Money, Inflation, and how to FIX IT ALL!

For Immediate Release

Contact: Andrew Horning
Horning for US Senate
thefreedomfarm@gmail.com 

May 1, 2024

Let’s talk MONEY

Freedom, Indiana – Author Andrew Horning is the Libertarian Party of Indiana’s candidate for Indiana’s US Senate seat in 2024.

It should now apparent to all, that the unconstitutional, wholly corrupt, inherently divisive “Two Party System” puppet show we’d been warned against since our nation’s founding, is driving us to destruction.  My book, “Relighting the Torch,” goes into much more detail of the constitutional and pragmatic aspects of money, banking and inflation.  But the simplified gist is that the more dollars our central bank prints in relation to market activity, the less each one is worth; which is why prices in those devaluating dollars go up.  In the words of Milton Friedman, it’s “too many dollars chasing too few goods.”  Our nation’s founders had experienced disaster with the hidden taxation, market distortion and inflation with fiat currency, and crafted solutions in both state and federal constitutions.  We only need to learn, and use them.

Bankers don’t have to be, “a den of vipers and thieves,” as described by Andrew Jackson.  Sound money, as both state and federal constitutions still demand, would make over-issuance of monetary debt instruments to cover government overspending, and the market distortion, and persistent inflation that invariably results, practically impossible.  Our current, unconstitutional fiat currency, central bank, and so-called “Modern Monetary Theory,” or MMT, on the other hand, helps the rich get richer at the expense of everybody else.  So today, if you’re not in the “investment class,” you’re paying for it.

MMT, with it’s inevitable “Cantillon Effect,” was doomed to failure from our government’s implementation of it in 1913, because it’s based on a few catastrophically and invariably debunked notions:

1. Fiat currency – or the creation of unbacked literal monopoly money out of nothing.  This becomes a “hidden tax,” debt engine, and means of transferring wealth from the bottom-up.
2. Zero reserve banking – or lending money, even fiat currency, that the bank doesn’t own, or have even a fraction of other people’s money, on hand.  Fractional reserve banking isn’t all bad, but The Fed eliminated the requirement to hold even a fraction of deposits on reserve, during the COVID madness.  This practically ensures bank runs and closures, fairly soon.
3. Forever debt – the idea that a government can keep spending fake money that doesn’t exist, and  doesn’t belong to it anyway, which both increases debt costs, requires the Fed to fabricate more devaluating dollars, which erodes the trust of the whole system until it inevitably collapses.

As economist Herbert Stein said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”  So before our monetary monster dies and collapses down upon us (let’s do hurry), I propose all states invoke, Article I, Section 10, of the federal constitution, which forbids states from making “… any thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts,” including, quite literally, our unconstitutional and inflationary Federal Reserve US dollars.  Indiana’s constitution Article 10 Section 3 already demands that “…all paper credit designed to be circulated as money… be readily convertible into specie, for the redemption of the same in gold or silver.” 

The Indiana Constitution’s Article 11, Section 7 says, “All bills or notes issued as money shall be, at all times, redeemable in gold or silver; and no law shall be passed, sanctioning, directly or indirectly, the suspension, by any bank or banking company of specie payments.” 

In other words, a return to a monetary system that’s been proven to be stable, functional, and a means for the poor to get richer, for over three thousand years… is already, and still, the law. 

Several states, and indeed many nations, are already making moves to return to sanity.  Texas is on the cusp of a state-issued gold-backed digital currency.  The state will hold gold on behalf of the digital currency holders, with trade being 1:1, without fractional reserve fudging.  Utah already passed a bill to accept federally issued gold and silver coins as legal tender to pay taxes.  There are commercial apps like Glint Pay, that are backed by physical gold holdings, yet allow simple digital transactions that are at least as easy as a credit card.  And past court cases held that increases in the value of monetary gold against the Fed’s fiat USD would not be taxable.  In other words, this is very doable, right now, and would give us a stable means for business, savings growth and daily life, even when today’s banking systems fail (and they will).

At the federal level I’d reintroduce Ron Paul’s “Free Competition in Currency Act” to repeal the Coinage Act of 1965, which unconstitutionally decrees that, “Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve banks and national banks, are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues.”  And I also propose we, of course, End the Fed.

