America: A ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ Nation
America died over a century ago in 1913, but we can restore what we lost if we understand the root causes
“Prior to 1913, there was no federal income tax. The states had rights and representation in Washington, D.C., there was no Federal Reserve Bank, and the federal government lived under the enumerated powers afforded within the U.S. Constitution. What a difference one year can make....”
“Prior to the enactment of the income tax, most citizens were able to pursue their private economic affairs without the direct knowledge of the government. Individuals earned their wages, businesses earned their profits, and wealth was accumulated and dispensed with little or no interaction with government entities.”—J.B. Williams
Today, Dec. 23, is the 109th anniversary of one of the worst crimes in American history. It is the day Woodrow Wilson, one of the worst if not the worst presidents in American history, signed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.
The creation of the Federal Reserve may be the biggest destroyer of what America was. But the thing is, 1913 brought us three death blows to the nation as that was the same year as the 16th and 17th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
The reality is, the America of the Founding Fathers is dead. It’s still propped up as an illusion that it still exists, hence the title of this piece.
What the three death blows of 1913 represent are the three “viruses/diseases” that killed America. The 16th Amendment killed the Constitution. The 17th Amendment killed the Republic and gave us the tyranny of the majority, democracy. And the Federal Reserve killed our free-market economy in favor of fascism.
Now, I’m open to debate about when the America of the Founders died. The fact is, we can find unconstitutional acts among basically every president. George Washington remains my favorite president, but even he wasn’t immune from violation his oath.
However, I think the America of the Founding Fathers was still well intact. Yes, there were violations. But we are fallen people, and there’s never perfection.
So, to me it’s indisputable that 1913 was the year of the death blows. But maybe America didn’t die that year. After all, viruses and diseases don’t necessarily kill people right away, and people can be cured. Maybe America died under FDR and the rise of the welfare state. Maybe it was the rise of the entitlement state under LBJ. Maybe it was the rise of the Military Industrial Complex under basically every president of the last century. Maybe it was the rise of the Medical Industrial Complex under Trump.
It really doesn’t matter when it officially died. But regardless, 1913 played a consequential year in the death of this nation. Paul Rosenberg wrote in 2013:
“America took its fatal blow in 1913, one hundred years ago; it just hasn’t hit the ground yet. This is a slow process, but it’s actually fast compared to the Romans. It took them several centuries to collapse.”
“The confusing thing about our current situation is that America – and by that I mean the noble America that so many of us grew up believing was real – has long been poisoned. Its liver, kidneys, and spleen have all stopped functioning. Its heart beats slowly and irregularly. But it still stands on its feet and presents itself as alive to all those who would let their eyes fool them.”
“And I’m not without sympathy for those who want to believe. They find themselves in a world where politics is almighty, and where their comfort, prosperity, and perhaps their survival all hang in a delicate balance. They don’t want to upset anything, and questioning the bosses is a good way to get yelled at.”
“But just because someone wants to believe doesn’t make it so. We are not children and we are not powerless. We Producers should never be intimidated by those who live at our expense. So let’s start looking at the facts.”
What America has become is what Donald Jeffries describes as “America 2.0,” or the “Illegitimate Bastard Child America.” America and its institutions abuse the citizenry on a daily basis. We cannot trust the institutions at all. Jeffries writes:
“As for the government, and the law, and the corporate world, and the entertainment world, and the legal system- you have failed us miserably. Would you trust a parent who had abused you for years? You have abused the common people. You don’t deserve our respect. If we could unplug from your rotten system, and not be thrown in one of your dreadful prisons, we’d do it. We are forced to pay tribute to a system we despise, and participate in the charade. I still think we need some kind of order. But we don’t need this criminal racket that you’ve created.”
Why is it important to recognize the death of America? Well, we need to live in reality if we ever want to restore what we’ve lost.
I’ve alluded to this before, but one of the biggest lies pushed is that America is a free country, built on free markets. That’s not to say that that was not the original intent of the Founding Fathers, but you have to take the rose-colored glasses off. America has become a nation of dependents, and we’ve been trained to accept this new world government.
