{"id":507,"date":"2008-09-24T10:41:40","date_gmt":"2008-09-24T15:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=507"},"modified":"2008-09-24T10:41:40","modified_gmt":"2008-09-24T15:41:40","slug":"the-highway-robber-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/24\/the-highway-robber-state\/","title":{"rendered":"The Highway Robber State"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Night Watchman State has been replaced by Highway Robber States – governments in which no asset, no contract, no domain is safe from marauding bands of politicians<\/em>. (from Freedom in Chains<\/a>, 1999)<\/p>\n

If you voted in the congressional elections two years ago, were you ceding the right to the winners to give @ a trillion dollars to their Wall Street friends and donors?<\/p>\n

Did any politician mention on the campaign trail in 2006 that a vote for them would be a vote for lavishing tax dollars on some of the richest wheeler-dealers in the nation?<\/p>\n

Did any congressional candidate run on a platform of seizing tax dollars and using it to pay above-market prices for worthless assets for Wall Street’s benefit?<\/p>\n

How in Hades can this bailout have any legitimacy within any notion of democracy that does not proclaim that citizens exist to be financially slaughtered for the good of whoever the rulers please?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Night Watchman State has been replaced by Highway Robber States – governments in which no asset, no contract, no domain is safe from marauding bands of politicians. (from Freedom in Chains, 1999) If you voted in the congressional elections two years ago, were you ceding the right to the winners to give @ a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[22,659,6,10,658,17,31],"class_list":{"0":"post-507","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"tag-attention-deficit-democracy","8":"tag-bovard","9":"tag-bush","10":"tag-congress","11":"tag-elective-dictatorship","12":"tag-wool"},"yoast_head":"\nThe Highway Robber State - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/24\/the-highway-robber-state\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Highway Robber State - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Night Watchman State has been replaced by Highway Robber States – governments in which no asset, no contract, no domain is safe from marauding bands of politicians. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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