Written in January 2012
Originally published 1-23-2012
On November 6th
of this year, we will elect a representative to the U.S. House who
will be paid 174 thousand dollars a year. Now, the Statutes of Frauds
which are found in the legal codes of the various states provide that
if two parties agree to sell goods worth at least a number well
below 174 thousand dollars, that contract is unenforceable
unless it is made in writing.
But why should the requirements for contracts to provide the public
services of government be any weaker?
We have been led to believe that the secret-ballot-voting provisions
in most of the states’ constitutions enhance democracy and protect
our privacy. But – in truth – there is a more sinister
reason why our voting is private, secret, anonymous, and unwritten;
and why our elected representatives stand in a giant room in
Washington speaking their congressional oaths instead of being
required to sign a written oath to support the government and
the documents upon which it is based.
President
Kennedy once said that “[t]he very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant
in a free and open society”, but the secret-ballot system
protects our unduly-elected representatives’ privilege never to be
bothered to provide written evidence proving that any particular
person delegated his authority to them.
Although
it has been suggested that to destroy the secrecy of the voting
system would signify the abolition of civil society, the
abolition of the secret ballot would in fact serve to augment
its freedom and openness. Your revered secret ballot possesses the
same type of freedom and independence held by the Federal Reserve
Bank which brought on the current financial crisis; and that type of
freedom is ownership.
Our government agencies are contractually irresponsible to the people
they control. This irresponsible, exclusive dominion has been
described as “political slavery… identical to the right of
private property”. What this means is that when we vote, we are
being permitted to choose who owns us – who we must pay to control
us – without ever being given the option of choosing not to be
treated as other people’s property in the first place.
Let
it therefore be said that voluntary action, free association, and
written contracts are the basis for all just and legitimate
governance.
Since the current financial crisis began, our Congresswoman Tammy
Baldwin has voted for a round of bailouts and restructuring that have
cost our government an estimated 12 to 24 trillion dollars,
which is equal to 80 to 160 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic
Product.
Not only this, but the total unfunded liabilities projected over the
next 75 years now number somewhere around 165 trillion, which
is 11 times the Gross Domestic Product, and 10 percent larger than
the planet’s annual earnings. Every 3 ½ years, the federal
government’s unfunded liabilities double.
Unfortunately, there is no legal safeguard against such excessive
spending. In fact, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution prohibits anyone from questioning the validity of
the government’s public debt. But the 14th Amendment
also prohibits involuntary servitude, except as
punishment.
So now I ask: do we have the voluntary choice to either
support and obey this government or not, or are we compelled to serve
it involuntarily? Do we have free will and the right to our
own bodies, or are we nothing more than political debt slaves
being used as the whipping boys of the politicians who have stolen
from ourselves and our children?
The
current political system – inasmuch as it is a secret, closed, and
unwritten system – is in fact the world’s wealthiest criminal
gang, and that we the people – inasmuch as our associations remain
free, open, and voluntary – are charged with the responsibility to
bring charges and punishment against those who would provide aid,
comfort, or material support to our treasonous, alien enemy the
State.
This debt that we are required to pay at the threat of being put in a
tax prison; what is it more than restitution – that is,
criminal responsibility and liabilities for having committed
theft – being passed onto a group of people who never signed a
single written document promising to pay the government’s
generational debts?
Set aside Citizens United and the railroad robber barons who
wrote their privileges into the Supreme Court reports during the
Industrial Revolution; if you want to talk about how corporate
personhood is corrupting elections, let’s talk about another
oft-overlooked legal fiction.
The vast majority of us were made U.S. citizens and given Social
Security numbers within our first year of life, at a time when we
have no comprehension or awareness what is being done under our
assumed consent.
But once we come of the age of reason; are we given the option to
renounce our citizenship and end our use of the public services
provided by the established civil society, or are we told that we
will be sued for over 100 thousand dollars if we do not
agree to potentially kill and die for the government if and when
asked?
Why do we permit our government to assume our permanent consent,
blackmail us into murdering foreigners, and limit our rights to
privacy and to defend ourselves?
Wisconsin’s
new Republican-supported Castle Doctrine law provides that if a home
owner injures someone who breaks into his home trying to kill him,
the home owner may be sued to pay that person’s medical bills, so
long as the home owner was engaging in criminal activity at
the time, or the victim was a peace officer performing
official duties. Democrats objected that the bill would provide too
much leeway to home owners assessing the threats against them.
What
the Democrats failed to see in this issue was that the rest
of the bill – in concert with federal legislation like the
PATRIOT Act and the 2012 N.D.A.A. – would do nothing to stop a
federal agent from unconstitutionally writing his own search warrant,
breaking into your home, enter into evidence your glass bong and your
hundred-dollar receipt that you gave to an overseas charity that the
government doesn’t like, coming after you with a gun, suing you to
pay for any injuries he sustains trying to prevent you from defending
yourself, charging you with providing material support to terrorists,
and asking the Secretary of Defense to allow military personnel to
place you in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely and without due-process
access to legal representation.
I
repeat, this is the policy of the Democrats; Democrats like
Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary and
former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, who were recently grilled
on the CIA / Homeland Security “Operation Fast and Furious”,
which later became “Project Gunrunner”.
Imagine
the American people’s surprise when they discover that these two
Obama appointees conspired to assassinate Republican Federal District
Court Judge John Roll and Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords
of Arizona, who were investigating the matter with a Congressman from
West Texas.
While
some have described President Obama as supporting gun control,
murdering political figures while arming drug lords suggests an
intentional relinquishment of control over weapons. But
Democrats in the state legislature have been actively
pro-gun-control.
