that in western Europe the kings entered into deals with the merchants and burghers, trading mercantilist privileges and “liberties” for tax revenue, in order to dominate the chronically warring rural dynasties and thereby to pacify the countryside. Unfortunately, as Bates recognizes, the kings sought this enlarged revenue for the purpose of conducting ever-more-costly wars against other kings and against domestic opponents. Thus, their “pacification” schemes, for the most part, served the purpose of funding their fighting, leaving the net effect on overall societal well-being very much in question. Both Olson and Bates argue along lines similar to those developed by Douglass C. North in a series of books published over the past four decades; see especially North and Thomas 1973, and North 1981 and 1990. [4] One of the most memorable and telling lines in the classic Cold War film Dr. Strangelove occurs as the president and his military bigwigs, facing unavoidable nuclear devastation of the earth, devise a plan to shelter a remnant of Americans for thousands of years in deep mine shafts, and General “Buck” Turgidson, still obsessed with a possible Russian advantage, declares: “Mr. President, we must not allow a mine-shaft gap!” Robert Higgs is a Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University.   New from Robert Higgs! TAKING A STAND: Reflections on Life, Liberty, and the Economy Organized into 99 short, accessible chapters Taking a Stand offers the grand opportunity to make Robert Higgs’ vast insights available to general readers by combining his keen analysis with his engaging wit, humility and compassion.

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