End of 2011 Wrap-up

 

 

As support in North Dakota grows in favor of abolishing property taxes and making it an amendment to their state constitution, it’s time to push for similar measures in the other 49 states. Supporters of the bill gathered more than 28,000 signatures to put that question on the ballot next June. I can hardly wait until this spreads across the nation, as millions are being made homeless by the hidden property taxes that make for multi-thousand dollar a month mortgage payments.

I must admit to some skepticism here, though.. North Dakota is sitting on a huge oil deposit and jobs in the oil industry are booming right now. Other states don’t have the natural wealth in the ground (or in many cases, that wealth is "owned" by the federal government and locked up. Which brings me to the next interesting topic…

There is No Oil Shortage

The US government statistics show that within the US borders, there are about 1.4 trillion barrels of recoverable oil in the ground. That’s about 250 years’ worth at 7 billion barrels a year — more than all the oil the world has consumed since the first oil well was made operational 150 years ago in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

Federal restrictions on land leasing mean that only 2.2% of the developable oil fields are available to be worked by oil companies. The rest is locked up by federal beaurocratic rules.

Looking at coal supplies, North America has 497 billion short tons of recoverable coal — more than three times that of Russia.

So the energy crisis is government-fabricated. We could be enjoying gasoline at less than fifty cents per gallon if the government would get out of the way and let the offshore drilling be done. We could solve our energy problems, stop the wars and scale back our spending to defense only. Which brings me to the next topic…

War and Banksters: An Unholy Alliance

I’ve been gradually reaching the difficult-to-stomach conclusion that much of the "unsolveable" problems of the world are being created on purpose and that purpose is to enrich the world bankers–uh banksters. It’s quite probable that the situation is hopelessly entrenched and beyond fixing, as was the story in the movie The International. Corruption has set in at every level of government, in every office, save for a few, and throughout the banks and Wall Street. In fact, the corruption is so widespread that the law enforcement arm of the government is broken, thus allowing one ponzi scam after another to operate, bilk its clients and the go bankrupt. The ugly creature is beginning to emerge, open it’s gaping maw to reveal unspeakable horrors now. Government is also running rampant, flagrantly abusing its authority, harassing small businesses, farmers, food co-ops, etc. Things have run amok and it’s so scary, because it’s not a Tom Clancy novel anymore–it’s now the reality. Many stock market players are waking up to the fact that "yesterday’s tinfoil is today’s reality."

So where does that leave us? Revolution? You gotta be kidding. The People, with their pistols and rifles, against Predator Drones, Hellfire missiles, Smart Bombs and who knows what else? There’s no level playing field. A revolution won’t stand a chance. So what can we do?

Wait for it all to collapse. The way the Fed is printing counterfeit fiat paper, it is a mathematical certainty that the whole system will eventually collapse. It won’t be an organized and orderly one, either. The banksters and their henchmen at the Fed will kick the can down the road as far as they can, and when it won’t go any farther, get ready for the most catastrophic collapse the world has ever seen. Remember Black Friday sales? See how people will trample each other to death over a $2 Chinese made waffle iron that will probably be in the dump in 2 months? Now imagine those same people haven’t had anything to eat for three days, the supermarkets are stripped bare of food (because there’s no fuel or money to pay the transportation side of the economy) and the grid goes down and suddenly it’s economic armageddon. Uh-oh. There are something lik 65 million people in America that are on government welfare. When those welfare checks stop, you can bet all hell is going to break loose.

So, with the stage set, we’re waiting for the dominos to fall. The first domino is Greece, then the collapse spreads like wildfire across Europe. The EU is about to dissolve under the stress already. Europe will plunge into chaos and much of the money that was invested there will flee to the US or other safer territory, temporarily, giving the Dollar a short-term boost. But the fire is not out. And the fiscal irresponsibility of the US government will continue to elevate the problems here in the US until our day or reckoning arrives, as it is in Europe. Some say we have maybe 18 months. Others conclude that it may be more like 5 years or longer before it all goes to hell in the US. While we can’t agree on the timing of collapse, we all can agree that it is a matter of when, not of if.

The big question hanging over concerned preppers is what will be the course of action on the part of the government? With recent legislation on the table granting the government the power to indefinately detain Americans on American soil, rumors of half a million plastic coffins at FEMA centers, internment centers next to railways in much of the south and other signs of German Nazi-style prison camps popping up all over the place, one has to wonder if, upon the great crash of the USA economy, whether the military will be deployed to round up US citizens and relocate them all into prison camps or slave labor camps. It sounds absurd, and even five years ago it was unthinkable, but I think the federal government and their power broker henchmen are scared to death of an awakening Sheeple. They are doing everything they can to prepare for mass civil unrest. We know they have the tax-extorted funding to pull it off. The real question is will they use it, or will things deteriorate so fast that enlisted men refuse to report to duty, preferring to bug out with their families to safety on their own? So many questions.

As 2011 comes to a close, the USA sits in the precipice, with no viable pro-American candidates running on either party, and a growing, but microscopic, support for the Libertarian Party. People are getting fed up in the USA, and polls are showing that, but with 51% of the voting public on the welfare roles, the Democratic system is a failure. It will have to collapse, and civil war will kill off 3/4 of the American population, if not first by famine, disease and panic, in the two weeks following the shutdown of the American economy. Get ready, and hope the government doesn’t try to steal what reserves and housing you’ve set aside for yourselves. Good luck, America!

 

Tom Baugh’s Figured It Out

 

 

If there is nothing else that you do this week, or for the rest of the month even, the one thing you need to do is watch this 8-part presentation by Tom Baugh. In all the years of reading, listening to, and talking with the perveyors of ideas, especially those that paint a dystopian future for America, this man’s ideas are non-contradictory, well formed and constructive.

 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPnMsRYLSsk&feature=feedlik

There are 8 parts–the above is the entry point. He systematically identifies what ideaology has brought America down, who the bad guys are (not the IRS, not the cops–think Pogo here), how we need to frame the situation and, after it all collapses, how we can rebuild a value-for-value society.

This man is brilliant. There’s no hyperbole, no fat, no ‘conspiracy’ theory. There is just facts, integrated and all the dots connected so you can see just how we got into this mess that we’re in.

For those into disaster, yes, there are plenty of predictions. For those thinking they can run, hide and stash, Tom’s view is congruent with mine: the tax man will taketh your farm and your food stash. So don’t bother. You can’t stash away enough anyway, unless you were rich enough, and if you are rich enough, then you have other options.

Bottom line, see this presentation. It’s clarity of point, precision organization and consistency of ideas will be an ephiphany for you.

Tom Baugh is the author of Starving the Monkeys Fight Back Smarter, which goes into detail about the coming shift in America’s future and what we all can do to hasten the collapse and pick up the pieces while there are still pieces worth saving. His web site is starvingthemonkeys.com

Nuggets of Wisdom

It’s been a while since the last entry, but some real gems have cropped up recently. Here’s one:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkJzF3cySlw&feature=player_embedded#at=266

 

John Adams’ political writings and specifically “A Dissertation on the Canon And Feudal Law.” John Adams’ work begins with:

“”Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of ruin of mankind.” This is an observation of Dr. Tillotson, with relation to the interest of his fellow men in a future and immortal state. But it is of equal truth and importance if applied to the happiness of men in society, on this side the grave. In the earliest ages of the world, absolute monarchy seems to have been the universal form of government. Kings, and a few of their great counsellors and captains, exercised a cruel tyranny over the people, who held a rank in scale of intelligence, in those days, but little higher than the camels and elephants that carried them and their engines to war.”

Why would the men that fought against such tyranny over their lives and of land ownership and irrational laws, implement a practice that they just fought a war to get away fromf? My answer is that they would not have and hence why for the first time in recorded history a country was created with a government of laws not of men, that did not rule the people but protected their right to their lifes and hence all the property that they could accumulate through their life’s efforts.

