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| Government Corruption |
| This Is Not Freedom, America: The Profit Incentives Driving the American Police State |
| 2023-10-05 |
| BLUF: [Rutherford Institute] By a government addicted to power: It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., "we the people" may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves. This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits has increased the reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix. And, as always, it’s we the people, we the taxpayers, we the gullible voters who keep getting taken for a ride by politicians eager to promise us the world on a plate. This is a far cry from how a representative government is supposed to operate. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #2 As government grows, the potential for corrupt profit grows as well. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2023-10-05 12:46 |
| #1 Authors John & Nisha Whitehead provide an excellent analysis. There seems to be a growing chorus, people like Victor David Hanson, who believe we have crossed the Rubicon and a repair is no longer possible. “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-10-05 05:20 |