HOW TO SPOT TYRANNY

Discussion

1. Governments take more than 10% of any individual's income:
   • Too many levels of government, each wanting tax revenue
   • Government can raise tax rates and fees any time it wants to
   • Regulation takes away value from property
   • Government requires people to use services, then charges fees for them
2. Government taxes items necessary to life:
   • Taxes or government fees on any of the following:
     1. food
     2. clothing
     3. purchase or rental of dwelling
     4. transportation
     5. employment
     6. farming
     7. owning a business
     8. medicine
     9. education
     10. marriage
     11. burial
     12. services the government requires people to use
     13. anything else essential to life
   • Government takes away necessities if taxes are not paid.
   • Government jails tax delinquents until taxes are paid (and they can't work in jail).
   • In cases of bankruptcy, taking taxes first, before others get paid.
3. Government penalizes work, rewards idleness:
   • Income tax penalizes work
   • Welfare handouts encourage idleness
   • Welfare rules make it dangerous for an individual to try to work
   • Property tax requires extra work to keep property
   • Property tax is always included in a dwelling rental payment
   • Taxing business profit destroys jobs
   • Minimum wage is a tax, where the revenue is given to the employees
   • Making items illegal to possess is taking property without compensation
4. Government spends on nonessentials:
   • After government forcefully separates money from people, it wastefully spends it
   • Spending on any of these items is unnecessary:
     1. sports, competitions, recreations, and special events
     2. parks, trails, and preserves (should be privately funded and operated)
     3. union wages (as opposed to free market wages)
     4. anything private industry does, or wants to do but is prohibited from doing
     5. attracting industry through special concessions
     6. convention centers, theaters, auditoriums, stadiums, amusement parks, bandstands, and other places to hold special events
     7. celebrations and parades
     8. subsidies to businesses
     9. commissions to study various questions
     10. bureaucracies
     11. keeping records on titles to various kinds of property, and value of same
     12. mail and utilities (should be business instead)
     13. speed limits (build it right, and people will use it right)
     14. monuments and plaques
     15. artworks, dances, music, exhibitions, fountains, and other aesthetic items
     16. enforcement of unnecessary regulation
     17. promoting immoral lifestyles
   • You can be put in jail for not paying to support any of these frivolities
   • Government can take your house and property to get the money to pay for these frivolities
5. Government owns more than is necessary to operate government:
   • land owned for uses other than seat of government, military, law enforcement, and transportation
   • mansions for officeholders
   • buildings for recreational uses
   • recreational equipment
   • seized property
   • land acquired to prevent development
   • Venues for sports or entertainment purposes
   • utilities
   • franchises for utilities crossing public lands
   • monopolies on certain activities that could be done privately
   • schools
6. Government controls daily life:
   • Government prohibits people from certain things unless they are citizens
   • Many regulations allow only one legal way to do something (to make inspection easier)
   • Government licenses activities where no threats exist to warrant licensing
   • Government tries to control the economy (with disastrous results)
   • Government always puts its own interests first
   • Government makes so many regulations that it is impossible to know them all
   • Government wants to control your health care, so you don't have any choice
   • Government tries to set wages or prices, with disastrous results
     1. Minimum wage inflates the money until workers make same real income again
     2. Price controls cause shortages (remember the gasoline shortage?)
     3. Price controls, not war efforts, cause rationing
     4. Subsidies keep producers from earning enough to continue producing
     5. Take away the profit, and the business closes
   • Politicians make traffic rules by whim, without sound engineering
   • Zoning takes property rights without compensation
   • Zoning excludes the types of uses people want
   • Zoning makes people travel farther to their jobs
   • Government officials do not care what religious beliefs they violate
   • Government officials want to replace deities with themselves
7. Government requires too many documents:
   • Identifying everyone and everything is their goal, no matter what religions they violate by doing it
   • They want to keep track of who owns what
   • Once they know someone owns something, they want to tax it
   • The paperwork required with payment of taxes is taxation enough
   • Soon government will have so much paper that no paperwork can be found when needed
   • Government creates a special legal way to discriminate called the "citizen"
   • Employment requires a huge amount of paperwork
   • Government collects huge amounts of data, to be used to do studies that make the government's preferred choice look more favorable
   • They keep records on race to prevent discrimination (??)
