By Dr. Jack Wheeler

It’s starting to look like 1948 all over again.

Mark Twain observed that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it often rhymes. The 2012 presidential campaign is now rhyming with that of 1948 in iambic trimeter – the poetic form tragedians of Ancient Greece such as Aeschylus and Sophocles used to best express portending doom.

So let’s revisit that extraordinary yesteryear of 1948, resulting in the most famous upset in American politics – Democrat Harry Truman defeating Republican Tom Dewey – and see how we can avoid a similar outcome by using it to our advantage.

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By Dr. Jack Wheeler

It’s time to choose. There’s only one thing that can extricate the world from the calamity descending upon it.

Jefferson is warning us right now about “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers…setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others.” Because Jefferson’s and Madison’s solution to preventing religious wars – Religious Liberty – is the solution to preventing the economic wars about to descend upon us.

That solution is Economic Liberty. That solution is the Separation of Economy and State – for precisely the same reasons for the Separation of Church and State. Such a separation – capitalism for real – is the only thing that will save the world from plunging into economic darkness. Violently.

With Obama’s Osawatomie Speech, we have reached the fork in the road of America’s future. The critical moment has arrived. If you can stomach it, read the whole thing. It is diabolically dishonest. He is actually claiming his Marxist-Fascist values are those of America’s. He has the mind-boggling demagogic chutzpah to claim that free market capitalism “doesn’t work – it has never worked.”

Free market capitalism – economic liberty – is the only thing that ever has worked to create widespread prosperity. What has never worked in history is what Obama advocates: socialism, fascism, and the destruction of economic liberty by government rules, hamstrings, restrictions, taxes, and subsidies.

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By Ron Holland

Just following Congress, the 2012 presidential campaign and the inability of citizens to influence government policy makes it clear to every American how broken the US political system has become. A few powerful interests run the entire show and the American people are being forced down a dark road to economic destruction. History shows us that Washington is immune to conventional national political action under the present system. What can freedom loving Americans do?

So do freedom advocates just give up or wait for the eventual collapse of the economy and the US political system?

There is only one effective, democratic and peaceful tool left to Americans to defend their liberties and restore the original republic of our founding fathers. It is the right of state sovereignty and nullification.

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By Jeffrey Tucker

There are occasions in American life — and they come too often these days — when you want to scream: “what the heck has happened to this country?!” Everyone encounters events that strike a particular nerve, some egregious violations of the norms for a free country that cut very deeply and personally.

We wonder: do we even remember what it means to be free?

You hear slogans about the “land of the free” and we still sing patriotic songs at the ballpark and even at church on Sunday, and these songs are always about our blessed liberty, the battles of our ancestors against tyranny, the special love of liberty that animates our heritage and national self identity. The contrast with reality grows starker by the day.

And it isn’t just about our personal liberty and our freedom to move about with a sense that we are exercising our rights. It hits us in the economic realm, where no goods or services change hands that aren’t subject to the total control of the leviathan state. No business is really safe from being bludgeoned by legislatures, regulators, and the tax police, while objecting only makes you more of a target.

Few dare say it publicly: America has become a police state.

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By Dr. Jack Wheeler

On Thanksgiving Day, Americans gather with their family and friends to celebrate the blessings that Providence has bestowed on their beloved country.

A deep appreciation of these blessings involves understanding that they were earned. It is to understand the awesome truth of how “God helps those who help themselves” applies to the Mayflower Pilgrims and their First Thanksgiving at America’s birth.

This is an appreciation and understanding of which those on the Left are incapable – for it would mean celebrating the capitalist freedom that made that original Thanksgiving possible. This no liberal, no Democrat, no leftie can do. Thus they must distort history instead.

The distortion starts in Kindergarten, with the childish make-believe of your kid’s school play portraying the noble Squanto teaching the helpless Pilgrims how to feed themselves. So let’s drop the curtain on the distortion and watch the real thing. Here it is.

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By Jack Kelly

In most countries for most of history, people were pretty much locked into the social class into which they were born. But in America men and women of modest means could become rich — if they had an idea for making life better, and worked tirelessly to make their vision real.

Entrepreneurs such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became very, very rich. The rest of us were enriched, too, by the fruits of their genius and their labor — the electric light, the automobile and the computer, and tens of thousands of other inventions and new, better ways of organizing things.

