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The Rawles Rationale

  By James Wesley Rawles | May 30, 2017 |         

The following is my core rationale on the nature of government, liberty, and Godly personal conduct in the 21st Century. You may have seen some of these rationale statements in my books or blog posts. I plan to expand this at a later date:

Rights

• The degree to which you allow your rights to be trampled is inversely proportional to your knowledge of (and respect for) the Constitution.
• Whenever someone must buy a license or pay a fee to exercise a right then it is something less than a right. It is in fact a mere privilege, subject to the whim of petty bureaucrats. Fundamental rights are not abstract tokens that are given or sold by other men. They are in fact primary liberties bestowed upon us by God, our maker. Rights are not substantially secured by asking, “Mother may I?” of any government agency. Rights are more properly demanded or boldly seized and then conspicuously exercised regularly. This secures the liberties that have legitimately belonged to us since birth. If need be, lost rights can and must be restored through proscriptive use. Do you live in a land where your rights have been marginalized into privileges?  Then it is either time to change your government, or to change your address. Much like a muscle that atrophies with disuse, any right that goes unexercised for many years devolves into a privilege, and eventually can even be redefined as a crime.

Government

• The natural tendency of all modern governments is to gradually push the citizenry, through police power, to the point of revulsion and resistance.
• Virtually all Nation States are in essence nothing more than a band of thugs who assign to themselves the power to “tax” their citizens. This is armed robbery on a grand scale and given feigned legitimacy through the trappings of “good government” and by self-proclaimed “jurisdictions” that inevitably have the power to enforce their will by force. Taxes subsidize these parasitical thugs, who maintain their “governing” power by dispensing grants of authority and providing petty bureaus for their chosen lackeys. Modern “government” is the biggest con ever foisted upon humanity.
• A “license” is what you buy when a government steals one of your rights and then sells it back to you.
• The first substantial loss of Constitutional limited government came with the Civil War of the 1860s. This was our first taste of military drafts and refutation of States Rights. We lost the last vestiges in the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was then that the Federal government took on even greater powers, developed huge bureaucracies, and instituted crushing taxes. Only the exigency of “saving us” from the Great Depression made all of this possible. And ironically, it was our government’s own Trade War that created the Great Depression.

Education

• The government-operated “public” schools are a dismal failure. There are some good private schools around the nation. But in most locales, homeschooling is now nearly a necessity.
• Any nation that denies the right of parents to educate their own children is no better than a Police State. And any bureaucrat who places burdensome restrictions on homeschooling parents is just in training to be a fascist thug. Thugs like these should work as gulag guards or run a Home Owner’s Association (HOA).

Guns

• It is one of the great ironies of our modern ‘civilized’ era that in most of the places where you don’t feel the need to carry a firearm for self defense you can legally do so if you choose. But in most of the places where you do indeed justifiably feel the immediate need to carry a gun, they are banned.
• Guns are like parachutes: if you don’t have one when you need it, then chances are that you won’t ever be in need of one again.
• Cartridge firearms are compact vehicles for change that have shaped modern history. The righteousness of their use is entirely up to their users, since like any other tool they can be used both for good or for ill.  A firearm is just a tool with no volition. A rifle is no different than a claw hammer. With a hammer you can build a house, or you can bash in someone’s skull—the choice of uses is entirely up to the owner.  A bulldozer can be used to build roads, or to destroy houses. A rifle can be used to drill holes in paper targets, to dispatch a marauding bear, or to murder your fellow man. Again, the choice of uses is entirely up to the user.
• The Second Amendment is about protecting your right to go deer hunting the same way that the First Amendment is about protecting your right to publish poetry.

The Nature of Money

• The bankers rule this country. The Federal Reserve (a private banking cartel) gets little public scrutiny. Observe how few congressmen have tried to even audit the Fed, much less abolish it.
• Scarcely one citizen in 1,000 can accurately tell you just how our debt-based money enters circulation (“money from nothing”), its multiplier effect, and who profits from the money creation system.

Association

• We should be careful about the company that we keep.  We can’t expect our children to attract Godly friends unless we first set a good example.
• Just like a sovereign nation choosing allies, every citizen has the right to pick and choose who they associate with and who they do business with. The freedom of association also fully implies the freedom of disassociation. Forcing someone to privately accommodate others in a social situation or in commerce is a Tyranny of Manners that is fitting only in a totalitarian state.