 

“Any form of property tax or regulation denies the individual’s right to fully control his own property and, therefore, his own life. For this reason, taxation and regulation of property is always wrong- taxation is theft and regulation by initiated force is slavery.” ~Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Market For Liberty (p.54)

Why Taxes are Organized Crime (A Response to a Reader)

 

In response to my “Feudal Land Title: A Commonlaw Fraud” article, a reader, “Dogma” responded with what I consider to be the typical “best” Marxist argument defending the quashing of property rights in America and in other countries that do not respect no recognize the right to private property.

Let’s begin with his opening remark:

You seem to have developed a victim mentality with an entitlement attitude. You realize you are rationalizing a self-absorbed position in light of facts not in evidence. Your positions have zero basis in reality, they simply serve to help you justify your lot in life, whatever that is.

The reader’s comment starts out with a contradiction: no one but the individual can defend property rights. The government can’t do it, since it’s motivation is to increase the reach of its powers through ever-increasing taxes, regulations and encroachment into individual’s lives. So instead of having unorganized and poorly-funded roving bandits attacking your private property, now you have a single, well-funded, heavily-armed, military or para-military force that is bound by law to take your property, using practically-unlimited resources, funded by mass extortion. You see, in most countries, including America, your Constitutional rights are only recognized (poorly at that) when your taxes are paid. So when you have property taxes, the government grows in power at an alarming rate and is soon out of control and interfering with every aspect of your life. And they have more mite than any roving bandits. And if you kill a “law enforcement” officer who’s about to take your property that you’ve worked your entire life to earn, many more well-funded para-military will be on your property in short order, with orders to murder you. Kill a roving bandit and that would likely be the last you’d be dealing with that particular pack of bandits.

In a moral society, the government’s job is limited to securing individual rights, not subverting them. The current system in America is immoral. What a fine example it is: stealing is how to run a government. Theft is socially acceptable. Even if you have to murder the creator of a certain wealth or value in order to obtain it by force.

In the free market, some people provide services and products. Those that are a real value to other men, prosper–there is no need to point a gun at the consumer and say “buy, or else!” But that’s exactly how the government works. Since few, if any of the “services” it offers are what people with a rational self-interest would want (who want’s their children indoctrinated with Marxist ideaology? Who want’s to be burdened with a thousand different forms and fees just to build a tool shed on one’s own property?) the government, in order to remain in “business” has to seize its income by force, or threat thereof.

 

You are not entitled to own property to do what you please, without compensating the rest of society [AKA: the government] for the expense of securing YOUR property rights, which are relative. See, in your world you would own some property, and then you would attempt to defend that property from others that wish to take it away by force. This is a battle you would lose. And very quickly. Somebody, or some group would easily over run you, and take your property for themselves. They then would have to defend it from other would-be predators.

To wit, here are two illuminating arguments from fellow Objectivists:

That is an arbitrary assertion defensible in neither political philosophy nor the historical record in America. If someone is opposed to private property rights because he is a collectivist who thinks you owe “compensation to society” in order to live, then the dispute is a lot deeper than the nature of land rights.

Rights are a moral concept. The concept of rights of the individual means a moral sanction of the freedom of action of the individual in a social context. Rights subordinate society to moral law because the individual, not society, is the fundamental unit. Rights do not have to be bought from the collective. That would invert the process. This pertains to all of our rights, not just land rights. Our political rights under law are a recognition and legal formulation of our natural rights as human beings. The whole purpose of the government is to protect our rights as individuals, not dispense them by permission in exchange for extortion payments on behalf of the mob.

~and~

Does man not own his effort which he trades for values (or money) which can then be traded for another value(s), land? Whether people recognize it or not a moral government is created by the people to protect their individual rights (the right to take action) and all the values they accumulate from that action which includes land/property. In other words a moral government outlaws force and only takes action against those that use or state they will use force against others. So, the government (and it’s citizens that agree) that act to take one’s property/land are acting in an immoral manner when they take someone’s land for non-defense based reasons. …

A right is a moral concept that subordinates the will of the majority to the rights of the individual within a social context. And to protect those rights man creates a government which does so by creating laws to protect man’s right to take action and accumulate values (to include land). Once again whether people recognize it or not, the U.S. Constitution was created to defend man’s rights (which comes from his very nature of being a man) not to give him rights nor limit his rights. In other words the U.S. Constitution was created to limit the power of the government so that it’s sole purpose would be to outlaw any usage of immoral force.

Man, by his very nature has the right to take all the actions required to sustain his life. And any man that takes the action(s) to produce an effort, but does not own his effort’s reward(s) is just a slave. In other words, man does not need a government to tell him what actions to take to sustain his life, but he does need a government to protect him from those that want to enslave his actions (and hence any property that is earned from those actions) to their whimsical desires. …

The Founding Fathers were fighting against a feudal or nonsovereign land ownership because they recognized that man has a right to the property (all property) that he has earned or been given. And once man has earned the property (or it has been given by someone that has earned it) he has the right to keep, use or dispose of the property as he sees fit.

~end quotes~

 

That is anarchy, where almost everyone dies a violent death, or is actually enslaved. That is the logical and absolute progression of your argument. That is what you want.

This reader has a malevolent view of mankind. He seems to believe that man is inherently evil, and that he will go about murdering everyone in sight, just to satisfy his lust for conquest.

No, this is not anarchy. This is moral and proper to man, to live in a free society, where individual rights are priority number one, and anyone can do what they please, at their own expense, so long as their actions do not harm others.

 

The rest of us want a manageable society where our children aren’t hunters or the hunted. This requires some sacrifice. SOME sacrifice. So we collectively agree to form a “government”. It is not some monarchy or brutal dictatorship, because by definition if it were, we would not be allowed to discuss this publicly or privately. We, the people, have agreed to hire and employ persons to provide enforcement of the laws we agree on. One of the many laws is indeed enforcement of property rights. So indeed one can own a home/property WITHOUT immediately being slain by some more powerful entity out to take the property.

There is a cost for this. It’s called taxes. So the deal is, for some cost (variable by state), the majority of citizens have agreed to pay some monetary fee into the collective we call the government. Part of what our government employees do is enforce the laws. We also put some penalty into the laws. If someone attempts to take your property by force, they are subject to losing their personal freedom. Also, if someone doesn’t pay their share of taxes, they to are at risk of penalty. Otherwise, many people, such as yourself, wouldn’t pay taxes, yet would want the protection of the law. In other words, these people would want something for nothing.

All Socialism leads to Marxism, which leads to Communism. Look at how our freedoms have eroded in America, at an exponentially-increasing rate in these last few decades. There can be no civility in a nation where the government is run by stealing. It sets one fine example for others to follow. A nation of thieves, starting with the government and working its way through to the inhabitants. Eventually all citizens of this type of government become the Hunted, and the government becomes the ultimate Predator.

If the government offered something we valued, we would gladly pay for it. The fact that the money has to be extorted is a clear sign that something is terribly wrong with what the government is “selling”.

 

We are not ENTITLED to these protections without some sacrifice. You are not a victim of the “evil government”. You have nobody to blame but yourself. You are a victim of yourself. You deserve what you get. Sorry.

I know I am sounding harsh, but I too thought like you for 20+ years. I too lost a property because I couldn’t afford both the payment on the property and the taxes on the property. I too blamed everyone else but myself. I lied to myself, I knew the rules before I committed to the binding contract. Property taxes, and the potential that they could rise were not hidden at all. I chose to ignore those cost because I felt I was entitled, I was owed the lifestyle I wanted … not the lifestyle I earned and thus deserved.