People who don’t have good ideas and who don’t want to work hard want to be rich, too. Some have found a way.

In the last two years, while middle class Americans have been struggling, the net worth of Members of Congress increased 25 percent.

“How do politicians who arrive in Washington D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires?” Sarah Palin asked. “How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us?”

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By Dr. Jack Wheeler

Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. It took coming here, to the darkest pit of hellhole Africa, for it to finally dawn on me who Obama really is, to what total extent he isn’t American at all, but African.

This is my first time here, and assuredly will be the last. Yet I wrote about Equatorial Guinea back in 2006 as an example of “Why Africa Is So Stupid.” It discusses the research on global IQ explaining why sub-Saharan Africa is at the bottom of humanity’s barrel in terms of tyranny, corruption, and poverty – because the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is 67.

Freedom House, in its 2011 Worst of the Worst report, highlights Equatorial Guinea as “one of the world’s most repressive societies.” Its dictator, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, is a murderer who ran the Black Beach Prison where countless prisoners were tortured to death.

Obiang uses his country’s oil revenue as his personal piggy bank, enriching his friends and family while the average citizen of his country lives on $1 a day. But there is nothing at all exceptional about him. He is merely yet another example of what in Africa are called Big Men – narcissistic charismatic sociopaths who gain power however they can, never let go of it, look upon themselves as demi-gods for whom ordinary morality does not apply, utterly convinced they deserve to be worshipped with total obedience, and to live in complete extravagance while being completely indifferent to the poverty of others.

Remind you of anyone in America?

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By Wendy McElroy

“Your papers!” In old movies, the demand is barked at trembling travelers by a Nazi with a guttural accent. If the demand is made in the opening scene, then the audience knows immediately that they watching a totalitarian state in which travelers are in danger.

“Your papers!” now rings out at every American airport and border crossing. The accent is different but travelers need to recognize with equal immediacy that a totalitarian state is playing out in front of their eyes, and they must be careful.

A passport is where the security theater begins. Indeed, without a passport those who wish to fly or cross a border are not “allowed” to be scanned, searched, interrogated, or undergo a plethora of other indignities imposed by uniformed thugs. The hoops through which passport carriers jump are all prelude to “permitting” them to exercise a right belonging to every freeborn person: the right to travel.

Things were not always this way.

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By Dagny D’Anconia

The evidence is mounting that the Fast and Furious gun giveaway was orchestrated and/or initiated from the top of the Obama administration. Forbes Magazine is calling it “Obama’s Watergate.” Are we to believe that they gave away enough guns to equip a small army of narcoterrorists out of a simple error? We would have to be pretty gullible to believe that.

We have to ask just what they intended to achieve by doing this. It was a truly extravagant gift to the Sinaloa Federation Cartel. It was not just expensive in tax dollars; it was expensive in political capital, and it was so close to the 2012 election.

People don’t give such expensive things away for nothing. The Obama people must have expected something in return.

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By John Whitehead

The transition to a police state will not come about with a dramatic coup d’etat, with battering rams and marauding militia. As we have experienced first-hand in recent years, it will creep in softly, one violation at a time, until suddenly you find yourself being subjected to random patdowns and security sweeps during your morning commute to work or quick trip to the shopping mall.

Perhaps you have yet to experience the particular thrill, and I use that word loosely, of being manhandled by government agents, having your personal possessions pawed through, and your activities and associations scrutinized. If so, not to worry. It’s only a matter of time before more and more Americans will experience such a military task force knocking at their door. Only, chances are that it won’t be a knock, and they might not even be at home when government agents decide to “investigate” them. Indeed, as increasing numbers of Americans are discovering, these so-called “soft target” security inspections are taking place whenever and wherever the government deems appropriate, at random times and places, and without needing the justification of a particular threat. Worse, not only is this happening with the blessing of the Obama administration but at its urging.

What I’m describing–something that was once limited to authoritarian regimes–is only possible thanks to an unofficial rewriting of the Fourth Amendment by the courts that essentially does away with any distinctions over what is “reasonable” when it comes to searches and seizures by government agents. The rationale, of course, is that anything is “reasonable” in the war on terrorism. What the powers-that-be understand–and Americans remain oblivious to–is the fact that by constantly pushing the envelope and testing the limits of what Americans will tolerate, the government is thus able to ratchet up the level of intrusiveness that Americans consider reasonable.

