King Of The World

If you are one of the many millions of people in the world right now who are trying to make sense of global events and keep score at home, you are probably confounded by labels like, "socialist," "nationalist," "globalist," and "populist".  Let me try to sort it out for you.

There are two competing versions of the same thing: Globalism.  Each side is firmly entrenched in their version and neither side wants to give an inch.  One could think of them as the Old World Order and the New World Order.  More vividly, one could think of them as Feudalism 1.0 and Feudalism 2.0.

Feudalism 1.0 believes that God created religion and governments to control people.  On this side, you have Pope Francis I, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.  This group thinks that it creates all human institutions and regulates them by Divine Order.  In a sense, this is the Devil We Know.  At this point, they are called the fascists.

Feudalism 2.0 believes that corporations are the source of wealth and profits, and that they are self-ordained to create, market and sell products that keep us all busy.  This group is represented by George Soros, Bill Gates and James Cameron.  They don't believe in God and think that corporations empower governments to do their dirty work so they can keep on milking the populace for the privileged few.  Think of this as the Devil We Don't Know.  At this time, they are called the socialists.

The 1.0s want to regulate corporations so that they don't disturb the flow of money to the religious and government elites.

The 2.0s want to regulate governments so they don't get regulated and can keep the flow of money into the hands of the corporate elite.

In the end, the whole argument boils down to, into whose hands the money flows, and thus who gets to make the rules of the game.  It's all rather quite simple really.

There is a separate New World Order, often called libertarianism.  This third way believes that every single human being is their own religion and government, and get off my back thank you very much.  Needless to say, this view isn't very popular because there are no elites into whose hands the wealth can be concentrated.  So we'll leave them out for now.

The 1.0s are often called conservatives because they want to "conserve" the Old World Order.  The 2.0s are called liberals because they want to "liberate" the corporations from regulatory control.  In neither case do any of them give a rat's ass about individual human beings.

I personally have far less sympathy for the 2.0s.  Ultimately, they want to be free to set up their headquarters on some prime piece of real estate wherever they so choose, and then operate with a single set of rules worldwide.  They hate having to have offices in every single country they operate in, follow separate and often conflicting regulations in different nations, and pay different tax rates and wages wherever they produce and sell their wares.  They would really like corporations to be above the law, or better, to BE the law so they can untangle all the regulatory environments, limit their liabilities and run rough-shod over the rest of us.

Bad idea.  Has been extremely harmful wherever they have succeeded, like the EU.

In contrast, the 1.0s want complete and utter control over everything based on them being Divinely Ordained by a fictional God who speaks only the the select few and hands down lists of "shalt nots" that must be fanatically followed to the letter.  They want to dictate every aspect of life from conception to after-life, with absolute obedience on the part of every single human.  The individual is to be grateful that they were given life and have absolute conviction that he or she will be rewarded in the after-life.

Both of these systems are fine for those who ordain themselves to be the leaders.  Popes, kings, presidents and CEOs live the high life and get all of their rewards in the here and now.  With the 1.0s, you'll get yours after you die.  With the 2.0s, you can have a little taste now if you knuckle under and kiss the right asses.

Both systems hold out the carrot that anyone can become one of the elite, but then they publish these arcane road maps that are nearly impossible to follow, meaning the elite get to pick whomever they please.

In either case, 99.99991% of us are pretty much screwed.

And that's the part they dont' want any of us to figure out.

Instead, they want us all fighting over the scraps from the elite tables.  Both sides try to drop a few bones with some meat still on them so that the rubes (us) will think their system is betterthan the other and follow dutifully to the bitter end.

In the final accounting, though, it's all scraps no matter how you slice it.  They want to have full control over which scraps go to which sheep, and at any cost, don't want us to figure out that there are other ways to do this where everyone gets a slice of pie.  Whether it's priestly mumblings or legalistic horseshit, it's all designed to keep the majority of us in line and rowing the barge.

