I would like Madisonians to think about a segment of the Wisconsin populace that both sides of the Walker-versus-the-unions issue have overlooked – and seem to want to continue to overlook; I’d like to offer a libertarian perspective on this, the one-year anniversary of the Wisconsin union protests.
Are you ready to take back your freedom of peaceful assembly and your
freedom of speech? Do you want to put a stop to these wasteful, disastrous,
undeclared wars in the Middle East?
Do you want to repeal the PATRIOT Act and the NDAA and stop illegal
searches and seizures by the TSA and the FBI? Do you want to end warrantless
spying and wire-tapping, extrajudicial killing of American citizens, and
indefinite detention without trial?
Do you want to stop the CIA’s funding and armament of foreign drug lords?
Do you want the DEA to stop raiding legal medicinal marijuana dispensaries in
Colorado and California? Do you want to pardon all non-violent drug offenders
and legalize the recreational use of marijuana?
Do you want to let the states raise their fuel-economy standards for
automobiles if they think they can do better than the standards set by the EPA?
Do you want to give towns and counties in northern Wisconsin the freedom to
raise their clean-water standards if they think they can do better than the
rest of the state, and protect themselves against the hazardous health effects
caused by the pollutants of mining operations? Do you want the federal
government to stop selling-out our water, air, and farms to BP, Halliburton,
the Chicago Climate Exchange, and Monsanto?
Do you want to stop congressional insider trading without making it harder for politicians to disclose to
the public the details of the bills that congress is considering? Do you want
to close the revolving-door between politicians, lobbyists, and high-power
corporate lawyers? Do you want to end corporate finance of political campaigns and
the legal fiction of corporate personhood?
Do you want to put an end to these multi-trillion-dollar bailouts that
lose taxpayer money, add to the debt and the deficit, don’t stimulate the
economy, and make industries harder to
regulate instead of easier?
Are you prepared to see more of your income taxed away – and put your children and grandchildren into
debt slavery – to pay for this wasteful deficit spending, and hundreds of
trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities?
Are you tired of the Federal Reserve printing up trillions a year to
cover for all this waste, inflating the dollar and devaluing your wages in the
process?
Are you sick of giving special legal protections to politicians, and
helping them stay unaccountable to the law and to the people they represent?
Do you want to abolish secrecy at all levels of government?
Several years ago, President Obama promised the American people the most
transparent and open administration in history, but it is becoming more
apparent every day that this has not happened, and that it is not going to happen.
If the events of the last twelve years have taught us anything, it’s that
we can no longer tolerate the degree of government secrecy to which we have
become accustomed. This is especially obvious in regards to our foreign policy,
our intelligence agencies, and our developing lobbying-regulation complex.
This complex permits legislators and representatives of big business such
as lobbyists and corporate lawyers to collude to write laws and company
policies favorable to their own common interests. It also gives a revolving
door for such people to switch jobs, has allowed our politicians to get away
with a form of legalized insider trading, erodes at our campaign finance laws,
and corrupts the integrity of our elections.
John F. Kennedy once said, “the very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in an
open and free society”. So how may we best remove secrecy from our political process? Perhaps we should look even
closer to home than lobbying, campaign finance, and congressional insider
trading; perhaps we should look at the very act of voting itself.
How long must we suffer the evils posed by voting machines, hacker threats to voting machines, the
tabulation of voting-machine results in undisclosed locations to counter such threats, and people voting
under the names of recently-deceased registered voters (which recently
corrupted the results of several Republican primaries)?
How many would agree that Wisconsin’s toughened voter-identification
requirements threaten the integrity of our democracy and undermine the privacy
of our secret-ballot system?
But what if the privacy that
the secret-ballot system gives to our politicians and to the voting public is
the same kind of privacy possessed by
the “independent” private Federal Reserve System? What if the reason that
politicians and representatives of businesses can get away with these back-room
handshake deals – and the reason that the president can get away with signing
unconstitutional bills with a robotic pen – is precisely because there is no
paper trail; and because there are no real, verifiable signatures?
