05 Nov Your Money Isn’t Yours: Happy Birthday by Bill Buppert

“In the main it will be found that a power over a man’s salary is a power over his will.”

– Alexander Hamilton

The income tax turns 100 this year and no more malevolent and insidious a taxing scheme can be found. “The 1913 income tax was also low. An individual or married couple earning taxable income under $20,000 ($458,000 in 2011 dollars) paid only 1 percent of their income in taxes. Just about everybody then could truly say they were part of the “1 percent.” A mere 31 years later in 1944 this tax is at 94% on every penny unsheltered above 200,000 dollars and the lowest bracket at 23%, the highest book-ended bracketing in US history so far. It was not until 1982 that the heist existing bracket of 70% was reduced to 50%.  These are astonishingly hubristic takings but all Constitutional, of course because the two main functions of that storied document are central national control and unlimited taxing power.

Why an income tax when for the span of the first half of the nation’s history excepting the Lincolnian income levy during his prosecution of the War of Northern Aggression? I would suggest that the US was incapable of levying the tax during that time in a largely rural society with primitive accountancy standards and a failure of the first three central bankster schemes in the US. It was not for lack of trying but the linkage between a monopolized fiat currency and the capability to impose an income tax run hand in hand. Alexander Hamilton championed the idea of taxing citizens in the states as  a means to feed the national government.

It is no mean coincidence that the Income Tax Amendment in 1913 and the Federal Reserve were parallel creations.  The monopoly on the creation of a money cartel was the only effective means to finally tax income as a means to feed the central government and the rest is history.

All who visit my blog know that I think all taxation is theft and any rate above zero is scandalous. You will note that the government and the state are moral train-wrecks that refuse even every precept of the Ten Commandments and stand them on their head. Government ravages the seed-corn, subsidizes the looter and raises the parasite as the paragon of virtue; in other words, those who exist at the violent and coerced expense of the rest of humanity are not the wicked but the true and moral. The collectivist fever-dream would make the Borg blush in envy.

There is a reason that a tax and attacks are synonyms. They both mean the same thing.

Happy birthday, income tax.

Resist.

31 Oct Red Dawn and the New Dawn by Bill Buppert

I just got finished watching the older movie, Red Dawn, the other day and it struck me how out of touch modern American teenagers are to the protagonists in the film.  I get it, the film is an homage to hyperbolic patriotism in the fight against a foreign invasion as unlikely as the scenario could be even in the heyday of US-USSR global bipolar disorder.

With dozens acknowledged insurgencies world-wide and realistically hundreds in reality (there are an estimated three hundred in India alone), these partisan scenarios played out against internecine rivalries for power within or around various nation-states are ubiquitous. Overwhelmingly, war is a young man’s endeavor ranging from the pre-pubescent fighters in the Lords Resistance Army to the twenty and thirty-somethings that made up the bulk of the fighters in Northern Ireland, Chechnya and Afghanistan among the innumerable ranks of trigger pullers battling for some cause world-wide.

But I have to wonder just how fit the modern American teenager is for this kind of fighting whether initiated by a foreign invasion or the far more likely notion of battling a brutal and repressive regime from DC visited against its own citizens resisting the increasingly totalitarian notions of Potomac America where freedom demands a license and laws are so legion that one can’t walk through a day without violating some obscure Federal statute.

America’s youth seem to be fatally tethered to a need for information which has become so addictive that it is hard to pry one’s children from the phones and computers that shadow, if not dominate, their every waking minute and hour.  One would think that a forward-looking mind that has access to the greatest store of knowledge ever in human civilization would render a new golden age peopled by superior thinkers, new inventions and new areas of cognition that would propel us forward into a brightly lit future of unlimited potential.

Not so much.

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26 Oct Sadism and Statism: Rhyming With The Reaper by Bill Buppert

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn

Obey or else.

That may not be the meaning of life but it is the simplest explanation of all government.

Note that the only objective is abject surrender or whatever pain can be inflicted on the resister after the notions of non-compliance are made clear by the victim.

