Tag Archive for Big Government

The Role of Policing in Society Part I: How Big Government Spawns Hatred for the Police

July 14, 2020 ANTIFA, Big Government, Constitution, Domestic Terrorism, Globalists, Justice Department, Leftist Communists, Liberty and Freedom, Organization, Support, and Advice, Police State, Politics, Second Amendment / Gun Control, Social Unrest, Socialists, Uncategorized One comment

I reject the narratives circulating in the media.  I reserve the right to think independently and dissent from what the nation is being intimidated into “believing.”  This is still a Right of free people.  The argument all cops are bad is absurd.  The argument that police are systemically racist is patently false…a fact we should all be proud to announce vice succumbing to political intimidation and pandering.  On the other side of the narrative, it is false to declare that all cops are good and beyond reproach.  Like all institutions, there are always some wrongdoers.  However, when we find these miscreants wearing blue, we should all agree to weed them out instead of insulating them from accountability, be it by a union or immunity.  Also false are the polarized arguments insisting at one extreme, we abolish the police, or at the other extreme, cops must be protected from all criticism.  Neither narrative is beneficial and neither serves to address the real problems underlying the growing animosity and distrust between the public and the police.  This is not accidental.  This is a classic false choice, a red herring, set up by subversive elites to effectively trick the public into division.  To be clear, the police writ large are still the good guys and appreciated by vastly more people than the mainstream media portrays through a campaign of relentless disinformation.  So, rather than rehashing ridiculous narratives, I hope I can inject some balance and reason back into this ideological divide, which has been engineered to rip apart the fabric of this great nation.  In Part I of my articles on policing in the United States, I address the root causes of conflict between the police and the public, which are by definition systemic, and how to reverse it at a macro level. 

To scope the argument, let me ask this question.  Is there a difference between law enforcement and the police?  I asked many police officers this question and the consensus answer, albeit nuanced, was they were the same.  Inherent in this consensus the two terms are synonymous is what I believe to be one of the greatest problems with “law enforcement.”  There is a huge difference between protecting citizens as citizens and enforcing any edict an insane bureaucrat may concoct as a paramilitary arm of the regime.  This divide can be traced directly back to the differing Franco-Continental and British views of policing pre-dating the 1700s.  The British ideas, captured in Sir Robert Peel’s Nine “Peelian Principles,” represent policing by the consent of the people.  The Franco-Continental view is one of authoritarian absolutism through law enforcement.  One is the champion of the people and respected and the other becomes the enemy of the people and detested.  Not surprisingly, governments left unchecked often create a Franco-Continental model of law enforcement instead of the citizen based British model of policing.  Being that the law enforcement model has been embraced by big government socialists around the world to force policies without the consent of citizens, I do not find it at all coincidental that this glaring distinction between policing and law enforcement has been eradicated in modern vernacular and discussion.  Equally true is that as our nation moves from policing by consent to policing by force, there will be growing resistance.  As such, when asked how to “fix” our police departments, my answer is simple.  It is not to outright defund the police or get rid of cops.  It is to remove law enforcement from the corrupting control of politicians and make the police directly answerable to the public, which they directly serve.  With this comes training, re-education, and a heavy scoping of the role police serve in society and how they perform their duties.          

In a perfect world, the public would elect competent officials that execute the duties of their office with the utmost integrity and the best interests of the public in mind.  The public would be well represented by their officials.  The elected official would be directly accountable to the citizens not just in theory, but in practice.  They would rigorously adhere to the legal precedents codified in the Constitution and jealously guard the Rights of the people enshrined in the Bill of Rights.  These representatives would craft legislation that improves the lives of the citizens and only when necessary, would they use the police to enforce these just laws in the defense of life, liberty, and property with the citizens’ consent. 

Then there is the real world where corrupt and utterly incompetent bureaucrats and politicians spend lifetimes enriching themselves and their close friends at the taxpayers’ expense.  These career politicians have an insatiable appetite for more power, which means bigger government.  How does government get bigger?  It creates more government organizations to churn out an endless supply of new laws and regulations that give the politicians more power, wealth, and protection.  To fund these all-consuming fiefdoms, the political elite need an ever increasing amount of money to be extorted from the public in a thousand different ways ranging from traffic cameras, highway tolls, and speed traps, to the 78,000 pages of tax codes and counting.  The bigger their government fiefdom becomes, the more inefficient it becomes.  The more inefficient it becomes the greater need for even more laws to raise even more revenue.  This leviathan left unchecked will create so many laws, regulations, codes, taxes, ordnances, and rules, life for the ordinary citizen becomes oppressive and the citizen soon sees the government as the enemy.   