After the Sheriff physically removed me from “my house”, I realized that I had the equation all wrong. I too thought I was forced to, as you say, “make an un-coerced choice as to whether we want to participate in the Socialist income-redistribution system or not.” I could have “chosen” to move to another State, or even another country. I could have chosen to continue to bitch and moan about how “the man” is keeping me down.

What I realized was that I COULDN’T AFFORD the lifestyle I wanted (which INCLUDED paying the taxes that enforced property rights), therefore I DIDN’T DESERVE it. In order for me to afford what i wanted, I was going to have to devise and execute a plan that would allow me to earn more, therefore I could pay more, and AFFORD it.

Hopefully one day soon, you to will come to that same conclusion.

Been there, done that. I empathize with your pain. Really, I do. The first time I was removed from my property, I was too ignorant to stand up and say, “Hey! This is stealing!” It was a sewer assessment that put me into foreclosure. I had 30 days to come up with a year’s salary to pay it. Plus the town condemned my septic and well, which were only four years old. I spent the next 44 years recovering, financially, from that devastation. The next time it happens, the uniformed men will be dealing with a man with “nothing left to lose.” Beware!

In America, we were founded on the ideal of the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires us to slave at jobs to pay a randsom just to be left alone (and even then we are frequently invaded, threatened and dislocated for other government demands). To pursue happiness, doing what we please, even if it means raising a garden and living off the land and not partaking in the IRS’ game of social security numbers and fiat money commerce. Since the only way to legally avoid paying income taxes is not to have any income, a homeowner is stuck with an inability to protest or “vote with his wallet” against the federal government.

This is America, a nation founded on the principal that no man should be forced to move somewhere else, to enjoy the lifestyle of his choosing. And no one should be forced to move, just because of government greed. You see, you’re property is YOURS, if you earned it and properly compensated the previous owner. You owe no other party anything. Society has no claim on your private property, nor on your person, as long as your use of your property does not put another’s in harm’s way.

Freedom means that no man is a slave to any other, or to any society. Property taxes are, in essense, the most quintessential form of slavery there is.

The Revolution Starts Like This

 

 

 

Not everyone has heard the news of the lone software engineer who, on Thursday morning, crashed a small airplane into the office building containing 190 IRS employees. Oddly, for an event that drastic, news has been scarce. In 90 minutes of listening to talk radio stations while driving yesterday, I did not catch even one reference to the story. So a lot of folks may not have heard about this yet.

 

Joe Stack III had been in the process of an extended ongoing feud with the IRS for a number of years, when this past week he suddenly snapped, set his house on fire (presumably to reduce the value of any property the IRS was going to seize) and took off in an airplane of unknown ownership from an airport in Texas. He plowed the plane, full throttle, into the IRS building in Austin, TX later that morning. It all happened in an amazingly-swift 30 minutes, from the time the fire broke out at his home to the time he martyred himself by crashing into the office building.

Stack left behind an interesting manifesto. It was inciteful and rings true for a lot of Americans. It is worth reading, so I’m reproducing it down below:

 

If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, "Why did this have to happen?" The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was "no taxation without representation". I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a "crackpot", traitor and worse.

While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political "representatives" (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the "terrible health care problem". It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in. And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!

How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly "holds accountable" its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law "requires" a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not "duress" than what is. If this is not the measure of atotalitarian regime, nothing is.

How did I get here?

My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ’80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful "exemptions" that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the "best", high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the "big boys" were doing (except that we weren’t steeling from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.

The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two "interpretations" for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.

That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their "freedom"… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.

Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of "paying my dues"), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer. On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.

The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.

In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be "healthier" eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.

Return to the early ’80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ contract software engineer… and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.

For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).

SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.

(a) IN GENERAL – Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:

(d) EXCEPTION. – This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.

(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. – The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986.

Note:

· "another person" is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship. · "taxpayer" is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.
· "individual", "employee", or "worker" is you.

Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it’s not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.

During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their "freedom". Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients. After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect. Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back. Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to "shore up" their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.

Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.

By this time, I’m thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I’ll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I’ve never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages… and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.

To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.
So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.

When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to Bill Ross, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl’s unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, Ross knew all along this was missing and I didn’t have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.

This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is… well, just look around. I remember reading about the stock market crash before the "great" depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s "business-as-usual". Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.

As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.

I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at "big brother" while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Joe Stack (1956-2010)

02/18/2010

 

 

Mind-boggling. A few readers might have vivid memories of being in similar situations. This writer certainly has. Although fortunately, my situation was not as dire. For Joe to have taken the drastic action that he did, he must have reached the conviction that he had nothing left to lose. It is not clear whether that was the case, but perhaps the IRS was about to foreclose on his house, his wife about to divorce him to escape the misery of his tax problems, and perhaps he was being investigated by the CID (Criminal Investigation Division) of the IRS. I suppose if he realized he would soon be incarcerated and homeless, that this action might have seemed like the best option. He was getting a message out, and at the same time raising the price of state-sponsored terrorism.

Now the problem remains for the rest of us. Small aircraft pilots will undoubtedly face new, draconian safety and security regulations. IRS agents will be more heavily armed. The agency will harden its facilities, perhaps placing all IRS offices in underground bunkers. This action by Mr. Stack may have gained nothing, given the way the mass media is spinning the story. Some are calling him a "Teabagger", implying that tea party ralliers are terrorists in the making. The flip side of this is that it’s serving as a wakeup call to patriotic Americans. There’s a surprising amount of support for Joe Stack. I looked at survey results on the New York Times and one other online paper. Over 30% of poll participants voted that Mr. Stack was justified in his actions. That’s a lot more than the 1-2% one might expect. 30% is hardly the "lunatic fringe" of society. It signifies that many people have grown that frustrated with the Federal Reserve system and the taxes we pay in America.

The only real hope is that we, as Americans, come away from this with some constructive results. That we strive to remove from office all incumbents who’ve had a hand in creating or expanding entitlement programs and immoral laws that invade privacy or interfere with private property ownership. Maybe this time we’ll do a more thorough house-cleaning at election time. Maybe more people will read the above and realize the truth that is embedded between the lines. Perhaps the next generation might have some small measure of hope for restoring America to its former glory.

Feudal Land Title: A Commonlaw Fraud

 

 

 

When you bought your home for a king’s randsom (basically your life’s savings plus all future earnings), you never imagined that you were only buying the permission to rent the use of that parcel of property, did you? You thought you actually owned that property and that no one could take it away from you, so long as you didn’t forefeit your right to exist as a free person by commiting a heinous crime.

When I was much younger, and getting into my first home, I never dreamed that anyone could take a home away. I viewed homeownership as the cure for worries about coming up with the rent payments every month. But I found myself in for a surprise. The first bite came from city sewers coming in to my block, four years after purchasing a small starter home. The sewer assessment and tie in fees were non-negotiable and there was no legal way to opt out, despite letters written to town officials on the matter. I was mad because the septic was new and working fine, yet the town condemned it. We had to accept the chemical-infested city water, too. At that point, I had to rent a water cooler and import bottled water, as the town’s water was unsuitable for human consumption. To make a long story short, the sewer assessment bankrupted us. The house went into foreclosure and we found ourselves without a place to live. A mad apartment hunt ensued. After two weeks of searching, we’d found a dumpy attic apartment above a post office, with no fire exit and one main exit that was at the bottom of a steep flight of stairs. It was only the luck of inheritance money that we were able to buy a small parcel of land on a swamp in the middle of nowhere. Well, nowhere, forty-four years ago. And that’s when I started building my own home, pioneer-style, with my bare hands. The process turned me into a bear, as I was living and working among wild bears with nothing by a .38 S&W by my side, just in case. The house is not great, but today I am paying the full purchase price of my property in taxes every single year. Last year, the taxes exceeded my annual gross income. Trouble ahead!

