Our elected representatives do not know the proper role of government...

I am pleased that you are working diligently toward better government. I am part of a team that is working the website http://www.mtlaws.com/ . This is a site to provide our reps. with support in evaluating bills, bill reviews, public information and direction how to be involved, and to coordinate various and disparate groups and individuals. We also hope to educate the lawmakers by providing principles for evaluating bills.


However, there is a VERY BIG PROBLEM in the whole process. I see it in nearly every bill that I evaluate.

Our elected representatives do not know the proper role of government, as laid down in our founding documents and our western, English common law heritage. We have become functionally illiterate in the American Civic Creed.

We have effectively forsaken common law, and have taken up Roman, civil law, which is political law. This is law according to the whim of men; law by whomever can get enough votes to implement the agenda they have chosen. It is all based on gaining political power. But political power is the power to be exempt from the restraints which apply to all people who are not in government. We are also ruled by commercial law, and have been tricked into signing away our common law, constitutional rights. We are now commercial persons, subject to commercial law, with government supervision and regulation of all our human endeavors.

So we try to send representatives to Helena, and to DC, who will write "better laws", and try to write into law more freedoms, so the corporate workers can have more liberty. But it cannot work, because we are too ignorant of the tricks that have already put us in bondage. We do not know who we are, our status as free people with God given, inalienable rights. We have all signed away our status by contracting for social security, federal benefits, driver licenses, permits, and many other things that contract us into status as federal employees and servants.

So many of our representatives act and talk more like fascists, or statists, than constitutionalists. While they ought to be repealing LARGE portions of the state codes, and eliminating government agencies, they revise, tweak, amend and alter the codes, and make the situation more confusing, more burdensome and hardly improved.

THIS APPROACH IS ALL WRONG.

We need a shift in the paradigm. We need an educated citizenry, who know common law, know how the judicial system ought to be constituted, and how a free society is ordered.

Then we need to elect our best men to go to the legislature and put these principles into practice. Now our candidates are poorly vetted, poorly read, and poorly prepared. So the broken system is perpetuated, and we make NO REAL PROGRESS TOWARD FREEDOM.

The proper role of government is to PROTECT OUR RIGHTS TO LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY. The role is negative, not positive. It is to protect from infringement, not to provide or supervise. Nor is it to so regulate our every action so we do not cause some potential harm. (This is the justification for nearly every regulation and law: to make sure someone does not cause some potential harm).

The only system that can work in a truly free society is to base all laws on 2 principles, on which every society can agree:

1. Do all you have agreed to do. This is the basis for all contract law and business dealings.

2. Do not encroach on any person or their property. This is the basis for tort law, and the interpersonal actions among people.

The summary of all this is the common law principle: If there is no victim, there is no crime. (NO harm, NO foul.)

No one would want to live in a society where these two principles are not the law. But the only civilizations that ever had any measure of freedom are the ones that have been based on these two laws. Most of the world has never had any concept of these laws, and so will never have any freedom. In proportion to our loss of these principles, we have lost our freedom. We will not regain it in the current direction.

So the pressing need is to relearn the American Civic creed, and to learn our proper status as free people. We need to renounce our corporate entanglements, and start to live as free people who know our place and status.
Until we do this, we are playing a rigged game which we will never win.

Joel Boniek
Livingston, Montana