The Leviathan Express

We are hurtling headlong into the statist abyss forewarned by our founding fathers. As Thomas Jefferson recognized that "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

In this regard, the government can be likened to a speeding train possessing a kind of inertia. Its tendency is not to rest on a foundation of perpetual liberty, but to accelerate with increasing hubris into every aspect of human life.

It takes a great deal of effort for the train of government to be set into motion. Its engine of coercion animates the machinery of state: it drives the escalating taxation, the dependency of welfare state programs, the propaganda organs of public schools and colleges, the adventurism of endless wars.

As such, Barack Obama is not the engineer of our impending national demise, but the latest conductor on a long train of abuses. You see, if Obama left office tomorrow, not much would change in a government that has been systematically lying to us in earnest since the Wilson administration.

The lubrication of the state is the big lie. Debt itself is a kind of lie that people tell themselves that their way of life is somehow sustainable. The welfare state is the lie that nearly half the American public are incapable of providing for themselves. (This in an economy that see five percent unemployment in "normal" periods of free market capitalism. Try to design a system of human affairs that runs at ninety-five percent efficiency, better than the ordered liberty of true capitalism.) Public education is built on lies that exalt the state, and diminish liberty. Wars justified by self-defense become wars of expediency, and ends in themselves.

America has been on a crash course with reality ever since the Fed engineers started shoveling dollars into the Leviathan Express. That was long before we puffed pass the Potemkin villages of the progressive imagination. Behind the shoddy facades of the New Deal and the Great Society, we saw the human wreckage of welfare dependents with nowhere to go but sideways. Yet the smiling visage of the heroic FDR with throngs of supplicating citizens at his feet made such a pleasant backdrop in our periphery as we thumbed over our pages of Look magazine. The ups and downs, the starts and stops, no one dared question that we were all being taken for a ride.

The train accelerated and national exhilaration pumped our hearts with fresh blood. We felt alive again. We had a sense of mission as a people and all was full steam ahead. But as winter set in, an unfamiliar chill froze our breath in mid-air. The attendant stopped in from time to time to make sure that we were comfortable, to offer us some chamomile, and to engage in some idle conversation.

Then came the entertainers. A television was installed in every car to occupy our minds. The car attendants served fresh bread and jam. America was getting fat and happy.

Then the train psychologists and social workers stopped by to make sure all was well. In between the awkward laughs and specious socializing, inquisitive passengers faintly noticed through the window that the picturesque vistas of our nation's youth were fading. Some detected in the scenery haphazard signs that something was awry. Not enough to mention in polite conversation, but there it was.

It wasn't until the train approached the ghost town of Carterville when people sat up and began to pay attention. Keynesian bandits conducted a daring raid on the train, hitting up the passengers and carrying off heaping bags of gold. Beneath the clumsy disguises, one could see the impudent mustaches so characteristic of Europeans. As they rode off into the sunset, the Feds shot and shot until they ran out of bullets. In the luxury car where the whiskey-breathed elites consorted, a butler later discovered a pistol laying on a poker table. It was filled with blanks.

In the aftermath of the robbery, there was a time when all appeared right with the world. We had a president who spoke platitudes so familiar to the American people, and who even reflected some of their values, for the first time in a long time. It was a fleeting period that soon passed.

We are now on a speeding train and the increasingly disturbing scenery is flying by our windows so fast that we don't even have time to take it all in. The attendant now comes with a gun instead of chocolates, and empties our wallets and purses. The toothy grin once so charming has now worn thin.

We are also alarmed to find the train is not going in a direction of our choosing. Perhaps it was an illusion that we were in control all along. The Liberty line was switched some time ago, and we now see the signs of Tyranny and Terror adorning a wasteland of broken promises and shattered lives. Up ahead, we see a tunnel, a black void threatening to swallow us whole. If there is any way off of this train, we better jump now. There are no promises that it's not going to hurt.