Vin Suprynowicz

The modern Prussian police state was built by Bismarck and others in the 19th century on a Spartan model, giving the central government vastly greater control over the individual than had ever been considered possible before.

From government control of the schools to health care, the whole idea was to create an obedient populace that would man the factories and produce large and obedient broods for the armies without every questioning the orders of the central authority.

Bismarck’s program centered squarely on insurance programs designed to increase support for the ever larger and more powerful government. The program included health insurance, Workman’s Compensation, disability insurance, and old-age retirement pensions, all innovations at the time.

Starting with the model of Prussian compulsion schooling, American “educators” starting with John Dewey and Edward Thorndike eagerly imported this Prussian model to America.

Trained to accept such state control (and now the new “Green” religion) in the schools for most of the last century, then made dependent on government insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare) as surely as the pimp makes sure his young ladies are dependent on the needle and the fix only he can provide, slavery to the state soon appears inescapable, even ordained by God and nature.

Why, it’s a good thing! In exchange for the possibility of ever becoming truly exceptional, of growing rich based on our own efforts, it rewards us with … “security.”

And so we come to love our chains.

“It is possible that all our politics will come to nothing when I am dead, but state socialism will push itself through (“Der Staatssozialismus paukt sich durch,”) Bismarck said in 1881.

“State socialism,” he called it.

We’re told that for some reason we’re not allowed to call the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda “socialism,” “communism,” “Marxism,” “state socialism” “fascism,” or anything else that might sound unpleasant.

Much as I hate to cite the tyrant Lincoln, if we call a dog’s tail a leg, does it have five legs? Telling us we’re not “allowed” to use an accurate label for something doesn’t change what it is.

Instead of allowing General Motors and Chrysler to go through normal bankruptcies, through which new and more efficient private operators could have purchased their worthwhile assets while shedding their crippling union contracts, the two giant auto makers have now been effectively nationalized. GM particularly is now run by a coalition of Barack Obama’s henchmen and the United Auto Workers. Meantime, an unelected federal “pay czar” decides on the compensation of executives, even at supposedly private banks that have paid back all their “bailout” loans. Does that sound like the normal function of the American free market, as understood in 1910, 1960, or even 1990?

“Cash for clunkers” destroyed used cars to create a larger market for government-made crap. You don’t suppose the biggest number of cars your tax dollars destroyed were Japanese imports, do you?

Thanks to thoroughly unconstitutional “bailouts” the federal government now de facto manages our major banks and/or credit card companies, along with our airlines and airports.

The health care bill was “sweetened” with a federal takeover of college loans. Why? You don’t imagine the federal government will ever try to manipulate the behavior of college graduates, offering to “forgive their college loans” if they agree to behave in ways favored by the fedgov, do you? Kind of like the kind of inescapable “credit” once extended to miners by “the company store”?

“Federalizing” all these programs shifts money and employment from the private to the government-bureaucrat sector. Unionized government bureaucrats tend to belong to outfits like the SEIU, which actively back Democrat/socialists, while dispatching purple-shirted thugs to beat up black freedom-fighters handing out “Don’t tread on me” Gadsden flags outside rigged Democratic “town hall” meetings. They vote Democratic and retire in luxury at age 59 or 62, while you go broke.

The so called “health reform” bill authorizes $10 billion to field 16,500 more IRS agents to collect and enforce mandatory “premiums,” which we’re assured are not a “tax.” Providing you’re a “normal” citizen with a job and house, of course. (Illegal aliens Get Out of Jail Free, as usual.)

Yet this is mainly about “providing health care to the 35,000 people who now die annually for lack of health insurance”? Please name 10 of those people, who die outside the locked doors of our hospital emergency rooms. While you’re at it, the local Clark County health district is currently running radio ads stating 55,000 people per year die of “second hand smoke.” Please name 10 Nevadans whose death certificates read “cause of death: second-hand smoke.”

These are projections based on rigged “scientific” studies that were re-done till they got the results the federals wanted. Once “science” has so whored itself, “scientists” should not be surprised when their entire undertaking is eventually thrown on history’s dung heap by a fed-up populace.

Last week the Review-Journal mentioned in passing, in an editorial about socialist congresscritter Dina Titus’ move to facilitate the takeover of Nevada Occupational Safety and Health enforcement by the federal government, that the Constitution grants the federals no authority to regulate workplace safety within the states. One letter writer couldn’t wait to write in that the newspaper was wrong: turns out the preamble to the federal OSHA law as adopted specifies that it’s all constitutional, since the federal government is empowered to regulate interstate commerce, and “workplace health and safety can impact interstate commerce.”

It would be more justifiable to hold that an IRS man can climb the fence into my back yard and smash the watermelons I’m growing there, since by growing my own watermelons I reduce the demand for supermarket watermelons grown in another state, and this “impacts interstate commerce.”

So we’re right back to “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, does it have five legs?” If Washington can do anything it likes because everything somehow “impacts interstate commerce,” why do we have a Constitution with that two-page list of specifically delegated powers? Why not just one sentence: “Congress shall have power to do anything it figures might promote the general welfare and/or impact interstate commerce”?

On the radio this week I heard Congresscritter Titus asked whether she’s concerned about state lawsuits challenging the new federal mandate that everyone will have to buy “suitable” health insurance. “Oh, no,” she said, “The Constitution has been interpreted all kinds of ways, so I’m not concerned about that.”

This from a woman — a supposedly well-educated college professor — who swore a solemn oath to “protect and defend the Constitution” just 14 months ago.

In good conscience, if she believed that oath meant nothing, didn’t she have some moral obligation to say, “Well now, wait a minute. I can’t very well swear to ‘protect and defend’ a document if I believe it can mean anything we want it to mean, can I? That might seem misleading”?

I know a few rich Americans. Their process of moving their assets offshore was already well underway before this all-too-predictable outcome was set in gear a year ago. They’re not waiting for the big new carbon tax, the big amnesty for the socialist-voting illegal aliens, the big new national Value Added Tax, etc. Those with big bucks find they’re welcome in Switzerland, Ecuador, any number of places.

You’re still waiting for the American economy to “come back”? You may wait a long while. Once the investment capital is scared offshore, and the foreigners stop buying our bonds, who’s going to pay for even the “entitlement” programs already in place, let alone this Obama-Reid-Pelosi “State-socialism on steroids”? How much money will that leave to fund new businesses? And in such a climate of uncertainty and sneering hostility, who’d be stupid enough to borrow it?

The biggest buyer of U.S. government bonds will soon be the Federal Reserve. Where does the Federal Reserve get its dollars? It orders the Bureau of Engraving to print them — or just taps them into existence on its computer screens. As ever more dollars bid for a fixed pile of goods, the value of each dollar — including the paltry few you still have saved in the bank — shrinks.

This is like saying, “I won’t starve; I can always eat my own foot.” By the time you’ve eaten both legs up to the knees, it may start to dawn on you that this is a recourse with a limited future.

Next week: But we’ll be saved by the Tea Party folks! By the big Republican victory in November!