America and Ike picked up some different ideas while fighting the Nazis- Not all were good

I am glad you agree that the Pennsylvania Assembly should not cede more power to the English governor, and defend the Pennsylvania colonists by their own means. But I am not sure what is essentially a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania Assembly and the English governor(as well as the English Crown & the Penn family in England who would be paying much of the proposed tax) has much bearing on the matter at hand.

So whether you are paying taxes set by the English, or you are paying taxes set by the Pennsylvania Assembly, you are still paying taxes.

Since we are tossing out Franklin quotes
Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

 

The threat was real but the planet would not be destroyed.

 

Here's an oft cited Ben Franklin mis-quote that I think is thought provoking and righteous in concept; "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy". I like it, even if he didn't coin the phrase.

That Benjamin Franklin quote that USMCPrice offered up to the discussion ("Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety") materialized with a vengeance in the 1930s when the German voters gave Hitler and the Nazis total power. Millions of innocents paid for that one many times over. Who says voting doesn't matter eh?

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www.whale.to/b/cold_war_hoax_h.html Check this site out

 

archive.lewrockwell.com/brennan/brennan19.1.html This one is better

 

And? There's nothing inherently anti-liberty about taxes. The issue was paying taxes while not being properly represented in Parliament. Pennsylvanians were surely represented in taxes set by the Pennsylvania Assembly.

 

Except the Penns were not Pennsylvanians, they were English, living in England. They were disputing the power of the Pennsylvania Assembly to tax their properties, and here they were supported by the English governor. However, the Penn family had also offered a cash to help finance the defense of the colony, but the Assembly had to agree that it did not have the power to tax the Penns' land, and here is where the issue arises. The Pennsylvania Assemble has to give up some of it's rights to self government to "purchase" temporary safety

That being said, Franklin's quote is still open to many interpretations, several of which have very good arguments supporting their particular viewpoint. The entire response can be found here: http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/framedVolumes.jsp?vol=6&page=238a

 

It can be anti-liberty. There are a lot of insidious taxes and hidden taxes. Property taxes are a particularly nasty example in many areas. You may have a majority of people who don't own, that get to vote for "free stuff" to be paid via property taxes on the minority that do. There a myriad of hidden taxes that you aren't even aware of because they come in the price of goods and services. You didn't vote on them because they were simply imposed by some regulatory agency.

A tax that you get to vote for and that is applied equally across the population is a good tax. A tax where somebody else gets to vote to raise your taxes is anti-liberty. A tax imposed without a vote is anti-liberty.

 

So you are saying all federal taxes are "anti-liberty"?

 

If it was specifically voted on by congress, it's OK by me. But, you have a lot of taxes that are imposed by regulatory agencies with very little or no input at all. If it was up to me, every tax whether federal, state or local would have a specific up or down vote by that level of elected representatives. Instead, the power to impose fees, taxes and so on by some agency is often buried in the authority given to an agency. I don't like that.

 

Absolutely. Taxes should be voted on and set by those who are taxed. One of the basic tenets of liberty that were established by the Founding Fathers; taxation with representation.

 

I don't think the USA took a leaf out if Hitler's book as the OP suggests, the drift towards big government is a "natural process" that nobody has found a way to counter effectively yet,

Great thinkers have tried to tackle with the problem of limiting government power to what it needs and avoiding government "mission creep" but gave up in the end. Jefferson's " The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time ... " quote is an admission of defeat.

The Roman "founding fathers", one the most innovative group of political thinkers in human history, were obsessed with avoiding concentrating power, the alternate days command when consular armies were operating together is obvious military folly but they were willing to pay the price to avoid concentration of power, but even their system of check and balances eventually failed.

 

Whether "Ike" was responsible is another good question. After all wasn't he the one that warned of the "military indusrial complex" becoming to politically powerful?

 

Viet Nam and all the massacres on women, children, Elderly, burning villages, killing livestock, destroying crops, poisoning wells, gang-raping women, throwing them into pits alive and then shooting. Sounds like the Ukraine in the summer of 1941. They all made the excuses of "just following orders," etc.and they were compared to Nazi atrocities at the time in the US. There is 2 sides to the argument, I understand that, but from everything I've read the attempt of the soldiers involved to justify it and the majority of people in the US not thinking it was wrong was compared to the citizens of Germany not caring one way or the other during the Holocaust what happened to those people and the Soldiers believing what they did was moral or justified.

 

At IWD, I didn't mean Ike specifically, but when his administration took over, the country moved significantly to the right, he used the CIA for all sorts of interference and covert action in a bunch of other small countries involving all sorts of black operations including murders and coups for American business interests. The propaganda on the Soviets constantly, having school children hide under their desks for nuclear fall-out practice when documents now show the Soviets were not intending to drop nukes on us through the 1950s and that was a scare tactic for use on the populace... Check out "the Cold War Hoax" by Mark G. Brennan.

 

The wars and outright intervention didn't start until the JFK era, then ramped up under Johnson. Post-war, there was real reason to suspect the USSR would move on allies in Europe and elsewhere. NATO presence along the border kept that from turning into a fighting war, but in the background was Soviet money and influence starting "popular fronts" and the outright purchasing of political figures. It was a real thing that couldn't be ignored.

 

I'm not saying that on its face the war was wrong. Our direct intervention was started by a false flag operation as its clearly on the record from military and government personnel that the second Gulf of Tonkin incident that triggered the main confrontation never happened and we never formally declared war. It was great for American arms manufacturers which was what one of the goals was all along. Look up actions taken by JFK such as NASM-263 which ordered 1,000 troops home by Christmas of 1963 and all troops home by 1965, and the fact that he was cutting the military budget and closing over 50 military bases world-wide, and then he was killed.

 

Ummm, all sources I have seen show the National Defense budget under Kennedy increasing, not decreasing, and he points this out in several speeches and interviews.

With regard to bringing 1,000 troops home etc., that was very conditional - ie. that the US & GVN were winning the "war" in considerable fashion and that the training of GVN troops had proceeded far enough to allow for the 1,00 American troops to be brought home. If those conditions were not met, US troops would not be coming home.

 

I said that wrong.... He did close 52 military bases, and he limited government contracts to certain voting districts that would carry him in 1964. If we take it that he was for that memo and it was true to his policy goals that he was not committed to a total war as it was under Johnson, then the military budget would have stayed significantly lower than it was during the war, and the arms manufacturers and big business in the US wouldn't have had the chance to make the massive profits and expansions that they were able to do after the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never occurred.

 

Please...

Your prejudiced "smoke and mirror" shenanigans get you nowhere.

Kennedy was firmly committed to building a strong military to counter any Soviet threats, even with base closings
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8554

Further, you have absolutely no proof that there would have been no Gulf of Tonkin incident had Kennedy survived, nor can you reasonably predict what Kennedy's reactions would have been.

Finally, big business ALWAYS makes a profit, no matter what, they are to well diversified not to.