Freedom Revolution

Gary North is one of those independent, eccentric thinker/writers who is both infuriating and often insightful. I know him mostly from his writing about the economic crisis, which he accurately predicted. In fact, it was him that I first learned about 'derivatives' and their explosive potential.

In this piece, he is thinking big-picture, in terms of political revolution and transformation in the US. Here's a sample from the middle of the essay:

A revolution favoring freedom must involve something like a return to what existed in the days of the Articles of Confederation. If this is not the direction of the revolution, then it will simply be business as usual.

It is not good enough to reform the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve System must be abolished. This is the proper approach of thinking about the revolution. Ron Paul has written a book called The Revolution. He has also written a book called End the Fed. This is the correct approach. We must not try to strengthen the system, or reform the system, or make the system more efficient. We must abolish the system, agency by agency.

Ultimately, this could mean secession. At the very least, it means decentralization back in the direction of what the Articles of Confederation provided. It is no accident that no high school history textbook or college history textbook has ever devoted much space to the Articles of Confederation. There is virtually no discussion of the details of that document. Almost no one, including people who have Ph.D.'s in early American history, has ever sat down and read the Articles of Confederation, let alone a volume of analysis of the articles. This is because the victors write the history books. The anti-Federalists did not win the state ratifying conventions in 1788. The Federalists won, and they and their heirs have written the history textbooks.

The difficulty is this: to reduce the power of the national governments in a period in which the Establishment is attempting to create an international government reduces the ability of locals to resist. So, for any long-term political transformation to be effective, there has got to be a reduction of sovereignty and legitimacy for both the national government and the international government. There has to be a realization that anything that concentrates power at the top is a threat to liberty.

This strategy is not yet understood in conservative circles. It is especially not understood among those traditional conservatives and all neoconservatives who believe the United States government has a moral responsibility to police the world by means of its military. Every time this nation extends the power of the military, it extends the power of the State Department....

Ron Paul is the first politician to get a national audience in favor of limited government since Grover Cleveland. Paul is the first politician to offer a systematic, integrated, Constitutional case for shrinking the Federal government. In the 1950s, Sen. Robert A. Taft and Congressman Howard Buffett of Omaha were articulate defenders of a government somewhat like that which is defended by Ron Paul. But Buffett was unknown, and Taft was a compromiser. Taft's voting record always testified against his ideological defense of freedom. Ron Paul's voting record is consistent with his ideology. That was also true of Howard Buffett, but nobody knew who Howard Buffett was. They know who Ron Paul is.

Compared to where Ron Paul was when I worked for him in 1976, this is a whole new ball game. It is a new ball game because of the Internet. Ron Paul and Matt Drudge are the supreme representatives of the threat posed by the Internet to every Establishment on earth. Matt Drudge was able to get a President impeached. Ron Paul was able to get the slogan "End the Fed" in front of hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of Americans. This could not have been possible without the Internet.

In my view, this is the greatest single irony in the history of big government. The Internet was developed by the U.S. Army in order to decentralize communications because of the threat of an atomic attack. It was the expansion of the military that made possible the development of the technological infrastructure which, more than any other invention in the history of man, now poses a threat to every Establishment in the world. This development has enabled the members of hard-core fringe groups to communicate with each other, and to get out the message that they most love: the incompetence and malevolence of the Establishment. It doesn't matter which Establishment we are talking about; every Establishment now has an unorganized but orderly audience dedicated to its overthrow....

We are on the cusp of a political transformation. The technology is on our side. The communications system is on our side. Articulate and even inarticulate critics of the existing political system have the ability to spread their message of discontent as never before in the history of man. The fundamental political fact of our era is an escalating crisis in legitimacy for the Establishment.