Tag: liberty

Meaningless Midterms in Terms of Liberty

To grasp the meaninglessness of the midterm elections in terms of liberty, let’s consider some of the important pro-liberty positions that did not get discussed by Republicans and Democrats in the races for U.S. House and U.S. Senate:

1. Open borders. There was never any discussion about open borders, which is the only solution to America’s lifelong immigration morass. The entire discussion was about how to manage and reform the federal government’s decades-old, deadly, and destructive immigration-control system and the nationwide immigration police state that comes with it. Every candidate had a “plan” for making this tyrannical system finally work.

2. The drug war. There was no discussion on legalizing all drugs and bringing an end to the federal government’s lifelong deadly war on drugs and the drug-war police state that has contributed to the destruction of liberty and privacy of the American people. There was no condemnation of the Pentagon’s drug-war assassinations of people who have never been convicted of a drug offense. Any discussion about the drug war, at most, involved legalizing marijuana.

3. The welfare state, especially Social Security and Medicare, which are the crown jewels of American socialism. No discussion on the immediate repeal of all welfare-state programs. Instead, every candidate had a “plan” for saving and reforming the welfare state.

4. The national-security state — i.e., the Pentagon, the vast military-intelligence establishment, the ever-growing army of fat-cat “defense” contractors, the CIA, and the NSA. No discussion about dismantling this omnipotent governmental apparatus and restoring America’s founding system of a limited-government republic. All we heard was the standard militarist claptrap about a “strong national defense” and a “well-armed America” to protect us from the scary official bogeymen, including illegal immigrants, drug dealers, terrorists, communists, Russia, Cuba, China, and others.

5. Foreign interventionism. No condemnation of the federal government’s policy of invasions, occupation, wars of aggression, sanctions, and embargoes, including the decades-old economic war on the Cuban people. Oh sure, some candidates criticized Trump’s war on Iran, but their criticism focused on its lack of success rather than on the immorality of foreign interventionism itself. There was no condemnation of the U.S. military’s deadly drug-war raid on Venezuela and the violent and deadly kidnapping of Venezuela’s ruler. That’s because Venezuela is considered a “successful” intervention. There was no condemnation of the U.S. government’s partnership with Venezuela’s tyrannical socialist-communist regime.

6. The empire of military bases. There was no condemnation of the federal government’s empire of foreign and domestic military bases, including the imperialist base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

7. There were no calls to abolish the Federal Reserve, repeal legal-tender laws, and end the government’s paper-money system. There was no advocacy of a free-market monetary system or, at the very least, of a restoration of the gold standard. Instead, candidates had their own plans for reforming the Fed in the hope that it would no longer debase people’s money.

8. There was no condemnation of America’s system of federal income taxation. There were no calls for restoring the right of people to keep everything they earn and to decide for themselves what to do with their own money.

9. There were no calls for a constitutional separation of trade and the state, which would mean a permanent end to tariffs, trade restrictions, and trade wars.

10. There were no calls to separate healthcare and the state, including the immediate abolition of Medicare, Medicaid, the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other federal healthcare agencies and programs.

11. There were no calls for a constitutional separation of education and the state.

Instead, candidates offered plans, including school vouchers, for making America’s socialist system of education finally succeed.

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True ‘Health Freedom’ Means Having Access to More Than One Kind of Medical System

I’ve emerged from three conferences on consecutive weekends with my mind buzzing over what it might take to turn the helm of a Titanic-like medical system before it reaches the iceberg now plainly ahead.

What follows is my personal perspective. It is deliberately direct because I believe the risks are too serious for polite euphemisms. I also recognize the brilliance of modern medicine in acute, emergency and surgical care. My concern is that the same system is failing to stem the chronic disease burden that now threatens to overwhelm it.

Eight signs of a collision course

1. The chronic disease trajectory is still heading the wrong way.

If modern, technology-based medicine had the innate capacity to avert the spiralling burden of chronic, degenerative, autoimmune and mental health conditions, we would have seen substantial evidence of success by now.

