Judge Napolitano interview

Moderator: You refer to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme and its chief founder, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as its principal swindler. You also argue that Social Security is unconstitutional and that it violates the due process clause of the 5th amendment. Please explain this for us.

Judge Napolitano: Sure. Social Security basically takes money from one person and gives it to another. The Constitution doesn’t authorize the Congress to do that. The due process clause says that if the government wants your liberty or your property, it must demonstrate that you have violated a principal of law and then sue you for it. It can’t just enact legislation and take you from it. Remember Social Security has never been called a tax. Whatever it is, it takes money from you and gives it to other people. It takes in less than it gives away. It’s Bernie Madoff to a grand scheme of the government taking from one generation and giving to another. As the receiving generation grows and as the giving generation shrinks, the government is engaged in a classic Ponzi scheme. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid - whenever the Federal government takes money from one individual to give to another, it violates the Constitution because that behavior on the part of the government is authorized nowhere in the Constitution. And the folks who took an oath to uphold it don’t care about the oath and don’t care about the constitution. They just want to get re-elected. That’s why they just keep giving $ away.

Moderator: In light of everything you wrote about in your new book and considering all that Congress has passed over the past few years including the massive record debt, do you agree with those who argue that we are in danger of becoming a banana republic?

Judge Napolitano: I think we are in danger of becoming a Fascist country which I define as private ownership but government controlled. We see that already with the banks. We’re about to see it with the insurance companies. Socialism is government ownership and government control. We are $14 billion in debt. The government doesn’t have the money to own anything but it has the force and the threat of violence to control just about anything it wants. That will rapidly expand under President Obama unless and until the mid-term elections give us a mid-term correction, which everyone seems to think, and I’m in the group, is about to come our way.

Moderator: Again the title of Judge Napolitano’s new book is, “Lies the Government Told You. Myth, Power and Deception in American History.”