This growth of government directly impacts how police are seen by the public they serve.  Bigger and bigger government requires the need for more and more enforcement capacity.  This is an inherent problem that defines the violence and tyranny of big government, which soon becomes synonymous with Socialism.  To sustain the government, police are placed on the front lines of revenue generation, which immediately makes them the object of scorn for the financially extorted public.  Yes, it is true that it is the “elected” politicians of the “people” that created these taxes, but the fact is lost on the individual who only sees the officer in blue writing the ticket.  Some examples of how law enforcement become the face of revenue collection include enforcing ridiculous taxes on cigarettes, issuing frivolous traffic tickets, and enforcing tolls on highways paid for a thousand times over by taxpayers.  We may dress this up better, but a man with a gun enforcing the extraction of a $40 toll on Interstate 66 from the father trying to get to work is little different in practice to the ordinary citizen than the highwayman of old that held up travelers at gun point and robbed them face-to-face.  In addition to revenue collection, law enforcement is tasked with all manner of intrusive actions into people’s lives.  The list of egregious abuses grows by the day and includes everything from civil asset forfeiture better known as state sponsored theft to raiding homes in the middle of the night killing innocent citizens through gross negligence.  Whether arresting a six-year-old for a playground scuffle or unconstitutionally disarming innocent citizens without due process, the root of these outrages grows from too much government.  This insatiable growth of government ultimately pits the organs of state sanctioned force against the people it was designed originally to serve.  It is at this juncture when our men and women in blue must ask who they serve and whether they are representing law enforcement and the bureaucrats or police and the people. 

Our nation is at cross-roads.  Do we want police, or do we want law enforcement?  My question to our officers in blue is will you force the corrupt politicians with their overzealous rules to capitulate or will you continue to protect and empower them?  Will you serve by the consent of the people or the decree of the bureaucrats that despise the police, yet use law enforcement for their benefit?  You, the men and women in blue, have the power to be the champions of the people by denying the political elite the ability to force their oppressive ideologies on the public.  You are their enforcement capability.  Without your consent, their edicts are hollow.  Who do you serve?  Are you going to stand in formation all night long getting pelted with bricks and bottles of urine as your neighborhoods burn because some corrupt councilman dictated a stand-down order?  Are the only arrests you make going to be the father that pulled a gun to protect his family as the mob attacked him, burned his business, and trashed his car?  If so, in spite of the disinformation and propaganda in the mainstream media, which does not represent the actual attitudes and values of the majority in the nation that want to support the police, you have not only have lost the people, but have become the willing dupes of an elite that despises you.  Instead of selectively enforcing the law based on intimidation and pressure from radical politicians, I challenge all officers across this nation to push back, use discretion, and exercise their right to dissent by not engaging in inequitably practices that alienate the public.  Equally important, if communities genuinely want change in our policing practices…and I do, I challenge the citizens to replace career politicians, roll back the insane number of intrusive and unnecessary rules, and remove the control of the police departments from these governing bodies.  Our nation desperately needs checks and balances and for all too long, the big city police departments have been hamstrung by corrupt officials unfit to wear a badge.  Make the departments and their budgets independent.  Make the police chiefs elected officials.  Make the governments stop using the police to enforce revenue collection and all other non-criminal matters.  As Sir Robert Peel advocated, make the police the citizens and the citizens the police.      

By Guiles Hendrik,

July 14, 2020

Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles:

  1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
  2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
  3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
  4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
  5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
  6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
  7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
  8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
  9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

The Disenfranchisement of America and the Plan to Reverse It

December 11, 2013 Big Government, Congress, Constitution, Exclusive Story, Liberty and Freedom, Organization, Support, and Advice, Police State, Politics, Resistance to Tyranny One comment

The Constitution says that the number of representatives shall not exceed one representative for every 30,000 constituents.  This ratio was roughly equal to the actual ratio of representatives to the population at the time the Constitution was ratified.  However, today, most states have less than one representative per 700,000 people.  The result of this massive dilution of federal representation in Congress has been a near total disenfranchisement of the population and consolidation of power within two establishment political parties.  In order to begin restoring the balance of power to the people, breaking the party gridlock within Congress, and restoring liberty we must build popular support to overturn the arbitrary limit of 435 representatives set in 1929.  The sooner we build awareness and draw media attention to this issue, the greater the pressure will be on Congress to increase its size and begin to return the power to their constituents.

