The No State Project

[Darren Dirt]

darrendirt said:

re. the Harold Thomas call-in question on the March 11th radio show:

3 Revealing Questions About Legal Obligations and Interpretations

1. Maxim "The intent of the law is the force of the law" (i.e. wording of a statute doesn't matter as much as its intended purpose for which it was created).

2. Maxim "Any law not clearly understood by the people to whom it applies is void for vagueness" (i.e. statutes with wording that is confusing, ambiguous, or contradictory should make it void and of no effect).

3. Maxim "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" (i.e. not knowing the existence of, or the meaning of, a statute is not an excuse for its violation -- even though it is humanly *impossible* to know every law, let alone its "clearly understood" meaning).

The reason I prefixed the 3 items with "MAXIM" was not to promote a men's "entertainment" magazine, but because Harold Thomas was correctly referring to legal maxims, which have mostly accumulated from common law dealings amongst honest men and women over the past 500 years or so.

See this previous thread, it's a good refresher for AiLL veterans, and important background info. for the shiny new faces:

Maxims of Law -- from Bouvier's 1856 Dictionary



- - -


Based on a quick word-find through this page: www.gongfa.com/MaximsofLaw.htm ...


( NOTE: "For the purposes of this document, "law(s)" has the meaning "man-made statute(s)/legislation". )


1. [Intent of Laws>Wording of Laws]

-Si nulla sit conjectura quae ducat alio, verba intelligenda sunt ex proprietate, non grammatica sed populari ex usu. if there be no conjecture which leads to a different result, words are to be understood, according to the proper meaning, not in a grammatical, but in a popular and ordinary sense. 2 Kent, Com. 555.

-Sensus verborum est anima legis. The meaning of words is the spirit of the law. 5 Co. 2.

-Statutum generaliter est intelligendum quaudo verva statuti sunt specialia, ratio autem generalis. When the words of a statute are special, but the reason of it general, it is to be understood generally. 10 Co. 101.



2. [Clarity of Laws]

-Non in legendo sed in intelligendo leges consistunt. The laws consist not in being read, but in being understood. 8 co. 167.

-Sententia non fertur de rebus non liquidis. Sentence is not given upon a thing which is not clear.

-Probationes debent esse evidentes, id est, perspicuae et faciles intelligi. Proofs ought to be made evident, that is, clear and easy to be understood. Co. Litt. 283.



3. [Ignorance of Laws]

-Ignorantia excusatur, non juris sed facti. Ignorance of fact may excuse, but not ignorance of law. See Ignorance.

-Ignorantia facti excusat, ignorantia juris non excusat. Ignorance of facts excuses, ignorance of law does not excuse. 1 Co. 177; 4 Bouv. Inst. n 3828. See Ignorance.

-Ignorantia legis neminem excusat. Ignorance of fact may excuse, but not ignorance of law. 4 Bouv. Inst. n. 3828.

[marc stevens]

Don't forget, tonight, April 8, 2006, Ms. Carolyn Beck from the Texas Alcoholic Beverages Commission will be my guest.

[faithchris]

Please don't take offense to this but can please in your emails add the time and radio station in case your turning it on at the last min. etc. Someone like me I have so many radio stations saved I forget which one. I appreciate your help in this Marc. God Bless,

[NonEntity]

:-( I agree. I just tuned in a few minutes early so I could catch the whole show... Well, I was able to catch the last few minutes, anyway. Oh well, I'll catch it on MP3. If I only had a brain! ;D

Speaking of Paul Butterfield, I heard him live at the Filmore in '67 with Charles Lloyd. Whoa!!! what a great show THAT was. If you want to hear recordings made LIVE at the concerts that Bill Graham put on, go to Wolfgang's Vault Radioand listen to the stream of recordings that have recently been unearthed from the voluminous collection of recordings that Bill Graham made of all of the concerts that he produced. Awesome stuff! (Bill Graham's real fist name was Wolfgang.)

- NonE

[marc stevens]

I'm sorry, I usually do include the time. I'd like to read some feedback on the show.