Instead, the Global Burden of Disease 2021 study documents an enormous burden of disability, while projections to 2050 forecast a continuing shift toward non-communicable diseases. On that front, there is little to shout about.

2. Health systems are being asked to carry more than they can bear.

The King’s Fund describes a growing population living with multiple long-term conditions and argues that better coordination is essential to the future of the National Health Service (NHS).

The Health Foundation warns that, without comprehensive action to prevent ill health, pressures on services and public spending will continue to rise. An ageing population is not the problem in itself. Ageing with declining healthspan is.

3. Tomorrow’s adults are not arriving in robust health.

In the U.K., work-limiting health conditions among 16- to 34-year-olds doubled in a decade, driven particularly by rising mental ill health.

Separate NHS data reported by the Health Foundation indicate that 1 in 5 people ages 8-25 in England has a probable mental disorder. If younger generations were entering adulthood with greater physiological, metabolic and psychological resilience, future burdens might fall. The opposite trend is now visible.

4. Families and communities are fraying when they are needed most.

Strong social networks cannot replace skilled health and social care, but they can reduce isolation, support recovery and help people live independently for longer.

Yet the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection estimates that 1 in 6 people worldwide experiences loneliness and regards social disconnection as a serious, under-recognized public health challenge.

5. Prevention is still not a priority for healthcare systems or governments.

Governments repeatedly promise a shift from sickness care to prevention. Yet the Health Foundation reports that the share of NHS spending directed to prevention, primary care and community services was squeezed before the pandemic.

Funding, incentives and professional structures still flow predominantly downstream, after disease has taken hold.

6. Truthful health information is too often constrained.

In the U.S., ANH-USA is now asking a federal court to overturn the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s suppression of 114 nutrient-disease risk-reduction claims derived from statements made by federal health agencies themselves.

In the European Union and U.K., restrictive health claims regimes similarly limit the communication of science-backed information. Consumers cannot exercise meaningful agency if regulators decide which truthful information they may see.

7. Self-healing remains a medical blind spot.

Recovery from illness or injury depends on repair, adaptation and coordination across psychological, neurological, metabolic, immune and endocrine systems. Yet care is still organized largely through specialist silos and single-disease pathways — even as multimorbidity makes that model increasingly untenable.

Enhancing the body’s capacity to restore function should be a central therapeutic objective, not an eccentric add-on.

8. We have engineered ourselves out of relationship with Nature.

Whole foods from healthy, biologically active soils; regular movement; clean air and water; daylight; darkness at night; microbial exposure; temperature variation; family and community support — these are not lifestyle decorations.

They are signals human biology has long expected. The evidence around evolutionary mismatch and the signals removed by modern life supports the contention that a sizeable share of chronic ill health arises from our failure to adapt to the built environments and cultures of the Anthropocene.

This is not an argument for returning to caves. It is an argument for designing modern life around biological reality.

The question troubling me is this: how do we fix it? How do we stop the Titanic from hitting the iceberg? And should we even try to save the ship in its present form?

When one approach is not enough

I have come to the view that we can no longer wait for a single, unified vision of future healthcare. We need plural systems — but genuine pluralism, not a dominant system that allows integrative, complementary and alternative approaches to survive only at the margins.

Pluralism doesn’t mean “anything goes.” Every approach should be transparent, ethical and accountable to forms of evidence appropriate to the intervention and the individual. But the present biomedical model cannot remain the sole gatekeeper of what counts as evidence, healing or legitimate care.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will undoubtedly play an increasing part in healthcare.

If its training, governance and outputs remain transparent and sufficiently free from commercial and political manipulation — none of which can be guaranteed — it could accelerate the adoption of strategies that minimise disease risk, reveal patterns across previously separated systems and help personalise care.

That does not require healthcare to become divorced from nature, human relationships or social context. Nor does it mean ignoring the influence of factors as fundamental as light and water, a subject so masterfully handled by our previous medical director, Dr. Damien Downing, in his new book “Coherent Health: The Power of Light and Water.”