What if the ballot is a
contract between the people and their public officials, and the spoken oaths
our politicians take to “preserve, protect, and defend” the law are meaningless?
What if the voluntary, written contract
is the necessary condition for all open, free, transparent, and legitimate
government; and this secret ballot that we never sign is the source of all government secrecy?
What if the Statute of Frauds –
which states that no contract to provide
goods shall be enforceable unless evidenced in writing – applies to the public goods provided by government, and
therefore stands in direct and flagrant violation of the secret-ballot-voting
provision of the State Constitution?
What if, instead, it is the secret-ballot
provision which is in violation of centuries of common contract law upon
which the Statute of Frauds – and indeed, our entire legal system – is based?
How can we expect a politician who has never signed a written oath of
office be held legally accountable to a group of people who never signed a written agreement to give him authority?
Surely this lack of written evidence that an agreement has been made –
coupled with the constitutional provision that no congressman shall be required
to respond to questioning (except in a speech or debate) – does nothing to prevent the use of government
power to ensure that our politicians remain unaccountable for their actions and
votes, and irresponsive and irresponsible to the will of the people.
What does it mean when our representatives in congress are immune from
prosecution for most misdemeanors? When five-sixths of them cannot be recalled
by their constituents? When they have the sole power to impeach other federal public
officials – while they themselves are extraordinarily difficult to impeach –
and when we do not have the option to vote “none of the above” and choose not to be represented (without a new
election being held later)?
What does it mean when we are not free to represent ourselves?
Although we pay their salaries, our “public servants” do not work for us. Nor can it be said that any mutual
exchange occurs in the act of secret-ballot-voting for political
representation. Nor even do we merely work
for our politicians, no; something else entirely is going on here.
If the purpose of government is to promote “liberty and justice”, why
then are we required to choose someone to make decisions on our behalves?
Certainly it would be most just for
us to have the liberty to make our own decisions, as long as they do
not directly harm others or damage their property.
Certainly if we choose to participate in a civil-societal system in which
actions whose morality is more debatable than causing direct physical harm are
made illegal according to the will of a majority of the people’s elected
representatives, we owe it to
ourselves and to our neighbors – both majority and minority – to establish some
mechanism whereby it can be verified that participants in such a system choose
to cooperate willingly, voluntarily, and
not under duress; and consciously, of
sound mind, and capable of giving informed consent.
When did you and I agree to support this government? Who among us can
rightfully claim that he was informed
and not under duress when he agreed
to do so?
Do we agree to support this government when we vote? If so, were we informed
when our politicians pandered and lied to us? Were we informed when we
perfectly and completely understood macroeconomics, constitutional process, and
the concerns of our fellow voters?
It has been said that the secret-ballot system is a safeguard against
voter intimidation and bribery. Putting aside that voter intimidation and
bribery do exist under the current
secret ballot system, who among us can say that he did not vote against one candidate because he was
afraid of the kind of controls which that candidate would impose on him? Is
this not voter intimidation? Is this
not duress?
Who among us can say that he did not vote for his candidate of choice because of the economic gains that that candidate promised him? Is this not
bribery? If your answer to any of these questions is “no”, then
what about when those threats of control and promises of economic gain would be
delivered through methods which violate
the Constitution and do not promote the general welfare?
Some say that when we vote, we agree to support the government, but only
for a period of time equal to the length of the term which our elected
officials would serve. But do we not agree to support the government for as
long as we choose to be citizens? Do native-born Americans indeed choose to become citizens? Do we agree
to support this government when we begin to benefit
from it by participating in its programs?
Who among us can say that he was informed and conscious of what was
happening to him when his nurse stamped his footprint onto his souvenir birth
certificate, or when his parents signed him up for a Social Security number in
his first weeks of life?
Who among us can say that he truly consented
to these actions? Being that we were not able to resist them – nor able to understand why we might want to – were these actions not
performed under duress and without informed consent?
If our civil society is truly based on “the consent of the governed” –
and if participation in it is based on informed
consent, then why – when we come
of age – does the government not make it known to us that we may choose to opt-out of the Social Security system;
or permit us to expatriate ourselves
(that is, renounce our federal citizenship)?