It is conservatives, of course, who mostly have those rose-colored glasses on. If you keep going on trying to conserve what we have, then you want to conserve fascism. I want to restore the free markets and the Constitution that we lost a long time ago. That requires knowing that we lost it.
As Caitlin Johnstone wrote, “the biggest obstacle to real freedom is the belief that we already have it.” Johnstone writes:
“If you live in one of the so-called free democracies of the western world, the worst mistake you can make is to buy into the hype. To believe you are a free individual in a nation that respects and protects your freedom and individuality.”
“Whenever I broach this subject I always get a deluge of objections along the lines of, ‘Well I’d much rather live where I live than under an authoritarian regime like in Iran or China! You would never be allowed to criticize your rulers the way you do if you lived in one of those places!’”
“And I always want to ask them, what do you think drove you to make that objection? Why are you falling all over yourself to defend your country and the people who rule over you, while condemning foreign countries that your own government happens to dislike? Could it be because that’s how you’ve been trained to behave from a young and impressionable age, and that your objection is arising from the same place as a cult member’s objections to criticisms of their cult?”
“Because that’s ultimately what holds power structures together in the US-aligned nations of the global north: indoctrination. The same thing used to program religious extremists and cult members. The only difference is that rather than scripture and religious leaders, the means of indoctrination is school, mainstream media, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation.”
“Without mass-scale indoctrination into power-serving narratives about nation, government and world, the power structures which rule over us would immediately collapse. People would cease voluntarily behaving in ways that benefit those power structures, cease acknowledging their government as a legitimate authority, cease pretending elections are real procedures for determining their government’s actions, cease believing they’re receiving truthful information from the mass indoctrination media, and use the power of their numbers to organize in ways which benefit the many rather than an elite few.”
“This is what one is defending when one objects to being told that they don’t live in a free society. Their objection is itself the product of the reality they are denying.”
“In reality we are not truly freer under our rulers than people are under the governments that our rulers hate. Sure, people can post criticisms of their elected officials online, but those criticisms will be dismissed and ignored by everyone who matters, they are being directed at political figureheads with no real power, and they are coming from minds that have been deeply indoctrinated into power-serving worldviews. Your rulers do not care if you’re a Democrat who hates Republicans or a Republican who hates Democrats, as long as you’re plugged in to one of the authorized reality tunnels.”
The 16th Amendment
“The power to tax is the power to destroy.”—John Marshall
The first death blow to America was the 16th Amendment, known as the income tax amendment. It was ratified on Feb. 3, 1913. It states:
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
It is true that the income tax had been tried by a few presidents in the past, but they were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
But with the 16th Amendment, it suddenly became “legal” for the government to seize a portion of our income every year.
The sad things is, the American people bought the lies of their government. As Rosenburg noted in his piece, Americans were told the income tax would never be more than 2%. But the American people never got that in writing. Instead, we get an amendment that allows the government the “right” to take 100% of our income, if it so chooses to do so.
Paul Harvey noted this in his 1965 broadcast “Freedom to Chains.”
Harvey said:
“At Runnymede the Magna Carta was handed to King John on the end of a sword denying to royalty the right of unlimited taxation. Yet, you know it was for us, the American People, to become the first in recorded history ever voluntarily to surrender our rights to private property? Oh, yes we did. With an innocent sounding Constitutional Amendment, the Sixteenth, which says that ‘Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived’ and we forgot to put any limit to the extent to which we could tax ourselves. Conceivably we could be taxed out of all private property. We could be taxed not 70%, 80%, 90% but at 100%. We could be awakened one morning and find the government owns the farm, and the house, and the car, and has a mortgage on the church, legally. Historically, when any nation has taxed its people more than 25% of their national income, initiative was destroyed and that nation was headed for economic eclipse. Presently (1965) the American People are being taxed 33% of their total income.”
