Topic: The American Iron Curtain

[Glock32]

Another excellent article from Sultan Knish. Read the whole thing.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-american-iron-curtain.html

With a Hat Tip to Western Rifle Shooters Association


Some excerpts:

(the American Iron Curtain) covers a million streets and hundreds of millions of people. Its shadow passes over stores and factories, homes and schools. It is not a physical wall. There are, as of yet, no border guards with rifles waiting to shoot those wanting to leave, there are no watchtowers or leashed dogs keeping an eye on the inner frontier.

It is a wall of words. A wall of laws, regulations and mandates. The 2012 Federal Register had 78,961 pages. There are 11 million words of ObamaCare regulations alone. With so many regulations, everyone violates a few of them without even knowing it. Assemble all the millions of them together and you have a great wall that would dwarf anything in China

The American iron curtain is still made out of paper, but in time it will be made out of cement and iron. Tyrannies begin with paper, but end with metal. The state begins by imposing bureaucracy on a free people and ends by imposing tyranny on them. When they will not obey the paper, it resorts to steel, iron and lead.
.
.
.
The conflict is simple and straightforward. It is the struggle over whether America will be an open system or a closed system.

In an open system, you choose the life you live. In a closed system, your life is mandated for you. An open system believes in the genius of the individual while the closed system believes in the genius of the visionaries of the ideology and the moral purity of the bureaucrats who implement it.

The open system is a door that you can choose to lock or leave open. The closed system is a cell door with wardens and guards who will let you out when they choose to.

In the open system you are in control. In the closed system you are being controlled for your own good, for the greater good, for the good of the state and the five-year-plan and the policy paper and the sub-paragraph of the regulation of page 50,261 as reinterpreted by a Federal judge in a court ruling that you never even heard of.

In the open system, you are a free man or woman standing at an open door. In the closed system, you are one of countless numbers in a book and a database. A number has been given to you at birth and your life is an interaction with other numbers that rate your behavior and your potential until your death when you are given your final number-- the sum total of your property that will be claimed by the state.
.
.
.
The iron dream has failed everywhere. Its ruins dot the Russian landscape. Its corpses fill the tundra from Asia to Europe. Its victims cry out across thousands of miles. The statues of its visionaries fill the scrap heaps of the east and its empty fields and abandoned factories can be found on every continent.

But everywhere there are men who need to believe in the supremacy of the state, in the closed system, the iron dream and the iron curtain, in 78,000 pages of regulations and all their millions and millions of words, in the nudge, the mandate, the law, the bill and the billy club.

These are the dreamers of the iron dream; the professors who tell their students to change the world by enslaving others to their iron dream, the newsreaders and entertainers who vividly paint the joys of living in the iron dream and the horrors of life outside it, the activists who crowd around shouting for the iron dream in the name of the "People" and the politicians of the iron dream whose faith is in the good of the many and the power of the few.

The American iron curtain is not substantively different than the iron curtain anywhere else, its descent is only slower and the men and women lowering it are more familiar.

The politicians are not guttural foreigners with harsh voices, they speak of American values and invoke American history even as they dismantle both, they stand in front of flags and speak of social justice at state fairs.

They claim that the old system is broken, that it's unfair and inhumane, that progress is inevitable and that the march of progress and the progress of science have revealed that their way is best. The Mohamedans had their revelation from an angel and the politicians have their muse who shows them that a better world is possible when all men are slaves and the right men rule over them.
.
.
.
They don't call for shooting their opponents, though occasionally the liberal thinkers at the think-tanks that come up with the ideas and talking points that are incorporated into their laws and speeches are indelicate enough to broach the subject. That sort of thing usually comes later.

For now they are concentrating on building their paper walls higher and higher. There are more laws than anyone can read, let alone know or follow.

The laws, like the marching Chinese, are effectively infinite. Even if a curious fellow were to sit down and try to read through them, going without food or sleep around the clock, it would be a hopeless task because no sooner will he have finished 100 pages,than a fresh delivery of another 200 pages will have already been added.

There is too much law being made to count.
.
.
.
We cannot have a hybrid system of both functioning together for very long. Freedom and tyranny do not naturally co-exist. A system does not hang in equilibrium between open and closed. Or as Lincoln put it, "This government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free." And it isn't enduring.

America has been moving back toward the closed system for some time now. The movement is incremental, its bureaucratic chains come wrapped in populist rhetoric, its power plays take the moral high ground for the oppressed, for progress and for efficient government, and its worst abuses are kept out of the headlines.

Each generation has less freedom than the last. Each generation lives under a more powerful system that is relentless in its determination to control and command. And each generation fails to make the connection between its incremental poverty, its incremental loss of freedom and its growing government.

