Pete Hendrickson (@LostHorizons)

It's A Good Time To Share Some More Victories ...as Americans prepare to go to the polls and either retain or reject the folks who just voted to add 87,000 new IRS agents to the federal bureaucracy. 87,000 NEW MOUTHS LOCKED ON to the federal teat (and-- along with their spouses and dependents-- reliably voting from now on to do whatever it takes to keep it full of other people's money) is bad enough. But that's just an incremental increase in the mountain of compelling reasons to go to the polls, dragging all your friends along, and throw out of office every statist shill, prostitute and enabler (of any party). Among those other compelling reasons in these current dark days are the ongoing evisceration of the American economy, the deliberate destruction of domestic tranquility, and the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, all brought on by those currently in office in Washington (and in many cases in state capital and city halls). So, vote, people, please! AT THE SAME TIME that you mark election day on your calendar, though, don't lose sight of the bigger picture and all the tools in the toolbox. While Americans were provided with the vote as the standard, repeating mechanism for political and policy corrections, the Founders and Framers recognized that sometimes corruption can become so pervasive (or dangers so immediate) that reliance on voting alone is inadequate to the People's needs. Hence we have, for instance, a supposedly independent judiciary; and a supposedly adversarial press equipped with legal guarantees of unhindered speech (which extend to everyone, whether formally organized as media or just as individuals speaking truth as they see it). Hence, we have, for instance, the decisions to allow state punishment of Americans being left in the hands of the citizenry by way of juries, Hence we have, for instance, in extremis, the Second Amendment. And hence we have the power to very largely defund corrupt American governments, acting entirely as individuals, with no permission slip needed from any quarter. The exercise of that power involves nothing more challenging than merely declining to engage in excise-taxable activities, along with knowing what constitutes such activities and how to overcome corrupt government efforts to pretend and persuade that ALL economic activities are of the excisable sort. Well, exercising the "excise power" does require one other thing, I guess-- the courage to do it and to stand tall doing it, even in the face of frothy efforts to discourage such extremely inconvenient behavior by the corrupt government officers whose personal gravy train, by which we are all being carried over a cliff, is thereby derailed. Continued: https://losthorizons.com/N/214.htm#1