The 14th Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in
the United States… are citizens”, but only if they are “subject to the
jurisdiction thereof”. Do we not have the right
to choose whether to subject ourselves
to the federal government’s jurisdiction?
The federal government, the governments of the states, and we the people
are – after all – co-equal sovereigns,
who only submit to one another willingly.
Are we to take it on faith that the governments of the states wield the
collective right to subjugate our wills to the power of the federal government,
or should we consider that the existence of the federal government – and our
participation in it – may constitute a rebellion
against the sovereignty, freedom, and independence of the states?
Why is political representation in the U.S. House based on the number of
residents in each state who are available to be compelled to fund the operations of the federal government, rather
than on the number of people who – willingly
and of their own volition – agree to become federal citizens, and to
support and fund the federal government’s functions?
Why do the politicians who tell us that “citizenship is not an
entitlement program” not remind us that we have the right to waive and forfeit the benefits of
citizenship, thereby relieving the government of the burdensome responsibility
to provide for the privileges associated
with citizenship?
Why do these politicians instead
use “citizenship… not [being] an entitlement program” as an excuse to encourage us to fund and pledge loyalty
to the government, and to consume its resources? What benefits are we to expect
from a system that often requires us to kill and to die against our will for
the furthering of its own power?
Private property has been
defined as the absolute power and freedom to exclusively possess – and to use
and abuse – at one’s own discretion; it is the ability to become the sole controller and dominator of an object,
and the right to refuse to respond to
questions about whether a possession is being either used or abused.
But do not our politicians have
the power to control and dominate –
to use and abuse us – at their own discretion? Do not their special privileges from
arrest, their power to remove other politicians from office, and our lack of
power to refuse to consent to delegate authority to them make their rule over
us exclusive and absolute? Does not
their legal immunity from questioning – except when we are choosing which one
of them will control us – make their rule over us irresponsive and irresponsible?
Are our bodies not, then, given
over by our parents at birth as possessions
to be dominated – absolutely,
exclusively, and irresponsibly – by rulers whose authority we have no power,
right, or privilege to withdraw consent to delegate?
Are we not, then, sold into a system which we are legally incapable of
resisting but required to obey? Are we not, then, the literal property of our government masters? Are we not, then, but prisoners and slaves? Are not prisoners permitted to earn and spend
money? Are not slaves permitted to
breathe fresh air?
What is your registration of birth but a contract signed by your parents
to permit the government to repossess you if its deems your parents’ level of
parental care to be below some standard set intentionally
high so as to excuse your kidnapping by Child Protective Services, which
studies have shown to have much higher rates of physical and sexual abuse than does the
general public?
So are you a person, or are you a piece of property? Is a corporation a
piece of shared property, or is it a person?
We can actually answer both of these questions at once.
What is a person? According to Black’s Law Dictionary, statutes may define a
“person” so as to include not only human beings and corporations, but also
labor organizations, partnerships, associations, legal representatives,
trustees, and others. This would explain why corporations and labor organizations – unions – have the same rights as people when it comes to donating money to political campaigns.
Why is the root of the word “organization” – as in “labor organization” – organ?
Why do we call Congress a “legislative body”? Why is the root of the word
“corporation” corpus, meaning body?
Governments, unions, and businesses do not have real, tangible, physical bodies which can be destroyed like ours can; they have the potential to exist indefinitely. Indeed, President Reagan
was not far from the truth when he said, “…a government bureau is the nearest
thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth”.
So when did these ghosts – the State, the labor union, and the
corporation – steal from us our corporeity; our “bodiliness”; our attribute of
being regarded by the law as possessing a body? In the late 19th
century, when a former railroad industry robber-baron became a court reporter
and injected his own opinion into a U.S. Supreme Court decision about a
railroad company, thereby establishing the legal precedent of “corporate
personhood”? Hardly!
