The Health Care Hoax
Posted: 12 February 2014
Let’s put national health care in its historical perspective, and then consider the truth of the matter.
For our purposes, we will ignore the rest of the world, not bring too far forward how the NHS in the UK dictates their internal politics and is ration driven, nor how in Canada they flood to the US for care, nor how they invade the US from Mexico to get social services of all kinds.
We will start in 1950.
As noted elsewhere, everything is connected, just not in the ‘butterfly effect’ that a small number of physicists and mathematicians think.
Prior to 1950, health care was the responsibility of the individual. The medical profession was regulated in the same manner as other special service businesses, most notably lawyers, accountants, and bankers. Doctors, lawyers, and barbers had to take proficiency exams before they could charge for their services and were held accountable for their actions, not only through Tort Law, but through internal policing, and self-defense by buying liability insurance. They attended specialized schools, with specialized educations and fields of study. Funding of health care was primarily in the form of direct payment for services, with a small, expanding, insurance segment.
In the 1950’s, the failure of The Federal Government to overhaul the income tax code, led to unions negotiating for benefits, rather than wages. This change in direction was a direct result of FDR’s Transnational Policies. Government had decided that income would be taxed in the unfair step-rate method. Those whose incomes where under $10,000 would not be taxed. Union wages, and thus first line supervisors and then up the entire corporate chain of command got compensation increases. Through negotiation, post WW II labor shortages, and an aggressively growing US economy, people found their wages entering the taxable income levels. In order to reduce the impact on blue collar and first level white collar workers, benefits were, as a matter of law, decided to not be income , and thus, non-taxable. Before the expansion of health care as a benefit of employment, and therefore, the insurance industry, the individual had to pay for medical services either out of pocket, or by paying for his own insurance, again, out of pocket.
The consumer of health care knew AND FELT, the direct costs of medical care. (For purposes of clarity, simplicity, and understanding, we’ll gloss over technological –pharmaceutical advances in the field, which, in and of themselves, are a significant factor in driving up costs.)
The individual needed cash in hand to visit the doctor.
The individual needed cash in hand to have the doctor make a house call.
The individual often looked to alternative, less expensive, care options. One got a mid-wife to deliver ones’ child. One had the child born at home, not in a specialized and expensive ‘birthing facility’.
The individual knew what he was paying for when he got it, and got what he was paying for and, in many instances, was getting more than he was paying for, the medical profession being very altruistic and actually believing in the Hippocratic Oath.
Almost all peaking of health care expenses have been caused by the interference of the Federal Government.
As noted, with Federal Labor Laws and the Internal Revenue Code impacting employment compensation, health care became an area of national interest. While employers and employees were working out a viable adaptation of this into their business models , left wing idealists were actually looking to create a capitalistic style economic safety net. Enter Camelot Jack and LBJ.
Jack was controlled by a GOP congress. Even so, he got us started in Viet Nam, failed us with Cuba, killed “The Monroe Doctrine” , but was persuaded to leave the domestic economy alone. Benefits packages became traditional in a very short time, and expected to expand as a method of tax avoidance.
LBJ, wanting to be more left than Camelot, with a Democratic Party controlled congress, got Medicare passed. Medicare is the first, direct, and most damaging of government intervention in health care spiking costs to levels that we will never be able to go back to.
Medicare provided our second, federally enforced, Ponzi scheme. Medicare, through the HCFA payroll tax, takes money from employees and employers, to pay for, AT NON-MARKET, BUREAUCRATICALLY DISCOUNTED FIXED RATES, health care for those over 65. There is NO negotiation for these rates, and facilities must meet government fixed standards. The actual cost of Medicare services has not, in Medicare’s history, ever met the actual cost of the services provided. Health care providers, and insurance companies, have simply allowed those unpaid costs to be integrated into insurance premiums.
This is the first, huge and unrealistic spike in health care costs; not caused by technological –pharmaceutical advances; NOT caused by an increase in wages to doctors and nurses; & NOT caused by a surge in facilities’ expenses.
A decade later comes the next huge spike, again caused by federal intervention.
HIPAA.
Except in few jurisdictions, those applying for a marriage license must get blood tests. These tests are not for DNA incompatibility, they are a check for venereal diseases being harbored in the applicant’s body. These tests are carried out by state law, under state constitutions, authorized by each state’s right to protect the health and welfare of its citizens. This is NOT a federal issue, however ….
