This story paints quite a scary picture of the future ..
Yeah, its old but i didn't see it posted in here... i found it funny and thought others might as wellYesterday I read a news article that left me shocked. Shocked.
It seems that the Principality of Liechtenstein is going in the wrong direction. The Prince, annoyed by catcalls from the local socialists and demands he distribute his Art Collection from his castle walls, threatened to return to Austria whence he came unless the people dismantled much of their democracy and voted him permanent powers that would make Saddam Hussein envious.
Hussein must after all put up with pesky if stage-managed elections. Not so the Prince.
The alarmed 20,000 or so citizens of the land with an additional 12,000 residents and whose main industries are tax havens, false teeth, and postage stamps voted their powers away and created in a day the most powerful monarchy in Europe.
And this is a monarchy now threatened with expulsion from the Council of Europe --not because people fear the Prince is aching to repopulate the dungeon in his rambling castle built in the 1200s but because he has the radical support of those in the population who believe that they have a a King Log right out of Aesop who agrees that there is no government like no government.
Paging contrarian Libertarian theorist Hans Hoppe and Robert Heinlein's less-is-less Libertarian Monarchists in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
It's a shameful attack on democracy and the right to vote on what your neighbor earns, smokes, does in the bedroom and in the bank account. Liechtenstein won't even coin its own money and uses silver-backed Swiss currency, is fairly easy-going on law enforcement and border controls, and will not arrest people who do not pay taxes abroad. While they are not tax free, if you are paying substantial taxes with a family of four and $50,000 income, you should get a new tax preparer: the highest total rate on a zillionaire is equal to the lowest Federal-State combined rate in the US on the poor: 18%. Worse: citizens take a lively interest in budgets, so their social security actually is funded and works more like a semi-private pension plan, seriously curtailing the freedom of action of officials to, as in the US, empty it to raise their salaries and other worthy causes.
While penalties for drug dealing and tax evasion involving non-governmental fraud are tough for foreigners in that conservative country where The Beatles are considered the latest hit, judges are inclined to be liberally lenient with drug use by locals and treat it as a medical problem, or ignore small amounts at home. And if you are a well-behaved foreigner who simply owes a tax bill then they're not interested, much to the horror of every tax bureau on the globe. Liechtensteiners ask: Why should they help other governments overcharge their citizens?
Clearly, with a little Rock and Roll to loosen them up, these people might well get rid of government altogether.
Fortunately, there is a resistance movement to free Liechtenstein for US-friendly rule, I mean support. And it's multi-cultural: socialists reacted by calls for massive tax hikes, physical threats to opponents and US-friendly rule, I mean support. And it's multi-cultural: socialists reacted by calls for massive tax hikes, physical threats to opponents and leaving mutilated pets at people's doorsteps.
Much like any American political campaign where you want people to know you can be trusted to run a caring, expanded government.
But the brainwashed 64% of the population didn't get the right message from obscene phone calls, dead cats and the prospect of US style tax rates to have a real government. Liechtenstein stuck to what it knows.
A Prince they had, but I admit it takes imagination and maybe more government funding to bring socialism to a low-tax country of full employment where most people are either wealthy professionals — or the farmers and workers choose to turn away from debilitating wealth to be that way and wouldn't sell their cows for a million.
If that isn't a spookily brainwashed population bribed by the prospect in a rigged election of keeping their own money by some creepy cult-like belief, well, what is?
A TIME OF CHOICE
Stop Liechtenstein now.
Why is the US Government wasting time with Mid-East mystery weapons it admits it can't locate and gave Hussein in the first place, a vast military conflict of questionable advantage for a potentially unappreciative population — and in the end have troops pointed at the soft underbelly of, of all places, Israel?
Here instead is a certifiable monarchy where democracy is going to pot, they have overawed the critical resource of false teeth without which our politicians can't propose more taxes and are easy to invade. Worse, they are a Germanic descended people, whereas the Iraqis can't even agree on their ethnic heritage. And you know what they say of the Germans.
Today we own false teeth, tomorrow, the world.
Let me tell you, you'll see the problem if you realize you can cook without Iraqi oil, but a lot of people can't chew a thing without false teeth.
I am not one to advocate government, government intervention, or war as a means of settling disputes.
