Beginning with the 1933 Enabling Act in Germany which granted Hitler all power, parliamentary bodies, especially in the United States, have consistently given up power in favor of a unitary executive. It is a trend away from liberty and toward dictatorship.
Beginning with the 1933 Enabling Act in Germany which granted Hitler all power, parliamentary bodies, especially in the United States, have consistently given up power in favor of a unitary executive. It is a trend away from liberty and toward dictatorship.
Beginning with the 1933 Enabling Act in Germany which granted Hitler all power, parliamentary bodies, especially in the United States, have consistently given up power in favor of a unitary executive. It is a trend away from liberty and toward dictatorship.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Daniel McAdams is with me today and it's nice to see you Daniel.
Good morning Dr. Paul.
I want to talk about a serious matter today because it bothers me and it's something that I've tried to prevent and so far I'm not bragging about my results and that is keeping our government from acting like a total dictator.
And when I think about it, the progress is continuous and unfortunately dictators are more likely to arrive when the conditions in society are bad, economic and social conditions are bad.
That's when people are sort of looking for a strong man and I am concerned about that.
But it's not with the current crop of politicians that we have today as much as a trend that I've seen going on and sometimes I throw it out at least 100 years and of course it's easy to date some real problems this country developed since 1913, you know, with the license to steal with the income tax and the license to counterfeit our money by the Federal Reserve.
These kind of things lead to trouble.
But a lot of people talk about this condition as enabling a government to do something.
And the most famous enabling act was in 1933 that Hitler got passed.
And it's rather amazing that the people went along with that.
But there's probably a fancy name for the Enabling Act of 1933.
Do you know what that is?
Literally, I think it was about a month after the Reichstag fire.
Right.
And they passed the act to remedy the distress of the people and the Reich.
Well, the people are awful distressed today, so maybe that's going to be an inviting thing.
Those early years of Hitler, he technically took control of power of the party, which meant to control the government, in January of 1933.
And then the fire, a month later, they had to fire.
And of course, they're still trying to figure out who did it.
And the Nazis said the communists did it.
But I think there's a lot of skepticism on that on exactly who did it.
But the point was, there was a major event.
And under those conditions of having suffered through the bad effects of the treaty, the World War I, the Versailles Treaty, had the conditions where the people were ready.
And they didn't say a heck of a lot.
I mean, but the power was there.
So they went ahead and passed this Enabling Act.
And it's called plenary power, which means it's complete and absolute.
So although the things that I'm concerned about, a lot of it has been happening over the years and a lot since 9-11, aren't quite as explicit, but very implicit.
And there's a lot of them, but when you add them up, boy, there's a lot of stuff that people ought to start worrying about.
If they want to live in a free country, you know, you could look at these things.
And, you know, from your experience with me in Washington, what do you think the odds are of us getting support, you know, enough support to start repealing these laws?
Not very good.
In a sense, I mean, for our purposes, it doesn't really matter that much who started the Reichstag fire.
As Professor Higgs writes often, a crisis like that leads Leviathan to grab more power.
And that, for us, I think, is the more interesting dynamic, how a state reacts to a crisis, whether imagined, self-made, or a horrible attack.
Yeah, I think that is important because they're always ready.
We'll go over a few things that happened even before 9-11, but the one bill that we actually used the word enabling when I was in Washington, that the Patriot Act may well be an enabling act because it was so intrusive.
And this was a bill that just didn't pop up.
Of course, the final version, we didn't get a chance to read it, and that sort of thing.
They just rammed it through.
A bill very similar to that had been floating around for years, but they didn't have that particular event.
And even the neocons have written about it, and this doesn't prove anything other than the fact that these events is like a Pearl Harbor event.
They'd use these words where people are really attentive to what's going on, and they say, do something, do something, relieve the distress of the people.
And I'm afraid that attitude right now is pretty strong.
That doesn't mean that the neocons did 9-11 or anything of the sort.
It simply means that they recognized throughout history the best way for the state to expand its power is to have some sort of a crisis.
