"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

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The Founders' Defense Against Sociopaths In Office

"In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty."

-Leo Tolstoy

IT IS WELL ESTABLISHED that there are an inordinate number of sociopaths in public office as compared to the general population. As observed by Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and author of The Sociopath Next Door,

"[P]oliticians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this..."

These sociopaths are people of the "power sickness", characterized by narcissism, self-importance, a willingness to manipulate others and the charm to do it effectively, and a perpetual habit of deflecting blame when their self-interested actions cause harm to others, all stemming from a basic lack of conscience. See here, here, here and here.

This overrepresentation of sociopaths in the "political class" is no surprise. After all, public office offers all the things gratifying to such people. Office-holders get lots of attention from others, much of it fawning; they get easy money and lots of it; they get the opportunity to rule over other people; and they face a standard of success that relies more on a skill at bullsh*tting than on the hard work needed to actually gratify the needs and desires of strangers, such as is required in any other occupation.

Further, the skills needed to achieve public office-- being willing and able to convincingly paint a rosier, more desirable picture than any honest opponent would have the moral turpitude to offer; charisma; and an obsession with self-aggrandizement-- are all the natural traits of the sociopath. Healthy men and women are hard-pressed to compete against these political "naturals" in any but the most extraordinary circumstances.

Given this remarkably-aligned package of requirements and rewards, it's no surprise that sociopaths gravitate toward public office and achieve it in numbers disproportionate to their representation within the general population of healthy men and women. The top prizes go to the very worst of them, and the losers satisfy themselves by joining the swarm of petty functionaries with clipboards that fills government buildings coast-to-coast.

SO, PUBLIC OFFICES ARE TYPICALLY nests of snakes, supported by nests of lesser but just-as-reptilian creatures, including, of course, all the appointees selected by the chief sociopaths (judges, department heads, commission members and so forth), who are from the ranks of those congenial to their benefactors' characters and desires. This has always been the case, from the very beginning of any kind of hierarchic ruling structure in any human society.

And sociopaths in positions of authority are dangerous! No one in his or her right mind wants these folks wielding significant power that is capable of causing harm on any kind of mass scale, whether at home or abroad.

HAPPILY, THOSE WHO FOUNDED THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN AMERICA knew all about sociopaths, their lusts, and their skills. Adams, Jefferson, Madison and the rest were close and accomplished students of history and psychology, and had their own personal lifelong experiences with public office-holders, both elected and appointed. The Founders recognized the danger these mentally-ill but eminently-functional types represented to decent society and the principles of liberty.

At the same time, the Founders also recognized that some form of power-managing societal organization was inevitable, whether theoretically "necessary" or not. So, they made provisions to structure that organization so as to provide for the accommodation of the inevitable while strictly protecting against the threat of sociopaths using the structure to do great harm or become an existential threat to the liberty of the People.

THE FOUNDERS' CHOSEN DEFENSES AGAINST THE SOCIOPATHS were two-fold. Informing both was an understanding that while power cannot be kept from bad people, and any degree of power corrupts even good people once it is in their hands, if the power that bad people are able to wield is small, then the harm done by them can be kept small and tolerable.

The lesser (less relied upon) of the Founders' defenses against sociopathy was the recognizably weak measure of granting public officialdom only express, limited powers. The Founders were not fools, and they were well aware that the very same public officials they meant to restrain would assume for themselves the authority to interpret those limitations, and would do so in a fashion which would, over time, nullify them. It was also understood that the class of public officials and those who supported their elevation would also end up manipulating the electoral process so as to largely ensure their perpetuation in office.

Thus, the second, and far more powerful and reliable defense: the juxtaposing of the personal interests of individual men and women directly against the desires of those in office by carefully-designed rules controlling the federal government's taxing authority. Here, too, expressions in the fundamental law were involved, but those regarding taxation are unique among the delegated powers in several critically-important ways.

First of all, under the unique rules controlling federal government (fedgov) taxing powers, the fedgov is given a means by which an unlimited amount of wealth can be commandeered at the sole discretion of Congress and the President-- but only if liability is laid exclusively on union-state governments. This is "direct" taxation.

At the same time, the fedgov is permitted to allege and seek to enforce individual, personal liabilities, but only in regard to gains from the purely elective exercise of federally-granted privileges. This is "indirect" taxation.

