Back in this Substack, I outlined what a free society looks like. But with a Great Reset looming large, involving the UN agency: the World Health Organization (WHO) — which
is helping to thwart — let’s break down tyranny so that we can recognize if it is growing or not.Power
One sense of power is as political or military power to carry out an initiative. But, in another sense of the term, there is also personal power for you to personally make your own life better off.
Human life gets better off through an economic process involving savings, new ideas (entrepreneurship), and productive machinery (capital). But as tyranny unfolds, less and less of the fruits of labor are at the disposal of individual citizens, and more and more of it is “disposed of” by government bureaucrats.
In 1929, all levels of government collectively spent 8.3% of annual income, or output (GDP):
This means that over 90% of income was being spent by private actors. This decentralized spending is not only more effective economically, but it means that there was high personal power to make your own life better.
Here is what happened to spending under “COVID tyranny” though:
Centrally-planned (government) spending rose to 46.4% of GDP, over 5 times the share of income spent by government in 1929. The centralization of planning and spending reduces the personal power that people have to make a better life for themselves.
Permissions
When you have a right to do something, then you are not required to obtain a “permit” to do it: You don’t need someone else’s permission.
But tyranny involves evermore laws until you get to the stage where there are so many laws on the books that everyone breaks a law every day, just by going about their daily business.
A telling example was the baker who got in legal trouble for not making a same-sex wedding cake, which went against the baker’s liberty of conscience (the baker’s right to hold personal beliefs).
The baker wasn’t in trouble for doing something wrong (there was no crime involved), but for failing to fully live up to someone else’s standard of what was thought to be “right” behavior.
This “over-regulation” is actually welcomed by tyrants, because if everyone is guilty of something, then anyone can be targeted and punished by the state. In all federal documents from 1950, the restrictive word “shall” showed up less than 900 total times:
The word “shall” is one of the words most-indicative of a restriction. In just the body of federal law (the Code of Federal Regulations, or CFR), the word “shall” showed up 32,000 times in 1996:
If that wasn’t enough, in order to add insult to injury, at least three times as many “shall” words were added by just two years later (in 1998):
Evidence suggests that, ever since 1950 — when there were a total of 848 federal government restrictions using the word “shall” — the United States of America has grown into a tyranny: a tyranny of shalls.
99,000 Shalls
Using this one word, shall, we have more than 100 times as many federal restrictions now — compared to 1950 — more than 100 times as many rules.
With the government allocating more of what gets produced, and with myriad restrictions on our personal lives, we’re losing the freedom which made America into the hope of the world. The Great Reset is something which should be thwarted, as it is possibly the greatest threat to peace and prosperity that the world has ever known.
Reference
[word search in the body of federal law] — Code of Federal Regulations. https://www.govinfo.gov/help/cfr
[the recent impossibility of following the law] — October 23, 2017. The Impossibility of Comprehending, or Even Reading, All Federal Regulations. By Patrick McLaughlin Jonathan Nelson Jim Pagels Oliver Sherouse. https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/impossibility-comprehending-or-even-reading-all-federal-regulations
[the trillions of dollars in setbacks each year, which stem directly and indirectly from regulation] — Ten Thousand Commandments 2021: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State. https://cei.org/studies/ten-thousand-commandments-2021/