There is plenty of good information out there on the vast reaches of the internet promoting a society based on voluntary interaction – such a society would not have any room for a government, which is based on the initiation of force.
One of the biggest and most successful sites of this genre is Stefan Molyneux’s site Freedomain Radio. To my dismay, great talks from Stefan on YouTube get – maybe – a few thousand views, when I wished that millions of people would get this information.
Now, how happy was I when Nicole (thank you so much) told me about Tim Hawkins. He is a comedian, a co-home-schooler, and, apparently, somebody with an anarchistic streak. What made me so happy was that his parody of The Candy Man Can – The Government Can – got nearly five million (in words 5,000,000) views.
That’s the exposure people who still think voting is a good thing need. Don’t misunderstand, I am not against voting. I am just against having to choose from the (slightly) lesser evil. I am all for voting with your wallet, in that you only pay for what you really want. Could not imagine that you would really voluntarily pay for the war on drugs, the war on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. – or the health benefits of somebody you don’t even know.
You know I am talking about taxes, right? Extortion, that the nice politician that you just voted into office, extracts from you at gunpoint, yes?
So, when you start voting with your wallet and don’t pay those politicians any more, then Mr. Hawkins will have to make some new song soon – but I am sure he would like that very much.
Without further ado, here is The Government Can…
And to help you sing along, here are the lyrics:
(Hey everybody! Gather ’round! I’m here to give you anything you like! You want free college, money, mortgages?! Whatever you like! You have come to the right place! Why? I’ll tell you why!)
Who can take your money? With a twinkle in their eye? Take it all away and Give it to some other guy
[Chorus] The Government The Government can!
Who can tax the Sun rise? Who can tax the trees? Let you run a business and Collect up all the fees
[Chorus]
The Government can ’cause They mix it up with lies and Make it all taste good!
The Government takes Everything we make To pay for all of their “solutions” Healthcare, Climate Change, Pollution (Throw away the Constitution)
Who can give a bailout? Tell us to behave? Make the Founding Fathers Roll over in their graves
[Chorus]
The Government takes Everything we make They’re power hungry And malicious
The economics are fictitious Soon we’ll have to eat our dishes Mmm! Delicious!
Who can be a failure? In so many ways? Instead of getting fired, HEY! We’ll give ourselves a raise!
[Chorus]
The Government can ’cause They mix it up with lies and Make it all taste good! And your government can ’cause they mix it with lies and Makes it all taste good!
And I feel so good Because the Government Says I should! Oh!…
Interesting video that explains how using the little word ‘we’ instead of ‘us’ and ‘they’ has made it possible for one whole country to see itself as the enemy of another, when most people in either country would get along just beautifully with any other person in the other country.
So, next time you notice a crook trying to make you an accomplice to his crimes by speaking of you and him as ‘we’ – be wary! I mean, if you get half the loot, that might be OK, but if you are also the victim, it might be prudent to look if the little word ‘we’ is indeed correctly applied.
I made a traffic stop on an elderly lady the other day for speeding on MN State Hightway 210 just East of McGregor, MN.
I asked for driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance.
The lady took out the required information and handed it to me. In with the cards I was somewhat surprised (due to her advanced age) to see she had a Conceal Carry Permit. I looked at her and asked if she had a weapon in her possession at this time.
She responded that she indeed had a .45 automatic in her glove box. Something – body language, or the way she said it – made me want to ask if she had any other firearms.
She did admit to also having a 9mm Glock in her center console. Now I had to ask one more time if that was all.
She responded once again that she did have just one more, a .38 special in her purse. I then asked her what she was so afraid of.
She looked me right in the eye and said, “Not a f—ing thing!”
On first sight, this looks like a funny story. But in my eyes there is some much wrong with it that we can really learn a lot from it.
The first, and most obvious is the elderly lady’s willingness to submit unquestioning to those she claims not to be afraid of. Why doesn’t she just use all that hardware on the person who stopped her with the intention to extort some money from her.
I don’t know if she was actually driving recklessly, endangering others so that the trooper had to intervene to save life and property of others, or if he was enforcing some random rules made by some men in black robes. Looking at the alleged location of this story…
… the second reason seems more likely.
