The Gazette: With the same Presidential Propaganda as Always

[originally published in The Voluntaryist, by Mike Morris]

In a totally lame President’s Day piece last month by The Gazette’s editorial board titled “The President defines the country” (see: gazette.com/article/1597262), we’re told “it has become a time to honor the office, our nation’s history and patriotism.” Contra The Gazette, there’s nothing honorific about the Presidency, as anyone should see why upon the advent of Trump.

Of first mention, others around the country were protesting “Not My President’s Day.” This sounds good, but sadly the participants, that is, those who oppose Donald Trump, don’t oppose the Presidency or the system on principle; rather they oppose only the current President. They didn’t get “their guy” into office, so now oppose it. They would be content, of course, if the establishment choice, Hillary Clinton, had taken the post.

In fact, I’d argue that if you believe in the system, period, e.g., you identify as a democratic-socialist, then you’re a Trump supporter. Funny enough, these people adopt the insane logic that “if you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Disagreeing with the system myself, however, Trump won according to the rules. Their only comeback was to question the electoral college; something that wouldn’t have been done, if say, Bernie Sanders had taken the electors though lost the popular vote.

A collection of essays compiled into a huge book, “Reassessing the Presidency”, published by the Mises Institute, might offer renewed hope for how the people should view the Presidency: as a dangerous rise in executive power, away from the original intentions of the executive branch of government, that has come at the expense of liberty.

After the typical run-down of George Washington, we’re given by The Gazette a rosy picture of Lincoln as being a President who leaves behind a great legacy; Republicans today, too, are very much favorable of Lincoln as they are Ronald Reagan, another big-government President despite rhetoric otherwise. The article says of the latter, that he “changed the world more than many presidents.”

Never mind that Lincoln was a complete statist and perhaps one of the worse Presidents, having suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus; being a President that believed in political centralization of power; nationalization of the money and banking system; state-subsidized railroads; high-tariffs; and had hundreds of thousands of men slaughtered in the name of “keeping the Union together.”

Lincoln didn’t “save the Union”, as popular acceptance goes; if anything he ended the Union as a voluntary association of states that were free to leave at any time. And as American abolitionist Lysander Spooner puts it:

“Still another of the frauds of these men is, that they are
now establishing, and that the war was designed to establish,
"a government of consent." The only idea they have ever
manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this --
that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”

So much for a “voluntary government” that allegedly has the “consent of the governed.” If the government ever did, then certainly it doesn’t today. No present, living men have agreed to be bound by the scribblings on paper of past-men; only “social contract” theorists, forever excusing anything the government does to us, would dissent from this. Another argument made is there would be endless war between the States. But isn’t it that we’ve been collectivized under one government today that there’s essentially a civil war brewing? Since decentralization of power weakens states, among other things there’s no reason to accept the thesis that what “we” would have been left with is two warring States forever. In fact, what we need today is a separation. The insane belief should really be the one that 320 million people should all be ruled by the same central, Federal government that makes our laws.

For a more accurate portrait of Lincoln, readers might turn to Tom DiLorenzo’s “The Real Lincoln”, who makes all the aforementioned arguments that Lincoln is not the hero most think he is.

Propagated by The Gazette here are the enduring myths of past Presidents that unfortunately don’t die with them. Any “democratic socialist” friends would agree with the following assessment as presented by our knowledgeable local paper that keeps us Presidentially informed.

According to The Gazette, we’re supposed to believe that the near-fascist Franklin D. Roosevelt, who put Japanese-Americans into internment camps because they looked like the enemy, mind you, was one of the “great men”, as they refer to them, who saved the country. In Reassessing the Presidency, Thomas DiLorenzo, an economics professor at Loyola University Maryland, teaches us the opposite—and the truth:

“The biggest economic myth of the twentieth century
is the notion that President Franklin D. Roosevelt's
unprecedented peacetime economic interventions
"got us out of the Great Depression"

So, again, contrary to The Gazette’s reporting, which tells us that “Franklin Roosevelt fostered the national government and agencies that still serve Americans today”, DiLorenzo also has this to say:

“FDR's economic policies made the Great Depression
much worse; caused it to last much longer than it otherwise
would have; and established interventionist precedents that
have been a drag on economic prosperity and a threat to
liberty to this day.”

Perhaps their editorial board attended the government-schools? Because “virtually every U.S. history book repeats this falsehood, despite readily-available evidence to the contrary.” (DiLorenzo)

The Depression didn’t end until after the War. There was the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1938, for instance. And “there were more than ten million unemployed Americans in 1938, compared to eight million in 1931, the year before Roosevelt's election.” (DiLorenzo)

Deliberately or not, these falsehoods are repeated by the second largest paper in Colorado; an unfortunate thought seeing that it’s where tens of thousands of people receive their news and regurgitate it to their children.

The President-worship continues. Not to our surprise, moreover, the rulers are also referred to as “our leaders.” And even more ignorant of reality, among the disgraces against liberty perpetrated by the government, that of “the free world.”

So, no, Gazette, Donald Trump doesn’t define me. He doesn’t represent me; no President does. The Presidency is a joke and it always has been. For anyone to be surprised that Trump is “at the helm of the ship of state”, as they put it, only shows how short the public memory is to forget about the unashamed clown that was George W. Bush; not to mention the political Left is near-silent when the guy (Obama) who does the bombing calls himself a “Democrat” instead.

Take any future “President’s Day” to honor yourself, as the owner of your body and your life, rather than to bow and look to those who wish to own you and control your property as people whom one should emulate. Forget mainstream papers