[NonEntity]

Hi Marc,

I'm listening to the show. You want comments.

In a way I must say that you appear to battering this woman. She continues to say your questions are beyond the scope of her expertise and her job and yet you continue to try to get her to answer questions of a legal nature.

I can sypathise with both you AND Ms. Beck. She is attempting to clarify her job as she sees it, and you are trying to make her responsible for being part of a criminal conspiracy without being willing to come out and say that is what you are doing. If you DID say that, of course, she would simply hang up and you would no longer be able to question her, so you can't do that and expect to continue with the interview.

In a way this gets back to (or around to) the point I've made in the past: each person individually must be held responsible for his or her actions. Government is a fiction, therefore we must pierce the veil and go directly to the person who is performing the criminal act and hold THAT PERSON responsible for that act.

Yet you seemed unwilling to do that.

It seems a Catch-22 sort of situation.

Ms. Beck constantly proclaimed her innocence in the crime by refering to the legislature and others as the "authorities" reponsible for passing the laws, etc. Yet you never pressed her to own up to her own personall responsibility for blindly engaging in criminal acts simply because someone else told her that she should.

It is interesting that in recent decades there seems to be an attempt to "pierce the corporate veil" and find the heads of corporations PERSonally responsible for the acts of the corportations they manage. This indicates to me that there is coming to be an understanding that people must be held responsible for their actions if justice is to have any meaning. We need to help to further that understanding. Fictional entities like corporations and governments are simply the attempts by criminals to avoid having to take responsibilities for their acts.

The difficulty that you face, of course, is that if you just come out and SAY that you will be seen as a total nutjob and no one (aside from me) will listen to you. So you have to be dishonest in order to try and get your point across. But will that work either? It appears, at least from this example with Ms. Beck, that it won't.

Perhaps the bottom line is that you cannot teach someone. All you can do is to help a mind that is ready, to learn. The mind has to want to learn first. Maybe that is why "public education" is so effective in indoctrinating minds with the government meme. It gathers together young minds when they are at their most inquisitive and controls what ideas they have access to.

I seem to be straying from the initial topic at this point ... so I'll shut up now.

- NonE

[dudeman]

Nonentity,
I agree with your points. Marc (or anyone else) wouldn't have very much success charging in and saying "you and your whole gang are a bunch of crooks!" so it's a very delicate balancing act.

I like the following approach (anyone who has tested this in the real world, please comment; also, please bear with the length and obviousness of this approach, but it's necessary to set up the bureaucratic trap)

AILLer: Mr. bureaucrat, does Joe Non-bureacrat (i.e., a "private person) have the right/authority to __________ (fill in the blank: take money from someone's paycheck; impound a person's car; take your house if you don't pay property tax; etc.)?

BUREAUCRAT: Of course not

A: Do I (a "private person" ) have the right to take your car?

B: No, of course not?

A: Does an inanimate object, such as a rock, "give" anything? That is, if I put a piece of paper or something on this table, does it, all by itself, without any human action, "give" anything (the reason for this question will be shown below)?

B: (if they haven't called security by this time) No, that's silly, of course a "rock" doesn't give anything.

A: What about if 100 or 1,000 or 1 million of the "private people" got together? If no one of them individually has the right/authority to do ________, do they then have the right to do this if they form a large enough group? In other words, I don't have the right to take your car; Joe doesn't have the right; Sally doesn't have the right; Ralph doesn't have it; etc., etc. None of them has it; if you put together a million of these people, do they have the right?

B: No, I don't see where this is going...

A: Just bear with me. Do you have the right to _______?

B: Yes, of course.

A: From whom did you get that right?

B: Why, the law gives me that right! (unspoken thought from him/her: "you non-government scum! how dare you question me!")

A: And who wrote the law?

B: Congress! (or the town council; or the "state" legislature; etc.)

A: And where did "Congress" get the authority to write this law

B: From the people of course!

A: You mean the same people who individually, that we discussed about a minute ago, do not have that right?

B: Why...why, the Constitution gives me that right! It authorizes Congress to write the laws that allow me to incinerate your house if I see fit (yes, I know no bureaucrat would say that, but I couldn't resist)

A: Didn't you say that inanimate objects can't "give" anything?

