While I'm not a Christian, I don't think you have to be one in order to appreciate Franklin Sanders' insights in this wide-ranging self-interview. Here are a few of what I consider to be the take-home quotes:
• "You only lose by not resisting evil. We suffer because so few people are willing to resist. They care more about what Francis Schaeffer called their 'personal peace and prosperity' than they do about the civilisation that they inherited from their fathers – and that they ought to pass on to their children."
• "(The system we live under) is a symbiosis of Big Business and Big Government, and every arm of it supports some other arm. As a perfect fascist system, it gives every layer of society something free in return for submission. It works well because every one of those clients – welfare recipients, beneficiaries of corporate subsidies, licensees, pensioners, etc., etc. – will fight like raging devils to protect their share of the pie. They may not like the whole system, but they have a strong interest in perpetuating it."
• "Central banks, especially the Greenspan Fed, spent the 1990s creating a huge credit bubble that pumped up debt around the world. All that bad debt must now be written off. That will choke the economy and slow growth for at least ten years. Stock markets won’t recover for 25 years."
• "The practice of life in the modern industrial capitalist world with all its rationalistic values – “modernity” for short -- not only alienates us from the natural world, but it also isolates us from each other." [I don't see this statement as an indictment of free enterprise itself, but mainly of the soulless way in which it is practiced by large companies]
• "When the courts recognise “rights,” they are most often “rights” that in no way endanger the Establishment’s status quo, or they are state-created “rights” (really “privileges”) like “civil rights” or entitlements. On the other hand, whenever you try to exercise inalienable rights that threaten that stranglehold – like starting a gold and silver bank, as I did in 1985 – then the government brings down the whole weight of its power to crush you. My pilgrimage through the court system, which lasted 15 years from investigation to exhaustion of final appeal, taught me that the courts will always uphold the status quo, regardless how the common law, the constitution, and the statute laws contradict it. Somewhere in this country there must be honest judges, but I never met one staring over the bench at me."
Although Sanders is talking about society as a whole rather than the Libertarian Party, his radicalism and grassroots/bottom-up message parallels that of the Grassroots Libertarians agenda (Key Values #1 and #4).
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))