Harvey added:
“At first there appears to be nothing wrong asking government to perform some extra service for you, but if you ask government for extra services government, in order to perform its increasing function, has to get bigger, right? And as government gets bigger, in order to support its increasing size it has to, what? Tax the individual more, so the individual gets littler. And to collect the increased taxes requires more tax collectors so the government gets bigger and in order to pay the additional tax collectors, it has to tax the individual more so the government gets bigger and the individual get littler and the government gets bigger and the individual gets littler, until the government is all powerful and the individual is hardly anything at all. The government is all powerful and the people are cattle.”
Of course, nobody likes to be taxed. But the 16th Amendment was even more insidious than taxation. It was the first time the Constitution recognized a “right” of government.
Governments do not have rights. Governments have obligations and authorities. In America, those obligations were to protect our individual liberty, and the authorities were very minimal. The government had authority to setup courts, write a few laws (not the gargantuan legal code we have today), etc.
Instead, the 16th Amendment gave the government the ultimate authority to take the income of its people. It ultimately laid waste to what the U.S. Constitution was about by taking away rights from the people and giving it to government. It turned the people into slaves.
The 17th Amendment
Something that really ticks me off is that the word “democracy” has some positive connotations in our society. It is, of course, the tyranny of the majority. Yet, left and right agree, they love democracy.
The 17th Amendment, ratified on April 8, 1913, killed the Republic and gave us democracy. It states:
“The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.”
It is important to note, the 17th Amendment would have killed the Constitution had the 16th Amendment not beaten it to it. The 17th Amendment creates a big contradiction in the U.S. Constitution which still states in Article I, Section 3:
“The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.”
So, the Constitution still states that the State Legislatures will choose the Senators, but also states, since April 8, 1913, that the people will choose the Senators.
Here’s the thing, the Founding Fathers had good reasons for the way it set up the government. It recognized the need for a separation of powers. The thing is, we generally only think of the separation of powers between executive, legislative and judicial branches. But, there was also supposed to be a separation of powers between the federal, state and local governments.
Each level of government was supposed to be separate. Today, we no longer have any local control. We have one big Leviathan beast government centrally planned in Washington, D.C.
And the 17th Amendment is a big reason why. And it was because of the lie that the so-called “right to vote” is sacrosanct. It’s not. In fact, there was never a “right” to vote. It was a privilege.
Our rights, given to us by God and not government, are best stated in the Declaration of Independence being the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” or “property” as it previously stated. The Bill of Rights gives us a little more detail on those rights.
But people really think that voting is the big one, the one we should all cherish. I’d give up my “right” to vote in a heartbeat if I knew it meant my right to worship, speak, defend, etc. were intact.
Thomas DiLorenzo explained more on how the 17th Amendment destroyed the Republic. DiLorenzo wrote:
“This was the original design of the founding fathers; U.S. senators were not directly elected by the voting public until 1914. Thus, S.J. Res. 35 proposes a return to founding principles and is therefore a most revolutionary idea. A good overview of the history of the Seventeenth Amendment is Ralph A. Rossum’s book, Federalism, the Supreme Court, and the Seventeenth Amendment. Rossum correctly points out that the system of federalism or "divided sovereignty" that the founding fathers created with the Constitution was never intended to be enforced by the Supreme Court alone. Congress, the president, and most importantly, the citizens of the states, were also to have an equal say on constitutional matters.”
“The citizens of the states were to be represented by their state legislatures. As Roger Sherman wrote in a letter to John Adams: ‘The senators, being . . . dependent on [state legislatures] for reelection, will be vigilant in supporting their rights against infringement by the legislative or executive of the United States.’…”
“State legislatures did not hesitate to instruct U.S. senators on how to vote. In fact, the very first instruction that was given to them was to meet in public! The Virginia and Kentucky Resolves of 1798 (see William Watkins, Reclaiming the American Revolution) were the work of state legislatures that instructed their senators to oppose the Sedition Act, which essentially made it illegal to criticize the federal government….”
“The founding fathers understood that it would never be in the Supreme Court’s self-interest to protect states’ rights. Rossum quotes the anti-federalist writer ‘Brutus’ on this point: It would never be in the self-interest of the Court to strike down federal laws trenching on the inviolable and residuary sovereignty of the states, because every extension of power of the general legislature, as well as of the judicial powers, will increase the powers of the courts.”