B: But the Constitution is a living document!!

A: You mean, it can walk on it's own, it breathes? If we hooked up some instruments to it, they would register heartbeat, respiration, etc.?

B: Why, you smart-mouthed s.o.b., I'm not going to put up with anymore of your impertinent questions! It's been settled, Congress wrote the laws that give me the authority to ________! If you don't like it, you can ______(make changes through the "political process"; write your Congressman; etc., ad nauseam).

A: Mr. B, I'm not trying to be smart; I just don't understand where you got this authority; you admitted that "we" don't have it; you said that the "people" elect Congress; if "we" don't have that right and "we" elected Congress, then who gave it to Congress?

B: The law did!!

Anyway, I think you see the point. I'm thinking of trying the above approach with someone who's in love with the state and believes that he must do whatever the "state" tells him.

[eye2i2hear]

m'eye' 2 cents worth on this weeks show...
first, I feel I share NonE's primary position expressed; tho rather than Marc "battering" her I might use "badgering" as to how I heard the dialog with The State lady...

My personal gut feeling during the whole show was remorse; I sincerely felt bad for both sides, as I could honestly relate to 'me' in both Marc and Ms Beck; her as the older 'me', Marc as the latter 'me'.

a couple of quotes come to mind as to this:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis

"To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Keep drunks from hurting others = good.
Do another harm in order to do said good = evil.

I feel I'd want to note, that I don't envy Marc as to hosting a 'live' show. Hind'site' is 20/20 as the saying goes, as is arm chair quarterbacking, so forgive us any display of anything other than constructive criticism, Marc.

The other thing I'd want to note, or perhaps remind, is that the show's name says what for me is the most crucial point. While it is of typical interest to have guests from the State (the frustration) side, what we really need, imho, is the format that presents realistic answers to the "better" way. I honestly had this in my inner dialog ('rebuke' spoken to a computer monitor) when the show's guest was announced. The shows results only reinforced that as the better path to stick with.

eye2i2hear

[NonEntity]

2i2 said, "I feel I'd want to note, that I don't envy Marc as to hosting a 'live' show. Hind'site' is 20/20 as the saying goes, as is arm chair quarterbacking, so forgive us any display of anything other than constructive criticism, Marc."

Let me add a big concurance to that. I could not even begin to do what Marc is doing and I have great respect for his doing it. Please understand that my criticism is with respect and appreciation and if I didn't believe in what Marc's doing I'd just go elsewhere and keep my mouth shut. Bravo Marc.

- NonE

[eye2i2hear]

Stefan Molyneux offers perhaps good counsel here: freedomain.blogspot.com/2005/11/freedoms-failure-theory-of-cause-and.html

from that:

[L]et’s look at the last major success in the limitation of state power, which was the abolition of slavery – not in America, which was the result of a corrupt civil war – but in the rest of the Western world.

Abolitionists did not condemn slavery because of its economic inefficiency, or by arguing that agriculture survived quite nicely before the introduction of slaves, or by making the case that slavery should be ameliorated, or reformed, or its evils reduced to some lesser degree.

Instead, abolitionists won over the hearts and minds of mankind by thundering, over and over, that slavery was a moral evil that had to be ended regardless of effects. They did not discuss costs and benefits. They did not say that the slave-owners should exercise less control over their slaves. They did not argue that slavery be should reduced to some prior historical level. No, they simply and passionately stated, over and over, for years and years, that it was an absolute moral evil to treat people as property. They did not consider slavery an institution which could be changed for the better. It could only be abolished utterly.

As advocates of freedom, we have failed because we have argued from the head, rather than from the heart.

People will do anything to believe that they are good.

Men will die and kill for the State, if they believe that a good man fights for his country. People will surrender more than half their income to the State, if they believe that the State is helping the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, or other such nonsense. They will cheer blank-eyed murderers if they are convinced that a good person "supports the troops." They will give up their liberties if they believe that doing so is "patriotic."

