It saddens me that you are such a nutjob. And it saddens me that you don’t seem capable of writing a regular short comment.

But it fills my heart with delight that I get to ban long-comment-writing nutjobs from my blog any time I feel like it.

Buh-bye.

It saddens me to see you treat such tragic events with derision. Apparently you are in the first stage of denial, the “ridicule” stage:

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” [Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher 1788 – 1860]

The fact that you can use the death of misguided people to poke fun at ideals of liberty is truly bottom of the barrel.

We are told in the scriptures that we will be held accountable for “every idle word” that we utter. I entreat you to speak with more honor in the future.

Randy was apparently a misguided soul, but his wife was unarmed and holding their 10-month-old infant when she took a fatal bullet through the spine from a trigger-happy yes-man FBI sniper. He either acted on an illegal order to fire, or fired on his own after violating the most basic rule of sniping during a civilian encounter, which is to know your backstop. Later, no FBI officer would admit who gave the order, and the sniper would not “rat out” his commander. There is “honor” for you. The sniper was indicted for manslaughter, although not convicted.

Besides Vicki (the unarmed wife) being killed, Randy’s 14 year old son was also shot (in the back) and killed. In all twelve FBI officers were brought up on disciplinary charges, and the director of the FBI admitted that the incident was a misapplication of force, and a miscarriage of justice.

You seem to believe that Weaver just randomly opened fire without any provocation. I am no fan of Randy’s, but technically it was the FBI marshals who drew first blood. They threw rocks at the dogs. This is not disputed. It is also not disputed that they did not call for a surrender. Under sworn oath during court testimony, they admitted that they were the ones who initiated the use of violence, and that no call for surrender had been issued. The rock throwing put the dogs into a mad rage, and then the Weavers felt they were under attack and began to defend their property with force.

Throwing a rock can be just as deadly as firing a gun. If armed men with drawn guns came onto your property and started throwing rocks, you might just get a little bit agitated. You might think the rocks were grenades or tear gas or whatever, things that could harm or kill you, your wife, and your young children. Consider how you would react in that situation.

The charges against Randy were lame: bail issues and failure to appear in court. The other issues were dropped because they could not be proven. The use of a large and heavily armed federal assault team to “bring him in” was massive overkill. Two local deputies walking up to the door without weapons drawn and calmly serving the papers, requesting compliance for an arrest, would have been entirely adequate and would have met with success. There was no past history of violence or resisting arrest. It was not a high risk situation by default. The marshals created a high risk situation by coming out in military-style force, large numbers, paramilitary dress-down, raw aggression, and a trigger-happy mindset. They acted like Weaver was a hardened, cold-blooded psychopath who was itching to murder anyone who simply stepped onto his property. And then they drew first blood.

Perhaps you have forgotten that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men to abuse power, to overreact, to take offense, to throw tantrums like petty monarchs. Those in the government wield a very concentrated and seductive form of power. Washington said that the government “was like fire: a dangerous servant and fearful master.”

I’m not defending Randy Weaver. He definitely made some mistakes. But the mistakes he made were not equal to the amount of force used against him and against his innocent loved ones.

It would be like getting pulled over for a reckless driving, and then having 18 troopers crowd around your car, who then proceed to break your windows without requesting your surrender, and then they start punching and attacking your “best friend” who is in the car with you (your dog) in order to subdue the animal and eliminate it from being a potential threat against their issuing you a bench warrant. That is how out-of-control the FBI was acting in the Ruby Ridge incident.

Again I invite you to read the prophetically recommended books listed in General Conference, April 1972.

Those books will change your heart, if only you would allow the possibility that you have something to learn in this matter.

True Regards,

JM

Wow.

Well my main advice to you JM is: Please show restraint and don’t just open fire when the feds come out to investigate you at your compound. We wouldn’t want another Ruby Ridge scenario.