Oh sure, occasionally one of us oarsmen get promoted to drum-beater with an extra portion of gruel and a sip of wine, but that's just a shiny bauble to keep us hard at it.

When the REAL awakening comes, you will see millions of people walking away from both sides.  That will be the point when most of us have seen the truth that both sides are the same coin, and that perhaps it's time to try another coin.  At that point, there won't be any World Orders, just free and happy individuals.

If you want to see a REAL revolution, wait till you see that one!

A Gift Unopened

Have you ever stopped to consider how much time, effort and wealth is squandered on leaders?  Or how utterly useless they are?

What is it about humans that make us go through so much toil and trouble to prop up people who are rarely better equipped to lead than anyone reading these words?  Most leaders in the world are no more capable of leading than any one of us, and yet we go through absurdly expensive selection rituals to find one person who can survive the process and then invest all our hopes and desires in them.

These leaders are no more intelligent or special than any one of us.  In many cases, they are far less so.  These leaders are little more than functionaries whose job it is to push papers and attend banquets.  So if the leaders are nothing special, then what is it about the rest of us that compels us to go through these rituals and then wait in vane for the leaders to fulfill the desires we have invested in them?

It's not for lack of trying that we haven't gotten rid of these useless figureheads.

The Enlightenment had a vision of the "sovereign individual."  All of the powers of the State were to be invested in each human being.  Through a social focus on education, the individual would be empowered to rule himself, and his home and property would be, in effect, his realm of supremacy.  In effect, every human of majority age would be a king or queen, a sovereign over their own lives and property, made benign and beneficent by access to learning never before made available to the masses.

Marx and Engels envisioned a system labelled Communism, where the State would ultimately be made irrelevant and the individual finally empowered to be their own supreme authority.  Few people realize this, since few have read The Communist Manifesto, but these men didn't want another system to replace something else, they wanted the ultimate demise of systems altogether, and created a roadmap to achieve it, if it were ever followed, which it has never been.

  Libertarianism is a sort of amalgam of these two, which is not difficult given the very similar goals.  The only difference between all sides is the means by which to achieve the target.

These three roadmaps were based on the Protestant Reformation and the idea that individuals were just as capable of reading the Bible and interpreting it for themselves, and didn't need a centralized power structure guarding the keys of wisdom and selecting compliant leaders to promulgate the system, rather than the common good.

What all of these concepts have in common is the empowerment of the individual over the collective and the need for leaders and authorities.  They are all predicated on a single event in history: the invention of movable type and Gutenberg's press.  By making books infinitely reproduceable, without the need for rooms full of scribes and caligraphers, prices plummeted and information became available to huge populations that were never able to access it before.

With one invention, the need for authorities and leaders was wiped out and the masses empowered with the same information as the elite.  This led to an explosion of creativity: the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution.  Every single person now had access to the same resources that were once the sole purview of the elite.

The internet is no less revolutionary.  Now cheaper and broader than at any time in history, individuals have access to vast libraries of information.  Books and data formerly only available to scholars and select elites is now just a click away, and most even downloadable to a personal library.  My own digital library probably contains a significant proportion of the library at Alexandria, and can be accessed without leaving my chair.

And yet...

People still turn to leaders and authorities.  We still prefer to have a perceived expert tell us what an author said, rather than going direct to the source.  We still think we are incapable of self-sovereignty and self-determination.  We still flock in annual rituals to select leaders who have spent inconceivable amounts of time and money to gain a position of power over us.

Are we so weak, so gullible that we can't see how much power we posses, and how little we require over us?  Has our educational system been so diluted that we don't see the power that is sitting right in front of us?  Are we so mis-led that we truly believe we cannot read and understand information for ourselves?

If so, then it is a sad commentary on both our leaders, and ourselves.  Our leaders have betrayed us by taking power away from us, rather than handing it out to us.  These leaders have destroyed our educational system, which is the key to personal empowerment.  They have made us more dependent on them, than on ourselves.  They have given us fish, rather than taught us how to fish.

