End Tyranny

as soon as possible

For thus says the Lord: “Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken, and the prey of the tyrant be rescued, for I will contend with those who contend with you, and I will save your children.” ~ Isaiah 49:25

Today I went to the Lord in prayer and asked what I should write about, and the answer was to address a part of the prayer that I have been taught. You’ve seen that prayer on other essays of mine, and it appears again at the bottom of this essay. So, going through it a phrase at a time, I was stopped at “end tyranny” and told to write about that part.

In the past I have written about freeing the enslaved, starting search and rescue teams to find those being trafficked, building a local group to help you and your family survive the coming difficulties, and very recently, about caring for the young with dignity and respect out of a place of humility. It is in my nature to be against wars and I have written a number of essays on that topic. It is in my nature to be for the exploration and human settlement of space, which is endless in all directions, and to carry the Gospels to the farthest stars in every direction and to all souls in between. You’ll find these differing essays here on this Substack, if you look. I’ve even used “tags” to indicate some of these topics as I complete each essay. But please feel free to ask in the comments about the essays you seek, and I’ll do my best to reply as time permits.

There are four things you can do to end tyranny. Now, I don’t want to be perceived as “victim blaming” but as Alexis de Tocqueville points out above, by asking for order from government, you are asking for the seeds of tyranny. And God has been very merciful, very kind, and very direct in telling you, over and over, though you seem to be impervious to the lesson: as ye sow, so shall ye reap. If you keep putting the seeds of tyranny into the ground, and you keep providing fertile ground in which it shall grow, a crop of tyrants will rise up, as if from beneath your very feet. You can stop, and you can stop now, and it would be good if you did. So let’s talk about those four things you can do to become masters and mistresses of your own destinies.

Stop Voting

Seriously. Stop. Don’t stop next year. Stop now. Stop right away.

Who do you expect to count the votes? The people who count the votes are not inclined to count votes for reducing their power, reducing their income, eliminating their positions, and doing away with the systems they use to impose surplus order upon you. And if you don’t think you are experiencing surplus order, if you think the only order you have around you is necessary order, then you should stop reading this substack, never look at another one of my essays, and go from me. Let your chains set heavily upon you, let them chafe and bind, and may none ever know that ye were our countryman.

They taught us a bunch of things at business school. You might like some of the courses. In the fullness of time, I believe essentially all the things they teach at Rice University’s Jesse H. Jones graduate school of business administration are available to you for free online in books, videos, and blog posts from all manner of people. The list of courses is probably available online, or is close enough to the online course listings of other business schools to be sufficient. Maybe you should think about running your own business, or running the kind of work you do as a business, because of the third thing you can do to end tyranny, down below.

One of the courses was organisational behaviour. One of the lessons in that class was “Seeking A while rewarding for B.” It’s really important. You need to take a lot of time to think it through, because if you keep rewarding for B, you will get a plentiful supply of B. And if you reward for A, you will get some A. It really goes back to what God said, which you keep pretending to hear and not doing. As ye reap so shall ye sow. If you keep planting seeds that produce B, you will KEEP GETTING B. And if what you want is A, then planting seeds that produce B will not ever EVER in all time generate any A for you at all.

If you keep voting, you are saying to God, to the voting system implementers, to the clerk who takes your name, looks you up in a list, has you sign your name, and who gives you a ballot, that you want government. And if you keep telling God that you want human-led government, what do you think God is going to do in God’s infinite mercy, wisdom, and justice? God is going to give you plenty of human-led government and give it to you good and hard.

Stop delegating your power

God gave you power over your life. Maybe not all power right away, but if you worked at it, you got to a place where you had the opportunity to do things for yourself. You have a place to live. You have food to eat. You have work to do. You can get paid for working. You can get paid for the things you make, or the crops you raise, or the cattle you husband. So why do you keep handing over your power?

God told you through the prophet and judge Samuel that by asking for a human king the Israelites were rebuking God. So why do you not attend to the lesson? Samuel told the people of Israel what a terrible mistake they were making, how much the king would take, how many of their daughters he would turn into his concubines and scullery maids, how many of their sons he would send in uniforms to be slaughtered in wars, and they would not listen. So why don’t you listen? Why is it that you have the same lessons before you over and over and over and over and over and you are sent prophets and the Messiah and you keep ignoring what God is asking you to see.