The U.S. Constitution is not a legal document outlining how we should be governed as much as it is a contract by the states to cede powers to
the federal government in exchange for monetary subsidies, and to promise to
share in the payment of the debt which the federal government and military
acquired from the British, who funded both
sides of the Revolutionary War. This promise was made in secret by the
founding fathers on behalf of the residents of the colonies who were never
given any opportunity to decide
whether to support the new American government.
As a side-note, let us not forget that it is the loser of the war that pays war debts; and let us ask whether the
Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 were truly wars between the British and their colonies, or whether they were
nothing more than violent civil wars
and trade skirmishes which were
fought over debt obligations and the legal statuses of citizens, and only
brought to a resolution not because
of a peace settlement, but because
both parties settled financially?
Through the Constitution, the states gave the Congress the power to
borrow money, and the Constitution provides that no law shall impair the
obligation of contracts (financial obligations and trusts not excepted). This
agreement by the states to share in the repayment of federal debt was – in
truth – a mutual trust, which
established the states as financial corporate subsidiaries of the corporate
federal government. The United States is, effectively, a plantation; a “tax
farm”.
I’d like to pause for a moment to caution my audience; let it never be
said that no self-described libertarian has ever criticized the Constitution or
its framers. Indeed, so long as one takes a close, honest look at the wording
of that document – and probes the true
legal meaning of each important word – there is a thin and blurry line
between a libertarian who strongly supports the Constitution and a libertarian
who strongly opposes the
Constitution.
But I digress; the reason the 14th Amendment uses the word
“citizen” and the word “person” – rather than using either word twice – is
because these words have different
meanings. In truth, the 14th Amendment created two separate and legally-distinct classes
of people.
A “person” is a natural,
flesh-and-blood human being who has a real body, capital-C Citizenship, and individual sovereign power within the
independent common-law state in which he resides. A small-c “citizen” is a “naturalized” artificial corporate person, who has a piece of paper with his
all-capitalized name on it in a file drawer in the office of a government
bureau, privileges and immunities (although no
rights or protections), and an
obligation to pay the debts contracted by the federal government on his behalf.
Every state in this union is a sovereign and independent country in and
of itself, and legal documents spanning from 1778 to just three years ago will
confirm that. The Constitution only authorizes the federal government to have
jurisdiction over the District of Columbia and over the lands it has purchased, and the U.S. Supreme Court
has confirmed that the federal government has jurisdiction over lands it has conquered.
Therefore, if the federal government has jurisdiction over a state, it is
either because it has purchased or
conquered that state, or because that state has allowed itself to be purchased or conquered. Likewise, if the
federal government has jurisdiction over you,
it is either because it has purchased or conquered you, or because you have allowed yourself to be purchased or conquered by it.
Unless and until you and I and the states resist and re-assert our
sovereign powers, rights, and protections, our corporate federal government
literally owns the states within this Union, along with all the businesses,
tangible and intellectual property, and human beings which exist within them.
This is what I meant when I brought up the birth certificate; the
“registration of birth”. Because we are required to register our cars, the
government can repossess them if it doesn’t like the way we are using them.
Just as our parents registered our birth – us,
for all intents and purposes – the government can repossess us if it doesn’t like the way our
parents are using their freedom to raise us as they see fit.
Just as we are required to take out insurance policies on our cars, all
of us – purportedly – are now required to purchase health insurance policies. But we can choose whether to buy a car; we cannot
choose whether to own our own bodies. Our cars – like our bodies – are the
property of the government, and, therefore, can be regulated like (so-called) property.
There is virtually no private property – and no private sector – left in this country. All is
subject to government regulation; anything you think you own – your body, your car, your house, your business –
you merely rent, use, possess, or occupy
temporarily.
All goods and services are deemed to be subject to the whims of the
public-sector government, and able to be repossessed by it via eminent domain,
and sold off – privatized – to some
other temporary user. But although privatization
is a province of government; it just
may be the closest thing to real private
property which still exists, at least in regards to anything worth owning.
You may think you own your
business, but through charter it becomes the property of the State, which will
take from you and your business in property taxes, personal income taxes, and
corporate income taxes however much it pleases. You may think you own your car, but you are required to have a license,
registration, and insurance if you don’t want the government to repossess it.