We have all heard the bromides and axioms about government being like fire, a dangerous servant and the usual platitudes about limiting the beast. Library shelves groan under the weight of hundreds of thousands of scribes, pundits and authors opining on how to temper the monster, how to steer the brute force in positive directions, how to control the perverse incentives that lead to the oceans of blood that seem to be both the birthing and death experiences of nations and states.

Over thousands of years, humans have wrestled with the problem of politically organizing society along peaceful and violent means and discover that the latter is a default of behavior.  Ignore all the library definitions; politics is a death cult. Ironically, the populations cry to have a defense against the predators among them and end up with the most empathetically crippled human beings in charge whose power at the larger level dwarfs the petty criminal excesses that drove the people to urge bondage upon themselves in the first place.

We keep the bad people at bay by putting the worst people in charge. Rinse and repeat. Over and over and over.

Whether the hijacking of the uneasy canton peace of pre-1791 North America by the Founding Lawyers shackling the country with the Constitution, the aggressive Westward absorption through aboriginal holocaust, the defeat of the Second American revolution in 1865 or the inauguration of the US predatory state abroad in 1893 and the continual war on the world that followed, you have been lied to.

Civics class is government obedience training and the metastasizing police state that emerged from the end of WWI has not stopped for a moment. Once the government got a taste of the national security state after 1916, there was no stopping it. Every war strengthened the state as it perversely screamed for domestic shackles and increasing surveillance and terror to fight…terror.

War is the health of the state as Bourne said and the mandarins in DC decided to take the war footing to the domestic front and the Volstead Amendment was born right on the heels of the income tax gestated in 1913.  A powerful hybrid brew was concocted: the power to tax not only individuals over the borders of states, in essence, nationalizing the tax cattle but using the era of Prohibition to weaponize the war on tax evasion and create a national policing organization in the Treasury Department which would expand enormously over time and have a corrosive effect on the relationship between the flock and its masters. The Treasury Department inspired the creation of legions of alphabet agencies to lord over the subjects captured in the tax jurisdiction known as the USA.

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24 Oct We Are All Federal Employees Now by Bill Buppert

Much like the silly Newsweek cover from 2009 that declared we are all socialists now nearly a generation after the death of the USSR, it becomes readily apparent that all the current US citizens are simply host animals to the Federal government as it attaches all manner of remora-like teeth to every aspect of human transaction in the former Land of the Free (prior to 1791).

I am hard-pressed to think of any aspect of the human condition that cannot be tracked down for a regulation in the massive government libraries where shelves are groaning under the weight of decades of psychopathic scribblings of the drones who comprise the Sovietized nanny-state we live in today. One could surmise that since the Age of the Lincoln, the state has proven the lie that is the limited government myth that has so permeated the fantasies of the Teabags, the Busheviks and neoconservatives in recent memory.

Obama’s centerpiece legislation in the “Affordable Care Act” has certainly been a monstrously clever scheme to collapse the private medical system and bring the dream of a single payer health care system dominated by the government to fruition. The presstitutes and their sharecroppers in the massive Free Shit Army will rush like terrified recently freed slaves to the government plantation owners to beg for more and they will get it good and hard to paraphrase the inimitable and eerily prescient HL Mencken.

Plenty of other scribblers in the blogosphere have commented endlessly of the terrifying and relentlessly stupid aspects of this scheme. Much like the usual suspects begging for the government to nationalize this or that, no such wholesale confiscation need occur if the entire tentacled apparatus of fascist regulation and taxation is firmly in place.

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15 Oct The Monster’s Ball: Swing Dancing at the Barricades by Bill Buppert

The monster hesitates in DC when the police imperium in the former swamp now known as DC finds its Praetorians choosing restraint over domination when the subjects of the tax jurisdiction known as the United States remove barricades from an open memorial to American planetary predation to deposit them at the fencing around the White House where the denizens of the Offal Office plan and scheme to steal more wealth and make more war.

This was not simply restraint but maybe a primitive acknowledgement between predators of different stripes respecting the bloodlust of the other. Not only was this not representative of compassion on the part of the police apparatus in DC but simply professional courtesy to another foreign branch of the policing disease.

If the protesters had moved on more judicious liberty targets like the IRS or the Clown Palace at Capitol Hill, the police drones would have reacted more protectively in defense of their primary clients, the rulers.

