Government's Spirit-Crushing Hatred of Lemonade

Wendy McElroy

The following two news items do not seem to be related, but the same theme lurks under the surface. The United States government is systematically dismantling the most important track people have out of poverty into economic freedom: the right to trade their labor and goods for money. If the news items are ridiculous, this merely demonstrates the ridiculous lengths to which government will go to crush the entrepreneurial spirit.

The government knows that the power to make money is the source of freedom. To exercise freedom of speech, you must first be able to feed yourself. And money-making requires nothing so much as property rights.

USDA offers to drop fine against rabbit seller

Associated Press

NIXA, Mo. | A southwest Missouri man who faced a $90,654 penalty for selling rabbits without a license might get a reprieve.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it would waive the penalty against John Dollarhite of Nixa if he agrees to never get a license, The Springfield News-Leader reported Saturday. He also must no longer own breeding animals and spay or neuter any animals he wants to keep

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Unemployed: Stop Searching for a Job, Learn to Forage and Produce

Good jobs are not returning to America anytime soon.  It's time to stop hoping someone will pay you to do useless tasks and learn to forage and produce for yourself.

Howard Beale
Activist Post

A good friend of mine has been unemployed for over 18 months.  He is 32 years old with a master's degree from a respectable university and an impressive resume of non-profit charitable work, as well as international business experience.  He is even fluent in two languages; English and Spanish. Yet he is just beginning to realize after countless job applications, with few interviews, that he is a dime-a-dozen in in America's new paradigm of over-educated, over-qualified people who can't find a job to sustain them.

In his tenacious quest, he joined a cooperative that provides office space with Internet and phone service, job training courses, and kinship for the unemployed.  He even applied to the only entity that seemed to be openly hiring -- government:  The United Nations, the U.S. State Department, the CIA and, yes, the IRS too.  He attended a high-level interview for a U.N. position that was set up by a very connected family friend.  Apparently the U.N. hired someone with even more connections and qualifications.

It is probably a blessing that he never received call-backs from those federal agencies, but at the time it didn't feel that way to him.  In essence, he has used all of tools in the matrix to pursue employment, but to no avail.  It seems the wheel no longer needs his cog.


My friend, like many others going through the same struggle, is finally beginning to see the system for what it is: a rigged game to create dependence.  Dependence for employment, or dependence on government assistance.  It is a system that makes the unemployed feel worthless and hopeless. Unfortunately, this horrible feeling may be a necessary phase of waking up to the nature of this prison.

As everyone already knows, the manufacturing jobs will never return to America in any measurable way, because the incentives have been sent offshore.  Therefore, the only American job growth will take place in a Ponzi-style economy in non-productive sectors.  Since America no longer produces anything, it seems that they must break things in order to create false economic "growth."  Consequently, they can't implement any genuine solutions, because that would threaten even more jobs.

For instance, they can't end the foreign wars, or the War on Drugs, because where would all of the soldiers, contractors, DEA agents, prison guards, court workers, and all their support staff find new employment?  They can't simplify the tax code because where would all the accountants, bookkeepers, tax attorneys, and accounting professors work? They can't undo the Patriot Act because where would the millions of people who make up the surveillance-industrial complex work? They can't clamp down on the exotic games at the Wall Street casino, or virtually no one would be left with a job.

This is the nature of the phony matrix we call the American Economy.  Even if you're "lucky" enough to have a position in the above-mentioned professions (and many other non-productive capacities), you must realize that your job depends on the system remaining broken.  Indeed, many will fight to keep the broken system for their own self-interest.  This was blatantly obvious when police organizations were one of the biggest contributors for the campaign to defeat Prop 19 to legalize marijuana in California.

Since most people subconsciously know that their daily tasks are fundamentally worthless, or at least replaceable, job insecurity is at an all-time high.  It is the system's mechanism to perpetuate the rule of self-preservation that has deliberate consequences.  It creates an atmosphere where moral individuals will engage in immoral acts to preserve their livelihood. So, our survival instinct allows us to justify any moral or intellectual compromise.  In turn, they've convinced us that it is the only way to survive; hence our "dog-eat-dog" world. It's an evil trap and even the best-intentioned can fall prey to it.

