Posted on 01/15/2003 1:11:19 AM PST by JohnHuang2
How far we have come.
Just two generations ago, it was not unusual in the rural south for one man to live on another man's farm.
The owner provided the house, the land, the food, the farming equipment and all the expenses of the crop. The other man paid nothing, but provided much of the labor to raise the crop.
When the harvest came in, the crop was split 50-50 between the farm owner and his partner.
This arrangement was called "share cropping."
It was a voluntary contract and served the mutual interests of the two parties – one that had capital and real estate, the other that had labor to offer.
Today, when an entrepreneur goes into business, he, too, provides all the money, takes all the risks and provides all the labor. But he's got a partner, too – one who takes 50 percent of the harvest or profit. And this arrangement is hardly voluntary. Today's businessman has no choice in selecting a partner and he gets no help from his partner. Nevertheless, he's still got to fork over 50 percent of his earnings.
His "partner," of course, is government – mostly the federal government, but also the state, county and city officials who forcibly confiscate a total of about 50 percent of his earnings through taxes.
This is modern-day share cropping.
In fact, the federal share of those taxes exceeds all of the businessman's costs for food, clothing, shelter and health care combined. That's what this silent and non-productive partner extracts by force from every "successful" working man and woman in America today.
It's a crime. It's a scandal. And despite President Bush's modest tax-cut plan, no one is really proposing any significant reform of this grave injustice – this 21st-century feudalism.
In fact, incredibly, for political reasons, there is even some opposition to Bush's tax-cut plan that amounts to little more than a small "tip" or gratuity being returned to wage-earners.
It's time to reframe the political debate in America. It's time to talk about justice. It's time to talk about the Constitution. It's time to talk about limited government. It's time to talk about liberty. It's time to talk about the kind of revolutionary ideals our founders fought to create for the first time in human history.
We won't get there if the debate is over whether we impose upon ourselves a 35 percent tax rate or a 28 percent tax rate.
Our money doesn't belong to the government. Washington has no right to confiscate our earnings before we ever see them. It doesn't have to be this way – not in America.
As long as we tolerate the government seizing our property and redistributing it in ways designed to retain and increase political power, we will never be truly free people, again.
You won't know freedom in your lifetime. Your children will not know freedom in their lifetime. And your grandchildren will not know freedom in their lifetime.
It's time for a radical change – like the change our founders birthed in 1776. We have to say no. We have to stop participating in the madness. We have to rebel. We have to stop accepting the way things are. We have to stop playing the game.
If the people of the old totalitarian Soviet Union could do that 10 years ago, why can't we do that in the United States?
Clearly, it is simply a matter of will. The people are asleep. They have been conditioned to believe black is white, up is down and right is wrong.
I believe there is a better way.
Our national motto is "In God We Trust," not in Washington. It's time to dethrone the 21st-century aristocracy. It's time to turn the engines of free enterprise loose. It's time to give individual initiative a chance to get our economy going. It's time to return power to the people. It's time to get the government out of our personal lives and out of our pocketbooks.
If I want to be a share cropper, that's my choice – not Washington's.
It puts me in mind of the Boston Globe column a few days ago, that insinuated that Ted Kennedy could be forgiven for abandoning Mary Jo Kopechne to her death because of all the "good" he's done politically since then. We forgive our government and those who control it for far too much, on the grounds that there are no better ones, and that we largely have what we want out of life. It's a self-betrayal -- the worst kind of all.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com
By Sunday evening, 10,031 people had viewed the broadcast and another 5,300 people downloaded the file to their computers, according to WTP.
But thousands began experiencing "sluggishness" in downloading the file, with the process taking up to 15 hours instead of 15 minutes.
"Something or somebody had so severely throttled our provider's 'big-pipe' transmission bandwidth that downloading was slowed to a 'crawl,'" WTP reports. "Urgent calls by our provider to his provider, Time Warner, for an explanation of the reason for the loss in transmission capability resulted, finally, in Time Warner's suggestion: 'Turn them off' ... referring to WTP."
..."I hope that this incident will wake people up to the fact that, even in America, there are 'gatekeepers' and censors who decide what you need to know and what you do not need to know," wrote former IRS Criminal Investigation Division Special Agent Joseph Banister."
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