Way back in the day (1998) the Foundation for Economic Education, a premiere organization and website supporting liberty, had an article about that very thing: salt losing its savor. It discussed the way unions are treated by government agencies (like the National Labor Relations Board and the Courts) as “more equal than all the other equal animals.” For one company to “salt” another company’s staff with its own agents is industrial espionage and illegal and strongly condemned, but a union using the same idea to sabotage a non-union firm is not just acceptable, but supported, by government.

But unionizing is not the ONLY example of this sort of “do as I say, not as I do” stupidity. Lets look at a few examples.

1. Any time a government agent (paid or volunteer) conducts a sting operation, or seeks to entrap someone into committing a crime
2. Traffic law enforcement, in which police routinely violate traffic laws in order to catch someone they think is violating traffic laws
3. The war on terrorism
4. The war on some religions
5. The war against those who do not obey the dictates of the Pandemic Panic and Lockdown

In every one of these, the government does exactly what it prohibits private citizens and groups – and often, even “subordinate” governments – to do.

It is a sickening example of the arrogance and overall attitude of government. Especially the FedGov. This hubris is enormous and disgusting. And has been long-lasting: we can see the roots of it in the Spanish-American War (and its hideous follow-up, the Philippine insurrection. We see it even more in the Great War, where the brave, wealthy Americans of long-lived memories came to the rescue of the French Republic (and incidentally, the long-term American enemy, the British Empire). The penultimate example was the Second World War, especially in Europe. While violating virtually every law of war for which Germans and Japanese were tried, convicted, and usually executed, it was glorious victory that we choose to remember.

Bluntly, the “war to end all wars” and the same “war against imperialism” was fought in order to defend OTHER empires (French, British, and even Russian!). As was the second war, against Nazism (National Socialism) and Japanese militarism: again defending other empires against the rising Japanese one and the restored German one. All with the same tactics and strategy as the enemy. Rank hypocrisy.

Back to the point of the headline of this commentary. It is clear that the American salt – the love of liberty and the fight against imperialism and tyranny – was losing its savor as far back as 1898. That was when the professional criminal class in DC (that is, Congress) decided NOT to really liberate the last Spanish colonies in the Americas and Pacific, but instead use them to build an American Empire. The hypocrisy of Wilson in defending and then seeking to preserve the old empires, directly or indirectly, in 1918 was even worse.

But the sustaining of the old Chinese Imperial system (although then called a “Republic” – just as Rome did), the compromise and surrender of half of Europe to the Soviets, AND the preservation of the British and German Empires, done by Roosevelt, Hull, Truman, and Marshall, was the crowning achievement.

Except by comparison to those old and new empires (NOT just the Soviet and Communist Chinese), American salt was totally unpalatable, unusable. Indeed fit only for throwing out to be trod upon (and not anywhere with freezing rain and snow!). And that was seventy-seven years ago.

We need to mine NEW, pure salt, or refine and purify the old, nasty, useless salt so that it again might preserve and protect. The first step in that direction is merely learning again what pure, uncorrupted and uncontaminated salt tastes and looks like. Like liberty: individual, personal, responsible liberty!

[That is the end of my commentary, at least for now. Since it is short and very open-ended, let me throw a curveball at TPOL’s readers.

What if… the United States had NOT won in WW1 or in one or both theatres in WW2?

Brush aside the garbage of fiction and counter-history, like The Man in the High Castle. Neither the Third Reich nor Imperial Japan had ANY chance of invading and occupying the Forty-Eight States. Any logistician (who is not riding his hobby-horse) worth his salt can explain why. Resources, people, technology, distance, industry, civilian armaments and attitudes, and more. To think that the Central Powers (German Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire) had ANY possibility of even occupying the ports of the Americas, or even doing anything beyond forcing the American Exeditionary Force out of France and into England.

So American failure to help the Allied Powers defeat the Central Powers, or twenty-five years later, the Axis Powers would NOT result in world domination by those enemy nations. And probably NOT a long-term occupation of even France, much less the United Kingdom. We would have had negotiated (legitimately negotiated) and much more fair armistices: cease fires almost certainly resulting in peace treaties far more just and equitable for all parties.

Such an outcome in 1918 almost certainly would have prevented the general European War of 1939-1945. And possibly even the success of the Soviet regime of Lenin, much less Stalin.

Just something to think about.