Nearly A Half-Million Employees Left At Department Of Defense, And That’s With Half Furloughed

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – If you weren’t opposed to the standing army from the standpoint that the framers of the Constitution and the generations that came after them had been very wary of and with very good reason of having standing armies lying around for obvious reasons, perhaps the latest statistics from the shutdown will warm you to the idea of at least considering this.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  We’ve slogged through this government shutdown business. I’m going to make one more point before I go back to the phones.  I was giving you the numbers of employees of the federal leviathan and the percentage of them that have been furloughed.  I left out the biggest number on the list here.  If you weren’t opposed to the standing army from the standpoint that the framers of the Constitution and the generations that came after them had been very wary of and with very good reason of having standing armies lying around for obvious reasons, perhaps the latest statistics from the shutdown will warm you to the idea of at least considering this.

The Department of Defense employs an estimated — this is just what they’ll admit.  This is not the actual employment, and this does not include military personnel.  These are civvies, as you people in the military call them.  Of the 800,000 employees, 400,000 of them, or 50 percent, had been furloughed.  If you’re not warm to the idea of eliminating much of what we would call our standing army, recalling our troops from hither and yon all around the world, putting the United States Navy, required by the Constitution to exist, back on its proper footing as the protective force it is to be for American commerce on the high seas — that’s what its purpose is.  It’s not a global force for good.

According to the U.S. Constitution, it is there to be a commercial force for good.  It is there to make sure that our coasts are protected and that commerce on the high seas is free from invasion from mercenaries, pirates, and other countries that might try to impress the sailors or the members of the commercial vessel that sails from the United States therein.  That’s what the Navy is for.  That’s why it’s in the Constitution and there’s no limit to its existence. The framers knew that power on the high seas or that naval power was necessary for any free nation in order to conduct trade with other countries.  You had to have a navy, otherwise Jean Lafitte and Blackbeard and Bluebeard and the Barbary Coast pirates and what have you would have their way with you.  That’s why we have this, in part, because the experience of those men told them that you had to have a navy.

So put the navy back on the proper footing, reduce the size of the rest of the standing army.  Folks, what exactly is wrong with the idea of retrenching and getting back to actual national guards that are supposed to be the first line of defense should anyone be stupid enough to try to invade the United States?  That’s what the National Guard was for, which is basically an extension of what was formerly the militia.  If the states want to get into the business of hiring and training the national guard [mocking] “Mike, the National Guard, that’s the military.  That is the federal military.”

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No, it’s not, not unless it’s called into service.  National in the sense that Texas is a state and Louisiana is a state, in the sense that a state is a country, national would be exactly what it would mean, or exactly what it would mean to any other country that had a national guard.  It would mean that you are to guard that state.  Should you be called into service and should it be necessary that you have to have a federal army, then you go to the National Guards and Congress has the authority under the Constitution to do so.  But, of course, we have to be involved and embroiled in the affairs of the entire known universe.  This is why you need 800,000 civilian employees to support the Department of Defense.

It’s the number one item on the list. [mocking] “Yeah, but that’s security.  We gotta have that.”  Hang on a second, 800,000 employees at the Department of Defense, 231,117 at the Department of Homeland Insecurity, only 31,295 of which had been furloughed.  I would imagine that’s a lot of TSA workers.  Then you have 332,000 that work at the Department of Veterans Affairs.  We keep hearing [mocking] “Military veterans are going to be denied services.”  That’s just cockeyed.  That’s just ridiculous.  Stop exploring and invading and occupying the entire known universe if you must in order to take care of those who have already sacrificed.  That ought to be the end of the story.  Anyone that says the Department of Veterans Affairs or VA hospitals or anyone that is due any kind of medical treatment or continuing medical treatment whatsoever because they were thrust into one of our many, many, many wars or occupancies by choice, those people are already owed.  A grateful nation should never forget and should always tend to those particular affairs.

The tragedy of continuing with the idea here that we’re going to create new or that we need or should continue to create future need for the Department of Veterans Affairs as a piece of settled law or discussion, [mocking] “We’re always gonna have to have them.”  Why?  Are you always going to be making war?  Is making war what we do?  I thought the purpose of the Constitution was for common defense.  It doesn’t say anything about common war.  It doesn’t say anything about perpetual war.  There’s an awful lot to be talked about here if people actually want to have the conversation.  You’re not going to get an awful lot of support and you’re not going to find an awful lot of “conservatives” that are going to agree with what I just said.