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By Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI)

We must address the clear and present threat to our economy.

Our prosperity stands on the precipice. Concerned Americans demand an explanation of how this happened and leadership that will walk us back from the cliff. But in the White House and along the campaign trail, the purported leaders fail to recognize or refuse to acknowledge the clear and present threat to our economy: the Great Deflation.

The failure to differentiate between an economic recession and this Great Deflation will cause an economically doomed generation.

But this need not happen. The strength of our economy — its capacity to generate employment, opportunity, and growth — is determined by the quality of its factories and its technology and innovation; by the depth and freedom of its marketplace; and by the ingenuity and efforts of its people. By these measures, we Americans should continue to have the strongest economy in history, and one which continues to grow.

So while our economic challenges are daunting, they can be surmounted. It is only a question of our will to take action.

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By Robert Agostinelli

The sad tale of profligate spending is clear. With an abandon and reckless disregard for common-sense economics, we have mortgaged our future. This has been the fault of both sides of the political aisle. Seemingly benign acts of largesse and the application of pork-barrel spending have numbed our national sense of responsibility and left us detached from the full implications.

This has been greatly exacerbated by the equally cowardly seduction of “entitlement.” This term embodies the height of all false utopian ideals that socialism has used to seduce its wards.

Long before our current president embarked on his course of ruin, his intellectual compatriots, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, charted the course of our demise. They were the forerunners who, in the name of good intentions, sowed the seeds of ruin whose harvest we are reaping.

The expectation that the government has a duty and an obligation to provide entitlements is and always has been a flawed proposition. Simply put, it is a grand illusion with a vengeful ending if not corrected.

Enter President Obama, the supreme narcissistic leader of the realm, never one to “let a crisis go to waste.” His is an artful blend of Keynesian voodoo economics, increased imposition of government control, and the largest expansion of the entitlement state in our history.

The financing of Mr. Obama’s spending and expansion of government can only be sustained by way of subterfuge.

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By Anthony Gregory

As Obama demonizes the wealthy and pitches a dozen plans to restructure the economy, opponents of this program need a reminder of what exactly we’re fighting for. We are resisting bureaucracy, central planning, and encroachments on our freedom and communities. Yet this does not get to the heart of the matter. We are not only an opposition movement, countering the president and his partisans’ agenda. More fundamentally, we stand in defense of the greatest engine of material prosperity in human history, the fount of civilization, peace, and modernity: Capitalism.

Many regard it a dirty word and it is tarnished most of all by its supposed guardians. Wall Street giants fancy themselves capitalists even as they live off the taxpayer and thrive on the state’s gifts of privilege, inflation, and barriers to entry. In the military-industrial complex they champion it by name as they produce devices of murder for the state. In the Republican Party and every conservative institution they talk it up while making such vast exceptions to the principle as to swallow it whole. When many think of capitalism, they think of the corporatist status quo, leading even some who favor economic freedom to abandon the term.

But we should not abandon it.

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By Dr. Jack Wheeler

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), one of Victorian England’s most prominent Prime Ministers (1868/1874-1880), once commented to a friend: “There are two things that the public should never be allowed to see how they are made: sausage and the law.”

We are witnesses today of just how immortally trenchant Disraeli was back in the 19th century. For in truth, observing our politicians handling the current “debt crisis” is a far more repulsive sight than the inside of a sausage factory.

Yet if Disraeli were here now, he’d smile sardonically and remind us that (he was fluent in French) plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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By Dr. Joel Wade

We’ve been losing the fight for freedom in America for the past hundred or so years.

From Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive Republicanism, to Woodrow Wilson’s fascist visions, to FDR’s New Deal liberalism, to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, to Richard Nixon’s wage and price controls, Jimmy Carter’s incompetence, George Bush I’s tax increases, Bill Clinton’s expansion of regulations and taxes, George Bush II’s spending spree and Medicare expansion, and Hussein Obama’s hyper-ballooning of government power and spending, everything has been a compromise with tyranny – which means that tyranny always wins.

Of course tyranny is insidious. We’ve had a struggle against it from the inception. In 1798,our second president, John Adams enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, allowing him to imprison anybody who spoke out against him. Abraham Lincoln had a similar policy during the Civil War. Liberty has always required, and will always require, courageous men and women to speak up for her, stand up for her, and fearlessly champion her cause.

The problem is that we haven’t been championing liberty very effectively for quite a long time.