You may think you own your
body, but take a look at your birth certificate. Your name is capitalized; this
capitalization makes you an artificial person, a legal fiction; a naturalized corporate citizen with no legal
rights or protections, but only the privileges and immunities conferred upon
you by the federal government.
You are not a name on a piece of
paper in a file drawer in a government bureau in the nation’s capital; you
are a soul who possesses a body; an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness; and sovereign power equal
to the federal government to affect the laws of the states.
Although you never signed your
birth certificate – consenting to be identified as your all-capitalized name – you did sign your driver’s license. Although you may not believe you
consented to be a federal citizen, you did
check-in the box on your census form identifying yourself as such. Perhaps this
decennial census is an opportunity to end your citizenship in the United States
Government.
If our natural Right of Expatriation is the right to withdraw our federal
citizenship provided that we have some other free state to go to – and if each
state has been described in government documents as free, sovereign, and
independent – then why do the states not issue passports, or contain consulates
or diplomatic offices to facilitate communication with the federal government,
which only wields exclusive jurisdiction in the District of Columbia and its
overseas dependencies?
What are the implications on the “consent of the governed” asserted by
the Declaration of Independence if we cannot choose to be subject to only our
states, much less choose to opt-out of all forms of territorially-monopolistic
governance altogether? The implication is that the existence of a right cannot
be confirmed by some scribbles on a piece of parchment paper; the existence of
a right can only be confirmed by our ability to exercise the right.
The budget of the federal government is eighty times larger than the budgets of the governments within the
average given state. Congress has now committed to spend some $160 trillion in unfunded liabilities;
nearly ten times greater than the
amount of wealth produced in the country in a single year, and ten percent greater than the amount of
wealth produced on the planet in a
year. These figures are set to double
every three-and-a-half years.
Despite these facts – and despite the fact that we become second-class
citizens when we cede our authority to the federal government (whereby – in the
process – we agree to help the government pay
for such extravagant, irresponsible spending) – there exist huge portions of
supporters of both major political parties which emphasize a greater role for
the federal government in our everyday lives.
Why should we accept this? Why should we accept the federal government’s supremacy in creating policy, overriding
the decisions made in the states and in the county and municipal governments?
Why shouldn’t we argue for a greater role for the states and the local
governments in creating policy, and for providing public goods and public
services?
Why should we agree to maintain the federal government’s monopoly power? Why should the more
local governments not compete against
the government to put forth better policies and to provide better public
services, thereby undermining the
federal monopoly power to do these things?
Why should we count on the federal government – rather than the more local governments – to defend us from
the power of the states? Are we to continue to pretend that the federal
government knows better than the states
what their residents want, and that the states
know better than the communities what
their residents want?
This is the principle of subsidiarity;
the principle that decision-making authority should be as close to the people
it affects (as would be effective, efficient, and responsible). It is the
principle of subsidiarity which is
the reason for the 10th Amendment (the states’ rights amendment),
and for the institution of dual federalism (the idea that the states have
supreme power in certain policy areas, while the federal government has power only in areas which the states allow
it).
But opponents of these principles are too apt to characterize states’ rights
as permitting slavery, ignoring the facts
that it would allow California, Colorado, and other states to legalize medicinal
marijuana, as well as allow a third of the states to raise their standards on the
fuel efficiency of vehicles.
Intrastate subsidiarity would go
the additional mile by allowing towns
in northern Wisconsin to raise their standards on water safety, and to protect
themselves against decisions made in Madison to damage the health of the local
and native populations with mining operations; as well as allow the communities
actually affected by the Keystone
pipeline to decide whether to permit its construction, rather than the federal
government treating land in the Great Plains states as its own property.
For the states to stand up against the federal government by re-asserting
their rights to enact laws and administer policy would compromise the federal
government’s monopoly power to
provide public goods and public services. State governments’ policies would –
in essence – compete against the
policies of the federal government, thus undermining its power. But to bring
about a more perfect competition
against government in general would
require that additional steps be
taken.