With the expansion of “civil rights” well beyond that intended by the founders , or even by most US citizens, sexual preferences have been designated as constitutionally protected civil rights. In order to protect the reputations of people with HIV/Aids, HIPAA created a situation that so altered the medical care delivery system, that this political agenda and group preferential treatment, again unrelated to actual medical services, had caused billions of dollars to be spent to reconfigure the physical facilities of the system.
Prior to HIPAA, wards and semi-private rooms existed in hospitals, emergency rooms, and clinics. Wards, where groups of people could be treated using economy of scale to keep down costs, disappeared. Where one ward could treat 20 people, with a small group lavatory, where one main line could feed oxygen or other gases to patients, where one physician making rounds could visit 9 patients in an hour as opposed to 2, where nurses could be physically on hand for all circumstances .
Here are only some of the physical costs. A complete lavatory per room instead of a group lavatory, LIKE THE ONE THAT YOU HAVE AT WORK OR AT A RESTAURANT! Expanded physical space, the hospital building needing to expand the walls, ceilings, floors, electrical wiring, plumbing, elevators, &c, at what cost? Buying land to build on. Telephones, corridors, laundries, visitation space, &c. absolutely none of these things enhancing the delivery of services, but now required by federal law!
The Emergency Room Access Act, another federal law, requiring that, regardless of condition, legal right, criminal status, or ability to pay, everyone, in any and all conditions, who presents at an emergency room, must be treated and may not be released until the presenting condition has been “stabilized”. This, as argued prior to the enactment of this legislation, simply made Emergency Rooms, the clinic of choice for the uninsured, the illegal, and the criminal. This created an economic crisis in the delivery of emergency care.
And now, The Affordable Care Act, which, according to all realistic estimates and CBO reports, will increase costs across the board, while at the same time, significantly lowering standards of care and rationing care in the same fashion as in Europe!
Consider: before The Affordable Care Act, everyone physically in the US, had free access to premium, personal health care, REGARDLESS OF ABILITY TO PAY!!!
Consider: before The Affordable Care Act, over 40% of all hospital beds, were being provided by charitable institutions, e.g., The Sisters of Carondelet (Roman Catholic), Long Island Jewish Hospital (B’Nai B’Rith), Shawnee Mission Medical Center (Seventh Day Adventists), St. Luke’s Health System (Episcopalian), &c., whose whole purpose is charitable giving, charity health care, and at no cost to taxpayers.
St. Jude’s doesn’t charge; Children’s Mercy Kansas City doesn’t charge; Cornell Medical Center doesn’t charge; KU Med doesn’t charge, &c. They are pleased to take insurance payments if the patient has insurance, but admission is not based on ability to pay.
Need I go into the constitutionality of it? It isn’t!
Footnotes:
I could easily go into how FDR created the extended US economic depression through his keeping the US Dollar pegged to gold when economists were telling him not to and his Euro-Centric monetary policy, and other anti-US policies of his, but there’s a whole section in “The Albany Plan Re-Visited” about this.
Tangentially, this has led to the pension problem, most particularly how it has killed the US auto industry through the inability to fund UAW pensions, and the bankruptcy of Detroit, and soon of Illinois and California.
Another point not needed here: Tort Reform and the needed additional education, and its inherent expense, that doctors need to understand and use the advancing technologies.
Ok, it’s the 50’s. This model predated globalization and the fierce competition in labor costs currently impacting us. For the moment, we are only dealing with a portion of the entire problem of utopian government failure.
Yah, another area we’ll gloss over. Just suffice it to say that in exchange for the USSR removing inoperable missiles from Cuba, Camelot Jack promised that the US would no longer take any military action against anything going on in the Western Hemisphere, and guaranteed the territorial integrity of Cuba.
Avoidance, not evasion: Avoidance is every citizen’s duty, evasion is a felony.
I have litigated extensively in this area; I know whereof I speak in detail.
And, one must consider that 90% of ones’ total medical costs come in the last one year of ones’ life. Pause for effect: yupper, this means that by unconstitutional government fiat, 90% of almost all medical costs of ones’ life had just been shifted from the individual, to the taxpayer! AND, worse yet, these are at an unrealistic discount!
Two direct points here: a quick survey of the writings of the founders shows both health care and sexual preferences to be areas of life from which the federal government was specifically excluded; and two, the founders included Article V, again in both “The Federalist Papers” and in “The Anti-Federalist Papers”, as a method of allowing THE TAX PAYING CITIZENS, to amend The Constitution, to specifically deal with such issues. As an aside, they did consider giving this power to The Supreme Court, and rejected it. Something that CJ Marshall decided on his own to change.
