Nice Men with Guns

I have a friend on Facebook who said this to me this morning; "I would like to support a constitutional government but at some point you are going to have to deal with mean people that do crappy things to other people through threat of violence and intimidation."

While that statement is true it got me thinking. Look at this; the threat of violence and intimidation is the only thing the government has to use to accomplish anything. No matter what it is that the Big Government wants to do, no matter what benefit they say it would be to everybody involved, the threat of violence and intimidation is the only tool they have to get it done. And how often is it that the mean people who are doing the crappy things to other people, are in the Big Government? That's what despotism is. You want to limit mean people that do crappy things to other people using such tactics? Then the first thing you have to do is limit the power of the government. Tyranny IS the threat of violence and intimidation.

Now I am not saying that there should be NO government. Brett's rule of debate #1 is; just because I don't agree with something does not mean I endorse what you conceive to be its most radical opposite. Just because I don't support absolute government does not mean I support no government. No anarchy for me please. As a the grandson of a nice man with a gun I have to say right here and now that I have the greatest unqualified respect for the police and the government within their proper function. There is a time and place for police as well as other government functions.  It's just that we are becoming far too accustomed with the idea that the government is supposed to provide us with everything, without understanding the nature of the consequences. If they provide everything, they control everything, even when they don't make sense.

There is a rather famous quote attributed to George Washington, "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." I believe based on any research I've done, that Washington was not the original author of this quote. But really, whoever said it, no matter who it was, it is still the truth.

As a nation We the People have lost sight of something valuable. We have become dependent on Big Government to give us things without seeing the inevitable consequence that everything we allow the government to do to our supposed benefit, authorizes them to use the threat of violence and intimidation against us in that area.

Do you want roads? It's kind of nice to be able to get on I90 in Toledo, Ohio and drive all of the way to Seattle, Washington isn't it? Well where did the funding for that come from?

Somebody, somewhere, made that money. At some point the people who made that money had to fill out some tax forms and report their financial information to the federal government, along with a check for some number of dollars. Now some people would say, "Yea! Tax dollars for roads so we can drive across the country!" But the fact is undeniable to those who pay the taxes that failure to do so would result in a visit from Guido and Vinnie, the IRS agents. If you think for a moment that a visit from Guido and Vinnie is not intimidating you have never received a letter from the IRS. That is all there is in one of those letters. Unveiled, obvious threats of the things that will happen to you if you don't cough up the cash. Should the taxpayer decide he does not want those roads, or to give up his hard earned cash, Guido and Vinnie will fill out a warrant and nice men with guns will kindly show up at his door, incarcerate him and take his stuff.

So what about the land that the highway is built on? The federal government wants their road. Most of the time they would pay for the land for this kind of cause. What happens when the owner decides not to sell? Well, there is precedent for this. President Grant had a unique solution. He ordered General Sherman to kill all of the Indians along the route of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Genocide is a pretty crappy thing; usually done by mean people to other people. But it did give us the Transcontinental Railroad. Who did it? Well, the federal government of the United States.

Now, because of that sort of precedent, the owner of the property where I90 is supposed to go, knows he stands no chance. The best he can do is make as much noise as possible on the way out. One side will label him as a radical. The other side will label him as a hero or a victim.

Either way, that is the use of threat of violence and intimidation against us. Either way the right of property is being denied to the person who worked and owned that land. This is the naked truth of the situation before us in this country today.

The formula for passing something of this nature has to include some supposed benefit to "everybody." That they make it sound like something good, that everybody needs, and that they are the only beings on the planet who can get it done, is a con game. Sugar coated crap is still crap. Sugar coated force is still force. Anybody who disagrees, because the act of passing things of this sort has some supposed benefit to and unspecified generality known as "everybody," is labeled an anti-social radical. Swept under the rug is the fact that those people who owned the land and made the money have individual rights to their property too.

Here's the operating principle. Write it down so you'll remember it later. Every single time you grant the government the authority to do something on your behalf, you are also granting them the power to use the threat of violence and intimidation against you so that you will be forced to comply.

You want welfare? Nice men with guns will take your money and give it to someone else. You want government healthcare? The IRS—nice men with guns—has the authority to use the threat of violence and intimidation to insure your compliance. You want government Social Security? If your employer doesn't pay it nice men with guns will arrest him and thrown him in prison. The threat of violence and intimidation is all they have to use on anybody who does not comply with their wishes. And if you think that these things are not threatening, just fail to pay your taxes, once, and wait and see how threatening and intimidating the federal government verses YOU, can really be.

All you need after that is mean people who do crappy things to other people in the government and voilà!, tyranny and oppression. Something of a note on human nature is that mean people who do crappy things to other people have a tendency to be drawn to power like a moth to flames.

