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Ron Paul Institute
Featured Articles
Apr 15, 2025
President Trump might have inadvertently come up with the perfect solution to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis. That solution entails making America so ugly that foreigners will no longer want to come here.
After all, that’s what North Korea did. Like the United States, North Korea militarized and sealed its southern border, established a police state, and isolated itself from the rest of the world. Today, no one is striving to get into North Korea because the government has made the country so ugly.
Many foreigners are cancelling vacation plans to the United States. Others are selling American vacation homes. They are wise to do so. Otherwise, they could suddenly find themselves on a U.S. military transport plane carting them to the maximum-security, anti-terrorist torture and brutality camp in El Salvador. As U.S. Justice Department officials are telling federal judges, once people have been delivered to El Salvador, as compared to the Pentagon/CIA torture and brutality camp at Gitmo, U.S. officials are powerless to get them released. What foreigner wants to take that chance by coming to the United States, legally or illegally?
Of course, the ugliness does not just extend to the mistreatment of people here in the United States. With Trump’s tariffs and trade-war antics, it now extends to harming people all over the world by bankrupting and impoverishing foreign citizens. The victims include extremely poor people who supposedly have been taking advantage of college-educated Americans by selling goods and services to them. Who wants to visit a country that adopts economic policies that wreak destruction among innocent foreigners who aren’t even trying to get into the United States?
No doubt operating under a deportation quota, U.S. immigration officials are now revoking student visas for foreigners studying in colleges and universities across the land. The reason? They are foreigners. Some of them are college seniors, which means they don’t get to graduate. That’s ugly.
But the fact is that President Trump is not the root cause of America the ugly. He’s just a manifestation of the very bad, rotten systems under which Americans live today. It’s those systems that have made America ugly. There are nine systems to which I am referring, all of which work in tandem:
America has not always had these nine systems. For example, if we consider the period 1880-1910, which is my favorite time in all of history, Americans living at that time had none of these systems. In fact, those Americans hated and rejected everything Americans today stand for and favor. Interestingly and not coincidentally, it was in the year 1893 that the song “America the Beautiful” was written.
When 20th-century Americans rejected those nine founding systems of our nation in favor of statist systems, they thought they were ushering in a “great society,” to use President Lyndon Johnson’s term, or, to use Trump’s phrase, a “golden era.”
In fact, those nine systems converted America into an ugly nation, one that is clearly being destroyed from within. Financially, the federal government is now $36.7 trillion in debt, an amount that climbs ever year, including during Trump’s first term as president. It will continue increasing during Trump’s second term in office. That debt now amounts to $330,000 per taxpayer. How many taxpayers can pay their share of this massive debt?
But far worse than the financial mess is the moral rot at the center of the American empire. With the welfare state, Americans do their best to use the IRS to take money from whom it belongs in order to give it to people to whom it does not belong. They call that coercion “care and compassion.” At the same time, they scramble desperately every April 15 to find as many income-tax deductions as possible in an effort to keep their own money from being looted. It is a system in which Americans are at constant war against each other, including intergenerational war with such socialist programs as Social Security and Medicare.
To help finance the ever-growing expenditure of these nine systems, the Federal Reserve has been inflating and debasing its paper money ever since its inception in 1913, a monetary phenomenon that current-day Americans falsely blame on private-sector “greed.”
In the name of keeping us “safe,” the national-security state has been given omnipotent, totalitarian powers over the citizenry, including state-sponsored assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, or rendition to Gitmo or El Salvador as accused “terrorists.” It also wreaks massive death and destruction around the world with invasions, occupations, coups, provocations, sanctions, and embargoes.
Today, an increasing number of American are choosing to live in foreign countries rather than here in the United States. In fact, it is ironic that more than a million Americans have chosen to live in Mexico, the country that is supposedly filled with murderers, rapists, and robbers who are supposedly trying to get into the United States to kill, rape, and rob us.
The drug war, which just happens to be the most racist government program since segregation, has given us a society of massive violence, not to mention that it has destroyed our liberty and privacy in the never-ending effort to “win” it. Of course, no one bothers to notice that the entire drug war is devoted to preventing countless Americans from getting their hands on the drugs that they wish to ingest. It’s just another way that America the ugly manifests itself.
But it’s clearly not the only way. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death for teens and young adults aged 10-34. That’s what America the ugly has produced — young people checking out of life early.
It’s also worth mentioning the irrational mass killings that have become a normal and integral part of all this the ugliness.
The problem is that thanks to America’s state-controlled educational system, 21st-century Americans, in the name of “freedom,” remain as wedded to these nine statist systems as their 20-century predecessors. The last thing they want to do is acknowledge that these systems have not only failed to achieve the “great society” or the “golden era” but instead are the root cause of America’s ugliness. And so Americans do two things: (1) Elect a man on the white horse who will be the one who finally — finally! — makes their beloved nine systems work, even if he has to make America uglier in the process, and (2) do what totalitarian regimes have done throughout history — target unpopular scapegoats who can be blamed for the ugliness arising from bad systems, such as illegal immigrants, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Muslims, or whoever.
America the Ugly. Why not make that our new national anthem?
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
ronpaulinstitute.org
Featured Articles
Apr 15, 2025
President Trump might have inadvertently come up with the perfect solution to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis. That solution entails making America so ugly that foreigners will no longer want to come here.