I don’t see this public-sector unions controversy as a question of
whether Governor Walker or the Democrats have the interests of public employees
at heart; I interpret it as an example of unwillingness by both sides of the aisle to take steps towards diminishing the power
of government and its bureaucracies to compel us – the taxpayers – to pay for them to provide us with those goods
and services which are typically thought of as public.
While opponents of Governor Walker are apt – and correct – to criticize
the government when it increases the power of businesses (leading to unchecked
corporate and P.A.C. influence on elections, business monopolies and
oligopolies, privatization schemes, and government sponsorship of enterprises);
they are not willing to admit that “corporate greed” – which is nothing more
than business executives trying to return wealth to their investors through
profit – is not the source of the problem.
The problem is that we have a
government which is powerful and large
enough to give those privileges to
businesses at the expense of the
taxpayers. The desire of private persons to obtain and increase their own wealth
has existed since the dawn of time, and will never cease to exist, no matter how hard we may try to regulate that
desire away.
But when we give our government
the power to give special rights to certain businesses, and to award contracts
to provide public goods and services to certain businesses, we are giving a
signal to the market that the
government will compel people to use
their services and buy their goods.
This is why force and compulsion are antithetical to the
freedom of the marketplace, and why competition
is antithetical to monopoly and oligopoly. It is forceful government violence corrupting peaceful market freedom; the ancient struggle of brute
force playing itself out in the market.
Contrary to what those who support central economic planning may tell
you, competition does not inevitably
lead to monopoly in a free market; competition only leads to monopoly when the
government decides to establish special privileges for – and award contracts
and charters to – the least ethical, most ruthless competitors.
Provide an avenue for smaller governments to engage in a more accepted
and robust competition against
centralized government power, and you will see domination of industries by a
select few businesses become greatly
diminished.
But aside from the monopoly powers of government and the monopoly powers
of business, opponents of Governor Walker also
tend to overlook the monopoly powers of unions,
and even the corporate personhood which Citizens
United granted to labor organizations in
addition to corporations. Suffice it to say that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. has done
little to inspire us to criticize the Citizens
ruling.
Why should the status of “corporate person” not be denied to both businesses and unions in the
interest of fairness? Why should the labor movement – large segments of which evidently fashion themselves revolutionary and anti-monopoly – actively
promote the ability of certain unions to exclusively represent workers in
negotiations with management, protected by compulsory governments wielding
territorial monopolies on the legitimate use of violence, no less?
Practically gone are the days of minority-unionism and wildcat strikes
which were once the tactically-pure principles of the labor movement,
uncorrupted by the desire of institutionalization and privilege conferred by
coercive monopoly government.
This conflict was the reason for the 1924 split in the Industrial Workers
of the World; between those who sought political privilege for unions; and
those who sought to refrain from using violent government power to compel
others to accede to their demands, but instead
to make employers and the public aware of and sympathetic to their concerns,
and to spread information about the plight of the working man through peaceful
discourse and convincing rhetoric.
But the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt effectively ended this dispute among the labor
movement at large; in 1935, his National Labor Relations Act outlawed wildcat strikes, gave a single
federal agency – the N.L.R.B. – the sole power to permit or deny the permission
of unionized workers to strike.
Certainly we can agree that when workers with more modest demands form their own rival union to compete with the established union in their
workplace, this can undermine worker solidarity within that workplace. But when
a more radical, idealistic, and extreme
segment of employees feel that the established
union is being too modest, and call for a wildcat strike, the established
union can bring charges against the more extreme workers, sacrificing their
just demands in the name of getting things done.
Thus, we see the established unions undercutting the efforts of both the
more modest and the more extreme
workers, each group of which assuming the risks and responsibilities associated
with their own actions. It becomes evident that – primarily – the established
unions seek not solidarity, but
rather the institutionalization of their exclusive
power to negotiate on the behalves of workers; their own monopoly power of representation within
each unionized workplace.
To this day, the Industrial Workers of the World promotes minority
unionism, and even goes so far as to recommend that non-unionized workers
engage in solidarity unionism tactics, rather than to pursue “the legalistic
strategies that have led us to the current mess”.
