by Harry Browne

Originally published July 4, 2003

Unfortunately, July 4th has become a day of deceit.

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress formally declared its independence from Great Britain. Thirteen years later, after a difficult war to secure that independence, the new country was open for business.

It was truly unique — the first nation in all of history in which the individual was considered more important than the government, and the government was tied down by a written Constitution.

It was the one nation where you could live your life secure in the knowledge that no one would ask for your papers, where you weren’t identified by a number, and where the government wouldn’t extort a percentage of your income as the price of holding a job.

And so each year July 4th has been a commemoration of the freest country in history.

But the America that’s celebrated no longer exists.

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Cross-posted from TenthAmendmentCenter.com

Editor’s Note: June 8, 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of a hero. Thomas Paine was actively involved in both the American and French Revolutions and is best known for his major works Common Sense, The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason.

But, Paine was more than just a pamphleteer for the cause of freedom. He was a serious political philosopher, as the following excerpt from The Rights of Man demonstrates. Continue reading →

A dramatic lowering of interest rates and massive government spending cannot improve the bottom line of the economy (the individual’s ability to produce more and better-quality goods). Such policies can only redistribute real wealth from wealth producers to wealth consumers. FULL ARTICLE

It’s all part of the war on depression, which is destined to be as successful as the war on drugs. But, hey, if it is a good investment, why not buy bailout bonds? Well, there’s a problem. The bonds represent credit extended to companies and projects that are proven market failures. Creating these bonds is a way of institutionalizing the principle of buying low and selling lower. FULL ARTICLE

This alternative vision sees America’s past as a series of betrayals by political leaders of all major parties, in which the liberal ideals on which this country was founded have been gradually abandoned and replaced by precisely the sorts of illiberal ideals that America officially deplores. In effect, say Howard Zinn and a growing chorus of others, we have become the people our founding fathers warned us (and tried to protect us) against. FULL ARTICLE

A State-run gold standard occurs when the State controls by force the monetary arrangements. States have done this in all sorts of ways and with many degrees of control. Money then becomes, wholly or in part, a product of the State, not solely of the free market. Monetary freedom is suppressed. FULL ARTICLE

The direct cause of soaring prices is printing too much paper mon­ey; the direct cure is to stop printing it. The indirect cause of inflation is government over­spending and unbalancing the bud­get; the indirect cure is to stop overspending and to balance the budget.  FULL ARTICLE

Despite Congressman Barney Frank’s blubbering insistence that our nation’s current financial mess is a “new phenomena,” today’s “housing/credit/confidence crisis” is anything but. Our ancestors had already seen all the broken dreams and ignorant greed surfing high on a wave of paper money and hollow credit – more than once before. The America of 1819 and the financial panic its citizens experienced was only the first of what is America’s true national pastime: speculative mania. FULL ARTICLE

An income tax is inconsistent with the historical definition of freedom. Today in America government has a claim on every person’s labor, just as feudal lords, the government of that time, had claims on the labor of serfs and nineteenth century plantation owners had on slaves. FULL ARTICLE

The best way to fight violent drug cartels would be to pull the rug out from under their profits by bringing these transactions out into the sunlight.  People who, unwisely, buy drugs would hardly opt for the back alley criminal dealer as a source, if a coffeehouse-style dispensary was an option.   FULL ARTICLE