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October
26
2020

Western Liberty R.I.P.
Paul Craig Roberts

Germany is on the brink of modifying its constitution, to allow all 19 secret services to hack anyone at any time, for any reason, secretly ( https://netzpolitik.org/2020/bundesregierung-beschliesst-staatstrojaner-fuer-alle-geheimdienste ). — Mark Crispin Miller, News from Underground

We are witnessing in every Western country a rapid transformation of what were formerly free countries into police states. Governments violate their constitutions, issue edicts in place of legislation, treat citizens arbitrarily, and pursue agendas on the basis of justifications that are contrary to the facts.  The digital revolution has given governments powers far beyond those of Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984.

I can remember when the year 1984 seemed to be the far distant future, and I can remember the free country in which I was born and grew up.  That country is no more.  

The youth of today have never experienced a free country and do not know what has been lost.  Indeed, they are absorbed in the digital revolution that they think is freedom.

The “War on Terror” launched by 9/11 and the war on Covid launched in order to learn techniques of mass population control have together terminated free societies. Today privacy is a non-existent right, as are free speech, free inquiry, open pubic debate, and the right to operate a business. 

In place of debate, people who disagree with official explanations enforced by the presstitutes and social media are  “cancelled.” Your every email, phone call, purchase and web search is captured and used to build a profile of you for marketing purposes and for future arrest should you prove troublesome for the regime.

Whistleblowers are prosecuted despite legislation defending them from prosecution. Thought control and behavior control are  imposed by firing people and destroying their careers for using unapproved words and taking unapproved positions.  

The collapse of liberty has been rapid in the 21st century.  But it has been creeping upon us for some time. Few Americans alive today remember when a wife could not testify against her husband or a husband against his wife. Such testimony was considered a violation of marriage that had formed one out of two.  It was self-incrimination, which is prohibited by the US Constitution in those days when the Constitution was respected and had authority.

Few who are alive remember that the marriage contract was in part a sexual contract and there was no such thing as “wife rape.”  

There was no such thing as Child Protective Services with the power to intervene in the family, seize children from parents, and have parents prosecuted on charges of child neglect or abuse whether real or fabricated. 

You could yell at and spank your child without being arrested.  You didn’t live in fear that bruises from sports activity or falling off a bike would be noticed by a school teacher, doctor, or neighbor and result in an intrusion into the family by Child Protective Services determined to prosecute parents in order to justify the budget.

Kids of my generation were free to be wherever they chose to be without adult supervision on week-ends, holidays from school, and summers as long as they were home by dinner time. Our bikes made us mobile, and we could be anywhere in range of a bike and a pair of legs, and our parents weren’t arrested for child neglect.  It was mass third world immigration, integration of formerly stable homogeneous neighborhoods, and the rise of the pedophile sex trade that made children no longer safe. Multicultural society failed to protect children and began persecuting parents instead. 

A person could start a car without, if it had a manual transmission, having to push the clutch petal to the floor.  A person could drive away without having to put on a seat belt or endure endless beeping.  Soon, if not already, you must be strapped in or the car will not move.  The range of free judgment has been greatly narrowed.  Even the appliances we use bully us.

I could go on at great length, but it is too depressing. 

If Donald Trump wins the election and is permitted to be inaugurated, perhaps he will make it a part of “making America great again” to get the intrusive government out of our lives.  I was born a free person, and I would like to die a free person.

But I am not holding my breath.

 

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

 

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