Compare that to the current facility where a nurses’ station is located yards down the hall from the patient’s room. If the nurse is busy in room 3 and the patient in room 1 pushes her emergency button, which lights up the previously un-needed red bulb over the patient’s exterior door, how is she to know that the patient in room 1 is in need? What if this need is a critical need? The heart monitor beeping flat line, but the nurse so out of position that she will never know until the patient in room 1 has passed.
While running for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton stated in an interview that the cost of the uninsured to the insured was $800 per premium/ individual covered by private insurance. Compare that to the CBO $2,500 – $7,500 estimate of premium increase under “The Affordable Care Act”.
A known to me true example is that of the Multiple Sclerosis sufferer, unfortunately no celebrity like Michael J. Fox has chosen this disease to become the spox for, but, Avonex, Beta-Seron, and Ampyra, are now on the questionable list for Rx. The first two are anti-cancer drugs, the last a muscle treatment which allows a sufferer to actually lift one’s legs and walk without falling, stumbling, or collapsing.
Although the unconstitutionality of it is posted elsewhere on this blog, y’all must consider the very simple fact that The Federal Government, under this constitution, does not have the authority to force someone to buy something, nor to force an employer to pay for something, that they do not want. (I have pointed out elsewhere how CJ Robert’s ruling is corrupt and unconstitutional on its face, posted elsewhere on this blog.)
[Addenda: received the following email, its self-explanatory, on 27 March 14 :
I Think SHE IS PISSED!
I don’t think ‘pissed’ really covers it!!!!
Alan Simpson, the Senator from Wyoming , calls senior citizens the ‘Greediest Generation’ as he compared “Social Security” to a Milk Cow with 310 million teats.
Here’s a response in a letter from PATTY MYERS in Montana … I think she is a little ticked off! She also tells it like it is!
………………………………………………………………………………
“Hey, Alan, let’s get a few things straight!!!!!
1. As a career politician,
you have been on the public dole (tit) for FIFTY YEARS.
2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS (since I was 15 years old. I am now 63).
3. My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in ‘an interest bearing account’ for decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of losers in return for votes , thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.
4. Recently, just like Lucy and Charlie Brown, you and “your ilk” pulled the proverbial football away from millions of American seniors nearing retirement and moved the goalposts for full retirement from age 65 to age, 67. NOW, you and your “shill commission” are proposing to move the goalposts YET AGAIN .
5. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying into Medicare from day one, and now
“you” propose to change the rules of the game. Why? Because “you” mismanaged other parts of the economy to such an extent that you need to steal our money from Medicare to pay the bills.
6. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying income taxes our entire lives, and now you propose to increase our taxes yet again. Why? Because you “incompetents” spent our money so profligately that you just kept on spending even after you ran out of money. Now, you come to the American taxpayers and say you need more to pay off YOUR debt.
7.To add insult to injury, you label us “greedy” for calling “bullshit” to your incompetence . Well, Captain Bullshit , I have a few questions for YOU:
1. How much money have you earned from the American taxpayers during your pathetic 50-year political career?
2. At what age did you retire from your pathetic political career, and how much are you receiving in annual retirement benefits from the American taxpayers?
3. How much do you pay for YOUR government provided health insurance?
4. What cuts in YOUR retirement and healthcare benefits are you proposing in your disgusting deficit reduction proposal, or as usual, have you exempted yourself and your political cronies?
It is you, Captain Bullshit , and your political co-conspirators called Congress who are the
“greedy” ones. It is you and your fellow thieves who have bankrupted America and stolen the American dream from millions of loyal, patriotic taxpayers. And for what? Votes, your job and retirement security at our expense, you leech.
That’s right, sir. You and yours have bankrupted America for the sole purpose of advancing
your political careers. You know it, we know it, and you know that we know it.
And you can take that to the bank you miserable son of a bitch .
NO, I did not stutter.
P.S. And stop calling Social Security benefits “entitlements”. WHAT AN INSULT!!!!
I have been paying in to the SS system for 45 years. It’s my money-give it back to me the way the system was designed and stop patting yourself on the back like you are being generous by doling out these monthly checks.
EVERYONE!!!
If you like the way things are in America delete this.
If you agree with what a Montana citizen, Patty Myers, says, please PASS IT ON]
Justplainbill's Weblog 
From 1939, Thanks to Butch and www.vonmises.org [c]
Hard to believe this was written in 1939.
