The Great Welfare Empire Conspiracy - Page 10

Welfare Officials Part of the Legacy of Domestic Tyranny in America

Those who worked to ban the game fit in the historical matrix with those who, in order to retain power, drew up the Alien and Sedition Acts; with those who, throughout the Southern States, passed laws restricting the press, speech, and discussion regarding slavery, and who made it a crime to merely possess abolitionist literature-so that their unjust economic system of involuntary servitude might prevail; and with those who jailed anti-war speaker Eugene Debs to keep him quiet. Those who forced the game off the market stepped beyond these three historical illustrations because, although those perpetrators were dreadfully wrong, they at least followed due process. Those who worked to ban the game did not act in accord with any law, good or bad: they acted above the law, as a law unto themselves, in order to keep a game they feared away from an electorate they manipulated.

Judges Ignore Their Own Standards

The federal judges who heard our cases, by taking a pro-welfare point of view, violated their own standards. The Supreme Court has stated firmly that this country has "a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open, and that it may include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials" (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan); that First Amendment freedoms are protected not only "against heavy-handed frontal attack, but also from being stifled by subtle governmental interference" (NAACP v. Alabama); the "evils to be prevented (are) not the censorship of the press, merely, but any action of government by means of which it might prevent such free and general discussion of public matters . . ." (Grossjean v. American Press Co.); "It is firmly settled that under our Constitution the public expression of ideas may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves offensive to some of their hearers" (Bachellar v. Maryland); that the avoidance of censorship is to "preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail" (Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC); and that it is the duty of the government "to preserve inviolate the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion, to the end that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means" (Dejonge v. Oregon).

Judge Kaufman himself had written that embedded in our democracy was the basic conviction that wisdom and justice are most likely to prevail in "public decision making if all ideas, discoveries, and points of view are before the citizenry for its consideration . . . (and that) we must remain profoundly skeptical of government claims that state action affecting expression can survive constitutional objection" (Thomas v. Board of Ed., Granville Cent. Sch. Dist.).

The judges had no business taking a position on the merits of the game. Only our right to distribute our political impressions in the form of a satirical board game should have been at issue. Whether the game has a "distasteful nature" or is "the most original game of the decade, if not the century," whether it "perpetuates outdated myths" or is an accurate lampoon of America's welfare system in action, is for the American people to decide. There ought to be no other censor in our democracy.

Central to the plan to ban the game and to the various letters sent by welfare officials to retailers is the idea that, if the American voter and taxpayer is offered a choice between welfare "mythology" as expressed in the game and welfare "reality" as espoused by the bureaucrats, he or she will mindlessly embrace the welfare "mythology" of the game, and be thus tricked into opposing welfare expansion. Let me put that another way: implicit in the efforts to ban the game is the elitist bureaucratic notion that the American people are too stupid to know which games are worthy of their own independent purchase and which are not; therefore, the game, Public Assistance-Why Bother Working for a Living?, had to be forced out of the marketplace for the good of the taxpayer!

But guess what? The welfare game is back!

We've had our difficulties with the welfare empire and with liberal judges, but we believe, in spite of them, that the United States of America is still the land of the free. And there is the internet.

****************************

<< Back - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10