Ask the average American walking down the street what they believe the biggest threat to America is and you’ll likely get as many answers and interviewees. Some will claim a nuclear armed Iran is the biggest threat, but they fail to understand that simply possessing a nuclear weapon doesn’t make for a threat if you lack a delivery system capable of transporting the weapon to your enemy’s home and bypassing that enemy’s countermeasures. Other people will claim the biggest threat to our county is the faltering education system, against they fail to see that a faltering public education system is a symptom of a much larger problem.
The biggest threat to our country is the tyranny of our government and Henry Hazlitt called it in 1956:
In spite of the obvious ultimate objective of the masters of Russia to communize and conquer the world, and in spite of the frightful power which such weapons as guided missiles and atomic and hydrogen bombs may put in their hands, the greatest threat to American liberty today comes from within. It is the threat of a growing and spreading totalitarian ideology.
Totalitarianism in its final form is the doctrine that the government, the state, must exercise total control over the individual. The American College Dictionary, closely following Webster’s Collegiate, defines totalitarianism as “pertaining to a centralized form of government in which those in control grant neither recognition nor tolerance to parties of different opinion.”
Unlike potential threats from foreign nations, the threat of ever more tyrannical government isn’t hypothetical but an absolute fact. We aren’t playing a guessing game of “what if” when talking about expanding government power but a game of “how much” and “how quickly?” No doubt can exist that the power the federal government commands is much greater now than any other point in our country’s history, and make no mistake our history is ladened with expanding government power.
The United States government has been on an ever expanding power grab since the start but it really began to ramp up after the conclusion of the Civil War. One the federal government realized they successfully prevented any state from seceding they also knew there was no limit to their power. Gone was the possibility of individual states finding federal laws and regulations unacceptable and withdrawing. While this expansion of power was continuous it really began to ramp up during World War II and has only continued to rapidly expand every since.
The article is an excellent read and should serve as a wakeup call to anybody who doesn’t see the constant destruction of liberty taking place in this nation.