LIES THE
GOVERNMENT
TOLD YOU
Also by Andrew P. Napolitano
Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When
Government Breaks Its Own Laws
The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal
Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the
Supreme Law of the Land
A Nation of Sheep
Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and
Freedom in America
LIES THE
GOVERNMENT
TOLD YOU
Myth, Power, and Deception in American History
by
Andrew P. Napolitano
© 2010 Andrew P. Napolitano
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Napolitano, Andrew P.
Lies the government told you : myth, power, and deception in American
history / by Andrew P. Napolitano.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-59555-266-2
1. Constitutional history—United States. 2. United States—Politics and
government. I. Title.
KF4550.Z9N369 2010
320.520973—dc22
2009051799
Printed in the United States of America
10 11 12 13 14 WC 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated
to the memory of
Senator Barry Morris Goldwater,
who, alone among major party
candidates for President,
promised to shrink the federal government,
and who is the father
the modern American Liberty Movement.
“‘For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone, who is of the truth, hears my voice.’ Pilate said to him, ‘What is truth?’”
— John 18:37
“[M]en are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli,
The Prince
“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
— Henry A. Wallace,
Vice President of the United States
(1941 to 1945)
Contents
Foreword by Congressman Ron Paul
Introduction
Lie #1: “All Men Are Created Equal”
Lie #2: “All Men . . . Are Endowed by Their Creator
with Certain Inalienable Rights”
Lie #3: “Judges Are Like Umpires”
Lie #4: “Every Vote Counts”
Lie #5: “Congress Shall Make No Law . . . Abridging
the Freedom of Speech”
Lie #6: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms
Shall Not Be Infringed”
Lie #7: “Your Body Is Your Temple”
Lie #8: “The Federal Reserve Shall Be Controlled
by Congress”
Lie #9: “It’s Only a Temporary Government Program”
Lie #10: “I’m from the Government, and I’m Here to Help”
Lie #11: “We Are Winning the War on Drugs”
Lie #12: “Everyone Is Innocent Until Proven Guilty”
Lie #13: “The Constitution Applies in Good Times and
in Bad Times”
Lie #14: “Your Boys Are Not Going to Be Sent
into Any Foreign Wars”
Lie #15: “We Don’t Torture”
Lie #16: “The Right of the People to Be Secure
in Their Persons, Houses, Papers, and Effects,
Shall Not Be Violated”
Lie #17: “America Has a Free Market”
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Index
Foreword
by Congressman Ron Paul
Andrew P. Napolitano is a true rarity among judges and media personalities: He is a passionate defender of liberty who understands that the United States Constitution puts strict limits on federal power. Judge Napolitano’s tremendous knowledge of American law, history, and politics, as well as his passion for freedom, shines through in Lies the Government Told You, as he details how throughout American history, politicians and government officials have betrayed the ideals of personal liberty and limited government.
Anyone who knows Judge Napolitano understands that he does not pull his punches or excuse any constitutional violations in order to support any group or political interest. Thus, Lies the Government Told You explains how politicians of both parties have routinely disregarded the constitutional limits on federal power and violated our natural rights.
One of the most important lessons Judge Napolitano teaches is how many shared premises there are by advocates of big government from both the right and the left. For example, Judge Napolitano exposes how both the conservatives’ war on marijuana and the liberals’ war on tobacco are manifestations of paternalism—the idea that government has the legitimate authority to stop adults from doing bad things, like smoking substances that politicians and bureaucrats do not approve of. Of course, smoking, whether of marijuana or tobacco, does have negative health consequences—but respecting the right of individuals to be wrong, as long as they do not interfere with the rights of others, is one of the pillars of a free society.
Lies the Government Told You also avoids the all-too-common error of drawing a distinction between “personal” liberty and “economic” liberty, and focusing on attacks on one type of freedom while ignoring or even supporting attacks on the other category of liberty. When the freedom movement began in the nineteenth century, supporters of liberty, who were then known as “liberals,” made no distinctions between government actions that interfered with economic liberties, such as laws infringing upon private contracts, and government actions that restricted personal liberty, such as limits on the freedom of speech. Supporters of liberty were also likely to understand the grave threat posed to liberty and constitutional government by a militaristic foreign policy. Thus, they were also supporters of peace.
