IRS: Obama’s downfall?

There has been a lot of news of late with regard the the IRS using it’s authority to intimidate and delay conservative political groups during the 2012 political election cycle.  Setting aside the fact that there were accusations made, requests for enquiry, and multiple reports of this happening, the mass media simply labeled this as “right wing paranoia” up until this same media found that the Obama administration was violating their first amendment right of free press.  Once this was done, the IRS scandal picked up full steam and investigations were called, with many stating that this scandal (among many others) would be the downfall of the Obama Presidency.  It is this last statement that I want to address.  Will the fact that the IRS, under Obama, used it’s political might to silence opposition be final thread to unravel Obama’s presidency?

Make no mistake, this scandal has wide reaching implications and is a severe breech of trust of government authority that should result in jobs being lost and prison terms, but should it land on Obama’s shoulders alone?  My response to you is no, it shouldn’t.    Was there a failure of leadership?  Absolutely and as this happened under the Obama administration, when it comes to brass tack, the buck stops with him.   However, this scandal goes far beyond party lines and the purview of one man and points to a much larger, more dangerous problem.

Obama henchman David Axlerod stated it best in an interview with MSNBC when he said:

“If you look at the inspector general’s report, some folks down in the bureaucracy, you know we have a large government, took it upon themselves to short hand these applications for tax exempt status, uh, in a way that was, as I said, idiotic and dangerous because of the political implications.  [sic]  Part of being president is there’s so much underneath you that you can’t know because government is so vast”

Mr. Axlerod summed it better than I ever could.  Now while he was making these statements as a way to defend, or shield, Obama from the negative coverage, he outright stated something that I, and many like me, have been saying for a long time.  Government has simply grown too large, too powerful, to be effectively managed and policed for abuses of power and tyranny.  David, and other leftist apologists, attempt to pass the blame on this to lower level employees, ala Richard Nixon, but the truth still rings true, our government has simply outgrown our ability to control it and that is the real problem.

This is not the first time that a wing of the government, specifically the IRS, has been used in a manner to intimidate opposition.  Most notably was Richard Nixon, in which this was used as one of his articles of impeachment, but there are instances that the same has happened under the Coolidge, FDR, JFK, Clinton, and Bush administrations.  The problem is that we have a large government agency that is made up of people, people of unprecedented power and reach.  As history shows, when power is granted, there is a risk of corruption by those that wield it. No, this is not an implication of party, but an implication on allowing the size of government to grow to such a level that it cannot be controlled.

Consider this, why do you pay taxes?  It’s not necessarily because you have a desire or will to see better roads, improved infrastructure, or enacted social programs, it’s because you fear the consequences should you not.  You pay them out of fear.  You know that if you do not, armed guards can break down your door, confiscate your house and/or property, garnish your wages, even place you in prison for failure to give that to government for which it feels entitled.  It is not for country or a common good, it is driven by fear and fear alone.  So, the question I have to ask is, why did the people allowed the creation and continued existence of a government agency that controls them by fear?

This was not the intention of our founding fathers.  They did not wage a revolution against the crown so that their future countrymen would live in fear of government, but so government would live in fear of the people.  Their intent is well known and documented in our constitution and that intent was to keep a necessary evil, a centralized government, constrained, restricted, and beholden to those that it serves.  However, we have allowed government to create an agency(s) that does not serve the people but serves itself and we did so with our consent.

The IRS has unprecedented access and involvement into an area of our lives which allows for manipulation and control: personal finance.  The IRS knows how much we make, how much we save, where and how we invest, and how we spend our wages.  These are details that we do not share with our closest family members, yet we somehow find it prudent that thousands of government agents be allowed that level of access to our private lives.  It was an agency built on the very premise of depriving us of our natural rights to property and the fruits of our labor.  Within the creation of the income tax and the IRS, we do not willingly consent to payments to the federal government, we are forced to do so at the point of a spear and threat of violence.  Do you think I exaggerate?  When have you ever seen a letter stamped IRS that did not give you a feeling of dread?  When have you ever received a call from the IRS that did not immediately cause a upset feeling in your core and your mouth to go dry?  These are not the feelings of a consenting person , but of a fearful one.