Back to the main topic of this article now. Most of us are aware of the powers of Eminent Domain and probably know at least one family or friend who’s been a victim of this agregious violation of property rights. So we have property taxes, Eminent Domain and, oh yes, building codes and zoning laws–the government’s way of hinting that you don’t have any rights to do with your property as you please (even if you do so responsibly at your own expense without endangering your neighbors). So what is the underlying legal structure which makes all these violations of your rights acceptable under what should be a government that is rights-respecting of free people? It comes down to something called "feudal title". In essense, your property is still owned by the King, or by heirs of the King, which are more commonly known as collective society. That’s right: under US commonlaw, your home is owned by all the people, not you, who actually paid for it. Ironic, isn’t it? This is why the Fifth Amendment has a clause enumerating the compensation of landholders when land is taken under Eminent Domain.

There are two basic types of property ownership in so-called "commonlaw" nations: Allodial Title, which is also known as the "King’s Title"–absolute, irrevocable ownership of the property that no person or government entity can claim jurisdiction over or take action to remove from your ownership. The other type of title is known as "Fee Simple" title. It’s a form of permission to occupy and use the King’s land for a specific period of time, with you, the buyer, becoming a "land holder" or basically a custodian of the land. You do not own it. As such, land held under fee simple title is subject to a wide range of government actions, including taxation, eminent domain, zoning and police powers. Think of it as the government owning a house and you renting a room in that house, with the government having full power to inspect your room and observe what you’re doing at any time, for any reason, while collecting "rent" in the form of taxes. And you thought "owning" a home gave you security of not having to worry about the rent payments and eviction notices. Nope. Herein lies the fraud foisted upon every American citizen who has ever dreamed of owning a home.

HISTORY OF "EQUITABLE TITLE"

As late as the Tudor period, in order to avoid estate taxes, a legal loophole was exploited where land was willed to a trustee for the use of the beneficiary. However, trustees often abused this privilege, and heirs found that the courts of common law would refuse to recognize the "use" clause, and would instead grant title in law to the trustee. However, the courts of equity, which were developed by the sovereign to deal with obvious injustices in the common law courts, ruled that the heirs were entitled to the use of the property, and gave them title in equity. As rulings of equity courts ranked above those of common law courts, this gave heirs the use of the land, but not title to it in the common law.

In the United States, "To say that land is owned ‘allodially’ is a fiction. All land under United States government jurisdiction is subject to expropriation by way of eminent domain."

Before 1774, all land in the American colonies could also be traced to royal grants, usually one grant creating each colony. The original grantee (recipient of the land) then sold or granted parcels of land within his/her grant to private citizens and other legal entities. However, when the colonies won the Revolutionary War, they did not want to retain a feudal system of land ownership. The Treaty of Paris (1783), which ended formal hostilities and recognized American independence, also had the effect of ending any residual rights held by the original grantees or the Crown. Essentially, this merely recognized that no person holding land in the new United States owed any allegiance or duty to the Crown or any English noble. There is no specific reference to allodial title in the text of the treaty. Some states created a form of allodial title while others retained the tenurial system with the state as the new ultimate landholder.

Few, if any, real estate agents understand what’s going on here. Even fewer know what Allodial land title is or where it originates. Most think of taxes as the "cost for living in civilized society" and are acceptant of such. If you bought a home and think that you own it, you’ve been hoodwinked. You should be beyond angry that the biggest financial decision of your life has been to allow yourself to be defrauded by misleading language ("own your own home", etc.) used in the real estate industry and in American culture, a/k/a "the American dream" of owning a home. Well, there is no American dream. You’re no better off than in other countries. In many ways worse off, as America has the most powerful and destructive government of any nation on earth and when directed upon a single citizen, can wreak utter and total destruction. Taxation puts all of the political power in the hands of government–you can’t say no to the government (well you can, but then be prepared for some unpleasant living conditions for an extended period) when the tax gun is held to your head. We mistakenly believe that we have political power through the vote, but in reality, the candidates that are ‘groomed’ for office by organizations with agendas that are not individualism-friendly, are not "in your corner"–they are already bought and paid for by special interests and won’t hesitate to steamroller over your rights if they get the chance.

So what can we do about this gross fraud and miscarriage of justice? Education is one area. Inform your realtor about this, point him or her to resources and research on Allodial Title and explain the differences. LTEs are another way to raise public awareness. Do your own research and blog about it. Talk it up on Facebook and Twitter. Even contact the news media with well thought-out discussion on the issue. The key is to raise public awareness. People need to understand that they’ve been bilked out of their life savings and that the whole land ownership dream in America is a gigantic fraud.

On Property Taxes

 

 

IF IT CAN BE TAXED, THEN YOU DON’T OWN IT

 

“When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as ‘human rights’ versus ‘property rights.’ No human rights can exist without property rights.” –Ayn Rand

It is annoyingly lacking, the degree of public outrage to this most basic and pervasive farce in America, as well as the blatant violation of individual rights that the taxation of primary domiciles thus commits.

Is it the payroll tax pre-deduction principal that, because the majority of “homeowners” are paying a mortgage in which the local taxes are included, transparently, in the payments, that people don’t really see how much of their lives are being stolen from them?

Perhaps it’s the Altruistic nature of the religious majority, who are too mentally lazy to design a society whereby the “easy” way out, via taxation, is taken to funding all the nefarious government “services” and activities. The common complaint, you see, is “who would educated the children and build the roads?”

There is not an honest answer in these people’s minds, an answer that does not involved armed robbery, extortion, stealing and looting from the working class. They simply lack the ability to understand a system by which people would be free to choose the services they wish to buy, and the market would ensure the availability of services that people really need.

You see, if people really wanted what the government offered, they would voluntarily pay for such services. People voluntarily hire painters, plumbers and stock brokers, because these people provide real, valuable services that produce or protect wealth and property. What does the government offer? The strangulation of our children’s minds, inane nanny state rules on human behavior, aggregious violations of property use rights, violations of our own bodies and how we dispose of same, and the list goes on. No wonder they have to point a gun at our heads and demand we buy their “services”!

Look at public shools: once past the early elementary stages, school systems start to infuse political ideology into children. For many rational parents, this is a disservice that will cost them countless hours to reeducate their children that these ideas taught them in schools are invalid and destructive to human existance. Thus, the taxpayer is forced to fund ideology that runs contrary to his own, via public school taxes. The biggest problem lies with Americans being able to admit that there is such a thing as philosophical bias that can be introduced when you teach children. Speaking of the response from your average Democrat/Socialist Liberal, to like-minded persons, all seems quite well and proper with the current education system as it stands.

The other problem is that most people fail to reject unsound philosophical premises because of an innate bias tied to their education since childhood. Moreover, the vast majority of functional adults do not bother learning the intricate details of higher-level philosophy, and rather act upon what they assimilated in the earlier years of their education.

Property rights are inviolable moral principles, protecting each individual’s sovereign right to keep the material values he earns and use them to support his life. This principle is violated when when property rights are infringed for the very first time.

If legal professionals systematically avoid telling people they have a moral right to their property, there will be less messy resistance when those rights are taken away by government fiat. Under this concept, property rights can be selectively violated (or eradicated) by majority vote—rendering them in fact (but not in name) “bundles of permissions.”

 

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control.
— Ayn Rand, “What is Capitalism” Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, p. 19.

Objectivism holds that because the opportunity to use reason without the initiation of force is necessary to achieve moral values, each individual has an inalienable moral right to act as his own judgement directs and to keep the product of his effort. The fundamental right is the right to life, with other rights following from it, including rights to “liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.”

These rights are specifically understood to be rights to action, not to specific results or objects, and the obligations created by rights are negative in nature: each individual must refrain from violating the rights of others.

