I’m really sick of all the people who are saying the police are justified in assaulting, tasing, pepper spraying, and even shooting someone who is “resisting arrest” in a situation where the police officer had no legal reason to arrest the person in the first place.
Seriously, think about it. The cop can violate your rights, and if you resist the officers assault on you that actually legally justifies the officers assault. Not only that, but they’ll charge you with resisting an illegal arrest, a kidnapping by an agent of the State.
Anyone who lets that really sink in and isn’t pissed off about it is beyond being a sheep, their a willing victim, a masochist.
DAY ONE: The federal income tax is abolished and April 15th is declared a national holiday. The 40% reduction in federal revenues is matched by a 40% cut in spending. The budget is still almost twice as big as Jimmy Carter’s.
DAY TWO: All other federal taxes are abolished, including the corporate income tax, the capital gains tax, the gasoline tax, “sin” taxes, excise taxes, etc. Businesses boom, and the few legitimate federal functions are funded with an inexpensive head tax. People who choose not to vote need not pay it. (Note: this was a mainstream view in the 19th century.)
DAY THREE: The federal government sells all its land, freeing up tens of millions of acres for development, mining, farming, forestry, oil drilling, private parks, etc. The government uses the revenue to pay off the national debt and other liabilities.
DAY FOUR: The minimum wage is reduced to zero, creating jobs for ex-federal bureaucrats at their market wage. All pro-union laws and regulations are scrapped. The jobless rate falls dramatically.
DAY FIVE: The Bureau of Labor Statistics, like the rest of the Labor Department, is sent to that big hiring hall in the sky. Without detailed economic statistics, future economic planners will be blind and deaf.
DAY SIX: The Department of Commerce is abolished. Big business has to make its own way in the world, without subsidies and privileges at the expense of its competitors and customers.
DAY SEVEN: The plug is pulled on the Department of Energy. Oil and gas prices plummet.
DAY EIGHT: All regulatory agencies, from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the Federal Trade Commission, are deep-sixed. Competition is legalized.
DAY NINE: HUD is squashed like a bug. There’s a building boom in cheap, private, apartments.
DAY TEN: The interstate highways reopen as private businesses. Road entrepreneurs price travel according to consumer demand. Using modern technology, drivers get bills once a month. Credit risks – and drunks and dangerous drivers – aren’t allowed on the road. Non-drivers no longer subsidize car owners.
DAY ELEVEN: Government welfare is wiped out. Bums work or starve. The deserving poor find a cornucopia of private services designed to make them independent. Private charity explodes, as the American people, already the most generous in the world, find their incomes almost doubled, thanks to the tax cuts.
DAY TWELVE: The Federal Reserve closes its open-market operations and stops protecting the banking industry from competition. But banks can now engage in all the non-bank financial activities previously forbidden to them. The business cycle, which is caused by monetary expansion through the credit markets, is liquidated.
DAY THIRTEEN: Federal deposit insurance is scrapped. All insured deposits are redeemed from federal assets, which include the personal assets of high-level government employees. The threat of bank runs forces banks to keep 100% reserves for their demand deposits, and prudent reserves on all other accounts. There are no more inherently bankrupt banks propped up by the government, at taxpayer expense, and no more bail-outs.
DAY FOURTEEN: The shaky fiat dollar is defined in terms of gold, with the ratio determined by dividing the government’s gold stock by all existing dollars on that day.
DAY FIFTEEN: The federal government sells National and Dulles airports to the highest bidder, and stops all subsidies to other socialist airports around the country. All constraints on airline prices and service cease. It costs more to fly during peak hours than off-peak, but overall, air travel drops in price.
DAY SIXTEEN: All government regulations that create and sustain cartels are abolished, including those for the post office, telephones, television, radio, and cable TV. Prices plummet, and a host of new and unforeseen services becomes available.
DAY SEVENTEEN: Centrally planned agriculture, as imposed by Hoover and Roosevelt, is repealed: there are no more subsidies, payments-in-kind, marketing orders, low-interest loans, etc. Farm prices drop. Entrepreneurial farmers get rich. Welfare farmers go into another line of work. The poor eat like kings.
DAY EIGHTEEN: The Justice Department shutters its anti-trust division. Companies, big and small, are free to merge – up, down, or sideways. Stockholders can buy any other company, or sell their stock to anyone else. Marginal producers can no longer battle their competitors with bureaucratic weapons.