Your lack of understanding with regard to a Free Market system is stunning and saddening. Take a step back and realize that our Constitution does not allow the kind of Nanny-State taxation that you apparently believe in. Observe:

Free Market roads and bridges: built and managed by private tolls and private investors

Free Market light and power: built and managed by private subscription and private investors

Free Market telecons: built and managed by private subscription and private investors

Free Market education: built and managed by private subscription and private investors

Free Market banking: built and managed by private investors (like the one Joseph Smith set up in Kirkland)

Military: standing army not authorized by the Constitution. Government can levy a special emergency tax for two years in the event of an invasion. Day-to-day border protection are the responsibility of state and local militias.

Fire, Police, etc: managed by state and local governments, not federal.

Unfortunately, for over one hundred years now, we have violated the divinely inspired Constitution on all of the above issues. We are essentially a Socialist country at present. And it’s largely due to otherwise good people like you, who have allowed yourselves to become seduced by Gadianton philosophy, and you have voted for wolves in sheep’s clothing.

If that sounds harsh, don’t lay it at my door. That is what President Grant, President JFS, President David O. McKay and President Ezra Taft Benson said in their General Conference addresses. They said that most of the Church members were “sleeping giants” who had been deceived by Satan with regard to their civic duty, and that we were ignorantly helping to destroy the Constitution, and have been since the 1930’s when we helped usher in FDR and the New Communist Deal. (The majority of Latter-day Saints voted for FDR four times in a row).

The principles of self-governance and self-preservation given to us by the US Constitution are extremely broad and immersive. As a result, the government is very limited in what it can rightly do, especially in terms of what it can take our money for. It is “shackled down” by the Constitution. The Constitution liberates us and enslaves the government. That is exactly what it was supposed to do: not the opposite, which is what you are advocating.

Let’s get a few things straight here. The liberty given to us by the Constitution is of a very radical and frightening nature. It is a hard-core libertarian document. It is one tiny step away from total anarchy. That is what liberty actually is: barely mitigated anarchy. That is why, in a free society, you have to TRUST IN GOD, because everyone has so much freedom and the government has so little power that free citizens can blindside you with a first offense at any time they please, and you can be killed, maimed, robbed, raped, or kidnapped at any moment. It is only after a person has been conclusively proved to be a criminal that their liberty is taken away. Before that is proved, they are essentially “walking time bombs.”

Additionally, you can starve to death, lose everything you own in a natural disaster, become gravely ill or injured and need medical attention, etc., and the government has no power to help you in any of those situtations. This is a debate that is as old as the Constitutuion. Our Founding Fathers specifically struggled with and debated these issues. During a flood early in US history, there was a bill that was submitted to the Congress floor that was meant to alleviate the suffering and devestation of the flood. Orphans were starving to death. No homes, no parents, no food. The debate was heated and emotional. The most passionate and correct argument, at the end of the day, was from a man whose name you would recognize. I will share with you his argument. He said that he personally was willing to give of his own substance to those in need, and he strongly encouraged others to do the same, but he could not in good conscience use the power of his position to forcibly take property from his fellow citizens (via taxes) in order to help the tragic victims of the flood. He would not “make slaves in order to save orphans”. He voted against the bill and decried it as unconstitutional, which it was.

The willingness to live in a truly free society is a huge departure from monarchy systems, peasant class, slavery class, feudalism, communism, socialism, etc., wherein all people are automatically classed as de facto criminals and helpless babies who cannot be trusted with weapons, property ownership, privacy, the responsibility to overcome hardship, etc. The people in those societies TRUST IN MAN and TRUST IN THE KING and TRUST IN THE GOVERNMENT.

But we don’t trust in any of those worthless, pagan idols in this country. We believe that God is the source of law and that he is the source of our rights. We trust (or least we used to before we started shredding the Constitution) that he would protect us, and that if he didn’t, it’s his will that we were harmed or became ill, or lost everything. That is what America is about. That is what made us so special and so wealthy for so long. We functioned on the assumption that God gave us our liberty, we were born with it, and that man has no authority to destroy the agency of other men until criminal behavior occurs. We have gone away from that now, and we are mostly socialist. We are starting to treat each other more and more like slaves and criminals.

