Decay and despotism invade our lives today like gangrene creeps up the limbs of a wounded soldier in the festering fields of war. Our Washington pols swagger through fulsome milieus of political putrescence and graft. Establishment pundits spew hysterical falsehoods on a daily basis. FOMC bureaucrats print fake money like mountebanks spin shell games to carnival dupes. Special counsel shysters conduct corrupted investigations to overturn the rightful will of the people. Political thuggery masquerades as congressional legislating.
A stalwart, combative President fights off hordes of quislings and seedy Machiavellians promoting egregious bamboozlement. Lilliputians now govern Washington. The swamp thrives. Keynesianism runs amok. Crypto Marxism lurks in the halls of ideology everywhere. America drifts deeper into peril with each passing year.
Yet Republicans rejoice in their passed tax reform. They are cutting regulations at the rate of 20 cuts for every new regulation added. A wall on the southern border is being championed, and is now acceptable among more than just the radicals in Congress. Pentagon enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting new infusions of the people’s money to bolster their war machine that now seeks hegemony in the Mideast, in Europe, over Russia, and the Far East. Tinpots in North Korea represents a definite threat, but can a power crazed Pentagon handle such a threat without triggering wider war with China and possibly Russia?
Carry a big stick, but walk softly is the wisest of military traditions, but can a neocon dominated foreign policy abide by it? Doubtful. The ghost of Irving Kristol and the neoconservative dreams of his progeny for the emergence of America as not just a leader of the free world, but a dominator of it, permeate the minds of the Washington-Wall Street political axis. This axis is comprised of CFR belligerents, globalists and all manner of imperial ideologues.
Aren’t liberals and neocons wonderful? They preach benevolence and practice hate. They advocate reason and worship fallacies. They shout for freedom and enforce authoritarianism. The natural desire to associate with one’s own kind is racism to them. Accurately describing the facts of socio-cultural reality is elitist and evil. Their entire lives become an endless array of illusions, sophistries and stupidities.
The Majesty of Western Metaphysics
Few people today realize the exquisite unity between the Golden Rule of Christianity, which comes to us spiritually, and the Golden Mean of Aristotle, which comes to us rationally. Both laws are one and the same, derived from the Creative Force of the universe. There is no conflict between the spirit that animates the Golden Rule and the reason that validates the Golden Mean. Spirit and Reason are merely two different means of God expressing himself via natural law. The spiritual is also rational, while the rational is also spiritual. Both methodologies are blends; both are interchangeable.
This is why Western civilization sprang up. It was a majestic blend of Christian faith and Greek rationalism. Greece on its own could never have launched Western civilization. Israel on its own could never have done so either. It was the convergence of these two powerful cultures that gave us the greatness of the West, out of which sprang Magna Carta in 1215, and 572 years later the creation of America.
See my book, The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values, for a more thorough treatment of this resplendent merging of the rational and the spiritual into the philosophy that spawned the Founding Fathers and the birth of America.
Very important to note: The Islamic cultures abandoned this blend of the rational and the spiritual in the 1100s, and they have been going downhill ever since. Greek rationalism became taboo in their academic circles after 1100 A.D. They adopted a “literal” interpretation of the Koran as the means to guide their lives. Men and women were not to apply logic, experience, and intuition in deciding how to live. They were only to abide by the written word of the Koran; it contained, for the Muslim, all answers to life. There is, thus, no need to individually reason, dispute, challenge, investigate. Just read and memorize the “literal” words of the Koran. Science and free inquiry became of no value to Muslim scholars from the 12th century on.
See Robert R. Reilly’s, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. He chronicles the tragic development of Islamic primitiveness in a very powerful philosophical history lesson.
Opposing the Tax Monster
At a recent dinner here in Dallas sponsored by Victor Sperandeo, the President of AFR, the discussion was vibrant and profound. At the dinner was one of our great patriots, Larry Becraft of Alabama, who has for several decades been fighting the IRS in the courts by defending various tax rebels as they challenge the injustice of our present tax system. I have great respect for men like this; they are the brave progeny of Sam Adams and Patrick Henry. They have done a great service for American citizens and the various rebels who go up against the IRS today. Hopefully they will continue to win cases against this gestapo agency. Unfortunately with the corruption of our courts and judges the odds are slim of ever doing great damage to the oppressive tax system now in place. This is why Americans for a Free Republic has chosen to fight in a different way.