The reptile brain in the various policing gangs such as DC Metro, Capital Hill and Park Service simply realized that the veterans visiting the War Memorials were kindred spirits to the vicious and sadistic mindset that animates 99 percent of all 19,000 police agencies across the fetid plain. Much like the schizophrenic mental paralysis that cripples the intellect of so many conservatives: the notion that we can wage war on the world but demand restraint at home of the same government that looses the dogs of war. Much like the lunatic Kucinich who espouses praiseworthy goals of stopping the militaristic foreign policy of America cold since its imperial germination in 1893 yet in the same breath he champions the aggressive socialist platform of using the government to violently extract wealth and time from its citizens so the productive support the parasites and looters at gunpoint in the sadistic lottery known as democracy.

You can’t have it both ways. I am pro-life and anti-death penalty and the consistency is in the championing of life over death. I am a non-voter but Ron Paul as opposed to Kucinich represents the best humans have to offer because he wants peace on earth both domestically and abroad. But he is one solitary man in an ocean of elected moral eunuchs whose mantra is to fine, kidnap, cage, maim and kill any human unwilling to obey as they march us to fiscal oblivion in the pursuit of the perfect police state.

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04 Oct Celebrating Thuggery: Clown Posse on the Potomac by Bill Buppert

An unarmed woman was gunned down in or near her vehicle today in the bosom of DC and her child in the car with her was apparently unharmed except for the theft of her mother’s life by the usual armed and badged suspects who bring so much horror and calamity to daily American life. The woman was caught in the cross-hairs of the terror state that has emerged to fight terrorism by using terrorism. Terrorism is politically motivated violence against non-combatants and innocents which fits the political science description of what all statist government does and the tactics employed by its uniformed gangs deployed across the fruited plain to deliver the real war of terror.

After over a decade of hundreds of billions spent to protect the rulers from the various hate groups they have created globally through a war on the world that has rumbled almost continuously since 1893, the woman’s death is yet another footnote in the horror novel known as the United States government. Zombies and vampires don’t hold a candle to the death and destruction wielded and threatened daily by the clown cavalcades that comprise the political ruling class in the US. One can see the zombie-like behavior of most government employees and the vampiric behavior of the taxing entities but the carnage and bloodshed is far worse than any horror novelist could dream up on a daily basis. Skeptics should search for police brutality on YouTube which is only the tip of the iceberg of a phenomenon vastly under-reported.

One would think that after a decade of the billions wasted just mentioned and the enormous bureaucracy in Fatherland Security invested with the august task of protecting the ruling elites, vehicle proof barriers and gates would have not been an afterthought but those who deal with government even at the local level start to realize that, at the end of the day, government is simply a deadly collection of adolescent bullies whose only agenda is the maintenance and expansion of their power over others and the continuation of a very clever money-laundering scheme to vacuum others people’s wealth and resources at the point of a gun into their coffers.

One must also take note that once again, the very well-fed badged warlords of the constabulary most likely reacted the way they did because that what they are paid and incentivized to do. There will be no wrongful death suit. The child will not grow up with her natural mother. The damage will be paid for by the taxpayers, or more likely their grandchildren, since DC is broke by any private standard of accounting.

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16 Aug Tanks But No Tanks by Bill Buppert

The police in Egypt maimed and killed hundreds if not thousands and we will never know the true toll. Armored cars, tanks and all sorts of equipment normally reserved for warfare were used against the civilian population. This is the ultimate mission of all police forces, they are not beholden nor obligated to protect the population they are allegedly there to serve and protect. Police and law enforcement entities are creatures of the state and their first allegiance and loyalty is always to the ruling class that pays their salaries and demands their fealty and obeisance. There is no surprise or mystery here; absent the constabulary, no state can abuse and shred the individual liberties that remain few and far between today.

The military in Egypt has famously never been used to defend the state from external invaders for literally decades.  The primary purpose of the treads on every tank in the Egyptian security force bought and paid for with American taxpayer funds is the lubrication of said machinery with the crushed bodies of the population.