The Criminality of the State
http://mises.org/library/criminality-state
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DECEMBER 29, 2006Albert Jay Nock
TAGS Big GovernmentWar and Foreign PolicyInterventionism
[This essay first appeared in The American Mercury in March 1939.]
As well as I can judge, the general attitude of Americans who are at all interested in foreign affairs is one of astonishment, coupled with distaste, displeasure, or horror, according to the individual observer’s capacity for emotional excitement. Perhaps I ought to shade this statement a little in order to keep on the safe side, and say that this is the most generally expressed attitude.
All our institutional voices — the press, pulpit, forum — are pitched to the note of amazed indignation at one or another phase of the current goings-on in Europe and Asia. This leads me to believe that our people generally are viewing with wonder as well as repugnance certain conspicuous actions of various foreign States; for instance, the barbarous behavior of the German State towards some of its own citizens; the merciless despotism of the Soviet Russian State; the ruthless imperialism of the Italian State; the “betrayal of CzechoSlovakia” by the British and French States; the savagery of the Japanese State; the brutishness of the Chinese State’s mercenaries; and so on, here or there, all over the globe — this sort of thing is showing itself to be against our people’s grain, and they are speaking out about it in wrathful surprise.
I am cordially with them on every point but one. I am with them in repugnance, horror, indignation, disgust, but not in astonishment. The history of the State being what it is, and its testimony being as invariable and eloquent as it is, I am obliged to say that the naive tone of surprise wherewith our people complain of these matters strikes me as a pretty sad reflection on their intelligence. Suppose someone were impolite enough to ask them the gruff question, “Well, what do you expect?” — what rational answer could they give? I know of none.
Polite or impolite, that is just the question which ought to be put every time a story of State villainy appears in the news. It ought to be thrown at our public day after day, from every newspaper, periodical, lecture platform, and radio station in the land; and it ought to be backed up by a simple appeal to history, a simple invitation to look at the record. The British State has sold the Czech State down the river by a despicable trick; very well, be as disgusted and angry as you like, but don’t be astonished; what would you expect? — just take a look at the British State’s record! The German State is persecuting great masses of its people, the Russian State is holding a purge, the Italian State is grabbing territory, the Japanese State is buccaneering along the Asiatic Coast; horrible, yes, but for Heaven’s sake don’t lose your head over it, for what would you expect? — look at the record!
That is how every public presentation of these facts ought to run if Americans are ever going to grow up into an adult attitude towards them. Also, in order to keep down the great American sin of self-righteousness, every public presentation ought to draw the deadly parallel with the record of the American State. The German State is persecuting a minority, just as the American State did after 1776; the Italian State breaks into Ethiopia, just as the American State broke into Mexico; the Japanese State kills off the Manchurian tribes in wholesale lots, just as the American State did the Indian tribes; the British State practices large-scale carpetbaggery, like the American State after 1864; the imperialist French State massacres native civilians on their own soil, as the American State did in pursuit of its imperialistic policies in the Pacific, and so on.
In this way, perhaps, our people might get into their heads some glimmering of the fact that the State’s criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation — that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class — that is, for a criminal purpose.
No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient. In the last analysis, what is the German, Italian, French, or British State now actually doing? It is ruining its own people in order to preserve itself, to enhance its own power and prestige, and extend its own authority; and the American State is doing the same thing to the utmost of its opportunities.
What, then, is a little matter like a treaty to the French or British State? Merely a scrap of paper — Bethmann-Hollweg[i] described it exactly. Why be astonished when the German or Russian State murders its citizens? The American State would do the same thing under the same circumstances. In fact, eighty years ago it did murder a great many of them for no other crime in the world but that they did not wish to live under its rule any longer; and if that is a crime, then the colonists led by G. Washington were hardened criminals and the Fourth of July is nothing but a cutthroat’s holiday.
The weaker the State is, the less power it has to commit crime. Where in Europe today does the State have the best criminal record? Where it is weakest: in Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Monaco, Andorra. Yet when the Dutch State, for instance, was strong, its criminality was appalling; in Java it massacred 9,000 persons in one morning which is considerably ahead of Hitler’s record or Stalin’s. It would not do the like today, for it could not; the Dutch people do not give it that much power, and would not stand for such conduct. When the Swedish State was a great empire, its record, say from 1660 to 1670, was fearful. What does all this mean but that if you do not want the State to act like a criminal, you must disarm it as you would a criminal; you must keep it weak. The State will always be criminal in proportion to its strength; a weak State will always be as criminal as it can be, or dare be, but if it is kept down to the proper limit of weakness — which, by the way, is a vast deal lower limit than people are led to believe — its criminality may be safely got on with.
