A police officer pulled over Floyd Dent for a routine traffic stop.
A violent altercation followed.
The officer dragged Dent out of his car, appeared to put him in a chokehold, and punched him in the head. He then used his stun gun.
A disturbing but hardly unique encounter. These kinds of things happen all the time. It seems like there’s a new police abuse video uploaded to YouTube every day. In many cases, these incidents turn deadly. Dent is lucky the officer didn’t kill him on the spot.
But what’s really remarkable about this incident is that there was any kind of accountability at all. In many cases, the government and the fawning mainstream media sweep cases of police abuse under the rug. The State is extremely reluctant to hold its enforcers to account. But sometimes it’s forced to when overwhelming video evidence comes to light that sparks public outrage.
Once a video of the Dent incident became public, the officer lost his job. He’s now on trial, facing charges of mistreatment of a prisoner.
Dent also decided to sue the city of Inkster, Michigan, where the incident occurred. Surprisingly, he won. The city of Inkster settled for $1.4 million.
One disturbing aspect of the political risk in the US is the trend of overcriminalization.
When you consider the totality of all the laws, regulations, codes, and rules that Americans are subject to (which are often broad and vague), it is practically impossible for anyone to be fully compliant.
In other words, we are all criminals now.
According to a civil liberties lawyer and author, the average American unknowingly commits three felonies a day. Overzealous prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes with draconian penalties on any one of us through some sort of technicality, for even the most seemingly harmless behavior.
This means Americans essentially live under the discretion and whims of prosecutors and the government, who can pick and choose whose lives they would like to destroy.
Take for example the recent and tragic case of Aaron Swartz the 26-year old internet entrepreneur who committed suicide amid a potential sentence of 35 years in prison for a victimless crime."Cruel and unusual" doesn't even begin to describe the penalties involved in the Swartz case, which were extremely disproportionate to any conceivable harm caused.
On to some good news: there has been some success in pushing back against the civil forfeiture laws in the US. These laws are essentially licenses for the government to steal. They surprisingly do not require you to be convicted or charged with a crime for the government to seize your property or business at the drop of a hat.
You will find this story and others that you need to know about, as well as recent International Man articles and the best resources from the internet, below.
Fortunately you can legally insulate yourself from the whims of any government through internationalizing yourself, your savings, and your business.
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Sincerely,
Nick Giambruno
The problem is, Inkster doesn’t just have an extra $1.4 million laying around. So what did the local politicians do? They decided to squeeze a little extra juice out of the taxpayers, of course. They did this by raising property taxes.
A local media source estimates the new property tax will amount to about $179 on a home valued at about $55,400.
Now that doesn’t sound like a lot. But consider that the median income in Inkster is just $26,500 and that 40% of its people live below the poverty line. They simply don’t have an extra $179 to pay for a police abuse lawsuit which had nothing to do with them. The case has outraged people there, and rightly so.
There are a lot of things that are outrageous about this story. But there’s one that I find most instructive. And that’s the very concept of property tax. It’s an insidious perversion of property rights. How can you think you really own something that the government forces you to pay an insatiable and ever-increasing amount of tax on?
If you ask me, it’s impossible to truly own something that has a property tax attached to it. You would possess such an item, but you wouldn’t own it. It’s an important distinction. Stop paying your property taxes to find out who really owns your home. In actuality, you’re merely renting the home you thought you owned from the government.
Whenever politicians want to steal more money, they can simply increase property taxes and hope nobody notices. It’s like changing the dial on a thermostat. The Floyd Dent case showed this.
Turning to property taxes to quench a thirst for money is not unique to the politicians in Inkster, Michigan. It’s a universal feature built into the DNA of almost any politician in the world. Consider the bankrupt government of Greece. Here’s an excerpt from an article in The Guardian:
The joke now doing the rounds is: if you want to punish your child, you threaten to pass on property to them… Greeks traditionally have always regarded property as a secure investment. But now it has become a huge millstone, given that the tax burden has increased sevenfold in the past two years alone.
The sad reality is that there are few countries in the world that do not have a property tax. Fewer than 20 to be exact. We cover them in detail in Going Global. The only way to skip the annual property tax harvest is to own real estate in these countries.
It’s not just a matter of minimizing or eliminating property taxes, though. Yes, that’s extremely important. But foreign real estate offers a number of other tremendous benefits, too.
It’s a hard asset outside the immediate reach of your government. They cannot confiscate it without a literal act of war.
It opens the door for you to obtain an offshore bank account, residency, and maybe even citizenship, in another country.
It diversifies your portfolio and can bring income streams in a foreign currency if you rent it out.
These are but a few of the huge benefits foreign real estate can give you.
For a more detailed discussion, you may wish to check out Going Global 2015.
