A Remarkable System
Given that governments are ruled by human beings, no governmental system is ever going to work perfectly. In fact, as everyone knows, America’s founding governmental system had some major flaws from the very beginning, with slavery being the biggest one and with secondary ones like the violation of women’s rights and tariffs. Nonetheless, by 1890, Americans had brought into existence the most unique and freest economic system that mankind has ever seen — a system based on free markets, voluntary charity, private property, and limited government that any libertarian today would marvel about.
Imagine: No income taxation or IRS, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, minimum-wage laws, (few) economic regulations, Federal Reserve System, paper money (gold coins and silver coins were the official money), public (i.e., government) schooling systems, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI, massive military-intelligence establishment, foreign military bases, foreign interventionism, (limited) immigration controls, state-sponsored assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, drug laws, and gun control.
That was one remarkable system. From 1890 to 1910, America was the most prosperous, most charitable, and most peaceful nation in history. If our nation had followed that trajectory into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the result would have been unbelievably incredible in terms of freedom, peace, prosperity, charity, and harmony with the people of the world.
Alas, it was not to be. In the twentieth century, Americans converted the federal government to a welfare state, a regulated, managed economy, and a national-security state, abandoning America’s founding foreign policy of noninterventionism.
While Americans have been taught to believe that the military-intelligence part of the government falls within the executive branch, such is not the case. That’s the way things were when the federal government was a limited-government republic. But once the conversion to a national-security state took place, the acquisition of overwhelming power by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA effectively brought into existence a fourth branch of the federal government — the national-security branch, which is, as Michael Glennon details so well in his book, the branch in charge of the federal government, with the other three branches deferring to its predominate role within the government.
One big problem is that every American has been born and raised under our national-security state system. Therefore, since Americans are inculcated with the notion that they are a free people, they do not question the national-security state form of government. Instead, they are convinced that it’s part and parcel of a free society, notwithstanding the fact that such authoritarian and dictatorial regimes as Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Egypt, and many others are also national-security states. They all have been inculcated with the notion that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA are necessary for their safety and security.
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