Monday, August 15, 2011

War or Ron Paul

Usually I concern myself, especially in regards to these kinds of letters, with issues relating to our local community. I do believe, as did our country’s founders, that political power is geographic in nature and I believe that the most powerful way to manifest a local geography’s true political potential is for the church in the community to follow the simple command of Christ to “Love our neighbors”, including those that are “enemies”. Following this simple command compels us to take personal and collective responsibility over ourselves and the local resources we depend upon, and to resist giving up control over those things to distant bureaucracies. In fact to the extent that we give up responsibility not only for the resources that sustain our lives, such as our lands, roads, waterways, schools, hospitals, businesses, but even for the poor and suffering amongst us, we also literally give up the very source from which our political power receives its legitimate authority and therefore its ability to protect our interests in our system of government.

When electing a politician to represent our political power at the state and national levels we need to take into consideration first the scope of power of the office to which they are being elected and second their perspective of protecting our local political authority. For instance if we elect a Senator or Representative that promotes a popular state or federal entitlement program to care for the poor, we need to understand what we are giving up in the process. If we delegate some of our responsibility to care for the poor in our community, we do this in trade for a part of our livelihood in the form of taxation. This may be a good trade, but more often than not these big city bureaucrats tend to tie strings that don’t often make much sense in our local contexts. By giving up our responsibility to the poor in our community we also give the government a moral claim via taxation to the local resources that are needed to meet this need. Our state and federal representatives make the laws that direct these kind of social programs, but let’s consider for a moment the office of President.

Realistically, a Presidential candidate’s promises are often conveniently left impotent by the fact that most of these ideas as they relate to spending, taxation, and other change are really not within the scope of power of the President. The President of the United States has a limited and balanced role in our system of government. The veto power is a significant tool of the executive branch, however even this requires considerable exercise of political principle on the part of the President, and can be overturned by a supermajority of Congress. However one area where the President can exert significant power is the area of foreign policy, especially in regards to the disposition of our military forces. It is in this scope of power that Presidential power poses the most significant threat to our local political authority and the resources that provide for our livelihood.

War is a doubly destructive activity that requires each side to destroy men and resources to finance and facilitate the destruction of men and resources on the other side of the conflict. Unlike entitlement programs in which we trade the rightful claim to our resources but at least receive, albeit often discounted in value and ineffective in purpose, a social program that provides some relief to our fellow citizen; when a nation gives it’s government the authority to wage war we are quite literally granting the government a moral claim to our resources via taxation and debt so that they can destroy it in the process of destroying our enemy.


War is never a boost to the economy, not even the subsequent rebuilding benefits prosperity because the resources destroyed in the carrying out of the war could have been invested into creating new wealth without having to have been destroyed in the first place (google “broken window fallacy” for a better explanation of this economic principle). While the defense contractors and the bankers financing the war and reconstruction may profit individually from war, that wealth is still a second hand result of the wealth destroyed in the act of war, wealth, and let’s not forget lives, that have left the people for good. With this in mind it is obvious that the decision to go to war must be considered gravely and with much consternation. Because of this threat, our founders wisely put the power to declare war in the hands of the congress, the people’s representatives, and the power to direct the war to the citizen President in his executive position as Commander in Chief.

Over the past several decades our country has trodden down the dangerous path of relinquishing the responsibility of Congress to declare war, in spite of constitutional objections, to the President. In a real sense, just as we have done in the delegation of our responsibility to care for the poor, in our delegation of the power of war to our President we have given a single individual the moral authority to take and destroy our wealth and even our sons and daughters in order to pursue a militaristic agenda who’s benefits are left solely to his personally biased determinations, and its important to point out that these bias’s are often influenced by the very banking and defense lobbies that most directly profit from the President’s confiscation and destruction of your wealth and children for the purposes of war.


To make matters worse, taking your wealth and children cannot provide enough money to finance the continuation of a war-faring empire. Each new battle creates new enemies creating a new need to go into a new battle. In order for our current appetite for war to be satiated we have to use the counterfeiting power of the Federal Reserve to come up with the money to finance our military adventures. Because of this you are not only being taxed without representation on the front end of the war, through inflation your wealth is being taxed again through dollar devaluation. Also consider that in addition to this unfair taxation, that our government does not merely inflate the currency and devalue it, it's worse than that: for every dollar they create there is another dollar in debt plus interest owed to the private banking cartel we call the "Federal Reserve". So to pay for these wars they are literally demanding our wealth, the lives of our children, our wealth again via inflation, and then telling our surviving children that they have to pay it all back plus interest! War cannot happen without the means to afford it. So, just as it is with most things, at the root of war is money. Any president who wants to take on the issue of war must also deal with the issue of money.

This brings me to the 2012 Presidential election. Obama was elected in 2008 based on many things, but one of the big motivators for many people was his promise to bring the troops home. However, upon entering office it was clear that his intention has become to continue to expand our country's policy of preemptive, undeclared and illegal wars. Since Obama is as of yet not being opposed in the Democratic primary, the only hope is in the Republican candidate that will be challenging him. In the field of Republican candidates there is only one candidate, Ron Paul, who is promoting a platform of peace that is promising to use his power as Commander in Chief to direct the military to bring the troops home and end our expensive foreign policy of militarism and intervention. Ron Paul is also the only candidate that is openly calling for an end to the Federal Reserve system which makes the financing of our war empire possible. He is calling for a return to sound money as outlined by our Constitution. With the field of candidates limited in this way, in effect, the Republican primary IS the general election if you are for peace, because if Ron Paul is not on the ballot of the general election the only other option is war.

The choice is now clear. Do you want war or do you want Ron Paul?