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Are you SURE they're breaking the Law?
by Madison MacBear
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Tovarishchii, Confederates, Countrybeings, lend me your ears! I come not to praise Hamilton, but to bury him! Yesterday afternoon, I had a discussion with my brother-in-law, in which I told him I was seeking to become holder-in-due-course of my own STRAWMAN, after which options not available to the common slaves would be open to me. He dismissed my assertions of loopholes available under the written laws because the information had come from (guffaw) the internet! He actually compared freeman-on-the-land websites to the Zimbabwean [sic] banking scam. He opined that I would look very silly telling the judge, "But it's here in the written laws -- " before they escorted me to a cell. Later, I realized that he meant (though I daresay he did not realize it) that quoting the law would not help my defense should I end up in court.

I have heard this sentiment echoed among the freedom crowd, but never by the "that freeman on the land stuff is all a bunch of malarkey" advocates before. Does this mean that the sense that the United States Government™ Empire having become a foreign and bloody tyranny inimical to the Constitution its officers have each and all sworn to uphold, protect, and defend is now widely held even among mainline Americans? Surely not barefacedly -- perhaps such a belief may be held in a sublimated form. If forced to face the logic, I feel certain my brother-in-law would deny the inevitability of drawing such a conclusion. But is this appalling situation truly the case in our fair country?

Which is more likely, a) that we have somehow, inexplicably transformed from a free republic into a tyrannical dictatorship whose officers, despite having each and all taken an oath of office to protect and defend the highest law of the land, yet arbitrarily enforce their imperial whims despite the ironclad guarantees of rights under the written laws, with no recourse available to the poor citizens caught in the judicial meat grinder, or, b) that the judges, lawyers, police, and tax officials are all scrupulously and religiously obeying the written law, but the written law does not say what you think it says? In the first case, we would be dealing with a vast, tight-lipped conspiracy, with millions of conspirators, each and every one angling to reduce us under a foreign and bloody tyranny despite both the spirit and letter of the written law, while in the second case, we need only assume a connivance to change the language and meaning of the laws, not tell anyone of the changes or their significance, and then sit back and let nature take its course. Take heart, tovarishchii, for the second option allows us to oppose the Empire without being conspiracy nuts. It is much more conspiracist to believe in the accepted story than in the "secret history" of the United States Government™ Empire.

Madison MacBear (if that's his real name) lives Somewhere in the Agora.

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