Ronald Reagan was one of the great American presidents. Many wish he was alive today to deal with ISIS and Putin. He truly understood how government worked so it is very useful to start with a few of his quotes:

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
“Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.”
“A taxpayer is someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take a civil-service exam.”
“One way to make sure crime doesn’t pay would be to let the government run it.”
“I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts.”
“Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
“We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.”

The obvious place to start is tax. This has grown and grown in its burden on us over many decades so we don’t realise just how huge it is. We are taxed on what we earn. Our employer is taxed for employing us. We are taxed again when we spend money. When we invest money the companies we invest in are taxed on their success. And when we die we are taxed again. There is something called Tax Freedom Day each year, before this day all the nation’s income goes to the state, after this day we are working for ourselves. In the UK it was 28 May this year. And where does this money go? To badly provide services that we don’t want. Unbelievably it takes 447,000 civil servants to do this. Plus the NHS, local government, the police, the armed forces and quangos. Our whole state is dysfunctional as huge legions of civil servants over many decades have used our taxes to build empires for themselves. It is utterly out of control.

So the state has its hand in your wallet. But even worse is that your life is not your own. The state record everything you do, everything you say. They know more about you than you know about yourself and they do it secretly. These days computers can listen to spoken conversations and read documents. So everything you ever say on a phone or Skype or any other electronic means is listened to by the state. Every email you write, every instant message, every keystroke is read by the state. They are even using the webcam on your computer and the cameras on your mobile phone to watch you. It is just like Brave New World. And they spy on you continuously. There are 6 million surveillance cameras in the UK. They follow you everywhere you go. And they follow your car on every journey. The state took some of these powers legally, with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) for instance, in the pretext of preventing terrorism, but the reality is that they spy on everyone so that they can control us. Some of the powers they took illegally, without the permission of our elected politicians. And when they are found out nothing is done. Yet the information they gather they freely share with all sorts of other people, including foreign governments and many hundreds of UK public bodies. Look up Tempora, MUSCULAR, IMP, Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation. Billions of our money is paid to people to spy on us.

Then we get to the police. In the name of terrorism they have been given excessive powers which they then blatantly abuse. They kill a lot of people, not just Ian Tomlinson, Mark Duggan and Jean Charles da Silva e de Menezes, but also the 800+ people who have died during or following police contact since 2004. Over 80 a year. Also we now have thought crimes, burn a remembrance day poppy and you could end up in prison. Post the wrong thing on Facebook or Twitter and you are far more likely to go to prison than if you physically assault someone. All this is the application of cultural Marxism. We must conform to other people’s ideas or we will be punished. Our rights and freedoms have been stripped away. Between 1997 and 2009, 4,289 new criminal offences were created, approximately one for every day as the socialist ran amok trying to control us in every way.

Of course it is not just the police that have huge powers over you. Many other tentacles of the state have massive authority. Take Ashya King, removed by his parents from a NHS hospital so as to get better treatment elsewhere. Those parents ended up in a foreign jail and Ashya alone in a foreign hospital without any of his family. This is state brutality, fascism, and it is alive and well in Britain today. Our state broadcaster, the BBC, have their own special tax, the license fee. Unlike ordinary bills, if you don’t pay this it is a criminal offence. So the BBC sends out 100,00 threatening letters a day, over 150,000 people a year receive criminal convictions and cautions, between 50 and 70 people are sent to prison every year. Utterly unbelievable.

There are more powers the state has over you. It can conscript you and send you off to fight in a foreign war. It can make huge changes to your lifestyle to satisfy a cult like pseudoscience, such as global warming. It can blatantly tell lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction to the House of Commons, resulting in the deaths of 655,000 people, knowing that it has total impunity.

The reality is that you have no freedoms, the state has total power and control over you. It is not there to serve you, you are there to serve it. And this is a recent phenomenon, largely brought about by Labour governments who need total control in order to force their dogma upon us. Let’s hope that the next Conservative government restores our rights and freedoms. As Ronald Reagan would have wanted.