But if to war America must, let it be (pace Peter Seller's hit invasion comedy, "The Mouse that Roared") for a cause the government can explain in 1 minute and presumably win with palpable strategic advantages I can explain to my 10 year old.
Because I sure can't explain what we're doing in Iraq or any of the other 150 plus countries where we have troops. And he's smart enough to immediately say, "But that's over 75% of the world, Dad."
If you're in favor of more government, the choice is clear.
Invade Liechtenstein. Now.
Now, before we wake up one morning and have a Kaiser-wannabe in the White House issuing monarchic orders for foreign wars we don't understand and demanding that Congress let him do what he wants — and a spineless Congress rushing to give it to him.
We certainly don't want a country where if a few citizens demand a little more control, why the first thought of the leader is not to raise taxes behind a phony tax cut, call us traitors, order our bank accounts audited, and spy on what books we take out of the Public Library — but instead, Mein Gott, offer to resign.
Sure, with help such a monarch might even come up with something like the Patriot Act and start spying on our e-mail.
People who hear radio messages giving them sinister commands from their false teeth may find themselves pretty commonplace in such a nightmare America.
But if he's from Liechtenstein, I wouldn't count on it.
No, time for a brilliant pre-emptive masterstroke at the heart of decadent Europe.
The Germans won't understand, the French won't believe and the Italians won't care.
If someone tries to counterattack, they'll have to find Liechtenstein on the map somewhere between Austria and Switzerland. And now that most countries are adopting our public school standards and methods, they are turning out graduates who can't distinguish between Switzerland and Sweden anyway.
And there is more, let's face it. It would position American troops next to our real enemy, Switzerland.
STOP LIECHTENSTEINISM NOW
Many will say they are more afraid of, not of some lucky bearded desert mystics with box cutters laundering funny pink currency with Presidents on them you never heard of through money orders — but a country that thinks having assault weapons at home and kids taking rifles to school is perfectly OK and where enthusiastic soldiers treat the Army as one big weekend hunting club, have their own Swiss Bank Account, officers and many men speak 4 languages plus English, and not paying taxes isn't a crime: Switzerland.
A thrifty and peaceful country where, compared to us, skeptical citizen-soldiers run the show and so concentrates not on vast occupation US-style forces but hundreds of fighter bombers constantly in the sky that, face to face with larger US air forces mostly in the maintenance shed, can in fact take the US military out if it chooses in one vicious, surgical, surprise blow.
The US Government can't do that since their hundreds of planes are mostly in the sky all the time, meaning their people are way better trained as well.
Now that's a weapon of mass destruction: actual military defense. And then they could pelt our cities with Swiss cheese, probably, too.
And talk about terror: a country that has plebiscites of wealthy people (like Americans used to be) who think they're just middle class to review legislation strikes terror in every Democrat, Republican and Green.
A country where immigration decisions are made at local levels, people can't remember the President's name and they have parks just for kids trying out pot is clearly a carrier of this Liechtenstein virus and can't claim neutrality.
Liechtenstein may even be a model for small, territorial, quasi-libertarian minimal governments with genial owners and large art collections.
This should worry government planners from zoning boards to MPO's. How would you like it if New York City subdivided into 500 mini-governments of 20,000 each ruthlessly run by art aficionados who have no interest in democratic bodies that raise taxes, create regulations, have closed borders and throw people in jail for fifty years for non-conformism such as not paying city income tax?
Not to mention set tariff regulations to raise the price of false teeth components?
Where since people can change governments by walking down the street, the head of government threatens to get rid of the people to effect change, not the people get rid of the government?
Beware: If government is small enough so the people truly can easily and rapidly fire it, it follows the government can pick up stakes and fire the people as well.
Almost like if you're sick of Burger King, you can try McDonald's — or in contrasting balance maybe you realize Wendy's is actually pretty good when they threaten to leave.
That would destroy our way of life from within.
Instead we are fortunate to have a New York that is a model for America of good government and sound defense: where government is a distant mayor with a powerless council and it takes years to get anything done because all 8 million must approve; and then it is still messed up anyway with numbing levels of unelected bureaucracy. Where it takes people blowing up the tallest buildings for the mayor to walk down the street and be accessible, and then people think he's some kind of hero.
And if you want to go into the nearest Art Dealer's and ask for political asylum, you'll get asylum all right — they'll have you committed.
