JOHN HALL AGAINST THE 2nd AMENDMENT

Letter to a constituent:

October 3, 2008

Dear Mr. *****,

           Thank you for writing to me regarding legislation pertaining to guns in Washington , D.C. It is important for me to hear from my constituents on a variety of issues, and I appreciate hearing from you.

           In 1976, the Washington , D.C. City Council voted to ban most D.C. residents from obtaining new handguns. The ban excluded police officers, private security professionals, and anyone who had previously registered a handgun. Since then, the ban has repeatedly been challenged in Congress and by D.C. residents but has remained in effect.

On June 26, 2008, t he U.S. Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 5-4 that the D.C. gun ban violated the Second Amendment. However, the co urt also stated that the ruling would not directly affect most bans on the possession of guns by felons or the mentally ill, or laws prohibiting gun possession in certain areas, such as schools and government building s . The D.C. Council quickly established emergency gun laws in accordance with the Supreme Court ' s decision .

           On July 31, 2008, Representative Travis Childers introduced H.R. 6691, the Second Amendment Enforcement Act. Upon passage, the bill would restrict D.C.'s ability to pass legislation dealing with certain types of firearms . The bill would repeal the ban on semiautomatic weapons in D.C., and the registration requirements for firearm possession. In addition, H.R. 6691 would abolish the requirement that certain individuals who own firearms must keep them unloaded, disassembled, or with the trigger locked while the firearm is in the home . The bill would allow D.C. residents to temporarily purchase handguns in Virginia and Maryland .

On September 17, 2008, t he House passed the text of H.R. 6691 by a vote of 266 - 152 , when it was offered as a substi tute to H.R. 6842, the National Capital Security and Safety Act , which would have required D.C. to update its gun laws to comply with the Supreme Court decision . I voted against the legislation because I believe this legislation unnecessarily infringes on the rights on the D.C. government to make the best decisions for its residents . In New York State , we would object if the federal government tried to impose its view of gun rights on our state and local communities. I believe that the District of Columbia should also have the right to determine its own firearm policy . This legislation has been referred to the U.S. Senate, where it is pending further action.

I support the Second Amendment rights of responsible, law - abiding citizens to own and use guns and believe our nation must have strong penalties for those who break the law by selling or buying guns illegally, or by committing gun crimes. In order to keep our communities safe our law enforcement personnel must have the proper tools to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and to keep guns from illegally getting onto the streets.

            I will be sure to keep your thoughts in mind as Congress considers legislation on D.C. gun laws. Please feel free to contact me whenever I might be of assistance to you.

Sincerely,

John Hall
Member of Congress   19th District

The Collaborator's Song

by William Norman Grigg

The scene is one familiar to many, if not most, American males of a certain age.

Colonel Ernesto Bella, the Cuban military ruler of Soviet-occupied Calumet, Colorado, is patiently interrogating Mayor Bates, who – since he poses no threat – is permitted the continued use of his official title (even though Bella has appropriated the Mayor's limousine).

The subject is the whereabouts of Bates' son, Daryl, and several other local teenagers suspected of staging guerrilla attacks on the occupation troops. "Daryl, he wouldn't hurt a fly," Bates insists in a voice heavily flavored with the bogus bonhomie that comes naturally to politicians. "I know my son, Colonel. He's not the guerrilla type."

Col. Bella is not convinced. "According to records, Mayor, your son is a prominent student leader," the Cuban points out. "Yes, well, he's a leader, but not in a violent or physical way," Bates stammers. "He's more of a politician, like his father. He's not a troublemaker – "

"Then who is?" interjects Col. Bella, who, weary of Bates's piscine floundering, skewers him with a barbed look.

After taking a moment to catch his breath and collect his scattered wits, Bates offers an answer he knows will please his masters, and probably lead to the death of some former friends.

"Well, let's just say – it runs in some of the families," he replies as he contorts his face into a caricature of a politician's confident smile.

Bella, not even attempting to hide his disgust, responds with a derisive chuckle.

"This community is indeed fortunate to have a shepherd like him," Bella comments to his aide-de-camp, scorn oozing from every syllable.

Deflated yet determined to play out his chosen role, Bates tries to clothe his naked collaboration in the robes of respectable "moderation": "Well, I just want to see this thing through, Colonel."

