America, the Free?

Too many people have no clue what "freedom" really means.

Apr 11, 2025

People lamely attempting to justify tariffs as a positive economic good (rather than just a negotiating ploy) often trot out the ol’ bromide about slave labor in China. “How can ‘we’ compete against zero wages!” they cry.

(Of course, no labor—even slave labor—comes at “zero” cost. At a minimum, a slaveholder must provide some kind of substandard food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Not to mention the very real cost of crippled worker productivity, sabotage, or out-and-out uprisings.

(But, sure: “zero” labor costs…)

This lame “gotcha” is meant to be a death blow to critics. These economic illiterates rarely state the conclusion they want readers subliminally to absorb. The underlying assumption or premise of this claim—“argument” is too dignified a term for their blather—that these NPCs are strongly pushing is the not-so-subtle implication that the United States is, in contrast to China, a free nation.

Glory be!

(But this essay is—surprise!—not really about tariffs. Maybe in the future…)

What. A. Laugh.

Sure. The chains are looser in the United States. The rope the statists and the collectivists use to control us is certainly longer and, overall, more lightly held.

But the noose is still around our throats.

And available on a moment’s notice for our would-be masters to yank tighter…

How free are we?

Well…

We are $37 trillion in debt with trillions more being piled on every year. Those increases dwarf into a rounding error any minuscule (but appreciated) savings from eliminating fraud or from firing unneeded employees or eliminating a few departments or increasing government “efficiency.” I mean, don’t forget: a trillion is one-thousand times bigger than a billion. A few hundred billions in reduction is a spit in the ocean these days.
Unfounded mandates for Medicare and Social Security add an additional $150-200 trillion of debt that we will not and cannot ever pay.
When all government-imposed taxes and fees are considered, the State takes HALF of all we earn every year. Plus, there is the obscene costs of compliance with unconstitutional laws and regulations that burden both businesses and consumers.
Thanks to inflation—real inflation, that is: an increase in the money supply created by the State printing unbacked pieces of paper—our money is worth 40% less now than it was just five years ago.
A dollar is worth 99+% less now than it was a century ago.
Almost everything we do in life requires permission from the State.
Over 90+% of what the State does violates the Constitution.
The State impoverishes us without conscience while enriching its cronies at our expense.
The State tracks what we do, where we go, who we communicate with, what we buy, both online and in the real world. REAL ID, anyone? License plate capture? Surveillance cameras?
War is the health of the State. We have military bases in over a hundred countries. People brag about spending a trillion dollars on the military and about bombing pissant enemies who are no real threat to us.
China is a police state.
The United States is a police state.
China is a version of Communism.
The United States is a version of fascism.

I could go on.

(I have done so, of course, at great length in hundreds of articles and thousands of online posts, but… Nothing much has fundamentally changed in all the decades I’ve been writing about these anti-liberty issues.)

So.

We MIGHT have an easing of the fascism over the next few years. I hope so. I truly do. Every inch we claw back from the abyss is precious and has a tiny chance of buying us a bit of time to come to our senses and to return to some semblance of a republic before Leviathan swallows us all.

But you can’t reform slavery. You can’t reform what shouldn’t exist, in the first place. It’s pointless to try. Most efforts I see are little more than feel-good responses that attack symptoms but ignore the real disease: statism, collectivism, and altruism.

For every step we take forward, our overseers drag us back two.

Every person with a modicum of authority who takes a pro-freedom stance on some issue immediately turns his second face and pushes another authoritarian power grab on us that violates our rights, our freedom, our Constitution. These Januses are particularly galling since they pretend to be on “our” side but are so only as long as it is not their ox being gored… But there are no “exceptions” to freedom.

The FBI, CIA, NSA, CDC, NIH, IRS, EPA, ATF, SEC, FHA, SBA, FCC, SSA, NASA, DEA, USDA, NOAA, DOE, HHS, HUD, DOI, DOL, DOT, DHS, FEMA, NEA, NEH, NSF, NLRB, FDIC, NCUA, USPS, AMTRAK, the Fed and all the other hundreds of overweening and illicit alphabet agencies and departments still exist and show no signs of disappearing any time soon. Indeed, our “leaders” praise these bastions of State control…

How to Reform Everything

Russ Madden

October 29, 2022

One cannot escape the politicians these days yammering in the media about how to “reform” all the ills and woes in our society. Consider just some of the issues and problems the State seeks to correct:

Read full story

Not to mention the local tyrants intent on dictating how we may or may not live.

So don’t tell me the United States is “free.”

Or even close to being free.

You can fuck right off with that.

Idiots.

We are not “free” by any definition that even remotely resembles reality.

Don’t defend the tax that is a tariff simply because a worse dictatorship is doing more of what we are—and have been—doing since forever without apology or regret.