“Relax, ” said the night man,
“We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! ”

Eagles
Hotel California

Communist Manifesto

Plank #4 — Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

Let’s assume that you live in a State with a onerous tax burden. Further let’s assume that the legislators of the State that you live in don’t want to see you leave without paying your “fair” share of the said State’s tax burden? I mean, after all, you can’t escape any other debt just by moving across state lines. Why should you be able to escape what you owe to the state in terms of your share for the State debt simply by moving to another state?

States are in a desperate straight for for revenue and it just doesn’t make any sense for states to allow their producers and taxpayers to leave the state (California — a particularly troubled death spiral state — averages 200,000 citizen departures annually) with the consequence that only the takers remain? After all, where do citizens get off thinking that they have the liberty to protect their money by moving to States where the tax bite is less painful?

The idea to tax departing citizens is not new but is merely an application of the 4th plank of the Communist manifesto. Both Stalin and Hitler didn’t allow people to leave their friendly boundaries without first fleecing them of most of their money. I mean, it is reasonable that if the State has cared for you, educated you, and made you the person you are, that you owe them a significant amount of your property should they decide to allow you to leave their gentle ministrations, right? Is it really so onerous to pony up a exit fee for moving across State borders when one already has to pony up a exit fee to the state when one moves across the borders from life to death. I mean if we are going to pay estate and inheritance taxes what is the big deal about paying moving taxes?

Of course another way to make sure that States don’t lose valued cash cows is to go all East Germany and place a barbed wire fence around the borders. The only problem with that is if states like California placed a barbed wire fence around their borders to keep tax-payers in, how could illegal aliens ever creep in order to profit as recipients of tax payer largess? Don’t you just hate the conundrum that progressive State legislators have to resolve? I guess that is why they get paid the big money.

Keep in mind as we advance the idea that States need to implement a expatriate shake down er, I mean, tax, that states would merely be following the example of the FEDS who already practice such a shake down. Currently the FEDS seize the monies of emigrants through the means of capital gains tax that includes taxation on unrealized gains, across all their holdings marked to market as of the day of their departure. However, we mustn’t stop there. Currently expatriates are responsible for gift taxes on amounts above $12,000 a year given to anyone in the U.S., for the rest of their lives, even though they are no longer citizens themselves. SCOTUS has no problem with this.

Somewhere Marx is gloating.

Look, those few of us who are awake need to start admitting some hard truths to ourselves if we haven’t already.

1.) This is not your Founding Father’s America
2.) If we are not a Marxist nation we at least have a Marxist Government
3.) Protesting against this Marxist treatment will eventually find the protester receiving Marxist Gulag treatment
4.) Both Democrats and Republicans alike are all Jacobins. The difference is merely one of degree
5.) There is no sense in trying to wrap this social order in any kind of Christian garb. We are a anti-Christ State.

Of course, one could always just embrace R2K theology and just completely ignore this anti-Christ social order.

Hat Tip — Bill Frezza

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Often people will talk about the original intent of those who assembled and approved of the US Constitution. There is value in doing that to be sure, but the real place we should look as to original intent is to the ratifying State Constitutional conventions. It was those who ratified the Constitution, state by state, who need to be consulted as to what they understood the intent of the Constitution was as they voted for ratification.

On the issue of the 2nd amendment we have some insight into the original intent of those who ratified the US Constitution. This is important to note because there remains yet a species of thought that suggests that the 2nd amendment only refers to the state militias as state militias. Upon this reading the 2nd amendment insures that state militias have the right to keep and bear arms. This understanding insists that the 2nd amendment was never intended to speak to whether or not individual citizens, unattached from state militias, had a right to keep and bear arms.

However, that such a reading is specious can be seen by the ratifying State conventions. To summarize the state ratification process, three states, New York, New Hampshire, and Virginia, ratified the Constitution while expressing their understanding that the people had a right to bear arms and that Congress would never disarm law abiding citizens. Two states, North Carolina and Rhode Island, refused to ratify until individual rights, including the people’s right to keep and bear arms, were recognized by amendments. In Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, an effort was made to amend or condition ratification on amendment to include, among others, the right to keep and bear arms. Efforts to amend were defeated but not on the merits. There is no evidence from any state convention that any speaker suggested that the proposed Constitution would permit disarming the public.

Eventually, the Federalists agreed to pacify Anti-federalists concerns regarding the Constitution by agreeing to add a “Bill of Rights” immediate upon ratification of the US Constitution. What is interesting to note is that there was some concern regarding adding a “Bill of Rights.” Some of the ratifiers were concerned that as there were many more God given rights then could possibly be enumerated in a document, what could be implied is that those Rights which were not enumerated would not be seen as Rights. This concern was satisfied with the 9th amendment. Second, there was concern that such a Bill of Rights would be redundant since the Constitution was already a negative document that gave very prescribed and limited powers to the Federal Government. Why say again what the Federal Government could not do when it has already been detailed as to what alone the Government could do? Also, there was concern articulated that in passing a Bill of Rights it could be perceived that the Government was the one giving these Rights as opposed to merely affirming that the Rights were God given (inalienable) and could not be touched by any Government.

And this brings us back to the 2nd amendment. The 2nd amendment is a reflection of a long history of the rights of Englishmen and at the time was but the latest instantiation of a equally long history of English law and tradition on the matter. Englishmen had, for centuries, the God given Right to armed self defense. The idea that the original intent of the ratifiers of the Bill of Rights was only to protect State militias as State militias is laughable.

The Federal Government can do all they like to eviscerate the 2nd amendment but whatever they do in that regard is meaningless and would, at best, yield up a illegal legality. The Federal Government did not create the inalienable Right to keep and bear arms and so the Federal Government can not take away, diminish, or void, the inalienable Right for individual citizens to keep and bear arms.

It should be a sobering fact that throughout history the prelude to the successful usurpations of Dictators and Tyrants has often been the seizing from the citizenry of their only hope of successful defense against eventual enslavement. Wise people have always known that the confiscation of their arms is the confiscation of their liberty.

God created all men equal. Sam Colt kept them that way.