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By David MacGregor

One definition of the word “incubator” is: a place or situation that permits or encourages the formation and development of new ideas.

If you consider the “old” ideas we have all grown up with, then it’s obvious that our family, our society and our culture were the incubator for such ideas. In fact, you could say that one of the most important evolutionary purposes of a family, a tribe, or a society is precisely to ensure the shared values and ideas of the group are effectively passed on to the children – in order to guarantee continuance of the group.

It also brings to mind the famous Jesuit saying: “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” In other words, if one can influence the mind of a young person, up until he is seven years old, then those ideas will become a permanent part of the identity of that person throughout his life.

That can be either a comforting or frightening thought, depending on what sort of ideas one is talking about. No doubt Christians, for example, would see the passing on of their faith as a very positive thing. But I doubt much popular support, if the ideas in question were of the Nazi/fascist variety!

And this is the conundrum. What ideas are worthy of being passed on in this manner?

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By David MacGregor

One of the major problems one has, in challenging the status quo, is that people are wedded to the way things are, and have great difficulty in seeing past accepted norms to “what could be”. Taxation is one of these accepted norms.

We were all born into a world where people pay tax. No one fundamentally challenges the system because that’s the way it has always been. Sometimes people put forward various reforms, but no one seriously puts the whole taxation issue under a clear spotlight.

Let me first make my own position crystal clear. I consider taxation to be immoral. Taxation is the forced appropriation of another’s rightful property – as money earned is a result of one’s personal effort.

Taxation cannot be likened to payment for goods and services, which is the result of a voluntary transaction. No, taxation is compulsory and you have no say as to how your money is to be used.

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By Tara Servatius

Americans must to decide if, in the name of homeland security, they are willing to allow TSA operatives to storm public places in their communities with no warning, pat them down, and search their bags. And they better decide quickly.

Bus travelers were shocked when jackbooted TSA officers in black SWAT-style uniforms descended unannounced upon the Tampa Greyhound bus station in April with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and federal bureaucrats in tow.

A news report by ABC Action News in Tampa showed passengers being given the signature pat downs Americans are used to watching the Transportation Security Administration screeners perform at our airports. Canine teams sniffed their bags and the buses they rode. Immigration officials hunted for large sums of cash as part of an anti-smuggling initiative.

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By Col. Ralph Peters

No one who broke our laws to enter this country should ever decide who becomes our president, a member of Congress, a governor or mayor, or a member of the local school board. This is the non-negotiable “die line” those who love our country must defend: We cannot permit a huge criminal voting block to determine our future.

And every person who entered this country without our government’s formal permission is a criminal. Period.

Democrat Party operatives embed their public arguments for amnesty for eleven-million illegals in terms of human dignity and decency (they never mention votes).

Our laws are never mentioned. Nor is the multitude of illegal immigrant criminals who continue to violate those laws after breaking into our national home.

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By Rob Rojas

Nobody really likes paying their taxes. But, as the old adage about “death and taxes” conveys, there is a sense that taxes are as legitimate and as inevitable as death itself. In their acceptance of taxation, many well-meaning people forget that taxation violates our most basic moral principles.

If you have ever been to a kindergarten or a playground where very young children play, you might have realized that, although the kids are too young to understand many things, they already have a surprising sense of justice.

Take a toy away from a toddler who cannot yet speak a word, and you will often be met with a very clear protest. As far as the toddler is concerned, you have stolen her toy, you have initiated violence, and therefore it’s time to cry. The toddler’s reasoning probably isn’t this sophisticated, but the understanding is there.

Slightly older children are even more amazing. They understand that there is illegitimate violence (when a toy gets stolen), but they also understand that there is such a thing as legitimate violence as well, which is when the victimized child goes to the thieving child and takes her toy back. The astonishing thing is that the usual focus is on getting the toy back rather than punishing the aggressor. Punishment is a concept that they learn later, probably from us.

The initiation of violence is the act of an aggressor against you or against your property. This can be done through actual violence or through intimidation, because the mere threat of violence is an act of violence in itself. A good example would be a thief that points a gun at you to get your wallet without actually pulling the trigger. Another less obvious example is the way the government takes our money. To say that taxes are a form of theft may seem a bit over the top, but refuse to pay your taxes and you will be thrown in jail. Refuse to pay your property taxes and you will see who really owns your house.

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