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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/tyranny_by_the_numbers_the_government_wants_your_money_any_way_it_can_get_it

Tyranny by the Numbers: The Government Wants Your Money Any Way It Can Get It

The government wants your money.

It will beg, steal or borrow if necessary, but it wants your money any way it can get it.

This is what comes of those $1.2 trillion spending bills: someone’s got to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity, and that “someone” is the U.S. taxpayer.

The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture, costly stimulus packages, and a national security complex that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to making us any safer.

Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in order to spend money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.

Basically, the U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card.

Let’s talk numbers, shall we?

The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is more than $34 trillion and will grow another $19 trillion by 2033.

The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars.

It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens).

In other words, the government is spending more than it brings in.

The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.

Interest payments on the national debt are more than $395 billion, which is significantly more than the government spends on veterans’ benefits and services, and according to Pew Research Center, more than it will spend on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture, science and space programs, foreign aid, and natural resources and environmental protection combined.

According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”

In ten years, those interest payments will exceed our entire military budget.

This is financial tyranny.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.

None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making while the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.

Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

It wasn’t always this way, of course.

Early Americans went to war over the inalienable rights described by philosopher John Locke as the natural rights of life, liberty and property.

It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”

Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.

On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16^th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.

It’s all gone downhill from there.

Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.

While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

Of course, we’re the ones who have to repay that borrowed debt.

For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.

Mind you, that’s only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.

The United States also spends more on foreign aid than any other nation, with nearly $300 billion disbursed over a five-year period. More than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance, with most of the funds going to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That price tag keeps growing, too.

As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Most recently, the U.S. has allocated nearly $115 billion in emergency military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine since the start of the Russia invasion.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex continues to get richer, while the American taxpayer is forced to pay for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.

This is no way of life.

Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.

We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.

There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, corporate turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.

And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.

But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?

What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?

What if, instead of quietly sending in our tax checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re no longer living the American dream.

We’re living a financial nightmare.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-whos-road-to-totalitarianism/

The WHO’s Road to Totalitarianism

Several articles on the proposed amendments to the WHO’s international health regulations have appeared here on Brownstone, such as this excellent introduction. Consequently, there is no need to repeat this information in a similar format. What I would like to do instead is to pursue the question, what the implications would be for people worldwide if this organisation were to be successful in getting the representatives of member countries to accept the proposed amendments. More specifically, what are the likely consequences in terms of the concept and practice of totalitarianism? 

To understand this, one has to get to grips with the mode of rule called totalitarian government, of course, but I doubt whether most people have an adequate grasp of full-fledged totalitarian rule, despite recently experiencing it to a certain degree under ‘pandemic’ conditions. Should the amendments proposed by the WHO be accepted in May, the citizens of the world would be subjected to unadulterated totalitarianism, however, so it is worthwhile exploring the full implications of this ‘anonymous’ mode of governance here.

This is done in the hope that, if representatives of the people – which is what they are supposed to be – in legislative bodies around the world were to read this article, as well as others related to the same topic, they would think twice before supporting a motion or bill which would, in effect, grant the WHO the right to usurp the sovereignty of member nations. The recent developments in the state of Louisiana in the US, which amount to the rejection of the WHO’s authority, should be an inspiration to other states and countries to follow its example. This is the way to beat the WHO’s mendacious ‘pandemic treaty.’      

On her website, called Freedom Research, Dr Meryl Nass has described the WHO’s notion of ‘pandemic preparedness’ as a ‘scam/boondoggle/Trojan horse,’ which aims (among other things) to transfer billions of taxpayer dollars to the WHO as well as other industries, in order to vindicate censorship in the name of ‘public health,’ and perhaps most importantly, to transfer sovereignty regarding decision-making for ‘public health’ globally to the Director-General of the WHO (which means that legally, member countries would lose their sovereignty). 

In addition, she highlights the fact that the WHO intends to use the idea of ‘One Health’ to subsume all living beings, ecosystems, as well as climate change under its own ‘authority;’ further, to acquire more pathogens for wide distribution, in this way exacerbating the possibility of pandemics while obscuring their origin, and in the event of such pandemics occurring, justifying the development of more (mandatory) ‘vaccines’ and the mandating of vaccine passports (and of lockdowns) globally, thus increasing control (the key term here) over populations. Should its attempt at a global power grab succeed, the WHO would have the authority to impose any ‘medical’ programme it deems necessary for ‘world health,’ regardless of their efficacy and side-effects (including death). 

In the preceding paragraph I italicised the word ‘control’ as a key term. What should be added to it is the term ‘total’ – that is, ‘total control.’ This is the gist of totalitarian rule, and it should therefore be easy to see that what the WHO (together with the WEF and the UN) strives for is total or complete control of all people’s lives.

