“Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals – that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government – that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.”

Ayn Rand

Maybe three percent of the adult population become addicted gamblers. Yet private gambling is illegal in most cities and states, except for government gambling schemes called lotteries. Less than ten percent of the adult population has a drug-addiction problem they can’t control. Yet all drugs are illegal for all adults in this country. Only a small number of men are sex addicts who can’t stop themselves from going to prostitutes. Yet prostitution, the combination of sex and free enterprise between consenting adults, is illegal in most parts of the country. The vast majority of adults who own guns use them responsibly and keep them away from children, yet gun-control laws are proliferating like weeds. Soon the 2nd Amendment will be shredded, and the right to possess guns, the right of self defense, will be taken from us.

This is government by and for the stupid. This is a tyrannical government punishing 95 percent of the American people for the actions of the other 5 percent who can’t control their addictions. What corruption of justice allows the rights of the vast majority of decent, law-abiding citizens to be violated because a small number of people can’t handle their sex, drugs, or gambling addictions? Why do politicians we elect presume they can destroy our rights because some people are idiots who can’t control themselves? What right do they have to punish you and violate your rights because of the stupidity or illegal acts of others? They have no such right.

Mankind fought for over a thousand years in England, starting with Magna Carta, to create and defend fundamental legal principles that protect liberty against government tyranny. The English achieved two crucial legal principles that were enshrined in English common law, and later American law. These principles are “mens rea” — no crime without intent, and “actus rea” — no crime without evidence of a criminal act.

Law-abiding gun owners are just that, law-abiding. They use their guns for sport and self-defense. When anti-gun laws control and restrict our right to bear arms, such laws are unlawful punishment against law-abiding citizens who have no intent to commit any crime, and where there is no evidence of any crime committed.

Also, gun-control laws violate another fundamental legal principle fought for over the centuries — no one should be punished for the actions of another. A man should be held responsible only for his own actions. Yet gun-control laws directly violate this self-evident rule of justice. They punish and violate the rights of the vast majority of law-abiding gun owners for the acts of gun-owning criminals or a few mentally unbalanced teen-agers who shoot their fellow students in school cafeterias.

Extend this outrageous principle and see where it leads. Suppose ten percent of us are hamburger, fatty-food addicts. We can’t allow that, of course. Therefore, all Burger King restaurants must be shut down. Because some people are too “weak-willed” to eat the “right” foods, government must “protect” all of us from our own stupidity. These hamburgers addicts must be protected from fatty foods that could lead to heart attacks. We should not have the right to decide for ourselves what food we want to eat. The ninety percent of us who eat hamburgers without getting heart attacks must be punished for the acts of the ten percent who do get heart attacks. Having a heart attack becomes a crime by this principle.

Suppose fifteen percent of young males are irresponsible and get their teenage girlfriends pregnant, which government prosecutors consider an outrage not to be tolerated. We must therefore pass a law that forbids all teenagers under the age of 21 from having sex. We will have sex-police SWAT teams roaming college campuses and breaking down dormitory doors. We must also forbid sex before marriage. The vast majority of teenagers who practice safe-sex will be punished for the actions of the irresponsible minority, and punished without any evidence of any crime committed.

Thousands of people are killed by drunk drivers each year. To prevent this, we must bring back alcohol Prohibition. More than 100 million adults in this country should be prohibited from drinking wine or beer from this day forth because a few thousand people are stupid enough to drink and drive. The vast majority of Americans who drink responsibly and moderately must be punished for the small minority who can’t hold their liquor and drink while driving.

A small minority of parents beat and abuse their children. To prevent this, all parents should be forced to go through a parent-training course before being allowed to continue being parents. If they don’t, their children will be taken from them and put under the “benevolent” care of government social-service workers, who will, of course, care for your children better than you do. The vast majority of parents who love and care for their children will have their rights violated and children ripped from their homes because of the irresponsible actions of a few parents.

If there were no compulsory education laws and no public schools, a small minority of parents might not “educate” their children, either because of stupidity, indifference, lack of money, or other reasons. Because of this, the vast majority of parents who would educate their children must be punished by being forced to send their children to government public-schools that waste twelve years of their children’s life and turn them into illiterates.

These examples show the moral obscenity and consequences of laws that violate the precious legal principles of “mens rea” and “actus rea.” Today we are awash with such laws, written by politicians who have not the foggiest notion they even exist, or who have utter contempt for fundamental legal principles that protect our liberty against their power-lusting agendas.

We are awash because, to their utter shame, the Supreme Court has repeatedly let Congress get away with violating these fundamental legal principles of common law and legal decency. The Supreme Court, over the last 70 years, has become a chief villain in this matter because they should have been protecting us against government tyranny. Yet, many of their decisions have ripped-away the sanctity of “mens rea” and “actus rea”, along with other fundamental legal principles that protect our liberty.

