15 November 2016
By Jacob G. Hornberger
Trump's supporters are on the right track, but they still just don't get it.
They know that something is wrong with America. They are characterized by a
deep sense of dis-ease about where our country is and where it is going.
On a personal level, many of them are barely making ends meet. They have
little or no savings. They live paycheck to paycheck. Some of them are
unemployed. They see American businesses closing down and moving abroad. Some
of them resent the fact that the one percent and the politically elite are
doing just fine.
Their cause for concern is actually a good thing and provides hope for us
libertarians. I'd be concerned if everyone was happy and content with what is
going on in the country, as many of Hillary Clinton's supporters are.
Just look at our country:
A president whose army and CIA wield the omnipotent, non-reviewable power to
assassinate anyone they want, round up people, put them in concentration
camps, and torture them. Does that sound like America to you? It sounds like
the Soviet Union to me.
Out of control federal spending and debt to fund the massive, ever-growing
welfare state and warfare state. U.S. officials continue to spend much more
than they bring in with taxes, adding to the mountain of debt that continues
to soar in amount. Meanwhile, the establishment economists tell us that all
this spending and debt are good — that they create jobs and prosperity. The
average man on the street — including those ''deplorables'' who voted for
Trump — recognize this tripe for the nonsense it is.
The drug war continues to wreck people's lives, as it has done for decades. At
least a growing number of states are striking back by legalizing marijuana.
Meanwhile, the feds continue enforcing one of the most failed, immoral,
destructive, and deadly programs in history.
More and more people continue to become dependent on the federal largess of
the welfare state and the warfare state. Once on the dole, no one wants to let
go of it. And hardly anyone questions the morality of coerced charity.
Meanwhile, people are fighting to get their share of the largess while, at the
same time, protecting their own pocketbooks from being plundered and looted.
Clinton and her ilk condemn Donald Trump for doing the same.
The military-industrial complex continues to gin up crises and wars in order
to justify its existence and its ever-growing budgets. Meanwhile, the
establishment press continues to blame the crises and chaos on the Russians
and the Chinese, who are increasingly encircled by the U.S. military and the
CIA.
Massive secret surveillance schemes on the part of the NSA that would fit
perfectly within any totalitarian regime. People who expose these KGB-like
schemes are called unpatriotic traitors.
Companies are run out of business with ever-increasing federal regulations. To
escape the ever-burdensome regulations and taxes, many of them are fleeing to
other countries. They're labeled unpatriotic traitors.
Economic booms and busts, bubbles and bursting bubbles, thanks to the Federal
Reserve's expansionary and contracting policies that come with the monetary
central planning and legal-tender laws that destroyed America's gold-coin
system that was established by the Constitution.
Sanctions, embargoes, trade restrictions, and managed trade, all of which not
only bring economic misery to people of foreign countries, they also destroy
the economic freedom of the American people.
Scapegoats are popular, with illegal immigrants being the most popular.
Muslims come in second.
Continued death and destruction at the hands of the U.S. national-security
establishment in the Middle East and Afghanistan, producing a massive refugee
crisis, which critics blame on ''open borders.'' And many people, including
many of Clinton's supporters, want more death and destruction. They feel that
the U.S. government just hasn't killed enough people yet despite 25 continuous
years of killing. They now want the army to bomb ISIS because ISIS is
supposedly coming to get us, just like the North Vietnamese were supposedly
coming to get us during the Cold War.
Yes, Trump supporters are right to sense that not all is right with America.
But what they still don't get is their conviction that Trump is going to fix
it all. They're convinced that he's going to make Amtrak run on time. He's
their man on the white horse. He's going to be the person who finally makes
the welfare-warfare state work. He's going to run government like a business.
He's going to make America great again.
Forgive me for raining on the Trump parade, but it just ain't gonna happen.
That's because America's problems are rooted in a bad system, not in the
people running the system. No one, including Donald Trump, will ever make the
welfare-warfare state way of life work. That's because it is an inherently
defective paradigm. No one is capable of making it succeed.
There is only one way thing that can put America on the right road — the road
to freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world. That
one thing is this: a dismantling, not a reform, of the entire welfare-warfare
state apparatus and the restoration of a genuine limited-government republic
and a genuine free-market economic system.
The Trump supporters are clearly not there yet. But the fact that they
recognize that there is a problem is cause for hope and optimism.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in
economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the
University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He
also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become
director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has
advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the
country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and
he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show
Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full
Context.
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