Trump’s Absurd Claim that Americans Are Free from Government Coercion
Trump’s Absurd Claim that Americans Are Free from Government Coercion
Written by James Bovard Thursday February 7, 2019 This article is republished with permission from Ron Paul Institute
In
his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Trump received
rapturous applause from Republicans for his declaration: “America was
founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion,
domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.” But
this uplifting sentiment cannot survive even a brief glance at the
federal statute book or the heavy-handed enforcement tactics by federal,
state, and local bureaucracies across the nation.
In reality, the threat of government punishment permeates Americans’ daily lives more than ever before:
The number of federal crimes has increased from 3 in 1789 to more than
4000 today. Congress has criminalized “transporting alligator grass
across a state line; unauthorized use of the slogan “Give a hoot, don’t
pollute”; and “pretending to be a 4-H club member with intent to
defraud,” as the Buffalo Criminal Law Review noted.
Law
enforcement agencies arrested over 10 million people in 2017— roughly
three percent of the population. Trump momentarily noticed the existence
of government coercion last month when he complained about the FBI
using “29 people” and “armored vehicles” for the arrest of Roger Stone.
But SWAT teams conduct up to 80,000 raids a year, according to the ACLU,
mostly for drug arrests or search warrants. Many innocent people have
been killed in such raids.
Trump on Tuesday highlighted the
case of Alice Johnson, unjustly sentenced to life in prison for a
nonviolent drug offense. Trump’s commutation of her sentence is no
consolation to the targets of 1.6 million drug arrests in 2017 – and it
is not like those individuals showed up voluntarily at police stations
asking to be “cuffed-and-stuffed.” More people are arrested for
marijuana offenses than for all violent crimes combined, according to
FBI statistics.
No coercion? Tell that to the scores of
thousands of victims of asset forfeiture laws, which entitle law
enforcement to confiscate people’s cash, cars, and other property based
on the flimsiest accusation. Federal law-enforcement agencies seized
more property via asset forfeiture provisions in 2014 year than all the
burglars stole from homeowners and businesses nationwide.
Since
1970, the number of people confined in American prisons has increased
by over 500 percent. Almost 10 percent of all American males will end up
in prison at some point in their lives, according to an a 1997 Justice
Department report. More than 10 percent of black males aged 20 to 34
were behind bars as of 2006, according to the Journal of American
History.
Citizens and businesses pay more than $3 trillion in
federal taxes each year thanks largely to the array of threats and
penalties for non-compliance. Each week, scores of thousands of
Americans have their bank accounts seized by the IRS, or have IRS liens
put on their houses or land, or endure a tax audit, or receive notice of
penalties and demands for additional taxes. The number of different
penalties the IRS imposes on taxpayers has increased more than tenfold
since 1954.
No one has a good estimate of the number of
Americans who fall victim to arbitrary and capricious regulations by
federal agencies. When the Supreme Court heard the case of the
Agriculture Department’s dictates prohibiting raisin farmers from
selling much of their harvest in 2014, Justice Elena Kagan suggested
that the regime was “the world’s most outdated law.” But there are many
other senseless provisions that the media and the courts simply ignore.
Trump perpetuates one of Washington’s fondest myths – that the federal
government is not coercive unless the president or some agency boss
formally announces their plans to brutally punish some group without
cause. This notion is avidly supported and propagated by many of the
nation’s pundits and political scientists as a way to keep people paying
and obeying.
Trump followed his “no coercion here” assertion
with the following line: “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America
will never be a Socialist country.” Democrats responded with a stony if
not irritable silence. Perhaps the greatest irony in Washington is that
the people who distrust Trump the most are seeking to vastly increase
government power.
Democratic socialists have offered no
evidence that new federal takeovers of the economy would not produce the
same disasters as followed federal domineering of agriculture or the
mortgage industry. Instead, new economic prohibitions would create a
profusion of victims akin to Eric Garner, who was strangled in 2014 by a
New York City policeman after being apprehended selling individual
cigarettes without a license.
President Andrew Johnson rightly
observed in an 1868 message to Congress, “It may be safely assumed as an
axiom… that the greatest wrongs inflicted upon a people are caused by
unjust and arbitrary legislation.” But the federal statute book and
Code of Federal Regulations are Towers of Babble that contain vast
numbers of punitive provisions that unjustly ruin or blight other
Americans’ lives. Trust the Washington establishment to continue
pretending that “there is nothing to see here” in the continuing
automatic-pilot coercion of the nation.
Reprinted with permission from Mises.org.
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