But let’s be very clear:  None of this will happen as long as voters keep reelecting the status quo cronies who benefit from the transfer of wealth from you, to them.  We have to vote out these liars, thieves, puppets and bums.  All of them; both the ones we see on the ballot, and those that lurk behind the curtains, and closed doors.  That is what Election Day is for, you know.  It’s our power of peaceful revolution.  And God Knows we need such an epiphany in action right now.

Liberty or Bust!
Andy Horning

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“‘Relighting the Torch‘ presents a historical and moral picture of our founders’ better ideas, where we failed those ideas, and some proposals for setting things right…for the first time..”

The case for (peaceful) revolution

For Immediate Release
Contact: Andrew Horning
Horning for US Senate

January 12, 2024

The case for (peaceful) revolution

Freedom, Indiana – Andrew Horning is seeking the Libertarian Party of Indiana’s nomination for Indiana’s US Senate seat in 2024.

With Larry Bucshon soon exiting, stage left, A good friend and longtime GOP D.C. insider said I should run in the GOP primary for Indiana’s 8^th district seat.  I was briefly tempted.  Truth be told, I’ve voted in the two requisite GOP primaries, and I’d love to get paid for what I do at personal cost anyway.  I won an election as a Republican, and a high percentage of the finest people I know, are Republicans.  So it is with respect to the opinions of my friends that I declare the causes which call for revolution, instead of continued capitulation to the status quo.

The whole inherently corrupt, unconstitutional, fraudulent Two Party System is a puppet show distraction from the legions of bureaucrats, bundlers, kingmakers, puppet masters and authoritarian NGOs, INGOs, corporations and billionaires who’re actually running the world.  That’s of course unconstitutional, as well as fraudulent, thieving, and mass murderous.  And those movie-ready supervillains are doing a terrible job of ruling the planet.  …How terrible?

Through the last forty years, fertility and birth rates have dropped.  Early puberty for girls, and halved testosterone and sperm count for boys.  Explosion in autism spectrum disorders.  Exploding chronic disease and the very visible problem of obesity and metabolic syndrome in even our very young.  More recently, a marked increase in “excess death” rates and lower life expectancy.  The ominous, new, phthalate syndrome.  Mental health issues, possibly including gender dysphoria.  We’ve gone from poisoning our own people, to funding the bioweapons research of the Chinese Communist Party.  We have a needless, corrupt, unconstitutional immigration crisis.  We’re on the edge of another World War, just as we’re about to experience a global monetary, fiscal/financial and cultural collapse that will make The Fall of Rome look like a lady’s gentle sneeze.

Since the mid-1990’s, I’ve ever-more-urgently protested, campaigned, written and publicly lectured against the corruption of our globalized, monopolized, corporatized, sold-out, blackmailed and bought government.  I’ve warned of the insidious growth of unelected cartel powers from the Fabian Society, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, Trilateral Commission and, of course, the World Economic Forum which have enacted the techno-totalitarian plans of Malthusians to create a corporation-owned digital panopticon, and rob us of all we have.  I’m certainly not the only one who’s issued such warnings.  Starting with founding fathers and several later Presidents, we’ve been warned.  My last press release was about one of the last steps toward a techno-totalitarianism Eisenhower could only imagine when he coined the “scientific-technological elite” – silencing opposition and controlling information.

To cut to the crux – “The Government” as represented by the Two Party System we see on the ballot is hardly even relevant anymore.  Most “laws” aren’t written by elected lawmakers. They’re written, judged, executed and enforced by executive agency bureaucrats and cops…and that’s all illegal.  Even the laws passed by legislatures are mostly written by unelected staffers and of course lobbyists.  “Public-Private Partnerships” are a scam.  Corporations chartered, empowered and regulated by corporate laws are government entities, and are not private.  “Public” means politicians.  Corporations, NGOs, INGOs and IGOs ARE today’s government.  This is of course anti-democratic, anti-constitutional, illegal and illegitimate.

Maybe we’ve not yet suffered enough? We all should have read the words, “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed” in context. For too long, and through too much deceit, injustice and death, too many of us have emboldened and sustained what must end by our mindful choice, or in slack-jaw horror, violence and poverty.

We need a revolution.  We need to fire the whole system of corruption and fraud.  No politician can do that – only voters can.  And they can do that only by willfully, conclusively rejecting the whole crony network.

