(continued)
Then there’s monetary policy, the means by which the government taxes when the legislative process seems too cumbersome. Thus the Federal Reserve injected $38 billion one day, another $70 billion the next, and established a $50 billion swap line with other central banks the next. Now that’s power. Not all of this new money will make its way into the economy; at least, that should be the hope. To destroy the purchasing power of the dollar in response to the destruction of the US financial district is a heck of "response" to terrorism.
As for the draft, someone please explain how conscripting America’s young men and women into the military – forcibly taking them away from their jobs and schools – is going to prevent more attacks like we saw September 11. It’s a power grab, of course. The government is using this occasion to do what it could only have dreamed of doing last week.
Civil liberties are already being curtailed. The government’s invasive "carnivore" software was already being shopped around the nation’s leading Internet Service Providers, to permit the feds to spy on all email. Until now, the ISPs had resisted. But in the aftermath of the new Bush "antiterrorism" act just passed by the Senate, they will not be allowed to say no.
As regards the mainstream print media, they are their usual selves: the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are both whooping it up for bombing anything and everything, on the theory that yet another display of rampant imperialism will deter future attacks and not actually have the reverse effect. By pursuing this course, we are made less secure, of course.
What, then, should the government do in this time of crisis? Less, not more. It was the US foreign policy of unyielding empire that incited these attacks in the first place. It’s hard to say when the turning point was. It might have been 1990, when the US gave tacit approval to Iraq to invade Kuwait and then bombed Iraq back into the stone age for doing so. It might have been the war on Serbia, or the bombs in Sudan, or the destruction of the Chinese embassy, or any number of other foreign adventures.
Most likely, the turning point was May 12, 1996, when Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the UN, explained to Lesley Stahl of CBS that 500,000 dead Iraqi children, killed by US sanctions, was morally justified to get Saddam. "We think the price is worth it," were her exact words, words that were mostly unreported here but which rang out throughout the Arab world. She was then made Secretary of State. That was five years ago. We continue to bomb Iraq, often on a daily basis, and the sanctions are still on. We should not do unto others what we do not want them to do unto us.
There’s never a good time to give up liberty. But when everyone else is calling for despotism to fight despotism, it’s the best time to stand up and say: We will not be moved. We need more, not less, liberty.
September 15, 2001
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.
Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com