A limited federal government does not mean anarchy. It just means less threat of violence and intimidation from the federal government. The idea of a well regulated government is to assign only the appropriate level of the threat of violence and intimidation to the level where it belongs, and use that power only where it is absolutely necessary to preserve the peace and freedom of the people in the area where that power applies.

Let's say that a country called "Dumbcrapistan" decides to bomb Toledo, Ohio. National threat, right? Then the national government, under the direction of the Commander in Chief, gets involved and uses the threat of violence and intimidation against Dumbcrapistan to protect the People of the great state of Ohio. That's the appropriate level of government using the appropriate level of threat and force to protect the people of Ohio and the country. Under this protection the people of Ohio, and the United States, can get on with their lives.

Let's say that Brett catches the flu. Now we have a national government, capable of bombing Dumbcrapistan, wielding an incredible amount of threat and intimidation, through Vinnie and Guido who are nice men with guns who work for the IRS, being used against you, toward the effect of paying Brett's doctor bill. This makes the president of the United States of America directly and personally responsible for my health, and you being personally responsible for paying it. I ask you, is this the kind of force, and purpose, you want to have used against you for my benefit? Setting aside completely that there is no way to make any organizational sense out of it, is this the appropriate power to apply to the problem of my personal health?

Philosophically speaking, the definition of a useful tool would be one that provides or conducts the right amount of force, to the right places, to the accomplishment of a desired task.

Would you expect Michelangelo to carve David with a jack hammer? Well, with the federal government of these days it would be more like trying to carve David with dynamite. Just as dynamite is a great tool for certain jobs, it is just as much the wrong tool to carve David as it would be to use the power of the federal government to cure Brett's case of the flu—at least as far as Brett is concerned.

Just as you would use the right tools to employ the appropriate force to carve a statue, so should you choose the right force of government to resolve problems; never letting that force exceed the necessity of the task.

With regards to the principles of the Constitution, it all comes down a question of which things you want the government to be able to employ the use of force against you. In other words; which things do you want nice men with guns to force you to do?

Rights and Responsibilities

I would like to stake a claim towards being a dedicated supporter of human rights but I'm a little (okay, a LOT!!!) apprehensive about it. Being misunderstood bothers me sometimes and I want to be very careful about being taken in the same light as the Generation Snowflakes that are currently falling throughout the country.

Where the current crop of Snowflakes have it wrong is they have no understanding of what rights really are and their relationship to our responsibilities. From my own point of view I can’t see how it would ever be possible to have rights as a human being here in our world without the corresponding responsibilities. There seems to be a lot of muddled thinking on these lines, some of which comes from both sides of the isle and all points in between.

By analogy you could say that it is yellow snow which I refuse to eat.

Don't Fight the Power, Question It

I had a curious—and very short—conversation on Twitter last week. You know, sometimes it's just the little things that bother me, and sometimes those little things that bother me stick to me for a really long time, particularly when the little thing is connected to a gigantic principle.

The question I asked was; "Under what clause in the #Constitution is the authority for the president to do anything about jobs?"

The reply was; "There is none Brett. However, the Constitution does not restrict the president from doing things to help either. Are you anti-Trump?"

You see what I mean here? Every president and smarmy politician in my fifty-four years of life has been talking about jobs, jobs, jobs. Every. Single. Effing. One. Of. Them. They have failed so dismally that it is a wonder more people don't tell them to mind their own job instead of all of ours...but I digress.

Okay, I get it. Donald Trump won. He's in the limelight, and honestly, I'm very relieved that Clinton lost. I know the guy who responded to my tweet doesn't know me personally, but for all the noise about the federal government trying to create jobs, I still find it alarming to have someone jump immediately to the possibility of my being "anti-Trump," especially when I didn't even mention him.

The simple Twitter answer for me was; "I'm pro Constitution. If Trump follows it, cool. Although the 10th amendment means POTUS doesn't have that authority."

But I think a more in-depth answer to that question of possibly being anti-Trump is called for, so I will just go ahead and write one.

The premise of the question of my being for or against Trump is completely wrong. I just don't think in terms of support for or against any politician. Ever. And I would encourage you to do the same.

There are two problems in my Twitter follower's question to me.

The first is that anything not listed specifically in the Constitution as a federal power, is unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment for the federal government to engage in. That's what it's there for. The Tenth Amendment is specifically designed to protect the American People from special interest group's influence on them. Big Labor and Big Business, for example, are special interest groups. Having a president, any president, getting involved in creating jobs makes him susceptible to the influences of Big Labor and Big Business. It is thus that the job of a president, under the Constitution, is not to create jobs. The president's duty is to follow the Constitution. Under the Constitution it is his job to keep the federal government out of the way of the People so the People can create their own jobs without the corrupting influence of Big Labor or Big Business. That's the constitutional system.