To begin, for a republic such as the United States to have a functioning representative government, there must be adequate and real representation of the citizen body.  The representatives must be answerable to their constituents and not political parties.  The notion today that a single representative can adequately represent the interests of over 700,000 people is lunacy normalized through decades of slowly eroding the individual’s political value to the point of nonexistence.  Further, the faux representation perpetrated upon the American people today has only been possible because politicians realize that their power is proportional to the number of people they represent.  The exact opposite is true for citizens.  The fewer citizens that are represented by a single representative, the more direct representation and influence the citizen possesses.

The Founding Fathers of the United States had much to say on the topic of what fair representation at the federal level would look like.  James Madison understood the danger of too few dictating to the many and adequately summarized his thoughts as the smaller the House, relative to the total population, the greater is the risk of unethical collusion or myopic groupthink.  In contrast, “Numerous bodies … are less subject to venality and corruption.”  [James Madison, 14-August-1789]   Federalist Paper Number 56 (February 19, 1788) describes this ratio stating, “…it seems to give the fullest assurance, that a representative for every THIRTY THOUSAND INHABITANTS will render the [House of Representatives] both a safe and competent guardian of the interests which will be confided to it.”  Note that the number “THIRTY THOUSAND” was capitalized in the papers for emphasis.

Melancton Smith’s observations deserve special attention as he, perhaps more than any of the other delegates to the Federal Convention, understood the gravity of the situation.  He knew that the power to determine the number of representatives could not be left to the ruling elite, which all too often become addicted to power.  This would be “a power inconsistent with every principle of a free government, to leave it to the discretion of the rulers to determine the number of representatives of the people.  There was no kind of security except in the integrity of the men who were entrusted; and if you have no other security, it is idle to contend about constitutions.” [Melancton Smith]  Smith elaborates on his valid and time proven point that we cannot expect the House to unilaterally increase the number of representatives.  “To me it appears clear, that the relative weight of influence of the different states will be the same, with the number of representatives at sixty-five as at six hundred, and that of the individual members greater; for each member’s share of power will decrease as the number of the House of Representatives increases.  If, therefore, this maxim be true, that men are unwilling to relinquish powers which they once possess, we are not to expect the House of Representatives will be inclined to enlarge the numbers.  The same motive will operate to influence the President and Senate to oppose the increase of the number of representatives; for, in proportion as the House of Representatives is augmented, they will feel their own power diminished.  It is, therefore, of the highest importance that a suitable number of representatives should be established by the Constitution.” [Melancton Smith]

Alexander Hamilton, an opponent of writing limits on representation into the Constitution, provides interesting insights into his logic.  For starters, it appears he neither conceived nor intended the federal government to have the sweeping powers that it possesses today.  “The subject on which this argument of a small representation has been most plausibly used, is taxation.  As to internal taxation, in which the difficulty principally rests, it is not probable that any general regulation will originate in the national legislature.” [Alexander Hamilton]  How Hamilton would have reacted to the reality of the Federal Income Tax, Obama Care, and the litany of other internal taxes levied since the ratification of the Constitution is anyone’s guess, but based on his above statement, one could surmise he would have altered his position on the need to include specific representational limits in the Constitution.  This conclusion is further supported by Hamilton’s statements respective of his belief that the federal government’s powers were limited and would never extend into one’s private life.   “The powers of the new government are general, and calculated to embrace the aggregate interests of the Union, and the general interest of each state, so far as it stands in relation to the whole. … Were the laws of the Union to new-model the internal police of any state; were they to alter, or abrogate at a blow, the whole of its civil and criminal institutions; were they to penetrate the recesses of domestic life, and control, in all respects, the private conduct of individuals,—there might be more force in the objection; and the same Constitution, which was happily calculated for one state, might sacrifice the welfare of another.” [Alexander Hamilton]  Of course we know now that the federal government has grown so oppressive and omnipresent as to invade every aspect of one’s private life.  As such, Hamilton’s grounds for objection, however implausible he may have believed them to be at the time, turned out to be the very grounds that time has proven most required the Constitution to dictate an equitable ratio of representatives to constituents.