What our Founding Fathers gave us is a document that is so white-hot, so searing, so horrifying, and so mind-blowing that only God could have inspired it. And according to the Doctrine and Covenants, God did in fact inspire the Constitution. Although it is radical and frightening, the Constitution is also god-like, ennobling, and empowering if we embrace it and treat it correctly.

The government is not our “parent”. We are the masters, the government is our servant. Your paternalistic analogy has it 100 percent backwards. With such a horrible analogy, you sound like you are ready for the arm and head holes, so that you can be plugged in and fed and taught directly, intravenously by zBig Brother. You are looking for an umbilical cord.

Most men want to be slaves. They crave a master. They crave direction, they crave a lessening of accountability. “Liberty means responsibility, that is why most men dread it” (GB Shaw). We want coattails to ride on, we want to be told what to do, and even how to do it. That is human nature. But our natures are lazy and carnal and devilish, and we shouldn’t give in to that enticement. God told us that if we have to have a nanny hold our hand our whole life, and be taken care of, and told what to do and how to behave, that is slothful and unrighteous and ungodly. You’ve got to stand up and be a man and take care of yourself.

As for you argument that we are not talking about “starving people stealing from starving people” that is completely dismissive of reality. What do you think the Great Depression was? It was starving people committing crimes against other starving people in order to survive. Almost 10 million people died of disease related to malnutrition during that time. In other words, they died of starvation. And the crime wave was hellacious. That is the basis for why FDR anointed himself and Congress with the bogus, unconstitutional power to swoop in and “save us all”. His motivations, however pure they may or may not have been, were absolutely misguided and mis-founded.

In a technical sense, all of us are all “starving”, all of the time. There are limited services and resources, and we are, all of us, always starving for education, for real estate, for vehicles, for weapons, for security, for food, for medical attention, for luxury items, etc., etc. We are in harsh competition with each other for all of these things. That is the nature of freedom.

Before you respond I invite you to first read “Civic Standards for the Faithful Saints” (Benson 1972 General conference) and then I’d like you to read the 5 books that were prophetically recommended in that address. You can read 4 of them online for free:

Three of them here:
http://www.inspiredconstitution.org/books.html

and one here:
http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=NoneDare

If you read these inspired works with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, they will smash your socialist justifications, destroy your current worldview, and motivate you to repent and become a defender of liberty.

You of course are free to reject those books and hold to the worldly and false doctrines of socialism that you currently espouse. That is what makes this country great. You are free to teach slavery and you are even free to attempt to enforce it by legislation if others agree with you and vote for your ideas. But destroying the Constitution and helping others to do it has consequences.

Right now you are in a Matrix of sorts. You are enslaved, and essentially bowing down and worshipping your “parent”, the government. You are in a collectivist mindset or groupthink, just like the unconstitutional and parasitic public school system has taught you to be.

According to the Constitution, I don’t owe you or your kids an education, and you don’t owe me or my kids an education. If we want to learn, that is up to us, on “our own dime.” The government has zero business taking my property to educate “me” or anyone else. The concept of public schools is based on tyranny, slavery, mass brain-washing, communism, socialism, collectivism, statism, fascism, take your pick. For crying out loud, a federal socialized school system like the one we have is one of the central planks of the Communist Manifesto. It “takes a village” to raise a socialist slave child. And my-oh-my does it work. You and many others are living proof. Publicly tax-funded schools didn’t exist in this country until what year? I would hazard the guess that can’t answer that simple question. You apparently think the country was born with a communist school system already in place.

Again, before you respond, please read those books, and then let me know whether you accept or reject what is in them.

Here is a passage from one of them:

Those Circumstances Under Which God Has Authorized Use of the Force of Government Against The Individual

The Lord justifies the use of the police power against the individual for the purpose of executing the divine law of retribution. The specific circumstances under which He has given His approval for this use of force may be classified under the following four headings:

(1) To punish criminals,

(2) To wage defensive war and provide for the nation’s defense,

(3) To enforce the right and control of private property,

(4) To compel the citizen to bear his fair share of the burden of supporting the government in performing the above three functions.”

