Monday, February 22, 2021

The Government Does Not Yet Have the Authority to Give You What You Want

     The article below was written as a reaction to the Joe Biden Administration failing to deliver the $1400 checks, and the $15 minimum wage, that it appeared to have promised during the election.





     The mainstream media and the college law professors don't know or care how the law actually works.
The federal government does not have the power to give raises to people whom it does not employ.
     Raising the minimum wage to $15 will not help 32 million workers, as its proponents claim it will. It will only help 0.2% of the non-tipped workforce. That raise would only help people who already work for the federal government, and earn below $15 per hour.

     The government does not have the power or the authority to do the things you want it to do.
     Joe Biden is a constitutionalist. He does not care that people want a $15 minimum wage, and he doesn't want to tell you that the reason he's not giving it to you, is because it's unconstitutional. He certainly doesn't want you to learn how to use the amendment process to allow the federal government to do what you want it to do.

     Americans need voter education and constitutional education badly. Study the 9th and 10th Amendments, Article I Section 8 of the Constitution (the Enumerated Powers), and how the Constitution is amended. This will help you understand which duties are supposed to be held by the national government, and which are supposed to be held by the state and local governments, and the people.
     American voters should stop blaming only Republicans for denying them what they want. It is not only the Republican Party legislators, but also the Constitution - and President Biden - who don't want people to get the changes to the law which they are demanding.
     We can argue all day long about what kind of laws we should have, and which duties belong in the hands of the national or state governments, all day long. But the fact remains: the Constitution is the law, and it is a limitation upon what kinds of laws may exist.
     Amending Article I Section 8, to allow or require the national government to exclusively regulate certain fields of law and policies, is the only way to achieve things like a national minimum wage increase that resembles what progressives are asking for. It is the only way to achieve a minimum wage increase, a federal jobs guarantee, or any sort of mass debt forgiveness program, in a way that is not unconstitutional.
     Enshrining reforms in the Constitution, with proper amendment, is the only way to shield those policies from easy tampering; whether by majorities, minorities, governors, presidential vetoes and signing statements, or activist judges. We must cease pursuing temporary fixes to our numerous economic and political problems, and instead resolve to pursue permanent forms of meaningful, revolutionary amounts of change.

     This country was founded on democratic-republicanism, but also on liberal-conservatism. We have to conserve the progress and freedom that we have achieved. We must consider social republicanism - specifically enshrining the people's human rights into the document by which the people's republic is constituted - in order to specifically enumerate more of our rights.
     We can, and must, do this, without suggesting that the mere appearance of these rights in the Constitution, does not necessarily mean that those are our only rights. Moreover, the mere appearance of a subject in the Constitution does not necessarily connote that the national government retains the exclusive right to legislate upon that manner.
     Through education about the Ninth Amendment, the separation of powers, and natural rights which originate from the virtue of our humanity, we can overcome the perceived conflict between (positive) rights and (negative) freedoms.

     Once we realize that we are parts of the Earth - breathing its air, drinking its water, and being made of food that grew out of the ground - we assert our right to hunt, gather, forage, farm, or glean whatever we may need, in order to survive.
     We have a right to appropriate whatever is necessary to survive, since if we exercise our right to refuse to use the state's money, then we constantly find ourselves on other people's property, in order to obtain the food and water we need. To say that a person has a right to eat, does not necessarily impose an obligation upon someone else to provide him with that food. It is a mere recognition that we cannot survive without eating, drinking, breathing, etc..
     We do not need private property in the means of production, money, or licensed work in order to survive. We need to do enough labor as it takes to acquire what we need to survive, and perform as much action as is necessary to assert our freedom and independence. But we will not die if we run out of money, or ability to solely own a factory or workplace, in the same way that we will die if we run out of food, water, and air.
     Shelter and medicine are gray areas, but it is worth noting that the value of these things are kept artificially high through zoning laws, construction laws, high costs of building permits, medical patent laws, unnecessary sales taxes, and professional licensing laws, and could thus be much less expensive, and therefore require less work in order to purchase.
     There is no reason why we cannot recognize human rights, and human needs, without endorsing the use of a centralized, violent state apparatus to "give" us (or recognize) those rights. Such apparati have rarely done so.
     We must therefore withdraw our trust and support - and also our consent - from the government, and from its officials and employees. Being that governments are instituted to preserve men's freedom, a government which lacks the consent of the governed is not legitimate.

     To say "the time to trust government is over" is to suggest that it was ever wise to trust government. All government which operates on the statist model - a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given territory - exists in order to legitimize the violence used by its employees, and to legalize their crimes.
     The state exists to criminalize the violence of its subjects, and to legalize the violence of its officials. The state establishes a border within which the government has an exclusive right to inflict politically motivated initimidation - terror, that is - upon a populace, and to give them nowhere to turn for defense or redress of their grievances, except for that very same aggressive state.

    The state is a self-legitimizing terrorist entity.
     We cannot trust the government to tell us the truth about what the law is, nor about how it works. Nor can we trust the government to allow us the ability to hunt, forage, glean, homestead, etc., enough to survive, without resorting to begging the government's help. Why would government help us become independent? It doesn't benefit the government at all to help us acquire a home as property, in a way which the government can't simply take away from us, after charging us an inordinate amount of property taxes.
     We can't even trust the government to deliver on its "promise" of $1400 checks. If the government would yank a $1400 check out of your hand, then why wouldn't it collude with universities to make you hate the very same document (the Constitution) which you could easily amend in order to achieve legal reforms that could result in you having more freedom, opportunity, and prosperity?
     There's no reason to hate the Constitution, and "throw the baby out with the bath water" in terms of ditching tools that could be used to limit government and separate powers, just because the Constitution still allows involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime (now referred to as "the new slavery" in the prisons).
     The Thirteenth Amendment is amended - and violence, secrecy, and torture are drastically reduced in prisons - the sooner people will no longer be able to rightfully claim that the Constitution allows slavery to continue to exist. It certainly does exist now; not only the outright chattel slavery,  forced labor, and sex slavery which exists in the prisons, but also a general state of political slavery (and wage and debt slavery) which exists in the so-called "free" population as well.


     Given that we have a slave society, why should we trust the government to afford us either freedom or "rights" (however we define that term)? Why trust a corrupt government more, when we know it can't do what we want it to, and wouldn't do those things even if it had the rightful authority?
     
It's time to stop lying to ourselves. We must engage in mutual aid, direct action, charitable acts, voluntary association, voluntary cooperation, and transparent self-governance of firms. That is the only way to bring production and innovation back to the United States, which the government insists on either penalizing and deterring through inordinate tax rates, or else only promoting for the sake of the financial benefit of the people whose corrupt business interests run the government.

     
     We can use the Constitution to limit government and abolish slavery, or we can resort to anarchy to abolish government and slavery. Until our governments stop lying to us, neither alternative should be taken off of the table.
     But additionally, if the government insists upon continuing to lie - and to mislead us about the Constitution's meaning, and brainwash us against what is good about that document, and about limited government - then anarchy will look like a rational choice in comparison to even the most permanent and meaningful reform.
     That's because such reform will continue to look impossible, because the majority of Americans will have no idea how to formally achieve those reforms through law in a way that cannot be easily tampered with.




     I have previously commented on the topics mentioned above; in three articles and three videos. Those posts are linked below.
     http://aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2021/01/half-of-federal-laws-do-not-apply-to.html
     http://aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2021/01/what-is-congress-allowed-to-do-and-what.html
     http://aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2021/01/letter-to-political-science-professor.html
     http://aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2021/01/links-to-all-of-my-videos-about.html




Written and Published on February 22nd, 2021

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