The good news is that we have the legal, peaceful power to accomplish this…in a single day, if we’re willing to look in the mirror and see the truth of how we got here.  All revolutions start in the mind, after all.  And it’d take only a little more than a third of us to change everything. It’s only the bad math of a “two party system“ that has us invoking “the masses“ for our “lesser evil“ choices. It’s the passionate few who’ve always determined the course of history – just as it’s only tiny handful of wealthy globalists calling all the shots today. And by all the recent data, we have the numbers – we need only vote the way we talk.

We can live together in peace, security, prosperity, liberty and justice for all.  We need only use our votes as weapons of revolution, as is their whole purpose. I intend to put exactly that peaceful, necessary revolution on the ballot for Indiana’s 2024 US Senate election.

Liberty or Bust!

Andy Horning

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“‘Relighting the Torch‘ presents a historical and moral picture of our founders’ better ideas, where we failed those ideas, and some proposals for setting things right…for the first time..”

Constitutional Crisis…and Opportunity

The Biden Administration’s “Fourteenth Amendment Argument” for an apparently infinite debt ceiling is quite the monkey trap for Republicans who’re just as bad as Democrats in stomping all over constitutional rule of law for ever more power, money, and, of course, corruption.

Here’s the relevant sentence in Amendment 14:4: “𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤 𝘥𝘦𝘣𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴, 𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙝𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙯𝙚𝙙 𝙗𝙮 𝙡𝙖𝙬, 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘥𝘦𝘣𝘵𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘱𝘢𝘺𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘥.”

Why add the phrase, “authorized by law?” Why not make the validity of the public debt unquestionable without that proviso?
Come to think of it, what did the words, “authorized by law” even mean to people who still had some respect for those who not only wrote extensively on nullification, beat the global superpower twice without a formal central government to nullify their own government, and, not coincidentally, wrote Amendment 10? What did it mean to the people who wanted to repudiate confederate debts and further chastise the South for its rebellion?

Remember: constitutions are the literal authority/authorization of government.  Laws written without authority are null and void, as repetitiously affirmed by people like Jefferson and Madison. (see my book…nullification still happens all the time…just in the wrong direction)  This is what the 10th Amendment is all about, right?

So, “authorized by law” in context as well as clear words on paper, means that not only are some “laws” illegal and unauthorized, but also that fraudulent debts are themselves illegitimate, illegal, null and void.

How many of us have been saying this throughout the past eleven score and sixteen years?  It was a big deal in 1776, and thereafter. Until Pres. Andrew Jackson used the threat of force against South Carolina, the states held some reign against federal abuse of power and trampling of authority..by nullification.

But Republicans, who’ve held all three legitimate branches of government many times for many years, have never nullified the unconstitutional powers, programs, agencies, actions and spending of government.  Never.  There’ve been precious few libertarians like Robert Taft, Ron Paul or Thomas Massie in the GOP…and fewer all the time. 

So, in FINALLY invoking the constitution for SOMETHING, Biden’s got the GOP over a barrel.  This is the definition of a constitutional crisis: do we start nullifying unconstitutional stuff at long last?  Or do the Republicans cooperate in nullifying the last shreds of the constitution?  It looks like the latter is happening right now.

We actually do need a “Great Reset,” you know. Just not the kind proposed by Klaus Schwab’s UN Agenda 2030…

The failure of the budget in 1995 (and every budget thereafter), along with the constitutional crises of 1903, 1912/13, the New Deal, LBJ’s nullifying the “gold cover” in 1968 and Nixon nullifying the Bretton Woods Agreement in ’71, unconstitutionally creating “the Two Party System” after WWII and partisan primary elections in the ’70’s, with unbridled, accelerating growth of government power, size, cost and corruption ever since means that:

1. Either we eliminate constitutions, state and federal, for a more honestly authoritarian rule – or establish constitutional rule of law at last.  (see my book) Of course I prefer that latter. We’d all like it. I promise.

2. Repudiate pricey promises like Social Security and Medicare and/or radically reduce the elderly population/ lower life expectancy, which would require…

3. Societal behavior hacking (like CBDCs and “social credit”) to protect the people who got us into this mess, and reduce the rest of us into a relatively sustainable form of self-enslavement and poverty.

4. Or we wake up and fix this ourselves for peace, prosperity, security, justice and freedom.  (see my book…please!)

How any of this works, and to whose advantage, is still, as ever, up to both voters, and the non-voters who let others make all the choices.

