The most basic and important functions of government are protection and maintaining a stable currency. Protection means protection from terrorism, white collar and street crime, attacks by foreign nations, and maintaining secure borders. But while waging a “war on terror” the US government has literally imported hundreds of thousands of Muslims from known terrorist-supporting states like Saudi Arabia and Syria and failed states like Somalia. Our government wages a “war on drugs” by leaving our southern border open and selling arms to Mexican drug cartels. We supported the Bosnian Muslims against our WWII allies, the Serbs, and the Bosnian Muslims, closely tied to Iran, are major heroin traffickers. Our intervention in Afghanistan has resulted in a huge increase in opium production. We are all familiar with the failures of our judicial system; vicious career criminals are routinely set free on trumped-up technicalities, and honest citizens, increasingly, are railroaded into prison for political reasons. Our government leaves our borders wide open, and imports hordes of people seeking to take jobs from Americans, get welfare benefits, and commit crimes. As to our currency, the government has given control of the money supply and interest rates to a consortium of private bankers – the Federal Reserve. This is putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse.

Meanwhile, our government does many other things which are not quite what the Founding Fathers intended or what many citizens want. The government maintains schools (and we pay for them) but these schools have degenerated into indoc centers where little learning takes place, but children are indoctrinated in leftist ideology and taught the wonders of sexual perversion and the glories of Islam. Our government redistributes income to hordes of multi-generational welfare recipients, and also to banks and corporations deemed too big to fail. And of course there is foreign aid to various dictators, and our support of the UN, which has failed to prevent almost seventy years of non-stop war and genocide.

We all know about the dreaded federal income tax, and, in many states, the state income tax. As of 2013 a single person earning from $38,726 to $48,942 pays a California state income tax of eight percent, and a federal income tax of twenty five percent. So someone earning $39,000 yearly pays $3120 to the State and $9750 to the feds – a total of $12,870, leaving them with $26,130. Already, government has taken about a third of the person’s income; at least this theft is done openly.

The rest of the stealing is not so open. If you buy a house, you pay income taxes on the money you earned to pay for it, and you pay taxes on the interest accrued while you save up for a down payment. After you buy the house, you don’t really own it, for you must pay property taxes (in all but name, rent to the government). If you fail to pay up, the county will seize your home. If you rent, your landlord passes the property tax to you, embedded in your rent. And of course, you pay sales taxes on most of the things you buy. You pay a special federal tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents per gallon, and most states take some more; in California the state gasoline tax is 46.6 cents per gallon, so state and federal taxes together add sixty five cents to each gallon of gas you buy.

And of course you must pay fees to renew your driver’s license and your car registration. You often must pay fees to enter national, state, and county parks. And there are innumerable other fees, like the ones for business and professional licenses, which generally end up being passed on to the consumers, hidden in the prices they pay for most everything.

Leftists continually clamor for higher corporate income taxes to “soak the rich.” Never mind that most prominent “liberals” are rich, and the major supporters of leftist causes, people like George Soros, are billionaires. The fact is that the corporate taxes do not come out of the pockets of the CEOs. They are a cost of doing business, applying to all the producers of the goods and services consumed by ordinary Americans; as such, they are passed on to us consumers, embedded in the prices of everything we buy. The US corporate tax rate ranges from fifteen to thirty five percent. So if you buy a product that might otherwise have cost, say, $100, it will actually cost you up to about $135. Add to that the local and state property taxes paid by corporations, including farms; all of this is paid by the consumers. If you buy food you are paying the farmer’s corporate and property taxes, plus that of the food processing company, and that of the supermarket chain, and the gasoline or diesel fuel tax on the trucking company that delivered the food to your local supermarket. Add to that the sales taxes paid by the farmers, processors, and supermarkets for all the items they need to operate their businesses – everything from tractor tires to lightbulbs. All of these taxes are hidden, but we all pay them. No one knows for sure, and it is impossible to compute it precisely, but all of these taxes and the income tax, all of it together, easily take about half of the average American’s real purchasing power. We are being bled white and most Americans don’t even know it. And this is not all.

The Federal Reserve essentially creates “fiat money,” backed by nothing, out of thin air. This is, make no mistake about it, legalized counterfeiting, but they get away with it due to the Golden Rule: those who have the gold (or, rather, the imaginary money) make the rules. We are all familiar with inflation rates, the increases in prices due to inflation of the money supply (the real reason for inflation). But, underlying any increase in costs, there is a basic and ongoing devaluation of our currency. Everything costs more because of the fiat money scam; the banksters are literally stealing our wealth without most people being aware of it. And no one has any idea how much this ultimate hidden tax (paid, not to government, but to the private banks that effectively own and control “our” government) costs us. Adding this to all the other open and hidden taxes, the average citizen has effectively lost well over half his purchasing power, perhaps as much as two thirds or more – no one knows for sure.

Government and the banking industry combined constitute a criminal cartel, a parasitic entity that is sucking the life out of our former Republic and its citizens.