Another example of this principle in operation would be Big Oil and Big Environment. How does the president become susceptible to the influences of Big Oil and Big Environment? Simple. Ignore the Tenth Amendment, which says it's none of his business anyhow, and start getting involved with the country's energy policy. There is no constitutional power for the federal government to do anything about energy and its uses by the People, or the environment.

There are hundreds of things this could apply to but the principle is exactly the same in every single one of them. Ignoring the Tenth Amendment not only makes Washington DC susceptible to lobbyists and special interest groups, it creates them through giving power to the federal government, over our lives, that they are not supposed to have in a free society.

It is not the point of the American federal government to have a president, acting as king, fixing everything the way he and his supporters want it. The point of the president of the United States is to keep the federal government running under constitutional limits, so that everybody can fix everything for themselves the way they want it.

Okay. Back to Joe Biden's three letter word, "jobs." Neither Donald Trump, nor any other president, past, present, or future, should be creating jobs. To do so is a violation of the Tenth Amendment. To that degree and on that subject I oppose them.

That's the first problem with the premise of this particular Twitter follower; that the federal government can stick its nose in anything they want, for any reason, without restriction, for the supposed good of us all.

The second problem is a bit bigger and ventures into the very nature of tyranny itself. Tyranny depends, surprisingly enough, on the support of the people of the country. It is not intuitively obvious that it is so, so I shall give an historical example.

There once, not too long ago, was a leader of a country who became a tyrant. (This tyrant shall remain nameless for the purpose of this article because I don't want people screaming, "He's comparing Trump to ____________!!!!" The point is to explain the nature of the people who follow a tyrant, not the tyrants themselves.) In order for those people to support him, they had to make one assumption above all other considerations. They assumed that the unnamed tyrant was GREAT!!! Following immediately under that consideration was the firm conviction that anybody who did not see or understand his greatness was somehow inferior, insane, or mistaken. See? He's GREAT!!!. Therefore everything he does is great. It "proves itself."

The unnamed leader that I speak of—and really, you should know who it is—through the unquestioned thought of his GREATNESS in the minds of everybody who should have known better, gained total control of everything in the country. Nothing he did was ever questioned, because it was so obvious he was GREAT the idea of questioning him on things that didn't really seem to make sense never crossed anybody's mind.

This extended to the degree that on making military decisions, when he issued orders to his generals, and they didn't understand the point of them, they just assumed he knew better than all of them combined, and they were just "too stupid" to understand his brilliance in military strategy and tactics. That's how far above them he really was—they thought—so they couldn't question him out of fear of looking stupid. When the orders turned out to be wrong and the battles, and eventually the war, was lost, the generals, true military experts who should have instantly spotted the supreme leader's incompetence, took the blame upon themselves. Why? Because they thought he was so unerringly GREAT that normal rules did not apply to him.

In other words, his cult of personality was so very strong that the people of his country were willing to follow him without question. And follow him they did. Straight to their deaths. Tens of millions of people who never questioned him, who may have lived full and prosperous lives had they bothered to simply understand and ask, wiped out simply for the fact of taking for granted that their leader was GREAT. Towards the end anybody who did question his judgment was summarily executed.

It is for this reason that I never, ever, EVER!!!, think in terms of supporting or opposing any politician on a personal basis. The Constitution is my only standard at the federal level. I only approve or disapprove of any politician relative to their exact job descriptions provided under it.

There is no other standard. I don't even bother to like them or dislike them because to do so is to risk our country and its people. And really, I don't know them personally so how could I rationally like or dislike them personally? The instant you begin to travel down the road of liking them or disliking them on any personal basis, you begin to make yourself vulnerable to the cult of personality at the risk of the constitutional system.

I don't care if the president is King Solomon and his decisions are directly from the wisdom of God Himself. I don't care if he is King Midas and everything he touches turns to gold which he promptly credits to my own bank account. Conversely, and to a certain sarcastic, joking degree, I wouldn't care if the president was filming porn, in the Oval Office, on the Resolute Desk, as long as he was following the Constitution while he was doing it.

None of those kinds of things are my standard. I don't care, on a personal basis, about any of them because we can never afford to just take for granted the decisions of any politician, or president, without looking at them and questioning them relative to the supreme law of the land; the United States Constitution.

This is how my support is determined. The same principle of evaluation would have applied to Clinton had she won. Because of this I am very glad she lost. But just because Clinton would have been a terrible president, especially under my exacting standards, does not—emphatically—mean that everything Donald Trump is proposing to do is automatically and unquestioningly great, beyond any reasonable need of logical and constitutional evaluation. That he is a competent businessman is completely beside the point. Because some people like him and think him to be a wonderful guy doesn't even register in my mind. That his support is growing to gigantic proportions is so far outside my scope of acceptance or caring that it was difficult for me to even type this sentence. The same principle applied to Obama. The same for Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, etc., all of the way back to Washington. And every single one of them without exception, did something as president, that was not, strictly speaking, any of their freaking business.