Because the population of a state in the aggregate will ultimately pay all direct tax levies, an explicit incentive exists for residents of the state to pressure its congressional delegation to keep direct taxes low. Further, because apportionment (the mechanism by which liabilities among the states are distributed) lays the burden for a tax upon a state based on its proportion of the national population, not its proportion of the national wealth, the overall per capita burden of any direct tax cannot exceed the whatever the poorest state is able to pay, again forcing direct taxes to remain low.

On the other hand, indirect taxes cannot be collected unless individuals have chosen to engage in government-privileged economic activities rather than common economic activities engaged in by right. Thus, every individual is entirely in control of how much, if anything, he or she will pay the government in indirect taxes, such as the "income tax".

Because every individual naturally seeks to optimize the gains from all effort, individuals will keep privileged economic activity at a minimum, unless the rates of tax are kept so low that the overall net gains from privileged activities exceed those that can be had through unprivileged economic activity, even with the additional burden of the tax factored in as a cost. Either way, the power accruing to the government through the capture of indirect tax revenues is kept small.

Putting the two varieties of tax together, Congress has a deep and broad authority to tax. At the same time, the rules under which Congress is exclusively allowed to exercise this authority impose extremely powerful, diffuse, wide-reaching and self-activating constraints on how much power its exercise puts into the hands of those in public office.

And those constraints operate by virtue of natural incentives needing no special political organization on their behalf. No other provision of the Constitution either authorizing a power of Congress or limiting congressional discretion shares this effective duality of character, and is so unassailable either politically or through creative "construction" of the law.

SO, THIS IS HOW THE FOUNDERS, in their far-seeing wisdom, solved the age-old problem of sociopaths in office. They set up a structure limiting the power those sociopaths can wield which does not rely on the inherently unreliable checks and balances of different branches of government, which are always at risk of corruption from "checks and balances" into "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours."

Instead, the Founders invoke and rely upon the discipline and energy of the competing interests of the individual Americans from whose pockets the power must be taken and against whom it would be exercised. People looking out for #1 look hard and sharply, and in doing so benefit all of society by keeping the sociopath-infested state from growing large, and therefore dangerous.

NEEDLESS TO SAY, THE SOCIOPATHS have struggled over the centuries to escape the constraints of the Founders' design, but to no avail. It has only been by the flimsy artifice of absurd myths about the nature of the indirect "income tax" that any evasion has been managed. But even this evasion is not an escape.

It is true that under the influence of the sociopaths' myths many Americans have been fooled into treating all their economic activity as federally-privileged and subject to tax during the last 75 years, and this has allowed much more power to accrue to the sociopaths than any sensible person would want.

But the mistreatment of activity as privileged and subject to the tax remains entirely within the discretion of each individual, however much that discretion is being controlled in its exercise by state-encouraged ignorance about the tax. The rules have merely been evaded, and only so far as the state can promote and maintain that ignorance. The rules have not been escaped.

Nor will those rules be escaped. It is telling that the mistreatment of activities as taxable by which the sociopaths benefit has not been accomplished by convincing Americans that is it good for their power to change hands. As the Founders understood, this will never happen, and has never happened.

Only the fostering of falsehoods about the nature of the tax and the rules to which it is subject have accomplished this undesirable transfer, which remains entirely vulnerable at all times to the simple expedient of informing misled Americans of the truth about the tax and the rules under which it operates. As rapidly as that re-empowering information spreads the power available to the sociopaths diminishes, and nothing is needed to secure that relief except that spread of knowledge.

Already the tide is starting to turn back toward liberty and limited government under the law. Many Americans have learned the truth about the tax and have re-claimed their power, keeping it from the sociopaths and protecting all of us from harm. Meet some of these truly heroic American men and women here.

If you're not already CtC-educated about the tax and the Constitutional structure designed by the Founders, start learning the truth here, and share it with everyone you know.

Being safe from the war-mongering, injustice-committing, liberty-crushing, self-enriching sociopaths is really as simple as this single question:

What's your answer?

Are the presentations and resources offered on this site and in my other work of any value to you?

Tim Kendrick has posted a video on YouTube regarding donations. I didn't know what to do about it to begin with; I don't do what I do intending for anyone to feel obligated in any way.

But of course, no one IS obligated. I will continue to make my work freely-available here, and in my books for only the cost of a cheap paperback.

Thus, even though I post it here below, Tim's very thoughtful personal resolution and encouragement to others is just an invitation for consideration by those who may not be conscious of the fact that I can't do what I do without support. No one is to feel any pressure from it; if it moves anyone to act let it be solely because it seems right.

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*****

True American Joe Black Testifies And Shares Victories For Liberty And The Rule Of Law

...as every American should...