So it strikes me that instead of sweating blood over the iniquity of foreign States, my fellow-citizens would do a great deal better by themselves to make sure that the American State is not strong enough to carry out the like iniquities here. The stronger the American State is allowed to grow, the higher its record of criminality will grow, according to its opportunities and temptations. If, then, instead of devoting energy, time, and money to warding off wholly imaginary and fanciful dangers from criminals thousands of miles away, our people turn their patriotic fervor loose on the only source from which danger can proceed, they will be doing their full duty by their country.
Two able and sensible American publicists — Isabel Paterson, of the New York Herald Tribune, and W.J. Cameron, of the Ford Motor Company — have lately called our public’s attention to the great truth that if you give the State power to do something for you, you give it an exact equivalent of power to do something to you. I wish every editor, publicist, teacher, preacher, and lecturer would keep hammering that truth into American heads until they get it nailed fast there, never to come loose. The State was organized in this country with power to do all kinds of things for the people, and the people in their short-sighted stupidity, have been adding to that power ever since. After 1789, John Adams said that, so far from being a democracy of a democratic republic, the political organization of the country was that of “a monarchical republic, or, if you will, a limited monarchy”; the powers of its President were far greater than those of “an avoyer, a consul, a podesta, a doge, a stadtholder; nay, than a king of Poland; nay, than a king of Sparta.” If all that was true in 1789 — and it was true — what is to be said of the American State at the present time, after a century and a half of steady centralization and continuous increments of power?
Power, for instance, to “help business” by auctioning off concessions, subsidies, tariffs, land grants, franchises; power to help business by ever encroaching regulations, supervisions, various forms of control. All this power was freely given; it carried with it the equivalent power to do things to business; and see what a banditti of sharking political careerists are doing to business now! Power to afford “relief” to proletarians; and see what the State has done to those proletarians now in the way of systematic debauchery of whatever self-respect and self-reliance they may have had! Power this way, power that way; and all ultimately used against the interests of the people who surrendered that power on the pretext that it was to be used for those interests.
Many now believe that with the rise of the “totalitarian” State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will.
The idea that the State is a social institution, and that with a fine upright man like Mr. Chamberlain at the head of it, or a charming person like Mr. Roosevelt, there can be no question about its being honorably and nobly managed — all this is just so much sticky flypaper. Men in that position usually make a good deal of their honor, and some of them indeed may have some (though if they had any I cannot understand their letting themselves be put in that position) but the machine they are running will run on rails which are laid only one way, which is from crime to crime. In the old days, the partition of CzechosLovakia or the taking-over of Austria would have been arranged by rigmarole among a few highly polished gentlemen in stiff shirts ornamented with fine ribbons. Hitler simply arranged it the way old Frederick arranged his share in the first partition of Poland; he arranged the annexation of Austria the way Louis XIV arranged that of Alsace. There is more or less of a fashion, perhaps, in the way these things are done, but the point is that they always come out exactly the same in the end.
Furthermore, the idea that the procedure of the “democratic” State is any less criminal than that of the State under any other fancy name, is rubbish. The country is now being surfeited with journalistic garbage about our great sister democracy, England, its fine democratic government, its vast beneficent gift for ruling subject peoples, and so on; but does anyone ever look up the criminal record of the British State? The bombardment of Copenhagen; the Boer War; the Sepoy Rebellion; the starvation of Germans by the post-Armistice blockade; the massacre of natives in India, Afghanistan, Jamaica; the employment of Hessians to kill off American colonists. What is the difference, moral or actual, between Kitchener’s democratic concentration camps[ii] and the totalitarian concentration camps maintained by Herr Hitler? The totalitarian general Badoglio[iii] is a pretty hard-boiled brother, if you like, but how about the democratic general O’Dwyer[iv] and Governor Eyre[v]? Any of the three stands up pretty well beside our own democratic virtuoso, Hell Roaring Jake Smith,[vi] in his treatment of the Filipinos; and you can’t say fairer than that.