After all, that’s what North Korea did. Like the United States, North Korea militarized and sealed its southern border, established a police state, and isolated itself from the rest of the world. Today, no one is striving to get into North Korea because the government has made the country so ugly.
Many foreigners are cancelling vacation plans to the United States. Others are selling American vacation homes. They are wise to do so. Otherwise, they could suddenly find themselves on a U.S. military transport plane carting them to the maximum-security, anti-terrorist torture and brutality camp in El Salvador. As U.S. Justice Department officials are telling federal judges, once people have been delivered to El Salvador, as compared to the Pentagon/CIA torture and brutality camp at Gitmo, U.S. officials are powerless to get them released. What foreigner wants to take that chance by coming to the United States, legally or illegally?
Of course, the ugliness does not just extend to the mistreatment of people here in the United States. With Trump’s tariffs and trade-war antics, it now extends to harming people all over the world by bankrupting and impoverishing foreign citizens. The victims include extremely poor people who supposedly have been taking advantage of college-educated Americans by selling goods and services to them. Who wants to visit a country that adopts economic policies that wreak destruction among innocent foreigners who aren’t even trying to get into the United States?
No doubt operating under a deportation quota, U.S. immigration officials are now revoking student visas for foreigners studying in colleges and universities across the land. The reason? They are foreigners. Some of them are college seniors, which means they don’t get to graduate. That’s ugly.
But the fact is that President Trump is not the root cause of America the ugly. He’s just a manifestation of the very bad, rotten systems under which Americans live today. It’s those systems that have made America ugly. There are nine systems to which I am referring, all of which work in tandem:
- The welfare-state system;
- The regulated/managed economy system;
- The income tax/IRS system;
- The paper-money/Federal Reserve system;
- The national-security state system;
- The drug-war system;
- The immigration-control system;
- The foreign empire/intervention system; and
- The public (i.e., government) school system.
America has not always had these nine systems. For example, if we consider the period 1880-1910, which is my favorite time in all of history, Americans living at that time had none of these systems. In fact, those Americans hated and rejected everything Americans today stand for and favor. Interestingly and not coincidentally, it was in the year 1893 that the song “America the Beautiful” was written.
When 20th-century Americans rejected those nine founding systems of our nation in favor of statist systems, they thought they were ushering in a “great society,” to use President Lyndon Johnson’s term, or, to use Trump’s phrase, a “golden era.”
In fact, those nine systems converted America into an ugly nation, one that is clearly being destroyed from within. Financially, the federal government is now $36.7 trillion in debt, an amount that climbs ever year, including during Trump’s first term as president. It will continue increasing during Trump’s second term in office. That debt now amounts to $330,000 per taxpayer. How many taxpayers can pay their share of this massive debt?
But far worse than the financial mess is the moral rot at the center of the American empire. With the welfare state, Americans do their best to use the IRS to take money from whom it belongs in order to give it to people to whom it does not belong. They call that coercion “care and compassion.” At the same time, they scramble desperately every April 15 to find as many income-tax deductions as possible in an effort to keep their own money from being looted. It is a system in which Americans are at constant war against each other, including intergenerational war with such socialist programs as Social Security and Medicare.
To help finance the ever-growing expenditure of these nine systems, the Federal Reserve has been inflating and debasing its paper money ever since its inception in 1913, a monetary phenomenon that current-day Americans falsely blame on private-sector “greed.”
In the name of keeping us “safe,” the national-security state has been given omnipotent, totalitarian powers over the citizenry, including state-sponsored assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, or rendition to Gitmo or El Salvador as accused “terrorists.” It also wreaks massive death and destruction around the world with invasions, occupations, coups, provocations, sanctions, and embargoes.
Today, an increasing number of American are choosing to live in foreign countries rather than here in the United States. In fact, it is ironic that more than a million Americans have chosen to live in Mexico, the country that is supposedly filled with murderers, rapists, and robbers who are supposedly trying to get into the United States to kill, rape, and rob us.
The drug war, which just happens to be the most racist government program since segregation, has given us a society of massive violence, not to mention that it has destroyed our liberty and privacy in the never-ending effort to “win” it. Of course, no one bothers to notice that the entire drug war is devoted to preventing countless Americans from getting their hands on the drugs that they wish to ingest. It’s just another way that America the ugly manifests itself.
But it’s clearly not the only way. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death for teens and young adults aged 10-34. That’s what America the ugly has produced — young people checking out of life early.
It’s also worth mentioning the irrational mass killings that have become a normal and integral part of all this the ugliness.
The problem is that thanks to America’s state-controlled educational system, 21st-century Americans, in the name of “freedom,” remain as wedded to these nine statist systems as their 20-century predecessors. The last thing they want to do is acknowledge that these systems have not only failed to achieve the “great society” or the “golden era” but instead are the root cause of America’s ugliness. And so Americans do two things: (1) Elect a man on the white horse who will be the one who finally — finally! — makes their beloved nine systems work, even if he has to make America uglier in the process, and (2) do what totalitarian regimes have done throughout history — target unpopular scapegoats who can be blamed for the ugliness arising from bad systems, such as illegal immigrants, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Muslims, or whoever.
America the Ugly. Why not make that our new national anthem?
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
America the Ugly - The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity
President Trump might have inadvertently come up with the perfect solution to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis. That solution entails making America so ugly that foreigners will no longer want to come here. After all, that’s what North Korea did. Like...
ronpaulinstitute.org
