�����������������������������������ͻ � BAD CITIZENS AND GOOD FREEDOM � � � � by � � Jefferson Mack � �����������������������������������ͼ "The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." --Lord Acton If every class is unfit to govern, then who will lead us? The answer is obvious. No one! Free, independent, competent people don't need leaders. A truly free society is disorganized. Nobody is in charge. Nobody takes orders. Everyone does exactly what he or she wants to do, taking orders from nobody else. If you want something from someone else, you make a voluntary trade or exchange in which both of you are happy with the deal. The people who preach the need to organize don't want you to be free. What they want is for you to pay their bills and do their dirty work so they can be free to do what they want to do. The last thing someone who wants to boss others wants around are independent, competent people who want to left alone to live their own lives. Such people never make good citizens, not the way a politician talks about good citizens. A political leader will tell you a good citizen obeys the law--every law. A good citizen works hard--at whatever job the government tells him he is suppose to work at. A good citizen pays his taxes--even if he doesn't have enough left over to feed his kids. A good citizen volunteers his or her time to work on civic projects the leader designs. A good citizen goes off to fight and die in wars with people he doesn't know so that the leader can win a place in the history books. The good citizen never complains--no matter how stupid or crude a government official treats him nor how much a leader asks him to sacrifice. Give a politician enough good citizens and he will rule forever, fat and happy, while the good citizens sweat and suffer and die to make sure the political leader keeps the good life. Politicians and bureaucrats spend a great deal of time and effort trying to convince the people they rule that a moral person must be a good citizen. Back in the dark ages they called it the "Divine Right of Kings". Now days it's called patriotic duty, or civic responsibility, but it all adds up to the argument that every decent, honorable person must put the interests of the state and the government above their own personal interests. BAD CITIZENS HAVE MORE FUN BECAUSE THEY ARE MORE FREE. A free society is supposed to have free citizens, not good citizens. The day you wake up and realize you don't have all the freedom you want, the first thing you want to do is bad citizen. A bad citizen may love the place where he lives. He may love his country and respect his neighbors. But a bad citizen won't love or respect the people who run the government. A bad citizen will always put his own interest and the interest of his family and friends above the interest of some common good as described by the people who hold political power. We are not talking here about violent criminals or rebels. Political leaders love those kinds of people. They love pulling their guns, arresting people and putting down riots. If you don't think the politicians loved the recent events in Los Angeles, you haven't been watching the TV news. Every single politician in the country has jumped on the band wagon by promising us they'll solve the problem if we'll just give them some more of our money and a little more of our freedom. Political leaders love big trials with lots of newspaper space. It gives them a chance to show how powerful they can really be. They are expecting open confrontation and they will be prepared to deal with it. They have detention camps, secret police, riot control equipment, and the army ready to go after all those who dare openly confront the government. But any political leader who's got a country full of peaceful bad citizens has got a serious problem. Bad citizens work hard to support themselves, they treat their neighbors with respect, they won't cheat others for their own gain, and they don't do violent acts that hurt innocent people. What bad citizens won't do is help the government make his or her life miserable. They continually try to maximize the freedom they have, even if they have to break or ignore a few laws to do it. Too many bad citizens make government almost impossible. That's one big reason why the Soviet Union didn't work. Too many Soviet citizens realized they were never going to get a fair share out of socialism and they stopped being good citizens. They looked out for themselves rather than the good of the State. GOOD CITIZENS MAKE TYRANTS POSSIBLE. Nazi Germany wasn't filled with people who wanted to throw Jews into bonfires, make slaves of eastern Europeans, or rule the world from Berlin. Nazi Germany was filled with good citizens and Hitler did everything he could to make all those good citizens think they were better off with him in charge, even if they did have to give up a few freedoms. Hitler was more frightened that all those good citizens might stop being good citizens than he was of the allied armies. North Korea, Viet Nam, Cuba, Iran, and Iraq are filled with good citizens, all of them hoping that by being good citizens, they will help things get better. Only things keep getting worse. The good citizen works harder but gets less to eat, has less fun, enjoys life less, and has less hope for a better future. BAD CITIZENS HAVE KEPT THE UNITED STATES FREE. Back in 1917 a majority of the voters in the United States decided they knew what was best for everyone