DAY NINETEEN: The Department of Education flunks the constitutionality test, and is kicked out. Private charities set up remedial reading and writing programs for the former bureaucrats. Federally subsidized sex education and other anti-family programs go out of business. Local school districts become responsive to parents or close, pressured by a fast-growing private school sector (which many more parents can now afford).
DAY TWENTY: All federal monuments are sold, in some cases to non-profit groups based on the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association, which owns and runs George Washington’s home. The VFW buys the Vietnam memorial. There is much bidding for the Jefferson and Washington monuments. Nobody wants FDR’s, so it’s torn down and the land sold to a farmer. (With the federal government cut back to its constitutional size, much of Washington reverts to productive uses like agriculture, as in late 18th century.)
DAY TWENTY-ONE: The computerized financial and political dossier maintained by the government on every American is erased. The public wanders through the federal offices to make sure, in a reprise of the East Berliners’ visits to Stasi headquarters.
DAY TWENTY-TWO: Equal rights are granted to all Americans, even members of non-victim groups. There is no affirmative action, no quotas, no set-asides, no public accommodations laws. Private property and freedom of association are fully restored.
DAY TWENTY-THREE: The EPA is cleaned out, with all “clean air” and similar big-government laws repealed. Ten thousand lawyers leap from their balconies. Private property is established in air and water. Americans harmed by pollution are free to sue the polluters, who are no longer protected by the federal government.
DAY TWENTY-FOUR: Americans are given complete freedom of contract, restoring rationality to malpractice and product liability law.
DAY TWENTY-FIVE: Government scrambles for more assets to sell (i.e., the National Zoo, also known as Washington, D.C.) to pay off the liabilities of the privatized Social Security system.
DAY TWENTY-SIX: Porno artists have to earn their own livings, as the National Endowment for the Arts tries to raise its budget through sidewalk painting sales.
DAY TWENTY-SEVEN: Foreign aid is outlawed as unconstitutional, unjust, and un-economic. Foreign politicians have to steal their own money. The World Bank, IMF, and United Nations close their super-luxurious doors.
DAY TWENTY-EIGHT: The American people are given the unrestricted right to keep and bear arms.
DAY TWENTY-NINE: The Defense Department is reoriented towards defense. American troops come home from all around the world. We adopt a policy of armed neutrality, remembering the Founding Fathers’ teaching that we could not have an empire abroad and a constitutional republic at home.
DAY THIRTY: All tariffs, quotas, and trade agreements are put through the shredder. Americans can trade with anyone in the world, without barriers or subsidies. Japanese car prices drop an immediate 25%.
Notice the newscaster says the the DEA claims Federal Law supersedes State law. Even though the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Feds on this issue DOES NOT make them right.
In reality, our Founding Fathers did everything they could to prevent the centralization of power in the nations capitol. There is no mention in the US Constitution of the US Government being able to restrict what substances people may ingest, whether it be for medicinal or recreational purposes. The biggest thing that I think everyone ignores is the 9th and 10th Amendment.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Often referred to as the forgotten Amendments, these would seem to me to protect such self evident rights as deciding how to medicate yourself, or what you choose to ingest, whether it be food, or intoxicants. Even if you don’t want to go as far as to say these rights were retained by the people, then surely they should be decided by the local State level, rather than in DC.
One other thing that people often forget is that they had to pass a Constitutional Amendment (the 18th)to enact the Prohibition, what is the difference with the war on drugs?
Some people point to the Commerce Clause in Article One, Section 8 of the Constitution as the place where such authority is derived:
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Probably one of the most abused sections of the Constitution, as far as it has been used by the Congress to power grab and justify legislating activities clearly not included in Congress’s enumerated privileges. But in reality, the medical marijuana distributed in California is grown here, and sold here, and doesn’t have a thing to do with interstate commerce, no matter how liberal you are in the application of the term.
If the Constitution doesn’t grant the Government a job, then they have no right to do it. Unfortunately this idea has been greatly overlooked, especially since the early part of the 20th Century, with such programs such as the New Deal, and the Federal Reserve being implemented.
Nowadays Congress simply rights a law declaring new powers for itself, and people simply accept it. This is unacceptable in a free society. The Government is our servant, it’s sole purpose in existing is to protect our rights as sovereign individuals. I believe it’s safe to say we’ve strayed pretty far from this ideal. That doesn’t mean it has to be that way.
One thing we can do is elect a true statesman in 2008, a true champion of liberty. That man’s name is Dr. Ron Paul.
