Are There Any Candidates for President Who Want a Free Society?

Op-Ed by Scott Lazarowitz

There do not seem to be any candidates for President, or politicians in general, quite frankly, who are promoting freedom and an actual free society.

Besides Marianne Williamson (and potentially Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) on the Democrat side, joining The Donald and Nikki Haley on the Republican side is the young hotshot entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy who has announced his run for the dreaded 2024 Republican Presidential nomination. Ramaswamy is the other one with the high forehead, like Matt Gaetz. (Are they related?)

Ramaswamy is a conservative anti-woke America Firster. Therefore, I oppose his candidacy, and here’s why.

I agree with the anti-woke stuff, but Ramaswamy is just another American nationalist and militarist. In some of his interviews he seems to want to tell us what America is and what being American should be all about. But like most other politicians and nationalists he doesn’t really get what America is all about.

I am not an America Firster, I am a freedom firster. America was supposed to be about freedom, not about “Making America Great Again” (sic).

Freedom is based on the principles of self-ownership, the non-aggression principle, private property rights, freedom of association and freedom of non-association, freedom of thought and conscience.

Freedom before “America,” in my view.

This America First nationalism is just another form of collectivism, which is what nationalism is. It is group think.

In contrast, the American Revolutionary founders were not nationalists — the nationalists at that time were loyal to the British regime. That was their nation.

No, the Revolutionaries at that time were by and large individualists. They were secessionists.

And even among those Revolutionaries, the ones who wanted federalism and a central government were the ones who wanted a power structure over the states. The Anti-Federalists were the ones who believed much more in the individualist philosophy, private property and voluntary exchange.

So, in an interview with Axios, the young whippersnapper Ramaswamy promoted “a vision of American national identity that runs so deep that it dilutes these other religions, from wokism to Islamism.”

Yech. Are you sure you’re promoting nationalism and not fascism? This stuff sounds very authoritarian to me, getting into how people should think and view the world.

“American national identity” that is to “run deep”? As though the population needs to be brainwashed to believe in one particular “national identity”?

In the old days, pre-woke, the government schools indoctrinated the kids to have this sense of nationalism, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, i.e. Pledge of Obedience to the State is really what that is. In fact, the government school kids were made to have their arm stretched out toward the flag in the same way the Heil Hitlers were doing in Nazi Germany. But Americans were offended that “fascists” were copying them, so the American school bureaucrats got rid of that.

And because the schools are run by the government, the cultural Marxists have gotten in and turned the indoctrinated authoritarianism of nationalism into other forms of collectivist authoritarianism promoted by the wokesters.

And while Vivek Ramaswamy is for abolishing the federal Department of Education (sic), how about abolishing ALL local and state government Departments of Education, all government school committees and bureaus and all the involuntary tax-thefts that are used to run them?

Conservatives oppose privatizing all the government-run schools, because, deep down they are authoritarians, and they like the idea of government having authority over kids’ education. It’s just a matter of “electing the right people” to try to control the curriculum.

There should be NO government involvement in kids’ education whatsoever!

What this society was really meant to be is a free society, as mentioned above.

So, besides promoting freedom in education, the kind of candidate I can see supporting for President would promote the following:

Abolishing the IRS, income tax, and all other forms of involuntary income and wealth confiscation and redistribution.

I have already written how the involuntary income tax-thefts are the enablers of all the government criminality that exists today.

Such a new President would by Executive Order abolish such criminal thefts on Day One, and/or not enforce it, and pardon anyone who is harassed or arrested by any federal agent attempting to steal one’s own wealth or property.

You see, if a serious, popular candidate proposes such a moral correction from the federal regime in Washington, you will see parasite Congresscriminals whining, “But without the income tax-thefts, how will we be able to fund all the horrible programs and intrusions that we inflict on the American people on a daily basis? Obviously American workers will not voluntarily give us the money because no one in his right mind would voluntarily pay to fund such crap! We MUST keep the income tax in place!!”

Sans involuntary tax-thefts, Americans would go back to paying for all of what they want or need voluntarily, trade among the people would all be voluntary, and charity would also all be voluntary. Like it used to be prior to the early 20th Century, which had been a time of the greatest increase in standard of living of all time up to that point.

If trades and transactions were made to be all voluntary, and all forms of stealing was made illegal, then illicit wealth accumulation (illicit because of being the receiver of stolen loot, i.e. from taxation) would also not exist. Except for outright robbers stealing from others, which would also be reduced because in a free society the people would not be disarmed and made defenseless by the government.