The promise of such great movements as the Enlightenment is all but dead, even at the moment when we have been most empowered.  We would rather spend hours on YouTube watching empty content, than reading Plato and discussing it in online fora.

How sad.  How utterly wasted is this personal empowerment.

When authorities censor information, it is an admission of fear.  They are afraid that we will know what they know, and act on it.  If the history of the world for the past 500 years has taught us anything, it is that authorities will do anything to keep us ignorant and enslaved.

It is the greatest irony in history that at the very moment the power of the ages is at each of our fingertips, that we are the most controlled and enslaved people of all time.  And all because our leaders would rather we learn to put condoms on cucumbers, than to learn the basic skills of liberty and independence: grammar, logic and rhetoric.

In fact, if you search "trivium" on Google, the entire list of top references are for a pop band.

How we have squandered our birthright.

The Fine Columbian

To paraphrase the Grateful Dead, what a long, strange week it's been.

Hitler's birthday passed relatively quiet.  In years past, there have been an inordinate number of big events around this particular date, including significant space events, Waco, Columbine, the BP Gulf of Mexico slaughter, and many others.

I was watching for some kind of marker, since They seem to be obsessed with celebrating this day.  At first, I though it was going to be one of the off-years, but then it happened...

Think about the archetypes involved here: the SS was caught in a scandal in South America involving Bolivian marching powder and little brown honeys.  SS?  South America?  Oh, that was just too rich!  They've gotten much more subtle now.  And it's hard to deny the tie between the two SSs.  Hitler's SS wore black uniforms and part of their job was to be his personal guard.  The Obama's SS wear black suits and part of their job is to do the same.

The delicious irony, too.  In the same week as the SS scandal, they were busily interrogating Ted Nugent about some of his comments regarding Obama's imminent re-election.  As if those black suits have any credibility left...  Next thing you know, they'll write off the scandal as an undercover investigation of drug and prostitution rings in Cartagena.  Bet me.

Another interesting event was the media getting caught with their propaganda pants down.  Looking at how media phrase things.  North Korea launched a missile that could "hit the US".  Iran's missiles are always talked about in terms of their ability to "hit Israel".  Then, India shows up with a missile that can "hit Beijing".

They never just give a range, or mention that any missile that can reach Earth orbit can hit anything anywhere on the planet.  They always give specific targets, though there are thousands of possible targets within the missile’s range.  Of course, if the particular country being discussed is the US itself or a close ally, then the missiles just have a range, or can be used to launch satellites, both relatively benign statistics.  You never hear, "The US tested a missile today that can level Moscow from Kansas.

It's all in the wording, and most people aren't critical of such things.  It's like those computer-generated photos in which the picture elements themselves are other pictures.  In other words, it's not the message, but how the message is composed that is the message.  One of those fun ponders for an afternoon of primo and scotch, eh?

Here's another good ponder for you.  What is a ‘person’?  Do ‘rights’ really exist?  And why is it so important to take God out of the public sphere?

Talk about a brain bomb.

The easiest part to dispose of, ironically, is God.  Everyone runs around talking about their "God-given rights."  Most of the thinking in the Enlightenment period was about Natural Rights and where they come from and who backs them up.  It always came down to appeal to a higher power in order to enforce rights  Every human has natural rights, because they are 'endowded by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.'  By the way, the root of 'unalienable' is 'lien', not 'alien'.  You can't put a lien on the rights or sign them away.

At any rate, if you take God out of the picture, then the author of the rights disappears and the conversation then turns to, "What rights?"  As George Carlin said very well, there are no rights.  No such thing.  Completely made up.  If there were Natural Rights, there would be no need to defend them.  The rights would be self-defending and apparent, like having ten fingers and ten toes.

