The unapologetic ramblings of an autodidactic Libertarian / Voluntaryist with too much time to think. Chock full of grammatical errors, talk of freedom, survivalism, and an extreme hatred of collectivism in these american states.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” -Mahatma Gandhi
Well, my vacation has been a real interesting trip. I took the family to Disney's Magic Kingdom, Disney's Animal Kingdom, Sea World, and Universal Studios. Four parks, four days; and three of the parks required me and my family to place our finger on a scanner at the front gate so our fingerprints could be registered and linked to our tickets. WHAT......THE.......FUCK!?!?!
I considered this a major invasion of privacy! What possible reason would Disney or Universal have for collecting private biometric information from park visitors? Who gets this information? How long is it held? What is it used for? I got no answers from the douche at the gate. "Sir, you have to do this or you cannot enter the park." When I asked questions I was treated like I was creating a disturbance. I don’t think anyone even questions this; they just submit and walk through. What the hell is wrong with people? The only possible explanation I have come up with is the threat of terrorism. But, using fingerprint scanners at theme parks would mean that the park is in cahoots with the government, and they are running instant checks on your prints against know BOLOs and watch lists. The thought of that terrifies me.
They really have you by the balls when you show up. You drive 1000 miles with your family giving promises of fun in the sun the whole way, and when you get there they pull this shit on you. What choice do you have? Tell your little girl that she can’t see Cinderella at the castle.....I think not. So, begrudgingly, you submit. It didn't matter to me, the government has all of my info on file from my time in the Marines, but my family is another story. You can bring it to my face all day long, but when you start fucking with my family you are really barking up the wrong tree. If you had not guessed by now, I am pissed!
Sea World is the only park that didn’t require the biometrics. Thank you for respecting my privacy Anheuser Busch! As to the Disney Corporation, you will never get another penny out of me for your theme parks. My kids will have more fun at Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, and Sequoia anyway; at least until the National Park Service starts requiring DNA samples at the gate. Big Brother really is watching you!
Here is a picture I took at the Universal Studio's gate. The scanners at the Disney parks were similar but took prints from the first and second knuckle of the index finger.
I wanted to let everyone know that I will be taking a break from the blog for a while. I am taking the family to Disney World and they will be enjoying Christmas after that. I still may be putting a few posts up here and there, but not with the frequency that I normally do. I hope to be back after the first of the year. Keep checking back…
It's a slow day in a little East Texas town. The sun is beating down, and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.....
On this particular day a rich tourist from back east is driving through town. He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.
As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.
The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel.
The guy at the Farmer's Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit.
The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner.
The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.
At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town.
No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States Government is conducting business today.
For centuries, America has been a bastion of freedom. I hear it at least once a day in the press, “America, the freest country in the world.” Since the American Revolution, America has been the litmus test for measuring freedom throughout the world. But, how free are we really? By way of comparison, I would argue that we are the freest country in the world. We are the freest of all statist regimes. We are the freest of the controlled masses. It’s kind of like winning a gold medal in the Special Olympics…well I won’t go there, but you get my point.
I just finished reading Marx’s Communist Manifesto (yes I read Marx in addition to Locke, Paine, Mises, and Hayek) and like most books from “the dark side” it scared the living shit out of me. Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World actually gave me nightmares, but it wasn’t until I finished Marx that I truly understood how prophetic those books actually were.