Based on the rather clear intent of the individuals ratifying the Constitution, one may wonder how did the number of Representatives become fixed at 435?  The answer is rather simple; because Congress passed a bill in 1929.  The bill sought to prescribe a national policy under which the membership of the House shall never exceed 435 unless Congress, by affirmative action, overturns the formula and abandons the policy enunciated by this bill.  Respective of the number 435, there is no real reason other than that was the number of representatives at the time and the House found it advantageous to their political power to limit the growth further.  Of course the population of the United States has massively grown since 1929, which in effect increased the representation ratio to such an astronomically large number that the mere notion of representation was utterly destroyed.  However, this has only bolstered the power of the representatives and political parties, which have gerrymandered districts to the point of making the election of independent, grassroots connected representatives nearly impossible.  Except for those who are independently wealthy, election and reelection campaigns in super-sized districts require that the representatives raise huge sums of money on a nearly continuous basis.  This makes representatives beholden to the parties and big donors that funded their campaign instead of the constituents they purportedly are there to represent.  In short, this allows special interests, lobbyists, and other corrupting elements to highjack the representative.

To put the state of disenfranchisement in perspective, it is worth noting that Russia as compared to the United States has over 50% better representation of its people.  In fact, the United States has the second worst ratio of population to House representative in the world.  Surely as the “leader of the free world” the United States could muster better representation.

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Challenging this notion one may surmise that a larger House would result in even more gridlock in Congress.  However, with an approval rating consistently below 10% and the inability to so much as even pass a budget, it would be hard to imagine a more dysfunctional Congress.  Further, if the above maxim that a smaller legislative body would be much more productive held true, then the Senate would certainly be very efficient.  However, the Senate is as dysfunctional as the House when it comes to operation.  In fact, there are rarely more than a handful of Congressmen from any chamber present during session and even fewer actually engaged in meaningful debate.  In part, this is because the work of the Congress is broke down into committees, which would be no different if the House increased its numbers.  As for anyone that doubts a large body could pass legislation, California is often used as proof this is untrue.  In fact, California has for decades effectively voted on hundreds of propositions.  If the millions of people in California can effectively vote on legislative initiatives, it should be simple for even ten thousand representatives to vote on similar legislation.  Naysayers may also point out that the government is too big already and adding more Congressmen will just make it worse.  This is also untrue and in fact just the opposite would most likely be the outcome.  As the number of representatives increase, Congress will have to become more representative of the people.   The House will be more, not less motivated to reduce the size of the government.  This is because the representative will be far more accountable to their constituents, which will be much better able to monitor their actions.  It is also worth noting that an increase in actual representatives may be closer to an overall neutral growth in government employees because fewer staff members are required to support smaller districts, which would balance against larger staffs to support larger districts.

Each state is guaranteed at least one representative, no matter what its population.  States with a single member in the U.S. House of Representatives are Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.  The District of Columbia has a non-voting delegate in Congress who has all the powers and rights of a representative, but is not permitted to vote.  Currently, the approximate number of constituents to a representative is around 705,000.  If the ratio was closer to 1:50,000 we would have a House with about 6,100 representatives.  This increase could be dealt with by regionalization of Congress much like the Federal Court Districts, which could have interactive debate via the web and electronic voting.  It would also mean your vote once again counted and you would have real influence at what approximated to what most experience at the state level of politics.  It would once again be difficult for any one party to control Congress.  It would be even more difficult for special interests, big businesses, and lobbyists to buy off Congress simply due to the sheer number or representatives, which would require immensely large sums of money and unavailable financial and manpower resources to gain a majority of support for pork legislation.  The result would be a more accountable, more effective, and more representative Congress.

The notion that we could once again have realistic representation in Congress is not a pipe dream.  It is an obtainable goal that is well within the feasible realm of effective change initiatives liberty minded citizens can unite around.  We must build the awareness of the population that the status quo is unacceptable and that the 1929 law that disenfranchised us today must be overturned.  We need to all write our Congressmen, get on talk shows and radio, use social media, and empower the grassroots movements around this nation to take this goal on as a part of the platform.