Shortly thereafter we see Bella presiding over the execution of a large group of "troublemakers," who are gunned down in a ditch at the outskirts of town. They remain defiant to their last mortal breath, which they use to hurl the strains of "America the Beautiful" into the face of their murderers.

Standing, appropriately enough, at Bella's side – or, more exactly, at his heel – is Mayor Bates, who had been dragged along to see his handiwork primarily as an object lesson regarding his fate should be somehow manage to overcome his canine servility.

The premise of the movie from which those scenes are drawn, the 1984 jingo-fest Red Dawn , is the conquest of the Midwestern United States by a Soviet/Cuban/Nicaraguan invasion force. Wildly implausible at the time, that storyline has not gained credibility over the past quarter-century. However, the movie's depiction of young, athletic mountain boys harrying and wearing down a vastly superior military force through guerrilla tactics in some ways foretold the eventual defeat of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and Washington's impending defeat there as well.

In addition to presenting a creditable dramatization of fourth generation warfare, the movie also offers some valid insights regarding the tactics employed by totalitarian rulers and those who oppose them.

While it's profoundly doubtful that Americans will be ground beneath the heel of a Russian-led occupation force, there's a growing likelihood that the government ruling us – a quasi-socialist kleptocracy supported by a militarized proto-police state – will metastasize into undisguised totalitarianism.

Every totalitarian system, whether imposed through military conquest or internal subversion, requires the services of people like the gelatinous Mayor Bates – those who have spent their lives seeking power and the favor of those who exercise it, and are willing to betray anybody and everybody in order to remain personally secure once power is in the hands of those who are utterly ruthless.

The common refrain of such people – the Collaborator's Song, as it were – is always some variation on the theme of "I just want to see this thing through."

A different take on that treacherous tune was performed by the character of Max Detweiler in The Sound of Music , a melodramatic adaptation of the true story of Austria's Trapp Family .

Since that film is tragically disfigured by song and dance numbers (guys prefer battlefield choreography set to the music of gunfire, punctuated by occasional explosions) its surprisingly strong message about resistance to totalitarian subversion is largely unknown to the male film audience.

The story is set in Austria just prior to the Anschluss , an event anticipated with dread by Austrian patriots – such as Capt. von Trapp – and eagerness – by the loathsome likes of Herr Zeller , an arrogant little functionary who would become gauleiter once the Nazis were in power. Caught in between were many like the wealthy Herr Detweiler, the self-appointed promoter of the von Trapp Family Singers.

Max was frustrated by Capt. von Trapp's reluctance to permit his children to sing in public, but terrified by his refusal to accommodate the Nazis in any way once the betrayal of his country was consummated.

When the Nazis sent the Captain a conscription notice, Max took aside Maria, the family's once-time governess who became the Captain's wife, and urged her to use her influence to moderate the Captain's views.

"He's got to at least pretend to work with these people," Max admonished Maria. "You must convince him."

"I can't ask him to be less than he is," replied Maria with quiet pride.

To his credit, Max did aid the Captain and their large family in their escape from their Nazi-dominated homeland. To his shame, Max – like many thousands of his countrymen – helped make the betrayal of their homeland possible by "pretending" to work with the enemy, rather than refusing to cooperate.

Unabashed collaborators like Mayor Bates – or their real-life versions, like the much-debated Malinche – are relatively few in number. Those of the Max Detweiler type are quite common, and many of them – despite their best efforts at maintaining the pretense of support for the ruling power – find their names written down on the lists compiled, and dutifully turned in, by those whose collaboration is more overt, and whose desire is to "see this thing through" at whatever cost to other people.

What do such unpleasant matters have to do with life in contemporary America? The tragic answer to that question is: A great deal.

Many people were shocked just a few weeks ago when we were given a reminder that the government ruling us compiles a roster of official enemies , and that the enforcement arm of Leviathan's state-level affiliates is being trained to recognize "danger signs" of political "extremism."

This reminder came courtesy of the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), which issued a "strategic report" last February entitled "The Modern Militia Movement. MIAC is one of more than fifty counter-terrorism "fusion centers" that pockmark the American landscape like syphilitic sores.

These entities are jointly operated by state, local, and federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, with involvement by some branches of the military and even a select few nominally private sector entities.