This is why the Framers of the US Constitution backed up their assertion of Natural Rights with the right to keep and bear arms.  When it comes down to it, the only rights you or I have are those which we are willing to defend with lethal force.  Obviously, those who want to take away our rights are willing to use lethal force to do so, so it stands to reason that an equal response is called for here.

In other words, free speech is limited by folks willing to shoot you to shut you up, so you must be willing to shoot them to maintain your 'right'.  Ergo, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which backs up all those pretty 'rights' with the 'legal' ability to shoot anyone who would take them away.  Of course, it says 'keep and bear arms', not buy and stockpile ammunition, so your rights end when the ammo supply runs out.

The final ponder is 'person'.  What is a 'person'?  Most Western law defines 'person' as EITHER an individual, or a collective acting in concert as if an individual.  This seemingly simple concept is the reason why corporations are treated as 'persons' having 'rights' under the law.  It is the origin of the 'corporate veil', in which only the collective can be punished, not the individuals behind it.

Since you can't throw a corporation in jail, the only other way to punish a concept is financial sanction.  Therefore, the worst thing you can do to a collective is to take away its profit, or some part thereof.

But how did all this come about?  After all, in our common speech, a person is just an individual human being using a non-gendered, non-specific term.

Interestingly, the origin of this concept of 'person' comes from the medieval Roman church.  Theologians took a close look at two New Testament concepts: the Church itself and the line, "Where two or more are gathered in my name, there too am I."  In other words, a group of people in common purpose constitutes a 'church', which is a singular entity supposedly more than the sum of its parts.

And here is how we got to the term 'person'.  It originally came from the Greek phersu, which was the mask worn by actors on stage...the classic image of comedy and tragedy.  In Latin, it became persona, meaning human being, on so on.  

In philosophy, a person represented the irreducible being that couldn't be defined by its parts, because the whole was more than a set of functions.  A human being could not be defined as the digestive, respiratory, circulatory, and lymphatic systems, nor could the human being be defined by the collection of mental and physical processes within an individual.  Even though we all have the same basic parts and functions, we are completely unique individuals, therefore we are more than the sum of our parts, therefore we are 'persons'.  Even persons are described as individuals...'unable to divide' any further without destroying the whole.

The Church was seen as being more than the sum of the beings who joined to create it.  A pope could die and another get elected, but the whole continued uninterrupted.  In this way, the collective was seen to be a macro version of the individual human being.  It existed on a plane above the collection of parts that constituted it.

By extension, something like McDonald's cannot be defined by the individuals who make up the corporate entity.  The CEO can retire or die, and another steps in, but the collective continues without interruption.  If you swap out the PhD flipping burgers with a high school drop-out doing the same job, it makes no difference to the 'person' of McDonald's.

Just like when one of your skin cells dies and is replaced by another.  You don't feel different,  You don't behave different.  You simply continue on as if nothing had happened.  In the same way, if you cut off an arm, the 'person' that is you does not change because of it.  'You' are more than the sum of your parts and functions.  You are a 'person'.

With all that said, where does that leave us?

Basically, we looked at Nature and saw that we humans were complete Universes within ourselves.  We were indivisible and individual.  Therefore, we were in the same image as God, who was also indivisible and individual.  We came to see ourselves as part of the creative process in this way.  If a group of us got together to perform a function, then that collective became a 'person' that we created by virtue of our joining in common cause.  Furthermore, we ascribed 'rights' to 'persons'.  

As images of God, we were endowed with 'rights' that were previously only given to kings in their function as the 'person' of the State.  If we are all 'persons' who are co-creators and perfect images of God, then we all have the same 'rights' as the king.  Thus, we are all kings (the sovereign individual movement).

In the end, however grand our reasoning and philosophies, we have no basic Natural Rights.  You claim to right to property, but I can steal it just as easily.  You claim the right to speak, but I can silence you in a dozen different ways.  You claim the right to privacy, but that's only a good as no one else listening.  Ultimately, the only rights you and I have are the ones for which we are willing to kill.  Anything short of that is not a right.  It is a civil privilege that lasts only as long as the majority respects the laws on which the privileges are founded.