and passed the Eighteenth Amendment, taking away the freedom of a man to relax with a beer after an honest day's work. Hundred of thousands in this great country suddenly turned into bad citizens. They didn't organize into a let's-bring-back-the- booze political party or start blowing up police stations. All they did was to keep on drinking. Some bad citizens were more than willing to smuggle, distill, or brew the booze and sell it for a profit. In 1933, the social manipulators and the do-gooders finally gave up, agreed to throw out the great experiment and a tens of thousands of people went back to being good citizens. These kind of things keep happening all over this country. Have you tried driving a fixed fifty-five along our highways? A whole industry has gotten rich selling us radar detectors to give us a chance against the modern technology of the Highway Patrol. Eventually, the wizards in Washington had no choice but to up the speed limit to 65, at least in a few places. The Drug Enforcement Administration, and every State and local police department spend billions each year to try and stamp out the use of recreational drugs. Yet every year, the price of the drugs go down, while availability go up. Anybody who wants to smoke pot, can, any place in the United States. Other freedoms are under constant attack. Take the issue of gun control. The people who tout this totalitarian principle keep telling us that the majority of Americans want some kind of gun control. So what? No majority in a free country has the right to take away the freedoms of any minority. That's what freedom is all about, and owning a gun is a damn good way to help make sure nobody starts interfering with your personal freedom. As long as the people who understand and believe that principle insist on keeping their guns, we are going to be able to keep them. In California the state government outlawed a whole collection of different kinds of semi-automatic weapons and demanded that every citizen register those weapons and turn them in. Non-compliance has been almost total. Americans used to be pretty good tax payers, way back in the forties and fifties. But one day we woke up and realized that the fat cat friends of Congress had all been given special privileges and were paying less than their fair share. So a whole lot of good taxpayers have turned into bad citizens. We are now a nation of tax evaders. We figure every angle, both legal and illegal to bring down our own taxes. Every increase in the tax structure is matched or exceeded by losses as more ordinary middle class citizens figure out ways to cheat on their taxes or join the underground economy. We've now got the politicians against the ropes. They are bankrupting the treasury, but they can't raise taxes any farther because the know all us bad citizens aren't going to take it any more. If we keep protesting and evading new tax increases, eventually the politicians will have no choice but to start cutting the waste if they want to leave enough money in the treasury to keep paying them their fat salaries. Each of the above examples shows just how much we are a nation of bad citizens. That's why we have as much freedom as we do. That's why in recent years, this country has been moving in the direction of more freedom, not less. The politicians are finally beginning to understand that you can't take an American's freedom away and make it stick. There are two many bad citizens in this country. HOW TO SURVIVE AS A BAD CITIZEN Once you realize that you are not living in a free country and that there is no go reason why you should be a good citizen, there are a few rules you need to learn so you can get the most benefit out of being a bad citizen without suffering more loss of personal freedom or even going to jail. A smart bad citizen won't let himself get caught being bad. He won't brag to his friends and neighbors about what a bad citizen he is. He won't tell the local newspaper how proud he is of being a bad citizen. He will not deliberately confront the government, and he will avoid doing anything in public that will warn any government official that he is not a good citizen. The bad citizen tries to be the invisible man or woman, the person the government official would never expect is denying the government his help and cooperation. That means if you want to be a bad citizen, you don't want to stand on any street corners making speeches demanding revolution and you don't want to run with a mob throwing rocks at police vehicles. You just want to live your own life, doing everything in private you want to do, exactly the way you want to do it. You want to look like a good citizen. You will even want to do some things that all good citizens do, like vote. Only once you are in the voting booth, you vote against every bond issue, every politician who's in office, and every new initiative that will increase government power or raise your taxes. If the only choice is between two common thieves then a bad citizen writes in someone else's name, or even his own. You insist on getting every possible government benefit you are eligible for and demand every government service the law says you are entitled to receive. If you are eligible, you'll collect social security, unemployment benefits, use food stamps, dip into Medicare, claim farm subsidies, and try to get the government to pay you for drawing obscene art or writing nasty stories. You may even decide to take a government job, if you