Two Great Evils: the Federal Reserve & the Income Tax
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 15 Feb 2005 13:00:00 GMT
From root:
"I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, 'Your money or your life,' why should I be in haste to give it my money?" -- Henry David Thoreau
From smith2004:
"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them." -- Mark Twain
# Fran Tully at Wolfesblog - Review of Vin Suprynowicz's Novel The Black Arrow - in case you're still on the fence as to whether to spend $50 for Vin's new book, maybe this will convince you. [claire]
# Jim Davies at Strike the Root - The Terrible Tens - how the world might be different had the U.S. government followed the Constitution in the first decade of the twentieth century. [root]
Fleming wonders aloud, on page 480, what would have happened if Wilson had not flip-flopped and America had stayed strictly neutral. This speculation just boggles the mind, and it does assume proper neutrality (i.e., that US traders would be free to sell or not sell equally to either side in the conflict and at their own risk).
First, WW-I would have ended in a stalemate, probably in 1916 and for sure by 1917. All sides were by then already exhausted, and if the US had not been supplying the Brits in and after 1915, leading them to hope for a full intervention, a halt would have been called and a peace patched up--without either side having grounds for massive resentment.
That being so, the Germans would have had no occasion to spirit Lenin and Trotsky into Russia in 1917 with funding to bring about the Bolshevik Revolution and take Russia out of the war. Russia would have recovered, not as a free society but at least as a democratic republic; the seven decade nightmare of Communist tyranny would not have taken place.
Third, no Versailles diktat would have ruined and outraged Germans by the imposition of impossibly harsh reparations and territorial confiscations, so giving Hitler's Nazis the opportunity to be elected.
Accordingly, there would have been no Second World War, nor Korean War, nor Vietnam Era nor Cold War. I suppose the atom bomb might have been invented, but never used.
Jews would not have been murdered by the million in the early '40s, so the pressure for a homeland would have been containable; no doubt individual Jews would have migrated to Palestine and been integrated, but with any luck, no Israeli state would have been set up to offend every Muslim and Arab nostril in the world. Consequently, no resentment would have arisen there such as led to 9/11 and thus to the Patriot Act.
All this, from one single event in the Terrible Tens: Wilson 's breaking of a 1916 election promise. And yes, from the Fed that permitted money to be printed to fund the Great War, and the "income tax" that helped it furnish fuel for the Second.
