Scenario: You’re working hard at building your business. You come in early each morning, check your stock, arrange the shelves, sweep the floor, and get the till ready for what you hope will be another busy day. Things are going well when a man enters the store wearing a black suit coat and a fedora. He walks straight up to the counter not looking at any of the merchandise and he locks his eyes with yours. “Who is the owner here?” he asks. You reply that you are. He then proceeds to tell you that for the privilege of operating this business and for the protection he provides he demands that you pay him thirty percent of all the profit from your business. He further tells you that if you refuse then some very bad things just might happen and you could lose it all.
We have seen this scenario played out many times in old movies of the gangster lore. The mobster would demand protection payments even when the protection you are paying for was from that very same gang. And if you did not pay you would end up losing everything.
Now I am going to ask what some would deem a ridiculous question; what is the difference between the government and organized crime?
When I ask this question most people would reply that the government does what it does within the confines of the law! Oh, really? What is the basis of all law in the United States; the Constitution, right? How many times have we had laws deemed unconstitutional? Plenty! How many times have people had their lives ruined and sent to jail for years only to find out they were innocent. Thousands! How many times have we heard of Constitutional violations by all the various levels of government? Too many to number!
So what is the real difference between government and organized crime? In my opinion it is the ability to amass force against the victims. Organized crime may be able to get 20 or 30 guys together to run a neighborhood. The government can get hundreds of thousands.
Case in point; how many people if they were told that they have a tax burden placed on them by the government would ‘voluntarily’ pay that tax if they were also told no one will bother them if they did not pay it? Besides the exception to the rule the vast majority will not. So why do we pay taxes to the government? We do so because if we do not men with guns will show up at our door and take our belongings, take our home, and possibly put us in a cell for years and years. This is called coercion, doing something out of fear of the consequences of not doing it, even when we would not otherwise do so.
Why do we, for the most part, buckle our seat belt when we get in a car? Besides being the smart thing to do for safety, we do it because we know that if we get stopped we will be punished for not doing what the parent government said we had to do. There is really no crime involved because there is no injured party you just did not comply with what you were told to do.
Unless we are believers in precognition, knowing something is going to happen before it does, an officer cannot arrest or cite you before a crime has been committed but in this case you are treated as a criminal because you did not do what you were told! Nothing criminal took place, no property damage, no personal injury, but you are damaged by having to pay a fine and points put on your license. Oh, I guess a little loss of liberty is okay to keep us safe, right?
Now parents this may sound very familiar, and even for those that can remember back to when you were children, and you asked why you had to do something and were responded to with ‘because I said so.’ That is exactly what thousands of these statutes consist of; no criminal intent, no injured party, no attempt to gain something that is not ours, and in many cases only a desire to be left alone. Yet each and every day citizens of the states of this nation are criminalized because they ‘did not comply’ with the wishes of the mob, I mean government.
Don’t get me wrong government is a necessary evil but one that must be held firmly in the grasp of those that create it. Thomas Paine said: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil, in its worst state, an intolerable one.” A question to ponder; who determines when it has become intolerable?
In defense of the government there is a great difference between the mob and our government. The mob is doing what it is doing solely for self enrichment. The government, however well intentioned, is governed by the nature of all governments and that is to expand its power to fulfill it designed creation. The problem though is that its goals, when taken to the extreme, suffocate those to whom it is supposed to benefit.
Case in point, one of the primary responsibilities of government is the protection of the nation. In order to do so a government must know what is going on around them so they can thwart off any attack against them. Over time when your mission is to look for the evil that may attack you you start looking everywhere. Before long there is evil everywhere you look.
During my career with the government I have been involved in creating plans for varying missions. When building a plan one must look at all possible scenarios and determine certain courses of action to defeat those scenarios. For domestic defense one must also entertain the likelihood of internal or domestic threats. Even though the domestic threat might be the least likely to occur you cannot ignore it. The problem is that the least likely scenario is the easiest to monitor, the easiest to respond to, and the easiest to control.
So as a government you start instituting ‘protections’ into the system to try and thwart such things from happening. These protections start to infringe on what many in the society deem as rights, even though the intent is to keep them safe. Then more restrictions are enacted, travel documentations, increased taxation to pay for enhancements and departments that run them. Soon the government starts to look at their own population as an even bigger threat as more and more rumblings are being detected within the communities. Protests are becoming more and more frequent and even prior government workers and soldiers are starting to mix with the protestors.
Suddenly the government identifies vast sections of the population that can no longer be trusted or may need to be identified as potential terrorists because they have skills and knowledge above that of the regular citizenry. So you put out warnings to the local police intelligence units to be watchful for anyone who displays certain political positions on bumper stickers, or if they display prior association with the military and pro Second Amendment position, they may be a threat. Soon the government needs to expand even more due to the expansion of the perceived threat and the cycle is renewed; like a self licking ice cream cone.
As Thomas Paine so plainly stated; governments are at best necessary evils, what is the purpose for which OUR government was created?
The Declaration of Independence tells us that we are endowed, upon our creation, with certain unalienable Rights and “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted…” The Constitution states the government is there to “establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
Nowhere in these documents or the reasons for their creation do I find that they are to burden the populace under massive taxation, control the populace under hundreds of thousands of intrusive laws, steal from the populace without due process and without a trial (current takings laws and withholding), more and more taxes, and licensing of rights that are not supposed to be infringed upon when in fact they are supposed to be protecting them.
As our forefathers knew, and many of us have forgotten or never learned, governments on the whole are much like man in general. They are prone to abuses, self aggrandizement, power hungry, and corruptible. Every government, every society in the history of mankind has undergone this cycle of government corruption and we are no different.
We have Congressmen admitting that they do not decide whether a law is constitutional before they vote on it, even though they swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. I ask how can you support and defend something when you are voting on laws that you know may not be constitutional. We have courts and judges that will not allow the Constitution to be a defense or will not allow the law to be presented as a defense (Tax court), yet people are sentenced to years in prison for supposedly breaking the very same laws that would acquit them.
We have people in the White House who are self admitted communists, Marxists, and followers of Mao with the ear of the President. We have a President whose actions and words at the best slant toward socialism and at worst embraces communism. We have federal takeovers of vast sections of industry, an ever expanding deficit with attempts to increase that deficit by trillions, laws enacted to fight terrorism that point their efforts inward toward our own citizens, ever expanding powers given to monitor, track, invade the rights of the very people they were created to protect.
As a parent I sometimes wanted to be able to put my child in a padded room where I could guarantee that they would not get hurt, that no evil could get to them, that their every need would be met (food, shelter, safety, etc). But I realized that they would never become all they could be if they did not have the liberty to make their own choices, bear the responsibility of those choices, and to overcome adversity.
Perhaps; if we just gave in to the will of the all knowing and protective government we would all be taken care of and we wouldn’t be hurt by the evils of the world or even by our own actions. But then I remembered the old adage of Paul, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” We must take the responsibility for where we are in relation to our government on ourselves. It is our responsibility to reign in a government that has gone far beyond the scope for which they were created. Just as a parent must reign in a wayward child we like wise must do so with our current wayward child.
It is time to put away childish things!