At the same time, I cannot imagine the technocrats willingly abandoning the technology-driven model.

Too much rests on a business model we have described previously: pay lip service to prevention; fund interventions that qualify for reimbursement or health authority approval; favor patented products that manage symptoms more often than they reverse underlying causes; and encourage long-term dependence on those interventions.

None of this means rejecting drugs, surgery, diagnostics or medical technology. It means putting them inside a much larger toolkit and judging the system by outcomes that count: fewer years lived with disability, longer healthspan, greater resilience and more personal agency.

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Freedom Is Much More Important Than Democracy

Democracy invites despotism. When understood as majority rule, democracy means that fifty-one of every hundred citizens can have their way with the other forty-nine.

“But I want to keep my possessions, weapons, and children.” Too bad, the majority have decided to redistribute your property to those lazy bums over there, disarm you before you can do anything about it, and indoctrinate your children in public schools, so that they learn to resent you and love the State.

Democracy is dangerous without guardrails. Unless a society has a strong sense of moral virtue that fosters personal discipline, duty, and honor, base selfishness becomes the driving motivation behind all political action. Unless certain constitutional protections exist to safeguard each individual’s inviolable rights, democratic majorities devour those rights whenever expedient.

This should surprise no-one. Political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke described humans’ pre-government “state of nature” as a chaotic, violent clash of self-interest. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” regards self-interest as the engine of free markets. Consequently, it is easy to understand why forms of democracy that are unshackled from both moral and constitutional restraints prompt a society to descend back into a state of nature in which humanity’s worst impulses are again indulged.

When Western leaders speak adoringly of “our democracy,” citizens should prepare to guard their freedoms. My goodness, there is nothing inherently virtuous about democracy. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un runs the most repressive regime on the planet, but his country is known officially as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea! China’s Xi Jinping is the general secretary of the oppressive Chinese Communist Party, but his nation remains officially the People’s Republic of China! Dictatorships around the globe claim to govern in the name of the people.

One might think that the blurry line between democracy and despotism would make Western leaders wary of singing democracy’s praises. Defenses of majoritarianism embrace the notion that the votes of a hundred people will lead to a more prudent outcome than we could reasonably expect from the decision-making of a single person. But that doesn’t make any sense. Would you rather live in a kingdom with a benevolent king or in a democracy filled with rapists, thieves, and murderers? If there is a 50/50 chance that any single dictator is good or bad, would there not be a 50/50 chance that a majority of citizens are good or bad, too? If one communist would take everything you have, wouldn’t fifty communists do the same thing? Democracy is a coin toss. It is the veneer of legitimacy that makes authoritarianism look shiny and sparkly. That hardly feels like something worth celebrating.

Democracy is just a process. It shouldn’t be idolized for its own sake. It can lead to just or unjust outcomes depending upon the moral virtue, shared culture, and general wisdom of the voters. Aside from these cultural attributes of a society, there is nothing more essential to a nation’s long-term peace and happiness than the recognition of and protections for inviolable, natural, God-given rights.

Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, the right to self-defense – these rights and other natural liberties do not come into existence because of majority rule. Our natural rights exist despite majority rule. As the Founding Fathers articulated in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” We aren’t equal because of democracy; we are equal despite any democratic vote that might claim otherwise. Our lives, personal liberties, and connections to God exist because of His will, not the government’s.

The idea that rights and liberties exist separately from the promulgations of government forms the foundation of our constitutional system and, more generally, of human rights.

The U.S. Constitution spells out quite succinctly what powers each of the three branches of government – Legislative, Executive, and Judicial – shall have. From where do our three branches of government get these powers? The Preamble to the Constitution lays out the source of government power plainly: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” In other words, the government’s legitimacy comes directly from the people.

Every power that one of the three branches exercises is a power that arises from and is borrowed from the individual citizens of the United States. Any power not specifically delegated to the U.S. government remains with either the individual state governments or individual American citizens. This is profoundly important. The Constitution is not a document that empowers the federal government to do whatever it wants. It is a document that says, “You get to do only these discrete things. Everything else is off-limits!”

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People may love freedom, but they don’t always love the responsibility that freedom demands

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859) was a French diplomat, political philosopher and historian, best known for his works ‘Democracy in America’ and ‘The Old Regime and the Revolution’.  According to Mani Basharzad, what Tocqueville teaches us was echoed in Sir Roger Scruton, the torchbearer of conservative thought in England in the last century.

Using Tocqueville’s philosophy, Basharzad explains how freedom is lost through the lack of taking personal responsibility.

The Psychology of Freedom

The following is an extract from the article ‘Psychology, Security, and the Subtle Surrender of Freedom’ written by Mani Basharzad and published by The Daily Exonomy.  You can read the full article HERE.

Tocqueville’s special contribution lies in showing us the psychology of freedom. For him, liberty was not only a matter of institutions and individual rights, but also of the deeper attitudes that hold everything together and make freedom work. On this basis, we arrive at one of the most disturbing parts of Tocqueville’s thought: freedom can be lost in democracies through democratic means. It is not only overthrown by revolutions, coups or violent movements; it can disappear in a calm, civil and apparently legitimate way.

The shift of consciousness Tocqueville described is this: people may love freedom, but they do not always love the responsibility that freedom demands. They look for someone else to bear the responsibility that comes with freedom. And what better candidate than government? Do not trouble yourself about the uncertain future; we will decide for you. Do not worry about the consequences of your choices; we will absorb them. We will shield you from danger.All we require is a little more power, a little more of your decision-making capacity. In this world, governments do not seize liberty; people surrender it voluntarily – a ‘Brave New World’ where people love their servitude, a painless concentration camp in which, as Huxley wrote, people “in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.”

This undermines one of liberty’s strongest safeguards: community. As government replaces community, people lose the habit of solving local problems themselves and they begin to surrender their agency, expecting the state to act in their place. Eventually, they reach the condition in which, as Tocqueville wrote, “they can do almost nothing by themselves.” If citizens forget the art of cooperating with one another, of pursuing common goals and solving their own problems, Tocqueville warned that “civilisation itself would be in peril.” Citizens grow weaker, more dependent and less capable. This is not the result of brute force, but of their own choice to substitute state power for individual autonomy, community and responsibility. They give up their freedom and allow others to choose for them, lulled by the illusion that life will be easier.

At its core, the loss of freedom is psychological. It is rooted in the failure to act, the failure to exercise personal autonomy, the failure to participate in community and the constant deferral of responsibility in the hope that someone else will solve our problems. The result, Tocqueville feared, would be “an insupportable tyranny even without wishing to.” A tyranny no one wanted, yet to which everyone contributed, step by step. Freedom is lost in the same manner Hemingway’s banker went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.

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How To Make America Great Again

Donald Trump and his supporters were certain that by restoring him to the presidency, they could make America great again. They are going to be as sorely disappointed at the end of Trump’s term in office as they were after his first term in office. Trump will not make America great again.

The problem, however, is not Donald Trump. The fact is that no one can make America great again — at least not if America maintains the same political and economic systems that have characterized our nation for almost 100 years. It is those systems that constitute an insurmountable obstacle to making America great again, no matter who is elected president.

Unfortunately, however, conservative Americans are not ready to accept that. They are convinced that by electing Trump and then vesting him with unchecked, omnipotent power, he will be the “man on the white horse” who will make America great again.

It won’t happen. At the end of this road to national “greatness” lies an increasingly weakened, dysfunctional society — one in which liberty and privacy have been destroyed — one in which the American people will be existing as subservient, dependent, and fearful serfs whose purpose in life is simply to serve the state and the greater good of society.

There is one — and only one — way for America to be great again. That way is to restore the sound, founding principles of liberty of our nation and then build on them.

Obviously, this entails deep soul-searching of how we started as a nation and how we ended up where we are today. It also requires Americans to think at a higher level — one that involves principles and ideals. Let’s examine what needs to be done to restore greatness to our land.

