So I guess the real question is why does our government officials fail to pay taxes and the act is shrugged off, while we the citizens are coerced and made to fear the very body of government that represents us? Isn’t it hypocritical to appoint someone head of the Treasury Department when they owe such a substantial amount of money to the government? I certainly know that if I owed $120,000-or even $34,000-the government would give me hell for it. But it seems that it’s only an honest mistake if it’s a government official in question….

You would be mistaken, however, if you thought that I support the income tax in any way. I believe that tax resistance against a government that uses our earnings to kill, coerce, torture and maim the innocents of the world is a legitimate form of protest. Men such as Mohandas K. Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau, and the very Founders of our American republic used tax resistance as a weapon against governments that use war and brute force to subjugate others. And the way I see it, our country is falling into the same path of domination and control that has been the classic method of empires throughout the ages. If you don’t believe me, ask the families of the dead what they feel of our system of governance.

What strikes me most about this situation is the utter hypocrisy of our tax system, where the people high on the government food chain are slapped on the wrist, while the ordinary person who may make an honest mistake are raided by the IRS, harassed and imprisoned at whim. Businesses have been destroyed, justice trampled underfoot and lives forever changed by that shadowy branch of government. So my message to President Obama is this: if you genuinely support tax resistance (however unlikely), be forthright about it. But if you maintain that the wealthy should pay more taxes than the working man, you should double check to see if your appointments, which are better off than many Americans, have been truthful about their own taxes. Otherwise, you are made to look like the mascot of your own political party that you have remained so loyal to.

Frankly, my views have pretty much run the gamut: Socialism, Communism, the Democratic Party, essentially anything left of center. As a Catholic, I understood that we should help the poor, to defend civil liberties, and that the economy should be protected as if we were handling a baby. And I researched anything and everything I could about the tenets of Marxist theories and Socialist and Communists governments past and present.

Yes, I even had a Che shirt. “Viva la Revolution!” it said beneath a picture of the man himself, the man so many other high school students have idolized and revered as the person that finally stood up. Little did I realize that everything I learned about Che, and Communism in general, was based around a system of control and abuse, not on revolution and the idea of justice my young mind was familiar with.

I was a sophomore in college here in one of the most liberal states of the Union. I was getting ready to go to my economic geography class, and I was thinking about whether I should wear my Che shirt, since I was feeling a little rebellious. I would choose not to, and so I went to my geography class and listened intently to my professor to see what his vision of government and the role of economics were. So convincing were his ideas and theories, from that day on my view of government had drastically changed to neither left nor right, but libertarian.

“What is libertarianism?” you may ask. It certainly isn’t a term discussed enough by the often left-leaning media bloc that feeds us our information daily. Libertarianism is basically the idea of “free minds and free markets”, which is individual liberty both socially and economically. I’ve always been interested in what makes men free, how we are able to say what we want to without fear of coercion. But Communism believes that there is such a thing as collective liberty, where the “common good” is established by the State and enforced as such. If the “people” (the Communist government) didn’t like what you had to say, you were imprisoned to defend the State. In other words, the State is God.

Libertarianism takes the original ideas of the Founders of this government and of the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment to defend the rights of the individual against the State. To a libertarian, the only role of government is to enforce social contracts and the law, and to defend us from violence and coercion. Laissez-faire capitalism, which is essentially free market capitalism, is defended as the right for the individual to make his own choices on what to buy or sell.

This embracing of capitalism AND individual liberties stuck me as odd, because when we look at the Democratic and Republican parties, they either support freer markets but more conservative restrictions, or less free market but a more liberal social view. It was a new idea that a free market, a small and less invasive government, and a view of the rights of the individual could coexist and thrive so peacefully! Seeing as how the government is taking more and more control over what we can say, eat, believe in, what we buy or sell, the ideas of libertarianism are more important now than ever before.

I encourage everyone to research libertarianism for themselves, and tune in for more articles from me about current issues with a libertarian mindset!

Check out this websites to learn more:
http://www.libertarianism.com/
http://mises.org/
http://www.lewrockwell.com/
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

Well if you did, you thought wrong.

We all know why Obama voted for FISA in the end, of course. One of his biggest weaknesses with American voters is that he’s “too liberal”, and that accusation, whether true or false, has been alienating a good section of the American people from voting for Obama. And the best possible way to ease this claim to an early grave would be to blow the neo-conservative horn of “national security” along side the lively beat of “change” and try to take the middle ground… while sacrificing his ethics upon the altar of victory.

For so many people, Obama has been a beacon of hope and the possibility of a new beginning, where the injustices and crimes of the Bush administration could be wiped clean, and America could grow and prosper from the ashes. Unfortunately for them, they’ve been used and betrayed by a man that had the common sense to vote down the Iraq invasion, but didn’t have the backbone to vote down a bill which he has criticized before. I think it only fair to include a section of Obama’s statement on the FISA bill, in order to see what kind of explanation he has to the American people for selling out on his values and original message:

“(But) I also believe that the compromise bill is far better than the Protect America Act that I voted against last year. The exclusivity provision makes it clear to any president or telecommunications company that no law supersedes the authority of the FISA court. In a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people.”

So essentially, Obama outrightly says that he voted for the bill because it’s “better than the Protect America Act”… which means that he’s perfectly fine with voting for a bill that he knows is flawed and has previously critiziced, just so long as it’s a tad better than another bill the neo-cons push into the Senate. The truth is, Obama knew that his choice was wrong, and contradictory to his previous statements; he simply didn’t care enough to make a fuss about it. Making a fuss means that you have to anger the powerful neo-conservative elite, the same elite that “swiftboated” the Democratic Senator John Kerry and sunk his chances for getting the Presidency. In Obama’s mind, it’s better to kowtow to the elite every so often, and try to appear moderate, than run the risk of sticking out his neck to the chopping block.

The truth is, America is becoming a 21 century Roman Empire. Think about it; how did the Roman Republic ever devolve into the empire that most of know it as, with emperors nominating their favorite horse as consul, where the senator’s wives were forced into prositution, and the rights of the people were abused and trampled upon? The people of the Roman Republic didn’t just wake up one day and have almost no rights, where the emperor was a god and the judicial system corrupt! It was a gradual process, where the rights and freedoms of the people were eroded away over the years. Like acid spilled on a scientists’ lab coat, it eats at the very fabric of what republics are created for. When I found out that Obama was thinking about sponsoring a Nascar race car, I almost fell out of my seat at the similarities between Roman leaders getting the approval of the people through the games, which included chariot races. (http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/11/preston.nascar/index.html#cnnSTCText)

Is this what politicians are doing now to try to pull the wool over our eyes; to make it seem like they’re “one of us”, or “plebian”, in some sense? We seriously need to wake up, people, and see the slow but sure devolution of the Republic that so many sacrificed their lives for. We have to see that our freedoms are slowly slipping away from our fingertips, and to turn off the TV and actually do something about it. I’m afraid to say it, folks… but the change you hoped for does not reside within this man.