I am not saying that we should not fund government, we should.  There are 17 enumerated powers that are owned and are the responsibility of the federal government.  To exercise these powers, some level of funding is required, but there are many alternative ways to provide this that do not involve allowing government insight into the minutia of our lives.  There are vat, flat and fair, and consumption taxes that remove any need for the fed to know our financial details.  Each removes them from knowing what/how much we have and provides privacy, taxing only on what we consume or which reduces the tax code to the size of postcard, thus reducing the need for invasion into our most intimate financial details.  There are ways to remove the fear associated with the IRS by removing the level of information they are allowed to access.  When you remove this access, your remove the ability to coerce and intimidate thru the use of that information.

No, the IRS scandal is not about party, it’s about the fact that we now have a federal leviathan that has grown beyond our control.  As the beast grows, the more it consumes, the more power that it has.  We cannot stop the abuses of the IRS by any other means than via reform.  Our only option is to defund and eliminate the office of the IRS and to reform our tax code.  Liberty is not achieved thru fear, it is achieved in the absence of fear.  As long as government has an agency with the power to invade, regulate, and confiscate our natural right of property, we can have no liberty. we can have no freedom.  Look beyond party, as that is just a symptom, look at the cause, a bloated federal ruling class with too much influence and control of our lives.  The answer, the only answer, to preventing future reoccurrences of tyranny and abuse is to restrain the size of government back to it’s original, constitutionally prescribe size.  Remember the next time you see an IRS letter or answer a call from them and your heart drops, free men should not live in fear of that which they should control.  If we ever wish to be free again, the abolishment of the IRS and the federal income tax is our first step.

Purpose of Government

“The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.”
― Thomas Jefferson

We, as citizens, have grown lazy.  We have forgotten our legacy and our duty as left to us by those brave, courageous men who fired the first shot for our freedom in 1775.  We have forgotten what it means to be free.

With so many of the details and controversies surrounding politics assaulting our senses on a daily basis, it is easy to become numb and oblivious to the consequences of what it all means.  As a result, we have become apathetic, we have faltered, and we have allowed our birthright to liberty to start slipping between our fingers.

On a daily basis we see our government declare a new war on some benign object from which it feels the need to protect the people.  Sodas cause obesity, we must ban sodas.  Salt causes high blood pressure, we must ban salt.  Guns are used by the evil and insane to take life, we must remove them from our society.  Lack of health insurance leads to people not utilizing services or seeking services for free, we must mandate all people have health insurance.   Drugs are deemed harmful, therefore we must dedicated resources, money, and life to their eradication.  With each of these, as government power and reach grew, our freedom shrank.

As times evolved, we have allowed the government to develop new rights and privileges:  Right to sexual freedom, right to a cell phone, right to a job, right to retire in luxury, right from the consequences of our own choices, and the list goes on.  We see consistent measures taken to try our limit our freedoms, in the belief that we are simply to naive to understand the impact.  Drones fly above our skies, presidents spy on citizens and media, kill/enemy lists are created without oversight or due process, our wealth is confiscated to be used as government sees fit, not as we see fit, and other violations too numerous to list.   Again, with each of these, as the influence of government expanded, liberty contracted.

In each of these circumstances, we listen to politicians dredge up the ghosts of our founding fathers and of our constitution to provide teeth to their arguments, to justify their over reach.  However, we have politicians that cannot tell the Constitution from the Declaration of Independence.  Politicians who are ignorant and blind to the purpose and provision of the articles contained within the Constitution.  Likewise, we have a state sponsored education system that fails, literally fail, to teach our young the foundation and meaning of this incredible document that serves as the law of our land.  As such, we have allowed the birth of low-information voters, those that know nothing outside of what they are told by the media and an ignorant ruling class.  Voters who are swindled, misdirected, and lied to every single day, abrogating freedom for handouts and made up rights, allowing their votes to be purchased by the highest bidder.  It’s time we remember our history, remember why we were provided with the Constitution, and what is the true purpose of government.