The national-security state

America’s founding political system was a limited-government republic, one that was characterized by three separate and independent branches, with a very small military force falling under the control of the executive branch. The Constitution, which called the federal government into existence, prohibited the government from killing people without “due process of law,” a term that encompasses notice of charges and a hearing or trial where the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused has committed some crime. The Bill of Rights guaranteed that the accused had the right to trial by a jury composed at random from regular citizens in the community. The Bill of Rights also prohibited the imposition of cruel and unusual punishments.

All that changed in the late 1940s, when the federal government was converted into what is called a national-security state. It effectively involved a fourth branch of government consisting of the Pentagon, a vast and powerful military establishment, an empire of domestic and foreign military bases, the CIA, the NSA, and, to a certain extent, the FBI.

Although this conversion took place without a constitutional amendment, it constituted the most radical change in America’s political system in the history of the country. Over time, the national-security branch became the most powerful branch — the branch to which the other three branches defer, especially in foreign affairs.

Moreover, the constitutional limitations on the power of the federal government disintegrated with the conversion to a national-security state. The Pentagon and the CIA now wielded the power to engage in state-sponsored assassinations, thereby nullifying the constitutional prohibition against killing people without due process of law. They also wielded the power to inflict cruel and unusual punishments on people, including torture. They also now had the power to keep people incarcerated for as long as they wanted, ignoring the constitutional prohibition against indefinite incarceration without trial. They also wielded the power to engage in mass secret surveillance, especially through the NSA. Moreover, once U.S. officials launched their “war on terrorism” after the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon and the CIA wielded the power to nullify the right of trial by jury and employ trial by military tribunal instead.

It is worth mentioning that all of these omnipotent, dark-side powers apply not just to foreigners but also to American citizens. The fact is that Americans now live under a national-security state system in which their very own government wields the power to assassinate, torture, surveil, and indefinitely detain them. What makes the whole thing so perverse is that Americans have been indoctrinated into believing that all this tyranny is “freedom.”

It’s also worth mentioning that the conversion to a national-security state was accompanied by a foreign policy of foreign wars and interventions, as well as an empire of foreign military bases, which have been used to inflict massive death and destruction on people in foreign lands.

There is one solution to all this: Dismantle the national-security state and restore America’s founding system of a limited-government republic, with just a relatively small, basic military force — one that lacks the capability to engage in foreign wars, interventions, coups, and wars of aggression.

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A Police State Coming to a Town Near You

We have seen this before.

A foreign entity attacks American persons or property and the government warns that its sleeper cells have infiltrated the United States and it is somehow necessary to expand the powers of the government and shrink protections for civil liberties — and this shrinkage will somehow keep us all safe.

The premise of this deeply flawed argument is that less liberty produces more safety. That premise is historically and morally erroneous. Even if we had cops watching us on every street corner or F.B.I. agents virtually in every home, who will keep us safe from them? And who would want to live, who could be private and free, in such an environment?

Here is the backstory.

When James Madison referred to the creation of the American republic as an inversion, he must have been met with quizzical looks and curious laughter. He meant that throughout history, popular governments came about by monarchs and despots — the sovereign — begrudgingly giving up power. This was, to Madison, power giving liberty.

In America, however, Madison argued — following his neighbor and good friend Thomas Jefferson, who maintained that individual persons are sovereign — the government came about by an inversion of the old way. In America, liberty gave power.

Thus, at the end of the American war for independence, which began 250 years ago, there was no central government here. The king’s agents and soldiers had been chased back to England, and many of his judicial and administrative officials retreated into private life or suddenly became patriots.

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Compromised integrity: Medical professionals failed to uphold ethics and freedoms during covid

The covid pandemic exposed the ease with which democratic societies can abandon ethical principles and human rights under collective fear, with a response driven more by authoritarian impulses than science.

The medical profession failed to uphold its ethical principles, with many doctors and medical bodies complicit in enforcing government policies that disregarded patient autonomy and scientific integrity.

To reclaim ethics and freedom, the medical profession and society must speak truth to power and defend principles such as informed consent, patient autonomy and free scientific discourse.

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