However, beginning in the Progressive Era, promoters of big government co-opted the rhetoric of the promoters of freedom, even stealing the label “liberal.” Whereas liberal once referred to a supporter of freedom, beginning in the Progressive Era, the term liberal began to refer to supporters of the welfare state. The division between supporters of “economic” and “personal” freedoms was accelerated by the Cold War, when many supporters of free markets allowed their (justifiable) loathing of communism to lead them to embrace militarism abroad and limitations on personal freedom at home. Thanks to this division between the
supporters of personal and economic liberty, it is not uncommon to find opponents of socialized medicine arguing for the Patriot Act, and opponents of gun control arguing for free speech.
Fortunately, Judge Andrew P. Napolitano is one of a growing number of Americans who support liberty across the board. Thus, Lies the Government Told You defends all of our freedoms. Readers of this book will find eloquent defenses of private property, the right to keep and bear arms, and attacks on excessive government regulations along with defenses of free speech, and attacks on unconstitutional wars, the drug war, and the Patriot Act.
One chapter of this book that is particularly important to me deals with monetary policy. Anyone who has followed my career knows that exposing and ending the damage done to our prosperity and freedom by the Federal Reserve’s fiat currency system drives much of what I do. While there is substantial literature explaining the myriad ways the Federal Reserve damages our economy, there is not nearly as much writing that explains how the Federal Reserve System violates the Constitution and ties the Federal Reserve to the general assault on liberty waged by Big Government. This book helps fill that gap.
As a congressional representative from a Gulf Coast district who has seen how the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) fails to live up to its promise to provide assistance to victims of natural disasters in a timely and thorough manner, I particularly enjoyed Judge Napolitano’s dissection of the constitutional and practical problems with FEMA.
I have only scratched the surface of the many virtues of this important work. Lies the Government Told You will provide those active in the freedom movement with much-needed intellectual ammunition. This book can also help open the eyes of those who are yet to recognize the assaults on our liberty by politicians and bureaucrats. I am pleased to recommend this book to anyone who cares about the direction of this country and wants to understand how we got where we are, and what we need to do to regain our liberties.
—Congressman Ron Paul, M.D. (R-TX)
Introduction
During the 1980 presidential campaign, a joke made the rounds in the Reagan camp. George Washington, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter die and go to Heaven. In a chance meeting about how they got there, Washington boasts, “I never told a lie.” Not to be outdone, Nixon proclaims, “I never told the truth.” A determined Carter can’t resist: “I never knew the difference!”
What is a lie? What is the truth? What is the difference?
One could not begin to count all the words, ink, and paper spent addressing those three questions, even though the answers are implicated in almost every thought and every word and every act that everyone perceives, utters, and engages upon every day of our adult lives.
Truth is identity between intellect and reality. A lie is a knowing and intentional violation of the truth. The difference between the two often depends on whether one is in the governing class or the governed class.
We have all come to expect some lying in our lives and have engaged in lying to some extent; perhaps to avoid or postpone a crisis, or to serve a higher good, or because telling a lie was easier under the circumstances than telling the truth, and the consequences of the lie were harmless. This is all normal human behavior, and it can range from being critical to existence to being innocuous.
If a ship captain is secretly ferrying innocents from slavery to freedom, and his ship is stopped on the high seas by agents of the government that enslaved his passengers, should he lie about their true identities? When a coworker asks how you are during a miserable day, should you lie to avoid a painful but harmless and useless conversation? Can silence be a lie when one has a lawful or moral duty to tell the truth? These are issues with which we wrestle almost every day.
In a free society, we expect the government to wrestle with them as well, but it does not; it is not concerned with truth. The government lies to us regularly, consistently, systematically, and daily on matters great and small, but it prosecutes and jails those who lie to it. For example, a male drug dealer with a heavy foreign accent and minimal understanding of English stupidly tells an FBI agent that his name is Nancy Reagan, and he is arrested, prosecuted, and jailed for lying to the government. Another FBI agent tells the cultural guru Martha Stewart, in an informal conversation in the presence of others, that she is not the target of a federal criminal probe, and she replies that she did not sell a certain stock on a certain day. They both lied, but she went to jail and the FBI agent kept his job.
What is it about the government and its agents and employees that they can lie to us with impunity, but we risk being sent to jail if we lie to them?
