The presidency must be destroyed. It is the primary evil we face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to hell. It’s not an inspiration; it’s a threat.

BY The Misesian

The presidency—by which I mean the executive state—is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete devotion and humble submission to its dictates, even while it steals the products of our labor and drives us into economic ruin. It centralizes all power in itself and crowds out all competing centers of power in society, including the church, the family, the business, the charity, and the community.

I’ll go further. The US presidency is the world’s leading evil. It is the chief mischief-maker in every part of the globe, the leading wrecker of nations, the usurer behind third-world debt, the bailer of corrupt governments, and the hand in many dictatorial gloves. The US presidency is the sponsor and sustainer of woke international agencies, of wars, interstate and civil, of famine and disease. To see the evils caused by the presidency, look no further than Afghanistan or Iraq or Serbia or Libya or Syria. These are places where the lives of innocents were snuffed out in pointless wars, where bombing was designed to destroy civilian infrastructure and cause disease. These are places where, in many cases, women, children, and the aged have been denied essential food and medicine because of cruel embargoes and US-imposed financial warfare. Look at the human toll taken by the presidency, from Dresden and Hiroshima to Waco and Ruby Ridge, and you see that the presidency is a prime practitioner of murder by government.

Today, the president is called the leader of the world’s only superpower, the “world’s indispensable nation,” which is reason enough to have him deposed. A world with any superpower at all is a world where no freedoms are safe. But by invoking this title, the regime attempts to keep our attention focused on foreign affairs. It is a diversionary tactic designed to keep us from noticing the oppressive rule it imposes right here in the United States.

As the presidency assumes ever more power, it becomes less and less accountable and more and more tyrannical. These days, when we say “the federal government,” what we really mean is the presidency. When we say “national priorities,” we really mean what the presidency wants. When we say “national culture,” we mean what the presidency funds and imposes.

The presidency is presumed to be the embodiment of Rousseau’s general will, with far more power than any monarch or head of state in premodern societies. The US presidency is the apex of the world’s biggest and most powerful government and of the most expansive empire in world history. As such, the presidency represents the opposite of freedom. It is what stands between us and our goal of restoring our ancient rights.

And let me be clear: I’m not talking about any particular inhabitant of the White House. I’m talking about the institution itself, and the millions of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who are its acolytes. Look through the US government manual, which breaks down the federal establishment into its three branches. What you actually see is the presidential trunk, its Supreme Court stick, and its congressional twig. Practically everything we think of as federal—save the Library of Congress—operates under the aegis of the executive.

This is why the governing elites—and especially the foreign policy elites—are so intent on maintaining public respect for the office, and why they seek to give it the aura of holiness. For example, after Watergate, they briefly panicked and worried that they had gone too far. They might have discredited the democratic autocracy. And to some extent they did.

But the elites were not stupid: they were careful to insist that the Watergate controversy was not about the presidency as such, but only about Nixon the man. That’s why it became necessary to separate the two. How? By keeping the focus on Nixon, making a devil out of him, and reveling in the details of his personal life, his difficulties with his mother, his supposed pathologies, etc.

Decades later, similar tactics are now being used with Trump, the alleged new threat to the unassailable dignity of the presidency. We are told that another Trump presidency would “end democracy” and destroy countless freedoms. If this is true, it would seem reasonable to conclude that presidents have too much power. But the governing elites will never admit that. They insist the problem lies with Trump the man.

But this tactic doesn’t work like it once did. Americans took from Watergate the lesson that presidents will lie to you. Few voters now expect honesty, integrity, or even decency from their presidents. Many vote simply in the hope that their favored candidate will be less awful than the other one. Most know that under our current regime of untrammeled executive power, we can’t expect any better.

This should be the first lesson of any civics course, of course, and the first rule of thumb in understanding government affairs.

https://mises.org/misesian/presidency-greatest-threat-our-freedoms

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