Let’s take Marx’s ten tenants of communism and compare it with modern society in America.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
Now, you might be saying, “But Sgt. Jarhead, I own my land! I paid it all off two years ago and don’t owe a dime on the place. Its mine!” Stop paying your property taxes and see what happens to you. The government will come take your land and you might end up in jail. You see, you don’t own your land, the government does. Your yearly property taxes are your rent that you pay to keep it.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
I don’t think there would be any argument that we have adopted a heavy progressive income tax. The government has gone from taxing just a few things to taxing everything. They have gone from taxing just a few of the richest individuals to taxing everyone. More about the tax game later.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
Hey, look, more taxes! In states like Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee you can expect to pay a tax on anything passed onto you in a final will and testament. In addition to that, the federal government sticks its fingers into the pot with the estate tax. Don’t try to transfer and estate prior to death to avoid the taxation, the beneficiary will have to pay a gift tax.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
The closest I can come to this would be the attempts to disarm the American public through gun control laws; and the forced government “reacquisition” of private property through eminent domain laws. It is a stretch, I know.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Wow, I would call that the Federal Reserve! Thank you Woodrow Wilson! Why are we doing this still? Andrew Jackson got rid of the last one, but we just couldn’t learn our lesson.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
You cannot travel freely in the United States. You have to pay the government. Want to drive a car or truck? You need a license issued by the state. Want to own a car or truck? Well, when you buy it you will have to register it (every year) and pay a fee, and you will have to pay a tax on it. OK, so let’s give up the car and travel by train. Cross country? Go Amtrak, its owned by the government. How about local? You guessed it, the rails are owned by the government. It is the same with public bus systems. How about flying? Make sure you take your shoes off for the nice junior high drop out with the blank stare in his eyes, and make sure you don’t cause any problems so they don’t add you to a watch list.
Communication? Lysander Spooner wanted to offer a privately owned option to the government controlled US Postal Service. He was tarred and feathered. Under the Patriot Act, your phone can be tapped without a warrant if you are considered to have terrorist affiliations. Who knows what the word terrorist will encompass in twenty or thirty years? The internet is the last bastion of freedom we have for communication, and our government is already trying figure out a way to restrict and tax usage of that!
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
This has happened in America today, but in reverse fashion. Socialism and Communism advocate state ownership of the means of production in a country. In America, the owners of the means of production now own the state. It is called Corporatism, and it is why there are so many lobbyists in Washington. The true free market has disappeared. When business owners realized that it was easier to legislate their competitors out of business, we lost our free market principles.
Now, before you liberals start patting me on the back, your side is just as guilty. You screamed and moaned about Dick Chaney owning Halliburton and handing out no-bid contracts, but Obama just gave billions of TAX MONEY to Goldman-Sachs, who was his biggest campaign contributor. Politicians on both sides of the isle are guilty.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Two words: LABOR UNIONS! Unions are your modern day industrial armies. Workers pay their union dues every year, so the union can use their money to pay off politicians who end up passing legislation that hurts the little guy in the end. This is caused by a lack of education in the truth of what is going on. As far as agriculture goes, FDR started a really bad trend in his New Deal by giving subsidies to farms. That practice has continued to this day.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
Abolition of the distinction between town and country… I would say Abe Lincoln pretty much accomplished that during the War Between the States. I refuse to call it a Civil War, because it wasn’t. Lincoln trampled all over the rights of states, and accomplished his goal of solidifying power in the federal government, one of the worst decisions ever made by a U. S. President.
Slavery was wrong, but I think the rest of this post will show that we are all living as slaves now. Our public education system has effectively reshaped the minds of most Americans to believe that the War Between the States was fought over slavery anyway. This leads to the last point.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
Public education is the wellspring from which all of the other tenants flow. This is the great secret that the power elite keep from us. This is where I see society transitioning more from Orwell’s 1984 to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley said, “Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors, and schoolteachers.”
This is where I see America today. We have all been trained to serve the state, because the state has essentially raised us. Parents take the most important years of a human life, and turn the responsibility of raising them over to the state. That is why it is so hard for people to fathom a truly free society. They have been conditioned and programmed by the state to rely upon the state. This is why they don’t mind paying taxes. This is why they don’t mind feeding the machine. The three most important lessons a child learns in public education are, don’t bite the hand that feeds you, don’t look at what the hand is attached to, and for God’s sake don’t look at how the food gets into that hand!
The problems with our public education system stem from the fact that it was set up to produce industrial workers. This is exactly what Marx wanted, but we have moved from an industrial based society to a technologically based society. Prior to public schooling, most kids were needed to work the farms with their parents. So, they were home schooled. This freed the child up to help in the fields, and the child received an agricultural based education. They still got their reading, writing, and arithmetic, but they learned from practical everyday work in the field and at home.