Examining our own reaction, this story allows us to learn to understand the real problem. We find this story funny, but only because we all agree with the idea that what the trooper did was correct. Besides stopping her with the intent of robbing her for some made-up reason (speed limit), we are also not appalled by his inquiry into her exercising her rights that are already confirmed by the trooper’s superiors. She has a carry permit, so she can carry whatever she wants and does not have to answer to any lowly enforcer’s questions.
The only reasonable answer to the enforcer’s very first question should have been “None of your f—ing business!” But she probably knew that the only reaction to that answer would have been to be dragged out of the car, and then acting upon her later statement of not being afraid of nobody. And that would have been the end of that trooper, and we would have never heard of that story.
We might have heard it differently, as, for example, that a vicious female in Minnesota had murdered a trooper for just doing his duty, and the SWAT team, that had been called in to hunt down this murderous beast, had shot her 86 times – and only because the avengers ran out of bullets.
One question to leave you with – did you stumble over the trooper’s wording of “She did admit to also having…” or did you just read over this? If you did read over this without a serious growl in your throat then I have to sadly give it to you that you also consider yourself chattel of the ruling class.
The following true story is told about Mr. Obama, but I believe it applies to each and every (career-) politician out there:
President Obama walks into the Bank of America to cash a check. As he approaches the cashier he says, “Good morning Ma’am, could you please cash this check for me?”
Cashier: “It would be my pleasure sir. Could you please show me your ID?”
Obama: “Truthfully, I did not bring my ID with me as I didn’t think there was any need to. I am President Barack Obama, the president of the United States of AMERICA!!!!”
Cashier: “Yes sir, I know who you are, but with all the regulations and monitoring of the banks because of impostors and forgers and requirements of the Dodd/Frank legislation, etc., I must insist on seeing ID.”
Obama: “Just ask anyone here at the bank who I am and they will tell you. Everybody knows who I am.”
Cashier: “I am sorry Mr. President but these are the bank rules and I must follow them.”
Obama: “I am urging you, please, to cash this check.”
Cashier: “Look Mr. President this is what we can do: One day, Tiger Woods came into the bank without ID. To prove he was Tiger Woods he pulled out his putter and made a beautiful shot across the bank into a cup. With that shot we knew him to be Tiger Woods and cashed his check.”
“Another time, Andre Agassi came in without ID. He pulled out his tennis racquet and made a fabulous shot whereas the tennis ball landed in my cup. With that shot we cashed his check.”
“So, Mr. President, what can you do to prove that it is you, and only you, as the President of the United States?”
Obama stood there thinking, and thinking and finally says: “Honestly, my mind is a total blank… there is nothing that comes to my mind. I can’t think of a single thing. I have absolutely no idea what to do.”
Cashier: “Will that be large or small bills, Mr. President?”
At the Porcupine Freedom Festival, which is held annually in NH by the Free State Project, a person, whom I only know as Emily, delivered the rant I want to present here in a free transcription.
The usual argument against a society without the state (anarchy) is that we would first sink into total chaos (another meaning of anarchy, yet not the right one) and then organized crime would take over.
Let’s assume that this is true – which it probably is not – but let’s just look at it for the sake of argument, and we find out quickly that we would still be better off with the Mafia than the current ‘state’ of affairs.
10. The Mafia has a sense of honor – when they say they do something, then they do it. That is not the case with people running the state. (Ed. comment: this is self-evident if you look at which ‘professional’ group the members are generally recruited from.)
9. The Mafia’s code of conduct is simple and clear. There is no legal double-talk and not millions of rules and regulations.
8. When two families of the Mafia go to war they do not create millions of fatalities as collateral damages. For the Mafia that would be just bad for business.
7. Instead of conducting a war on drugs the Mafia is happy to provide quality products to those people who desire them.
6. When you buy protection from the government, you get protection. The Mafia limits violent crimes in the area they protect instead of only giving you a phone number to dial when you become a victim of violence.
5. The protection of the Mafia is much less expensive at 10 to 15% of your profits versus at least 40 to 50% for the current legal syndicate.
4. Unlike the government, the Mafia actually wants your business to succeed. They know that ruining your business makes you unable to pay for their protection. They also don’t impose a huge overhead of paperwork and force you to fill out reams of self-incriminating confessions (tax forms).