The converse and ultimately obscene notion of officer safety as enshrined in the American police state was on display during the riots in Egypt and the literal evisceration of human beings to ensure that the political machine remains in the hands of those in power. The cops pick a fight with protesters and exercise deadly force to protect themselves from any display of self-defense by their intended victims.

Egypt remains a harbinger of things to come in the United States as police forces become more militarized and bolder in their everyday war on normal citizens day by day. My friend, Carla Gericke, has launched a potent campaign to embarrass the shameless authorities in New Hampshire who seek to have a tank granted to their department to Concord, NH.

Here is a direct quote from the grant request:

“Groups such as the Sovereign Citizens, Free Staters and Occupy New Hampshire are active and present daily challenges. Outside of officially organized groups, several homegrown clusters that are anti-government and pose problems for law enforcement agencies.” 

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27 Jul Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes by Chris Dates

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy(philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs). The most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all who seek the opportunity.” – J.R.R Tolkien

 
   Amidst all of the race-pimping, hate-mongering, media-whoring, collectivist anti-gun, anti self-defense crusading, boundless breathtaking ignorance, and general awfulness that was the Zimmerman Affair,  the motto, bellum omnium contra omnes rang out in my head like a shot. A war of every man against every man; neighbor versus neighbor.
 

I heard it crystal clear over the past couple of weeks. It was painfully apparent embedded in the chants of, “stand your ground is legalized murder!” And, “Stop more George Zimmermans; repeal stand your ground!”
 

There is a sinister assumption smuggled into the premise of the government supremacist’s argument, and that assumption is this — without the Almighty Leviathan State everyone would be murdering, raping, and looting each other. I’d like to tease out this assumption in a little more depth, and focus on what is actually being said, if only implicitly. The State worshipper, the one who bows to the absolute authority of their God, is saying this —
 

“Oh, mighty omnipotent State, while we recognize your supreme sovereignty, and happily submit to your righteous rule, we believe, with all due unwavering respect, that you may have made a slight error in all of your infinite wisdom and judgement. It seems that you, the stalwart of all that is good and moral in this world, may have accidentally overlooked a safeguard that keeps us, your unthinking, unquestioning, unchallenging, ever devoted flock, from randomly murdering each other. The fact that this law wasn’t even sighted by the murderer’s feeble defense notwithstanding.”
 

“We fear that without the abolition of these laws, we will resort back the brutish, and beastish state of nature you found us in, and most graciously rescued us from. We do not desire to return to the perpetual state of war from which you delivered us. Therefore, we, as a collective, have come to the obvious and necessary conclusion that we cannot be trusted with our individual self-defense. It would be most wise of you to repeal all laws that condone the abhorrent practice of self-defense, and we will gladly, and dutifully, relinquish all responsibility in that regard.”
 

“We believe that it is you, oh magnificent State, that has written the laws of morality on the hearts of human beings. We believe this is true, because when you think you can trust us with our own defense, we pervert these laws and use them as legal cover to mask our primitive, murderous tendencies. We understand that some will perish from the abolition of these laws, but we also understand that it is ultimately for the greater good of the State, and that is your end, and your end is our end. Everything within the State, nothing outside the State.  So now, we throw ourselves upon your alter, and pray that you will banish these laws from your lands, and save us from ourselves!”
 

You might think what I wrote above is hyperbole, but this is what it comes down to. This is what people think of their neighbors. They believe the only reason their neighbor hasn’t viciously and ruthlessly hacked them to pieces, or gunned them down in cold blood is because of the virtuous laws penned by the individuals calling themselves the state. There are many factors that played into the outrage sparked by the Zimmerman Affair. Some(if not most) of it was manufactured, no doubt, but I think some of the outrage directed towards the state is justified when viewing the situation from their perspective.
 

A major part of the state’s legitimacy, in their view, stems from the state having such an unbelievable amount of power that it leaves their neighbors awestruck, and makes them think twice about reverting back to Man’s natural state. But, by their estimation, the state failed at that job. Not only has the state failed at keeping murderers at bay, it has given them license to do so with Stand your Ground, and other pro self-defense laws. This runs completely counter to their conception of what the state was created to do, leaving them confused and scared.
 