[end quote]

Consider how extremely limited is the righteous use of coercion. I don’t see anything in that list above that gives the government the power to take my property for your luxuries or even for your survival, except in very limited and specific circumstances.

NOTE 1: “zBig Brother” wasn’t a typo. Look it up. Your New President is actually the “advisor” Zbigniew Brzezinski, not the mindless puppet “Barry” (Barrak). zBig was also an advisor to McCain. Both candidates are his socialist string puppets. They are both ready and willing to implement his policies. Read Brezezinski’s books and you will get a taste of what the future will be.

NOTE 2: You state: “The key word being “legal”. We are collectively deciding what is legal when we vote.”

Yeah, I agree, we do decide what is “legal”. But there is a huge difference between something that is legal and something that is Constitutional. We can certainly choose to violate the highest law of the land and pass bad legislation. We can and have legalized immoral behaviors. The Patriot Act says that the government can detain you indefinitely without trial. That doesn’t mean it’s constitutional or moral.

I will restate my position as follows, to make sure you are perfectly clear about what I’m saying:

“When our lives and our property are involved, we can rightly demand the uttermost constitutional farthing (highest law of the land) from those whose decisions impact us.”

You are aware that juries can provide an innocent verdict even when they know the law has been broken? This because it is a jury’s responsibility to interpret the Constitution. If I am being tried for not paying Social Security tax, and it is conclusively proved that I have not paid it and have thereby broken the law, the jury can (and arguably should) still acquit me. It is their civic duty to uphold the Constitution, and not punish people for breaking bogus laws. Look up Joe Bannister. He was acquitted of tax evasion because the jury understood the Constitution and disregarded a bogus and evil law.

I personally do not advocate that you should not pay taxes. I pay mine. What I am saying is that your understanding of what is legal and what is constitutional is grievously mistaken and not according to reality.

Please don’t take offense at this post or engage in an emotional response. Be dispassionate and cool and collected. Inform yourself before re-entering the conversation. Read the prophetically recommended books from General Conference, and see if they change your heart.

You are a good person, an elect person. I can tell that from your many posts, and the many righteous things you have to say on so many topics. But in this matter you are deceived. Please allow your heart to be open and be willing to countenance that possibility.

Your brother in Christ,

JM

Humdinger of a comment.

Your logic in Assertion 1 is flawed because of some faulty assumptions. The notion of ownership in the case of taxation policies is not nearly as clean as your analogy implies. A better analogy would be a parent finding that one child had stockpiled all kinds of food in his room and was hording it while the rest of the family starved. It is the parent’s home and therefore even though the parent might allow the child some autonomy by having a bedroom the parent can do what it wants with the food in the end — it certainly isn’t robbery for a parent to take excess from one child and give to another in need. If the child doesn’t like the rules of the home the child can choose to leave the home. (And in the analogy the parent is voice of the collective peoples of the USA –as in government “of the people, for the people, and by the people”).

As for you Assertion 2 it has problems too. The main problem is that your scenario has the starving stealing from the starving. I don’t think that has anything to do with this conversation at all so it is a bit of a non sequitur.

When our lives and our property are involved, we can rightly demand the uttermost legal farthing from those whose decisions impact us.

The key word being “legal”. We are collectively deciding what is legal when we vote.

Violations of private property ownership are never, ever, supposed to be passed by Congress

Again, back to your faulty assumptions about ownership. How can we even gain wealth in this country? Because we are educated on the public dime, because we travel to work on roads and bridges paid for on the public dime, because we are protected by a military paid for on the public dime, because we count on infrastructure of every kind paid for on the public dime. See my previous analogy.

I think you have done something really important in your post. You have used valid logic to show that the coercion of good and the coercion of not doing evil are identical. That is very insightful. You are therefore 100 percent right in your rejection of the assertion that “Any law that compels or coerces people to do good acts is Satanic.”

But of course rejecting that assertion does not solve the deeper problem that you have identified. We still have to answer another question, and that is: How do we know when we are using coercion correctly? And that is an extremely important and salvation-impacting concern.

