Today's excerpt begins on page 6.
Privacy is vanishing beneath the rising floodtide of government power.
Government officials have asserted a de facto right to search anybody, any time, on the pretext of “terrorism.”
The average American now has no freedom from having government agents strip-search his children, rummage through his luggage, ransack his house, sift through his bank records, and trespass in his fields.
Today, a citizen’s constitutional right to privacy can be nullified by the sniff of a dog.
Federal officials have given rewards to hundreds of airline ticket clerks for reporting the names of individuals who paid for their tickets in cash, thereby allowing police to confiscate the rest of people’s money on mere suspicion of illegal behavior.
Local police are conducting programs in two hundred thousand classrooms that sometimes result in young children informing police on parents who violate drug laws.
The number of federally authorized wiretaps has almost quadrupled since 1980 (except the ones intended to catch spies of our nuclear secrets), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to prohibit development of new types of phones that would be more difficult to wiretap.
The demagogues in Congress are rabid with the intent of taking away our right to carry and bear arms.
Could this description of events occurring in the United States today have applied to pre-war Nazi Germany?
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are increasingly under assault.
The proliferation of vague federal regulations have had a severe chilling effect on the free speech of millions of businessmen who cannot criticize federal agencies without risking reprisal that could destroy them.
Thanks to a 1992 federal appeals court decision and a late 1993 congressional uproar, even pictures of clothed children can now be considered pornographic, thus greatly increasing the number of Americans who can be prosecuted for violating obscenity laws by taking pictures of their own children.
The government is manufacturing more criminals now than ever before.
It is increasingly choosing the citizen-target, creating the crime, and then vigorously prosecuting the violator.
During the past fifteen years, law enforcement officials have set up thousands of elaborate schemes to entrap people for “crimes” such as buying plant supplies, asking for a job, or shooting deer.
Hundreds of private accountants have become double agents, receiving government kickbacks for betraying their clients to the IRS.
Total federal spending has increased from under $100 billion in 1963 to over $3 trillion in 2002, and as spending has grown, so has bureaucratic control and political power.
Since 1960, the federal government has created over a thousand new subsidy programs for everything from medical care to housing, from culture to transportation.
Subsidies are the twentieth century’s method of human conquest: slow political coups d’etat over one sector of the economy and society after another.
Government subsidies have become a major factor in squeezing out unsubsidized developers, unsubsidized schools, unsubsidized theater producers, and unsubsidized farmers.
The money is extorted out of the lifeblood of the citizen by rapacious and unlawful taxes while the subsidies slowly smother his freedom.
A government powerful enough to give you everything is powerful enough to take everything away.
Former President Clinton set aside 1.7 million acres of Utah to be protected by the federal government.
That sounds warm and fuzzy until you understand that the land federalized was the nation’s largest reserve of soft coal.
The electric utilities must now buy their coal for electrical generation from Indonesia - soft coal owned by the Lipo group, the same organization that donated millions to Clinton’s election campaign.
Beggaring the taxpayer has become the main achievement of the welfare state.
The federal tax system is turning individuals into sharecroppers of their own lives.
The private economy has become an agent of the federal government.
At least fifty percent of the total productive resources of our nation are now being organized through the political market in the form of taxes.
In that very important sense, we are more than half socialist.
The average American now works over half of each year simply to pay the cost of government tax and regulation.
High taxes have created a moral inversion in the relationship between the citizen and the state.
Before the income tax, the government existed to serve the people at least in some vague nominal sense; now the people exist to provide financial grain for the state’s mill.
Federal court decisions have often bent over backward to stress that citizens’ rights are nearly null and void in conflicts with the Internal Revenue Service.
IRS seizures of private property have increased by six hundred percent since 1980 and now hit over three million Americans each year.
Not only do we have more laws and regulations than ever before, but the laws themselves are becoming less clear, consistent, or coherent.
An example is the tax code.
In 1913, a debate was held on the Senate floor regarding the first income tax act under the 16th Amendment.
Senator Elihu Root commented about the complexity of that first law.
His comment was humorous then; it is hilarious now:
“I guess you will have to go to jail. If that is the result of not understanding the Income Tax Law, I shall meet you there. We shall have a merry, merry time, for all of our friends will be there. It will be an intellectual center, for no one understands the Income Tax Law except persons who have not sufficient intelligence to understand the questions that arise under it.”