And when I refer to the illicit wealth accumulation i.e. from the stolen loot from taxation, I am more specifically referring to the “national defense” contractors and the pharmaceutical companies. Those two industries are the most troubling welfare recipients, in my view.

Abolish the immigration police state.

Like most “conservatives,” Ramaswamy supports the current police state socialist controls over the border, in which the central planners in Washington attempt to control the movements of millions of people, which is impossible!

And on the immigration issue, as I noted, Ramaswamy is like Trump and the other nationalist conservatives. They believe that the territory is all one big private club for which people have to pay their dues. “Citizens” own the territory and you can’t come in unless you have everybody’s (i.e. government bureaucrats) permission.

And you have to get the bureaucrats’ permission if you want to employ someone at “your” business. And I’m putting that in quotes because the businessman in America is not the ultimate owner of one’s business, the government is. If you have to get the government’s permission to hire someone, then that is an example of a socialist society. It certainly isn’t capitalism, or the free market.

In a free society that consists of a free market, the business owner is the ultimate decider of whom to hire at one’s own business. If you want to hire someone from Mexico, then you hire him (and take responsibility for the consequences, of course). If others disapprove of that, they don’t have to do business with you. That’s the American way.

And the anti-immigration crusaders say immigrants are coming into the country to “get on welfare” — but that’s a case for abolishing the welfare state, not imposing a police state on the border.

End the “War on Drugs.”

The anti-immigration crusaders also support the “War on Drugs,” which is for them a related issue. They are concerned about fentanyl being smuggled into the U.S. and killing people. As I have said before, drug prohibition is the main contributor to the fentanyl crisis.

The “War on Drugs” has resulted in more dead and miserable people than there has ever been from drugs themselves.

But authoritarians like the “War on Drugs,” a nanny state/police state, because they probably think that they are self-righteous and morally superior to those who want chemical enhancements to their lives, even though the anti-drug moralists need to have their BOOZE!!! But I digress.

Like Trump, Ramaswamy wants to militarize the War on Drugs. Take out those drug cartels, with “air strikes and drone strikes.” The prohibitionist authoritarians have been wanting to send the U.S. military into Mexico for years now. I’m sure using the military for non-defensive reasons will work in Mexico, just as that has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and on and on.

However, the drug cartels wouldn’t exist were it not for the U.S. government’s 60-year-long failed “War on Drugs.” Prohibition causes the black market to occur which causes higher profits which incentivizes low-lifes to exploit people’s need to get high so the low-lifes can profit from their addictions.

This kind of authoritarian prohibitionism is NOT the kind of society America was meant to be.

End the military worship and support the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

And then there’s the military worship. Conservatives tend to like men in uniforms, especially with an officialdom and authority with their positions, like government police and government military. Especially “our” military. Most conservatives and Republicans (and liberals and Democrats as well) support the criminal invasions overseas by the U.S. military sent over there by lying, corrupt Presidents in the name of this, that and the other thing.

But as Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation has pointed out, the American founders were wary of having a standing army. The founders knew that past governments had used their standing armies to impose tyranny on their own people, and that is why the Anti-Federalists insisted on writing the 2nd Amendment into the Bill of Rights.

We know the people on the left don’t like the idea of individuals and the general population exercising their 2nd Amendment right to be armed. But I am not sure that most conservatives really understand that right.

Because most conservatives are authoritarians, if given the choice between an armed civilian population and disarmed government, or a disarmed civilian population and an armed government, when push comes to shove most of them would feel compelled to choose the armed government and disarmed civilian population, in my view.

But if society is to ban any weapons, the only form of weaponry that should be banned is nuclear weapons, which can only be used in an indiscriminate way. See Murray Rothbard on that.

Decentralize, eventually abolish the U.S. government, start with 50 independent states and further decentralize from there.

We saw from the “Civil” War that Lincoln’s goal was not “freeing the slaves,” but preserving a union and centralized power structure, whether the population wanted it or not. Most conservatives and nationalists agree with this priority, and that is why many of them worship Lincoln.

So, like most Democrats and liberals, I don’t see most conservatives and Republicans as being particularly concerned about living in a truly free society. As long as we are living under the rule of a powerful government in Washington, that is what authoritarians care about.

Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and commentator. Please visit his blog.

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