Relighting the Torch

For Immediate Release
Contact: Andrew Horning
Libertarian candidate for IN08

16 October, 2022

Horning publishes “Relighting the Torch”

Freedom, IN – From the description on Amazon.com: “We The People and our government avatar, are a hot mess. But we can fix it whenever we set our minds to it.

‘Relighting the Torch’ presents a historical and moral picture of our founders’ better ideas, where we failed those ideas, and some proposals for setting things right…for the first time.

In this book are Horning’s almost-famous and now updated annotated Declaration of Independence and USA Constitution, along with numerous (and sourced) authoritative quotations by key historical figures.

We can, at long last and in the midst of all today’s troubles, realize our ancestors’ dreams of peace, prosperity, security, liberty and justice, for all.

…But the unconstitutional and contemptuously divisive Two Party System our founders warned us about really has to go.”

The paperback is available now, and the Kindle edition will be coming soon.

https://horning4congress.com/
Liberty or Bust!
Andy Horning
Freedom, Indiana

*See my previous press releases at: https://horning4congress.com/news-media-2/
And please see, “Eight Steps to Success” at https://wedeclare.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/eight-steps-to-success/

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BAD FED! Bad, bad Fed!

For Immediate Release
Contact: Andrew Horning
Libertarian candidate for IN08

28 September, 2022

The Fed caused inflation and now wants more unemployment

Freedom, IN – Andrew Horning, the 2022 Libertarian Party candidate for Indiana’s 8^th district US House, is not the only one who has for decades warned of the dangers of ungoverned government in general, and specifically, a malignant, corrupt central bank that funds it all.

The original design of The Federal Reserve System, while corrupt and unconstitutional, wasn’t so bad when it’s only purpose was to be the quasi-private “lender of last resort,” and when the US Congress, via the Treasury, was still solely responsible for monetary policy and the issuance of money as constitutionally required. But The Fed grew worse and worse as it became a para-political hybrid, and anti-constitutional scheme, of hidden taxation to monetize political debt, and thus over-mortgage our future. A future, which by the way, is coming payment-overdue within just a few years.

The Fed’s stated role is now to control inflation, interest and employment rates. The fact is that their market interventions cause malinvestment through artificial market signals originating with their now complete power over the issuance and value of the US Dollar. The fact is that the Fed admitted to causing and worsening the Great Depression¹, and is about to make that depression look like a minor kerfuffle.
Nobel-Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said that “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” All serious economists have understood this for some time. So it’s understandable that Fed Chairs have, up to now, issued cryptic statements about their operations, since they’ve been lying.

Now Fed Chair Jerome Powell has made a clear statement. “There will very likely be some softening of labor market conditions,” and “We will keep at it until we are confident the job is done.” He said this understanding that it will cause a recession and pain with innumerable US citizens thrown into unemployment or early Social Security…which will cost all of us dearly.

This is not just bad economics. This is self-immolation at a time when our culture, our state of law and public trust is already on fire. Agriculture and energy infrastructure is being systematically and globally ruined. Big Pharma and politicians have destroyed public respect for science. We’re heading backwards into Follow-The-Alpha authoritarianism and domestic militarism that predates Hammurabi, and is both global, and cartel-monopolized in scale. This is a pivotal, dangerous, and, well…stupid situation.

For too long, there’s been no electoral advantage to being right, and no electoral disadvantage to being wrong. And for too long there have been too few willing to speak truth to power.

Well, here is some truth. Our government, or rather the unconstitutional colossus comprised of the global “deep state” and “shadow government” of consortiums, NGOs, secret agencies and shadow apparatchiks like Victoria Nuland, is now our biggest, most existential threat. It’s even worse than the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing war with us…a war that they are slowly winning, by the way.
We will be very sorry if We The People don’t make new choices in the voting booth very soon, and overwhelmingly.

https://horning4congress.com/
Liberty or Bust!
Andy Horning
Freedom, Indiana

*See my previous press releases at: https://horning4congress.com/news-media-2/
And please see, “Eight Steps to Success” at https://wedeclare.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/eight-steps-to-success/ and https://wedeclare.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/money-politics-and-central-banks/

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1 In 2002, Ben Bernanke admitted, “I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

Cassandric Ruminations

When I shared this on Facebook after the tragically fumbled (but otherwise correct) withdrawal from Afghanistan, I wrote: “Well, #7 is a little less true today, even though we’ll still have wars going on once we’re finished blowing up charity workers in Afghanistan. Thanks, Joe!