Objectivists reject alternative notions of rights, such as positive rights or rights belonging to anything other than an individual human being, such as collective rights or animal rights.

It is possible to live independently only if one is allowed to do so. One’s choices must be voluntary if they are to be freely made. Fundamentally, only the threat of deadly force can undermine one’s ability to reason and choose.

The power of government is the power of the gun. It has the power to enforce a set of rules in the territory it controls, a power that is often turned against freedom. Objectivism therefore advocates a strictly limited form of government: a republican system that has only those powers and takes only those actions required to secure our rights to freedom from force.

There must be a military force for defense against external enemies.

There must be a system of legislation and law courts to establish the law and to adjudicate disputes in which force might be used.

And there must be a system of enforcement of the law such as the police, to make sure the law is a social rule, not empty words.

Until the majority of individual citizens in America recognizes the fundamental and sacred right to property that is rightfully earned and acquired, no person can enjoy the benefits of the Fourth Amendment. No person can be safe from exposure to the elements, psychological depression from the denial of the psychological security and stability that property ownership brings, and no person can be free. As long as people willfully accept that working a second job to pay property taxes is not slavery, then America cannot truly be the America that our forefathers fought and died on this continent for.

 

Defending Property Rights

 

 

The property tax has got to be the most immoral tax on earth.

How can a vital essential to life–particularly in cold northern climates–be considered taxable when food and some clothing is not?

The logic of taxing the home or primary domicile is one of ‘they got you by the balls’ and the homeowner has no option NOT to pay, otherwise he faces a cabal of armed storm troopers bent on murdering him if he resists and chooses to protect his home for him and his family.

In effect, the property tax criminalizes low incomes and creates legalized slavery.

 

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.
["Man's Rights," The Virtue of Selfishness]

It is only on the basis of property rights that the sphere and application of individual rights can be defined in any given social situation. Without property rights, there is no way to solve or to avoid a hopeless chaos of clashing views, interests, demands, desires, and whims.
["The Cashing-In: The Student 'Rebellion,'" Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal]

The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who’re able to think, will not work under compulsion; those who will, won’t produce much more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved.
["This Is John Galt Speaking," Atlas Shrugged]

 

The above statements form the foundation of a free nation. Without property rights, there IS no freedom.

The property tax is partly based on stale, Marxist class-envy politics. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were so eager to destroy the successful upper and middle-class "bourgeoisie." Ever since the passage of the 16th Amendment, which granted the federal government the power to directly confiscate our income — our property — we can own nothing to which the government cannot also lay claim, at least in part. If there is a valid argument justifying taxes levied on voluntary transactions, there is absolutely no justification for a tax that is nothing less than State-sponsored theft. Though I would be incarcerated — and rightly so — for walking next door and taking money out of my neighbor’s wallet without his permission, the government makes this very act routine.

The property tax is immoral and oppressive and deprives citizens of their necessities of warmth and shelter.

It is with these facts that I propose that no law enforcement agent take part in the aiding and abetting of theft of homes from people who owe no voluntary mortgage, but who may be unable, due to the expanding greed of local government, to pay the extortionist and confiscatory taxes. No moral law enforcement officer should obey an order to remove an otherwise moral and law-abiding family from their rightfully owned home for inability to pay property taxes. This should be a fundamental part of the Oath Keeper’s pledge. Property and security in one’s home is a FUNDAMENTAL American right.

 

 

What China’s Doing Right that the US Got Wrong

 

 

While the US is hopelessly racing toward economic suicide, with continued spending, printing of fiat paper money and setting up the scenario for the mother of all defaults, China has been slowly introducing elements of free enterprise in its economic system and the results have been the creation of significant amounts of wealth. They’re accomplishing this by rewarding, financially, the producers of real wealth–engineers, producers, people who actually make things.

Case in point: An engineer who lived in the UK all his life, spent nearly two decades trying to achieve wealth in business in the UK, but remained a pauper because of the onerous taxation and laws that kept his business forever struggling. He moved to China four years ago, and today he’s well off, his business is making a generous amount of money, owns a large villa, a Mercedes and has a beautiful Chinese girlfriend. He’s an engineer. A profession that is looked upon with disdain in the UK, and even the US, but in China, engineers are highly-valued for their ability to create products and thus wealth. China’s culture values the product of work and thus work itself as the source of wealth.

According to this engineer, China’s economy is being completely restructured, to focus on domestic consumption and evidently it is working. The only issue of concern is that they are also moving in the direction of universal health care.

China’s leader ship says that China must develope strong brands and intellectual property for international consumption if China is to be taken seriously in the world. China understands wealth creation. Industry, manufacturing and construction create wealth. China may well (if only by default) be set to become the wealthiest nation by the end of the next decade.

Meanwhile, the US government is essentially bankrupt from the day it stopped redeeming its currency for gold. Meanwhile, foreigners are buying up physical assets in the US, such as farms, real estate, food supplies, financial institutions, hotels, factories, casinos, retail businesses and any other valuable assets located in the US with their hard-earned currency. If we stopped this exchange of title to US property (instead of gold) for foreign earned dollars, the buying power of the US dollar would decrease the the point that it may take a full days’ wages just to buy a loaf of bread.

We are selling our children’s legacy to foreign owners and the fed calls it “investing in America”. We’re racing to print paper currency and sell titled to everything on US soil in order to keep from doing any actual work. A nice analogy is that it’s like selling off our body parts to keep from working.

Economic value is created when you grow, build or manufacture something that is consumable and useful. Printing money to pay people for environmental cleanup, mortgage bailout, union retirements, TARP, business failures, etc., to stimulate the economy ujust makes the existing money have less buying power, yet does nothing to improve the economy in the long term.

If this situation, where we sell US gold, currency and assets to foreign nations, continues, we run the risk of becoming like post WWI Weimar Germany, economically. We need to produce and export a lot more than we do now, in order to balance this situation and reverse the flow of US property to foreign owners. These products would have to be cheaper, better in quality, technologically superior to those products made in foreign countries or the foreigners won’t buy them.

If foreign investors suddenly stop buying our printed US T-bills, bonds and securities at close to their face values and start buying these at equivalent of a few pennies on the dollar, the government checks, social security checks, government payroll checks and private paychecks will not buy very much food or anything else. One’s life savings might only sustain you for a month or two. The US is committing economic suicide. And that leads to the US becoming a “banana republic”.

China has a real GDP, whereas our thinking here is short-term, based on micro-political self-preservation which perpetrates an unending cycle of corruption. China doesn’t have rampant credit infiltration; the people live within their means and their consumption is real, not based on credit card or HELOC illusions of wealth.

On the current course, the US is headed into a hyper-inflationary depression, dollar collapse, federal, state and municipal debt default and the status of a banana republic. For a picture of what life in the US will be like, if this course is not changed, look closely at post-2001 Argentina.