3. The Mafia will not keep you from having guns to protect yourself. The Mafia will gladly sell you the means to protect yourself.
2. Different than the state the Mafia will not regulate what you do in your bedroom. Instead they will offer for sale all the things you might need to increase your enjoyment.
1. Members of the Mafia have style, dress much better and are a lot easier on the eye than government bureaucrats.
The added advantage of having the Mafia being in charge is that the ‘protected’ do not believe that the organized crime lords have a god-given right to rule us (as most people believe the government has.) This will make it much easier for competition which will then drive down prices – something that will always happen in a free society.
This article is more for my own benefit, so that I can find it again later should I need to refer to it.
But as I am writing this, mostly for the links to the videos below, I thought to expand a bit, just in case you reach this page by accident. The chances are slim because there are so many more established sources for this info that it is a minor miracle that Google would send you here instead to those older links.
My added value to the information below is that you first have to get out of your mind that you did anything wrong by breaking the ‘law.’ There is a chance that you did not break the law and it was just a crooked cop below his quota who gave you a ticket anyway, but chances are good that you actually went too fast – pretty much all of us do – with the hope not to get caught.
Where the shift in your mind has to occur is that deep inner feeling that you actually did something wrong. I am not talking about a situation where you went 90 through a school zone with a high probability of kids playing on the road. That, I would consider criminal because your chances are high that you will truly harm another person. I am talking about random rules of men in black robes that say that you can only go 65 mph on that wide open, straight road where your car could safely make 95 without endangering anybody or anything.
If you are a responsible person who would stand up for their actions, you do not need a nanny to tell you what you can and can not do and punish you when you break this recommendation. If you own yourself – and I hope you don’t believe otherwise – there is nobody who could possibly tell you what you can or can not do. If somebody tries, then you have no more obligation to obey than you have to give your wallet to the mugger you encounter in the dark alley.
It might be prudent to do what the mugger asks you to do (better to lose your wallet than your life), but you would not feel any obligation to obey. To the same tune it is prudent to look out for a cop with a radar gun behind that bush on the side of the road and it might also be prudent to pay a fine if that saves you sanity and a drawn out court battle that cost more of your time than it’s worth – but don’t feel any obligation because you have broken a ‘law’ pushed upon you by some ‘authority.’ Simply, because there is no authority over you if you are not a slave but own yourself.
Armed with this changed state of mind, you will be stronger to resist at any possible legalized muggery and make the mugger at least follow his own rules.
Now, let’s see what a paralegal pastor – what an interesting combination – has to teach us in this classic video series. Some of the things might not be current any more, but take this as a start and don’t feel like being subject to, or owned by an ‘authority’ any more.
Here is the first video of a series of 12… (Edit: the series has disappeared from YouTube)
Today is the day again when America celebrates its freedom.
I don’t have much to say, but I let Chris contribute something that might be appropriate. I met Chris at a recent homeschooling event. He writes the wildest poetry you could imagine. When I tried to read the first poem he forwarded to me, I told him that it reminded me of the famous Vogon poetry.
Today I want to present a piece from his moderate era.
Land of the Free…REE-LEE
Do taxpayers pun while paying frivolous fines?
Do marlins still tug against tightening lines?
When pinched by no squirm-room, left choice-less, bereft,
then clap-trap verboseness is all that we’re left. (Seemingly)
The noose of Big Brother hangs ever about
the necks of the masses – We, the People, who pout..
..As waiting in lines with our checkbooks in hand,
we ponder the path of this once wondrous land..
..of Washington, Lincoln and ‘W’ too,
while stonily missing the freedoms we knew,
when God was the giver of all of our rights..
..before lawyer-armies marched in in the night
and put up their fences now seen at the dawn..
We knew it would happen, we knew all along.
We’re cleared to chase evil the ends of the earth,
but we can’t stand against in the Land of Our Birth(?)
The lawyers’ america (sic):One City Hall..
Can’t fight’em, or join’em, go shop at the Mall.
It’s time to hold fast and rise up to the fight..
And pull off the darkness, the long winter’s night.
Recall when as children, they taught us to sing..
My Country ’tis of Thee, Let Freedom Ring?
