Category Archives: Liberty

UPDATED: IRS Survivors (Fleeing Police State USA)

Founding Fathers, Ilana Mercer, Law, Liberty, Natural Law, Taxation

Writer Christopher Sandford describes his interactions with the Internal Revenue Service as “dealing with a simultaneously incompetent and psychotically aggressive opponent.” “What is beyond a doubt is that our relentlessly progressive and humanely empathetic leader had done precious little for the rights of those of us who find ourselves caught in the spokes of his infernal government machinery. Indeed, he and his government myrmidons have frequently spoken of their intention to pursue the allegedly noncompliant taxpayer to the very brink of that unhappy individuals’ endurance and sanity. That most certainly is part of Obama’s record.” (Writing in the April issue of Chronicles Magazine.)

“Think the IRS can’t send you to prison?,” warns CBS’ Survivor winner Richard Hatch in a timely television commercial. “The IRS sends people to prison and they’re not celebrities. If you owe the IRS $10,000 or more, call for your free tax consultation NOW. Listen, I went to prison for over four years, and you don’t want to,” Hatch tells potential victims.

The US government exercises a brutal tax-enforcement regimen. As a police state, it regularly finds citizens guilty of crimes absent the intent to commit a crime—the legal imperative of mens rea.

The “taxpayer,” compliant or not, however, must accurately be described as an innocent, non-aggressive property owner, who has the natural right to keep what he has worked for, or what was voluntarily bequeathed to him.

In the case of the so-called “non-compliant” victim of this armed and dangerous syndicate—the state—his actions have been criminalized, even though his alleged crime, more often than not, was unintentional; he did not mean to “deprive” his masters of the spoils of his labor.

Going by Thomas Jefferson, we live under tyranny, for as this founder said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

UPDATED (April 17): Fleeing Police State USA. Special Report: Tax time pushes some Americans to take a hike.

UPDATED: Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam

Feminism, Gender, Liberty, Ron Paul, Socialism, Welfare

The following is excerpted from my new column, “Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam”:

… As sincere as she is in her conviction that a woman’s “reproductive rights” are the responsibility of other taxpayers, Sandra Fluke is no statistical fluke.

Sisters love the state.

Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, dates the statism of American women to the 1980s, a function of “Ronald Reagan’s assertive foreign policy,” but also of the female affinity for bigger government. Kohut confirms that, “Then, as now, women [have] tended to favor a larger role for government programs than do men.”

John Derbyshire traces remarks about the ladies’ lack of proclivity for liberty to 391 B.C.

“That was the year Aristophanes staged his play ‘The Assemblywomen,’” Derbyshire documents in “We are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.” “In the play, the women of Athens, disguised as men, take over the assembly and vote themselves into power. Once in charge, they institute a program of pure socialism.”

George Orwell, whose insights into these matters were very deep, also noticed this. He has Winston Smith, the protagonist of ‘1984,’ observe: ‘It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of orthodoxy’ (p. 88).

Having lived in communist China “in the years just after Mao,” Derbyshire seconds Orwell. “If you wanted to hear … utterly unreflective parroting of the Party line, a woman was always your best bet.”

Libertarians like to imagine that their constituency is differently derived than that of the Republicans. However, the fantasy that women flock to liberty is just that, a fantasy. I’ve attended those libertarian gatherings in which, after “subtracting the dragged-along wives and girlfriends from these events, the normal male-female ratio of the remainder is around ten to one” (p. 86).

Granted, among the fair sex, Rep. Ron Paul fares better than his Republican rivals—no doubt because of his trenchant opposition to the Warfare State. But Obama beats Paul handily. “Against Mr. Paul,” notes the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Obama …wins among women by 18 points and loses among men by four points.” …

The underlying truth of this very public tiff remains this: On the whole, extending the franchise to females was in furtherance of egalitarianism, not freedom. …

The complete column is “Fluke’s No Fluke; Sisters Love Uncle Sam.”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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My book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. (Remember those Amazon reviews; they help the book’s mission.)

UPDATE (March 9): Myron is being cynical with his Archy Bunker comment, but is there any wonder millions of ordinary American men, who did the right thing for decades, and went to work to support their families, are no longer doing this? That white America is unraveling? They’ve been piled on as Myron has done in jest (I hope) repeatedly, called cavemen and primitives and worse by The enlightened Class, only to be replaced in the affections of their families with the state.

Military Men Respect a Man of Peace

Foreign Policy, Liberty, Military, Ron Paul

I would not have known this had I not tuned to RT for my news: “Veterans for Ron Paul 2012 “marched from the Washington Monument to the White House in an effort to show their support for the presidential candidate, a veteran congressman from Texas. The Presidents’ Day march is meant to send the message that Ron Paul is the choice of the nation’s armed forces, said group founders Nathan Cox and Adam Kokesh on the Facebook event page.”

Bless these men and women (you’ll tear-up; I did).

Reality Check For America’s Armchair Warriors

China, Fascism, Foreign Policy, Liberty, Military, Republicans, Russia

Said Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. … we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.”

And that was then.

Nevertheless, Mitt Romney (“I will insist on a military so powerful no one would ever think of challenging it”), and Rick Santorum (“I will not cut one penny out of military spending”) both decry the “gutting” of the military by Obama. They are following a not-so proud tradition. A “former president George W. Bush told his Argentine counterpart Nestor Kirchner, ‘The best way to revitalize the economy is war, and the US has grown stronger with war.'”

“In 2009 alone,” reports RT, “the United States was responsible for almost half of the world’s total military spending – 46 per cent, or 712 billion US dollars. Since then, the figures have only grown, to the point that American military spending now exceeds that of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined. The US has more than 700 military bases in 130 countries around the world.”

Wikipedia confirms that assessment.