 

The Broad Spectrum

 

From Broadcast Regulation to Medicine Regulation and More (From my writings of 1997, reprinted here)

The problems we experience with broadcast regulation are merely a symptom of a much broader problem in our society. We live in a nation regulated by special-interest groups, empowered by public opinion. This is a situation brought about by default; apathy and tolerance for mis-deeds on the part of the public. When we look at the picture of how our society operates in broad terms, several common facts appear: special-interest and big business lobbying our congressional leaders, and an attitude that favors the streamlining of the justice system to favor convenience to the system over justice for the individual. Examples of corporate lobbying of Congress resulting in legislation which restricts the freedoms of individuals to choose lifestyles, medical treatments, and livelihoods, are prevalent today: the food and drug administration, the Federal Communications Commission, the banking commission, trade and industry laws requiring individuals who are self-employed to have licenses, and the list goes on. In the course of daily life, we are witness to a shift in what is considered lawful and unlawful behavior. In the earlier days of this nation, proactive acts of mis-deeds were considered unlawful. If you went out and robbed someone, or if you assaulted someone, you were a criminal. If you sat at home and did nothing, you were a “good citizen”. Today, that is no longer true. In today’s America, the failure to perform is a crime. Today’s government makes demands upon you that exclude the option of sitting home and doing nothing if you please. Today’s government demands you pay taxes and maintain insurance on your motor vehicles, and respond to demands made by local ordinances. The failure to acknowledge the government’s demands on any of these counts results in violations of our fourth amendment rights to various degrees. The folks at Waco, Texas stand out as one of the more extreme examples of what happens when a citizen fails to perform on the government’s behalf. A failure to file a tax return can have dire consequences. A failure to allow a building inspector into your home can result in a very sudden inrush of law enforcement. A failure to do the whim and will and every capricious wish of the government ruling party can result in various forms of unpleasant reprisals, all of which are funded by your tax money. A very dangerous problem in our society today is what I call knee-jerk journalism and its attendant public response. One clear case of the situation is the recent increase in the number of reported school shootings and other public acts of violence by lone gunmen. Such media has worked wonders for the anti-gun lobby. With each new report of a shooting, we hear ever louder calls to action for increased legislation and laws against gun ownership, for more legal action taken against gun manufacturers, and more justification for giving up our constitutional rights as Americans. The part that is never mentioned is the causes for these acts of violence. It is easy to blame gun owners or manufacturers of guns for these problems but guns have been around for a long time and the height of violence we’re now seeing is unlike anything we’ve seen in the past. We need to look beyond the symptoms of the problem to see what is causing this dramatic change in behavior. When we do, we’ll see an alarming fact: the increase in the misguided use of antidepressant drugs to combat the symptoms of hypothyroidism and a parallel alarming increase in violent behavior. The public could easily accept this fact if we’re talking about illegal drugs. But government approved, legally prescribed drugs are totally different situation. No one contributes more campaign money or has more political influence than the pharmaceutical industry, and you can bet that the drug companies don’t want this information going public. Once again, we have a situation where extreme greed and lust for profit at any expense without regard for moral implications has led us on a one-way path to disaster. In each of the cases were there has been a school shooting or other public outbreak of violence by an individual, it has been discovered that the perpetrator was under medical care and receiving the drug Prozac. Antidepressant drugs work on the same mechanism in the human brain to elevate one’s sense of well-being, as the portions of the brain which control violent tendencies. It is a known fact in the medical community that such drugs remove the barriers to violent behavior, when consumed. And how ironic it is that we defend the war on drugs, while we prescribe Ritalin to our children in school such that it is now so prevalent that 1 in every 5 students is on this drug. While I’m on the topic of children and their behavior, it needs to be said that government interference with parental discipline is a formula for disaster. When a parent cannot spank a child who will not respond to reason, there is no alternative left by which to effect a correction of the child’s defective thinking patterns. To add insult to injury, when children know they are “protected” from the consequences of their mis-deeds, they will act out these behavior patterns even more blatently, with an “in your face” attitude to spite their elders. These kids know they are protected from punishment, and hence have a free hand to commit all the evil they want, without fear of the consequences that kept older generations in line. As a good friend of mine once pointed out about the terrible behaviour of our youth today, one line in particular is so appropriate, “the problem with this world is the fact that we now have an entire generation of kids that have never been spanked.” How utterly true. And when these kids grow up and try their shenanigans in the real world, reality will have a harsh blow to deal them. There is no doubt in my mind that another major source of the problems we are now experiencing with our kids is due to the lack of parental supervision, caused by both parents having to work to support the family. By eliminating income taxes, we are no longer faced with this problem. Even more unsettling are the lengths that the medical, pharmaceutical and government agencies are willing to go through to suppress the truth. One such case is that of Dr. Stanislow Burzynski. Here is individual who has come with a cure for a certain type of cancer which affects mainly young children. Due to the fact that his treatment works, word-of-mouth has spread quickly, resulting in an influx of parents from other parts of the United States bringing their children to his treatment center. Unfortunately, his success has also drawn the wrath of the medical industry. This has resulted in a long chain of harassment by the FDA, and even the Justice Department. Dr. Burzynski has endured multiple raids upon his office, physical arrests, lawsuits, and just about every known form of harassment the government can come up with. It was only through the tremendous outpouring of thousands of parents whose children’s lives depend upon the treatment that only this particular doctor was providing, that the government has recently dropped their charges and allowed him to continue practicing. Here again, we see that public opinion is influential on the government. What controls public opinion? When we consider that the vast majority of information we as citizens receive comes from media like newspapers and television and radio, those of us who have given this issue deep thought realize the extreme danger in central control of such media. Yet, as in every rising dictatorship or tyranny, government control of the media overall, was the first step. The more dictatorial the government, the harsher the punishment of those who attempt to create their own media outlets containing independent views not approved by the big corporations, the few influencial and powerful individuals who drive the opinion of the nation, and the government. As the government relies on the nation’s schoolteachers to mislead children right in their own classrooms, so too does the government rely on and utilize the nation’s media–converting it into a virtual monolithic government propaganda agency. This vast media network is harnessed to work the American public into a virtual income tax filing frenzy around April 15th, little realizing that it has been actually duped into duping the public in like manner. We are now at the stage where we are beginning to see some of the exact situations happening as were described in Ayn Rand’s famous novel, Atlas Shrugged. We see examples of government dictating personal decisions everywhere. And we will soon see a form of poetic justice as the subjects of these Draconian government rules begin to disappear from society. For example, we have the mayor of New York City mandating, by law, that cab drivers should have to pick up passengers in any neighborhood, no matter how dangerous or how much of a threat the cab driver feels to his own personal safety. The logical outcome of this is that eventually cab drivers will not accept this law and will find some other line of work. The practical outcome will be that one day the New Yorker will be unable to find a cab and will have to rely on other forms of transportation. Here again we see politicians chasing after the symptoms of a problem, rather than dealing with the root of the problem. The U.S. government’s war on drugs has been a major boon for the law-enforcement business. Here again, through the manipulation of public opinion by the government-controlled media, we have taken what could have been a relatively harmless situation and turned into an excuse to wage warfare right on our own city streets. The mere act of prohibition of controlled substances creates market demand. Cold and calculating drug cartel industry figures regularly weigh the cost of human lives against the higher profit motive and have decided that lives are expendable because the profit is so large. As long as the profit motive exists, marketing efforts for spreading drug usage among our young population have a reason to exist. Thus we have the impetus for perpetuating the production and sale of narcotics. If the government wanted to end the war on drugs, then simply de-criminalizing them and making them widely available through multiple outlets would put the drug cartels out of business almost overnight. Once you put the drug cartels out of business, their vast network of marketing agents have no purpose and will no longer have reason to interest future generations in the purchase of controlled narcotics. I think the public at-large is, for the most part, aware of the negative effects that narcotics have upon people. Public opinion is moving away from favoring the behavior of the drug culture. There is little need for government to dictate moral code in this matter. A shocking fact is that legal prescription drugs cause more illness and death than