Our founding fathers sacrificed life, wealth, and comfort to provide our country with an opportunity to pursue happiness absent of tyranny.  They fought and won the right of the people to self-govern.  The key here, self-govern, as they did not wish to trade the tyranny of the crown for tyranny of another.  No, they sought to isolate the people, both then and now, from having to go thru the same trials as they did.  As such, they create the representative democracy that gave birth to the American Experiment.  An experiment based on the premise that people were granted certain inalienable rights as derived by their creator, but recognizing that human imperfection exists and that it has a tendency to abuse power if granted. 

Begrudgingly, they created a central government with just enough power to protect our nation and serve as mediator between states, but they constrained those powers thru a purposely worded Constitution.  They sought to balance, and separate, the powers of central government through a carefully constructed system of checks and balances.  To all other things, they left the power of rule to the states and ultimately, to the people.  Within this power, they provided a mechanism to amend the constitution, to allow the people the right to delegate power back to the government as they saw fit. 

While it was with good intent, is this final attribute that has been used against us.  Under the guise of security and “rights”, we’ve allowed ourselves to delegate so much power back to the government, that we are no longer self-governed.  We now have a government that finds itself above the law.  We find ourselves once again under tyranny, not by the crown, but by bureaucracy.  We have a ruling class that deems itself not subjected to the laws that they create for us.  Tyrants that wish to impose restrictions, or outright denial, of rights that are guaranteed to us.  Per Thomas Jefferson’s warning above, we now have a government that rules in the interests of the governors, not the governed.

It is time for us, the people, to realize that the Constitution was not established to grant government unlimited centralized power, but instead limit that power and reserve it to the people for themselves.  Rather than following this blueprint and restricting government, we have allowed what history has shown happens with all governments, and that is to permit the corruption of law and to allow the powerful few to rule the masses.

It’s time for the people to remember, the purpose of government is to protect our rights, not to grant them.  We are a people endowed with natural rights, rights that preexist government, rights that can not be rightfully taken away by governments, nor must we seek permission to utilize them.

 They cannot silence our speech in an effort to dissent or speak our minds or prevent us from gathering to redress our grievances. 

They cannot take our weapons. 

They cannot confiscate and redistribute our private property. 

They cannot break down our doors and search our homes. 

They cannot murder, imprison, or use the force of government to intimidate us for our beliefs without due process before our peers.

Contrary to current events, the ability to violate these principals is not granted to government.  They are overreaches allowed by the people, overreaches that we, the people,  must bring to an end.  We cannot allow them to pervert and manipulate the language of the Constitution,  to subvert its meaning and intent,  in an effort to deprive of us of our liberty.  At some point, we must say enough, we must take back the power left to us by our founding fathers. 

We are not slaves, we are not servants,  we are free men.  We are free men who determine our own course of government.  Liberty is our natural right and should government become abusive, we have duty to abolish or reform that government to bring it back to the core, basic principals prescribed by the people’s Constitution.  Now is that time.

The Constitution is not there to limit the power of the American People, but the power of government.  The Constitution does not grant government power, it grants US power.   The purpose of government is to protect the rights of the people, not provide for them.

Government only exists because we allow it to exist and it’s high time that we, the people, remember that and take back that power that belongs to us, to take back the liberty that is ours by birthright. 

“The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.”
― Mark Twain

Why Do You Hate the Liberal Left?

People often ask me, "Nicky, why do you hate leftists/liberals so much?"

I don't hate leftists, I fear them. Theirs is an ideology based on fantasy and false perceptions. Their methods have historically been proven as unsustainable and dangerous to any country that attempts to exercise them, yet they push them forward despite this truth.

I fear them because those that lead them have been able to infect both academia and the media and use both as a way to misinform, indoctrinate, and manipulate our young and the uneducated into believing that they portray a cause for "social justice and equality" despite using class and racial warfare to meet their goals.

