Thoughts On Freedom

More and more governments are making the inalienable rights you were born with, conditional rights the government can revoke whenever it decides it’s “an emergency.”

Inalienable rights aren’t conditional. In the US, the Constitution specifically limits government powers to those specifically enumerated. Nowhere does it, or the Bill of Rights, give the government the power to suspend or eliminate your rights at its choosing.

If a government can eliminate your rights on a whim (emergency), you don’t have rights, you have privileges. That was the big argument over inalienable rights vs. civil rights (inalienable are granted by God, civil are granted by government) in 1861, when the Southern states walked out of the last lawfully quorumed meeting of the Continental Congress - the Northern states wanted them to trade their citizens’ rights for federally granted civil rights, and the Southern states said nowhere in the Constitution, nor the state constitutions, were they granted the authority to do so. Revisionist history has the war that broke out about slavery (which requires you be historically illiterate), but that wasn’t the issue. It was state (the people’s) rights vs. the Federal state’s privileges it wanted to swap. But I digress.

My point is that the US is inundated with propaganda that assures its citizens that they are free. The military “protects our freedoms.” We “bring freedom” to other nations. And so on.

The shameful period when the government simply eliminated the freedoms of thousands of Americans of Japanese heritage born in the US (legally citizens by birth) has been hand waved away as an anomaly. An outlier. But here’s the lesson: the government will act as though your inalienable rights are granted, and can be eliminated by it, if you let it. It will seize power it doesn’t have, and hold onto it, and abuse it, if the citizenry allows it.

If the government can eliminate your freedom to determine whether you participate in a medical experiment (without informed consent), you aren’t any freer than a lab rat. Never mind that post-WW2, the Nuremberg Code was ratified by the world’s nations in order to prevent dictatorial abuse of power with forced medical experimentation, and the US’ unlawful mandates and coercion are obvious violations of it (ask the Native Americans what the US government’s word is worth or to talk about its honor in behaving as promised). If the government can restrict your ability to work, to shop, to dine, to go to school, whenever it decides the common cold, or any other pathogen, is an “emergency,” you’re a slave who’s being gaslit into believing you’re free.

That really is the litmus test. Not how low your interest rate is on currency a private banking cartel requires you to pay your taxes with (and prints in the back room at no cost to itself), in violation of the Constitution’s clearly stated rule that the only legal tender in the US is gold or silver. Not how “free” you are to pay 200 overt and hidden fees, taxes, permits, licenses, etc. while being assured you’ve got it great. Not whether you own your land outright or the government has ultimate ownership (the basis of both property tax/rent on your land, and imminent domain laws that assume the government has ultimate rights to your property, your air, your water - powers it simply assumed, rather than were granted by the people).

It’s whether your inalienable rights to pursuit of happiness and the fruits of your labor and freedom of movement and all the rest are conditional upon the government honoring them, or whether you as a society stop its overreach and prevent it from claiming power it doesn’t have and abusing it.

I give America an F on this one. The majority of the country is allowing the federal apparatus to abuse its power to bully the citizenry into clear violations of the Nuremberg Code, and the big corporations that are its lapdogs, and the press that is supposed to be the last line of defense in keeping the government honest, is in cahoots with it.

Shameful as anything I’ve ever witnessed.