What they fail to realize is their belief in the state is what gives rise to the perpetual war that is being waged around them. Their belief in the state is the license for this perpetual war. Not a war of all versus all, but a war of some versus all. Unending propaganda campaigns, inflicted from cradle to grave, has birthed the  mistaken belief that the people are a part of the some. Of the people, by the people, for the people, and all of that nonsense. However, if the state is made up “of the people”, then it stands to reason that the individuals who make up the state have the same rights the rest of us have, and it doesn’t take an analytical mind to show this is empirically false.
 

To believe the state is the thing that keeps us from being beasts is to believe in the ultimate class war; the superior and the inferior. A class of übermensch who are truly enlightened, using superior force to keep us all in line, and our knuckles from dragging on the ground. I don’t think anything could be more absurd or further from the truth once one comes to understand the factual nature of the state.
 

This is the Big Lie that has been perpetuated by the psychopaths who’s only desire is to lord over other human beings. Unfortunately, the acceptance of this lie was on display writ large in the events surrounding the Zimmerman trial. Some people seem to think they’re the only ones who are moral in this world, and without an army of legislators keeping the immoral in chains and fetters, it would be chaos. When trying to shatter the Big Lie, I always attempt to personalize it. I ask, “if the state made murder legal tomorrow, would you murder?” The person I’m talking to usually says, “well I wouldn’t, but…..” If I’m talking to a woman I would ask, “if the state made prostitution legal tomorrow, would you become a whore?” Again, the answer is, “well I wouldn’t, but…..”
 

You see, everyone is worried about everyone else, instead of just focusing on what they would do. They don’t seem to understand that their basic sense of morality is mirrored by almost everyone else around them. This fear is what ultimately gives rise to the state. They are willing to create the most immoral institution the world has ever seen, because they have an irrational fear of their neighbor.
 

I’d like to ask this question: absent the murderous, predatory state, and the criminal syndicates it has spawned, how many true criminals do you think are out there? Too many for free and independent human beings to handle? I think not.
 

Resist the Big Lie.

14 Jul Truth and Collectivism by Bill Buppert

It may be a tired saw that politicians lie but the truth to the notion bears examination.  The libertarian enterprise outside of the Libertarian Party apparatus is essentially a non-political undertaking. It is trying to tease out and liquidate the political form of organizing societies. The freed market, spontaneous order and voluntary nature of the anarchist society means that compromise cannot be reached via initiated violence so what has become the easiest route to a societal forcing function cannot be leveraged.

Collectivism is based on deception, disinformation and lies; it has to be.  No sober humans in their right and moral minds would countenance the casual brutality and bloody-mindedness that is beneath the surface of all contemporary political rhetoric and action.

We often hear of the National Socialist and Communist uses of the Big Lie to keep populations under the boot and the self-congratulatory tone of modern democratic supporters in the West of the superiority of their societal constructs.  All sheer poppycock and a rhetorical shield to hide the fist and the lash. The very fundamental elements and public drapery of anthems, flag waving and political speeches are merely props and theatrical devices used to make the pig look more handsome and the smell of offal more appealing.

Why do you think every modern politician except Ron Paul tailors their speeches and bromides to the demographics of their audiences?

I am amused at the “stop bullying” campaigns sponsored by the government the antiterrorism that has led to so much political frothing and exponential growth of the government when these very notions are the basis of the government and state itself.

Terrorism is the threat or use of violence against non-combatants and innocents to achieve political goals.  A textbook definition of what a state is.

From Plato to Karl Popper to Leo Strauss, all parts of the political spectrum have used the “noble lie” to grasp for and maintain power at the expense of the remainder of all communities because they know what is best for the rest of humanity in their neck of the woods.

If you learn one thing from this exposition of the intuitively obvious, it is that outside of libertarian circles, truth has a whole new meaning and the destruction of it and exploitation of the lie is the foundational concept in the pursuit of all political power.

Is there a litmus test available?  Occam’s Razor shows one that is elegantly simple: whatever a politician or their mediums in the media say, ask yourself if it advances the maintenance or expansion of state power?  They will lie to ensure that is the case.