Indeed, perhaps the I.W.W.’s humble anarchism explains why it claims just
one nine-hundredth as many members as
the A.F.L.-C.I.O., one-tenth of whose members are in the business of providing
public services, and another tenth of whose members are in the automobile
industries, companies and unions in
which were bailed out under Bush and Obama.
But this is all in regards to collective bargaining in the private sector. What of public-sector collective bargaining, and
the effects of Governor Walker’s budget-repair bill on the power of unions?
Being that the public-sector workers who struck a year ago were government employees, the fact that they
strengthened their appeals to and rapport with the party more inclined to support
them was to be expected. However, it was not
well-advised.
I submit that if the
Republicans’ assault on their alleged rights was so egregious, then they should
have used the opportunity which this crisis presented to show their independence rather than their
dependence, thus proving that they are as
powerful – if not more so – than
the government, and that their right to demand the moneyed property of the
people through the threat of force exists regardless of the opinion of whomever
happens to be the current governor.
They should have gone into competition
with the government; they should have shown that they provide public services
so efficiently, effectively, and responsibly that any rational person would
choose to use their services rather
than those which would still be provided by the government.
Why didn’t public employees show their strength and their independence by
competing against the government, thus proving their worth? Maybe they know
something we don’t know.
But perhaps a more important
question is: why didn’t public employees show their strength and their
independence by marching to the door of each taxpayer in Wisconsin, and
threatening imprisonment unless we surrender the funds necessary to provide for
their benefits? Maybe they lack sufficient firepower, the willingness to use
it, or both.
But maybe the most important question
is: why in this time of reckless government spending and unprecedented State violence
and intrusion into our daily lives are individuals who supposedly value their
privacy and their individual rights begging the government to stay the same
size, and maintain or increase the privileges of its employees? And how does
the situation in Wisconsin relate to the situation of the country as a whole?
The actions of the Obama Administration have
shown its reluctance to cut taxes, spending, government services, and the size
of the federal payroll; and it appears unwilling to allow private enterprise
and the governments of the states to compete against it to provide public services.
The current administration has even gone so
far as to reduce tax breaks for charitable contributions, which I interpret as
an assertion that the government is more moral than are the people, and that it
has the right to take from anyone who would attempt to bypass its inflation
taxes and the overhead fees of its corrupt bureaucracies in using their liberty
to help others.
I believe that the state and local
governments, the private sector (especially small and local business
entrepreneurs), and fledgling labor unions pose some of the most significant
threats to the perception that the federal government, government-sponsored
enterprises, and unions with government privilege are the most legitimate,
moral, efficient, and qualified to provide goods and services to the public;
and – as such – experimentation regarding their role competing against the federal government to do so should be
encouraged.
We have arrived at a point in the history of American political economy
when the majority of leftists have deviated from their social-anarchist roots
and acceded to the power of the established centralized, federal social
democracy, rejecting both the free-market principle of competitive capital and the anarcho-syndicalist
principle of competitive labor.
But the problem of competing against monopoly government – specifically, centralized
monopoly government – remains to be addressed in our public discourse; in this
case, the monopoly power that Governor Walker and the Republicans currently
have the potential to wield over regulating the benefits and negotiation
privileges of government employees providing public services.
Make no mistake; the Democrats constitute no real challenge to the
current Republican power monopoly. In fact, most if not all Democrats actually
desire to entrench the government
monopoly; specifically, through increased taxation which would provide for the
expansion of government cooperation with both established unions and established capital. We would be hard-pressed
to find a single Democrat in power who consistently votes to encourage
competition against the established oligopolies of both labor and capital.
So replace Governor Walker with a Democrat if
you must. Replace him with a big-government, pro-gun-control Democrat who wants
to chip away – even further than the Republicans do – at your right to defend
yourself against those who would seek to threaten violence against you for
rightfully asserting that you never knowingly entered into a contract promising
to give them as much blood and money as they require for the rest of your life.