[IronDioPriest]

There is a growing consensus that this is all self-evident.

My questions now, are who, what, and when will first moves be made - either to overtly put the hammer down on liberty, or, to resist with more than rhetorical recognition of the problem.

[Libertas]

It is good, I like this as it seems to encapsulate the warning:

"The American iron curtain is still made out of paper, but in time it will be made out of cement and iron. Tyrannies begin with paper, but end with metal. The state begins by imposing bureaucracy on a free people and ends by imposing tyranny on them. When they will not obey the paper, it resorts to steel, iron and lead."

But...

"Only when Americans see the wall, when they sense its shadow over Missouri and Florida, over New York and California, from ocean to ocean and border to border, will they be ready to tear it down.  Only then will they be ready to be free."

Yeah, probably true...but also too damned late!!!

[Pandora]

“Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
- Alexis de Tocqueville

But, eventually, it does come to tyranny and killing.

[Libertas]

Aye.

TOL, water - check.

[ToddF]

I'm really expecting limits on moving capital, coming.  I can't see the piglets letting one take their stuff elsewhere.

[Pablo de Fleurs]

...or, to resist with more than rhetorical recognition of the problem.

Rhetoric & grammar can be fun when properly applied.


(Caution: Sharpened pencils can be dangerous! The examples shown are for theoretical/rhetorical situations & should NOT be brought into the classroom for Show & Tell!!)

[whimsicalmamapig]

sort of like the frog in the pan of warm water slowly coming to the boil, but the lefties are in the pan with us and will meet a worse fate as they don't see this coming

[OldSailor]

sort of like the frog in the pan of warm water slowly coming to the boil, but the lefties are in the pan with us and will meet a worse fate as they don't see this coming

A goodly number of them would think it's a Hot Tub and want to stay, the dumbmasses.

[Pandora]

sort of like the frog in the pan of warm water slowly coming to the boil, but the lefties are in the pan with us and will meet a worse fate as they don't see this coming

A goodly number of them would think it's a Hot Tub and want to stay, the dumbmasses.

So, fine.  We help them.  We drown them and then climb out.

[Libertas]

I'm really expecting limits on moving capital, coming.  I can't see the piglets letting one take their stuff elsewhere.

Yup.

And look for outright seizures and confiscations to increase in scope and severity.

The real squeezing has yet to kick into high gear.

[Pandora]

I'm really expecting limits on moving capital, coming.  I can't see the piglets letting one take their stuff elsewhere.

There already are, sort of.  Americans are persona non grata at overseas banks thanks to FATCA.

[RickZ]

I'm really expecting limits on moving capital, coming.  I can't see the piglets letting one take their stuff elsewhere.

What about the limits on people travelling around the country?  A little known side effect, among many little known side effects, of the Unaffordable Health Insurance and Patient Denied Care Act will be the restrictions on travel.  This is the logical inference when you look at the woman who survived bladder cancer thanks to doctors at two different hospitals providing two distinct treatments; she's been told to pick one hospital now, which then limits her doctors.  With the limiting of which doctors you can see and which hospitals you can use, people merely going on vacation will not be covered thanks to OwebamaCare.

Look to California to institute a 'moving' tax as people get more and more fed up with all the regulations and taxes there.  It's happening in NYC, as the more affluent are getting the hell out, lowering the tax base, and you know a commie rat bastard like deBlasio will never allow that without a severe financial penalty tax.  Look at how NYS/NYC, year after year, go after Rush Limbaugh for taxes, even though he hasn't lived in Moscow on the Hudson for years.  (Who knew Robin Williams was the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce?)

Remember, you can't take your insurance with you if you move to another state.  A new and most likely higher cost policy or the exchanges await those daring enough to relocate within the borders of the US.  OwebamaCare, with a Congressional 'fix', can easily morph into internal passports.

Then you have the desire of many states to install black boxes in cars to track mileage so as to be able to tax road usage, which no doubt would include tracking roads used/destinations.  Commies can't be having the People be free to move about the Country.

As we all know, OwebamaCare was never about health insurance but is about control of the population.

[Pandora]

Been ongoing.  We had to pay NJ an extra tax when we sold the house of Gunsmith's mother's estate because we were taking the proceeds out of state (200?).  So, thank you, Governor I'm a Gay American, for your last act before leaving office.

[Glock32]

Yeah they've already been floating the trial balloons for exit taxes. It dovetails right into Obongo's hatred of suburbia, as he believes people who flee the urban cesspools are abandoning their "duty" to stay behind and provide for the Pore & Starvin'. That's ultimately what the mileage tax is about too, to penalize people who commute to work from suburbia.