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Barack The Usurper
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Those of us most concerned with observing—and preserving—the Constitution of the United States of America, especially the first ten amendments (commonly known as the Bill of Rights—the highest law of the land), have just begun to learn the particulars of the latest infantile, illegal declaration by the criminal presently occupying the White House, another attempt to limit the power of the Second Amendment to protect the right of the people to obtain, own, and carry weapons.

Ever since the middle 1960s, and likely before, the collectivist scum floating atop the pond we call the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, have strategically set their sights on removing the ability of this nation's citizens to defend themselves from the left wingers' most precious and cherished housepets: freelance criminals—burglars, muggers, and rapists—and their mirror-equivalents in government.

There's no great mystery why this is important to them. While it is true that they all suffer from an acute mental disease that drives them to try to control the minutest details of the lives of everybody around them, the "dog's breakfast" that is America's current political situation can be understood in the simplest terms: unable to earn or create anything for themselves, they want your money. And they want your guns because they're afraid you might use them to retain your money.

This is all the more pathetically obvious when you stop and think about the politics of the current regime: underneath all the lies and omissions, they are communists, plain and simple, far to the left of quaint little old socialist Bernie Sanders, with a lifelong driving committment to subjecting those few of us they would leave alive to what might be termed Utopian Maoism, the utter eradication of all individualists and of individualism. Effective weapons in private hands represent a serious bump in the road toward achieving that ambition.

As I have said before, many times, the only reason that Obama and his Progressivist/Eugenicist bottom-of-the-barrel-scrapings want your guns is so they can do things to you that they can't do if you keep your guns. I have also said before that if you remember nothing alse about this essay, remember this: the only reason Obama wants your guns is so he can do things to you that he can't do if you keep your guns.

Where I come from, we don't say "gun control", we call it what it is: victim disarmament. It's easier to make you a victim if you're disarmed.

Naturally, Obama's attempt to impose victim disarmament on America by decree has met with a great deal of conservative and libertarian outrage, but it has made me want to ask, as frequently, and at as high a volume as possible, why are you outraged? Didn't our short-sighted ancestors set us up for this kind of thing two and a half centuries ago when they got rid of a monarch without getting rid of monarchical practices?

Robert LeFevre and others maintained that humanity started out primarily as hunters. Should the tribe or family or whatever find themselves beset by those who would rather steal than earn, they could be driven off or killed with a suite of tools which were also weapons. Later, when Mankind foolishly allowed itself to be persuaded to settle down in one place, and replace its weapons with agricultural tools, the bandits settled down, too, right beside them and called themselves a "government", no longer content with honestly stolen goods, but developing an insatiable appetite for the same booty, collected as "taxes".

Why did people put up with this? Partly because their agricultural tools were useless as weapons and they could't afford to invest their time and energy in a second suite of tools for self-defense. Also because, as Thomas Jefferson observed, "Experience has shown that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

Then he added, "But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."

Our great mistake, as I have said, is that, when we threw off monarchy, we failed to throw off monarchical practices—like the 10,000 year old practice of taxation. It is long past time to do that. Consider:

Taxation is theft. It is an act of taking wealth from people who earned and want to keep it. Despite a lifetime of establishment propaganda to convince us that paying taxes is a duty all of us must undertake and share, very few of us really believe that, which is why there is an Internal Revenue "Service", willing, eager, and able to steal anything and kill anyone they can get their bloodstained hands on.

Taxation is slavery. Americans labor from January until the summer, simply to pay the IRS, and yet "involuntary servitude" is supposed to be against the law. Like so much else under the superstate created by mass-murdering tyrants like Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, the "law" means whatever those in power find it convenient to mean.

Taxation is the fuel of war. Sometime around the end of the 19th century, so-called "democratic" governments acquired a power that most medieval kings didn't opossess. They were permitted to steal mony and other things directly from the individual. As a direct consequence, international warfare—not only the health of the state, but of statists, as well—became vastly more frequent and intense. Millions stolen and spent on antiproductive activities, became billions, and billions quickly became trillions. If governments had been limited to bake sales, church bazaars, and people on street corners with tin cups, the 20th century would have been a century of peace.

Once more, so there can be no mistake: taxation is theft, taxation is slavery, taxation is the fuel of war. Taxation is the root of virtually every evil in the world, certainly of the political evils we're increasingly plagued with. So my question is this: You allow them to tax you, to steal what you've earned and have an absolute right to. So why all the outrage when they prepare to steal your weapons?

The first anti-slavery society was founded by Queen Isabella of Spain when Columbus revolted her by bringing home a clutch of sickly, starving North Americans he'd captured and enslaved. Abolishing slavery must have seemed a pretty forlorn and hopeless ambition back then. Indeed it would be 373 years before slavery was outlawed around the world. It may have seemed equally hopeless to William Wilberforce, when the end was only 70 years away, or to William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass who both flourished on the brink of an entirely new era.

Robert Heinlein warned us that slavery is an insidious practice, arising in one society after another under a variety of comforting euphemisms. We now have a different kind of slavery to contend with. Who knows how long abolishing it will take? It doesn't matter. If we are dedicated to civilization, we must be dedicated to ending taxation.

Taxation is theft, taxation is slavery, taxation is the fuel of war.

L. Neil Smith is the Publisher and Senior Columnist for this online magazine. He also writes books.

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