No one has analysed and elaborated on totalitarianism from this perspective more thoroughly than the German-born, American philosopher, Hannah Arendt, and her monumental study of this phenomenon – The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951 and in enlarged format, 1958) still stands as the authoritative source for the understanding of its historical manifestations. The latter, focused on by Arendt, are 20^th-century Nazism and Stalinism, but it is not difficult to perceive its lineaments in what we have been living through since 2020 – although a strong case could be made that 2001 marked its identifiable beginning, when (in the wake of 9/11) the Patriot Act was passed, arguably laying the authoritarian groundwork for totalitarian rule as clearly perceived by Henry Giroux.   

Arendt (p. 274 of the Harvest, Harcourt edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1976) singles out ‘total terror’ as the essence of totalitarian government, and elaborates as follows: 

By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them; compared to the condition within its iron band, even the desert of tyranny [which she distinguishes from totalitarianism; B.O.], insofar as it is still some kind of space, appears like a guarantee of freedom. Totalitarian government does not just curtail liberties or abolish essential freedoms; nor does it, at least to our limited knowledge, succeed in eradicating the love for freedom from the hearts of man. It destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space.   

Reading this evocative characterisation of totalitarianism in terms of ‘total terror’ makes one realise anew, with a start, how fiendishly clever the perpetrators of the so-called ‘pandemic’ emergency were – which was no real pandemic, of course, as the German government recently admitted. It was the thin edge of the wedge, as it were, to insinuate ‘total terror’ into our lives by means of curtailing our access to free movement in space. ‘Lockdowns’ are the signature tool for implementing restrictions of free movements in space.

It may not, on the face of it, appear to be the same as, or similar to, the incarceration of prisoners in the concentration camps under Nazi rule, but arguably the psychological effects of lockdowns approximate those experienced by inmates of these notorious camps in the 1940s. After all, if you are not allowed to leave your house, except to go to the shop to buy food and other essentials before you hurry back home – where you dutifully sanitise all the items you bought (a concrete reminder that venturing out in space is ‘potentially lethal’) – the imperative is the same: ‘You are not allowed out of this enclosure, except under specified conditions.’ It is understandable that the imposition of such strict spatial boundaries engenders a pervasive sense of fear, which eventually morphs into terror.   

Small wonder the pseudo-authorities promoted – if not ‘commanded’ – ‘working (and studying) from home,’ leaving millions of people cloistered in their houses in front of their computer screens (Plato’s cave wall). And banning meetings in public, except for a few concessions as far as the numbers of attendees at certain gatherings were concerned, was just as effective regarding the intensification of terror. Most people would not dare transgress these spatial restrictions, given the effectiveness of the campaign, to instil a dread of the supposedly lethal ‘novel coronavirus’ in populations, exacerbating ‘total terror’ in the process. The images of patients in hospitals, attached to ventilators, and sometimes looking appealingly, desperately at the camera, only served to exacerbate this feeling of dread. 

With the advent of the much-hyped Covid pseudo-‘vaccines,’ another aspect of generating terror among the populace manifested itself in the guise of relentless censorship of all dissenting views and opinions on the ‘efficacy and safety’ of these, as well as on the comparable effectiveness of early treatment of Covid by means of proven remedies such as Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. The clear aim of this was to discredit contrarians who raised doubts over the official valorisation of these supposedly miraculous cures for the disease, and to isolate them from the mainstream as ‘conspiracy theorists.’ 

Arendt’s insight into the indispensable function of space for human movement also casts the WEF’s plans to create ‘15-minute cities’ worldwide in a disturbing new light. These have been described as ‘open-air concentration camps,’ which would eventually become a reality by prohibiting movement outside of these demarcated areas, after an initial period of selling the idea as a way of combating climate change by walking and cycling instead of using carbon-emitting motor cars. The WEF and WHO’s ‘concern’ with climate change as a putative threat to global health offers further justification for these planned variations on prisons for the thinly disguised incarceration of millions of people.  

The pertinence of Arendt’s thinking on totalitarianism for the present does not end here, though. Just as relevant as the manner in which it cultivates terror is her identification of loneliness and isolation as prerequisites for total domination. She describes isolation – in the political sphere – as ‘pre-totalitarian.’ It is typical of the tyrannical governments of dictators (which are pre-totalitarian), where it functions to prevent citizens from wielding some power by acting together.

Loneliness is the counterpart of isolation in the social sphere; the two are not identical, and the one can be the case without the other. One can be isolated or kept apart from others without being lonely; the latter only sets in when one feels abandoned by all other human beings. Terror, Arendt sagely observes, can ‘rule absolutely’ only over people who have been ‘isolated against each other’ (Arendt 1975, pp. 289-290). It therefore stands to reason that, to achieve the triumph of totalitarian rule, those promoting its inception would create the circumstances where individuals feel increasingly isolated as well as lonely. 