It is understandable, and common throughout history, for a powerful majority to become tyrants who punish minorities for “aberrant” behavior. History is full of horror stories of majorities stealing from, murdering, and torturing minorities they don’t like or agree with. It is the story of human nature at it’s worst.

But what are we to make of a society where a small minority, backed by Big Brother’s guns, now has the right to rip away the rights of the vast majority? What kind of society allows the small number of stupid or careless people that have existed in every society, to destroy the sacred legal rights of the vast majority? It is a society based on the vicious moral notion that “man is his brother’s keeper.” It is a society where this principle has been elevated to the overriding rule of government and the controlling mechanism over our lives. How so?

Every social program, every entitlement program, including Medicare and Social Security, is justified today by this evil notion that men are their brother’s keepers. The swarms of vulture-lobbyists descending on Washington asking for new programs, new handouts, new subsidies for their constituents, all tell their Senator or Congressmen that their constituents “need” the help, “deserve” the help, that they have a “right” to this help.

What are their demands based on? Group whining. If some group is suffering from some temporary economic problem, “it is not their fault,” spout the power-hungry liberals. The group’s problems are not caused by their apathy, laziness, incompetence, poor decisions, lack of foresight, or lack of perseverance. No, it is bad luck, Nature’s fault, or past injustices by other groups. It is everyone and everything else’s fault but their own. Whining is in, personal self-responsibility is out.

If a man didn’t have the common sense to save for his retirement, we need heavy taxes for a Social Security system to “support” him in old age. If farmers had bad weather this year, we need food price supports. If young teenage girls can’t control themselves and get pregnant, we need aid-to-dependant-family programs. If government regulations strangle the health care industry so health insurance is too expensive for millions, then we need Medicaid to pay for poor people’s health care.

If anyone is having a problem in life, why, it is everyone else’s moral responsibility to fix the problem. Our lives, our precious time, our hard-earned money is now mortgaged to any special-interest group who whines loud enough that everyone else owes them a living. That is what our liberal-fascists in government say — “we’re all our brother’s keeper, and brother, if you don’t want to “contribute” voluntarily, why, government will make you.” How? Through strangling taxes and regulations.

Our politicians say if most Americans are not moral enough to help their fellow man voluntarily, then government must step in and see that this alleged “moral law” is obeyed. Government is the highest judge of what is right or wrong, the highest judge of how we should behave, isn’t it? If we leave these decisions to weak or selfish men and women, why, the poor suffering special-interest groups would never get help. So government has to impose the “moral law” on all of us.

To do so, they violate our must fundamental legal rights. They strip away our property rights and our right to resist government orders. Through “creative” lawmaking and “creative” Supreme Court decisions that uphold the “public interest,” government has stripped us of fundamental legal principles mankind fought for over a thousand years to protect us against government tyranny.

Hence, we have the cannibal “entitlement-state” America has turned into. Compassion turned into compulsion. Government agents point legal guns at our heads and say, “be compassionate or go to prison for tax evasion.” Compassion at the point of a government gun. “Man is his brother’s keeper,” enforced by prisons, SWAT teams, taxes that loot forty percent of our paychecks, bureaucrats who strangle us with regulations — by America turning into a police state.

When the immoral notion that “man is his brother’s keeper” is forced on us by a tyrannical government, a country and its people lose their most precious possession — liberty. When we exchange our liberty for a mess of potage from government handouts, when we expect government and our “brothers” to protect us from every ill-wind life throws at us, we end up degenerating as human beings.

We also end up hating our “brothers” who presume the right to steal the bread from our mouths. We end up punishing law-abiding men for so-called “crimes” they did not commit, did not intend to commit, and for which there is no evidence of a crime. We end up punishing law-abiding men for the actions of others. We end up destroying a once free country.

© 2009 Joel Turtel – All Rights Reserved

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The idea of forcing someone to pay his “fair share” of taxes through progressive income taxes applies only to a society of cannibals. It applies to a society where the majority has the right to devour those people who earn more than others. Paying your “fair share” in taxes implies that all of us have a responsibility to support the rapacious Welfare/Entitlement State, but some of us have more responsibility than others. It implies that the more money you earn, the larger your “fair share” should be, simply because you have more to give.

In other words, the “fair share” principal embedded in our progressive income-tax code brings to America, the “land of the free,” Karl Marx’s dictum from his Communist Manifesto, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

This dictum is the philosophy of socialist looters who are consumed by envy. This policy simply justifies stealing from those people who earn more than others. And since there’s always someone richer or poorer than you, the progressive income tax leads to universal looting, on a massive scale. Through the progressive income-tax system, everyone steals from the next victim above him on the economic ladder. Paying your “fair share” of taxes appeals to looters or parasites who have no idea how wealth is created or why it’s wrong to steal.