In the final analysis, all that we hold dear is founded on a single, savage act.  As proof, I offer the sum total of human history, in which millions have died to secure or take away various rights.  If these rights were in fact God-given, there would be no need to kill to protect them, and in fact, there would be no need to kill to determine whose God is more powerful.

When we strip away all the centuries of rhetoric, there is only a human being who is a 'person', individual and indivisible.  Just like Dick Cheney.  You can swap out hearts, and even give him mechanical organs, and he's still the same mean, bitter old fool who shoots his friends in the face.

So, what does it all mean?  It means it's time from more primo and scotch!

Me, A Name I Call Myself

All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one... characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers. - Henry David Thoreau

It is a stealth weapon of the elite to confuse political thought and labels.  If one controls the definition of a word, then one controls all thoughts and ideas associated with that word.  This is why Orwell made such laborious points about the NewSpeak dictionary and Big Brother's control of vocabulary.

In this US political season, there are many labels being thrown around, and in fact, it is not much different than it has been for many decades.  It used to be a habit to smear folks with the term 'communist.'  The McCarthy era went on 'witch hunts' for Commies.  Yet I daresay pure communism has rarely existed, and certainly never at the level of national political control.

Today, the media and opponents smear Ron Paul with the label of 'libertarian,' though Ron Paul is hardly a pure libertarian, nor does the body of thought called 'libertarianism' have much to do with the common perception of it.

In order for social dialogue to be effective in parsing real leaders, it is vital that the language be clear and unambiguous.  For this reason, the elites relish the idea and ability to control definitions.  In doing so, they control outcomes and masses.  Thus, it behooves us to be absolutely clear on the definitions of political thought, so that we know exactly who we are electing and what they will do when they get there.

One of the most egregious examples of mis-definition is the word 'democracy.'  Democracy is probably one of the worst forms of government ever devised, since it is absolutely dependent on the masses being educated and enlightened.  Otherwise, it always devolves into the classic two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner.

The concept of America making the world 'safe for democracy' is so absurd and so wicked, as to be laughable if it weren't damaging so many lives.  Nothing is safe with or for democracy.  Everything is at the whim of the majority.  All rights, property and wealth are subject to whether 50.1% of the masses want what you have.  And if you are a reviled minority, then the majority can round you up and hang you whenever they damn well feel like it.

The elite love democracy, because they have mass mind control down to an art form.  Since they can manipulate at least 50.1% of the masses, they can do pretty much anything they like and blame it on the 'majority'.

For this reason, the US founders virtually spat the word democracy from their mouths.  They studied ancient Greek history and knew that any system based on it was doomed to corruption and dictatorship.  Instead, they turned to a Roman concept called  a 'republic'.

The idea of a republic is that there are a basket of rights that are sacrosanct and 'unalienable' (think unable to make a lien against them).  These rights can not be taken away by the majority, nor can they be contracted away.  In other words, a free man can not make himself a slave, but a slave has all the rights of a free man.

This is why the US Constitution dilutes the power of voting as much as possible.  The House is directly elected, but they are balanced by a Senate that was supposed to be elected by the State legislators.  People vote for electors, who in turn vote for the president.  The vice president was supposed to be the second-highest vote-getter.

There's also a Bill of Rights in that Constitution.  This was to be the basket of rights that were untouchable..."Congress shall make no law..."  No majority, no matter how big, was ever to have the power to abridge, amend or rescind those rights.

Both democracy and repulicanism were supposed to be reactions to monarchy.  Monarchy invests all sovereign power in a single individual, whose successor is a genetic relative.  All political, social, legal, and religious power was centered in this one individual.  If they happened to be good, then the masses flourished and things were peachy-keen.  If the monarch was evil and corrupt, then the entire country suffered for it.

Hardly a basis for stable governance.