The lesson – and our potential salvation – is that morality rules the world. Whoever controls morality controls the hearts, minds and future of mankind. Morality is the invisible physics that rules all our fundamental choices.

dudeman: the web link above includes an example dialog along the above lines that reminded me of yours posted here~

2i2

[NonEntity]

I must say, I just read that entire piece by Stefan and it is profoundly moving. Read it. Send it to your friends. Send it to you enemies. Keep it in the forefront of your mind.

- NonE

[Darren Dirt]

nonentity said:

I must say, I just read that entire piece by Stefan and it is profoundly moving. Read it. Send it to your friends. Send it to you enemies. Keep it in the forefront of your mind.

- NonE

Wow -- the excerpt quoted above certainly affected my... heart. I guess now I've got something to thoroughly study and meditate on during lunchtime ;D

PS: Haven't listened to Saturday's program yet; I guess I'm a bit pre-pared now, which is probably a good thing considering (I never liked Alex Jones' way of doing "ambush interviews" and I doubt Marc was doing anything resembling that, but the comments above will now help me have a healthy, balanced perspective on the show I am sure )

[marc stevens]

I appreciate the comments.

My wife emailed me during the show warning me to be nice to Ms. Beck. There was a balancing act for sure, I did not want to come off as badgering her and I didn't think I did, though I'll have to listen to the show.

My point was to show Ms. Beck, though probably well intentioned, did not know what she was talking about. As I said, she came on a show talking about people being obligated to get a license and violating the law and then made the typical excuses for not being able to support those opinions.

I wanted to say to the effect: "If you cannot answer whether there is a cause of action against someone, then you cannot claim someone is required to get the license..."

I felt that would have been badgering. Yes, NonE, she did claim it was outside her expertise, that she was just a spokesman. I pressed to issue to make the point above.

[Darren Dirt]

Stefan's article... wow!

Staring at their pillaged paychecks and property taxes, people hate the State in their hearts, but they feel guilty for it, because the State owns the moral discourse (which is, incidentally, why the State had to take control of the schools first). As they say, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. The same is true for morality. Once a statist, always a statist. We can fight all we want, but if we don’t utterly condemn the morality of the statist argument, we will always lose.

We have so much to learn from our enemies, from those who have successfully controlled the public discourse for the past century. Look at the invasion of Iraq. It was presented in purely moral terms. Hussein is evil. You don’t approve of him, do you? He wants to kill us. You don’t want Americans to die, do you? Remember 9-11. You don’t want that to happen again, do you? Therefore, let slip the dogs of war!

There can be only one answer. Not ‘less State’ – just as the answer to slavery was not ‘less slavery’ – but no State.

...now I'm guessing some of us are thinking of taking time to review our own writings and looking for the "heart" of the matter... and when we completely overlook it. :-\


PS: Marc, not sure if you've read Stefan's article, but personally I notice that a lot of your questions do indeed trigger the "heart", i.e. get people to face their own moral position (re. coercion, aggression, etc.) but I think a lot of us still need reminding there's a human being behind the ideology being spouted... yes, even by the O'Reilleys and Frankens and Hannitys and Colmes and Limbaughs and Moores of the world!

We can’t appeal to a citizen’s self-interest, because as wars graphically teach us, people consistently act against their self-interest for the sake of moral approval.

There is only one solution. We must take aim at the only soft belly the Leviathan possesses. We must reclaim the language. We must take back the moral core of the debate.

Them's Fighting Words! ;D ;D

[eye2i2hear]

perhaps we could consider... as to reflection upon Ms Beck...
tiz hard to reason with a drunk!
down right impossible with some.

State (of mind) bureaucrats are inebriated on their theology ("drunk in the spirit" of "good"); she couldn't 'hear' Marc, she was so intoxicated?
(she definitely refused his 'cup of coffee' as offered for sobriety, imho; at least, as to Sat pm/so far...?)

A new device was proposed in another thread; perhaps we need one here? A "breath-alyzer" for those hanging out in State "bars"... in hopes thereof, of arresting their minds, as to keep these public drunks from causing any further injury to others~

eye2i