As for the British State’s talent for a kindly and generous colonial administration, I shall not rake up old scores by citing the bill of particulars set forth in the Declaration of Independence; I shall consider India only, not even going into matters like the Kaffir war or the Wairau incident in New Zealand. Our democratic British cousins in India in the Eighteenth Century must have learned their trade from Pizarro and Cortez. Edmund Burke called them “birds of prey and passage.” Even the directors of the East India Company admitted that “the vast fortunes acquired in the inland trade have been obtained by a scene of the most tyrannical and oppressive conduct that was ever known in any age or country.” Describing a journey, Warren Hastings wrote that “most of the petty towns and serais were deserted at our approach”; the people ran off into the woods at the mere sight of a white man. There was the iniquitous salt monopoly; there was extortion everywhere, practiced by enterprising rascals in league with a corrupt police; there was taxation which confiscated almost half the products of the soil.
If it be said that Britain was not a sister democracy in those days, and has since reformed, one might well ask how much of the reformation is due to circumstances, and how much to a change of heart. Besides, the Black-and-Tans[vii] were in our day; so was the post-Armistice blockade; General O’Dwyer’s massacre was not more than a dozen years ago;[viii] and there are plenty alive who remember Kitchener’s concentration camps.
No, “democratic” State practice is nothing more or less than State practice. It does not differ from Marxist State practice, Fascist State practice, or any other. Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: you get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you. A citizenry which has learned that one short lesson has but little more left to learn.
Stripping the American State of the enormous power it has acquired is a full-time job for our citizens and a stirring one; and if they attend to it properly they will have no energy to spare for fighting communism, or for hating Hitler, or for worrying about South America or Spain, or for anything whatever, except what goes on right here in the United States.
Editor’s Notes
[i] Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg (November 29, 1856 – January 1, 1921) was a German politician and statesman who served as Chancellor of the German Empire from 1909 to 1917. He was particularly upset by Britain’s declaration of war following German violation of Belgium’s neutrality in the course of her invasion of France, reportedly asking the departing British Ambassador Goschen how Britain could go to war over a “mere scrap of paper” (the Belgian Neutrality Treaty of 1839).
[ii] Horatio Herbert Kitchener (24 June 1850 – 5 June 1916) was an Irish-born British Field Marshal, diplomat and statesman. During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), Kitchener’s policy was to destory Boer farms and move civilians into concentration camps whose conditions led to wide opprobrium in Britain and Europe.
[iii] General Pietro Badoglio succeeded Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister of Italy (Provisional Military Government), from July 25, 1943 to June 18, 1944.
[iv] Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer (April 1864 – March 13, 1940), was Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab from 1912 to 1919, where he oversaw the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre on April 13, 1919. According to official figures, 379 unarmed civilians were killed by Gurkha troops. Unofficial estimates place the figure much higher, at perhaps 2,000, with many more wounded. In the wake of the massacre O’Dwyer was relieved of his office.
[v] Edward John Eyre (5 August 1815 – 30 November 1901) was an English land explorer of the Australian continent and a controversial Governor of Jamaica, where he ruthlessly suppressed the Morant Bay Rebellion, and had many black peasants killed. He also authorized the judicial murder of George William Gordon, a mixed-race member of the colonial assembly who was suspected of involvement in the insurrection. These events created great controversy in Britain, leading to calls for Eyre to be arrested and tried for Gordon’s murder. John Stuart Mill organized the Jamaica Committee — comprised of such classical liberals as John Bright and Herbert Spencer — calling for his prosecution. Eyre was twice charged with murder, but the cases never proceeded.
[vi] General Jacob Hurd Smith (1840–1918) was a veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre and well known among Indian campaigners. As brigadier general in charge of the Samar campaign in the Philippine-American War (1899–1913), Smith became infamous for his orders to “kill everyone over the age of ten” and make the island “a howling wilderness.” He was dubbed “Hell Roaring Jake” Smith, “The Monster”, and “Howling Jake” by the newspapers.
[vii] The term “Black and Tans” refers to the Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force, which was one of two paramilitary forces employed by the Royal Irish Constabulary from 1920 to 1921, to suppress revolution in Ireland by targeting the IRA and Sinn Féin.
[viii] On March 13, 1940 — one year after Nock published this essay — Punjabi revolutionary Udham Singh shot O’Dwyer dead in Caxton Hall in London as an act of revenge for the massacre.
[Both “The Albany Plan Re-Visited” and TAPR 2nd Edition, solve this problem in the section on Federal Authority and Citizenship. Of the three ways to curtail this form of federal criminality, only Secession may be peaceful. The other two require an armed revolution or insurrection as one, and the other is conquest by an outside force. Both are violent, bloody, and expensive. Secession.]