Radicals or Slaves

It is has taken two centuries for us to get to this point. With freedom hanging by a thread, the first nation to be founded by radicals may plummet into statism like all the rest. What will it take for us to be worthy of our founders' legacy? What will it take for Americans to take freedom seriously and to fight for it, with all the heart and spirit they have got?

Since the election of Barack Obama, the government has waylaid the American people with a relentless onslaught of unprecedented and frankly, un-American measures. While many greeted this fundamental change of political environment with unfounded hope, it has horrified millions, leading to the formation of a nascent opposition known as the "tea party movement."

Even so, there is a great, "independent" middle that is still so devoid of principle they are unable to take a position on the direction of the country. These self-described "moderates" are either unsure what party to turn to, are apathetic and otherwise pre-occupied with work-a-day life in the sour economy, or are escaping through omnipresent entertainment.

It is beyond reasonable discussion that the United States is being taken over, by stealth, subterfuge, and outright socialism, by a radical cadre of elites. The leftists have admitted as much in word and in deed. And yet a huge proportion of the nation sits on the fence. How did the country get to this turning point, and what should be done to begin to reverse the progressive tide?

The process of de-Americanization has taken place over decades, at least since the Progressive Era. The pivotal institutions the radicals have used to "fundamentally transform" the nation have been public education and the Federal Reserve Bank.

Education in the United States is currently guided by the Department of Education and carried out by radical unions such as the NEA. And now, due to the passage of Obamacare, the government controls college student loans. The history of public education in the United States is seedy, and is guided to a great extent by the thinking of the radical pragmatist John Dewey. As "the father of progressive education" modestly put it:

"I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers that correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being...The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and new — the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent with the promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of 'love thy neighbor' will finally be achieved."

Pretty heady stuff for someone who is often described as a "pragmatist" and a relativist. It has taken decades for the public education system to reveal itself in the minds of Americans as the radical institution it has always been. It will take an immense effort of adults, and particularly, those who matured in the Reagan era, to combat the entrenched radicals. The younger generation is virtually lost, though we must assiduously work to instill common sense in them, and undermine the radical narrative at every convenient opportunity.

Contrary to popular opinion, "the Fed" is not merely a sop for well-connected banks and corporations, it is a plank straight out of the Communist Manifesto. It was formed in 1913, under the statist progressive Woodrow Wilson. The words of John Maynard Keynes, who has become the dominant mind of American economics, bear repeating:

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. – As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. [...]

"Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

There can be no economic reality in a system whose currency issuance is controlled by a central bank. That is the bottom line. As long as fiat currency exists, Americans will be pawns of the government. The political will to fight "The Fed" is precisely tied to the ability of those who understand the problem to articulate it to those who would otherwise have unquestioning faith in the government's ability to maintain a sound currency, and to present the alternative of asset-backed currency.

Education must be liberated from government control and sound currency must be instituted if America is to become a free, prosperous country. Until that time, any talk that we are a free nation is a pleasant illusion, and one that fosters a sense of complacency. We have lost America and we are not free. The government is an alien element, intent on preparing us for servitude to the state. It will take a revolution in ideology and morality to develop the judgment of enough Americans to stand on principle and to find the political will to reinstitute freedom. We are forced to make an uncomfortable choice: We are either radicals for freedom or future slaves.