As time went on, many kids who grew up on farms wanted something else, so they moved to the cities and went to work in factories. This presented a problem for the factories. If a kid showed up 20 minutes late to the fields at home, Uncle Bob would cover for him until he arrived. When that kid, as an adult, showed up 20 minutes late for a factory job he affected the production of everyone on the assembly line. This resulted in a loss of profit. So at an early age, a child in school is taught punctuality. You can’t be tardy! Bells ring and they all scamper off to the next class like rats.
Children are not taught how to think. They are taught forced memorization and regurgitation. They are taught how to be bored for long periods of time. They are taught respect for authority. These are all things that are needed for factory work. They still get their reading, writing, and arithmetic; but the underlying lessons and themes that they learn are subservience to teacher, boss, state, etc. and how to tolerate extreme boredom.
Since we have moved away from an industrial society, many of the old models for education simply do not work anymore. But, the state comes in with their education reform policies, and continues to apply the same outdated logic to a new problem. Why? Because, at the heart of it all, the state doesn’t want the masses to become truly educated. They don’t want free thinkers. They want the schools to continue churning out mindless drones who don’t mind sitting in a cubicle for eight or nine hours a day doing menial work. And, most importantly, they want ensure those drones don’t get angry and rebel. The state actually wants us to think that we are happy to live in this system! Huxley’s quote has come true. They basically say: “Sit down, do your work quietly, don’t raise a fuss, take your Soma, be happy. We pay you well. Don’t you want that nice shiny new car like the Jones’? Yes, you’re happy. Don’t forget to pay your taxes. See, you’re happy.”
"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." --Norman Thomas, 1948, Six Time US Presidential Candidate from the Socialist Party of America
I would argue that Thomas’s vision has come true. I have shown that we have adopted Marx’s vision in America. Sure, a couple of them were a stretch, and some could have been explained more thoroughly. If you really think about it, we have taken Marx’s dream and expanded it to new heights he never would have thought possible. Mainly, I wanted to focus on education in this article and how we have all been swindled and enslaved.
Let’s go back to Orwell’s book 1984. One of the main themes of the book was doublespeak, the idea that if you said an untruth long enough the masses would accept it as truth. Hitler realized this as a truth, and used it to his advantage. 2+2=5, up is down, left is right. This is the power of language, but it happens every day and most Americans don’t even realize it. They have been conditioned to think that 2+2=5! Communism could never happen in America! We are the most anti-communist and freest nation on the planet! Um, okay, what did I just cover? Doublespeak is rampant in our political structure, and is one of the means of propaganda used to keep us under control.
Ask yourself what true freedom would be? To me, it would be living a life without any state intervention. That would mean paying absolutely no taxes, and not having to answer to anyone else unless your life infringed upon the rights of another individual. Do you realize that this used to be possible? Back when we were a young nation, a man could get on his horse and ride out to the mountains. He could build a cabin, hunt and fish, sew and reap, and live pretty much any way he wanted. He could trap and trade on a truly free market without taxation or coercion. How far have we come?
Try doing that today! Go build a cabin on land that you own outright and see how long it takes for a suit from the government to come knocking on your door. SCENERIO: You own a place to live free and clear. Let’s say it is a 20 acre plot of land in the middle of nowhere with adequate water for drinking and irrigation. You grow all your own vegetables and keep a small herd of cattle, some pigs, some goats, and some chickens. You produce all the power needed to run your small farm from solar, wind, and geothermal energy. You are totally self reliant. You don’t have to leave your land for one thing that you need. You still can’t escape the machine! You have to pay your property taxes every year, so you are required to do some form of work for monetary gain. This puts you in the position to be required to pay income taxes. You are a slave to the machine weather you choose to be or not. I am starting to understand what Chris was talking about when he said that our flag should be changed to a woman giving childbirth. Once you are born, there is absolutely no way to completely emancipate yourself from the system. The only option left is to be a Kerouacian road bum, and if you choose that option the state adds you their tally of “people who really need help.” The saddest part about all of this is, we are conditioned by our state education to think we are happy about all this.
