Paul Craig Roberts

Unequal group rights, the politics of redistribution and a Constitution whose meaning varies with changeable coalitions are a recipe for civil war.

If liberals can seize our guns because they are dangerous, we have no chance of holding on to our cars and our homes. The total number of accidental fatalities (the majority of which are hunting accidents) of all types of firearms is infinitesimal compared to the number of fatalities from car and home accidents. More children die from playing with cigarette lighters than from playing with loaded guns.

I don't know why liberals want to disarm the law-abiding population, but I do know that not a single argument proffered stands the light of facts. Armed citizens deter far more crimes than the police, and far more lives are saved by the intended victim being armed than are lost in firearm accidents.

The notion that Americans can be protected from \\'terror\\' by giving up the Bill of Rights is absurd. Democrats are complicit in this absurd notion. Many were intimidated into voting for police state legislation, because they lacked the intestinal fortitude to call police state legislation by its own name. The legislation that has been passed during the Bush regime is far more dangerous to Americans than Muslim terrorists.

According to the Tax Foundation, the average American worker works 127 days of the year just to pay his taxes. That means that government owns 36 percent of the average American\'s output-which is more than feudal serfs owed the robber barons. That 36 percent is more than the average American spends on food, clothing and housing. In other words, if it were not for taxes, the average American\'s living standard would at least double.

When America\'s creditors consider our behavior they see total fiscal irresponsibility. They see a deluded country that acts as if it is a privilege for foreigners to lend to it, and a deluded country that believes that foreigners will continue to accumulate US debt until the end of time. The fact of the matter is that the US is bankrupt.

If our language and culture are not passed on to immigrants, where will they learn to value integrity in government and the rule of law?

Americans need to understand that they have lost their country. The rest of the world needs to recognize that Washington is not merely the most complete police state since Stalinism, but also a threat to the entire world. The hubris and arrogance of Washington, combined with Washington\'s huge supply of weapons of mass destruction, make Washington the greatest threat that has ever existed to all life on the planet. Washington is the enemy of all humanity.

American liberty is being destroyed by Marxist doctrines that explain society in terms of hegemonic and oppressed groups - whether classes, races or genders - fighting for suzerainty. In these societies spun out of Marxist theorizing, good will does not exist, only the material interests of warring groups. Morality resides in the oppressed, but if the oppressed succeed in becoming hegemonic, their claim to moral supremacy evaporates.

People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars.

The United States has entered the ranks of the failed states. One of the most remarkable manifestations of a failed state is that the criminals are all inside the government operating against the people, whereas in a normal state, the criminals are on the outside of the government, operating against it. So, we now have every manifestation of being a failed state, with the government in the hands of a few Wall Street gangsters.

The tax that was supposed to soak the rich has instead soaked America. The beneficiary of the income tax has not been the poor, but big government. The income tax has given us a government bureaucracy that outnumbers the manufacturing work force. It has created welfare dependencies that have entrapped millions of Americans in an underclass that is forced to live a sordid existence of trading votes for government handouts.

The US is not a superpower. The US is a financially dependent country that foreign lenders can close down at will. Washington still hasn't learned this. American hubris can lead the administration and Congress into a bailout solution that the rest of the world, which has to finance it, might not accept.

The great paradox of the civil rights revolution is that instead of enforcing and expanding equality before the law, the revolution created differential rights based on race, gender and, any day now, sexual orientation. The great liberal revolution, centuries in the making, that brought forth equality in law has been overthrown. In its place we see rising a new feudal legal order of status-based rights.

Terrorists can endanger some of us, but the war on terror endangers us all. How much more can the Constitution be diminished before it is completely replaced by arbitrary government power?

People everywhere face the threat of control by government and technology.

Clearly what differentiates the U.S. from other countries is the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution defines us as a people. Without the Constitution, we would be a different country. Therefore, to lose the Constitution is to lose the country.

In 21st century America, capitalism has been unfettered from the regulations that democratized it and made it serve society.

I did not think the Oligarchy would allow Trump to win. However, it seems that the oligarchs were deceived by their own media propaganda.

If it turns out that global warming and ocean acidification are consequences of capitalism\'s carbon-based energy system, the entire world could end up dead from the external costs of capitalism.

Everyone who ever trusted Washington has been betrayed. Possibly there is an exception somewhere, but the betrayals are vast and are sufficient in number to define Washington as the least trusted entity on the earth.

Every public institution in the United States and most private ones are corrupt.

Governments unaccountable to law are tyrannies, whatever they might call themselves, no matter how exceptional and indispensable they declare themselves to be.

The planet is being polluted with many forms of wastes.

Beginning with the Clinton Administration and rapidly accelerating with the George W. Bush and Obama regimes and Tony Blair in England, the U.S. and U.K. governments have run roughshod over their accountability to law.

Western capitalism is a looting mechanism. It loots labor. It loots the environment, and with the transpacific and transatlantic \'partnerships,\' it will loot the sovereign law of countries.

It is the nature of government and of technology to establish control.

Whether one has a favorable or unfavorable opinion of unions, their demise is also the demise of countervailing power. A system in which there is no countervailing power is a tyranny in which power is unconstrained and unaccountable.

Because of the failure of the federal government to enforce federal law, we now have \'banks too big to fail,\' unregulated Internet monopoly, and the evisceration of a dispersed and independent media.

When America\'s Newspaper of Record is nothing but a propaganda ministry, what is America?