Or worse, try and grant your wish for government choice by sending you to New Jersey.
Dealing with that kind of thing is what makes our people a little complaisant but strong. Otherwise, why would thousands of volunteers think a trip to Iraq is a good thing? Likewise with our other cities and States, from the charmingly corrupt police of New Orleans to the fact that we have a word for growing Freedom to do as you choose here in America already: Nevada.
No way. Next thing you know this Prince will be legalizing polygamy, raising armies of Princelings or even train the whole country to be Princes — and they'll be sneaking through our undefended borders, Rembrandts and low taxes in tow.
It isn't just that racial profiling may not work on some blonde, blue-eyed guy with a suit and false teeth in his briefcase.
This ideology exercises a perverse fascination.
Islam may seem alien until you realize that if this catches on, we are open to creeping Liechtensteinism.
Right now it exists in a traditional, creaky European variant, but don't be fooled.
Let American know-how get to work, and with perverse but geometric logic we'll have customized government on every street corner.
LOCK YOUR DOORS!
This is a warning not merely for now but all future US Governments. Presidential advisors must not hesitate, must not falter, must not attempt to use grammar. It is too late for that.
A system where you can choose governments like hotel stays and we trust each other enough to have endless tiny governments of a few thousand citizens — dare I say in some places no government at all — once it catches on cannot be stopped by any Army or Bureaucracy. It will in fact dissolve Armies and Bureaucracies at home and then spread abroad like a corrosive acid.
And as anyone who has driven 100 miles to the "nearest" courthouse to discover they are closed because they had given the wrong hours or patiently filled out the wrong 11 page form knows, government services convenient to average people is not what many politicians believe America is about: that the customer is always wrong.
In Liechtenstein, by contrast, I was told the two prisoners in the country when I visited loved it so much and were so connected to the community they showed up at the jail every day, locked themselves in, and then at dinner unlocked themselves and left in the evening to return home to do their rehabilitative homework in the bosom of their family.
Unlike America, where by dint of government action and ever increasing punishments, now citizens must imprison themselves in their own homes in many cities against both roaming criminals alienated from everyone and trigger happy police who dangerously run stoplights in pursuit, as civilized people should.
If Americans were exposed to a society of people who locked themselves into their own jail cells, where would it end? What would that do to the panoply of democratically enacted draconian punishment and regulation on which our free government is now based?
Let Liechtenstein continue to spread this fanaticism, and before you know it, the schools will subversively teach the uncomfortable truth that the Declaration of Independence fired King George for allowing Parliament and his ministers to get too powerful instead of fulfilling his role of looking noble while locals devised means of ever less government. And the Republic began to malfunction as those who saw themselves as heirs to the old British party of strong rule by bureaucracy and favor began to dominate again and split into two parties.
Americans: I have visited that country at some length. I have seen what their ways can do to the young and unsuspecting. It is weak now, but if they realize their real strength, we will find we have let a mustard seed be watered as we hacked at desert weeds.
Again, as a Libertarian, I advocate negotiation, trade and peace. We do not need a military, drafts, and taxes for these things.
But if the President is looking for a real threat, there is no question: unless he will send troops now to stamp out this jovial monarchy of tolerance, this dictator with nothing to dictate, this system you can literally walk away from and so do not wish to leave — and put a McDonald's on every street corner and Hollywood starlet pictures in every art-gallery picture frame, sell the Art to feed the starving in case of flood in the Sahara desert and then teach them Our American joys of graveyard votes, legislators who don't read what they pass, and judges who rule it is OK to execute the innocent as long as government convenience is respected — and tax them at rich-man's rates every April 15th for the privilege — the form of government he represents may not survive.
In a few generations people may barely know what a government is as it falls into disuse. We'll be singing thousands of homegrown local versions of Britain's "God Save the King" which is what I understand goes for a National Anthem in downtown Vaduz, Liechtenstein, since the thrifty citizens won't even pay for one of their own — while counting our fat bank accounts.
Which, as "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" the Americanized British anthem was, come to think of it, what we used to sing anyway.
Invade Liechtenstein
by Michael Gilson de Lemos
http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?a ... 67ecc1a261
Costa Rica last had a war in 1948, but is also extremely small and insignificant in the world political and economic stage with the nations boardering it too poor to have wars or already busy with them.