Yeah, and it reminds me of the first cabinet meeting for Bush.
You know, the report there was in January of the year he was sworn in, the first line of business was, when are we going to attack and invade Iraq?
And that was a long time before 9-11.
So the event came along, and they were able to galvanize the people and get support.
And people had to be fearful, they had to be angry, and they have to respond to propaganda.
Just remember how much propaganda there was in 1990, 91 in order to get the people ready to rescue Kuwait.
But finally, people went in, and that was a slaughter in many ways.
And in some ways, it was ineptness or who knows what that we actually said that, oh, we would have nothing to say about it if you're dealing with a border dispute and who owns that oil.
It was sort of the green light type of thing.
Executive Power Expansion00:10:27
So there's a lot of those things.
But I think attitudes are important.
The big attitude that people have to change in order to accept the dictator mentality is that liberty becomes of minimal interest and that there's safety and security.
Safety in that people will take care of them in a physical sense and security in the sense that I don't have to worry about my economic security.
And something big is happening right now because they're incapable of providing safety or security, you know, and people are becoming very frightened.
How does a bankrupt nation who's losing the strength of the reserve currency right now?
I hear that in August 90-some billion dollars of American securities were sold by the Chinese.
So people feel insecure and not very safe.
So they're ripe for this.
And there's so many conditions and laws that have been passed.
But mostly it's the shifting of the responsibility from the Congress especially.
And even the courts are complicit and they send it over to the executive branch.
I remember one argument you helped me research on and we took a position which was not popular with conservatives and that had to do with the earmarks.
Oh, how could anybody be for earmarks?
And of course, my position there was earmarks.
The principle of earmark is one thing, spending of money is another.
So I was criticized because I spent all the spending, but I was wrong because I voted for the principle that the Congress decides how the money is spent, but the earmark, getting rid of the earmark actually helped.
Helped the technical branch.
Talked yourself blue in the face to people when they just didn't seem to make the obvious connection that there was not a penny reduction in spending by eliminating the earmarks.
It was just Congress throwing up its hands and saying, Okay, President, you spend that however you like.
Yeah, that's for sure.
But you know, we've had, of course, I mentioned the IRS, we've had the drug war going on, the principle of asset forfeiture, those kind of things have been going for a long time.
But essentially, I don't see the courts as a protector of our rights.
Jefferson, of course, argued that they shouldn't be so powerful to gauge every law that's being passed.
But even when they did, even when they do that, they should give us a little protection.
But when it comes to big issues, I would say the Supreme Court leans favorably toward the executive branch.
And the one thing that is always bewildering is why is it that Congress has been so willing to give up their responsibility and just give it to the president?
You know, a guy like Boehner, you know, he doesn't defend congressional oversight.
He just delivers it to them.
So you'd say that we've had sort of a series of many enabling acts over the course of our history, punctuated by some much stronger ones like the Patriot Act and others.
But it's a long process.
Well, in that long process, I said, you could date it back to 1913 and then the Depression, and you had, you know, we've talked about labor laws and different things like that, and that's expanded and all these other things that have been going on.
But there definitely was an explosion of attacks and delivering more power to the executive branch after 9-11.
And nobody can argue against that.
But the people, but mostly we said, well, that is important.
You know, this is what we need.
Just listen to Chris Christie's argument on a stage, you know, about, well, we need this stuff, you know.
And so he strongly defends NSA.
But I mentioned the Patriot Act.
That was setting the stage.
It came after 9-11 and shortly after 9-11.
But what about the National Defense Authorization Act?
I mean, that is something about holding people without any recourse.
Yeah, it enabled the president to bypass the Constitution and hold an American indefinitely.
Then it's the executive branch that's in charge of the TSA.
And how much leeway do they have there if your name gets put on the list?
And then, of course, the establishment now of the president's argument that he has a right to assassinate an American citizen.
You know, without being challenged, it becomes charged with anything.
But in foreign policy, the one that bothered me the most, and I tried to express it the best I could in the campaign, was the Bush doctrine, you know, about the American exceptionalism and our obligation to have preemptive war and do it unilaterally, not only unilaterally without other countries, which doesn't disturb me as much as individually doing it without the consent of the people.
