19A029 The Source of the Swindle by Jim Davies, 7/16/2019    

Drafting of this Blog began on Independence Day, whose manifesto was published on July 4th, 1776 to the cheers of everyone. But it does not at all say what it seems at first to say.

Its long list of "usurpations" and compaints against the government based in London are tied in each particular to a wish to take control directly; for example King George III "has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good" Now, His Majesty may have started losing his marbles and had eventually to hand the monarchy over to a regent, but the refusal in question had been crafted by his ministers in the House of Commons, and the quarrel was about control; who rules. It was not, alas, about whether anyone should rule. July 4th was about independence from British rule, not about independence from any and all rule. It did not set out to begin an anarchist revolution.

The swindle, though, appears much earlier in the famous document, and it has two parts. The wording is:

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.

There is after the "--" mark, a Big Lie and an Irrational Claim.

The lie is that governments are instituted so as to secure the specified rights. They are not; they never have been. To the very contrary, they are put in place to violate rights, and that was true from the get-go ten millennia ago, as far as can be told. Governments exist in order that one group can rule the rest, and so deprive them of their natural right to rule themselves. There is not a single example in history of a government being formed so as to secure indvidual rights to Life, Liberty or the Pursuit of Happiness, and as a scholar the author Thomas Jefferson must have known that full well. Accordingly, this was a Big Lie.

The Irrational Claim is closely associated: namely that government could ever possibly secure those individual rights. The author says it can, but that claim is bogus, completely irrational, for the task is impossible. However a government may be constituted or shaped (and Colors of Evil names several ways) it simply cannot be done; not even if the ruler was so benevolent as to wish to do it. The reason is simple: government has no resources whatever, and to accomplish a "securing" of rights, or any other task at all, it needs some. It cannot operate on air. By definition it can not earn revenue for it is not a market participant; hence, its only possible way to acquire the needed resources is to do so by force, ie to steal them. And in stealing them, it violates the very rights it pretends to secure.

There's a second element to the Irrational Claim: there in black and white the Founders used the phrase "consent of the governed." It's hard to think of a more obvious oxymoron, a bigger piece of nonsense crammed into three words. If a person is granting consent, he is not being governed! If he is willing to pay an excise tax on tea or machinery he imports, he isn't being forced to do so! It can be one thing or the other (pay it voluntarily, or pay it under distraint) but never possibly both at the same time!

Now, the foregoing is so obvious when pointed out that any ordinarily intelligent person can grasp it. Jefferson and his friends were far more intelligent and well educated than the average, so it is not credible to me that they overlooked it. They must have known full well that they were launching a giant scam, a swindle. By delighting readers and audience with those wonderful first phrases, they then slipped in the Big Lie; and the wide acceptability of lies, as Hitler later observed, is proportional to their sizes. Surely (those first audiences must have thought) after a preamble like that, these leaders must be deeply sincere? How could they not be trusted?

Yet that is exactly how con jobs are always launched.

Ten generations later here we are, living in the gigantic superstructure of a ruled society that has grown out of that huge deceipt. There is not the slightest chance that it can be reformed, for it is rotten at root; the swindle was right there on the 4th of July, 1776 before the anticipated government had even been put in place. The only hope for us and for the generations to come is to rip it out by the root. And the only way to do that was described here on July 2nd.