You don’t need other people to ruin your life. You don’t need other people to run your life, either, and if you think they are going to run it without ruining it you are a crazy person. If you keep rewarding them for ruining your life, they are going to keep ruining it. And if you ask them to run your life, guess what? They are going to find lots of ways to profit from the work and they are going to necessarily and inevitably ruin your life.

I shouldn’t have to tell you these things. I should insist that I won’t do it any more. I should throw books at you. I should literally hit you in the face with No Treason by Lysander Spooner, with The Law by Frederic Bastiat, with Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises. Perhaps your parents should have given you On Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de la Boétie, and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. But you won’t read these books if I give them to you, or throw them at you, or knock you upside the head with them, will you? Because if you did, then I wouldn’t have to tell you to STOP DELEGATING YOUR POWER.

Stop Taxable Events

Did you know that receiving the principal of a loan is not income to you? Did you know that paying back the principal of a loan is not income to the lender? Of course not! It is certainly true that the financiers of our world are not all of one ethnicity, nor of one religious persuasion, but it is clearly true that they have immense influence over the governments of this world. So naturally they are not going to allow the tax collectors to make the lending biz any more difficult by, say, taxing borrowers on the amount of principal they borrow, or taxing lenders on the repayment of principal.

If instead of being paid by your employer you receive a cash advance, or an advance on commissions to be earned, that is not income to you. It would become income if it were given away to you, such as by the forgiveness of the principal of the loan, and it would become a taxable event in that case if, and only if, the event were recorded in some way. Like by your employer taking it off their taxes as a business expense.

As it happens, I was in the city of Las Vegas in the seventh month of 2004. My friend Mark Skousen invited me to speak at the first event he promoted under the name “FreedomFest.” For various reasons that I find unclear or foolish, Mark counts the FreedomFest events from a later date. But I was there, and I spoke on a panel sitting next to Patri Friedman. He spoke about seasteading. I spoke about Somalia, building free ports, and building toll roads. There were many other speakers that weekend.

In exchange for the opportunity to speak, I paid all my travel and living expenses at the event, but got in to the show for free. I was also provided a table in the exhibitor hall. Since I was, at the time, starting to publish The Indomitus Report as a financial newsletter, I stayed as much as I could at my table. Across an aisle from me, and down a few tables, were the brothers Schiff, Peter and Andrew. And visiting them at their table from time to time was their dad, Irwin Schiff.

Irwin was on bond, and I don’t think he spoke at this event in 2004. He was appealing a conviction, if I recall correctly. Sadly, of course, he lost his appeal. He spent his final years in prison. Again to my recollection of these events, he was diagnosed with cancer and his family’s request that he be allowed to spend his final days at home was refused. The state hated him, wanted him dead, incarcerated him, and kept him in prison until he died.

Naturally, people who tell you that the state is fraudulent, that taxes are not compulsory, that there are things you can do to limit the government’s ability to collect money from you, are not going to be loved by the state. I have become used to these facts, believe me.

It is also the case that in hearings before congress in the late 1990s, during the second term of the evil nefarious mass murderer and rapist Bill Clinton, members of congress invited a great many tax payers who had been treated abusively by the Infernal Revenue Service to testify. I call these men and women congresscritters because they are not like good people, not like decent human beings, they are mostly grifters with every once in a very long while someone who thinks of him or herself as a public servant. Ron Paul, for example, would be an exception tending to prove up the rule that congress critters are horrid, nasty, corrupt, ugly, mean, and in many cases quite stupid.

But, wow, they had these hearings. And a lot of people testified. CSPAN video taped the whole thing. Transcripts exist. After hearing from victims of really outrageous terrible ugly nasty abusive mean-spirited bad behaviour by the disgusting troglodytes who work for the irs, congress called the commissioner to testify. I think instead that an assistant commissioner was sent. That guy was asked by the congress critters why the gooferment agency he was involved in was so mean to the constituents of these same congress things.

Do you know what he said? He said that they had to be abusive because they didn’t have enough places to put all the people who were already refusing to file. So they asked him how many people that was, and he said it was sixty-six million. That was in 1997 or so, iirc. Every year since then the irs has reported how many people they think should file are not filing, and as recently as 2019, I would go look every year because I thought it was an interesting number. It kept going up. The last time I looked, as I say in 2019, it was 125 million persons.

