The welfare-warfare state way of life under which Americans have been born and raised has created a highly dysfunctional society, one in which the federal government has destroyed the freedom of the American people, killed countless millions of people in foreign countries, debased the value of people's money, and put our nation onto a trajectory of national bankruptcy.

By focusing on individual federal programs, one is able to easily see how the federal government has succeeded in doing these things. For example, one can see that the federal government's drug war has not only destroyed freedom by punishing people for engaging in a purely peaceful activity but also given rise to untold violence both here and abroad. Or one can see how the government's inflation of its supply of printed money, a kind of indirect tax, has worked to plunder the American people. Or one can see how the federal government's interventionism in foreign countries has produced the threat of terrorist blowback here at home, which has then caused the federal government to adopt counterterrorism measures that have destroyed the freedom of the American people.

But there is another point that is worth considering — that oftentimes federal programs work in tandem with each other and end up producing even more death and destruction of liberty and prosperity than would otherwise be the case.

The effects of interventionism

Let's consider, for example, Venezuela, a country that was ruled from 1999 until 2013 by a brutal socialist dictator named Hugo Chavez. When he died in 2013, he was succeeded by Nicolás Maduro, another brutal socialist dictator who remains in power to this day.

U.S. officials loathed both Chavez and Maduro for one big reason: They both refused to kowtow to U.S. officials and do the bidding of the U.S. empire, as other Latin American rulers do. Thus, U.S. officials embarked on a scheme of regime change, one that was intended to oust Chavez and later Maduro from power and replace them with U.S. stooges who would be absorbed into the U.S. empire.

Of course, U.S. officials maintained that the real reason they were targeting Venezuela with regime change was to help free the Venezuelan people from a brutal dictatorship. But that was pure nonsense, given the fact that the U.S. empire has always been — and still is — an ardent supporter of other brutal dictatorships in the world. The U.S. support of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s and 1980s comes to mind. Today, there is the U.S. support of dictatorial regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.