06-06-2019, 01:31 PM
(06-06-2019, 10:12 AM)David Horn Wrote:(06-06-2019, 09:49 AM)vine Wrote: Americans used to believe in freedom.
http://www.naplesnews.com/story/opinion/...427082001/
Now Americans would need to be mentally ill to think tyranny won’t get worse.
Who would have thought in 1980 that the USA would soon have curfews, gun bans, NSA wiretapping, checkpoints, forfeiture, the end to the right to silence, free speech bans, torture, kill lists, no fly lists, searches without warrants, private prisons, mandatory minimums, 3 strikes laws, DNA databases, CISPA, SOPA, NDAA, IMBRA, FBAR, FATCA, TSA groping, secret FISA courts, and Jade Helm?
During the Wild West in the US, everyone could carry guns, businesses were not licensed, no one had Social Security numbers, there were no sales, income, or property taxes, and drugs, alcohol, smoking, gambling, and prostitution were legal.
There was little government, yet people lived and had freedom.
Your grasp of history leaves a lot to be desired. First, gun bans were common in the "old west". You didn't just waltz into town packing heat. Unlicensed businesses, as you call them, regularly produced and sold products that poisoned or maimed their customers, and got away with it. Others merely sold useless products that made them money in exchange for nothing. And you're bitching about Social Security? Half of the elderly population would be dead if not for SS, and most of the rest would be burdens on their children -- assuming they lived long enough, of course. Taxes were low, but services were almost nonexistent. Houses regularly burned to the ground, criminals regularly avoided capture and forget about streets and other amenities. There were none.
I could go on, but why bother. If living in a shithole is your idea of greatness, there are still a few of those still around. Emigrate.
Thank you. The image of the Wild West, with gunslingers bringing trouble into town, is an exaggeration. Mining towns such as Tombstone may have been extremely violent, and the termini of cattle drives were raunchy places in which cattle drovers got their pay and often got rowdy. But all in all, there are good reasons for such states as Nebraska and Utah not having violent Westerns set in them. The settlers of Nebraska and Utah were not violent people and did not tolerate violence.
Some of the calls for putting the bad patent medicines out of business came from... the Big Business of the time. Those badly-labeled medicines often consisted of alcohol and opiates good only for masking pain without curing the cause. People using those medicines often became monsters as is often the case among addicts. To be sure, the medical profession had its role in insisting that people see a physician about maladies from tuberculosis to diabetes that physicians could treat. If one had terminal cancer, then the physician would prescribe the appropriate level of opiates as needed.
I do genealogy, and I have seen the ads for those patent medicines. If those medicines were as good as they were claimed to be, then if we still had them we would have no cancer, and people would be living into their 140s by now. Haw! Haw!
...I think that we are freer because working-class children are in schools instead of the factories and mines. Social Security was intended to get the elderly, who as a rule were not good workers and often made a workplace more dangerous, out of the workforce and create more opportunity for younger workers. The rate of fatal and crippling accidents for workers over 65 in industry had to be incredibly high.
Taxes seem to be a consequence of prosperity. The highest tax rates are generally in the most prosperous countries. The absence of taxes indicates either a country with a small population and a great store of resources (example: Saudi Arabia), a Marxist state in which profits from state-owned enterprises support a monstrous regime (North Korea is the only remaining pure example of such), and... basket cases unable to tax or serve the People.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.