Legalized Theft And Individual Liberty

Theft – a: the act of stealing ; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it (from Mirriam-Webster dictionary)
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Question: Is it legal for the government to steal your property and give it to someone else at the government's whim ?

Answer: If you think the answer is 'no,' you better think again, because as things currently stand, the answer is an unqualified 'YES.'

Questions: How can such a thing possibly be legal when we have a Constitution that provides for equal protection under the law, the right to privacy, and the protection of private property ? How can such a thing possibly be legal when we adhere to the idea that all men are created equal ? How can such a thing be possible when our entire citizenry would say they are against theft ?

Answer: That's a long story, but in shorthand, it's known as the redistribution of wealth (taxation). Under the Constitutional vision of our founding fathers, taking away the income and property of one individual only to hand it to another individual would have been a crime. That crime is known as theft, and it's against the law all over the world….until the government gets involved, that is. Somehow theft is accepted by some when the government does it. It makes absolutely no sense, but that's the way some people see it.

Now for the long version of how we got to where we are today, where the government can legally steal almost anything it wants to steal. This is the story of how the Constitution was subverted over time, and the Constitutional limits on government were stripped away, leaving government as your virtual lord and master, where liberty is granted or stolen at the government's discretion.

Some of you may be saying to yourselves, 'wait a minute King, the government has ALWAYS had the power to tax. That's in the Constitution too.' And that's true. Congress does have the power to tax, but the government had to amend the original Constitution in order to tax people UNEQUALLY. That was accomplished with the Sixteenth Amendment, which made the income tax legal in 1913. Prior to the income tax, the Constitution stated that taxes had to be apportioned among the states (equally applied). The Sixteenth Amendment overruled existing law, and overruled existing court decisions, such as Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (1895), which greatly limited the Congress' authority to levy an income tax. With the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, the door was opened for Congress to start confiscating private property at it saw fit (your wages are your private property. They don't belong to anyone else).

If you want to see what the income tax has led to, just look at the explosion of government spending in the following chart:

After 150 years of relatively stable government spending, it didn't take long after the establishment of a limitless income tax for the government to realize it could confiscate money from the people any time it liked, to be used for any purpose the government wished. In other words, the power to tax without limits and without any sense of equality has allowed the government to become the all-powerful behemouth it is today.

The above chart also explains perfectly why we are in such dire financial straits today. We have allowed the federal government to have far too much dominion over our lives, and as it has proven time and again, the federal government is an inefficient and dumb beast that can't manage anything, least of all itself.

But government tyranny and legalized theft didn't stop with the income tax. That was only the beginning of the subversion of our Constitution. Once we started down the road of abandoning Constitutional protections for the people, we continued right on allwoing it to happen. George Will wrote a column called 'Racing Past The Constitution,' that discusses some of the ways the government is denying our Constitutional rights.

In 2005, we had a radical Supreme Court ruling in the Kelo v. New London case that trashed the Fifth Amendment, perverted the rule of eminent domain (which previously only allowed the government to take property 'for public use'), and allowed the government to take private property from one person and give it to another private entity just for the sake of increased tax revenue. And we the people accepted it, when we should have risen up against our government over such a blatant redefinition of Constitutional intent. We allowed the government to make our country less about the people, and more about – of the government, for the government, and by the government.

We've also allowed the Fourth Amendment to be trashed repeatedly, through RICO laws, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and a variety of other ways. Due process is denied to American citizens as their property is taken and the citizens have to prove their innocence, rather than the government having to prove them guilty. Privacy hangs by a thread. You may as well consider it a relic from the past.

While I'm on the subject of trashing the Constitution, the Tenth Amendment, which guarantees states rights, is virtually repealed. Fedzilla has mowed that one down too, as all power coalesces to the federal government. Second Amendment rights are narrowing and under attack.

How long will it be until the First Amendment, the right to free speech, is assaulted ? There is already a movement in Western culture to prohibit speech against religions, which is endorsed by the United Nations, as free speech begins to become secondary to political correctness and diversity. How long before America starts down that road, if we haven't already ?

Beware, America. The freedoms you take for granted are dissolving right before your eyes. You can't take them for granted. You must fight for them. As legalized theft of your property and rights increases, your individual liberty diminishes. As George Washington once said, "freedom is not free."