I remember last year, when I got my tax paperwork, having a discussion with my dad about taxation. I gave my libertarian view that taxation was theft, and he said, “I think there are acceptable levels of taxation that should be paid for the privilege of living in this country.” The only form of taxation that is acceptable is that which you can remove yourself from if you choose. Forcible taxation is theft because they payer has no other choice but go to jail.
Many well meaning people try to rationalize taxation away by saying, “Well, we need roads and police and fire departments so I don’t mind handing over 30% of my paycheck.” I wonder what kind of mental hoops they have to jump through to justify that in their own mind. It’s not like they actually sat down with a government official and negotiated how much they would pay in taxes based on how often they drive on the road or how many times their house has caught on fire.
Have you ever thought about how many taxes we actually pay? Think about any simple act. Let’s use driving to the grocery store to buy a six pack of beer as an example. Where are the taxes? The initial response is a sales tax on the beer, but let’s looks deeper. You walk out your front door that you pay yearly taxes on and get into your car that was taxed when you bought it. The new brake pads that you just had installed were taxed when you purchased them, but so was the metal used to make them when they were manufactured. The guys that actually made the brake pads all paid income taxes, and the company paid a capital gains tax because the “rich have to pay their fair share!” You drive down the road that your taxes paid for, and it’s probably rutted up and bumpy as hell. Don’t forget the gas that is in your car has been taxed, and was also taxed when it was sold as crude oil, and then taxed again when it was refined. The guy that owns the gas station where you bought the gas was taxed for his business, and his employees pay an income tax. The guy that drove the gas in his truck from the oil refinery to the gas station paid taxes on his income, and if he was an independent driver also paid a capital gains tax on any money he had not reinvested back into his truck at the end of the year.
Once you get to the store you pick up your six pack of beer. You will pay a sales tax on it, and possibly a sin tax on top of that. The girl at the counter pays an income tax, and the grocery store itself pays taxes. The hops, wheat, and barley that were used to make the beer were taxed when the seed was bought to plant, and then taxed again when it was sold at market. The farmers, if they are incorporated, paid a capital gains tax on any money not used to buy farm implements or reinvested back into their farm business at the end of the year. They paid property tax on their farmland. The combines that they used to harvest the wheat, hops, and barley were all taxed when they were bought by the farmer. The guys who made the combine paid income tax, and John Deere pays a huge capital gains tax, again, because the rich have to pay their fair share! The steel and electronics equipment that went into making the combine were taxed when they were made, and taxed when they were sold. Don’t forget, farmers need gas to run their combines. Taxed 9 times over again.
The bottle that the beer is in was taxed when it was made, and taxed again when sold to the beer distributor. All the people at the bottle factory have to pay income taxes, and the company pays a capital gains tax at the end of the year. Same with the cardboard box that the bottles are sitting in. The loggers who cut the trees that made the box paid income taxes, and their company paid a capital gains tax and an extra environmental fee. Oh yea, they needed fuel to run chainsaws, trucks, and equipment. Do I need to go on? Really! The scariest thing is, none of these people even realize or question the taxation that is being imposed upon them! They have all been conditioned to think, that they are paying for roads, police, and fire; and they are happy to do that!
Our government literally has their hands in every single aspect of our lives, either directly or indirectly. I could have gone on and on with that last example, but I think that was enough…….probably more than enough.
If the state really wanted revenue, and wanted to get it by taxing income, they would apply a flat tax. Progressive or graduated income taxes always have an underlying motive. A flat tax would be a rate of, say, 10%. So, a guy making $20k per year would pay $2,000. A guy making $200k per year would pay $20,000 per year. How could any poor person argue with that? The so called rich guy would be paying more in taxes, than the poor guy made in a year! It would be simple and fair, and it would raise a hell of a lot more money for the state than the system we have now. So, why do we have the system we have now? Because it foments class warfare! A house divided against itself cannot stand. They don’t want us to agree. As long as they can keep us arguing amongst ourselves, they can continue to fleece us out of our money, take money out of the hands of people who actually provide jobs, and keep more people dependent upon the state.
What would a truly free society look like?
Like David Boaz said in Libertarianism (A Primer), “One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a socialist society can’t tolerate groups of people practicing freedom, but a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism.”
