There were 3 huge ‘events’ that occurred in the USA in 1913 that have a great impact on our lives today. Any one of them alone was a big deal, a very big deal, but the fact that all three of these things happened in the same year blows my mind.
16th Amendment: Income Tax – You know the saying, “the only sure things in life are death and taxes”, well, starting in 1913, the federal government obtained the unprecedented power to tax individuals on their income. This is so wrong on so many levels, but I’ll try to be brief. Taxing income is bad for individuals, and it is bad for savings. It stifles the desire to earn more. Money you make by saving it or investing it is also considered ‘income’, so it stifles these things too. In addition to that, the federal government was not designed to have lots of power, this just gave them all that power!
17th Amendment: Direct Election of Senators – This one may not be obvious because it sounds better to most people to have government officials directly elected by citizens. The difference is between a democracy and a republic. This tipped the scales too far into the democracy realm. The senators were designed to represent the individual states, and to be elected by state representatives. There are many nuances about the role, power, and accountability of senators that this changed, and mostly, the importance of the state’s role in the federal government diminished, while the role of the central power increased.
The Federal Reserve Act – This has to be the biggest hose job in history. This is president Woodrow Wilson’s act that removed the very important power of controlling the money supply from the Senate and gave the power to a group of private central bankers (a cartel) that operate outside of the control of the government or the citizens. This very thing is explicitly warned against by the founding fathers. The history leading up to the creation of the banking cartel involved several previous central banks, and panics. (panics likely created to build support for the creation of the cartel) The last president who was serious about dealing with this problem was JFK. Many think this is the reason he was assassinated.
While I don’t really understand how the citizens in 1913 allowed these 3 atrocities to occur, I do understand we have the responsibility and the tools (made possible by the Internet) to educate ourselves about current issues, history, and truth. One of my top questions is “how bad does it have to get before YOU actually do something about it?”