I fear them because they have been allowed to rewrite history with the help of the media and to brand themselves as the "party of racial equality" while attempting to erase all accounts of supporting the KKK, racial segregation, promotion of abortion for social engineering, etc. Ironically, they use the calls of racist, homophobe, and other pejoratives to silence anyone that dares to disagree with them while ignoring the fact that their policies harm those they claim to stand for the most.

I fear them because they do not believe in the core principals that made this country great. They despise the concept of private property opting for a principal of confiscation for the general good. They believe in the promotion of made up rights while seeking to limit or eradicate natural rights as prescribed in our constitution. They provide a concept that big government can solve all problems even though a majority of those problems are directly tied to the actions and breadth of big government.

I fear them because the promote a concept of having a ruling class, where those that make the rules do not have to play by them. They force us to buy/participate in programs to which they do not subscribe, or are subject, to themselves. They believe that they are above the law, seeking to bypass our historical, lawful proceedings and system of checks and balances. They place themselves above those that they rule and seek to carve out special, protected classes, while stealing rights and property from those that they consider their enemies.

I fear them because they see themselves as above scrutiny and push forward with economically harmful policies under a false perception of science.  They refuse to listen to dissenting scientific opinion in relation to climate change and label those that disagree as “climate deniers who want America to have dirtier water and air”.   In their minds, they are almost god like, with the ability to control the weather with the simple passing of laws when in truth, they are capable of nothing more than using emotional responses to these charges to expand the power of government and intrude further into into the lives of American citizens.  

I fear them because they seek to cripple our energy industry and raise prices on the staples of electricity and gasoline, claiming it is for our own good and safety, despite controversies and proof of manipulated and cherry picked or falsified data.  I fear them because they seek to deny America the possibility of energy independence, and thus harm our national security, by not allowing common sense proposals such as Keystone Pipeline and hydraulic fracking to continue even though their own agencies have deemed them safe.  Instead, they would rather beholden us to energy dependence on unfriendly nations, never seeing the irony of an even greater potential environmental risk results in the shipment of fuels across our oceans.

No, I do not hate the left. I fear that they are going to be successful in "transforming" this country by praying on a lazy, uninformed, complacent citizenship. I fear them because their ideology is dangerous, harmful, and toxic to freedom and the very foundational concepts that allow America to become the greatest nation the world has ever know.

No, I do not hate the left, but I will fight them, despite my claims to let them burn in the fires of their own making. The future of our country depends on it and I am not yet willing to see it die by suicide at their hands.

Using Force of Government to Silence Opposition

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/report-top-irs-officials-knew-in-2011-that-conservative-groups-were-targeted/2013/05/11/2619face-ba7b-11e2-b94c-b684dda07add_story.html

On the heels of the Benghazi controversy and cover-up, and make no mistake, it was a cover-up, we are now finding out that top IRS officials lied to congress and the public when they stated that "No conservative groups were targeted".

This is one of many examples of top officials within this administration lying to the American People and their representatives.  However, in this case, we now have proof of government agencies being to target and harass political enemies thru the use of the tax code. This is a serious, serious charge! How can the American people, much less congress, trust an administration who consistently and constantly lies about their act ivies and policies. How can there be any hope of so called "bipartisanship" when one side of the equation cannot be trusted to be honest and forthright in any of their dealings? Further more, there is now information coming out of the investigation that IRS officials were illegally leaking donor information to key opposition leading up to the elections. Again, this is the use of the government to silence opposing voices and using the tax code to target any opposition to this administration.

I know there are are many out there that will quickly become Obama apologists saying such things like "This is just another witch hunt. How can Obama keep an eye on all aspects of government? Yes there may have been bungling or inappropriate handling of this situation, but people make mistakes?" My question to you would be, at what point to you quit apologizing and see the trend of leadership inability, out right corruption, and malfeasance associated with Obama and this government? How many controversies does it take before you start to question the ability of this administration to govern, especially in the best interest of the people and not it's own.

There is no doubt now, there is tyranny in this government. This can no longer be denied. Using the law, inappropriately and illegally, to target opposition (or enemies as Obama likes to say), is the definition of tyranny and we are now seeing that this administration is rampant with it.