But the others are much 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙚 true today.

What I thought was pretty funny when I said some of this two years ago, is less funny now.”

I should add, however, that the tribal rhetoric varies greatly depending on which tribe has the government’s keys. For example, Republicans talk a good story against spending, debt and the inherent inflation of the Fed’s money presses when the Democrats are in charge. And Democrats talk a good story against the anti-USA-citizen militarization of our government when Republicans are in charge.

And I should add a third #9 (or maybe a #11):
That THIS PARTICULAR ELECTION IS TOO IMPORTANT to vote for anything different.

Anyway, you can see that this is now tearing us up, apart, and down right now. Maybe it’s not yet too late to turn this around before this becomes history-making catastrophe. Maybe it is. But I sure wish we’d try…

Politicians Lie – Social Security is Past-Broke

This is an old press release. Almost ancient, in terms of how much things have gotten worse. But on the eve of the Great Reset, when lies and “cancel culture” and tribal hostility is coming to a boil, I thought it made sense to post this here:

For Immediate Release

August 15, 2016

Contact: Andrew Horning

Freedom, IN – We’re living the biggest lie of all time. I wish that were hyperbole. But we’ve taken an ancient recipe for disaster, and inflated it to a systematic, global, trans-generational scale that’s unprecedented in human history.

Incumbent politicians want only to be reelected, so they won’t spill any bad news. And voters want to believe promises, and don’t want to hear bad news, so we keep reelecting the incumbents.

But there is bad news that people need to hear sooner, rather than later: Our nation’s debts are worse than we’ve been told, and the recent rosy prognostications of OASDI’s short term health, are lies.

The ~19.4 trillion-dollar “US National Debt” figure often bandied about includes only the face amount of securities outstanding. And this amount, while seemingly huge, is comparable to the USA’s debt/GDP ratio just after WWII and at the peak of our nation’s rebuilding. Many people know this, and therefore assume the government has an infinite capacity for writing and redeeming such debts.

But that’s not today’s picture at all.

An approximately $66 trillion “US Total Debt” includes state and local government securities outstanding, plus citizen personal debt; and that is by itself the greatest debt any nation ever owed. While this comes to about $809,896 of debt per US family, even this still doesn’t include the “Federal Agency Debt” of over $8 trillion, or much more significantly, what we call “Unfunded Liabilities” of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

That debt, which is typically only a matter of conjecture since the rules of its calculation are purely political, is guesstimated to be, by itself, well-over $1.1 million …per taxpayer!

Putting it another way, the promises politicians have made to future generations amount to around two times the globe’s total economic output. Just the retirement-related debt alone equals a full year of global output.

Putting it in a much more personal way; the whole world cannot pay for your Social Security. It was spent long ago, and we’re only writing IOU’s now.

There’s a one-hundred-year-old, terrible-ending story about this involving The Federal Reserve, Lawrence of Arabia, FDR and Richard Nixon.

But the bottom line is that a lot of political effluvium is about to hit the fan, and we need to act quickly to clean up what is sure to be a terrible mess.

I propose we dramatically cut spending, government interventions, powers and agencies immediately. Stand down our crony empire and global war machine, and focus on the real problems we face in our real, personal, human lives.
I propose we replace our Ponzi-Scheme funding of Social Security, Medicare and other welfare and entitlement programs with a much simpler taxation and minimum support system at least similar to the Fair Tax.

In other words, I propose we stop lying, stop making promises we can’t keep, and start keeping the promises that make sense for the promotion of peace, prosperity, security …and freedom.
How? It’s really just a choice. Ask me about it.

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The eBook is out…

The Truth about Excelsior is now available in both paperbackand Kindle eBook.
No, I’ve not yet heard about film rights, who might direct or star in the movie no doubt forthcoming.
But the significant news is that in both eBook and paperback, you can read “Far more than the usual fanciful tale of precocious children, fire-breathing dragons, disastrous monetary policy and World War.”
“‘The Truth about Excelsior’ offers a unique perspective on today’s cultural madness, and a glimpse into a world of peace, prosperity and …freedom.”

Let me know what you think of it.  If you like it, please leave a rating and review.

If you don’t like it, well, let me know what you think of it.

The TRUTH about Excelsior…on Amazon

My brother Greg published a book about three years ago.  I don’t think of myself as particularly competitive, but doggone it, I couldn’t let him beat me!  So I wrote one too.