The good news is that the system will eventually implode because it is built on an illusion, by fake money, and can only "produce" by destroying things through literal and figurative wars.  It destroys people, property, freedom, and basic morality. The bad news is that while it crumbles the human suffering will get much worse before it gets better.  The only way we can avoid or limit this suffering is by becoming aware and changing our approach to the matrix.

Back to my buddy.  A lot of good his $100,000-plus education has done for him in this system. He is only now taking the initiative to create something productive for himself out of sheer necessity. Can you imagine the level of production he could have accomplished in eighteen months working on a personal project, side business, or learning new skills?

It seems that the times are ripe for the hopelessly unemployed to realize that the only person they can depend on to create labor is themselves. The wonderful thing is that you finally get to choose how you will deploy your precious time and effort.  Sure, you may not make boatloads of money, or have health insurance right away, but some positive income can be achieved.  And if you're truly driven by passion, your labor becomes effortless and enjoyable and will ultimately result in whatever level of income you desire.

You may have to learn to forage for a while before you find the best income vehicle for your passions.  Learning to appreciate incremental gains when they do come is also vital to success, as any gain is certainly better than wasting away as a blob in front of the TV, polishing your résumé , and circling want ads for the next 6 months.

There are countless ways to turn your passions into income by foraging.  You can start a blog for free about topics you care deeply about; learning how to monetize it as your audience grows.  You can treasure hunt for valuable relics at yard sales and shops and sell them online. You can grow, make, and sell homemade products to your local cooperative or farmers market.  And why not organize a local co-op in your community if there isn't one?

The point is: our belief, dedication, and complacency to a "system" that has been defined for us has led to a lost ability to forage and create. The key is taking the first step on our own and seeing where it leads.

Related Article by Howard Beale:
So Broke We Can't Pay Attention

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Independence Criminalized: The Great Wall of Bureaucracy Comes to America

If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.  -- Thomas Jefferson

Michael Edwards
Activist Post

The purge of the farming class in various Communist dictatorships is well documented.  The regimes in China (1958-62) and Russia into the Ukraine (1920-39), identified those who were independent of state control, and implemented a heavy-handed oppression designed to turn true productivity toward collectivist goals.  These regimes are but a version of what is being proposed in modern America.

Today's elite seem to have learned from the messy approach of Mao, for instance (the boot in the face of 1984), and have opted for a similar eradication campaign, but they are doing so largely through excessive regulations coordinated between private companies and government.  These policies and regulations are handed down by political and corporate leadership, and have becomede facto laws enforced by compromised judges.  This forms the foundation of classical bureaucracy.

Unlike Mao's collectivist state, today's state of America is pure Fascism.  From both authoritarian sides, however, the independent-minded are squeezed -- the man who believes his home to be his castle; the woman who wishes to be free of the boys' club corporate rule; those who have unacceptable ideas like peace and feedom; or simply those who wish to be left the hell alone and not be branded a terrorist.  There is no better example of this than the control over food production and distribution, as this is at the heart of what it means to be truly independent. 


Farmers are America's original entrepreneurs, and have been instrumental in forming the strong middle class for which all free countries are known.  Mao Zedong knew that if he were to build his collectivist state, he had to eradicate the very base which threatened his statist control.  Today's corporations have used the color of law instead of brute force, employing a combination of their legal designation as "persons" and using the revolving door of the corporate-government state to infiltrate key positions.  From these positions they can legislate people into conformity.

This modern Mao-Fascist system still employs brute force when needed, as the SWAT raids of peaceful farmers and communities increase in frequency, while peaceful protest can lead to surveillance and intimidation.  Although, this campaign prefers to cloud the sheer brutality of it by legitimizing the codes and enforcement thereof in the name of public safety and the "greater good."  In this way, one now becomes a violator of laws -- not of an ideology per se -- made to jump through hoops that continuously change in size and location.  Mao was less devious.

America's obsession with law and order, has conveniently inculcated a complete lack of sympathy for lawbreakers (evildoers), or those who seem like they might break the law.  This is an essential cultural feature that also worked well under Mao, as there was a strong prejudice by city dwellers toward their rural counterparts.  Suspicion of lifestyle is the key.  We often hear people say, "If you have nothing to hide, then don't worry."  However, when bureaucracy takes hold, everyone eventually becomes a lawbreaker.  The mountain of rules, regulations, codes of conduct, and arbitrary decisions about conformity have created a Great Wall of Bureaucracy for which Mao would be frothing with envy to behold. Frighteningly, America has a burgeoning prison-industrial complex ready-made to accommodate the increasing flood of violators.  Modern day America doesn't have to purge their independent class into mass graves, just lock them away.