To see what fair share really means, imagine the following. You have $10,000 saved in your local bank. You worked for ten years to save this money. The bank then gets a new “progressive” manager. The manager finds that most of the bank’s customers have less than $500 in deposits, which he thinks is grossly unfair. So he makes new rules for the bank. He sends you a letter telling you that he is going to “redistribute” your $10,000 to all his poorer depositors so that everyone has their “fair share.”

Do you think the bank manager should be arrested or sent to the loony bin? What if the government passes a law that lets him get away with this theft? You know that the bank manager has no right to “redistribute” your money. Does the government? Yet progressive income taxes do exactly the same thing the bank manager did.

In 2005, if you earned $80,000, you now pay a 28 percent income-tax rate, or $22,400 in Federal income taxes. A person who earns $28,000 a year now pays a 15 percent income-tax rate, or $4200 in Federal income taxes. If you pay $22,400 in income taxes, do you get five times more in services from the Federal government than the person who paid only $4200 in taxes? No you do not — you get the same “services.” In effect, those who earn higher incomes are looted far more than low-income earners to pay for Welfare/Entitlement programs that are now devouring our country. By what right?

What is the excuse that liberals make to justify this legalized looting of people who earn more than others? Simply this, that low-income earners need more money for all the goods and services they are “entitled” to. Since higher-income earners have more money, they claim, these higher-income earners have a moral “duty” to hand over their “excess” money to the “less fortunate.” In other words, they say “you have the money, we want it, so we’ll take it from you, and we’ll use the progressive income tax to do this. In effect, the federal government becomes a fence for stolen property.

Well, any mugger does the same thing when he puts a gun to your head and says, “your money or your life.” The mugger sees that you have money, he wants it, so he has decided to take your money at the point of a gun. Our government income-tax collectors are simply legalized muggers who loot our money through the progressive income tax.

In a free society, the taxes a person pays should depend on the services he gets from government, his agent. We should only pay for services that we personally use or benefit from. We could devise a system where each of us paid taxes for government services we bought – a voluntary trade between a citizen and his agent. But this system would be possible only if America had a small, limited government.

This goal is entirely possible. In 1914, the entire federal government’s budget was only $725 million. The 2005 fiscal-year budget was over $2 trillion, a 2000-percent increase from 1914. Why the incredible difference? The income-tax revolutionized the role of government from limited agent to safety-net builder. It gave government the income-raising tool it needed to create our devouring Welfare/Entitlement State.

We could have a contractual tax system if we reduced government to its size in 1914. A contractual system would be easy then, because the budget would be so small. Imagine that the annual federal budget is $750 million because we phased out regulations and entitlement programs. To be more realistic, let’s increase the budget to $75 billion (one hundred times the amount in 1914) to account for inflation, defense costs, and the general increase in population.

The United States today has a population of about 250 million people. If we had a simple flat tax calculated by dividing the total budget of $75 billion by the population of 250 million, the tax per person would be $300 a year. Do you think you could afford $300 for taxes? This figure also excludes money the federal government collects from other taxes, such as excise, tariffs, and user fees, which were its primary taxes before 1913. These extra taxes would further reduce the income taxes needed and give government more funds to work with.

Most of us would be so happy about our low tax bill that we wouldn’t want to bother with a complicated contractual tax system. We would be happy to pay the $300 and be done with it. Except for this small tax, you could keep everything you earned. Add up all the taxes you now pay and then subtract $300. Everything else would be yours.

But low taxes are possible only if we totally reject the philosophy behind the Welfare/Entitlement State. We pay heavy taxes only because we have thousands of regulations and entitlement programs and millions of government bureaucrats. The Welfare/Entitlement State and out-of-control government can be swept away only when we reject the idea that helping others is a moral and political duty instead of a personal choice.

Until then, the Welfare/Entitlement State forces us to help others at the point of a legislative gun. Our paychecks and savings accounts are no longer private property to be scrupulously protected and used for our own benefit. Instead, liberals assume that your salary, profits, and property are collectively owned. They assume that your income is a national resource they can give away to anyone who “needs” it. They assume that the only person who has no right to your money is you, the person who earned it.

Are they right? Should you let them get away with that? Does your hard-earned money belong to you, or to any looting moocher who wants to steal it from you? The next time you go into a voting booth, ask yourself these questions. Every liberal, most Democrats, and too many Republicans believe in the welfare-state philosophy. Vote only for those who don’t believe this.

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