Some friends from my Tea Party group told me about a town hall meeting with our state legislators this morning, so I went.  This kind of thing is really just becoming rather difficult for me to attend.  To have a self-appointed pillar-of-the-community type in a crisp clean suit or smart haircut and gold earings sit at the head of the room and explain to everybody how they are going to take our property by force and use their superior knowledge and judgement to craft a better world for us with it is bad enough.  But to listen to a crowd of adoring sheep agree with them and waste time on the excruciatingly boring practice of suggesting slight changes to the way this horribly destructive process proceeds is almost unbearable.  If it wasn't for some amount of entertainment value in watching grown adults fail to acknowledge the absurdity and utter immorality of the process, I don't think I could bear it.  I would have just stayed home and cleaned the garage.

But I'm curious about people.  Not the politicans, I know most of them are beyond hope, but the other people in attendance might be receptive to the ideas of liberty.  I have concluded that the only way to achieve liberty is to go about reconnecting people with the natural laws, based in reality, that can guide their behavior from within, and turn them away from the contrived laws that leave them wanting for the abuses of extrinsic guidance that hangs around their necks like a power hungry parasite.  The good thing is that basically everybody already knows these laws.  We follow them all day long, every day.  Don't hit people over the head and take their stuff. The bad thing is that for at least the last 5000 years or so, an uncalculable amount of time and resources has been constantly directed at convincing mankind not to apply these laws consistently.  While this has been percieved as quite a rewarding and profitable practice for certain special people, on balance it has been the source of unconscionable evil, malaise, and depravity for the whole of our world.

So I try to hold discussions about these issues of dominion and watch for responses in the crowd.  Like a billfish circling a school of baitfish I figure if I swim through the crowd smacking them a bit with my bill and making a rucus I can then get back and watch to see if anyone is swimming differently, has a few scales knocked off, or is falling out of line with the rest of the collective school.  Then I'll dart in for the kill and talk to them one on one to see if they can be reached. I often do this in long email exchanges so I can send them links, videos, and podcasts.

It's been a very slow process and I can't say I've won over a single person completely.  Some people become quite angry when confronted with the moral dilemmas and dysfunctionality associated with a force-based hierarchal system.  They consider lines of questioning that do not respect authority to be immoral in and of themselves.  There is a fear there.  Other's arrive at a point where when unable to articulate a rational reason for the state to exist, they simply indicate that these ideas of mine are unacceptable to them.  They figure that despite their inability to explain why institutionalized theft and violence is acceptable, it must be, because that's the way the system works and that system is the creation of much wiser people than we who have insights we do not possess.   Others when backed into a philosophical corner, respond that although it seems like it's criminal on some level to initiate force against the innocent, civil government is ordained by God, and therefore what seems wrong is really not, because the scripture of their choosing (to back up whatever point  they want to make at the time) is the only moral absolute.  God's designs may seem bad and arbitrary to us, but that's just because we don't know the whole plan yet.   I have not yet found any of this stuff to be present in the actual teachings of Jesus, yet religious authorities through the ages seem to have managed to get this stuff permanently inserted into the popular Christian dogma.   Pure geniouses at creating and propogating submission they were.  Still others I talk to actually agree with my points, but they respond that it is a hopeless cause to try to change all this stuff at this point, so therefore it is not a worthy passion or pursuit.  They simply have no interest in wasting time on lost causes.

So anyway these 3 legislators at the meeting outlined their plans for the upcoming session.  In this area it's all Republicans.  What a mess.   The agenda included the "grandparents protection act", an application of the law to force parents against their will to grant visitation to grand parents if a judge deemed it so.    An act to ban convicted sex offenders from public libraries to protect the children there.  An act to make it a felony to have an automobile crash resulting in death if the state can determine that you were on your cell phone at the time of the crash, an act to ban K2 sythetic cannabinoid, and of course the ever popular community development initiatives. 