Among the new class of evildoers is The Entrepreneur.  These independents, who have built the middle-class of America, are now burdened by a cost of doing business where it is difficult to justify the investment of time and money.  This terrific 5-minute video perfectly captures their plight:

The impact that this creeping control structure has had on America's social climate is beyond measure, but a trove of financial statistics bear out the magnitude of the financial loss.  Here a few key measures of how America's foundation of entrepreneurial independence has been eroded by bureaucracy and collectivism:

• A country that issued a Declaration of Independence has only one growth industry remaining: government. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Overview of the 2008-2018 Projections shows that since government has now co-opted health care, finance, insurance, and information, it will hold fully 30% of all future employment growth, far outweighing any private sector. 
• America has all but fully succumbed to Globalization, which is bureaucracy writ large.  Thus, a nation of producers has become a nation of consumers.  The production capacity of a solid manufacturing base (in a free market) fosters independence; the declining productivity of a country  through the sacrifice of its manufacturing guarantees dependence.
• According to The Land Institute :  In 1801, when Jefferson became president, 95 percent of Americans essentially made their full-time living from agriculture. By the turn of the 20th century, it was 45 percent, and by the turn of the 21st less than 2 percent.

The true "endgame" of this multi-level control system might be nebulous, but at the heart of every theory -- conspiracy or otherwise -- is the elimination of all independence.  Which brings us back to food: What kind of system would attack the very foundation of freedom?  According to historian, Frank Dikötter, this was Mao's system; and he killed 45 million people implementing it.  So, where is America headed through proposed bills like S. 510?  If there is one place to focus our efforts of resistance, it should be toward any system that diminishes independence and promotes state control.  Especially if that state now has a logo branded on its flag.

For details of how excessive regulations can lead to the End of Liberty,  please view the new film by the National Inflation Association.





Other Works Cited:
Smitha, Frank E.  "China From Mao to Deng: Socialism and Collective Agriculture to 1957." http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch25prc.html
Gregorovich, Andrew. "Black Famine in Ukraine 1932-33." http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/gregorovich/

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Why Can't Chuck Get His Business Off The Ground?

Institute For Injustice


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Nearly Half of Small-Business Owners May Never Retire

Dennis Jacobe

Gallup

PRINCETON, NJ -- Nearly half, 47%, of small-business owners now plan to never retire until forced to do so for health reasons -- up from about 4 in 10 in 2005 and 2007 -- according to a recent Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index poll. Another 41% plan to cut back on work but stay involved with their business when they retire. Those planning to stop working in their business altogether fell to 1 in 10 during 2010 from nearly twice that level in 2005.

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An Ode to Entrepreneurs: Middle-class? Long Gone!

J. Speer-Williams, Contributing Writer

Activist Post

Like swans of legend, American entrepreneurs sing their final, beautiful song before they just fade away.

When everyone who is employed works for the state or federal government, we’ll all likely be as impoverished as the citizens of the old Soviet Union. Remember the Soviets standing in long lines, with falling snow, to buy what they could from a dwindling short supply of consumer goods; goods they could barely afford, like two left boots, both of the wrong sizes?

Having too many people working for the government is the antithesis of prosperity. And it’s estimated that for every “green” job the government creates, they’ll eliminate 2.2 jobs from the real world of private enterprise, at a cost of about $700,000.00 a piece.

Government employees seem to concentrate on negatives: They stop people, impoverish people, tax people, poison people, imprison people, kill people, torture people, or bomb civilizations into rubble. Governments create little of a positive nature, least of all their governmental programs.

Sophists-historians-academics say, without government programs there would never have been an American middle-class. How wrong can people be? Well, these fellows push the limits, when they repeat the doctrines so widely promulgated by America’s academic class. They are the living embodiments of how a people can be very insightful and yet so blind at the same time.

It was not government or large corporations, but the American entrepreneur who built our middle-class, in spite of governmental programs. At last, however, the federal government eliminated America’s small businessmen, while rewarding the oligarchs of the Banking Cartel. And there went our middle-class, too burdened were they with governmental programs, taxes, laws, and regulations.