I think more people are warming to the idea that the Department of Defense is the government and they are employing all of these souls and this is a significant if not the most significant part of the trillions of dollars that is spent every year that has to be borrowed.  [mocking] “Mike, don’t we have to have some kind of defense?”  Some kind of defense is not what we have.  The discussion ought to center around that.  I saw Ron Paul had his weekly column out yesterday talking about this, about how people aren’t really serious about doing anything about the budget because they won’t touch the military, won’t touch it in any way, shape or form.  We can’t even get an agreement that maybe we should stop producing paralyzed, maimed, and wounded veterans unless we absolutely have to have some kind of a war.  We continue with the present.  I don’t even know if we can identify what our foreign policy is other than to say keep making munitions and keep finding places to deploy those munitions in.  [mocking] “If we don’t, we’ll lose our stature in the world.”  Stature in the world as what?  Stature in the world as what?  The biggest military force, not the most free people, not the ambassadors for liberty that we kid ourselves and try to pat ourselves on the back that we’re supposed to be, no, the force is the military force.  It’s long past time that that gets a fair, open, and honest evaluation.

Mike Church Show Transcript – Obamacare + Preexisting Conditions = Bankruptcy

Let’s put it this way.  Let’s say we all agree that we’re not willing to fork over another nickel of our incomes or productivity to the federal leviathan to collect and harass us to extract from us.  Whatever you’re getting today is all you’re going to get.  That’s it, that’s the end of it.  Okay, that’s resulting right now in between $700 billion and $1.2 trillion per year in debt that has to be borrowed.  You can pay the debt back one of two ways.  You can devalue the currency and pretend like you’re paying it back by inflating the dollar.  You’re not really paying it back.  You’re really gipping the people that bought the debt.  Or you can increase taxes. Or you can borrow the money outright, not devalue the currency, and promise to pay it back at a future time.  We’re doing a combination of all these things, meaning the bills for what’s being borrowed today are going to be paid at some point in time.  The money doesn’t exist on the face of the planet.

A Boston University professor has calculated that we are $222 trillion upside down.  Shouldn’t we stop making trillions of dollars’ worth of commitments?  He wasn’t even counting Obamacare, which, by the way, many of you are probably thinking this is a wag-the-dog scenario, that the entire government shutdown is being waged and talked about and promoted here as a way to obfuscate the beginning of the Affordable Care Act’s reign of tyranny and reign of very soon to be unfunded liabilities and unsustainable promises.  Let’s just say we agree all we have is the $2.7 trillion you’ll be able to collect.  Let’s just say do no more damage.  Just don’t do any more damage, no more debt.  Maybe target ten percent to repaying the national debt down if we’re going to be stuck in this union because we don’t have the good sense to split it up because it’s out of scale.

Let’s just say that all things status quo remain status quo as I just described them.  Isn’t it prudent then to then to immediately implement alterations in the various departments of state, whether they’re defense, whether they’re justice, whether they’re revenue or whatever the case may be?  Shouldn’t there just be some across-the-board agreement that we’re just going to have to live within the confines of this amount of revenue and thus this amount of spending?  Maybe we should project that we’re not going to spend as much as we’re going to take in, just to be on the safe side.  This is what a prudent, non-arrogant, humble citizen of the planet country would do, you would think.  Of course, that’s beyond us.  We’re Americans.  We can’t be told no.  That’s why we have MasterCard and Visa and Discover.  That’s why the Capital One Vikings are so popular.

Even if you look at it from a financial or economic point of view, dollars and cents, pluses and minuses, revenues and debits, we’re at the end of the game.  We keep talking about [mocking] “I wonder how long this is going to be sustained?”  Well, that’s the wrong way to look at it.  Why wait for the correction?  Why wait for the crash in order to act?  The Republicans in Congress that are trying to hold the dam or trying to hold the line on not surrendering on the Obamacare front, on the Affordable Care Act front, to me, as I said yesterday, that’s the legislative process.  That’s what they’re supposed to do.  That’s not going far enough.  The issue is they’re not being serious with the rest of the $3.7 trillion-headed hydra.

Founders TV – How is the Millenial Generation Going to Fix This Mess? Will They Even Bother?

There’s a lot of work left to do here, folks.  It ought to begin with the discussion of do no more harm.  We have a shutdown.  Deal with the damn shutdown.  Have faith and confidence that what happened after the end of hostilities in 1946, which was the end of World War II, that the American economy absorbed 9 million soldiers.  Nine million enlisted men were reabsorbed into the private economy at the end of World War II.  You can look that up. That’s a fact.  How’s that possible?  They were drawing government checks.  They were government employees at the time, weren’t they?  Nine million of them returned to the civilian workforce.  It is possible, doable, feasible.  Markets have a way of working these things out.  You stop taxing.  You stop confiscating.  You stop the redirection of resources that are being plowed into unproductive things.  You stop the unintended consequences that are unleashed by this level of State spending.

Mises is a good person to look to and to study for why this is a great opportunity.  Hayek, Road to Serfdom, a great person to look to and study why this is an opportunity here to grab a handle on the rest of the federal leviathan and do something about it.  Of course, that’s not going to happen.  Don’t kid yourselves.  This is just me monologuing here.  I am under no presupposition that this is going to happen, or under any delusion this is actually going to come about.  I can hope for it to come about, but I don’t think it is.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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