The Importance, And Meaning, Of "Knowing The Law"

"It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."

-Samuel Adams

The Importance, And Meaning, Of "Knowing The Law"

By Peter Hendrickson

Author, “Cracking the Code”

A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

-Thomas Jefferson

TODAY, OCTOBER 26, IS THE DAY G. W. BUSH signed the breathtakingly mis-named USA PATRIOT Act into practice 11 years ago.

This anniversary of the formal pretense of authorization for a host of unauthorizable practices (short of a few Constitutional amendments, anyway) sets the stage nicely for a conclusion of my series of articles over the last several weeks concerning bad behavior by certain actors in the executive and judicial branches of the federal government when faced with educated Americans seeking to exercise their rights to speak.

The articles have focused on studied evasions that have occurred in a couple of recent judicial contests and in executive efforts to thwart an unfortunate selection of educated refund-claimants that have gone on for a number of years now, all of which involve the pretense that the claims are made by way of legally-defective affidavits which can therefore be lawfully disregarded. The reason for my focus on these sordid affairs is to highlight the flirtation of the "ignorance tax" schemers, who recognize in CtC's revelations a uniquely fatal threat to their usurpations of power, with a hugely dangerous, never-before-seen effort to suppress and control speech-- and testimonial speech, at that.

This venture into deep corruption is about as unambiguous an acknowledgement of the pinpoint accuracy and significance of CtC as can be imagined. After all, you don't have to try to stop people from saying something unless what those people are saying, and how they're saying it, DOES inescapably secure THEIR ownership of their property and thwarts YOUR effort to improperly claim it for yourself.

This corrupt venture is also a clarion-call to all true Americans to wake up both to the peril represented by this new push on the envelope, and to recognition of the liberty-restoring, Leviathan-restraining power of acting on the truth about the "income" tax. The enemies of individual liberty know that power full well, as is evidenced by their step into this darkness. But many more Americans need to learn about and act on this power as soon as possible, before the corrupt "push on the envelope" effort to neutralize this liberating power matures into an entrenched and defended practice.

The threat here is real, and imminent. Indeed, it is not a threat, it is a happening, and it will either be opposed hard, immediately and ceaselessly, or it will successfully metastasize into a new chapter of nightmare for all of us.

HAPPILY (IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING), the worsening behavior of the law-defiers offers ever-better opportunities for communicating the truth against which they act. Further, like pain alerting someone to an injury, it emphasizes the importance of attention to this subject. This latest offense to which the misapplication-beneficiaries are resorting is no exception. However dumbed-down a great portion of the American population has allowed itself to become, most people's response to being told of government efforts to suppress, control and punish inconvenient speech-- especially testimonial speech-- is, "That's unconstitutional!"

Some folks require a bit of help because they suffer under the delusion that the normal principles of law don't apply where taxes are concerned. This is brought on by the effort to make sense of the misapplication of the tax while not understanding that it IS a misapplication, coupled with the childlike tendency to more readily embrace the proposition of one's own ignorance (in this case as to how or why tax laws should for some reason be exempt from the usual rules) than that "authorities" could possibly be misbehaving (or might themselves not understand the law).

But even these confused folks recognize the impropriety of controlled speech when it is pointed out to them that tax return contents are not an accounting of one's economic activity, but are rather a statement of the signer's beliefs as to what, if any, economic activity was conducted in which the federal government has an ownership interest (and what deductions and exemptions and credits the signer believes are available to be claimed, if any are desired). At worst, even in these cases, the initial reaction is, "I don't see how they can do that..."

Because, of course, they can't. Such a thing IS unconstitutional-- a plain violation of the prohibition on abridging the freedom of speech.

It is also plainly wrong. The Constitution secures the right to speak as one will (and not speak) not only because the free exercise of that right is critical to a legitimate structure of self-government (which is to say, a legitimate government, period); but also because no one has, or can have, legitimate authority to impose control, suppression or subordination of anyone else's words under any circumstances, and especially not words over their own sworn signature.

UNDERSTANDING SIMPLE TRUTHS LIKE THIS is what "knowing the law" is all about. Misunderstanding them (or failing to give them their proper significance) is what serfdom is all about.

Nothing is more important for Americans at this point in our history than clarity on these points.

During the time of the revolution in the 18th century, British politician Edmund Burke recognized the significance of these points, and made an observation that speaks to us today. Addressing the British Parliament and opining that all efforts to resist the revolution were doomed to failure due to the intractable spirit of the Americans, Burke observed:

“Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our colonies, which contributes no mean part towards the growth and effect of this untractable spirit. I mean their education. In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavour to obtain some smattering in that science. I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the plantations. The colonists have now fallen into the way of printing them for their own use.”

Now, understand this, please: Burke did NOT mean that "all who read" were studied in the intricacies of British statutes and regulations or even common-law. Nor did he mean that the average American was a master, or even passing familiar, with procedural nuances and peculiarities of the British courts. That's the kind of "law" Jefferson scorned when he said,

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’, because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."

What Burke meant was that Americans in huge numbers were reading the works of people like John Locke, who provided many of the core elements concerning the limits and nature of rightful government that would shortly appear in the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense', which still holds the record for the greatest depth of penetration (circulation as a percentage of the overall population) in American publishing history. These works cut straight past, and properly relegate to irrelevance, "precedence", "procedure" and "interpretation" and all the other B.S. by which those who would impose their will without proper authority browbeat and confuse their victims into overlooking the actual core issues in any contest over who gets to exercise power over what.

Americans in Burke's day, in other words, widely and deeply understood the concept, "They can't do that!" Their understanding, as Burke recognized, translated into an irrevocable commitment to not LET them "do that".

MODERN AMERICANS HAVE BEEN SUBJECTED to a sustained, broad and deep effort to condition them away from knowing the law. The "childlike tendency to more readily embrace the proposition of one's own ignorance than that "authorities" could possibly be misbehaving (or might themselves not understand the law)" has been nurtured through 75 years of intense "consent engineering" designed and intended to produce a compliant, unquestioning and unresisting population of strong backs and weak minds whose conclusions as to whether "they can do that" are arrived at by... asking "them".

For some, the conditioning has worked, and "asking them" is where the inquiry stops. There was a time when this might have been ok, because even "they" respected the limits laid down in the law, and no one in even the darkest corners of Mordor-on-the-Potomac would dream of trying to control speech for the preservation of a state scheme. I do not believe that it is ok any more.

Today it falls to us to know the law in the way our forefathers did-- to know the simple truths about power and ownership and rights that all statutes and regulations and procedures are meant (if properly enacted and practiced) to uphold and enforce. It falls to us to know "they can't do that", and to say so, and to mean it.

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

-Edward R. Murrow

The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.

-Thomas Paine

Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

-Mahatma Gandhi

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