United Liberty

The left screamed about the Bush administration using fear. It’s being used again in this same way—to get packages through Congress. The same way Bush and Cheney did it, now Obama and Biden are doing it. You don’t hear a word from the left. I mean, I’m sitting there going, ‘Am I in the Twilight Zone here?’

There’s no denying that the Bush Administration used policies of fear in an inappropriate manner to convince Americans that it was necessary to allow our civil rights to be ignored and abused in order to provide security for our nation.  But O’Reilly is correct- using these same tactics in order to pass the largest spending bill in history is equally reprehensible.

Economist Ludwig von Mises, a man who witnessed the rise of totalitarian systems of fascism and communism, noted that totalitarian governments thrive in the soil of etatism, or “the trend toward government control of business”. On Mises’ view, etatism went hand-in-hand with economic nationalism and the glorification of war. There is no better example than Nazi Germany, the home of national socialism. Before Hitler could mobilize resources and support for his Lebensraum-oriented war machine, he first nationalized businesses, turning them from entrepreneurial market ventures to servants of the state. But what does that have to do with us?

Earlier this month, I commented on the indictment of several Blackwater Worldwide security guards for their role in the killing of 17 Iraqis. There’s more news to this story, as apparently during the heat of the Democratic primaries Hillary Clinton cosponsored with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) the Stop Outsourcing Security Act.

The Act specifically called for the Secretary of State, an office she will be occupying next year, to act in making sure that American defense is provided for by the military:

The AP News is reporting about the security command center in Denver for next week’s Democratic Convention. When I saw the report I could not help but ask the question - Why do you need more security for a political convention than for the transportation of a nuclear weapon? It was only a century ago that a regular citizen could knock on the White House front door and have the President of the United States answer. The necessity and level of security for public officials seems to correlate with very high accuracy to how many of our liberties they restrict through the use of government force.