A very old form of governance is something called communism, from the same root as community.  This form can not work on a mass scale.  In fact, masses of people are anathema to the whole idea of communism.  It only works on the scale of extended families, or possibly small villages.  Monasteries are a form of communism merged with monarchy.

They idea is that the group of people involved work together for the common good.  On the scale of a village, some folks grow food, others hunt, others are blacksmiths or leatherworkers, etc., and they pool their output for the benefit of everyone in the community.  If I'm a farmer, then I put my harvest in the pool and take out a pair of shoes for the kids and a shirt for myself.

One can see that scaling that sort of lifestyle up to even the size of a city wouldn't work.  Obviously, communism is unsuitable for mass society and therefore, has never existed on that scale.

So, along comes socialism.  Here, the concept of communism is adapted to mass society by vesting all power in the State.  Thus, the State owns and controls everything, and distributes the fruits of production to its constituents as needs arise.  However, this system is susceptible to corruption.  Inevitably, those who control the distribution keep the lion's share for themselves, which in turn calls for creation of vast bureaucracies of watchers to watch the watchers, all of whom become corrupt as they all try to take the cream off before passing out the dregs to the folks who actually produce the goods.

Socialism is doomed to collapse from an ever-swelling political class who become ever-more corrupt and self-centered.  The collapse is exacerbated by the eventual dissatisfaction of the masses who do all the work and get none of the benefits.  Like a teetering inverted pyramid, eventually the masses yank the rug out from under the system and it crashes down in a heap of ruins (see USSR).

The complete reverse of socialism is fascism, whereby all power and control is vested in corporate interests.  The business elite own and control everything, including government, and set out to establish an environment that favors them at the expense of all others.  This is the current state of things in the US.  Corporate interests manipulate the system so that the corporate elite siphon off the wealth for themselves and throw the scraps to the masses.  Fascism is an insidious form of government, because it appears to operate in the interests of all, in that everyone thinks they have an equal chance to get a piece of the pie.  But, the elite control the legal system, among other things, and simply change the rules when any one group gets too close to challenging their hegemony.

This form of government is doomed to collapse for many of the same reasons as socialism.  In fact, there's little that distinguishes the two, other than who ultimately benefits at the top.  Socialism and fascism are like Ismael and Isaac.  They are half-brothers but doomed to hate each other for all time, since the controllers at the top differ by degree and title.

In this same group, we'll call it a cousin, is theocracy.  Here, the monarch is a god or gods who ostensibly appoint a bureaucracy to see to their Earthly duties.  Ultimately, you end up with the same thing as the latter two forms - a ruling elite who scrape off the cream for themselves in the name of protecting society.  The only difference is that this bunch of bastards nominally answer to invisible forces, for which only they have the hotline.  Basically, it's a monarchratic socialist state with an invisible chairman.

There are a couple dozen variations on all this.  There's constitutional monarchies, and capitalist socialism, and democratic republics (talk about juxtapositions).  But all result in the same thing: a corrupt few controlling the masses by manipulating symbols of power to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Here's where libertarianism stepped in.  Now, to hear the US mass media tell it, libertarianism is like Reaganomics on steroids.  The gist of it is that the philosophy is presented as unleashing corporations from any pretense of government control and letting them run amok in a capitalist orgy of rape and pillage.  This is why Ron Paul is painted as crazy and libertarianism is slandered as lunatic fringe.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  First of all, Ron Paul is not a pure libertarian, and second, libertarianism has nothing to do with unfettered corporate greed.

In its purest form, libertarianism is the concept that all people, everywhere, are completely sovereign within themselves and their property.  In other words, every man is a king and every woman a queen, and within the confines of their proptery, they are ultimate rulers over all they survey.  The more property you own, the bigger your kingdom.  And within that property, you are the ultimate law and order.  Whatever you say, goes.  Period.