He also has a website for both his book, and a bunch of stories from my mom (she wrote and illustrated some hilarious stuff).

…Anyway, The Truth about Excelsior is now available in paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0849X45LQ?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860.

I don’t like the way it looks as an eBook, but I’ll likely publish that, too, in a couple of weeks or so.  It’ll be cheaper, of course.

But since some stuff gets lost in the eBook version, I’m resisting it as long as I can.

The blurb is, “Far more than the usual fanciful tale of precocious children, fire-breathing dragons, disastrous monetary policy and World War, “The Truth about Excelsior” offers a unique perspective on today’s cultural madness, and a glimpse into a world of peace, prosperity and …freedom.”

I mean it to be fun, but you know me…I had to insert some serious stuff in there, too.

Anyway, let me know what you think of it…and if you like it, tell everybody, and leave a review!

Fearing our own shadow

The Land of The Free has been surrendering freedom hand-over-fist because the Home of The Brave is scared of its own shadow.  Almost literally, its own shadow.

We’ve for generations been the arms dealer and political destabilizer to the world.  Our CIA and armed forces have interfered with elections and even violently taken down one dictator to prop up another for over seventy years.

Our government has lied about its wars, warmongering, entangling alliances and foreign interventions for much longer than that.  Our CIA and NSA have been spying on the whole world, including every person within our own borders, as well as prying into foreign elections (and our own) for long enough that it’s disingenuous to complain about foreign spies and foreign interference in elections…unless we claim we’re the only ones who’re supposed to do all that.

To everybody.

All the time.

Though China is certainly a strong contender – even with its fingers in our sock puppets – We The People are still the most heavily-armed, most globally nannying and bullying, domestically intrusive, imprisoning and militarized nation of all time.

It is our own shadows that both terrify and genuinely threaten us now, and, surprisingly, in the past, too.

You think our soldiers are fighting for freedom?   Which freedom?   How many freedoms must we lose to get that elusive freedom we’re fighting for?   At what financial/future security cost?   At what moral/social spiritual cost?

We have literally reordered and molded our society’s defense/military, monetary and legal and political structure to our collective trembling nerves.   Why?

While nobody ever says it exactly like this, the predominating justification for the USA’s violent, costly Fear-Aggression Syndrome is:

Our past screw-ups necessitate today’s screw-ups.

Rational people can look at the USA’s past mistakes reasonably.  Our government made horrible, murderous, costly mistakes when it was far smaller, less powerful, less secretive, less snooping, and vastly less heavily-armed and militarized both globally, and domestically, than today.  But ironically, the closer we get to the present, the more wrong we call right, and the more we justify today’s wrong by yesterday’s wrong.

We all know that slavery and native genocide was bad.  Only the more educated among us know that the wars against Mexico and Spain were motivated by greed and desire for empire, and had nothing whatsoever to do with protecting American liberties and land.  But very few consider how Teddy Roosevelt stimulated the Empire of Japan and the USA helped create the Soviet Union, however, so we tend to think of WWII as a wholly Good War, where the USA wore white and saved the world for liberty and justice for all.

The point is that, the closer we get to the present, the more our views of USA government become disconnected from reality.
Even after we learned that the Vietnam War was justified on, at best, a screwup, we tend to think of USA government as a benevolent god of peace and love, incapable of wrongdoing (though we keep seeing new wrongdoing every day).

This is a freakishly weird phenomenon.  But it’s also the nature of tribalism and idolatry.  We love our team, and we hate the other guys.  We can’t see the wrong in our idols, teams, champions and leaders, but we know that the other peoples’ idols, teams, champions and leaders are pure evil.

And it’s also just human: People of the past were THEM.  People of today are US.  We can easily admit that our ancestors did horrible, stupid things; but we sure don’t want to admit that, today, right now, WE are screwing up.  We’re blind to our own errors.

In other words, we see the past more clearly than the present.   And we see other sinners more clearly than we see ourselves.

So, as a result, we exemplify, even if unintentionally, the exact opposite of The Golden Rule.

This is self-immolation.   We have so many impending disasters of fiscal, social, monetary and military nature (will it be WWIII when China takes Taiwan and Russia takes Ukraine on the same day?), that we desperately need an epiphany and revolution of heart and mind.

You can’t be the Land of The Free if you’re not the Home of The Brave.   But no nation can survive at all with this kind of stupid.