Or to double-down! How do you feel about being in league or just in agreement with the ruler of a country that looks to undermine or overthrow our Republic. And he shares the same sentiments as our president.

Vladimir Putin has come under fire for suggesting that liberalism is ‘obsolete’ and has outlived its purpose.

The Russian President also suggested that LGBT rights are ‘overshadowing’ culture, traditions and traditional family values, as well as saying migrants can “kill, plunder and rape with impunity”.

In an interview with the Financial Times ahead of the G20 summit, Mr Putin said: "The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population".

He said: “[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades. This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done.”

He also said while Russia had “no problems with LGBT persons”....“some things do appear excessive to us”.

“They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles,” Mr Putin said.

“Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with that. But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”

During the interview, the Russian leader also praised Donald Trump for his attempts to stop migrants entering the US from Mexico.

He said liberalism: "presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected". A picture-perfect Trump tirade.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/vladimir-putin-liberalism-obsolete-070434243.html

I’d have to say Putin is a little late to the party... but, better late than never.

”For centuries liberalism has meant a faith in individual liberty—the greatest possible freedom from both private dictation and from regulation by the government. Historic liberals have opposed increased taxing and spending and lawmaking by political rulers because these always restricted the ability of the individual to live his own life.

Yet today, many of those in America who call themselves liberals advocate programs the effect of which is to tax away more and more of everyone’s income and to spend more and more billions of dollars regulating the living, working, and thinking of not only all Americans, but all the rest of the world.

Of course, this false liberalism throws a smoke screen of “national defense” in front of its conniving to socialize the industries and government of the United States. There is a serious conflict of opinion as to how and where and when the enemies of our free people are planning to strike and will strike the most effective blows against our liberties.

We can, however, separate the two areas in which the war to overthrow our government and to enslave our people will be waged indeed, is being waged. We can assign to the armed forces only the military defense of the geographical area of the United States. We can assign to ourselves the responsibility for a civilian defense of the American people against their most dangerous enemies. These are the foes of our own household. These are the aggressive American socialists who call themselves liberals, but who have been working for a generation with tragic success to corrupt the minds of the American people, to submerge our love of liberty in a desire for security, to destroy our faith in ourselves as individuals, to destroy our confidence in a free economy, and to transform the limited powers of our free government into the unlimited tyrannical powers of a socialistic state.

This has not been a vast conspiracy in which millions of people have intentionally played a part. Instead of willful subversion there has been, on the contrary, a gradual conversion of millions of people, in one minority group after another, to a state paternalism that they believed would relieve them of burdens and problems that seemed too heavy for them to handle by themselves.

To gain a common understanding of what happened, let us glance back over the years between the beginning of the Great Depression in I929 and the end of the Second World War in 1945. Despite the lavish outpouring of public funds, the spending of higher taxes, and the Increased mortgaging of our future, there was no adequate relief of the depression in America until preparations for war, and then war itself, set the government free to raise taxes and borrow money and make expenditures utterly beyond even political justification, except by the magic of those words: “Necessary for national defense and self-preservation.” This whole experience might well have provided a great lesson in liberalism if our politicians and our educators had been inclined to teach this lesson. It would have been so easy to point out that we were achieving full employment and prosperity on a temporary inflationary stimulant which could not be wisely established as a permanent policy. But who can convince a man drinking his fourth cocktail that he should quit drinking liquor tonight and cut it out entirely tomorrow?

So when the war ended, millions of people had been unconsciously converted to state socialism. They repeated day after day the stock arguments of socialists: The problems of the modern world are too great for individuals. They can be solved only by collective action. Collective action on a large scale must be government action. It needs the support of government money raising and spending and, above all, it needs the support of government coercion. The citizen will only accept a limited discipline in voluntary organizations; and therefore to subject him to adequate collective action in the modern world he must come under the enforced discipline of government operations. This is, in pleasing, insidious language, the justification of a slave state.

Today, the state socialism our backsliding liberals still admire must be given a more acceptable name. So we have now the Welfare State, which in simple language means a half socialist state. This is a project of the character of Fabian socialism. We move gradually down the primrose path, denying all the time that that is what we are doing. We do not take over government operation of all public utilities. We simply go into the business of owning and operating public utilities to a sufficiently large extent so as to use their tax free, subsidized service to discredit private operation and to discourage or prevent private expansion.

We do not collectivize our farms or nationalize our industries. We simply make all farmers dependent on the government. We simply regulate and tax all business in great detail and authorize organized labor monopolies to hamper and coerce private enterprise, so that eventually it may be found necessary to “liberate” business altogether from private management.

We do not fix wages for labor, but simply fix a minimum wage as a basis for all wages and then do everything we can politically to aid labor unions to dictate terms of employment to industrial management.