Those who seek out positions of power tend to be paranoid, hypocritical wimps. Consider the issue of firearms. Politicians have many thousands of mercenaries (soldiers and "law enforcers") wielding all sort of deadly weapons--guns, tanks, missiles, drones, etc. Yet those same politicians pee themselves at the thought of the rabble owning semi-automatic rifles. From their twisted, elitist perspective, it's perfectly fine for them to swipe many billions of dollars from their subjects to spend on all manner of armaments, but if YOU want to possess a rifle, they think you should have to ask their permission, and register it, and make sure they always know what you own.
They also expect to be allowed to do things in secret, while claiming the right to spy on you and everyone else. As far as they are concerned, it's none of your business what they do, or what weapons they have, but it is their business to know everything that you do and everything that you have. Of course, they will pretend that their goal is to protect you from the "criminal element," but you'd have to be pretty dense to actually believe that. Why do you suppose they mostly whine about civilians having weapons that:
are used in only a tiny percentage of actual crime, and;
are the most effective types of weapon for resisting "government"
aggression?
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. People who gravitate towards political office think they have the right to rule you. That's the job they applied for. And, of course, extorting you and bossing you around could be rather more difficult if you are better armed than their enforcers. So they hand out machine guns to their mindless thugs, but have tantrums about you having a 30-round magazine.
A new Congress has been seated, and it brings the prospect of perhaps, maybe, potentially, in a possible way doing something about the runaway federal deficits. And in other news, several New York area bridges are for sale, which you can acquire at a bargain price.
Excessive Spending Destroys!
Feds Have a Spending Problem — DO NOT RAISE THE CEILING!
Feds Have a Sewage Problem!
Becky Gerritson: "...government is out of control!" and "...our representative government has failed us."
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the IRS to detail under oath how some of former agency official Lois Lerner’s emails went missing, as well as any potential methods for recovering them.
Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington gave the Internal Revenue Service exactly a month — until Aug. 10 — to file a report, which he demanded as part of a lawsuit from a conservative watchdog, Judicial Watch, against the agency.
Judicial Watch is seeking a wide range of documents from the IRS, including Lerner’s emails, as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. It has complained that the IRS didn’t tell it that the agency couldn’t recover all of Lerner’s emails from 2009 to 2011.
Sullivan cast his ruling as a compromise, and a potential way for Judicial Watch to get answers without the court wading any deeper into the matter. Judicial Watch had asked the court to potentially compel IRS officials to testify about the lost emails, through a process called limited discovery.
The FairTax is a consumption tax unilaterally applied to all Americans at the same rate. For businesses, payroll taxes would no longer exist. Our exports would include a heavy tax for overseas buyers purchasing our products, while our imports would be cheaper for us to purchase. I'm not sure how this would affect GDP, as more information is necessary.
According to the FairTax website, "Under the FairTax, every person living in the United States pays a sales tax on purchases of new goods and services, excluding necessities due to the prebate." The prebate gives every legal resident household an "advance refund" at the beginning of each month so that purchases made up to the poverty level are tax-free.
So a family of four making something like $50,000/year should not have to pay taxes, thus preventing an unfair burden on low-income families. Since the FairTax eliminates both federal and payroll taxes, you get to keep your gross pay amount of each paycheck earned.
John Adams said, “Without [term limits] every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey”. That being said, here are some of the reasons we believe our country needs Term Limits.
Term Limits can help break the cycle of corruption in Congress. Case studies show that the longer an individual stays in office, the more likely they are to stop serving the public and begin serving their own interests.
Term Limits will encourage regular citizens to run for office. Presently, there is a 94% re-election rate in the House and 83% in the Senate. Because of name recognition, and usually the advantage of money, it can be easy to stay in office. Without legitimate competition, what is the incentive for a member of Congress to serve the public? Furthermore, it is almost a lost cause for the average citizen to try to campaign against current members of Congress.
Term Limits will break the power special interest groups have in Congress.
Term Limits will force politicians to think about the impact of their legislation because they will be returning to their communities shortly to live under the laws they enacted.
Term Limits will bring diversity of people and fresh ideas to Congress.
[Editor's Note: If you want to get rich, i.e. advance from a low paying government bureaucrat job on the local or state level, THEN GET ELECTED TO THE US CONGRESS (House or Senate). Once you're elected, it's easy to steal from your campaign contributions or the Congressional budget allocated to your seat and staff. You can go on a government-funded junket with 'lavishly' paid expenses. The list of ways to steal from the government while in office is inexhaustible. There are only a few Congressmen who left Congress just wealthy instead of a multi-millionaire. Of course, there are several who arrived in Congress as multi-millionaires and don't need to steal from the government.]
One disturbing aspect of the political risk in the US is the trend of overcriminalization.
