A Country of Free Men or Free Things?
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The expected speeches will celebrate some notion of American Exceptionalism and Independence, but what substance is there to either one? Did so many men risk their lives just to end up with a system that made the one they escaped seem positively libertarian by comparison? If they had known that they were going to end up with the NHS, death panels that will eventually adopt some version of the Liverpool Care Pathway’s euthanasia protocol, and a co-dependent system where everyone is looted for the greater good of the looters—they might have stayed home on their farms, sadly watching the fighting from a distance.
JFK’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” was always a hollow lie. Half the country is expected to ask what their country can do for them, while the other half is expected to ask what they can do for their country. This simmering civil war is often pegged as a class war, but it isn’t about class. There are billionaires and paupers on both sides, and the divide cuts across the Middle Class, dividing those who derive their income from private business from those who receive it from government and government-subsidized employment.
The Fourth of July is Independence Day, but every other day is Co-Dependence Day, the days we celebrate our integration, our volunteerism and our compliance with a vast system which makes everyone dependent on the government and which makes the government dependent on everyone who still works for someone other than the government—including the freest of free riders, who work for themselves. Empires function by draining every drop from their possessions to cover their costs. The British Crown tried to drain America to pay down its debt, resulting in growing protests from the population and eventually a revolution. Now the Empire of Co-Dependency is draining its independent subjects for the benefit of its dependent subjects and the dependency infrastructure that employs its numberless bureaucrats who govern it all.
The Tea Party, both of them, began when an out of touch government and its monarch levied taxes on a subject population that the cloistered capital considered mere savages, clinging to backward beliefs and living without the benefit of the civilization to be found in the inner cities of the realm. The Gadsen flag with its twining serpent is not a symbol to be found on the split river that flows around a narrow island. But the island was a Loyalist government enclave even then, that Washington was forced to flee, putting the torch to half of Brooklyn to aid his escape. Now the new empire operates out of a city named after him and buildings with more bureaucrats than the entire deployment of British forces in the colonies govern what is still described as a “Free Nation.”
The American Revolution was not a struggle for another nation, one of many, but for a free nation. It was not split off to accommodate the national strivings of an ethnic group or their historical destiny. Its guiding idea, like its national holiday, was independence, but independence means very little unless it reaches the individual.
A nation where everyone is part of one great co-dependent community, a centrally planned marketplace that can only be balanced if everyone is forced to buy what they are told to buy, is not a free nation. It will not even be independent for long. The logic of co-dependence is to expand that dependency beyond the borders and make the region and then every part the world dependent on one another to balance out the numbers.
Co-dependence required an end to states rights. It will eventually require an end to the rights of nations. The Eurozone is a spectacle of co-dependent economic implosion with bailouts for all in the name of a regional stability that cannot be sustained. America, like Spain and Greece, is also passing along its debt to more vibrant economies. We are no longer co-dependent with the Mother Country, instead we are co-dependent with the People’s Republic of China, buying their products, while their buy our debt.
As Britain gives way to the European Union and America gives way to NAFTA and nations give way to the United Nations, the burden of dependency is passed on to greater and greater systems until its weight is more than that of the entire world. That burden of co-dependency is like a rock rolling downhill; it gathers more and more mass to itself, increasing its momentum, until it crashes.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/. The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Jewish Press.
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