   • Most legislators are lawyers, so they make more jobs for lawyers
   • Administrators keep volumes of data, intended to show disastrous results of closing down their administration
   • Government charges much more than the actual cost for official copies of documents
8. Government bans possession or ownership of too many things:
   • Government wants to ban possession of anything that might be used to commit a crime
   • Government wants to ban anything that somebody could get hurt on
   • Since almost anything could be used to commit a crime, there would be nothing left
   • Sometimes, government bans things to solve a single dispute, not caring who else they hurt
   • Banning plants or animals is impossible, because things grow by themselves
   • Government never considers legal uses of things when banning items
   • Some chowderheads want to ban anything that might attract a thief
   • They never think of increasing the penalty for committing the crime itself
   • Officials especially want to ban anything contradicting their own philosophies
   • A common crime is possession of "burglary tools" available in any hardware store
   • Policemen constantly lobby to ban anything that can be used against an officer
   • Firemen constantly lobby to ban anything that can start a fire
   • Emergency doctors constantly lobby to ban anything that can injure someone
   • Generally, officials want to ban anything that makes their jobs harder
   • Now they want to ban possession of sound waves without paying royalties
   • Government wants anything offensive to any person except a Christian banned
9. Government controls education:
   • They teach things that would help their own political party stay in office
   • Union scale for teachers causes a lack of teacher expertise in marketable trades
   • Unions emphasize ease of teacher's job over effectiveness in teaching skills
   • Government elitists tend to emphasize unmarketable arts over trade skills
   • Government prevents children from being taught morals and responsibility
   • Government crams too many students into one space to save money
   • Government educators stick to tradition instead of teaching needed skills:
     1. The traditional artists' primary colors (red, yellow, blue) have been shown to be in error, yet government schools still teach the error.
     2. The correct pigment primaries (magenta, yellow, cyan) are rarely taught in the classroom.
     3. Somehow the correct light primaries are taught in physics, but the reason they are primaries is seldom taught.
     4. Arts that were once valuable trades are still emphasized, even though technology has totally displaced these arts from the general market.
     5. The displaced arts include:
        • Fine arts
        • Performing arts
        • Music
        • Acting
        • Dance
        • Poetry
        • Literature
     6. The market has replaced the above arts with:
        • Mass production
        • Photography
        • Recording
        • Radio
        • Movies
        • Television
     7. The very few professionals can use this technology to send their talents worldwide. But, because of this, there are no other jobs in these fields.
     8. Too many people become teachers because they want to teach these obsolete arts.
     9. Now that computers exist, the memorization of facts for social studies is obsolete.
     10. Memorization of mathematic facts, reading skills, and grammar are necessary, but not often practiced.
   • Cramming students into large buildings causes discipline problems
   • Once the schools are bad, they produce more people unable to teach properly
   • The result is a bunch of stupid people who have to depend on government to live
10. Government competes with industry:
    • Government borrows so much money that there is none left for business to borrow
    • Government sets up special monopolies that it runs or favors
    • Government creates its own utilities, and keeps others out
    • Government franchises other utilities to stop competition
    • Government fears competition because some workers might lose jobs
    • Government will not let more than one utility in an area
    • Governments sometimes buy factories to run to hire people, causing more to lose jobs
    • Officials actually believe the purpose of a business is to hire people
    • Government fears a free market, because it can't control it
    • Government likes monopolies, so it can regulate them easier
    • Megalomaniac regulators think they can anticipate every need and supply it
    • Government wants to control what you choose to buy. They do this so people can have jobs at their chosen professions
      • The problem is that there is no market demand for those products. Government should not support obsolete professions.
      • But government also does things to intentionally make products obsolete (e.g. the change to digital TV). This is also wrongdoing.
    • Part of the job problem is that nobody wants to do certain jobs
11. Government blockades its borders:
    • Government calls certain people "citizens" and gives them special rights
    • People cannot freely enter the country
    • People cannot freely leave the country
    • Special permits are required to have a job
    • Government restricts imports and immigration to "help its own workers"
    • Government does not realize that border blockades also choke off the ability of other countries to buy the country's exports
    • Extensive paperwork is required
    • Goods crossing the border are either prohibited or taxed
    • People can be killed for trying to travel
12. Government can do what people can not legally do:
    • Government can go into debt to an extent that people cannot
    • Officials can break laws others must obey
    • Government can legally steal from people
    • Government can make people incur expenses without committing crimes
    • Judges can take away rights without any legislative vote
    • Officials cannot be sued for improperly acting
    • The aesthetic values of the officeholders become the required standards
    • Government can legislate special deals for itself
    • It's a crime for a person to impersonate an official, but it's not a crime for an official to impersonate a person
    • Legislators can repeal all of the moral laws they themselves break
    • Where people and government disagree, government wins
    • Government can make special exceptions for certain people or offices