Now I didn't feel like standing up in front of small town America and suggest that perhaps in some cases grand parents should not see their grand children if the parents so choose, that coercively funded libraries should not exist,  that policies regarding cell phone use should be established by the private company that should own the road, or that studies have shown that cell phones are not worse distractions than eating, talking, or changing the radio station. 

I chose to ask about community development.  One of our new representatives explained this wonderful system whereby they (legislators) would allow for the issuance of tax credits based on what sort of investments persons or businesses made.  The theory is that these people can reengineer the community in this way from the top down to be more productive, attract new businesses and keep everybody happier. 

I asked her from the standpoint of moral principle, from where she derived the right to take a persons property away through taxation in quantitative accordance with her judgement of how well it would be used if they were allowed to keep it, thereby superseding the wishes of the actual owner of the property. 

She responded that this would open up opportunities for an entrepreneur that otherwise would not be able to afford to invest in new machines to do so.  I pointed out that if that was the case then either one of two things is true.  Either that entrepreneur essentially got his own tax money back (got to keep it)  through his "community development" credit, in which case you could have just let him keep it in the first place anyway, or you were giving that entreprenuer a tax credit with someone else's money.  In other words you took more of somebody else's for your state purposes,  so that your favored person might pay less, in which case we're back to a moral problem.  She asked me back if I didn't like that system for encouraging productive investment what was my better idea?  How about simply letting the owner of the property keep their own property and invest it in whatever fashion they see fit?  I explained the role of the government under our state constitution intended her to be primarily a protector of property, not a violator.  She said we would have to agree to disagree on that one.

I asked her from a purely practical standpoint; if a couple hundred strangers could possibly expect to possess the knowledge to increase the prosperity and productive capacity of millions of people by directing how they invest their money?  Whereas each human being and business is already intrinsically driven to optimize their own return on investement and knows their own situation and needs intimately, how could politicians possibly create a more efficient system by taking property away from it's owners and dolling it back out hither and yon in the form of selective tax credits?

She answered that that was a philosophical question and she did not know. 

So shes going to take property away from people at gunpoint in the name of making the marketplace more productive and you admit that you dont' even know this works?  There truly is nobody steering the ship of state!  Hello! 

Later another legislator brought this back up in her defense citing the threat of other states holding out carrots (he actually said carrot too) to get businesses to move there and China (they always use China, China is scary).  "Why Michigan just flat out gave a facility to a company lock stock and barrel so that they would move there, we have to compete with that or we will lose out".

I asked him where the Michigan got the money to buy this facility for this company?  He grudgingly admitted that it could have come from the people, or maybe it was simply a forclosure or some such thing, a tax forfiture maybe.  I reminded him that that money was taken out of the economy to bring in a nice shiny factory that legislators can point to and say they did that, but that he will never talk about the rightful owners of that money and greater net economic loss that occurred by taking property away from it's rightful owners.  Michigan has always been a top-down government engineered economy and that's why that state is in the crapper.  Why do we want to import that philosophy here?  So this state can be just as in the crapper?  If it didn't work there, why here?  If this stuff has never worked anywhere in history, why are we doing this?

He went off about how we must continue to manufacture things here instead of in China.   

At one point one of the legislators commented about how critical thinking must be taught in schools again and I almost burst out laughing.  I would like to see some critical thinking from her.  To think that someone with critical thinking skills would entertain the notion of a communized education system is bizarre.

I couldn't help but think these people belong in jail.  But on the other hand some just seem to really just not have clue and are kind of riding along on a river of fallacies and hidden contradictions.  Some no doubt have a psychological need for control and attention.   But the things they are doing destroy people's lives and fortunes and chain society down, never to realize it's full potential.  

The bizarre thing is through my questioning there was really little interest in the faces of most of the people there.  No eyebrows raised.  Just blankness.  I tried to point out that they are arrogant theives in a civil way and then sat back down to watch the discourse go smoothly right back into a bland discussion of the benefits of high speed rail funding and simplifying state code wording.

It's like attending a cult self-sacrifice ritual where the blind worship the fake and smile.