Who owns you, your life, your body, your property?
I own me. No one has a higher claim to me, my life, my body, or my property. This might seem like an easily answered question, but let me ask you this.
If you were walking down the street & a stranger came up to you & said, “Hey buddy, I don’t like that you’re drinking a 64 oz soda, you can’t drink that here.” …or someone came to the bar you own and tells you, that you can’t have a sandwich board outside of your front door advertising your specials because it gives the town a bad image. What if some guy pulls up to your house and leaves a piece of paper on your door telling you that you owe him and his gang money because your driveway is gravel and not paved.
Would you follow their command, or pay their extortion fee? If so then how can you claim that you own yourself? If you collapse under threat, if you give into coercion, then you are not a free person. Everyone, and I mean every individual born on this planet or on one of the vast number of planets in the sky has the right to their life, body, and property. One would not listen to some stranger demanding they thrown away their soda because it’s too big. No one would let some guy off the street tell them how to run their business or what they can or can’t do with their property. So why would anyone let the government tell them what to do??
The answer to that question is that the government has a monopoly on the use of force. For some reason, individuals see the government as some legitimate organization whose propose is to serve and protect it’s ‘people.’ This is not the case. The truth is that if you do something, say something, or put something in your body that the government doesn’t like, they will come to your home or place of work, kidnap you, and throw you in a cage. They’ll keep you in this cage until they think you’ve been corrected. Oh, they will also steal your money and/or property depending on the ‘offense’ you committed.
Oh, but wait, we have a court system to keep that from happening! You have a right to a trial by jury! You have a right to a fair trial.
There are a couple things wrong with the above argument. The court system in the USA is flawed and corrupt. They say you have a right to a trial by jury, but if the court makes a clerical mistake and sends your mail to the wrong place, then you don’t. Such is what happened to Ademo Freeman on his chalking appeal. You also don’t have the right to a fair trial. I say this because you cannot have a fair trial if there is a conflict of interest, and in the court system there’s a big one… The judge and the prosecutor work for the same team, the state.
District judges are incentivized to find people guilty because they don’t want to let a guilty person go free, so instead they convict tons of innocent people to be sure they don’t make any mistakes. Then, you come to a jury trial. Okay, maybe you’ll get some justice here, it’s a jury of your peers! Well, the instructions given to the jury say that they are to judge only whether the person standing trial broke the governments rule. They jury is supposed to be the last check and balance, as in, jurors can judge a law on whether it’s moral or not. The state doesn’t tell jurors that, though, they like the status quo.
Ask yourself this: How can a group of people represent an entire nation and make rules and laws for an entire nation if everyone in that nation doesn’t agree? How is it moral for someone else, no matter what their job title is to make up rules and laws that everyone has to follow? It’s not. Each individual is just that, an individual. They are capable of governing their own life, the way they see fit. I know that I don’t need someone telling me what to do every second of every hour of every year for my entire life. That’s my job, that’s why I own me.
I’ll ask again, who owns you? Yourself, or the government?
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
This is awesome, Cecelia. Very well put!