 

By Guiles Hendrik

December 9, 2013

All rights reserved

 

 

 

The Debates in the Federal Convention

August 6, 1787

As the proportions of numbers in different States will alter from time to time; as some of the States may hereafter be divided; as others may be enlarged by addition of territory; as two or more States may be united; as new States will be erected within the limits of the United States, the Legislature shall, in each of these cases, regulate the number of representatives by the number of inhabitants, according to the provisions herein after made, at the rate of one for every forty thousand.

— Reported by James Madison

The Most Endangered Species: The Small Farm in America

August 12, 2012 Big Government, Constitution, Liberty and Freedom Comments Off on The Most Endangered Species: The Small Farm in America

Government Thugs Raiding Farms

The small family owned farm is disappearing at an alarming rate.  Once a cornerstone of American life, the small farm has been obliterated by big industrial agricultural operations, heavy government regulation and bureaucracy, and schemes by Argi-corporations such as Monsanto.  To say a small farm can’t compete is an understatement when the entire industry is rigged for them to lose.  This is the result of what happens when corrupt businesses, crony capitalists, and progressive Marxists join forces.

One should not forget about Stalin’s false famine that wiped out 20,000,000+ people in the Ukraine alone.  The Ukrainian famine is indicative of the affect on your food supply when leftists joining with industry gain control of your agricultural industry…they use it as a weapon against the population.  Disagree?  Today’s government is forcing corn to be used in ethanol production to satisfy a green agenda that could be better used to keep food prices down for the world.  Previous price spikes as a result of corn crop failure led to the starvation of many globally.  Further, the insistence on the use of GMO seed is generating super resistant strains of insects and diseases now requiring a return to even greater uses of more potent chemicals that combined could be lethal for your health.  Even worse, Congressional lobbying by corporations like Monsanto have effectively stopped the FDA from mandating GMO labeling, which would help small farms, break seed monopolies, and improve the health of millions that unknowingly consume theses products.  One should ask what happens when the only farms left are controlled by a few mega corporations that have a sole mission of profit?  Consider your health and the security of the food supply at risk.  Once a monopoly is established, price manipulation for maximum profit will almost assuredly be the result to speak nothing of the product quality.  What is even scarier is that one of the easiest ways to spike prices are to reduce supply.  This will equal global starvation and destabilization.  From a purely government perspective, the ability to force the population to become solely reliant on a few government controlled agricultural operations for food is in effect total control over life and what Stalin accomplished.

Fortunately, there is a significant backlash in this nation and Europe.  Europe has mandated labeling of GMO and has put funds toward insulating the small farms.  Domestically, people from across the political spectrum want healthy, organic, non-GMO food raised in a responsible manner.  They are also willing to pay more for it meaning that no matter how much Monsanto and big agri grow…or recently, not grow food…the small farms can still find a niche “IF” government reduces regulation. Today the American farmer is subject to some of the most regulation in industry, but has one of the smallest profit margins so small farmers are disproportionately affected.  Dealing with the USDA, FDA, IRS, EPA, Dept of Labor, etc. for a single family owned farm is near impossible when you don’t have the lawyers of big corporations and lobbyist firms to fight the thugs.

To resist this takeover of American agriculture, the media and public should focus on exploiting the natural rift in ideology within the Democratic party in particular.  Split away the environmental crowd from the leftists that have co-opted them into the party.  Environmentalists should quickly see that their support of big agri-business and leftist agendas will deprive them of both their ability to raise and consume healthy sustainable food as well as damage the environment through the use of chemicals and GMOs.  The environmental lobby is better suited to an independent libertarian political ideology than that of the Democrats in both practice and theory.  Further, both parties should be pressured at the local, state, and federal levels by their constituents to allow for the labeling of GMO based products.  This will go far in breaking the Monsanto monopoly.  Finally, push legislation that disarms regulatory agencies.  The FDA and USDA should not be raiding small farms with military SWAT teams.  Defang the agencies and let actual law enforcement agencies handle the policing if it is ever actually necessary.

For more information, see the below article:

http://theintelhub.com/2012/04/27/the-family-farm-is-being-systematically-wiped-out-of-existence-in-america/