Although the complexity with determining whether a given law is moral or not is often decried as impossible, unknowable, or relative, it is actually very easy to judge correctly. Here is the divine smack-down that proves it:

Moroni 7: 15
For behold, my brethren, it is given unto you to judge, that ye may know good from evil; and the way to judge is as plain, that ye may know with a perfect knowledge, as the daylight is from the dark night.

The grand secret to righteous judging is found within the Golden Rule that our Savior gave us in Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31. Christ made the stunning and all-encompassing assertion that His short, one sentence rule was in fact the entire and complete guide to good and evil. He said that it was THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS. That is a massive bombshell. The Golden Rule (“do unto others as you would have done unto you”) is easily one of the most audacious statements about good and evil ever made. Only a God could say something that provocative and that absolute, and still have it be true and valid.

And His word is vindicated. No matter how complex a moral issue seems to be on the surface, the Golden Rule is the key for how to brush away the tangles and judge righteously. It works every single time. Here are a few examples:

ASSERTION 1: A law that forces me to give any of my property to the poor is evil. (i.e., compulsory charity is evil)

The way to prove that the above assertion is valid is to generate a hypothetical that takes the Golden Rule to the logical end of the road with respect to private property ownership:

If I was starving to death during a famine and I had a choice between armed robbery and dying of starvation, (suppose I’ve already pleaded and begged for food from those around me) the correct choice would be to die rather than rob someone. We are not supposed to violate the agency of “innocent” others in order to live. God has clearly commanded us to die (if necessary), rather than engage in that kind of coercion. (See Matthew 10:28. In a limited, context-sensitive way Alma 27:29 also applies).

The Golden Rule demands that you put yourself in the shoes of the person or group who you are about to rob. That individual or group are human beings with God-given rights of agency and private property ownership. It doesn’t matter if the person you are about to rob is an honest man who is taking his last bit of food to his starving children, or instead, if the target is a vicious, selfish group of people who are hoarding huge amounts of food and knowingly letting others die. The crucial thing is to realize that he/they are “innocent” because they have inalienable rights, and they have done nothing to forfeit those rights.

In particular, if you put yourself in the shoes of the vicious/selfish group of people, you can assume that they are thinking self-justifying thoughts such as “It’s not my job to take care of others. If I give food away now and things don’t get better, then that act of giving would be suicide. That is not fair to me or my family. I feel bad for the starving people around me, but come tomorrow I could be in the same boat.” And they are right. They have valid logic, and they know that they have the God-given right to do as they please with their private property. They may be selfish cowards, but they are not “wrong.”

That is how cutting the Golden Rule really is. It evaporates one-way circumstantial justifications and forces people to be honest about what their neighbors really must be thinking. Even people who are evil and vicious have entirely valid logic, and they are often completely within their legal rights even when they are committing great spiritual evil. We have to respect and honor their agency. If we attempt to use force to “correct” their spiritual evil, then we become more evil than them. We become tyrants and criminals who will stoop to destroy the agency of our fellow beings in order to achieve our desires.

Prophets of God have compared unjust tax laws to armed robbery and “legalized plunder”. When tax laws are enforced, the government uses police force (armed seizure of property, jail time, etc) in order to take your money and give it to the poor.

ASSERTION 2: A law that coerces me to not steal from my neighbor is righteous.

Again, the way to prove that the above assertion is valid is to generate a hypothetical that takes the Golden Rule into account. And this time it is much more “intuitive”, because no rational person wants to be robbed. A rational person would always prefer to be asked for something, and be able to make a voluntary choice about whether or not to give or retain property.

Now at this point some people may “cry foul” by bringing up the following dilemma: “What if during a war there are lots of abandoned houses, and I am a starving and/or wounded civilian, and there is food and/or medicine in those houses. Does the Golden Rule forbid me from taking what I need? If I were the owner, wouldn’t I be glad if someone broke in and was able to use the food to survive and help others?” (And then they extrapolate that poverty is a very real kind of “war”, hence the necessity for laws that redistribute property).

