Wow, a lot of great feedback here. I will attempt to respond to KyivAndrew first, and the human being.
With regards to foreign policy:
I am in no way an isolationist. I believe in active, positive engagement with other nations in cultural, religious, and trade matters. I do not believe a nation needs to be actively seeking to plunder and rampage in vain pursuit of imperial nation-building in order to be considered open to the world! Yes, we should withdraw from all fronts of occupation and bring our troops home where they belong, including from Iraq and Afghanistan. We should learn from our mother country, Great Britain, and realize these pursuits are in vain, and we cannot nor should we force the world to be remade in our image. Our patriotism calls us to love America for who she is, and not for the glorious, pompous image that some seem to want to make her into. As Chesterton stated in a famous rebuke of Rudyard Kipling, “He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.” The same is true of our country. We should not love her because she is great, but because she is our mother.
No, I do not believe the Cold War was necessary, and I feel that it has in fact damaged our pursuit of liberty and cultural growth, since it emphasized a backward-looking jingoism and authoritarian attitude which persists today. As William F. Buckley stated “We should accept a totalitarian beuracracy within our shores,” in order to win the Cold war. This attitude was and is tragically common, and we have unfortunately become beholden to the idea that America must not be America in order to win. We should see that this is a self-defeating attitude and we shall instead become the very enemy we despise.
I accept the analysis of Mises and Rothbard regarding the Cold War, that the Soviet system, being an economic basketcase and inherently weak and unworkable, would have inevitably failed. It is only because we fueled its flames, with our foreign aid directly, and through the UN indirectly, as well as through our foreign policy, that we kept the Soviet Union alive long past its due date and it expired long after the foundation of its system had started to fade.
You may not have read any of my other posts, but consider myself a strong social conservative in the sense that I feel that only traditional morality can sustain a free society, and, as John Adams put it: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” I agree with this sentiment 100% I feel what few legitimate regulations the government can put on moral conduct (as the Church says the State may, though not necessarily, excercise this power) should be limited to counties and municipalities, no level higher. The principal of subsidiarity, emphasized by the Popes, should apply here. Abortion should always and everywhere be illegal, and this goes without question since it is murder. Other regulations may be questionable. St. Thomas Aquinas tell us there are limits to what the State can do to curb vice, and I agree.
Yes, the devolution of the State has, because of long permitted abuses of government power and growth, become a radical move. But as the founder of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch, said, “It is realistic to be fantastic.” I also have inspiration from St. Paul: “What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). However, unless the State is curbed, it will become even more the Leviathan of dread, for even America is not immune to human avarice and greed. If we wait until the evil falls upon us, it is already too late.
Regarding the Federal Reserve, actually if you study the history of banking prior to 1913, you will find a much more stable and less violent system than we have today. Of course, like any marketplace bad things happened, but nowhere near what we have now and never was there a Great Depression before the Fed. I would say the analysis on post-Fed economics shows far less stability, greater rises and falls, and a horrible devaluation of the dollar (1910 dollar worth a nickel today). For a good, easy source of info on this, look at Antony Sutton’s book “Gold vs. Paper.” This is a true classic. It is too complex for me to explain central banking, it pitfalls, and commodity-based currency here, but I may in a future post if interested.
With regard to Italy and Spain, I meant to make these comparisons only in the economic sphere, not the overall system. Thankfully, if we act now, we can still stop ourselves from becoming a full-fledged version of these countries in those eras, since we do still have many of the freedoms you mention.
Thank you for your questions, that is what these forums are all about, sharing ideas!