EDUCATED AMERICAN GROWN-UP JOE BLACK has stood up and acted to enforce the law upon its domestic enemies-- or, at least, upon agencies of the state whose operators seem to happily exploit ignorance and mis-apply the law at every chance for their personal benefit. Get inspired and encouraged by Joe's video sharing his spirit, his testimony and the acknowledgements he has secured:

Find more testimonial videos here, and please, people, share these around as widely as you can. To learn what, how and why to share your own testimony (with or without mere practical victories to go along with the far more important spiritual victories that are the real heart of CtC), click here.

 

Happily, we latter-day Americans need not engage in revolution, we need merely adopt the resolution in our hearts and minds to which Adams refers, and stand up for the law laid down by our revolutionary ancestors. Do it! Adopt that resolution! And then share it with the world.

     

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*****

“I didn’t say it would be easy, I just said it would be the truth.” -Morpheus   Make someone you love sweat bullets this year... (...and show them you think they're the greatest!) I think we'd all agree that sometimes the truth can be a pesky thing-- demanding, disturbing, and seriously inconvenient. The fact is, when you know the truth, you have to act on it, or be party to a lie; and when that lie is old, entrenched, vigorously defended and comfortingly familiar, the correcting truth can be very hard to learn, and even harder to act upon. That's why one of the most challenging gifts to receive this holiday season is a copy of 'Cracking the Code- The Fascinating Truth About Taxation In America'. Learning the truth about the income tax means setting aside misconceptions nurtured for a lifetime. Acting on that truth means abandoning lifelong servility to the state through the offices of the IRS-- the one organization whose carefully cultivated reputation as a rabid junkyard dog is feared by everyone in America. Both of those things are really hard! However, those very same challenges also make 'Cracking the Code-...' the most rewarding gift to get or give this holiday season. After all, how better could you communicate to those you love the high degree of esteem in which you hold them? How more certain of your high regard could they be made, after such a display of your faith in their character? (Helping them stop unnecessary losses of up to 40% or more of their earnings each year goes over pretty well, too, by the way...) So, pass out a little panic this year. Then stand back and watch your special someone stand tall, like the real American he or she was born to be.   Warriors! Don't Forget About Grandpa!! The sequel to CtC is now available!! Click the image below for details!   If You're Already a CtC Warrior, Aren't You Really, Really Glad YOU'VE Taken Control Of Whether Any Of YOUR Money Goes To Washington, Just As The Founders Intended?   If You're Not A CtC Warrior, Isn't It Time You Became One?    Set a brushfire-- E-mail this newsletter to a friend   Return to contents

Two Simple Questions For Every Silent "Alt-Media" Journalist

The silence of these folks is the liberation bottleneck. Maybe this'll help, if enough people ask...

HERE'S A SIMPLE QUESTION: The income tax is, and always has been, an excise tax on privilege. This is established beyond any controversy whatever by repeated Supreme Court rulings, the words of the related laws, and, over the last twelve years now, hundreds of thousands of acknowledgements by federal and state tax agencies.

You, like most folks, have been fooled into inadvertently agreeing that your economic activities are exercises of privilege, thereby allowing the tax to be applied to your earnings. Why is this so hard for you to admit?

HERE'S ANOTHER SIMPLE QUESTION: You and everyone else being fooled into agreeing that your economic activities are privileged and thereby allowing them to be taxed is what enables the flow of wealth that finances all the bad things done by the state of which you complain in every column. Why is this so hard for you to admit?

I GUESS THESE ACTUALLY LEAD TO A THIRD SIMPLE QUESTION: If you really feel that all these things of which you complain are so bad, why are you not helping more Americans understand the nature of the tax and the ill effects of it being misunderstood and misapplied?

Learn how and why you should ask every journalist in the so-called "alt-media" these questions here.

 

Illuminating anniversaries of this week: December 8- In 1941, the U.S. Congress declares war on Japan.  In 1980, John Lennon is assassinated in New York City.  In 1991, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine formally dissolve the Soviet Union.  In 1993, the "North American Free Trade Agreement" is signed into law by President Bill Clinton.  In 2010, SpaceX becomes the first private company to launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft.  On the same day, a Japanese solar-sail propelled spacecraft makes a close (80,800 km.) pass of Venus.