Fusion centers are more appropriately referred to as domestic intelligence soviets – policy making "councils" designed to create and impose a ruling "consensus" regarding the nature of the internal "threat." They tend to be highly secretive, and operate on the assumption that their activities are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act or its state-level equivalents .

The "report" itself is a product of the same congeries of left-wing "watchdog" groups who have been laboring for decades to criminalize everything but "progressive" opinion and activism. I would write that MIAC simply "regurgitated" what it was fed by those people, but the olfactory signature of the report in question suggests that it exited the bureaucratic apparatus by way of a bodily orifice other than the mouth.

As with all such efforts at broad-brush civic excommunication, "The Modern Militia Movement" was written by people of bad faith whose net gathers of every kind but their own.

Where else could we find militant white power agitators (a group whose ranks are routinely replenished with an endless supply of federal provocateurs) forced into unnatural association with the supporters of the late Ron Paul presidential campaign, a multi-ethnic movement whose motto was "Liberty, prosperity, and peace"?

It should be understood that this document was written for the guidance of law enforcement personnel, who are instructed that those displaying the traits and attitudes described in the report consider law enforcement to be "the Enemy.... They view the military, National Guard, and law enforcement as a force that will confiscate their firearms and place them in FEMA concentration camps."

Leaving aside the matter of which agency would run detention centers in the increasingly likely event of full-scale martial law , we're left with a perfectly reasonable question: Why shouldn't we view the State's armed enforcers as "the Enemy"?

The typical conduct of police during confrontations with civilians bears eloquent testimony of the fact that they are indoctrinated to treat us as the enemy, and to be prepared to disarm us when given the opportunity – for their own safety, of course. Why else would police ask motorists if they were armed, or confiscate video and audio recording equipment from witnesses whenever police are involved in potentially controversial episodes of official violence?

The import of the Missouri MIAC report was to prime state law enforcement agents to perceive as potential terrorists anybody who displayed any of the political sentiments listed therein. Thus bumper stickers announcing support for Ron Paul or Chuck Baldwin would be regarded as warning signs, as would the advertisement of hostility toward the FBI, ATF, IRS, UN, or Federal Reserve. None of this is new.

The Missouri document reads almost exactly like a police checklist created in 1995 and presented in Oklahoma City when the federally-facilitated bombing of the Murrah Building by disgruntled former federal employee Timothy McVeigh (and "others [conveniently still] unknown") was still a raw and bloody memory.

During a presentation on "Criminal Justice and Right-Wing Extremism in America," John J. Nutter of the Ohio-based Conflict Analysis Group described that political persuasion as a "lightning rod for the mentally disturbed" and warned the 500 law enforcement personnel in attendance to be wary of those displaying the symptoms of such alleged derangement.

Those symptoms included, but were not limited to, opposition to the UN and the above-mentioned federal alphabet agencies; "excessive" anger over, or familiarity with, the federal atrocities at Waco and Ruby Ridge; opposition to the Federal Reserve; a strong commitment to the right of armed self-defense; unusual knowledge about the Constitution and its history; a tendency to buy gold and silver; and possession of various forms of "extremist" literature. I was particularly intrigued by that last category, since it included the magazine for which I was then employed, as well as the book I had just recently published.

The document assumed that law enforcement agencies would have pretty detailed intelligence on the political opinions, literature collections, and personal habits of the people described as potential terrorist threats. Like the more recent MIAC document, furthermore, Nutter's little report was intended to fortify the assumption that such people, rather than being active citizens in the tradition of Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine, were a direct threat to the physical well-being of law enforcement personnel.

Nutter's profile was just one of many versions of the same official libel that was reproduced in Missouri's MIAC report. The post-OKC bombing "Counter-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act" appropriated several million dollars to the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) by way of the Institute for Intergovernmental Research (IIR) for use in creating the State and Local Anti-Terrorist Training program (SLATT) . SLATT was a conduit linking the Justice Department and state police agencies directly into the demimonde of hard-left "watchdog" groups.

The program's official literature (circa 1999) described its mission as providing "pre-incident awareness ... preparation, prevention, and interdiction training and information to state and local law enforcement personnel in the areas of domestic anti-terrorism and extremist criminal activity.... The SLATT law enforcement training program focuses on the detection, investigation and prosecution of extremist-based crimes, criminals, and criminal activity."