I think most things should be handled on the state and local level. The behemoth of the federal government needs to be abolished and shrunk back down to the size outlined in the US Constitution, if not smaller. A truly free society would allow you to emancipate yourself from any system you found objectionable or questionable. We do not have that choice now. The only choice we have is to move to another country, and there isn’t a better option to be found. Staying in America is like winning a gold medal in the Special Olympics…
The power of the federal government should not be used to tell individuals, organizations, companies, local communities, or states how to live or conduct business. If a local government wants to levy a 90% tax on all its citizens and make everything under the sun “free” they should have the power to do so. I think they would have a hard time finding people who wanted to live there, but that would be their prerogative. Under a truly free society, you would have small isolated pockets of people who lived the way that worked best for them. If someone didn’t like the way their neighbors did things, they could move somewhere that was more in line with their thinking.
So, what can we do?
Well, as you know, this blog covers survivalism as well as libertarianism. The machine has to break down. It has to stop working, either on its own accord, or because it was coaxed. I am not talking armed revolution here. I am taking more of a John Galt approach.
Jack Spriko from the Survival Podcast did an awesome show called, “It’s the Systems, not the System.” This show really pealed back another layer of the Matrix for me. Everything is interconnected. When you go back to my taxation example of buying a six pack of beer, you start to realize that the beer would never have made it to the shelf had it not been for the farmers, the truck drivers, the oil industry, John Deere, the loggers, the guy at the gas station, and so on. These are interconnected systems of dependence. They all rely upon each other to survive, and the government relies upon all of them for revenue. When you apply this same rationale to how most people get their food, water, and power; things start to get scary.
Ayn Rand had it wrong in Atlas Shrugged. Her character John Galt advocated completely dropping out of society. The idea was, if you were a nuclear physicist you should become a short order cook, or if you were a geneticist you should become a gas station attendant. The thinking was when you remove the best and brightest from society, the society will inherently fail and those in power will finally come crawling back to the people who make society work. I think it would be pretty hard to convince Mr. McMillionaire to give it all up in hopes for something better. Jesus has been trying to do it for 2000 years, and has had a hell of a time.
My plan is similar, but not as extreme. With great liberty comes great responsibility. If every person in America were to slowly but surely emancipate themselves from one small system at a time, the government revenue would start to shrink. Sick of paying sales tax on the food you buy? Turn your back yard into a garden. Grow most of what you eat. Engage in direct barter with people who own livestock. Trade your potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, and peppers for a cow and a pig. You have just dramatically reduced your tax burden. More money in your pocket means more money to spend, but it also means less money you will have to make next year to support the same lifestyle. You now do not have to make as much money to keep the same standard of living. You can now take a job for less money and avoid paying as much tax. If you want to increase your standard of living, that is fine too. Keep that extra money, but know you are paying tax on it. All it takes is a large group of people pulling out of one small system or another to start breaking things. The state will eventually wise up and realize what is happening.
The government hates the libertarian survivalist. He is a free thinking, self reliant creature who doesn’t feed the machine. He has the freedom to bite the hand that used to feed him, because he now feeds himself. The more “middle class” people become truly self reliant, and start to emancipate themselves from the interconnected systems of slavery that have been forced upon us all, the more overreaching power the state loses in our lives. It is not enough to think freedom; you have to start living freedom. Your goal should be to get your tax burden down to zero. Your goal should be to emancipate (I use emancipate for a reason, because we are all slaves now) yourself from every system that takes your money and freedom without giving anything in return. The machine has to be broken for true freedom to emerge. All the bubbles need to pop and all debts called in.
Most people do not even want to ponder these topics; because they are happily so ensconced in their servitude they don’t think there is anything wrong. They are content to debate their own silly little notions of right and wrong without looking to the true root of the problems. Or, they just stick their heads in the sand, flip on American Idol so they will have something to talk about around the water cooler like all the other rats in the maze, pick up the newest copy of Cosmo or Maxim so they know what’s cool and hip, and continue on with their useless bliss. Just another cog in the wheel, just another rat on a wheel, just another brick in the wall.
I should have taken the friggin' blue pill! See you at Galt’s Gulch!
