"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