 

PRO TIP: By the physics of the law, an indirect tax is necessarily a privilege tax. Here's why: The distinction between a direct tax and an indirect tax is incidence. A direct tax arises by the direct imposition of the taxer, without any election of the taxed (other than that of authorizing the taxing power in the first place). An indirect tax arises by the taxed choosing to to do something by which the taxer's claim is then created. The choice that is a valid object of an indirect tax can't be anything done as an exercise of an untaxable right. Nor can it be any activity of necessity. A tax on anything done by necessity would arise not by actual election of the taxed but simply because the tax had been imposed by the taxer. Such a tax, whatever it may be called, would be in actual substance a direct tax, even if one that arose only intermittently. Think of a tax on eating, for example, or working, or engaging in trade with others (all of which are things done by right as well as by necessity, but you get the point). What is left as the valid object of an indirect tax is the exercise of privilege-- something done not by right, and therefore done by the permission of the taxer (who, due to being possessed of an ownership right in the thing being permitted, is entitled to claim of portion of the proceeds when the thing is profitably used).rong> "[Although the Legislature may declare as privileges and tax as such for State revenue purposes those pursuits and occupations that are not matters of common right], the Legislature has no power to declare as a privilege and tax for revenue purposes occupations that are of common right." Sims v. Ahrens, 167 Ark. 557, 271 SW 720 594, 595 (Ark. 1925)

 

The 'Watching the Watchmen Amendment'

If you're not talking this one up everywhere and helping generate a buzz, you don't really want liberty and the rule of law...

 

PRO TIP: The argument that a concept explicitly given a statutory definition for purposes of this or that chapter or "title" has the same meaning as the common word the legislature has borrowed for its label-- which meaning plainly didn't suit the legislature's purposes, hence its replacement-- is a preposterous reading of the law. “It is axiomatic that the statutory definition of the term excludes unstated meanings of that term.”  Meese v. Keene, 481 U.S. 465 (1987); “[W]e are not at liberty to put our gloss on the definition that Congress provided by looking to the generally accepted meaning of the defined term.” Tenn. Prot. & Advocacy Inc. v. Wells, 371 F.3d 342 (6th Cir. 2004).

 

Illuminating anniversaries of this week: December 9- In 1835, revolutionary forces of what would become the Republic of Texas capture San Antonio from Mexico.  In 1946, the trial of Nazi "doctors" who had engaged in human experimentation begins in Nuremberg.  In 1958, the John Birch Society is founded.  In 1979 the eradication of smallpox is declared by the World Health Organization.  This is untrue, as both the United States and the then-Soviet Union (and perhaps other states) retain supplies of the virus for possible "use" at a future time.

 

*****

I Stand With Doreen

A New Story In The Tribune On Doreen's Case

ARE YOU JUST LEARNING ABOUT the crime against your rights and the rule of law by means of a heinous crime by which Doreen Hendrickson is being victimized? Get up to speed with this and this, and this film:

Free Speech On Trial: IRS v. Hendrickson

(Find and share this on YouTube at http://youtu.be/IagZzFIIymw)

The longer but much more comprehensive and question-answering backstory (the "why" history leading up to this unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and principles of due process) can be found here.

There's a good article on Doreen's ordeal here.

***

DOREEN'S ADDRESS: Doreen Hendrickson 48564-039, FPC Alderson A-4, P.O. Box A, Alderson, WV 24910. She would love to hear your encouragement, uplift, appreciation and solidarity, and she can even be sent paperback books, as long as the envelope in which they are packaged has clearly written at the top: Paperback Book Enclosed.

Anyone wanting to send Doreen a few dollars for her commissary account (with which she can get better food, soft drinks, clothes and other amenities) can do so by mailing a money order made payable to Doreen Hendrickson 48564039. Mail to:

Federal Bureau of Prisons,

Doreen Hendrickson

48564-039

Post Office Box 474701

Des Moines, Iowa 50947-0001

DO YOU NOTICE THAT MESSAGE ON THE T-SHIRT being worn by the lovely model of the 'I Stand with Doreen' care-bracelet? It reads, THINK. It's not illegal yet!

But you know what? The charge against Doreen is an effort by the state to make it so.

Doreen was charged, remember, with criminally-refusing to cede control of her expressions to the state. Now, I'll grant you that technically her thoughts would remain her own, but if the state can dictate what everyone says, then pretty soon that atmosphere of controlled expressions will result in first influencing, and then ultimately controlling what everyone thinks.

If the State gets away with establishing the precedent that every written expression-- even just those on testimonial instruments-- can be required to echo the state's preferred view of things, the fate of free thinking and liberty is obvious (and it's not good).

Think about it, while you still can.

Click here for more on Doreen's ordeal and its assault on the rule of law.