Or – instead
– we can bring charges against our state governments, compelling them to decide
whether the Statutes of Frauds violates the secret-ballot provisions in the
state constitutions, or whether the secret-ballot by its very design flies in
the face of basic principles of the Anglo-American common contract law;
essentially, getting the states to declare whether their authority comes from
us voluntarily giving up the right to make some of our decisions, or else admit
that their powers are only based on domination, control, and violence.
Instead,
we can abandon these spectres of secret, coercive, monopolistic
government, capital, and labor; and provide public goods and services through
gift-giving, bartering, trading, and sharing; through philanthropy by private
citizens to charity and religious organizations; through the efforts of small
and local private businesses seeking to undermine the strength of the
established multinational corporations and state-sponsored enterprises; through
consumer- and citizen- advocacy agencies; through open and legitimate
municipal, county, and state governments; and through direct-action general and
work-to-rules strikes, picketing, boycotts, and confrontation of management by
freely associating and disassociating segments of mutually sympathetic workers;
lest we consign ourselves to manipulation by big-labor leaders, corporate
lobbyists and attorneys, and corrupt, well-paid career politicians in the
national government who until this very moment have used us as pawns to
entrench their own wealth and power.
Instead we can revive the
principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment – that the powers not
delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states and to the
people – ushering-in a new era, wherein the federal government’s grip on our
everyday affairs is greatly loosened, permitting us to engage in political
experimentation which exalts participatory and direct democracy and local
governance over representative
democracy and centralized governance,
for only then may we learn to tolerate a diversity of opinion and of
administration of best practices, and come to discern for our own subjective
purposes – of ourselves and our communities – which combination of practices suits
us best.
Let us take the crisis which Governor Walker has created by cutting
government funding to public services as an opportunity to let volunteers fill
the void; to educate our youth, to care for our sick and vulnerable, to build
our roads, to provide us clean water, to put out fires, to keep our streets
safe, and to protect and defend our businesses, our property, and ourselves.
Let us require no teacher, health worker, police officer, or fireman to
worry about his pay and benefits while toiling under the reign of a politician
who doesn’t represent his political and economic interests. Let those who
provide public goods and services – Republican or Democrat, libertarian or
socialist – work to provide them in the way they see fit.
Let us do away with the notion that the best way to care for the less
fortunate and underprivileged – and
to provide for the average person’s
everyday needs – is to force us to pay taxes; funnel them through corrupt,
wasteful, bureaucratic middlemen; devalue that money through inflation brought
about by our usurous national centralized Federal Reserve Bank; and require us
at the threat of fines and imprisonment to purchase the products and services
of unethical companies who have successfully curried the favor of our politicians.
Let us do whatever is in our power to cease associating ourselves with
the world’s largest and wealthiest criminal gang which calls itself the United
States Government. Let us use our
inalienable rights and our common-law sovereign powers within our states to
affect an even greater protection of
the freedoms of speech, press, and peaceful assembly – and the rights of the accused and of self-defense – than our
federal government now seems willing to provide us.
Let us begin to view the debts it has contracted under our names and the
taxes it has extracted from us as evidence
that they have committed crimes against us. Let us assume the
responsibility to bring charges and punishment against those who would provide
aid, comfort, or material support to our treasonous, alien enemy the State.
Let us pay to one another the
criminal restitutions which the government owes to all of us, without worry that these government thugs will resurface
and force us to give them a cut of every transaction in which we may take part
in our quest to provide each other with the means to subsist.
Let us abolish this conception of the State as having a “monopoly on the
legitimate use of violence” which President Obama has endorsed, proclaim that no violence is legitimate, and bring
about truly free association; with voluntary unionization, voluntary
interaction with businesses, and voluntary government.
Achieve these goals, and you will have total liberty and equality of
opportunity, without sacrificing a financially secure outcome for those who
provide us safety, peace, and prosperity.
Please vote for me – independent candidate Joe Kopsick, the candidate of
liberty, sovereignty, independence, and social liberalism – in the election to
the U.S. House of Representatives from Wisconsin’s 2nd Congressional
District on November 6th, 2012.
Thank you.
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