illegal controlled substances. That is, if you don’t count the deaths caused as a direct result of government agents acting in the war on drugs. Another shocking fact is that there are more deaths due to automobile accidents than from these illicit drugs. But why don’t they ban automobiles? It is a matter of economics: government has learned that a populous with mobility earns a higher taxable income than a populous without mobility. How about the environment? Now here is another hotly debated issue. And, entire industries have been born on the junk science that supports public opinion on environmental issues. It is true that man’s existence is detrimental to the natural state of the environment. There is only one real solution to that problem: reduce the population. However, this runs counter to the goal of any government. Since government power relies on having large populations to support it, then when the public becomes concerned over the environment, other scapegoat issues must be found. Inevitably, the solutions to these issues always result in the production of additional revenue streams for government and for industries that lobby government for favoritism. Most of us are familiar with motor vehicle emissions testing and its attendant fees and ever tightening standards. The vehicle repair shops make additional money off these unnecessary repairs to bring vehicles into compliance with emissions rules. In addition, sales of new vehicles are driven because the cost of repairing older vehicles is artificially set at high values. Now here is one irony: the invention of the catalytic converter, a device which is supposed to burn off any partially unburned fuel residues in auto exhaust fumes. While it is effective at reducing solid particulates, it, like many prescription drugs, as untold side effects. One of these unpleasant side effects is the release the chemical gas H2SO4. This is a substance which rises up to our upper atmosphere and comes down in the form of acid rain. The acid rain effects the ability to plant life to absorb certain essential trace minerals. For instance, vegetables are recently in the past 20 years, showing a deficiency in selenium. Farmers were forced to figure this out recently when their cattle began to have an outbreak of cancer. Once again, due to the profit motive of the farming industry, it was necessary to accurately identify the cause of this cancer outbreak. The result was that farmers found it necessary to add selenium supplements to the cattle feed, since the corn alone no longer contained this trace mineral which is so essential in fighting off cancer. Meanwhile, the public at-large is being kept in the dark about the recent rise in cancer in humans. Now we have the American Cancer Society, which takes in millions of dollars in donations every year, working on chasing after that elusive treatment for a problem that was partially created back in the 1970s by government mandate on behalf of the environmentalists. Such foolhardy government intervention has cost the American public untold amounts of money, loss of time and health. I submit to you that it is a false brand of patriotism (and an insult to our Founding Fathers and our Constitution) to allow this situation to continue. The latest new attack on individuals by the environmentalists in the Northeast is an attack on in-ground residential oil tanks. During a time when the oil industry manufactured a phony oil shortage as a direct form of poetic justice for President Nixon’s wage and price controls, many homeowners acted wisely and installed large underground oil storage tanks and began to stockpile fuel oil. Recently, there is talk in state government about the passage of another law mandating that homeowners in possession of such tanks should be forced to remove them at the homeowner’s expense. This cost would be on the average of 4000 to ten thousand dollars. The cost of disposing of any oil contained in tanks to be removed will be about 50 cents per gallon. The alleged justification for this gross violation of private property rights? Environmentalists are now claiming that underground oil tanks can leak into the aquifer and pollute our water supply over great distances. There are two glaring flaws with this claim: one is they assume that all oil tanks leak. This is simply untrue. Metal, which is in contact with oil, does not rust or corrode. I have spoken with a number of individuals who are in the business of removing oil tanks from the ground. One such individual has told me that in 20 years of this type of work, he has only seen one oil tank that actually leaked. It was explained to me that if oil tank is properly installed, it can last without leaking nearly indefinitely. The one case where an oil tank actually did leak was a situation where the tank was improperly installed such that its side was gouged by jagged rocks. Proper installations involve lowering the tank into a bed of sand which protects the tank from damage which later results in corrosion and rust. The second glaring flaw in the attack on in ground oil tanks is that, regardless of whether the tank leaks slightly or not, any small seepage from such a leak will not travel very far from the origin of the tank. Then here is the irony: when the town maintains the public roadways, what do they put down on the road surface in quantities of hundreds of thousands of gallons? Oil. Crude or re-claimed oil. While state government worries about a few ounces of oil per year leaching from homeowners’ underground tanks, state and local road construction crews are dumping thousands of gallons of the substance onto the ground everywhere! To quote a recent pop song from the 1980s, “who’s zoomin’ who?” While we’re on the issue of environmental regulations, how about recycling? Imagine this: in an increasing number of communities, it is now mandatory to wash thoroughly, your garbage before you dispose of it. The ludicrousness of this would have the average American laughing ten to twenty years ago, but it is taken seriously today. What happened to the days when the $30-$40 per month you pay for trash pickup actually resulted in the garbage collectors doing their job? Now we as citizens are to assist them in their work by pre-sorting and washing “recyclable” items that we dispose of. And we still pay outrageous monthly pickup fees. What’s the matter with people? The average American spends at least 8 hours a day on the job, 2.5 hours commuting to and from that job, and several more hours fulfilling the various administrative, maintenance and family business issues involved in daily life. Short of time and energy, the citizen is now being asked to work for the garbage men. Absurd. And more absurd is the irony of increased energy wasted to wash all that garbage individually, instead of at some central plant where it could be done for a fraction of the cost. The electricity to pump the water that is used to wash out those bottles has a specific price in terms of pollution that is produced. So recycling and washing our garbage before throwing it in the garbage is all rather political “feel good” behavior for our self-agrandizement as a society. Returning to the general issue of crime, it is not the fault of guns and gun manufacturers. We have too many gun laws already. We do not need additional gun laws. We simply need to enforce the laws that we do have. Hardly a day goes by when some wacky anti-gun nut doesn’t come up with some new idea for an ordinance to prevent gun owners from exercising their duly recognized second amendment rights. Some municipalities have gone so far as to outlaw the discharge of firearms on one’s own property! This is a roundabout way of outlawing guns without a direct technical attack on the second amendment. The notion here is that if you can’t outlaw them, then you can outlaw the use of them. The effect is the same: a complete prohibition on deriving the benefits of gun ownership. We live in a nation that is so bored with freedom that it continually engages in the sport of destroying that freedom in the public interest. Pragmatism is at work every day on this front. Any group of short-sighted people who don’t like what another group or individual is doing can petition the government for action against those parties. This is what we’re seeing with the case against Microsoft and with the case against gun manufacturers and even cigarette manufacturers. What they forget, is that the so-called victims of the these corporate enterprises willingly bought their products. The software buyers did so because of the open standard that Microsoft provided. The gun owners because of the safety and security and the need to hunt for food that the gun manufacturers provided a solution for. And the smokers who had an emotional need to take a drag on a cigarette, that the tobacco industry has filled. While I don’t necessarily endorse the goals and purposes of these industries, I do believe that it is immoral to interfere with the personal choices of those who wish to utilize these products, whether it be to their personal benefit or to their destruction. Free persons have the right of personal choice, including the right to choose suicide. A major underlying cause for the denial of human rights is the philosophical premise that the individual is not sovereign; that the state knows best and that the state owns the physical body of the individual. This is what socialism is about. You, your children, your property and even to some extent what you’re allowed to think and believe are either the property of, or controlled by, the state. It is the notion that every man is his brother’s keeper, which justifies the act of taxation. As with every good intent turned bad, each new law, brought about under the guise of public good, knows no limits to its intrusive existence on the lives of the individuals which it affects. The mere principal of taxation opens the door to slavery. We may have abolished one form of slavery in the late 1800s, but we have brought about a broader more sinister form of economic slavery which affects every man, woman and child in America today: the system of taxation. Taxation, by its very nature, removes the citizen’s right to say no. Herein lies the danger of taxation, a perilous condition where a government holds a gun to the very citizens that government is bound by Constitution to protect, and can extract, without limit, taxes from those individuals, resulting in property confiscation when the tax rate exceeds the individual’s ability to pay. A system of taxation is a self perpetuating vicious cycle where bureaucracy is needed to manage the tax collection, and more taxes need to be collected to support the bureaucracy. Such easy money promotes the frivolous use of tax funds on new, varying social projects which are foisted upon the public by using the news media as a tool for social engineering to convince the public they need the next wonderful new government program. Furthermore, our school systems have