Resistance

• We must recognize that in our generation there might come a day with no remaining avenue of escape. You can avoid State laws: Just move to another state.  But what of unconstitutional Federal laws? At that point we will have no choice but to rebel against tyranny. (Since the alternative would be to live as little better than bleating sheep.) When we reach that juncture I doubt that I will advocate expatriation. Most foreign lands have less freedom than we enjoy here in these United States. I don’t think that I will find some ideal “bolt hole” nation with more firearms freedom, better banking privacy, a more positive business climate, lower taxes, full religious freedom, unimpeded personal property rights, fair courts, and assured freedom of speech. If I must die, then I will do so here in America, fully armed, and facing my oppressors. I won’t die in some ditch, begging for mercy.
• Some things are worth fighting for. I encourage my readers to avoid trouble, most importantly via relocation to safe areas where trouble is unlikely to visit. But there may come an unavoidable day when you have to make a stand to defend your own family or your neighbors. Do you value your liberty? Then be prepared to fight for it. The fight is both for yourself and for the sake of your progeny.
• Personal liberty cannot be maintained through mere passivity. You must forcefully and regularly assert your rights. In extremis, we must defend our rights with lethal force.

Restoring The Constitution

• The return of individual liberty and limited government can be achieved with the passage of four Constitutional Amendments: 1.) A Congressional Term Limits Amendment, 2.) A Balanced Budget Amendment, 3.) Revocation of the 17th Amendment, and 4.) An Amendment that amplifies the 10thAmendment and sharply limits Federal power.
• Refusal to consent to an unconstitutional search or police questioning session should be a matter of honor. Be ready for a long wait, even when tired, hungry, or in a hurry. If you assert your rights, the police will probably dawdle but eventually they will give up on their planned “fishing expedition”. Never give them the satisfaction of answering any of their questions. Instead, consistently assert and re-assert your Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. Be polite but assertive. Never consent to a search, even if you have absolutely nothing to hide. Never voluntarily turn over a key, provide a combination, passcode, or passphrase. Regularly remind officers of the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree doctrine. Allowing bullies to succeed only serves to further embolden them.
• Our Second Amendment Rights are in peril. Our government has declared possession of a shotgun with 18” barrel perfectly legal. But starting in 1934 the possession of a shotgun with 17.9” barrel became a felonious crime with a penalty of up to 10 years of imprisonment and/or fines up to $250,000. That is just one illustration of the incredibly arbitrary power of unlimited government.

Taxes

• Tax-funded abortions are a national disgrace. This is the moral equivalent of the Nazis forcing German Jews to pay their own train fare for deportation to fenced ghettos and eventual extermination.
• Property taxes in America were largely nonexistent until the advent of compulsory public schools systems. That was the excuse for taxing all private land except that owned by churches. By emulating the Prussians, we became as the Prussians. We made or children slaves to the school bell, regimentation, and universal indoctrination. And now we, their parents (and neighbors), are forced to work for wages to pay taxes on our land, or otherwise lose it to property tax default judgments. Agrarian subsistence farming and ranching is now essentially impossible because of the annual property tax burden.
• Politicians are brokers of violence or more commonly just the threat of violence. The tax collectors are their key minions. The police are their domestic bully boys. And the military are their overseas bully boys, en masse. The great unspoken threat is: “Stop paying your taxes, and then see what happens.”
• We are living in a borderline Police State that has the gall to still declare itself “The Land of the Free.” But in fact we are no more free than Roman galley slaves. Our shackles–just as painfully binding–are invisible. They renew our shackles every April 15th.

Our Illogical Opponents

• A Social Justice Warrior Snowflake demanding a “safe space” or a “bubble” is inconsistent. Why? Those same people don’t see fit to allow me to walk on public streets armed.  I make it a very safe space in a 30 meter radius around me whenever I carry a Glock .45 ACP.
• Publicly flying the Mexican flag on May 5th (Cinco De Mayo) is absurd. It has co-equal logic to Americans publicly flying the North Korean flag on February 16th. (Kim Jong-Il’s Birthday, also known as The Day of The Shining Star.) Neither display is appropriate inside the territory of our sovereign nation.
• Don’t allow public detractors to attach labels to you. Those that end with “-phobic” are particularly inappropriate, in most cases. Taking a righteous stand against a sinful behavior is not a phobia. (By definition, a phobia is an irrational fear.) I insist that a nation should have a defined language, a distinct culture, agreed standards of conduct, and defined borders. That is not an issue of fear or a phobia. Rather, it is an issue of rectitude and resilience.

Conclusion

This rationale is apropos for the times we live in. Never lose hope in restoring Constitutional government, and more importantly never lose your faith in Christ. Without that, we are mere pawns in the game and simply victims of our circumstances. But with faith, we can be courageous defenders of Christian Liberty and good government. And to my mind, good government is synonymous with minimalist government. – JWR

(Note: SurvivalBlog grants permission to re-post this entire rationale article. You must re-post it in full, with proper attribution to James Wesley, Rawles and SurvivalBlog. And you must preserve the included links.)