can make more money doing that than working for some private firm. But a bad citizen who's got a government job takes all his sick leave, goofs off every chance he gets, and does everything he can to minimize the damage the government can do to other bad citizens. But don't cooperate with the bastards when it's not to your advantage to do so. Except when it's in your direct, economic advantage, you ignore the government. Never voluntarily do anything that will help the government in any way. If bad citizens know someone who is cheating on their taxes, violating a business license law, working in a job paying less than the minimum wage, or selling a little dope, they don't call the authorities. A bad citizen files his income tax return but cheats in ways that take advantage of IRS incompetence. Bad citizens work off the books and don't declare the income. They'll drive one hundred and fifty miles to buy a truck load of groceries in another state that charges less sales tax. A bad citizen loses his census form, or fills it in wrong. Bad citizens don't provide the government any kind of information unless they get an immediate benefit or there is a government official standing there insisting that they do it. Bad citizens don't sacrifice their own pleasures or happiness just because the government tells them such sacrifices are in the common good. They don't volunteer their services for anything the government is trying to do, no matter how worthwhile the project appears to be. If the politicians tell them there is an energy crisis, they don't turn the heat down and the lights off if they can afford the electricity. Bad citizens enjoy the freedom of driving their own personal cars instead of riding tax-subsidized mass transit systems or subjecting their personal schedules to the demands of car pooling. Bad citizens don't waste time sorting garbage unless there is a direct economic benefit for doing so. They don't man a voting booth, support the local sheriff, waste time in town meetings, donate to political parties, report poachers, nor contribute to the Community Chest and United Fund. They recognize that a government that steals freedom shouldn't get any voluntary help. Of course, there is a chance that someone will show up at your door pointing a gun to make you volunteer for some civic duty like jury duty. When that happens, don't argue, go. But a bad citizen won't do anything more than what is absolutely necessary. On something like jury duty, it may even be possible to help screw up the system even while pretending to act like a good citizen. It the person on trial is accused of tax evasion, drug offenses, bootlegging, pornography, non-violent sex offenses, a failure to obtain a business license, or any other crime that shouldn't be a crime in a free society, a bad citizen can always find some justification for voting not guilty, even if every other member of the jury is convinced he's guilty. Such a bad citizen is exercising the right of jury nulification, that is, the right to set a person free because the juror thinks the law is not constitutional. But the bad citizen won't admit that to the judge, the jury, nor the press. Instead, he or she will insist that he or she was not convinced by the prosecutor's evidence. When the government confronts a bad citizen, the bad citizen will insist that the government official respect every right that the Constitution and the law gives every citizen. The bad citizen makes sure he knows what rights the law gives him, and then he demands they be respected. The bad citizen will be polite, he will fight the urge to get angry, he will never, ever, initiate violence against a government official, but he will insist on his rights. Unless he is presented with a warrant, he won't let a government official into his house, he won't give permission to any officer of the law to search any of his belongings, and he won't answer any questions, even apparently innocent questions without first checking with a lawyer. Even in the United States with all the protections against self-incrimination, most of the people in jails are there because they talked too much. When questioned by a government official, the smart person in such a situation becomes the dumbest citizen in the county. He hasn't been reading the newspapers, doesn't listen to the radio, doesn't know a thing about what is going on, but he loves the government, and loves doing his civic duty, and he knows his rights. If bad citizens are asked a direct question, they won't lie, but they give as little information as possible. They never gives any information that they are not required by law to give. But the do it all courteously, never suggesting by tone or attitude that they are being anything but totally cooperative. All you have to do is say, "I don't want to answer that question." If the government official insists you answer the question, then you say, "I want to speak to my lawyer before I answer that question." But most of the time, the bad citizen will never be bothered by some government thug because he will learn how to maximize his own happiness without having to have any dealings with the politician or the bureaucrat. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | THE CHAOS ADVOCATE is copyrighted by Mack Tanner. You | | may review and read sections of this electronic publication | | to determine whether or not you would like to read the entire | | work. 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