The surprising answer to the above dilemma is that the Golden Rule does forbid stealing from an abandoned house, even during a war. All you have to do this is place yourself in the shoes of the absent owner and analyze their position in a very honest and dispassionate manner.

If I am the absent owner of one of those “abandoned” houses, and I come back after a long absence, and my kids and I are starving and wounded, and I find that my house has been violated and emptied, I will be righteously indignant. I may now have to watch my children die of starvation because a stranger violated my property and stole my goods. And even if I came back in perfectly good health, and the war was over, and I brought with me a big load of food storage and other supplies, and the stuff I left was all spoiled and would have to be thrown away if it were still there (“wasted”, instead of going to those who needed it), I would still be justified in being indignant that my house had been robbed and that my private property was gone. I would still be justified in pressing charges and having the thief prosecuted for grand larceny if he were found. The Golden rule demands that you give maximum benefit of the doubt to your neighbor, and bare minimum, “legal” allowance to yourself.

When our lives and our property are involved, we can rightly demand the uttermost legal farthing from those whose decisions impact us. And when the roles reverse, when it is our decisions that are influencing the lives and property of others, they can rightly demand the uttermost legal farthing from us. If it requires our death to choose the right, than that is the necessary cost. It is a simple equation that allows no compromises.

It doesn’t matter if someone is a “good” person or a “bad” person, the Golden Rule demands that they be given the same allowances by their neighbors, and that they be treated equally. [By “bad” I don’t mean criminal, I mean carnal, devilish, or unholy. A person can be carnal, devilish, and unholy without breaking any secular laws.]

One of the difficulties that people run into when discussing moral law theory is that they mistakenly think that spiritual evil and secular evil cleanly overlap in a lot of cases where they don’t overlap.

For example, they know that choosing to not give some of your bounteous substance to a starving beggar is spiritually immoral. But then they want to conclude that such spiritually bankrupt behavior also violates secular morality, which it doesn’t.

Within the bounds of the US Constitution, a citizen who withholds privately owned property from those who desperately need has made a “righteous” choice: it is right in the eyes of the law, or in other words it is legal in the eyes of the law.

END NOTE 1:

I noticed a lot of back and forth in previous posts about the difference between “prohibitive” and “compulsory” laws. Most of the dialogue really missed the mark because most of you don’t seem to understand the basic elements of a law.

Every law has two elements: the Substantive element and the Procedural element.

Substantive element = the proscriptive (prohibitive) or prescriptive (compulsory) rule

Procedural element = enforcement method given to authorities and the punishment details that violators will experience if they are convicted of acting or failing to act according to the substantive element of a given law

Example One: POLLUTION

Substantive element = NO SMOKING [this is a prOscriptive law, or “prohibitive”]
Procedural element = VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED, ARRESTED, AND/OR IMPRISONED

Example Two: TAXES

Substantive = PAY INCOME TAX [this is a prEscriptive law, or “compulsory”]
Procedural = VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED, ARRESTED, AND/OR IMPRISONED

The point here is that all laws, every single one of them, by their very definition, employ real, actual coercion (force) as part of the Procedural element. Sometimes the coercion is applied to physically stop us mid-stream from something we are already doing. In other situations the force is applied to violate our physical stasis, and make us physically get up and do something we don’t want to do. Either way, we are dealing with forced change of behavior. When the “rubber meets the road”, proscriptive laws and prescriptive laws are exactly the same thing. They are the same because they both have physical (procedural) consequences attached to them: and those consequences always involve coercive, uninvited, unwanted force.

Mondo Cool in #12: I like your spunk and wit, but your arguments about the football and the ugly wife don’t actually work.

Note again that Geoff’s argument is a really simple and elegant equation:

Forbidding Badness = Coercing Goodness

In order to forbid badness in a legal sense, you have to physically stop someone from doing something, or physically punish them after they have already been proven to have acted or failed to act in a way that was required by law.

What you are talking about is spiritual enticements, not the physical realities that take place at the point of violations of the law. Geoff is clearly talking about the full, physical reality of what a law is, which includes not only the Substantive element, but also the Procedural element.