Where it gets a little sticky is outside of your property.  Here, the Biblical axiom takes over: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  In other words, your rights stop at the self and property of another.  Any attempt to enforce your beliefs or exercize your rights over another is a literal act of war.

The only means of interaction with others is by contract, which literally works much like treaties between nations.  You are allowed to take or give as much as you like, as long as you abide by the terms of the contract you make.  Thus, every employee becomes a contractor.  All public works are performed by groups of people acting under contract.  Each contract becomes a form of Constitution, limiting and defining the powers of the parties involved within the scope of work in the contract.

It's an interesting and exciting political philosophy.  You can run your oil company, but the minute you spill some and cause a mess on my property, then you - personally - are liable for it, as is everyone under contract with your company.  If you want to run a meth lab in your house, more power to you.  But if your operation blows up and damages my property, you are liable, as are the folks working with you.

Libertarianism is the ultimate form of personal responsibility.  You are absolute monarch within the limits of your property, which includes your body.  But if any of your actions impair the property or rights of anyone else, then you lose your wealth making them whole again.

What makes libertarianism so appealing, at least to me, is that it completely decentralizes power.  Instead of small bodies of elites governing the thoughts, actions and wealth of the many, there are seven billion governments all acting organically with each other.  There is no public property, only that which isn't owned by someone.  There are no forced innoculations or militarized police or even lawyers, such as we know of them now.

Instead, there are only people.  No strawman entities like corporations.  No governmental bodies with power to force you to do anything you don't want.

The concept is so foreign to most people's thinking that they can't conceive of such things.  No welfare?  No subsidies?  No taxes?  How would we survive?  No armies?  No drug/terror/poverty wars?  How would we make anyone follow our ways?

Once you start looking seriously at it, though, you find that Ron Paul is pretty darned far from being libertarian.  Sure he espouses a lot of the ideas, but the basis of his rhetoric is really just a return to the founding ideals of the US, which is a damn sight closer to libertarianism than currently exists, but it is NOT libertarianism.  In pure libertarianism, there could be no central authority or power to tax or presidency to run for.  It wouldn't exist.

It's important in this election season to clarify the terms being thrown around.  America is not a democracy, nor has it every been one.  Ron Paul is NOT a libertarian, nor has he ever been one.  Liberals and conservatives are neither.  Democrats and Republicans are neither.

America is a fascist state.  Granted, it is not the most severe example...yet.  But it is important to both realize that fact and decide where you stand on the issue.  It would help if you look up the history of fascism (dating back to the Roman period) and see how they always end.  Look up democracy, while your at it.  Notice that you don't live in one, first, and second, that you don't want to.

Finally, examine pure libertarianism.  It's a scary concept for many folks, since they can't imagine being personally responsible for their lives.  However, I find it most appealing in many ways.  Though Indonesia has a socialist repulic form of government, at the street/practical level, the people have a strong libertarian impulse that I find refreshing.

Freedom is a scary thing.  Having only yourself and your family and friends to rely on is terrifying for a lot of folks.  They would rather use the guns and force of government to take your property and wealth to support them, or at least give them the illusion of security.  The problem is, the more power you give to government to make you secure, the more the government will become your worst enemy.

Ultimately, the fairest and most egalitarian social order is libertarianism, but the world is not ready for it.  Our ancestors used to live that way, but we have become so socialized and dependent on some form of authority structure that the very idea of personal responsibility causes cold sweat and trembling knees.

Part of what scares the hell out of the elite with the internet is that it has empowered the libertarian in all of us. Groups like the TorProject.org and Anonymous and others are painted as anarchists, but really they are libertarians fighting for the right to take care of their own.  The elite must shut down the internet before these groups can become powerful enough to do things like launch their own communications satellites, or build subnets that don't rely on government control, or land robots and people on other planets - all without the aid and coercion of government control and power.  In fact, all of those efforts are based on contract and free association, which are the roots of libertarianism.

Makes me want to run over to the bookshelf and take down Emerson and Thoreau!