Although SLATT's emphasis changed to reflect a pre-occupation with Middle Eastern terrorism following the 9-11 attacks, it still presents training about "The Psychopathology of Hate Groups" ("hate" groups are always right-wing, of course – and note the call-back here to Nutter's Soviet-flavored idea that "right-wing" politics attract the "mentally disturbed") and "Recognizing Terrorist Indicators and Warning Signs."

SLATT could be considered the progenitor of today's "fusion centers." Indeed, despite repeated disavowals of the fact, it can be demonstrated that SLATT played a key role in creating the FBI's tendentious 1999 Project Megiddo "strategic report" on domestic "extremism " and potential terrorist threats. That document, widely circulated among state and local police nation-wide identified "religious motivation and the NWO [new world order] conspiracy theory" as the "two driving forces behind the potential for millennial violence."

Both SLATT and the archipelago of "fusion centers" are subsidiaries of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) , which collects and disseminates information about "listed threats" to state and local police. The defamatory "intelligence product" distributed by Missouri's fusion center – the "strategic report" that listed supporters of Ron Paul or the Constitution Party among potential terrorist threats – is not only of a piece with previous efforts by the likes of Nutter and SLATT, it is all but certainly representative of the kind of material being distributed to police nation-wide.

None of this is the result of carelessness or ignorance. The effort to shoehorn right-leaning activists into the role of "domestic terrorist threat" has been going on for nearly a decade and a half, and the people responsible for it certainly dispose of adequate resources to know exactly what they are doing.

They taxonomize us as terrorists and enemies of the state not because they have misinterpreted our values and objectives, but because they honestly regard us to be such, irrespective of our efforts to pursue the vindication of our ideals through lawful and peaceful means. They consider us to be the domestic enemy. We should be thankful for their candor, and earnestly reciprocate that designation.

This means, at the very least, that in our dealings with the State's agents, particularly those employed by what the Russians call the "Organs of State Security," we should follow Solzhenitsyn's advice: "Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them." We certainly should not support them, respect them, or seek to cultivate a relationship with them. Doing so will inevitably lead to compromise and collaboration.

And this brings up a sad and unpleasant element of this subject I'm duty-bound to address.

A few days ago, just before the efforts of others led to the official retraction of the Missouri MIAC report, the upper management of a "constitutionalist" organization for which I was once employed has instructed its members, and whatever elements of the general public with which it has influence, to cultivate a good "relationship" with their local Homeland Security "fusion center": "The John Birch Society is urging members and all constitutionalists to work on bettering relationships with local police as well as the DHS Fusion Centers ."(Emphasis added.)

I reiterate that this was the voice of that organization's upper management. I would assume that many within the rank-and-file membership have a much sounder take on the issue.

Why should constitutionalists seek to have a "relationship" of any kind with a governmental entity that exists without constitutional warrant? Fusion centers are designed to amalgamate law enforcement under federal control, which would be entirely impermissible, from a constitutional perspective, even if they were generating reliable intelligence regarding legitimate terrorist threats.

Why should any organization that advertises its supposed expertise regarding Communist subversion embrace a course of action that could be summarized in the slogan: " Support your local Homeland Security Soviet "?

Is the intention here to do what is necessary to "see this thing through," in the style of the invertebrate Mayor Bates, or merely to "pretend to work" with those who are building the New Order, as the duplicitous Max Detweiler would put it?

The only principled approach to dealing with the fusion centers, and the entire Soviet-style "Homeland Security" apparatus, is to agitate for its abolition , rather than helping to consolidate the power of that apparatus by treating it as legitimate in any sense.

As bad as things presently are, we're experiencing merely the overture to what may become a bloody and violent historic tragedy. Opposing the Organs of State Security now costs relatively little – much less than it will eventually cost when they have been "strengthen[ed] ... in exercise," and their roles become "entangle[d] in precedents," to adapt Madison's timeless language.

Yet we see that even in these circumstances, some supposed defenders of "Freedom and Family" are choosing collaboration rather than timely confrontation. Rather than hacking at the roots of police state tyranny, or even pruning some of the more conspicuous branches, they are helping to water and fertilize the monstrosity in the name of maintaining a good "relationship" with the enemy.