“‘Brutus’ also pointed out that with increased powers of the courts would likely come increased compensation for federal judges….”
“The direct election of senators was said to be more democratic, and therefore would reduce, if not end, corruption. There was a good bit of corruption involved in the election of senators, but the source of the corruption was: democracy!”
The Fed
The Federal Reserve turned America’s free-market system into a fascist economy/government. It is neither “federal” nor a “reserve.” It is a quasi “private” bank that gets to manipulate our purchasing power at will. It is what attacked the government and corporations at the hip.
It, too, contradicts the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 states:
“The Congress shall have Power… To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.”
Additionally, Article I, Section 10 states:
“No State shall… make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”
Yet, the Federal Reserve told us gold and silver are not money, but fiat paper currency is. Of course, gold and silver remain money and fiat is just currency. But we accept the lies of the Fed.
What has the Fed done to the purchasing power of the dollar? Courageous Lion 380 has a graphic, among others, showing the purchasing power of the dollar dropping to just 5 cents from 1913 to 2013:
Proponents of the Fed tell us gold is a “barbarous relic,” which was coined by John Maynard Keynes who is the father of our perverted monetary, economic system we have today. Bot left and right submit to Keynesian economics.
George Ford Smith writes of the lie of gold being a “barbarous relic”:
“One of history’s greatest ironies is that gold detractors refer to the metal as the barbarous relic. In fact, the abandonment of gold has put civilization as we know it at risk of extinction.”
“The gold coin standard that had served Western economies so brilliantly throughout most of the nineteenth century hit a brick wall in 1914 and was never able to recover, or so the story goes. As the Great War began, Europe turned from prosperity to destruction, or more precisely, toward prosperity for some and destruction for the rest. The gold coin standard had to be ditched for such a prodigious undertaking.”
“If gold was money, and wars cost money, how was this even possible?”
“First, people were already in the habit of using money substitutes instead of money itself—banknotes instead of the gold coins they represented. People found it more convenient to carry paper around in their pockets than gold coins. Over time the paper itself came to be regarded as money, while gold became a clunky inconvenience from the old days.”
“Second, banks had been in the habit of issuing more bank-notes and deposits than the value of the gold in their vaults. On occasion, this practice would arouse public suspicion that the notes were promises the banks could not keep. The courts sided with the banks and allowed them to suspend note redemption while staying in business, thus strengthening the government-bank alliance. Since the courts ruled that deposits belonged to the banks, bankers could not be accused of embezzlement. The occasional bank runs that erupted were interpreted as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people lined up to withdraw their money because they believed their bank was insolvent, the bank soon would be. People had no idea their banks were loaning out most of their deposits. They did not know fractional reserve banking, a form of counterfeiting, was the norm.”
“Gold coin redemption requirements put limits on fractional reserve banking. Such limits were not welcomed by banks. Since banks could loan to the government, limitations also capped government spending, so the government did not like the limitations of gold coin redemption either.”
The Federal Reserve tells us that fallen men are to be trusted to set interest rates rather than natural force. Jeff Deist writes:
“Once we accept the axiom that humans prefer present consumption (all things equal), it follows that any ‘natural’ rate of interest must be at least nominally positive. Nobody will forego consumption and lend money—with the attendant risks—to be paid back less.”
“Thus, in the Austrian framework, interest is a ratio representing the discount (which arises in the market economy) for future goods against present goods. Like all goods and services, interest is about want satisfaction. Interest is rooted in time, in the intertemporal preferences of saver and borrowers. And these preferences, left unmolested by fiscal or central bank policy, manifest as natural or ‘originary’ interest rates. Interest operates as a category of human action, under the axiom (again, all things equal) that humans prefer present to future goods….”
“Today’s central bankers may scoff at the idea of a ‘natural’ interest rate. But only Father Time helps us cut through the policy nonsense and understand interest rates conceptually—as a noble and necessary market phenomenon. Time ravages all of us, and thus we must consider the heavy price of waiting until tomorrow for what we desire today.”
