PM's Self Reliance Tools: Everyone is a Criminal

Poor Man Survival

Self Reliance tools for independent minded people…

www.poormansurvivor.net

ISSN 2161-5543

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching.
- Unknown

The Goal: Turn everyone into a criminal…

If you laid all our our laws end to end, there would be no end…no other nation in history has created as many laws as the USA. Nor has any other nation accumulated so much debt in such a short time span.

I’ve written about this many times over the past decade. Our government is out of control and no one seems willing or able to reign it in. When I was born we were a solvent nation and government pretty much minded its own business. Now, our leaders have bankrupted the national treasury and interfere with every damned nook and cranny of our lives…it is despicable.

Justice William Douglas once lamented “The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people!”

Despite efforts of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who wanted to keep government severely limited and leave folks blessedly alone for ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ we are no directed by Washington on every element of living. Only special interests, willing to pay the piper its price, seem to hold any sway while the will of the people is damned.

The enumeration of powers granted to the government gives them the authority to run the government, NOT our personal lives.

It’s apparent to many that we are no longer a free society. We now have taxes on everything but, like the quality of our leadership, our infrastructure is crumbling.

In 1970 we had 100 million laws on the books. Today, no one knows or can keep track of the amount of laws that are in place at all levels of government. Most of us know we already have too much government interference in our lives and its cost to citizens is beyond vile. Instead of laws issued by legislators, we’re now run by unelected federal agencies and bureaucrats who seem bent on destroying our nation.

The more people who are unwittingly trapped by our all-encompassing, all choking legal system become just another revenue source for the system and more fodder for the growth of more regulations from UNELECTED bureaucrats who have little oversight by legislators.

The shocking growth of entangling laws and regulation is tripping up honest Americans. Several thousand federal criminal statues exist nowadays. For historical comparison, back in 1790 only six existed: treason, counterfeiting, piracy, murder, maiming and robbery in federal jurisdictions.

Today scholars from universities, to the Justice Department, to the American Bar Association don't even know how many laws exist! It's believed to be far greater than 4,500. It's too numerous to count and these statutes are peppered throughout 27,000 pages of the federal code.

Adding to this problem, many new federal laws have lower standards for conviction than in the past: Prosecutors do not always need to show criminal intent (mens rea.) And, federal regulations (also numbering in the thousands) often carry the force of federal criminal law as penalty.

Most people believe that knowing their rights and respecting the rights of others is pretty much good enough to stay clear of legal trouble. The problem today is the growing number of federal criminal laws and regulations. They ensnare many law-abiding citizens who have no criminal intent, yet threaten them with arrest, prosecution, and prison time.

Retired race-car champion Bobby Unser told a congressional hearing how he got lost in a blizzard on his snowmobile and got a $75 fine, plus a criminal record! The crime? He drove onto protected federal land, an automatic violation of the Wilderness Act. An honest mistake that left him with a misdemeanor conviction.

"There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime," said retired Louisiana State University law professor John Baker in a Wall Street Journal report. "That is not an exaggeration."

"Most people think criminal law is for bad people," says Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute. "They're one misstep away from the nightmare of a federal indictment."

Many pundits, like the Blaze's Buck Sexton, feel this gives federal agencies too much power. To justify their budgets, they need something to show, which encourages abuse... hammers in search of nails.

Resources you can use and share…

Participate in Liberty.me. The ideas of liberty have always needed an action plan, something besides begging the people in power to recognize human rights and liberties. Now there is a global liberty community that provides discussions, libraries, friendship, and turnkey publishing, effectively crowdsourcing the building of liberty. It’s a community for doers, not just dreamers, and it’s made possible entirely through digital media.

Learning basic sewing skills can save you money
read more here

French intensive container gardening is so easy she does it from her wheelchair!
read more here

Read or publish an eBook. Time was when only the rich could afford home libraries. They were treasures, more valuable than houses and the land they sat on. It was only in the 20th century that home libraries became common. In the 21st century, anyone with a cheap e-reader can download hundreds of thousands of books at no cost. It’s a breathtaking development, and yet how many of us take all this knowledge for granted? Every dystopian novel features a world of censorship. That world is impossible today.

Skip the student loans. A key problem with government loans is that they are not creative. Students rack up debt and find their careers hobbled for years. What if there were a different way? Lumni suggests this: they will pay for your education and, in return, you give a percentage of your income back after you get your paying job. It’s not a loan; it’s an investment — or a form of seed funding. It’s flexible, and the company benefits from your later performance.

Yours for a life fulfilled

[or - is the future useless]?

Bruce ‘the Poor Man’