Now try to imagine how the country of 341 million or so persons (which is the concatenation of the numbers counted by the census takers in various places and compared in some ways against numbers counted by county gooferments, and so it is all lies and useless, but might be an approximation of sorts) tried to put 125 million people in prison for refusing to file tax paperwork. Let’s say it only took one person to guard every ten prisoners, which is a hugely risky approach, and doesn’t really work because of 24 hours in a day and needing to have time to sleep. There goes another 12.5 million. Where would the workforce be? Who would keep the lights on so the grifters in congress can continue to grift? How much money would it cost to feed and house all those prisoners? Where would you put the prison cells? Until they worked out this one trick of telling everyone to be afraid of a respiratory infection and having shrieking blue haired busy bodies call the police on everyone in the country so that they could close all the small businesses, run everyone’s purchases through big box stores, and literally got many of your neighbours to put themselves under house arrest (!) they figured it would be too expensive.

I’m not going to give you tax advice because, guess what, I’m not a tax professional. I wouldn’t want to be one. I know, because I have composed tax paperwork for a lot of people, companies, and non-profit entities over the years, and it isn’t any fun at all. The people in the gooferment never pay very well for this service, and the people who do pay aren’t generally very enthusiastic about it, either. Moreover, I don’t have a degree in tax law and I don’t want you to confuse me with the sort of person who would allow a government agency or an accounting board to “certify” me as a public accountant. I’m just this guy, y’know?

But if you would stop paying them, they would go away. Really. It goes back to rewarding for B, and rewarding and rewarding and rewarding, and all the time what you want is A. What do you want?

I’ve told you what you want. In their film “Running Scared” from 1986, Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal are asked this same question by the auto mechanic who repairs all the unmarked police cars in their precinct. No sooner does he ask them, “What do you want?” than he smiles and waves away their responses, and says, “I know what you want. You want to be invisible, invincible, and invulnerable. You want to come and go like the wind.”

Billy Crystal looks at Gregory Hines, smiles, and looks at the mechanic, and says, “And we want it tomorrow.” The mechanic shrugs and tells them it’ll be ready on Thursday.

What you want is to be left alone. You want to have individual sovereignty. You want autonomy over your home and person. You don’t want to have your privacy invaded, your guns confiscated, your children raped, your wife murdered, and your person chained in a wretched hole. God gave you that set of instincts when He created your soul. God also gave you individual sovereignty if you would only make use of it.

Pray

In the fourth month of 2023 I was sleeping in a van. Nearly every evening after prayers I would sit on a bench in the back of the van, get on my boots, put on my jacket, brush my hair a bit, and go into the truck stop to have a meal at the restaurant there. One day I was walking in, and a gentleman in a pickup truck parked in the loading zone adverted on the crucifix hanging down from the rosary about my neck, and asked me if I would help him pray. So we prayed.

Do you need help knowing how to pray? You should talk to God as you would talk to your very best friend. God knew you before you were born, because God created your soul before you were born. That’s how these things work. God sent your soul into this world with your permission, because this place is very difficult. Before you came here, you were told about what it would be like. No soul comes here without volunteering.

Your soul is connected to God. Again, that’s simply how things work. God feels your feelings. If you are sad, God already knows it. If you are joyful, God is very happy about it. God loves you and wants you to be happy. As abundant evidence of this fact, God sent His son Jesus to purchase for you the rewards of eternal salvation.

So let us pray. Let us pray for an end to tyranny, and for the other things we want. Because that is the fourth thing you can do. You can stop voting. You can stop delegating your power. You can stop taxable events. You can pray.

Do you have words in mind to pray? Please pray them. Pray out loud, if you wish. Jesus taught his disciples, when they asked how to pray, to go into a private room and close the door. Pray to God in private so God may reward you in public. Don’t pray in front of others as a display of piety, because if you do so, you have your reward from those who see you being pious. Pray to God for what you seek and God will answer your prayers. And sometimes the answer is yes.

Here are the words of a prayer that I have been praying. Back in 2017 it was shorter, now it is a little bit longer. If you like the words, just say, “amen.” And if you don’t want to pray some parts of it, take from it what you choose, and leave the other parts behind. If you have other words of your very own, pray those instead, or in addition. Please pray. God listens.

Eternal Father, please help us to free the slaves, stop the wars, end tyranny, cast out all demons, translate the Gospels into every language, care for the young and the old, the sick and the dying, with dignity and respect, out of a place of humility, and carry the Gospels to the farthest stars in every direction, and all souls in between. Please help with guidance, resources, ingenuity, endurance, fortitude, and patience. Please show us the little fires so we may pass by them. Please bring love into our lives so we remember what we have to live for. Amen.

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That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.