29 Jun The Fireworks Smuggler: Keeping the Spirit of ’76 Alive by Chris Dates

“Make no mistake, when you cheer for the people of the American Revolution, you are cheering for traitors and criminals. They broke the law, because freedom is always illegal.”  – Larken Rose

It is truly something that is worth celebrating. While the masses of people in this country are lost in a sea of red, white, and blue, celebrating an event they don’t really even understand or comprehend, I’ll be celebrating something else; something that harkens back to the real meaning of the day — acts of defiance.

Every year, just before Independence Day, people who would otherwise claim to be law-abiding citizens, break the law. They seek to defy the laws that prohibit them from owning and using fireworks. They venture just outside of the political boundaries that have banned the use of fireworks except for those who have sought the proper channels; have applied for the correct licensing; and have paid for the privilege of recreating an act of which men were in open rebellion against their government.  The irony of that situation is enough to make any freedom lover’s stomach churn in discontent.

It is these individual acts of rebellion that bring a smile to my face. And even though the true spirit of freedom is only smoldering in this country, it has not been extinguished. How do I know this? Because men are breaking the law to reenact an event where men were breaking the law. Of course, there is a vast difference in degree, but the principle is the same, and that principle is individual nullification of law. I’m not too sure what drives these law-abiders to break the law on such a massive scale days before Independence Day. It may be they do not want to be told that they cannot celebrate the successes of their forebears in a way they see fit, or it may be just market forces driving the event. In either case, it is certainly something I can agree with. However, I do not think it to exclusively be the latter, because not all smugglers are in it for the money. Some of them smuggle just to acquire fireworks for personal use. Some of them even take their children on their cross-border law breaking excursions.

Some of you may say, “well, they’re just smuggling fireworks, no real trouble could come of it.” In most states that have outlawed fireworks, the penalties can be just as stiff as getting caught with drugs. Further, these smugglers must evade a myriad of state defenses if they are to be successful in their smuggling endeavors. Agents of the state have been trained to catch these smugglers, and they will employ a plethora of tactics to try and stop them. Police will hunt the borders looking for vehicles that quickly run back and forth through jurisdictions. The thin blue line will also band together with their bordering state brethren to help facilitate the further fleecing of these rebels. In the states where fireworks are legal, police will prowl the parking lots of the pyrotechnics purveyors and dutifully jot down the license plates of the out-of-staters. They will then radio in the plate numbers of these law breakers where they will be quickly apprehended as soon as they cross back over the border.  The penalties for these crimes against the state are more than any law-abiding citizen would usually risk in their day-to-day lives yet they risk it for Independence Day.

Along with the law breakers and the smugglers comes the loyalists. They will also be out in force calling the law on whoever dares exercise their self-ownership. One should take note of these people, because they also keep the reenactment true to form. I’ve observed this behavior for years, and I recall the first time I put all of this together. I remember thinking to myself, “this is the real reenactment complete with rebels, loyalists, and Tories.” Even the jail time and other penalties are real for those who are caught. I began to wonder if the people who engage in fireworks smuggling would have what it takes to smuggle the real thing if push came to shove. I began to wonder if these people would be the supporters of the 3%. As for the loyalists, I had no doubt what side they would take in that fight as they were already showing their hand in the reenactment.

This Independence Day I would encourage the readers of this essay to disregard the swarms of people who gather to watch the state-sanctioned fireworks display as they wave the American rag around falsely believing they are free, and focus on the illegality taking place all around you. Civil disobedience will rule the day, and even though many tons of fireworks will be confiscated, countless pounds of fireworks will be fired off with relatively little arrests made. This is because the state simply cannot handle such a large scale assault on their laws. The defiance of the law that takes place around Independence Day illustrates the lessons taught by the grasshopper and the ant story. There are simply more of us than there is of them, and if we ever truly grasp that idea — other than the disobedience surrounding Independence Day — the ruling class is finished.

The true reenactment of Independence Day will be found in these individual acts of rebellion. It will never be found in any state reenactment. Indeed, it cannot be found there, because that runs counter to what the day is supposed to represent. Maybe this is the reason that fireworks smuggling is so prevalent in this country. The smugglers and their customers know that to let the state take over the celebration is to permanently deface the day forever.

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. 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.”