America’s small businessmen and middle-class withstood the damaging effects of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs; those governmental infringements, however, formed the paradigm by which our entrepreneurs and middle-class were eventually annihilated by governmental programs.

And even if the International Monetary/Banking Cartel brought back to America its monopoly corporations, it would be no better than a Medieval European serfdom of contractual servitude between us -- the semi-free peasants -- and the Cartel’s lords of corporate greed.

Before the middle-class was wiped out, George Carlin got it right when he said, “The upper-class keeps all the money and pays none of the taxes. The middle-class pays all the taxes and does all the work. The poor are there just to scare the s--- outta the middle-class.”

Our unsung entrepreneurial heroes of America are no longer part of the national discourse, even though they were the ones who built our affluent middle-class, and helped so many of us to achieve the American Dream. Without a return of our small business owners and family farmers, the American Dream will be forever lost.

Entrepreneurs started and finished things; things that built an affluent and viable middle-class society, something the world has seen very little of.

The small businesses and family farms that made America the envy of the world, were largely made up of a dynamic, rugged, bright, hard-working lot of entrepreneurs, who fought for the common hope of us all: the American Dream. 

It was a dream of owning your own business, home or farm outright. It was an aspiration that desired but one family breadwinner, and a wife/mother who ran her household, taught her children the important things of life, sent her children to college, and generally ensured her little ones would enjoy a better life than hers, which was far better than what Americans are suffering through, today.

And the improved wages, lifestyle, and independence of women, known as Women’s Liberation, was made possible with an affluent middle-class, during the age of the entrepreneur. Affluence for women will be impossible once everyone, save the elite, are divested and dispossessed.

In any case Women’s Liberation has always been less about liberation, and more about the destruction of the family unit. Moreover, divorcing a tyrannical husband and struggling alone with growing children --while extremely difficult and unfair -- seems more possible than divorcing a despotic government, with armies and a police constabulary to back them up. And while Big Brother cares not a whit about liberating women, he lived in torment over the repeated successes of the entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs organized, operated, and assumed the risks inherit in commercial ventures, something the average government employee could never do.

It was not government employees, or corporate bureaucrats, who made America great and the envy of the world; it was our vibrant entrepreneurial-class, that made us what we once were.

Not everyone possesses the spirit, drive, attitude, and qualities of a successful entrepreneur; and so, we must value them, as it is from them that come the fruits of their labors and ingenuity we all enjoy.  It is from enough successful entrepreneurs which spring an affluent middle-class.

American entrepreneurs were  thinkers, doers, competitors, innovators, who fueled economic growth, created jobs, and made a better, smarter world for us all. Entrepreneurs changed our beliefs about what was possible, with their lofty visions, and their will to obtain those dreams.

Entrepreneurs often risked their life’s savings, and the little they could borrow, to try untried ideas; but never did they asked for government bailouts when they failed.

Nor did our entrepreneurs ever ship our millions of jobs overseas, virtually condemning billions of foreigners to low-wage slavery, and our own nation to a no-wage bondage, controlled by trillionaire, investment bankers.

Entrepreneurs have long been the heredity nemesis of the International Monetary/Banking Cartel.  When America had some patriotic lawmakers, bureaucrats, and judges -- hundreds of thousands of American entrepreneurs and family farmers exacted a sort of retributive justice from the Cartel, by far out-producing the International Cartel’s mega-corporations.  The Cartel countered this, not with increased production, but with something far more sinister: Espionage!

The money-changers, whose ancestors were driven out of the Jerusalem Temple by Jesus, with a whip fashioned from fibers, slowly gained control of  “our” intelligence services, by which they gained control of all three branches of our federal government through fixed elections, bribes, blackmail, and assassinations.

Once in command of our entire federal government, the Cartel set out on their complete pillage and plunder of our middle-class and its entrepreneurs, with federal regulations, directives, laws, and taxes, all meant to eliminate all small business and family farms. The Cartel has succeeded with espionage, when they could have never succeeded with honest production, which has meant a dying economy for all Americans.

In the globalist, One-World Order agenda there must be no affluent nation that can feed itself, remaining independent of the global market and centralized world governance, free of the reins of power held by the International Monetary/Banking Cartel.

The American Dream, however, came true for many of us, and that’s a legacy we can and must pass on to our friends, children, grandchildren, and all future generations.  It’s proud heritage that we must keep alive. For it was possible once, and can be again … The American Dream.

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