naked, smirking evil

I sent the following letter to my Congressional delegation and President Obama on 17 August, 2009. I received the usual form swill from four of the five legislators, and nothing from Obama. Then, on 16 September, I got a real little gem from Michael Bales, on the staff of Senator Tom Udall, (D) NM

Let’s look at the letters. First is my letter to them.

I have a very serious question that occurred to me in the context of national health care, but I believe has far wider implications to the relationship between the American people and their government.

Could you please show me where in the Constitution the national government is given authority to send a man with a gun to take money from my neighbor, (and please do not be so disingenuous as to claim the IRS is not a lot of men with guns) give me a few pennies on the dollar of my neighbor’s money, and keep the rest to pay the wages of the guys with the guns.

I have searched the US Constitution over and over, but can’t find that. Could you please point out to me what I’m missing?

And Mr. Bales’ reply:

Dear Mr. Reb Sarge,

Thank you for contacting Senator Tom Udall with your question of where in the Constitution the Congress is given the power to levy and collect taxes.

The Senator asked that I contact you with the answer. The power to tax is delineated in Article I, Section 8, clause 1, of the Constitution which states:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States;

There is only one express exception to federal taxing power found in the United States Constitution. Article I, Section 9 provides “No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any State.” I hope this answers your question.

Michael Bales
Legislative Correspondent
Office of Senator Tom Udall

In my opinion, Bales’ letter expresses in crystalline terms what we can expect from the current government. It is my hope that by making this matter known to the public, we might awaken some who have been complacent or undecided, and galvanize some who have been overwhelmed by the assault on our liberty.

At first, I couldn’t believe that anyone could think this was a legitimate response to my question. I wrote to Bales, directly, and asked if he’d actually read my letter, or if Udall had just told him to quote from the Constitution. He replied on 21 September that he had, indeed, read my letter. It is my opinion that the attitude expressed by Mr. Bales is an exquisite illustration of what can be expected from this government, and why.

My question had nothing to do with taxation. It asked how the government could justify looting one person for the benefit of another, with a large cut of the loot going to the government. Bales says the authority “…To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States…” equates to the authority to loot the nation to support whatever purpose those in government choose. I decided to examine this, one phrase at a time to see if there is any legitimacy in Bales’ position, of it is simply a blatant perversion of the Founders’ intent.

In the present context of nationalization and redistribution of wealth, the questions on the table are the bailouts, subsidies for various industries, the stimulus program, and the nationalization of health care. There is also a war in the Middle East, the support of which has been a subject of much debate.

Only one of these issues deals with the common defense, and ironically, that is the only one upon which the government is reluctant to spend anything other than the blood of our sons. Equally ironically, the war is the only one that is supported by the majority of the people. Since the common defense does not seem to be a priority for our government, I think it is safe to say Bales did not mean to use it as justification for looting us.

The general welfare, by definition, includes everyone, as in “the welfare of people, in general,” so any doctrine that establishes a population of sacrificial sheep to be bled and sucked dry by the rest of the population can’t apply here. Can Bales possibly mean to say that IRS thugs constitute the general population? Perhaps he means that anyone who works for a living and tries to pay his own bills – or the children of such people -is not part of the general population. Could he be saying that the destruction of our freedom is in the best interests of our children?

As a matter of fact, he could, at that. The American Progressive has always been the enemy of liberty. When the Weimar Constitution gave the German government the authority to control every aspect of the lives of the German people, from reproductive matters to who worked at which jobs and lived in which cities, to what was published or broadcast in the news or entertainment media, to how much anyone earned or what foods they could buy, the American Progressives and liberals hailed the document as the finest piece of politics ever to come down the pike. They loved it. They supported and praised the German delegates who walked out of the convention because the constitution left too much power in the hands of the people.

The general welfare clause has been used for years by looters wishing to define themselves and their supporters as “general” and everyone else as sacrificial sheep. This particularly odious little argument is worthy of an article – or a book – in itself, and we don’t need to get into that rathole here. I will say here only that anything purporting to be for the “general” welfare, like “common” defense, must benefit the entire population, including children who will someday grow up to be blood drinkers or sheep. Therefore, the general welfare clause cannot justify the scenario in my original question.

The only remaining phrase that Bales might be using deals with the debts of the United States. Let’s look at that. The government is talking about taking responsibility for trillions of dollars in medical bills, bad loans, and autoworkers’ wages. It is promising to simply give away billions more to “stimulate the economy,” apparently under the premise that money spent by the government has some magic stimulating effect that is lacking in money spent by citizens. There’s no end to the debt. There’s more debt headed our way in the next few years than has been accrued in the history of the Republic. Can Bales seriously mean to say that the Constitution allows the creation of trillions of dollars in debt in the interest of paying off a few billion?

You know, he just might, at that. Bales is clearly part of that Progressive intelligentsia elite who think they are so much wiser than the rest of us, and are somehow endowed by their Creator with the authority to enslave us for their own purposes, according to their own values and to our own benefit.

And that, Brothers and Sisters, is what this is all about. It isn’t about health care, or bailouts, or stimulus plans. It’s about one group of people seizing the power of life and death over another group, not on the premise of self-defense or criminality, but out of arrogance and greed and lust for power. That’s it, pure and simple. This whole flap is about whether some people are so much smarter and better than the rest of us that we must be made to shut up and do as we are told… Oh, and pick up the tab, too, please.

Chief Justice John Marshal said, “The power to tax is the power to destroy.” Truer words have never been uttered. It is the belief of those presently in our government that the authority to tax is, literally, the authority to destroy any part of the population they wish – to destroy any aspect of our culture or our liberty that annoys them. They know it; they acknowledge and admit it; they glory and revel it in; they throw it in our faces.

One of Rand’s characters asked, “What is it hell is supposed to be? Naked, smirking evil?” Well, folks, here is naked, smirking evil. These people are committed to the destruction of our Republic, of our lives, of our prosperity forever. They believe they are empowered to do so by the Constitution, and endowed with some moral omniscience that places them on a plane well above the rest of us low-grade commoners. They are not misinformed or mistaken. They know precisely what they are doing, to where it will lead, how they’ll go about it, and what they’ll do to anyone who tries to stop them. You can’t change their minds by giving them more information. You can’t show them they are wrong about where their policies will lead. If you say, “Your policies will destroy America and plunge our children into a fascist dictatorship,” they will look you in the eye and say, “Well, duuh!” These people are monsters, bent on raping our Republic and feasting on its entrails. They are not misinformed but well-meaning loyal opposition, and to treat them as such would be make a pet of a rabid wolverine. They are maggots from the intellectual sewers of mankind.

But they are not invincible. They have not thrown over the Constitution yet, and it is still a very powerful force in our society. Let us use it to stop them. If we don’t use the Constitution, we will have to use armed force, for there is no third option. They will not simply go away, and they cannot be convinced by reason or argument, no matter how eloquent or unassailable. We must throw them out of office – every slimy, stinking one of them. Just to make sure we don’t miss one, we need to turn over the entire edifice of government in America, from the ward level to the White House. Our war cry must be, “NO INCUMBENTS!”

Sic Semper Tyrannis,
Reb Sarge