How absurd it is to call this gradual creation of a socialist state the advance of liberalism! It is a fact, boasted by the American boss of the Communist party, that we have moved further along the road to state socialism than even Great Britain did with a socialist government. Yet, a large majority of those who support the socialist program of a welfare state do so in a blissful delusion that they are liberal thinkers. The truth is that they are reactionaries who are selling their liberties for a temporary gain of self-interest, and justifying their folly as humanitarianism.

It is easy to understand how farmers can be induced to vote for a man who promises a government guarantee of a fair price, or how workers can be seduced by government support in raising wages. It is easy to understand how the aged, the sick, the unemployed, or unemployable will vote for government relief of the unfortunate. It is easy to see how government favoritism for many minorities that are distressed, or feel themselves oppressed, will add up to a favoritism for a substantial majority of voters who will in grateful blindness support a paternalistic government.

But the total result of these and similar expansions of government is to weaken the nation’s productive energies which rise out of individual self-reliance and initiative. We make more and more millions of voters dependent largely on government favor until eventually, to use an old but solid phrase, we make the ruling class, which is the government, the masters instead of the servants of the people. No man with an educated intelligence and a proclaimed intellectual capacity can be excused for telling a people that they can go into debt indefinitely because they owe the money to themselves. No such man can be excused for advising labor unions to raise wages so high as to price their product out of the market. No such man can be excused for criticizing profits as wrongful when they are purely voluntary compensation for the use of private property. No such man can be excused for denying or concealing the fact that the maintenance of rights of private property is essential to the maintenance of liberty. No such man can be excused for deceiving poor people with claims that they do not pay taxes just because they have an income tax exemption. No such man can be excused for defending the fraud of a public social security reserve that provides no reserve and no security.

To sum it all up, no such man can be excused for arguing that a retreat to the historically proven failure of a socialistic state is a liberal advance for a free people.

Recently, walking down a busy street in one of our largest cities, I observed the thousands of free men and women crowding the stores to buy what they wanted to buy. I passed restaurants jammed with people eating the food they chose to eat. I thought of the hundreds of thousands of workers in factories, in shops, and in transportation, earning the highest wages paid in the world and working at jobs for which they were chosen in an actual competition of employers to obtain capable helpers. It suddenly struck me how amazingly free millions of American workers and their families were in cities and on farms throughout the United States. They were freer than workers anywhere else in the world to seek and obtain, in a competitive system, the best employment of which they were capable; and free to improve themselves and demonstrate their capacity for better employment.

Then I thought how shrunken would be the lives and liberties and ambitions of all these people under a socialist dictatorship; how they would be confined by thousands of regulations and dictations of bureaucrats to accept the jobs and the wages, the living and working conditions fixed for them by political judgments and, worst of all, by inevitable political favoritism.

So the thought came to me suddenly and clearly that the overwhelming majority of mature Americans don’t want socialism, don’t want to be dependent upon the political rulers of government. If there were visible armed forces marching against them to subject them to a socialistic tyranny, they would take up arms and fight to the death to preserve their individual liberties and to save themselves from the oppression of an all-powerful government.

But that is not the way in which the chief enemy of the American people is gradually gathering power to destroy their liberties. True it is that the militant socialists of Russia, the communists, inspire us with fear that they may embark upon the physical conquest of the United States by the gathering of armed forces. But a far greater threat confronts us in the weakening of our resistance to any foreign aggression by the corruption of our thinking by ourselves, by the brainwashing of the American people by continual internal propaganda in favor of the gradual transformation of our government from a protector of individual liberty into the paternalistic ruler of our lives.

Here is where backsliding liberals are doing the greatest harm to the American people. They misdirect public opinion on the recurring issues as to how far the government should go in protecting and promoting the general welfare, and how far such government activities destroy self-reliance and deny fundamental freedoms. Worse than this, they never admit but always deny that they are leading us deeper and deeper into the tyranny of a totalitarian government.”

[From an address to the Wausau, Wisconsin, Chamber of Commerce, March 1, 1955.]



Restrained By Law:

”Do you realize how much your economic freedom is restrained by law? The law regulates prices, hours of labor, wage rates, income which you can retain, inheritance, importation, interest rates, education, gifts, banking, installment selling, railroad rates, prices of farm products, insurance, employment. You must get a permit to enter business, to enter a profession, to establish a bus line. There are export subsidies, domestic subsidies, excise taxes. To enforce the legal interferences with trade, you support an army of agents, lawyers, judges, collectors, inspectors, clerks, arbitrators, conciliators, tax gatherers, and members of innumerable boards and commissions. You are enmeshed in reports, forms, questionnaires, indictments, complaints, laws, regulations, hearings, conferences, and court trials. These interventions are worse than useless; they reduce output, obstruct trade, paralyze enterprise.”

John W. Scoville, Labor Monopolies—or Freedom.
New York: Committee for Constitutional Government

By: Donald Richberg (July 1, 1956)