And that to me was a major thing, and that goes on.
But I can't see that it's likely that even if you have a president well-intended, you're not going to get the Senate and the House or the courts ever to go along with trying to get rid of these common laws.
Well, look, how when you were trying to argue what the unintended, unintended consequences of the Patriot Act might be, you said that they're going to use some of the spying authority to spy on us.
And they said, oh, you're crazy.
You're so exaggerating.
This is ridiculous.
And guess what?
But even some bills back in, you know, into the teens during World War I, the Espionage Act, it sat around for a long time.
It wasn't used.
So it was sitting there.
It had enabled presidents to use it.
But it's this current president who is supposed to be perceived as sort of pro-civil liberties and pro-peace, which is complete nonsense.
He uses the Espionage Act to arrest journalists and dampen the enthusiasm of report and look at how our whistleblowers get treated.
You know, they don't get treated very well.
But there are a few things, and maybe you can add to this list if you think of something that we have to think about in the future.
What will presidents do?
Right now, we're still allowed to own guns, but I think we have basically we have registration.
You know, you just don't walk in the store and buy a gun.
So we have registration.
I don't, I see, I know that they'll want to do it, and this president would like to do it.
But the big question is, will they do it, and can they do it, or will that be crossing the line?
Also, the confiscation of gold, they've done that in the past.
They did that back in the 30s.
It took a long time to re-legalize gold.
And now with the financial crisis on our doorstep, would they do it again?
I don't think that's going to happen.
But what I fear is that they make gold worth a lot less and they'll criminalize you for using it and not selling it to the government.
So if gold is $1,200 an ounce and you have to pay a tax of $1,000, then you can cash in your gold and you say, oh, you own your gold.
See, that to me is a possibility.
And of course, it's guns and gold, and guns protect you as an individual.
Supposedly, you know, the founders thought against your one's own government.
And of course, the gold protects you against a government-run crooked monetary system.
And we've done a program on holding up cash.
And that is an attack on personal liberty.
And there's a strong attack on private property, too, with asset forfeiture and the regulations.
I mean, just think of all the regulations the executive branch can write.
Congress passes vague laws and then the thousands and thousands of pages of regulation.
So I'll tell you what, I think our executive branch has been enabled with way too much power.
And I remain fearful that somebody will be overly energetic in using those powers as our conditions get worse.
So I want to thank everybody today for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
There's no doubt in my mind that we face serious times ahead because there's way too much powers already given to the executive branch.
They have been enabled to be a literal dictator.
I don't think we're going to have the dictators that came about in the 20th century, but it'll be a softer form.
But nevertheless, it may be more seductive for that reason.
The things that I just talked about with Daniel, people rationalize and say, well, they're not so bad.
They're not so bad.
They serve a real purpose.
So if the conditions get bad and people become fearful and they listen to the propaganda, that could be every bit as dangerous than somebody standing up and say, I'm going to be your dictator and this is it.
I want this one last law passed that ordains me as the dictator of America and the dictator of the world.
It's not going to quite happen.
But these powers right now should wake up every American citizen and say, what should the role of government be and what should the role of the federal government be?
And it certainly should not be the endorsement of the kind of system that we have allowed to grow over these past hundred years and the last 15 or 20 years has gotten much worse.
So, the principle of liberty is the answer to our problems.
The Constitution can be very helpful, and that is to limit the scope of government.
That is the only argument.
What is the proper role for government?
And it's not to manage our lives, it's not to pretend they can run the economy, it's not to counterfeit the money, and it's not to have an empire and run the world.
That is a disastrous course, and the worse the conditions get, the more the people are probably going to demand, I want somebody to take care of me, I want to be safe and secure, and that's the only way we can do it.
So, we have to keep our eye on the ball, and the eye on the ball is the individual liberty that comes to us in a natural way.
And governments are there, if for anything, to protect that liberty, but not to pretend they can take care of us from cradle to grave.