And all the while the people who dictate that course of action can be expected to sing – in counterpoint to whichever version of the Collaborator's Song they select – the occasional hymn to their own sensible moderation.

As I said, things will get much uglier than they are at present. Those who choose to collaborate when the alternative is relatively painless will either have to make some painful course corrections right now , or they'll eventually find themselves standing metaphorically at the elbow of Colonel Bella as his troops gun down the people whose names were so thoughtfully provided to the Enemy – in the cause of maintaining that valued "relationship" and "seeing this thing through," of course.

April 4, 2009

William Norman Grigg [ send him mail ] writes the Pro Libertate blog .

Copyright © 2009 William Norman Grigg

Piling Bailouts Upon Bailouts

ITEM: The New York Times for October 31 reported: "As the Treasury Department prepares a $40 billion program to help delinquent homeowners avoid foreclosure, it confronts a difficult challenge: not making the plan too tempting."

ITEM: An editorial in the New York Times for November 1 advocated a federal bailout of state government budgets. Noted the Times: "The National Conference of State Legislatures has begun appealing for Congressional help with the 'precarious' financial status of many states.... If Congress and the White House can bail out bankers and insurance companies and possibly the auto industry, they should be able to help state and local governments, too.... In addition to extending unemployment benefits and food stamp programs, which provide the biggest immediate boosts to states' economies, one promising idea being pushed by governors is to put more federal money into projects like roads, subways, bridges, tunnels, schools and sewage plants."

ITEM: USA Today reported on October 31: "Not long ago, the International Monetary Fund had a problem that bankers don't normally face: It had lots of money and no one to lend it to. That isn't a problem any more."

Now the problem is that the fund does not have enough money to lend. USA Today continued: "Simon Johnson, who recently stepped down as the IMF's chief economist, says up to 20 countries eventually may require fund help. But the IMF only has about $250 billion available for all lending — not enough in a world of massive cross-border capital flows. 'It needs a lot more money.... Ten times more money than it has,' Johnson says."

CORRECTION: The best three-card Monte player that Washington might hire still can't change the fact that government cannot make us wealthy by spending more money. But big government and its promoters continue to try to push this con game — such as, as noted above, by giving incentives to people who have made unwise housing investments, bailing out profligate state governments to fund whatever Pharaoh-like schemes seem expedient, or even promoting a global redistribution of wealth with the United States acting as central banker to the world, as the International Monetary Fund and Federal Reserve seem inclined to do of late.

Invariably, it turns out that political intervention has led to the economic problems at hand, and the earlier intervention becomes a pretext for even more government intrusions.

In much the same fashion that liberals have long wrongly taught that the Great Depression was the result of a failure of laissez-faire in order to justify FDR's schemes — which of course didn't work (there were more unemployed Americans in 1938 than in 1932) — today's interventionists also blame the "free market" for producing the current financial crisis.

Indeed, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has declared: "The all powerful market that always knows best is finished." So what is proposed? Sarkozy has the virtue of being blunt. Claiming, " Laissez-faire, c'est fini ," he has admitted: "We will intervene massively whenever a strategic enterprise needs our money."

Today's bailouts have no apparent end. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to beef up the powers of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF already says it will offer a trillion dollars to the developing world and has grandiose notions of saving the international monetary system.

The IMF scheme at hand is to inflate its own importance by giving billions in loans to "healthy" nations, with $30 billion each being held out to Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Singapore so those nations will swap their currencies for dollars.

The IMF long made a practice of loaning to governments that had broken their economies. Economist Hans Sennholz noted in 1979 that the IMF represented the "spurious notion that the policy of inflation can be made to last indefinitely through cooperation of all member governments. It acts like a governmental cooperative with 146 members that tries to coordinate the inflationary policies of its members."

The marketplace doesn't work anymore, say the experts. We are supposed to trust these experts to know how to fix the problems, even though the creation of new money and credit by the Fed and Treasury, and the U.S. government's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, led to the current financial problem in the first place. As usual, the big government backers are happy to use problems to increase their own powers.

But Frank Shostak, an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, sees through the gambit: "If central bankers and government bureaucrats can fix things in difficult times, why not in good times too? Why not have a fully controlled economy and all the problems will be fixed forever? The collapse of the Soviet Union's centralized system is the best testimony one can have that controls don't work. A better way to fix economic problems is to allow entrepreneurs the freedom to allocate resources in accordance with society's priorities."