It is superfluous to remind anyone of the systematic inculcation of both of these conditions in the course of the ‘pandemic’ through what has been discussed above, particularly lockdowns, the restriction of social contact at all levels, and through censorship, which – as remarked above – was clearly intended to isolate dissenting individuals. And those who were isolated in this way, were often – if not usually – abandoned by their family and friends, with the consequence that loneliness could, and sometimes did, follow. In other words, the tyrannical imposition of Covid regulations served the (probably intended) purpose of preparing the ground for totalitarian rule by creating the conditions for isolation and loneliness to become pervasive.

How does totalitarian government differ from tyranny and authoritarianism, where one may still discern the figures of the despot, and the sway of some abstract ideal, respectively? Arendt writes that (p. 271-272):

If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.

Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action. As such, terror seeks to ‘stabilize’ men in order to liberate the forces of nature or history. It is this movement which singles out the foes of mankind against whom terror is let loose, and no free action of either opposition or sympathy can be permitted to interfere with the elimination of the ‘objective enemy’ of History or Nature, of the class or the race. Guilt and innocence become senseless notions; ‘guilty’ is he who stands in the way of the natural or historical process which has passed judgement over ‘inferior races,’ over individuals ‘unfit to live,’ over ‘dying classes and decadent peoples.’ Terror executes these judgements, and before its court, all concerned are subjectively innocent: the murdered because they did nothing against the system, and the murderers because they do not really murder but execute a death sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal. The rulers themselves do not claim to be just or wise, but only to execute historical or natural laws; they do not apply [positive] laws, but execute a movement in accordance with its inherent law. Terror is lawfulness, if law is the law of the movement of some suprahuman force, Nature or History.            

The reference to nature and history as suprahuman forces pertains to what Arendt (p. 269) claims to have been the undergirding beliefs of National Socialism and Communism, respectively, in the laws of nature and of history as being independent, virtually primordial powers in themselves. Hence the justification of terror being inflicted on those who seem to stand in the way of the unfolding of these impersonal forces. When read carefully, the excerpt, above, paints a picture of totalitarian rule as something predicated on the neutralisation of people, as human beings, in society as potential agents or participants in its organisation or the direction in which it develops. The ‘rulers’ are not rulers in the traditional sense; they are merely there to ensure that the suprahuman force in question is left unhindered to unfold as it ‘should.’ 

It takes no genius to perceive in Arendt’s perspicacious characterisation of totalitarian domination – which she relates to Nazism and Stalinism as its historical embodiments – a kind of template which applies to the emerging totalitarian character of what first manifested itself in 2020 as iatrocracy, under the subterfuge of a global health emergency – something well known to all of us today. Since then other features of this totalitarian movement have emerged, all of which cohere into what may be described, in ideological terms, as ‘transhumanism.’ 

This, too, fits into Arendt’s account of totalitarianism – not the transhumanist character, as such, of this latest incarnation of the attempt to harness humanity as a whole to a suprahuman power, but its ideological status. Just as the Nazi regime justified its operations by appealing to nature (in the guise of the vaunted superiority of the ‘Aryan race,’ for example), so the group of technocratic globalists driving the (not so) ‘Great Reset’ appeals to the idea of going ‘beyond humanity’ to a supposed superior (non-natural) ‘species’ instantiating a fusion between humans and machines – also anticipated, it seems, by the ‘singularity’ artist called Stelarc. I emphasised ‘idea’ because, as Arendt observes (p. 279-280), 

An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the ‘idea’ is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same ‘law’ as the logical exposition of its ‘idea.’

Given the nature of an ideology, explicated above, it should be evident how this applies to the transhumanist ideology of the neo-fascist cabal: the idea underpinning the historical process has supposedly always been a kind of transhumanist teleology – allegedly the (previously hidden) telos or goal of all of history has constantly been the attainment of a state of surpassing mere Homo and Gyna sapiens sapiens (the doubly wise human man and woman) and actualising the ’transhuman.’ Is it at all surprising that they have claimed to have acquired god-like powers? 

This further explains the unscrupulousness with which the transhumanist globalists can countenance the functioning and debilitating effects of ‘total terror’ as identified by Arendt. ‘Total terror’ here means the pervasive or totalising effects of, for example, installing encompassing systems of impersonal, largely AI-controlled surveillance, and communicating to people – at least initially – that it is for their own safety and security. The psychological consequences, however, amount to a subliminal awareness of the closure of ‘free space,’ which is replaced by a sense of spatial confinement, and of there being ‘no way out.’

Against this backdrop, reflecting on the looming possibility that the WHO may succeed in getting compliant nations to accept the proposed amendments to their health regulations, yields greater insight into the concrete effects this would have. And these aren’t pretty, to say the least. In a nutshell, it means that this unelected organisation would have the authority to proclaim lockdowns and ‘medical (or health) emergencies,’ as well as mandatory ‘vaccinations’ at the whim of the WHO’s Director-General, reducing the freedom to traverse space freely to ironclad spatial confinement in one fell swoop. This is what ‘total terror’ would mean. It is my fervent hope that something can still be done to avert this imminent nightmare.