Tyranny Personified

From Lew Rockwell.com:

Tryanny Personified


by Thomas J. DiLorenzo



During the U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for attorney general nominee John Ashcroft, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-O’Shea’s Saloon) threw a fit over a perfectly correct statement once made by Ashcroft regarding how the founding fathers advocated the Second Amendment right to bear arms because of their belief that a well-armed citizenry constituted yet another check on governmental tyranny. "What, us, tyrannical?" Kennedy bellowed. He then demanded that Ashcroft "apologize to the American people" for having made such an outrageous statement.



Senator Kennedy is perhaps the most important member of Congress because in incidents like this he reminds Americans of how truly corrupt, tyrannical, deceitful, and rotten to the core the US State has become. To Kennedy, murdering some 80 people, including several dozen children, with poison gas, machine gun fire, and flames in Waco, Texas, because they allegedly violated a minor gun control law (which is unconstitutional, of course) is not an act of tyranny.



An FBI sniper shooting a new mother holding her baby in her arms at her home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, right between the eyes because her husband allegedly violated a minor gun law is not an act of tyranny.



Murdering literally thousands of innocent civilians in three different foreign countries with cruise missile attacks just to deflect American media attention from Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial is nothing to be concerned about in Ted Kennedy’s mind.



The tax police in recent years have audited over a dozen outspoken conservative and libertarian organizations that have criticized government intervention, but has not investigated any left-wing groups. There is supposedly nothing at all suspicious or tyrannical about this, as well.



The tax cops have a training videotape in which an "instructor" gives the following advice on how to treat taxpayers: "Make them cry. We don’t give points around here for being good scouts. . . . Seizure and sales. That’s our mind set . . . . You’re not out there to take any prisoners. . . enforce collection until they come to their knees." And people like Senator Kennedy insist on referring to the federal income tax as "voluntary" and the tax collection office as a "service."



According to the government’s "glancing goose" standard, if a goose flies over one’s property and glances down at the smallest mud puddle, the government has a right to control the use of that property under the commerce clause of the Constitution because the goose is likely to cross state lines and be shot down by a hunter, which would constitute interstate commerce. This is not a joke. This is an integral part of the EPA’s "wetlands" policy of unconstitutional property confiscation. Nothing tyrannical about that, either, Senator Kennedy?



Communities all over America have attempted to return to some semblance of equality under the law by prohibiting racial hiring quotas, only to be vetoed by a single federal judge, educated at one of the left-wing propaganda mills known as Ivy League law schools, and granted lifetime tenure by unscrupulous and downright criminal politicians like Bill Clinton.



Based on mere hearsay, heavily armed, flak jacketed federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents can break into one’s house in the middle of the night and confiscate all of one’s property if an "informer" tells them that there may be marijuana plants there. Property is confiscated without recourse, and it takes years for innocent parties to get it back, if they ever do. Many innocent citizens (and even their pet dogs) have been gunned down by federal agents in such raids.



Beginning in 1999, the National Security Agency ran a spy satellite program named "Echelon" which scans millions of phone calls, e-mails, and faxes from all around the world, ostensibly looking for "national security threats." The Soviet Union’s secret police were never so prying and abusive of citizens’ privacy.



Despite the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to bear arms, in recent years laws and regulations have been passed that ban millions of guns, create thousands of "gun-free zones," retroactively turn more than a million gun owners into felons by declaring their firearms "illegal assault weapons," and created a national registry of all people who have purchased firearms, historically the first step to gun confiscation. All of these laws and regulations are a blatant attack on the Constitution, our most important safeguard against tyranny.



These are just a few examples of horrifyingly tyrannical behavior of the US government that has become routine. Politicians like Ted Kennedy are Orwellian caricatures who apparently believe that TYRANNY IS FREEDOM, for they are the architects of all these despicable acts of tyranny. If the American public ever wakes up to this fact, these political charlatans will hopefully suffer the same fate as the defunct tyrants of the former communist countries.



January 19, 2001



Thomas J. DiLorenzo is Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland.



Copyright 2001 LewRockwell.com