become the breeding ground for socialism. While the Constitution may be clearly written as to proscribe such collectivist as activities, the new left will go so far as to alter the definitions of words in human language so as to change the meaning of our Constitution without technically violating it. The important point to remember is that taxation removes the power of the people to control government and invert this so that government now has the power to control people. Once this happens, there is little hope for freedom in such a nation. That stage has come about some 60 years ago. So I am afraid, that without a bloody revolution, we Americans will not be able to enjoy freedom ever again. But, as with all governments and tyrannies throughout history, the rise and fall is cyclic and inevitable. The unfortunate aspect of this is that the process IS cyclic– it seems that people do not learn from history because they continuously make the same poor choices over and over again. My thoughts on the military draft: it is a gross contradiction in principal to take one’s freedom away in the cause of freedom. Again, we have the doctrine of every man is his brothers keeper– the doctrine of self sacrifice for the sake of others. This is a deadly contradiction. The ability to easily make war because of government has easy access to military personnel is a danger only paralleled by the similar principal behind taxation: control is removed from the people and placed in the hands of the government. When you have a military draft, there is little to stop governments from engaging in war to serve the interests of private groups, such as the oil industry. America has had a consistent policy of engaging in military skirmishes while publicly proclaiming that is our interest in protecting human rights abroad. What good as protecting human rights abroad when we’re violating the human rights of our own citizens, whom it is our government’s primary obligation to protect? Ultimately, several years down the road, the true intents of these small military engagements often surface, and they are often strategic economic wars intended to serve the economic needs of big corporations. Readers of this WebSite can probably easily ascertain my views on radio communications and the right to exercise constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. So I’ll say a few brief things about this topic: the notion of freedom of speech is meaningless when no one is able to hear that speech. No act should be illegal unless the carrying out of that at violates rights of other individuals. Therefore the act of exercising one’s mind in the creation of a broadcast facility and the responsible use thereof, is not a crime. On the other hand, the willful violation of the right of expression by individuals, as guaranteed by our Constitution, is criminal. The federal government has engaged in this crime called the doctrine of prior restraint or prohibition. Prohibition, as I have witnessed all through the 1920s and early 1930′s, did not result in sobriety or an improvement in the modesty of society as a whole. On the contrary, it resulted in the creation of an excuse for the government to engage on blatant violation of the fourth amendment by giving it an excuse to engage in acts of violence and wanton destruction of property of individuals. There was nothing inherently evil about the distillation of alcohol from fermenting grapes. Again, it was a case of knee-jerk reaction by a few politicians, at the occasional harmless display of drunkenness outside of saloons. The result, like the war on drugs, has been the creation of crime and many acts of violence on the part of taxpayer funded government agencies. And as taxes increase, isn’t it interesting how the size and terrible power of government increases too? Those who have read my words before, will realize that the only proper status of airwaves is like that of the discovery of a tangible natural resource, such as land. Ownership of an untapped natural resources is the right of those who applied the brain power to make that otherwise useless resource, in this case the spectrum, into a useful and valuable quantity. It becomes private property. The government has no business in regulating private property. Access to the airwaves becomes a matter of being first come first served. While some may argue that this is unfair, how is it any different than the current system we have today? The only difference today is that we have a system that is so financially bloated that it must support itself by prostitution to the lowest common denominator: the lust for maximum profit at the expense of morality and at the expense of the individual. There are scientific formulas for profit maximization, and these formulas have had consistent results, which we perceive as the homogenization of program content broadcast on the airwaves. Instead of becoming a medium for individualism and diverse ideas, thanks to the governments unconstitutional involvement in private affairs of business, such business is forced to maximize profits because of the artificially imposed high costs of running a radio station in our highly regulated economic environment. I have engaged in arguments time and again with people from the radio industry proclaiming that you cannot run a radio station for just a few hundred dollars a month. This is evidence that bureaucratic thinking is so heavily entrenched in these individuals that they cannot see the reality of the situation. A radio transmitter is an electronic appliance like any other electronic appliance: it uses a fixed amount of electricity, has a certain amount of required upkeep and maintenance, and has a certain purchase price or cost of construction. Yet, through government regulation, a falsely inflated market value can be attached to the physical facility of a radio station. While the physical facility might have 50,000 dollars worth of equipment, the “market” might have a value of 80 million dollars. Now I don’t resent that people are able to make a lot of money with radio. There’s nothing wrong with making a good honest living by providing service to others. What I object to it is that this system is run like a private club, something akin to organized crime clubs in which the entrants must conform to certain skewed policies, as well as be capable of paying astronomical amounts of money by which to gain membership. The whole system is a political shell game in which prospective entrants try to buy favor by kowtowing to the demands of the agency that dole’s out the spectrum. This is not a healthy way to have laissez-fair capitalism. When the government denies a natural right to the people, it sets up a condition by which crime can be invented. It seems however, that this is a desirable condition for the government, as it provides government with a sustainable reason for existence, at least so far as it can publicly claim in which many of the population accept. I have been slowly reaching the conclusion that all crime is the result of society denying the natural needs both emotional and physical, of individuals. The few individuals who do not follow the conventions set forth by society are labeled as criminals and often physically separated from the rest of society and stored in buildings called prisons. It is no great secret that America has the greatest percentage of incarcerated citizens of any nation in the world. In fact, the prison industry has become big business of late. While we set back at home and complain about how we buy products built by Chinese slave laborers, here on the other side of the Pacific Ocean we are engaged in the worst form of hypocrisy. A growing percentage of our prison population is being used for slave labor. Does anyone remember of the “chain gangs”? Well today a more industrial form of slave labor is emerging in our prison system: that of commercial manufacturing. Prisoners are being forced to work for wages on the order of 50 cents a day so that products can be manufactured for use by the government. It used to be just the manufacture all of license plates but now it is expanding to furniture and other things that can be made with an un-educated prison slave labor. The privatization of the prison system creates further economic encouragement to incarcerate increasing numbers of individuals regardless of their crimes. A large prison population translates into a large industrial manufacturing workforce– a workforce that is cheaper than any workforce available on the free market. Meanwhile, the taxpayer is paying for all of this. A similar parallel exists with the forfeiture laws. Sweeping changes to the law have enabled so-called law enforcement officials to freely confiscate private property under the guise of association with a criminal act. And due to the fact that the government now defines many harmless activities as criminal, that opens the doorway to the wholesale theft of millions of dollars worth of private property by government every month. This is a dreadfully dangerous trend, and if it is not stopped, will eventually lead to the destruction of traditional American values totally. Have you noticed recently the sudden emergence of roadside motor vehicle stops without probable cause? While masquerading under the guise of checking for motor vehicle emissions stickers and seat belt usage (another case where we are being told that we are not responsible adults able to decide whether or not we wish to wear seat belts), these motor vehicle stops provide the police with an excuse to search the vehicle without a warrant or without any probable cause. The symptoms are already very apparent. The rights of the individual have been subverted and we are rapidly becoming a police state. The harboring of an adversary relationship between citizens and government is probably intentional. This leads to social unrest eventually, the very condition and excuse that government looks for to justify further expansion and invasion into our privacy. America has cancer. And that cancer has metastasized. Like the once strong and great oak tree, aged and glorious, but rotted from the inside slowly over the decades, the outward signs of decay have been well concealed for most of this time. At some point, in the slightest wind, that oak tree, undermined by the internal decay within its trunk, will collapse and fall to the earth. America, like that oak tree, is on the path to a similar fate. The people at-large are ignorant to this, and, being the good stimulus response creatures that they are, will only react when it is too late– when the effects of this internal decay reach them on a daily and very personal level. By then it will be too late. I can only be thankful that I will not likely be around to witness the day when this ultimate collapse occurs. The rest of you will have to deal with this hell created by your own ambivalence– your own unwillingness to believe in the existence of the problem and to take the effort to deal with the problem.