The best rescue plan would be to allow market mechanisms to operate freely. However, as Shostak says,

This is precisely what the government rescue package prevents from happening. The government package is not going to rescue the economy, but it will rescue activities that the economy cannot afford and that consumers do not want. It will sustain waste and promote inefficiency, draining resources from growth and efficiency. Remember: government is not a wealth generator; it can only take resources from A and give them to B.

There seems to be no end to the government's willingness to hand over tax monies outright or loan our assets to others as a form of political capital. Billions of dollars have already been promised to automakers, who are just part of the parade of industries on the corporate dole, and other various special-interest groups are anxious to rip off some goodies for themselves. As noted by Dr. Robert Higgs, a Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute:

Hundreds of billions here, hundreds of billions there — pretty soon you're talking about real money. It will be highly depreciated money, however, because the government's bailout commitments to date, along with its already huge budget deficit, ensure that the Fed will be flooding the world with newly created dollars, and, other things being equal, each one's creation reduces the purchasing power of every existing one. So far we must contend with $700 billion authorized by the big bailout law enacted on October 3; $85 billion for the AIG loan; $100 billion each for Fannie and Freddie; an undetermined amount, but potentially as much as $1,300 billion for the Commercial Paper Funding Facility; $25 billion for the auto companies; and $540 billion for the money market mutual funds. Together, these giveaways, all ultimately taken out of the taxpayers' hide, amount to an astonishing $2,850 billion — a sum almost equal to total federal government spending in the fiscal year just completed.

Of course, most of these outlays nominally take the form of loans, and much of the money probably will be repaid eventually. Nevertheless, extension of the loans must be financed in any event, and in the present circumstances, such financing is inconceivable without gigantic expansions of central-bank credit, which require nothing but a snap of the Fed's electronic finger. If you are not expecting a surge in price inflation, then you need to review your economics notes.

The problem, whether at the local level or beyond, is that the U.S. government already spends the equivalent of about 40 percent of the national income. Our financial failings today are decidedly not from a free-market failure, but from big-government encroachments. Why do the automakers need a rescue? In large part, they have their hands out because statists used the government to foist expensive fuel-economy regulations on consumers who didn't want them and colluded with the United Auto Workers to resist changing benefit packages that were above their competitors' elsewhere. So now we are told the taxpayers should have to pay for these poor choices.

Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm seems delighted to reprise the Depression days. He recently told the BBC: "It is certainly the greatest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s.... There'll be a much greater role for the state, one way or another. We've already got the state as lender of last resort, we might well return to the idea of the state as the employer of last resort, which is what it was under FDR. It'll be something which orients, and even directs, the private economy."

Old failed ideas keep resurfacing. Soon, it would appear, we can expect another "stimulus package" — again using government spending as if that were a magical amulet that could make us better.

Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) takes heed of the fact that much of this spending is unconstitutional, not that such matters bother those doing the spending. Says Paul:

The next stimulus package is likely to include money for infrastructure. While these investments are, constitutionally speaking, supposed to be made by state and local governments, it is not likely that Congress will suddenly begin to pay heed to the document we are all sworn to uphold. Still, we need to acknowledge the fact that the current Congress and Administration are rushing the nation toward bankruptcy.

This being the case, we could hope they would at least come to their senses regarding our debt and foreign spending sprees. Our nation's foreign-held debt is at record highs and moving ever higher. Continuing to borrow money from Red China and others in order to pay "dues" to the United Nations and run "Plan Colombia" makes no sense at all.

Our whole carrot-and-stick approach to foreign policy makes no sense. The U.S. government simultaneously gives money to Israel, and to Egypt. We send AIDS money to Africa while AIDS clinics in America shut down. "Millennium challenge" funding goes to countries which enact "market-based reforms" as we push our own country further and further into a centrally planned economy.

All in all, much of this should seem familiar to students of history. Social engineers just love to allocate what they think is the right mix of resources, as they redistribute wealth and ration goods and services. Yet, as counterproductive as all of these schemes are, there is a real goal in mind. It was once propounded by Karl Marx, who called for the "centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly."

Old Karl was just aiming a bit low for today's social and fiscal engineers.

Written by William P. Hoar The New American