Remember the soldiers, parades on Main Street?
And picnics and fireworks..Man, it was sweet!
America’s stirring, her proud heart can’t stand
the tyrannies festering all through the land..
We call on The Blood that was shed for all men..
In songs that commit all our voices as One!
Patriots, everyone, Sleepers awake!
Lift up your voices, for Heaven’s sake.
Remember your blessings and answer The Call!
In Christ, Hallelujah! Freedom for all!
Hand on your heart, now sing:
My country ’tis of Thee, sweet land of liberty, of Thee I sing.
Land where my fathers dies, land of the pilgrims’ pride,
I went to college in Germany (they call it Universität) and the semester fees were about 23 Marks – maybe 10 Dollars. I lived with my parents but was registered at a friend’s house so that I could draw state-funded study support, part of which was a loan. (I still owe some of that today, by the way.)
So, I have to say, my college education was pretty – – – inexpensive. At least for me personally, maybe not so for the rest of the population. But my justification was always that later in my professional life, I would earn well and pay lots of taxes.
OK, the latter did not really happen. First, I was self-employed most of the time, and I first saw all of my money in my account and only then had to write a check (instead of it being collected before the wage earner even sees it). That created a rather intense resistance, so I did everything possible to avoid writing big numbers on those checks.
And second, I left Germany after just about six or seven years.
At one point, it becomes acute to think about those things for my son. He is still a few years away from any college thoughts, but eventually it will be something to consider.
Now I ran into this video that paints a bleak picture of the current college situation here in the old US of A… (when I revisited this article, my original video was not available any longer, so I found another one)
There is not that much to add in terms of the facts, that it really does not seem to be worth going to college anymore, but what I do want to add is the following from my very own experiences.
I studied physics and got up to the equivalent of a master’s degree – 6 years. It was fun to a greater degree, especially my little stints down at CERN, to mingle with world-class scientists – for example, the internet was born down there (no, it was not Al Gore!)
But I did not pursue a career in science; instead moved into the computer field, which was just then starting to be something to be reckoned with. What later became computer science was, in the beginning, manned by physicists and mathematicians.
So, after college, I never did anything much in physics. I did practice forcing my will onto computers during my college days, but this was more or less a side effect because the experiments I conducted produced lots of data, and we happened to have PDP 11 at the physics chair where I did my work. My first contacts with computers, a little bit before that, were in my spare time when I taught myself to program a big IBM mainframe (I think it was an IBM 360) through the use of punch cards. I did this just because I was fascinated by these machines, not because of any career goal.
All this happened during a time when, in most cases, you could still do the job you trained for for the rest of your life. With the accelerated development in technology and science, that is definitely not true anymore. Sure, programming the PDP 11 in assembler gave me some basis, but certainly did not prepare me for optimizing websites and writing that occasional PHP application. All that I do now is self-taught and did not require me to sit in some auditorium and listen to a professor who has given the same lecture for the last 20 years, who can not be replaced by something younger and more up-to-date because he has tenure.
This is why I have to wholeheartedly agree with the implied conclusions in the above video that going to college at this time is a waste of time and money, and at these costs would just make you a slave for the rest of your life. It was scary for me to learn that not even a bankruptcy can get you out of these student loans – do I see debtor’s prisons on the horizon?
Maybe my son is really smart, because at his young age, he is really embracing the digital world, which might be the area that we will be living in in 10 – 15 years. You’d better learn how to become an entrepreneur in Second Life.
This year, all things seem to come together right on this one weekend
Memorial Weekend
School’s out
Summer weather
And particularly the first point makes me ponder the eternal question of ‘what is real’. It helped a bit that I also listened to a talk by Larken Rose, one of my favorite anarchists.
Let us look at my spiritual path for a moment and see if we can somehow apply this to my pondering.
On this path, I have now reached a point where I believe that I create my own world. This is often expressed as “The world IS as I see it” and not the other way around, something that I did subscribe to at some point on my path.
However, I have to admit that this is still, to some degree, a belief and not a certainty, as sometimes doubt creeps in. Occasionally, I wish for just one very good and solid experience to show me that something that I had just created in my inner world was also visible to my physical eyes – that would be a nice thing to have and would remove all uncertainty, right? To give a rude example – I create a Ferrari in my inner world, go out the door – and there it is – in RED!