It is our view that we need to take the fight to the people at large. Bypass the courts because of their socialist corruption and appeal to the common sense of the people themselves. The people are against the most tyrannical aspect of the income tax, which is its progressive rate structure. As the Reason-Rupe Poll (Reason Magazine, April 15, 2014) shows, 62% of the people want a flat tax enacted.Thus public sentiment is in our favor at this juncture in history.
At our dinner in Dallas, the famous 1894 case against the income tax was discussed extensively in which the Supreme Court ruled against such a tax. There were several reasons why they did so, but the most important reason was expressed by Justice Stephen J. Field, who had this to say in his ruling: “If the court sanctions the power of discriminating taxation and nullifies the uniformity mandate of the Constitution…it will mark the hour when the sure decadence of our government will commence.” [Stephen J. Field, 157 U.S. 607 (1894)]
I contend that here lies the Achilles heel of the income tax system. Because of its “progressive nature” it violates the uniformity mandate of the Constitution. This is where it is vulnerable, and where it can be successfully attacked. Justice Field was quite correct. Such a tax would bring about the “sure decadence of our government.”
Unfortunately by 1913 the socialist sentiment of the day had swayed the courts to ignore the “uniformity mandate” of the Constitution and allow a progressive income tax to stand. Judges are human and quite often subject to sophistry. For example, our courts also ignored the “uniformity mandate” of the Constitution in their allowance of the Jim Crow laws in the South as somehow compatible with legal legitimacy in America. Such laws were not struck down until 1963. So judges are always corruptible by false ideology. This is why the courts have to be bypassed for the great issue of taxation. We need to take the fight to the people themselves.
And this is also why we need a Constitutional Amendment passed to clarify why “progressive rates” cannot be any part of income taxation. AFR’s 12-page Tax Report, Ending Progressive Tax Rates in America, gets into this issue in layman’s language and explains why we need such an Amendment to end, once and for all, the evil confiscatory power of the federal government and the IRS.
Trump and Beyond
With Donald Trump’s election, something very important could possibly take place if he can win a second term. There are two liberal judges and a moderate set to retire from the Supreme Court – Ginsburg (age 84), Breyer (80), and Kennedy (80) – in the next few years. This would allow Trump to appoint three more justices like Gorsuch, i.e., like Scalia. When combined with Justice Thomas who is very close to Gorsuch in philosophy, we would have a 5-4 majority in favor of strict interpretation of the Constitution, and it would last for the next 30-35 years. We could make great strides toward restoring the Republic as it was meant to be.
With a strong educational crusade, we could sell the American people on passage of a 28th Amendment that ended “progressive rates” because they violate “equality of rights under the law,” i.e., the uniformity mandate of the Constitution.
This is how America gets saved. This is the way Sam Adams, John Hancock and their organization of the Boston Tea Party in 1773 led to the American Revolution. Hancock, as we all know, was the wealthy merchant patriot who bankrolled the Boston resistance. The lesson to be learned here is this: When money and right ideology converge, great things happen. As Adams said, “It does not take a majority to prevail…but rather an irate tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”
Here lies the future of America. “Brushfires of freedom in the minds of men” have been lighting up now for the past several decades. Critical mass is approaching. A revolution is coming in which great numbers of American citizens will rise up to follow the example of Adams, Hancock, Jefferson, Paine, and Henry 245 years ago. AFR hopes to be instrumental in this fight.
We are presently creating an 8-minute video to explain how this revolution is to be launched and promoted. It is a visual portrayal of our 12-page Tax Report on how to end the socialist income tax in America, and thus stop the growth of the Godzilla government in Washington that is dominating our lives today. The video will be out in the next 30 days. Look for it at www.AFR.org and through this newsletter.