There are many things a president can do that would make the country prosperous which he would have no business doing under the Constitution. Every one of them that I can think of would involve some special interest benefiting some people and harming other people. Therefore and for this reason it is essential for the president to keep the federal government out of the way so we can get on the business of living our own lives for ourselves.

Don't fight the power. Question it. If you do, honestly, there would never be any reason to fight it.

The Worst President Ever (It's not who you think it is.)

It is said in some circles of philosophy that any person really only begins to decline when he abandons his principles.

It is also said that there are certain underlying principles which have to be maintained or freedom can't exist. You have the right to associate, which means for it to be a right, you also have to have the right to disassociate. What freedom could you possibly have if once you decided to join up with somebody for any noble purpose, when that purpose is abandoned, you can't sever the ties to them?

The fundamental principles of slavery are that you can't leave when you wish and the fruits of your labors are taken from you, against your will, for the benefit of someone else.

The United States was founded on the principle that the people's of the States could join or not, of their own free will. The Constitution did not have to be ratified because there were the guns and bayonets of General George Washington's army pointed at the people. The Framers of the Constitution debated exhaustively and formed a government which was voluntarily consented to and contributed to, by the People. It is the only time in human history that I'm currently aware of where this has happened.

In the 1860's several States decided to declare their own independence. Whether we agree with this decision or not is moot. They have the same right to leave or not leave the Union, based on their own integrity, as any wife has to leave any man whose marriage is no longer suitable to her. They have the same rights as any person who has ever left the partnership of a company. They have the same rights to leave as any individual or anybody who has ever left any friendship or employment. They have the same rights as anybody has ever had to leave any political movement with which they no longer agree.

Without that basic right, to sever the ties that bind you to any other person or group of people, freedom cannot exist. From the moment military force becomes involved you are chained by force to whatever they decide, no matter how disadvantageous it may be to your own existence.

I submit to you this basic principle: You cannot free slaves by enslaving the masters.  This is not to be understood as my saying that I agree with the Confederate States having slaves. It was wrong for them too. It is also not to be taken as my support for any of the reasons for their succession.

Since the first shots were fired over Fort Sumter on April 12th, 1861, the United States has been held together by military force, thus violating its basic principle, freedom, which is the natural birthright of not only every American, but every living being on the planet. Right there, without another word, we have violated the first rule of the fundamental principle of slavery. Rightly or wrongly we, as States, cannot leave, under the potential threat of our own destruction.

Now what of the second principle of slavery? The fruits of our labors taken from us against our will for the benefit of someone else? The current (as of this writing) government of the United States sucks 3.8 trillion dollars out of the American economy per year and nobody seems able or willing to stop it. If you doubt for a second that that money is not taken by threat of force, try not paying sometime and see how quickly the nice men with guns show up at your door. I cannot pretend to be arrogant enough to decide for you if that is money you wish to give for causes which you support. In the recesses of your own mind I also hope you will consider that to the same degree that you disagree with the taking of your money, or the spending of it, you are in every meaningful respect, a slave to the federal government of the United States of America, not as it was founded but as it currently is.

We are held to comply, as citizens of States, to every unconstitutional edict proclaimed by the federal government by military force, whether we agree or not, whether it benefits us or hurts us. We are held to comply to every crappy and smarmy federal politician who can bribe or threaten, through the potential loss of our individual sustenance owed to the federal government of the United States, the votes of enough people to win their office in Washington DC. We are held by military force, used to deny us the right to decide that enough is enough, having our basic rights as human beings destroyed. We can no longer choose not to participate against our will. We exist as the People of States bound to a federal government run out of control because the best means of correcting the actions of the federal government and bringing it back within constitutional limits has been taken from us.

Here is the man we have to thank for it and we have only to do so because he abandoned his principles or never really believed them in the first place.

"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right—a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit." —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, JANUARY 12, 1848

I think that it was the ultimate spit in the face to the men who risked their lives by signing the Declaration of Independence for Lincoln to "preserve the Union" in the manner which he did. The men who wrote this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness..." would most certainly have disapproved. They would have done so because the manner in which the "preservation of the Union" was accomplished was at the expense of its primary fundamental concept.

It was not the action of a wise statesman but that of a brutal barbarian to use force to hold a voluntary association of States together. In doing so Abraham Lincoln cast himself as the same sort of character as King George III. Everything that Lincoln did to preserve the Union or free the slaves could have been accomplished by a wise statesman without the dreadful cost of war. Without that use of force in United States history any president or federal congressman would not have nearly as much power to annoy us as they currently have.

Therefore I very firmly believe that Abraham Lincoln was the worst president of the United States because the fundamental principle of the country was destroyed the instant he allowed combat to begin at Fort Sumter.