Unfortunately, these examples work both ways, so every time I create something in my own universe, and it does not show up in the one that I share with others, or believe to share with others, it is like a punch in the teeth of my certainty.
If I could only find one (oh so) little example where it really worked – creating in my own world and finding it manifested in the ‘real’ world!
Today I understood that I’d better not look for little things only – I have a really big one right in front of me, and after being able to see it – it’s undeniable.
“So, what is it?” you might now ask.
I was tempted to write some more sentences in order to build tension before I tell you, but I can’t stand this excitement myself anymore – so here it is:
Memorial Day!
Huh – that makes no sense, this is something everybody knows and agrees upon – we honor our fallen heroes and celebrate that they are dead!
Maybe that did not come out right – ‘celebrate’ might not be the right word. Let me try it a bit differently and start at the beginning.
We, as a group, came over here from Europe, mostly to escape slavery from the kings and the nobility that owned us.
We made the mistake of bringing with us the conviction that others can own us – we did not leave this behind. Could have – but did not.
With this emptiness inside, of a leader telling us what to do, we quickly got ourselves a new set of rulers. We got better ones that did not milk us as much as the old ones, but we allowed them to take rights that we ourselves don’t have.
The first few waves of leaders were very gentle with these rights, but slowly but surely the thumbscrews were tightened, not in the arrogant ways of the rulers we had left behind, but instead with delicate psychology telling us “You are free” while putting the chains on.
And we did not notice because we were still feeling the old chains, and their weight might have actually felt good because it was so familiar – and the new ones were a bit lighter, so all was good.
Leaders, like every other group of people, do not always agree, but they never had to work out their differences themselves because they had us to go into battle for them. These battles decided whose view was the right one.
Smart as they were, they did not tell the families left behind something like “Oops, George did not make it – maybe in the future your next son has more luck – but don’t worry, everything went fine, and I got what I wanted.” Instead, they said the same thing but with words like “George put his life on the line for a [insert noble cause here] and in doing so, he became a hero. You should be proud!” And then they handed the happy wife/mother a shard of metal with ‘George – Hero’ scratched into it.
As the years went on, the reason for George’s demise was quickly forgotten, but everybody remembered that he was a hero.
All this because we forgot to leave behind in Europe the conviction that somebody can (and should) own us.
Now let’s see how this would have played out had we actually left that conviction back in the old world.
We had come over here into the new world and had started to interact freely and voluntarily with each other, knowing that I own myself, and you own yourself, and that we have every right to do anything as long as it does not infringe in these very rights of others.
Now, a strange group of people might have come along, claiming rights that they themselves did not have, like stealing or making random rules that carried cage time if not followed. That would have been normal, every society breeds some of those crazy individuals but in this hypothetical scenario, where we all know that we own ourselves and can not give what we don’t own, these strange individuals would have just been put into the loony bin where they belonged – Imagine, the idea of ‘I have the right to take your stuff without an exchange and without your consent!’ – They must be surly mad!
Today, then, we would not have one hundred million people who give away up to half of their wealth obeying the command of a few hundred (congress, etc.) who back up their ‘power’ with about one hundred thousand enforcers. A nice graphic representation of these ratios can be seen in The Tiny Dot.
This article you are reading here right now, also demonstrates the ratio of Us v. Them – taxpayers v. IRS employees: it has about one thousand words. If this article represents Us, then the total of the enforcers is ONE WORD – 100 million v. 100 thousand – and of those latter, the bigger part are only pencil pushers and not real ‘enforcers.’
Imagine how strange it is that this whole article is terrified of one word.
The only explanation that would make sense is that this power is a creation of all those one hundred million taxpayers. On a logical level, the few could not terrorize those many. Only when those many would create the existence of this power, which, in a so-called ‘objective reality,’ is just not there, can this government (and any other) exist. Neither does ‘the law’ exist in some kind of ‘objective’ fashion, as it was created by the few that we put into existence and which we could just as easily un-create if we so decide.
We only have to answer this one question for ourselves:
Who owns me?
Everything else falls into place automatically – there is no ‘government’ – no ‘authority’ that could possibly make rules which I have to live by.