You do however, in a sideways kind of manner, bring up the important concept of deterrence. Substantive elements of the law have little or no bite, little or no deterrence. For example, we all know the Speed Limit is 65, but many people violate that limit every day, and most of them get away with it for years on end, and the authorities know they are violating the law. The deterrence power of a law is only present when the Procedural part of the law is really iron-fisted and beefy, and people start to see what the authorities are doing to citizens who either violate the proscriptive rule or ignore the prescriptive rule, as the case may be.

END NOTE 2:

Regarding the original post, the following statement is made with respect to larceny laws, abortion laws, and tax laws:

“In a democracy like ours these three could all be voted into laws or all be voted out as laws.”

Technically, we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a Constitutional Republic. Right and wrong are not supposed to be subject to mob rule or whims of the leaders. Our founding fathers tried to create a situation where it was extremely difficult to change existing laws or create new ones.

Most tragically, some of the laws mentioned above “can” and have been voted in and out, but in many cases this has involved hundreds of Congressmen and the President all violating their oaths of office and grievously violating the Constitution.

Violations of private property ownership are never, ever, supposed to be passed by Congress, or signed by the Executive Branch (the Pres.), or upheld by the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, it has happened. All three branches have become corrupt and they are not checking or balancing each other (mostly because the people are blind and lazy and have elected evil men). Our Republic is in decay, and the Constitution has been shredded down to the last thread. Tyranny and mob rule (democracy) is now “essentially” what we are living under.

Probably over half of all laws that are in place right now are unconstitutional abominations. Not only do they violate our rights, but they are insanely difficult and expensive to enforce, and that breeds corruption, and organized crime, and crooked cops, and causes lives and agency to be destroyed and wasted.

RESOURCES:

The prophetically recommended book By Jerome Horowitz, The Elders of Israel and the Constitution. (Ezra Taft Benson, 1972)
The prophetically recommended essay by Mark Skousen “Persuasion versus Force” (President Hinckley, 1991)
And the prophetically recommended book by Hans Verlan Andersen “Many Are Called But Few Are Chosen.” (Ezra Taft Benson, 1972)

The “action”/”inaction” thing is all about being able to make a distinction between prohibitive and compulsory laws. But we are probably beating a dead horse on that issue by now.

I would like to say, however, that the idea that Satan could “eliminate” agency is without foundation. If one defines agency as free will, (as most do, but which I believe is wrong) where does Satan get this magical power to take away one’s will? Maybe God should take away Satan’s will.

If one defines agency as “effective moral stewardship”, then it is pretty easy to see how the bondage of sin could reduce agency, but it is hard to see how such agency could be eliminated even by throwing everyone in prison.

No, that is not my position.

(That sort of undermines all the spinning you tried to do in the rest of your comment, eh?)

The reason many of us associate socialism with Satan’s plan is that it doesn’t just punish wickedness, it attempts to to force active righteous.

And the reason one could just as well associate forcing pregnant women to carry the pregnancy to full term with Satan’s plan is that it doesn’t just punish wickedness, it attempts to to force active righteousness.

So I feel that my position is neither hypocritical or inconsistent.

You are free to feel as you wish. Your position is at best inconsistent. It may be hypocritical too but you seem to believe your own BS so I don’t know if it really counts as hypocrisy in that case.

And as Darin noted, if you think that any wealth spreading methods like the ones he mentioned are ok doesn’t that make you a satanist who supports some form of satanic socialism too?

At what point are government laws considered socialist? Is any redistribution of wealth considered socialist in your view?

For example, what about Pell Grants and guaranteed student loans? These clearly redistribute wealth from those who pay taxes to those unable to pay for a college education. Would you consider that socialist?

What about WIC, the government program to provide food to poor women, infants, and children? Is that socialist?

What about government aid to those suffering from major catastrophes, such as Katrina? Because that redistributes tax dollars to those who have lost homes, loved ones, and need shelter, food, and water. Is that socialist?