Throughout this book, I will suggest answers to these and similar questions. As I do so, you’ll see a chip on my shoulder. I am angry that we allow the government to lie to us, that we expect it to do so, and even take comfort in the illusions created thereby. When I told friends about the title of this book, I frequently joked that it would be four thousand pages in length. Most laughed; but none doubted that there have been enough government lies to consume that many printed pages.
When you recall that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States mandate a free and open society, one in which the government works for us, you can see where the chip on my shoulder came from. It is morally reprehensible for any government to lie to anyone over whom it has lawful authority. But in a free and open society where we are the employers, and the government workers are the employees, every government employee—from a public school janitor to a state governor, from a soldier to an FBI agent, from a cop to the President—has a lawful obligation to be truthful to his or her employers, and it is utterly and completely and unconditionally unacceptable to treat as normal that they should lie to us.
And yet, treat it as normal we do. Just look at the names of the chapters in this book—from “All Men Are Created Equal” to “Congress Shall Make No Law . . . Abridging the Freedom of Speech,” from “Innocent Until Proven Guilty” to “Your Boys Are Not Going to Be Sent into Any Foreign Wars” to “We Don’t Torture”—and you will see the stuff of which historical myth is made. Every one of those well-known, well-worn, well-stated canards is a goal the government has never reached but claims it has. Each has become a bald-faced lie, a perpetrated myth, a grasp at power, a monstrous deception. And most of us recognize that.
Why do we believe government-generated myths? Why do we allow the use of myth to enhance government power? Why do we condone the government’s use of deception to crush our freedom, steal our property, and destroy our lives? And how does the government get away with all this?
These are the questions we will explore in the coming pages, as we tear through American history from 1776 to 2010, and expose the use of myth to seize power and the power of deception to delude the public. When the public is deluded by the very folks it has hired to defend its freedom, the delusion interferes with that freedom by denying us accurate information with which we can decide in whose hands we should repose government power. Would Americans have reelected FDR had they known that he caused the attack on Pearl Harbor? Would voters have chosen LBJ, the supposed “peace candidate” in 1964, had they known he was secretly planning to ramp up the Vietnam War? Would George W. Bush have been reelected in 2004 if we knew he was illegally spying on us, concocting evidence for war, torturing people, and lying about it?
Government lies take on a life of their own since they breed more lies to substantiate the original lies. Government lies induce government lawbreaking, and government lawbreaking means someone is suffering a loss of life, liberty, or property because of some event not caused by the person suffering; and it also means that the lawbreaker walks free in the corridors of power to strike again.
Government lies are a direct assault on freedom because, if believed, if accepted as truth, the lies dupe individuals into making choices they would not make were the truth known. Government lies seduce us into surrendering freedom and accepting unlawful behavior and irretrievable
loss as somehow warranted, and they establish a precedent for similar thefts of freedom and personal loss in the future.
In my previous books, I have targeted government excess. In Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws, I argued that government lawbreaking is a serious, yet hidden problem recognized primarily by those who benefit from or are victimized by it, and if unchecked, will lead to tyranny. In The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land, I made the case that the feds have systematically stolen power from the States and freedom from individuals, under the guise of interpreting the Constitution, and much of that power and many of those freedoms will be impossible to reclaim. In A Nation of Sheep, I showed that government in America hates freedom, that it defends its power and not our rights, even though our rights are natural, come from our humanity, and as Jefferson stated, are “inalienable.” In Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America, I demonstrated that any government that thinks it can suspend the free will of the innocent is fatal to life, fatal to freedom, and breeds horrors that can last for centuries.
In the pages that follow, I continue with my theme that the government is not your friend. The lies told to us by our own government, and accepted by our grandparents and our parents and our children, have destroyed the lives, stolen the freedom, crushed the God-given rights, and seized the property of those who got in the way of official government deception. Why has our government rejected America’s first principles of individual freedom, guaranteed rights, limited government, free enterprise, private property, and the right to be left alone? And why has it denied doing so?
Before you start reading this book, I suggest you flip back to the quotations I have selected as representational themes of this book and reread them. Hold me to these themes, and at the end of the book, decide for yourself if I have supported them.
Come with me now on a tour of myth, power, and deception in America; woven into the fabric of our history, perpetrated even as you read this, and accepted by millions as the norm.
Lies the government told you Page 1