Constitution Party of Minnesota Newsletter: A Power Unto Itself

Government must never presume to do anything beyond what individual citizens also have the right to do. Otherwise, government becomes a power unto itself and becomes the master instead of the servant of society.

What do you think of that statement? The Constitution Party may make some allowances to the government in a very few issues such as the coinage of money, but otherwise the party’s platform would probably be mostly in agreement with the statement. By reading the platform, it shouldn’t take long to see that the party wants to roll back much of what our current government has done.

So what does our government do that we citizens do not have the right to do? The list is very long, but the following should be sufficient to show you that our government has indeed become master of us instead of servant to us. Let us begin.

•The federal government does not use generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). These are the rules that business accountants follow to keep things above board and keep their businesses out of trouble. If we used the Congressional form of accounting, we would likely be serving time in jail.

•The federal government exempted itself from the Sarbanes Oxley Act. Every business of any size in America has been burdened by this knee-jerk reaction to corporate scandals such as the Enron debacle and has spent billions of dollars abiding by it. Those billions are added onto the costs of your goods and services, so effectively it’s a tax on you. Congress exempted itself – probably because they would all go to jail under these rules that we are required to follow.

•Government employees can touch you inappropriately at the airport. Outside of government, this is called sexual assault, pedophilia and assorted other things. There are many non-government citizens in jail for doing the very same thing.

•Police officers can text while driving. Texting while driving is a very dangerous act for any driver and anyone around them, but apparently the government employee gets a pass. Citizens would get fined for texting while driving – police officers are encouraged to do so by physically mounting the computer in the squad car. http://www.kare11.com/news/article/942432/14/Study-
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•Congress can trade stocks with insider knowledge of how the stocks will likely react to their legislation. This is called “insider trading,” and it is a crime for the American citizen. In fact, there are many people in jail for doing insider trading – but none of them are from Congress. (A recent 60 Minutes program exposed this practice quite adequately.)

•Government has made stealing legal – at least when they do it. It’s called taxes. If you were caught stealing, you could go to jail. If you demanded some portion of people’s monetary gain,you would be called thief or robber. If you told them it was required for their protection, you would be classed with the Mafia who demanded “protection” money from business so “something bad didn’t happen to them.”

•Government can deal in stolen goods (what they’ve stolen) and fence it. Since I’ve already covered taxes above, how about property that government steals from their owners so it can be given to some corporation who would certainly thank the government employees with generous financial donations. They call it Eminent Domain and make it sound lofty and legal, but for us it would be called possession of stolen property and could land us in jail.

•Government can kill, and they have done so tens of millions of times. Whether it’s the military being sent around the world to stick its nose in where it doesn’t belong or the increasinglymilitarized police forces around the nation, our government cannot be bested in the killing business. You already know what happens if you kill someone.

•You can’t lie to Congress or you’ll be sent to jail for contempt of Congress. If you lie to the police, whether local or federal, you will have additional charges (false information) brought against you. But Congress can lie to you all they want. In fact, they are expert and pathological liars. The police can lie to you to “encourage” you to confess or say something that will help their case. They lie to us about inflation rates. They lie to us about unemployment rates. They lie to us about how their laws will affect us. They lie to us about virtually everything. Are they ever found in contempt of Americans? It doesn’t seem so.

•They can give themselves a raise and do so frequently. I wonder what would happen to me if I gave myself a raise. I believe the term is embezzlement and is against the law for non-government citizens.

•They can give themselves all sorts of benefits – you can’t. (See above)

•They can print paper money that is backed by nothing of value except their word that it’s good money. A citizen caught doing the exact same thing would run afoul of the counterfeiting laws.

•They can now force you to purchase something you may not want (Obamacare) or be fined if you don’t, but they have conveniently exempted themselves from this law.

•They can send drones to spy on you and look in your windows. In fact, they’re salivating all over the halls of government thinking of how drones can help them to prevail over us. If you followed their example, you would go to jail as a peeping tom.

•They can track your every move (NSA). If you decide you want to track someone’s every move, sooner or later, you’ll be in trouble with the law. The charges against you will be stalking.

•Government police officers use lots of tricks to hunt you down and catch you. For example, they sometimes have buttons in their squad cars that will darken one of their headlights. This is better to catch you, because as you’re speeding down the highway, you’d never expect a car with one headlight out to be a police car. If your headlight was out, you could pay a fine for equipment violation. If you did it on purpose, it might be called careless driving.

•They can have “assault weapons” and are arming themselves with the latest in military hardware at a very frightening pace. For you to do the same makes you an immediate suspect. Surely anyone who wants these kinds of weapons must be focused on overthrowing the government, so it’s important that they be more heavily armed than we are. Never mind the 2nd Amendment – those are just quaint words from a bygone era. The thought that you might like to protect yourself and your family from their tyranny and the criminals they protect is a thought-crime of the highest order.

•They can imprison people and torture them without due process (water-boarding, loud Sesame Street or heavy metal music to deprive of sleep, etc). If we were to do anything like this – well, think of the uproar over that Ariel Castro who kept those three girls imprisoned for ten years. Government prosecutors were falling all over themselves trying to take this case. So, they will happily prosecute American citizens for the exact same things they do on a regular basis.

•Governments across our nation are on an “anti-bullying” kick now. Never mind the fact that the main purpose of these laws is to protect the homosexual. (If the homosexual is the bully, you’ll never hear about it.) But consider that they’re telling us we shouldn’t be bullies while they are the biggest bullies ever known to the world. I submit that being bullied on the playground in school is good training for how to stand up against the biggest bullies of them all – government employees. Maybe that’s the real reason they want it to stop so we will be unprepared for what they constantly do to us.

There you have been given evidence of a government that has become a master instead of a servant of society. Read that statement at the beginning of this editorial again. What do you think of it now that you have reviewed a small portion of the evidence? This is nothing new to our world. Consider the three quotes from one Frederic Bastiat who wrote a small book called The Law as a call for us to always be vigilant or government will consume us and everything we have.

“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.”

“But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law – which may be an isolated case – is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.”

“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”

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