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[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

 This is a rational woman, willing to be brutally honest about our country 
and culture. .....bobford

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Reflections on the 'Crisis'

by Karen Kwiatkowski


Every news report, and every bit of new blather from George W. "I love free 
markets" Bush, reminds us of George Washington’s position, "Government is not 
reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant 
and a fearful master." 

As we consider our government’s forced federal bailout/buyout of what many 
Americans believed were private banking, investment, insurance, and auto 
industries, the key word is not "government bailout," or "nationalized" or 
"socialism," or even "private." As George Washington and his compatriots 
understood, the key word is "force."

American foreign policy has long been based on force, and force alone. 
Forcing people out of arrangements disliked by "our government" and its 
friends. Forcing people into arrangements that pleased "our government" and 
its friends. In World War I, we joined a war just to have a place at the 
table, from which to force "our government’s" vision and preferences. The 
list goes on and on, all the way to Iraq Part Deux and Afghanistan. The 
central theme is not, and was never, freedom. It was, and remains, force. 

In no case of our expeditionary wars and interventions was this force ever 
brought to bear without a certain key motivating factor, a fundamental 
animator. Dare I say it out loud, in this decade of the 
fool-me-one-hundred-times boobus Americanus? This woebegotten species 
residing on Main Street suspects the truth already: The god who breathes life 
into our government, fans its flames and if necessary, restrains it, is the 
state-aligned and state-leveraging corporate class – not boobus.

With war and foreign policy, government force is an easy sell. You’re with 
us, or ag’in us. Support the president, be a patriot, else be a terrorist and 
a traitor. Support the troops, wherever they are and whatever they are doing, 
or leave the country. 

Such foreign policy is always expensive, destabilizing, and deadly. It’s a 
good thing domestic policy is not conducted this way, huh? During the recent 
permutations of the bailout, some reporters even used words like socialism 
and communism to describe the situation, indicating that this wasn’t how it 
is supposed to be. But what we have really been observing is not ideology. It 
is brute application of government force, up close and personal. 

No guns or tanks were used. Printing presses and penalties, executive orders 
and mandates, effectively forcing valueless paper and market-opposing 
behaviors on producers and consumers alike, were more than sufficient. Call 
me boobus, but we were not consulted about this use of the tax- and 
debt-funded till, and we will never be. The government tells us we have no 
choice in currency, and no freedom to even think about alternatives to 
federal decisions. 

Without choice, we submit, as the weak always do to those who wield – or are 
perceived to wield – greater strength. The empire has come home, and it has 
made us the occupied, the enslaved. Just as the American empire abroad has 
been motivated and animated by corporate interests, it is so here at home. 
While many Americans are dazed and confused by this turn of events, they 
needn’t be.


Kevin Carson explains how it works in a brilliant article published by the 
Foundation of Economic Education’s monthly, Ideas on Liberty. He writes, 
"…the corporate economy is so closely bound up with the power of the state, 
that it makes more sense to think of the corporate ruling class as a 
component of the state…." He explains, "The ruling class allows some amount 
of voluntary market exchange within the interstices of a system whose overall 
structure is defined by coercive state intervention."

The article from which these statements are taken is about the nature of free 
market reforms, and understanding primary and secondary forms of state 
intervention in the economy. A wonderful result of the current "crisis" has 
been that a majority of Americans are actually thinking about, for the first 
time, the nature of such government intervention. Unfortunately, like most of 
our Congress, most are thinking about it in an emotional and uninformed way. 
But that will change, and change rapidly.

Coercion and force are concepts with which Americans are long familiar and 
quite comfortable, at least in foreign policy. It’s a bit different when 
these chickens come home to roost. 

There are ways to deal with this homecoming, and happily violence is not 
necessary to bring down an empire. As Michael Rozeff suggests "If the black 
hole of government proves too powerful for the concerted action of its 
citizens to control it, then they will control it by their own personal and 
individual actions." 

I would assume these actions include – and are not limited to – reducing and 
eventually eliminating our physical, moral, verbal, spiritual, and financial 
support of the corporate state. Instead, we will increasingly choose to 
support ourselves, those about whom we care, and those with whom we choose to 
trade, in the marketplace of both goods and ideas. We will shun the state. If 
this sounds unreasonable, utopian, or radical – consider that the most 
upstanding and traditional-minded sector in our localities – community banks 
– are leading the way. 

The nature of empire is to expand until it becomes unsustainable and 
intolerable. The American empire’s collapse – something we should fervently 
hope to witness in our lifetimes – will occur through the actions of millions 
of people, who first recognize the absurdity and injustice of government 
coercion abroad and at home, then reject that coercion – and ultimately 
proceed, each day, at their own lead, and by their own consent. 

Now is the time for Americans to embrace the idea that government should be 
neither our master, nor our servant. 

October 20, 2008

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF 
lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian 
perspective for MilitaryWeek.com, hosted the call-in radio show American 
Forum, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com and Liberty and Power. 
To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here. 

Copyright © 2008 Karen Kwiatkowski