An Explanation of Our Current Pickle by John Taylor of Caroline

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  The issues that you care about, if you listen to this radio show, are not going to be on the ballot this election, ladies and gentlemen.  Politics as usual, the continued evisceration of any wealth that you have accumulated in your life, that’s what’s on the ballot and there’s no one talking about stopping it.  You’ve got one guy that’s talking about ramping it up because, [mocking Obama] “That’s how you get back to growing economy, take it from people that got it, give it to those that don’t.  That’s called growth.  Where I come from, that’s called growth.”  Where I come from, they call that theft, or plunder if you’re a Bastiat fan.  Then the other candidate talking about, [mocking] “We just want to direct it in the direction that we want confiscation to take place in.”

This is, I think, as important a distinction as any that you could make, which is to say what it is that actually is at stake here.  What is at stake is neither of the previous two statements, one from Governor Romney and one from President Obama that I summarized for you, what is at stake here and what has been at stake for the past 100 years or so and really, really at stake in the last 50, and then supercalifragilisticexpialidocious at stake in the last 20 years.  Now we’re at Germany 1936 at stake here, or Russia 1918, or Cuba 1958 at stake.  And that is whether or not we will take the path and become a nation of total — I say nation, even though you know my protestation about nation, and about this nation, and about how it’s supposed to be a union of states.  You may have a national shared heritage.  I could go for that.

The issues that are at hand here, folks, are really not that complicated.  They simply aren’t.  They have been made complicated by people that want them to be complicated so the sheeple can’t figure it out and will continue to go along with the scam.  The issues at stake here are whether or not you’re going to allow the continued confiscation of your wealth to be laundered through these mechanisms called governments, and then showered upon people that haven’t earned them.  There are lots of people that they are showered upon.  They’re not all bureaucrats.  They’re not all politicians.  They come in the form of experts.  They come in the form of think tankers.  They come in the form of public policy advocacy groups, nonpartisan this and nonpartisan that.  They are all sucklers, ladies and gentlemen.  They produce absolutely nothing, other than human misery.  Why human misery?  Because someone has to be conscripted to actually produce the wealth that can be confiscated to feed these bastards.  That’s why.

John Taylor of Caroline in a prescient manner saw all this coming.  He was only dealing with Hamilton and Adams.  Here’s what Clyde Wilson writes in part in the chapter Forgotten Conservatives about John Taylor of Caroline, who was, by the by, the intellectual guider or the intellectual fountain from which Jefferson and others derived their [r]epublicanism.

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Governments become oppressive when a crafty minority manage to impose itself upon and live off the body of the society.  In earlier times, this had been done by force and superstition.  Now it was to be done by fraud and mystification around words like . . .

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Mike:  Ladies and gentlemen, if you are driving, I’m telling you right now, pull over.  If you’re standing, sit down.  Assume the position.  So how are they going to get away with stealing from the productive post-founding generation?  You’re going to love this, folks.

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Now it was to be done by fraud and mystification around words like “full faith and credit,” “necessary and proper,” “regulating the currency,” and “protecting domestic industry.”  In John Taylor of Caroline’s view, “The useful and major part of mankind comprised within natural interests, by which I mean agricultural, commercial, mechanical and scientific in opposition to legal and artificial, such as hierarchical, patrician and banking, is exclusively the object of imposition whenever words are converted into traitors to principles.”

For Taylor, the important conflict was not between the rich and the poor but between the taxpayers and the tax consumers.  [Mike: If you’re wondering where I get it from, this is where.]  This view long remained a basic way of understanding politics for American critics of Hamiltonian government.  The idea still has potency.  When Jeffersonians condemned aristocrats, they meant people with artificial, unearned, government-granted privileges, not talented and honorable men who were the natural and necessary leaders of their communities.

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Mike:  That is powerful stuff there, folks.  That explains our current pickle in three paragraphs.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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