All the confusion over an eighty-page Act then is exponentially compounded now by the current ten thousand-plus page Internal Revenue Code 26 USC, along with more than thirty thousand pages of implementing Internal Revenue regulations - 26 CFR and some borrowed from 27 CFR. It is now practically impossible for citizens to keep track of government’s latest edicts.
Today the law has become a tool with which to force people to behave in ways politicians approve, which is politically correct, rather than a clear line that citizens can respect in order to live their lives in privacy and peace.
With the proliferation of retroactive regulations, government agencies now have the right to change the rules of the game at any time, even after the game is over.
The “Rule of John Ashcroft,” whereby federal officials on a whim create new rules to bind and penalize private citizens, has replaced the Rule of Law — the classical concept endorsed by the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 as a restraint on government power.
Each night we are deluged with “cop” shows that reveal how far out of its box the beast of government has crawled. Government agents dressed like military commandos wearing black jumpsuits, bulletproof vests and armament that would give a seasoned military force pause to reflect, wear full head masks to conceal their identity. No one busy doing the constitutional work of the Republic needs to wear ski masks concealing their identity. Criminals and outlaws wear masks, not constitutional officers. They bash in doors and throw the inhabitants to the floor, screaming children watching in horror as their parents are manacled and dragged off to prison.
The government is supposed to set the example that we the citizens are required to emulate. When the government breaks the law, then there exists no law. We have anarchy. That, I am afraid, is the state of the union as of today.
In the famous Supreme Court case of Elkins Et A1 v. United States, 364 U.S. 206, the Court, reinforcing judicial integrity, stated:
“In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites every man to become a law unto himself, and it invites anarchy.”
The time in which Justice Brandeis spoke was a simpler time, and the government had not broken the chains with which the Constitution bound it down. Unfortunately, the federal judiciary has opted out of the Separation of Powers doctrine of the Constitution, and now has become self-regulating.
The courts do not maintain their independence as a judiciary. Without constitutional authority, the system elevates judges above the law. The courts are no longer our courts of justice or a bastion of freedom. With the passage of the War Powers Act of 1933, they have become the Executive’s tool. The judges are little more than organized crime families. They have invaded the people’s court and now only impersonate and give lip service to justice by exchanging obfuscation and sophistry in place of a justice system, void of any form of judicial integrity.
Enforcing judicial standards on judges under this system is impossible. Even though the court has rules, the judges make up their own rules as they go or break the rules with impunity whenever it is convenient for them to do so.
How can you take a judge to court when the judges control the court and have granted themselves immunity from prosecution?
How do you call the police when it is the police who are breaking the law?
The judges’ dishonesty is contagious, and the government as teacher has sewn the seeds of discontent and anarchy.
The LORD God Almighty has granted a judge immense power to judge this creation, we the people.
But along with that power comes immense responsibility in that the LORD on the Day of Judgment will hold each judge to a higher standard of judgment.
The people have learned their lessons well.
They follow by example, and the example of the courts and the criminal justice system has led the people to behave criminally, just as Justice Brandeis predicted.
Government now appears more concerned with dictating personal behavior and political correctness than with protecting citizens from the private violence of murderers, muggers, and rapists.
In 1990, for the first time in history, the number of people sentenced to prison for drug violations exceeded the number of people sentenced for violent crime.
The number of people incarcerated in federal and state prisons in 2001 was almost four times the number incarcerated in 1980, and America now has a higher percentage of its population in prison than any other country in the world - two million people.
If those on probation and parole are taken into account, the number controlled by the justice system is over six million.
So much for “the land of the free and home of the brave,” which is now just another oxymoron akin to “military intelligence.”
Unfortunately, the more that government has tried to manage people’s behavior, the more unmanageable American society has become.
Gangs have replaced families, resulting in a greater proliferation of drugs and illegal weapons.
Our babies are becoming parents with no jobs or education, spiraling an entire generation of children into grinding poverty and third world expectations of life.
This series of posts will insure that these free thinkers' works live on in living memory.
If only a few.
There is a reason these books are not taught in the modern skools.
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