When
gun freedoms are too loose, a child may shoot his friend to death
with his father’s shotgun, or a madman may shoot 30 people, and
that is certainly very sad. But when gun controls are too tight, gun
control proponents like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot may
obliterate five percent of humanity, and that – my friends – is a
tragedy.
It
has been just under three months since the day a fifth of the unarmed
audience of the Wisconsin State Assembly was arrested by armed
security guards while their fellow audience members brandish plastic
handguns in open mockery of their new-found temporary privilege to
defend themselves, while Democrats failed to make the Republicans
give up a little of the people’s leeway against criminals as well
as the established, organized cadre of violent police and military
agents that we call our duly-delegated sovereign.
The
politician who votes to keep weapons out of any place – whether
private or public – is sending a message to criminals that
law-abiding citizens in such places will be guaranteed not to be able
to defend themselves.
I
will accept nothing less than my absolute freedom to defend myself
against those who would seek to harm my person and describe my
resistance as illegal competition against their exclusive monopoly
power to force, compel, coerce, defraud, intimidate, and manipulate
me.
The
offender has made it clear that this is a battle based on power and
strength; I have no delusions that giving up my right to stronger
weapons and shields – whether real or symbolic – will inspire
sympathy in him.
But I mentioned the government’s monopoly force, an idea to which
President Obama subscribes. This is the monopoly force of government
that privileges the large, well-established, and centralized banks
from fair competition with smaller, newer, and more
community-oriented ones; that privileges large, well-established, and
multinational companies from fair competition with smaller,
newer, and community-oriented ones.
Despite
their awareness of the roles of monopoly capital and monopoly
government colluding to engineer the current economic crisis,
most on the left have still neglected to examine the role of monopoly
unionism in all this.
Gone
are the days of dual- and multiple-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 I.W.W., between
those seeking political union privilege; and those who sought to
refrain from using violence 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.
But
the administration of the banker Franklin Roosevelt effectively ended
this dispute; in 1935, his National Labor Relations Act outlawed
wildcat strikes, and required management to negotiate with the agents
authorized to represent their employees.
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 extreme segment of employees feel
that the established union is being too modest, and desire to
have 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
actions. It becomes evident that – primarily – the established
unions seek not solidarity, but rather the entrenchment of
their own exclusive power to represent workers; their monopoly
power of representation.
To
this day, the I.W.W. promotes dual unionism, and even goes so far as
to recommend that non-unionized workers engage in solidarity unionism
tactics, rather than to pursue, quote, “the legalistic strategies
that have led us to the current mess”. 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-fifth of whose members are
associated with the public service and automobile industries which
were bailed out under Bush and Obama.
Despite
all his rolling-back of union privileges, Governor Walker has stated
that he has no desire to use the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act
to make Wisconsin a Right-to-Work state… and to the detriment of
the labor movement. For history has shown that when and where union
membership is optional and voluntary; union membership, employment,
and wages tend to increase.
Now
that we have discussed the dangers of using government force to grant
monopoly privileges to oligarchical labor and capital,
we are ready to understand how to undermine the very monopoly of
force on which the government and its dependents rest.
The
actions of the Obama Administration have shown an appeasing
unwillingness to allow the governments and the states compete against
the federal government to provide public services. The Administration
has taken a similar attitude towards private enterprise.
I
believe that the state governments, the private sector, and fledgling
labor unions pose some of the most significant threats to the
perception that the federal government is the most legitimate, moral,
efficient, and qualified to provide public goods and services; and –
as such – experimentation regarding their role competing
against the federal government to do so should be encouraged. It is
this competition that undermines the monopoly of
government.
Ladies
and gentlemen, we have arrived at a point in American political
economy when the majority of leftists have deviated from their
socialist roots and acceded to the power of the established
centralized, federal social democracy; even – sadly – the
Mutualists, who have exalted both the free-market principle of
competitive capital and the anarcho-syndicalist
principle of competitive labor.
But
to the extent to which an embrace of Mutualist anarchism would solve
the problem of monopoly labor and capital, the problem of competing
against monopoly government – specifically, centralized
monopoly government – remains to be addressed; in particular, 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; namely,
through increased taxation which would provide for the expansion of
government cooperation with both established unions and –
quite often – established capital. We would be hard pressed to find
a single Democrat in power who votes to encourage competition against
both established monopoly labor and monopoly capital.
But
replace Governor Walker with a Democrat if you must. Replace him with
a Democrat who wants to– even further than the Republicans do –
chip away 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 money and blood they please 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 getting them to admit that they are only based on domination and
force.
Instead
we can abandon these spectres of secret, coercive, monopolistic
government, capital, and labor; and instead provide public goods and
services through open, legitimate, local government; through charity
and religious organizations; through consumer- and citizen- advocacy
agencies; through gift-giving, bartering, trading, and sharing;
through the efforts of small and local private businesses seeking to
undermine the strength of the established multinational corporations
and state-sponsored enterprises; 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 corrupt,
well-paid career politicians in the national government who until
this 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 or to the people – ushering in a new
era, wherein the federal government’s grip on the affairs of the
states and the people is loosened, permitting us to engage in
political experimentation in which exalts participatory democracy and
local governance over representative democracy and centralized
governance, for only then may we learn to tolerate a diversity of
administration of best practices, and come to discern for our own
subjective purposes which combination of practices suits us best.
Let
us require no teacher or health care worker 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.
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.
For
more entries on elections and campaign finance, please visit:
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/why-voting-is-not-necessarily-evil.html
For
more entries on government secrecy and N.S.A. surveillance, please
visit:
For
more entries on unions and collective bargaining, please visit:
