As the madness continues and indecency, debt and war pile up, people ask are our leaders stupid or evil? People who saw this coming earnestly desire to get the word out to everyone, so others can see what is going on as well. The evangelicals of freedom are eager to get the word out.
It is not a matter of being stupid or evil, it is a matter of riding a beast the reins to which they were handed. The powers that be ascend the heights by people demanding more ludicrous benefits from a shrinking pie. As long as the people you lead care little about the here and now, it does not matter what you do. We must be disappointing to our leaders, even discouraging.
It is not about being either stupid or evil, it is about learning the difference between what we have the power to do and what we have a right to do. People working in the lines at the airport as a part of the TSA have the power to search you before you get on a plane, but not the right.
Our radical roots give us strange elocutions. Our government recognizes they do not have the right to tax citizens. So they actually say federal taxes are voluntary. Yet they make it near impossible for an employee to avoid taxes. When people are convicted on tax evasion, it is generally not for failure to pay taxes but for lying to the government. Essential to tax evasion is lying. And juries are more likely to convict liars than tax evaders. The government has the power to tax, but not the right.
Our government recognizes it has no right to issue currency (only mint coins) or be in the banking business, so it calls the federal reserve system a private bank and each branch is, for example San Francisco, http://www.frbsf.org/... that is "org", until you get to the headquarters, when it becomes http://www.federalreserve.gov/. The government has the power to run the banks, but not the right.
Dominant philosophies worldwide today can be traced back to about 500 BC, worldwide. Around that time Socrates, Buddha, and Confucious were working out their systems. The Jews are released from Babylonian captivity with a new view of the world and themselves. Egyptian systems were quite mature by then. We know these philosophers today because their systems were adopted.
There were other philosophers working at the time, quite popular in their time. For example, one you have never heard of in China, Mo ti, preached a philosophy of love your neighbor, natural law. Rather like Christianity, 500 years before Christ.
But Confucious taught a philosophy of hierarchy, one that suits government. And from the Hebrew Bible, we see in 1 Samuel 8-10, people clamor for government, in spite of the fact that God Almighty Himself offered us freedom, radical freedom. People all over the world want government, so it is just a matter of the powers that be picking what is best for themselves as the powers that be.
The emperor Tiberius was ruling when Rome was at the top of its game. When he sent off a governor to one of Rome's conquests he advised them they would do well to "sheer his sheep, not slaughter them." In government, it is the system that best strikes the balance between shaving and slaughtering the sheep that wins out.
It is not a matter of being stupid or evil, it is a matter of riding a beast the reins to which they were handed. The powers that be ascend the heights by people demanding more ludicrous benefits from a shrinking pie. As long as the people you lead care little about the here and now, it does not matter what you do. We must be disappointing to our leaders, even discouraging.
It is not about being either stupid or evil, it is about learning the difference between what we have the power to do and what we have a right to do. People working in the lines at the airport as a part of the TSA have the power to search you before you get on a plane, but not the right.
Our radical roots give us strange elocutions. Our government recognizes they do not have the right to tax citizens. So they actually say federal taxes are voluntary. Yet they make it near impossible for an employee to avoid taxes. When people are convicted on tax evasion, it is generally not for failure to pay taxes but for lying to the government. Essential to tax evasion is lying. And juries are more likely to convict liars than tax evaders. The government has the power to tax, but not the right.
Our government recognizes it has no right to issue currency (only mint coins) or be in the banking business, so it calls the federal reserve system a private bank and each branch is, for example San Francisco, http://www.frbsf.org/... that is "org", until you get to the headquarters, when it becomes http://www.federalreserve.gov/. The government has the power to run the banks, but not the right.
Dominant philosophies worldwide today can be traced back to about 500 BC, worldwide. Around that time Socrates, Buddha, and Confucious were working out their systems. The Jews are released from Babylonian captivity with a new view of the world and themselves. Egyptian systems were quite mature by then. We know these philosophers today because their systems were adopted.
There were other philosophers working at the time, quite popular in their time. For example, one you have never heard of in China, Mo ti, preached a philosophy of love your neighbor, natural law. Rather like Christianity, 500 years before Christ.
But Confucious taught a philosophy of hierarchy, one that suits government. And from the Hebrew Bible, we see in 1 Samuel 8-10, people clamor for government, in spite of the fact that God Almighty Himself offered us freedom, radical freedom. People all over the world want government, so it is just a matter of the powers that be picking what is best for themselves as the powers that be.
The emperor Tiberius was ruling when Rome was at the top of its game. When he sent off a governor to one of Rome's conquests he advised them they would do well to "sheer his sheep, not slaughter them." In government, it is the system that best strikes the balance between shaving and slaughtering the sheep that wins out.
World-wide, as a middle class emerges, it is by commerce it does so, and it is necessarily uninterested in what the government has to offer, since these merchants provide for themselves. These merchants at once benefit the powers that be, but at the same time threaten the status quo. We are the solution to our economic problems, but we are a threat to any system.
We see we do not need power and force and violence to maintain our way of life, indeed even improve things. We see what nonsense the pretenses of government are. We see we do not need the power to get anything done, we only need the right to do so... a right within a natural ethical system of freedom to contract and freedom from force or fraud. Government always backs itself up with force, and often perpetrates fraud. We know we do not need government. But we also know most people demand it.
People who despair of change often turn to violence. Well, that means they do not want change, they just want to be in charge. And with little experience and much enthusiasm, they generally make things much worse, as they did in the US and French revolutions. Violence always yields worse results. And free markets fail when it comes to allowing people to aggregate enough power to do the great harm we see "great" nations do.
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