The Fed turns savings into a negative when savings are required for a strong real economy. Frank Shostak writes:
“Savings, however, are not about money but about consumer goods produced in excess of the consumption of these goods. For instance, if a baker produces ten loaves of bread and consumes two loaves his savings are eight loaves of bread.”
“Now, in order to enhance his oven the baker hires the services of a technician. The baker pays the technician with the saved bread. The saved bread enables the technician to maintain his life and wellbeing while he is busy improving the oven. With an improved oven, the baker can increase the production of bread.”
“We can derive from this that the producers of consumer goods by exchanging these goods for the goods of other producers can supply them with the means of support. The saved consumer goods support individuals in all the stages of production. From the producers of consumer goods to the producers of raw materials, the producers of tools and machinery, and all the other intermediate stages of production.”
“If the production of consumer goods were to increase, all other things being equal, the pool of savings also increases. This permits a further enhancement and the expansion of the infrastructure.”
“An expanded pool of savings allows individuals to introduce new stages of production, which prior to the expansion in the pool of savings could not be undertaken. This in turn permits the production of a larger quantity and a greater variety of consumer goods.”
“In addition, once there has been an adequate increase in the pool of consumer goods, individuals would then be in a position to aim at further enhancing their wellbeing by seeking things such as entertainment and service-related products—such as medical treatment etc.”
Ultimately, the Fed is against the people and for a small group of elitists. No wonder the Fed is today blaming people for price inflation and not its massive currency printing.
Although the Fed didn’t come into existence until 1913, it was years of plotting outside of public view like the meeting at Jekyll Island in 2010 “where J.P. Morgan had a home, as did William Rockefeller, John D. Senior’s brother, was where the secret meeting — first names only — was held in 1910 to plan the Federal Reserve System,” wrote Gary North.
It actually started even earlier than that. David Knight explained in a 2013 piece called “It’s a Wonderful Lie” where he uses “It’s a Wonderful Life” to show how the big banks used panics to destroy local banks.
Knight said:
“Over the last 100 years, the Federal Reserve has created bubbles and burst them, enslaved us with debt and destroyed our purchasing power with inflation. Yes, it’s been a wonderful lie for the bankers. There are striking parallels in Frank Capra’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ to the lies and tricks that real bankers used to create the Federal Reserve. Human nature doesn’t change, and the greedy elite of 1913 and 2013 look and act a lot like Potter, the banker in the movie. And many Americans are left like George Bailey, staring into the abyss as their dreams collapse and they face financial ruin.”
The Federal Reserve’s creation was spurred by six years of “fraud, fear and manipulation,” Knight said. He noted the panic of 1907 that triggered rumors of bank insolvencies. And that panic was manipulated and orchestrated by the big bankers, like J.P. Morgan, who were the beneficiaries of the Federal Reserve system.
Charles Lindbergh, Sr. warned about it:
“To cause high prices, all the Federal Reserve Board will do will be to lower the rediscount rate..., producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market; then when ... business men are adjusted to these conditions, it can check ... prosperity in mid-career by arbitrarily raising the rate of interest. It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by a greater rate variation and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down. This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any Government that ever existed. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money. They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage. They also know when to stop panic. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them when they control finance.”
Lindberg also said:
“This [Federal Reserve Act] establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President (Woodrow Wilson) signs this bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized.... the worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill.”
The Solution
Of course, we can start with repealing the unconstitutional amendments and ending the Fed.
Ultimately, the biggest thing is the people desiring freedom again and personal liberty. That is where freedom and personal responsibility intersect. Of course, most of us like the idea of freedom. Few want the responsibility that comes from it.
The biggest thing is repenting to God as Knight stated: “Ultimately it is God that changes minds and changes heart. God hates oppression, and we can and should confidently pray that He stops it.”
Yes, the America of the Founders is dead. But it can be revived if we tap into that American spirit of independence that we lost long ago. I do not want to conserve what America is today. I want to restore what America was at its founding.
Maybe America can be the Prodigal Son. But that takes repentance and knowledge of how far we’ve fallen.