Politicians are thieves, but are they murderers?

I get few raised eyebrows when I say that politicians are thieves, taking from the productive and giving to, well, everyone else.

But when I call them murderers, I sometimes (often) get "what?"

Leaving aside just plain first-handed murder like Teddy Kennedy's killing of Mary Jo Kopechne, politicians kill with legislation (by proxy): Here are some examples:

1) The creation of the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). It regularly restricts chemicals and/or treatments that are allegedly "not tested," keeping vital medicine and medical actions from those near death. A recent example of this was the rejection by the FDA of Yondelis, an ovarian cancer drug created by Centocor. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 24 that in this case, politics was behind the rejection. How many women will be murdered by this political action is unknown. Worse, most drugs must go through years or decades of FDA tests before being "approved" for sale while thousands are dying and could benefit from the drug. It should be up to those dying people whether they are willing to chance death to save their lives. Instead, these individuals must live at the mercy of autocrats.

2) Drug laws. There is no argument anywhere that thousands of police and tens of thousands of citizens in the U.S. have been killed directly or indirectly by the banning of "hard" drugs. Each one of these cases is murder by proxy (by politician), and the politicians should be tried in a court of law because of it.

3) Welfare legislation. Since these laws began being passed by the wretched FDR administration 75 years ago, millions of people began receiving handouts and relegated themselves to wards of the state, creating ghettos where violent crime escalated and tens of thousands of innocent people have been murdered (again, by political proxy).

4) Second-handed war-making. The U.S. has the capability to wage wars from afar without ever putting a soldier in harm's way on the ground, and yet our politicians (fearing world opinion) refuse to use our most powerful weapons to wipe out regimes from Vietnam to Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan to Iran to Panama to Somalia to North Korea (in the 1950s). These are war crimes of the first degree by our politicians, and they should be tried in a court of law for killing tens of thousands of our precious military men and women. Second-handed politics (instead of independent unilateralism) is also responsible for 9/11 and many other atrocities that have been committed against Americans.

Besides all of the above, the grand larceny by politicians for the last 100 years has effectively created a government that is a provocateur of suicide, by vanquishing independence and wiping out hard-earned wealth, fostering a state of psychological inefficacy amongst producers and causing many of them to jump from windows or put guns to their heads in their plight. These suicide victims are obviously responsible for their own lives and often act irrationally, but many of them would be alive today if it were not for political grand theft.

We can save trillions of dollars in productivity, foster independence and save hundreds of thousands of American lives by creating an airtight Constitution that relegates the U.S. government to its one and only moral task: protecting Americans from coercion. It's time to put an end to political murder by proxy.