The Status Quo: Unsafe, Limiting, Nonsense

• Too many rules

  • In the USA, for example, the Code of Federal Regulations is 100X longer than the entire works of Shakespeare (over 100 million words vs Shakespeare’s 884,000 words). U.S. federal, State, and Tax laws are an additional 60 million words.
    • Not even the best lawyer can retain knowledge of all these laws that must be abided by.
  • It is an abuse of power to punish someone for breaking an unprincipled rule that can’t be remembered.
  • Unanchored from the Legal Principle, these rules are susceptible to be coopted for private interests at the expense of society. Even in supposedly developed and civilised societies, it is pervasive that private corporations influence, lobby or pay politicians to create rules that benefit themselves at the expense of their competition. The result is crony-capitalism, the military-industrial complex and a more expensive and difficult world than is otherwise possible.

• Unequal freedom

  • The current system of democracy is essentially a tyranny of the majority. The voting public are easily influenced by the media to elect politicians whose policies explicitly breach our right not to be aggressed against.
    • After being elected, it is common that politicians create unjust policies and laws, even when they promised they would not.
  • Mob rule is not justice. Correct principles are what create correct law, not the opinion of the majority. It was not too long ago that democracies allowed slavery, prohibited unorthodox sexual preferences, and banned alcohol. Many unjust prohibitions and victimless crime laws are still in place today.

• Hollowing of the community

  • Taxation is the process of coercively taking money from individuals and groups, often by a distant centralised power. It reduces our ability to look after ourselves, our loved ones, and our wider communities. It increases our dependency on the state. Some of the taxed money is returned in various forms of subsidy, but these are anonymous; the joy of gifting has been deprived by coercive taking. Many people can not envision or have even attempted to imagine a society without taxation. To be clear, we do not propose to eliminate all taxation immediately, but rather to strategically and smartly reduce taxation as we grow our shared highest level of prosperity and charitable efforts.
  • Do people in a far away place, who you’ve never met, really know what’s best for your local community?

• Ever-increasing debt, sapping our creative potential

  • As irresponsible and insurmountable government debts rise, an ever-increasing amount of taxation will be needed merely to cover the massive interest expense on that debt. This is not sustainable and will likely result in a devastating financial collapse. Action must be taken now to mitigate this looming financial crisis.

  • The US government's massive interest cost is set to be the largest budget item soon.

  • There is a risk that the ‘social safety nets’ could become traps if the government finds itself caught between high inflation and high interest payments. In that scenario, the choice will be between cutting welfare payments or allowing rapid inflation, both of which would hurt the poorest. When people become habituated to welfare, they lose the practice of self-reliance or finding support from their local community. We must change course.

    

• Victimless crime laws

  • It is an abuse of power to punish someone even though they didn’t harm anyone (victimless crimes). Indeed, the punisher becomes the aggressor.
  • If someone wants to ingest a herb or any other medicine or substance without harming anyone else, why should we punish them? Why should we ever punish actions that don’t harm others? Although we are free to attempt to persuade, we have no right to aggress against other competent adults even if they seek to engage in harm to themselves.

• Institutionalised theft, war, and environmental damage

  • Many existential threats result from our current paradigm of legalised aggression.
  • Why do we tolerate these consequences, yet show intolerance towards activities that cause no harm?

• Justified by a social ‘contract’ you never agreed to

  • None of us consented to the so-called Social Contract. Nonetheless, nonsensical rules are imposed on us, our property is stolen, and we face uncompromising enforcement if we choose otherwise.
  • Why should we accept life on hard mode when there is a far superior alternative available to us?

• Endless cycle of aggressing

  • We must end these cycles that do not serve us. Society is divided and habitually imposes morality on each other by fighting for control of the law.
  • We must surrender our desire to control other people and instead adopt a law rooted in principles that are fair and agreeable to all reasonable people.
  • We need to stop aggressing against each other if we are to achieve freedom. From freedom, peace follows as people recognize the social benefits of acting decently to others. From peace arise the conditions for love between the human family.