An increasing number of 'regular' people get fed up with more and more taxes and government control. It is not some fringe group of the population any more that wishes there was less, or even none, of it.

This author received an email from a friend reflecting this sentiment. This friend can not, by no stretch of the imagination, be considered a tax protester - legal or illegal. Let me give you the content of this chain letter and then I will explain what is wrong with it even though it is well intentioned.

Taxes!!!

How Many Taxes!!!

This puts it all in perspective.

This is about as clear and easy to understand as it can be - read it!!

The article below is completely neutral, ...not anti republican or democrat.

Charlie Reese, a retired reporter for the Orlando Sentinel has hit the nail directly on the head, defining clearly who it is that in the final analysis must assume responsibility for the judgements made that impact each one of us every day.

It's a short but good read. Worth the time. Worth remembering!

545 vs. 300,000,000

EVERY CITIZEN NEEDS TO READ THIS AND THINK ABOUT WHAT THIS JOURNALIST HAS SCRIPTED IN THIS MESSAGE. READ IT AND THEN REALLY THINK ABOUT OUR CURRENT POLITICAL DEBACLE.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.

545 PEOPLE - By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does.

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits..... The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? Nancy Pelosi. She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million can not replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red ..

If the Army & Marines are in IRAQ , it's because they want them in IRAQ

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power..

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.

Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees...

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

So, can't we all agree with this? Doesn't it sound all reasonable and good to get somebody else in the captain's seat?

Sorry, but we tried that and it did not work. Remember how this all started here in the good old US of A? As a country free of the oppression of the king, right? With a constitution safe-guarding the freedom and privacy of its citizens. With a very limited government!

And what happened? Mainly two players played musical chairs. No chair was ever removed so when the music stopped either blue or red sat on the chair, and independent of who made it onto the chair the population's freedom and privacy was reduced bit by bit.

Thus the solution to all these taxes and invasion of privacy could not possibly be to put the other guy in the chair. The solution can only be to have no chair.

Now I already hear the obvious objection that there would be nobody to build and maintain our roads! - Really? - When have you last seen a politician building a road?

This question might first seem silly but take a second look, unbiased by public education - it becomes quickly obvious that it's people like you and me who actually build the streets, like the contractor down the street. Mostly they are the richer ones because the politicians reward their supporters with unreasonable high pay (you remember the $200 hammer, yes?) but, still, they are business men, trying to make a living.

Without the government contracts they would still be contractors, maybe a little bit more honest, but still in the same business of building streets, now competing with other road builders. The principles of the free market would quickly weed out the bad apples and we will end up with better products for less money.

The only losers in this scenario would be the poor politicians, but I don't think too many tears would be shed, except by those politicians of course. This Author believes that deep down we all know that the men in government are not here to help anybody but themselves.

Now comes the difficult part to understand. A sane person can not understand the motives and thought-processes of the insane. He just can't. He can observe and collect empirical data on how the insane functions, but a gut understanding is not possible. As a sane person we just can not understand that somebody would want to control others and so we attempt to create a reality for us that would explain why somebody exhibits this strange urge to control. If this politician were to actually help people, that would fit into the reality of a sane person. In his wicket mind the politician knows that and uses it. Thus he pushes help, help, help when it is in fact furthest from his mind. He is indeed unable to understand real help.

Just as we can not expect the dog to purr, so can we not expect the politician to feel empathy for his constituents. Just as demanding the dog to purr has no chance of success, so will demanding from the politician to behave ethically has no possible way of succeeding. An unbiased look at history will clearly prove this.

Therefore, if we want to remedy the current situation we have to stop asking and petitioning the politicins, we just have to take them out of the loop and the best way is to take away their funding and mostly just ignore their ranting. Ranting that we do not love our country, that we endanger our children and that we support terrorism. Just the opposite is true.

The required change has to start within ourselves. We cannot wait for something else to happen, somebody else making the first step, or blaming anything or anybody for the current situation. We have to just face the fact that we have been duped and make the decision not to allow that any longer.

Sure, there is the fear we have to deal with that on the way out the tyrants will try to hurt us. And to be realistic, they will succeed in some rare cases. But are you still driving your car despite the fact that there is a real chance you will have an accident? Certainly, we always take risks to gain something. This author believes that the risk we take in the case of ignoring a politician is small compared to the possible gain of freedom and privacy.

Overcoming fear is a process that can be practiced and learned. This is what this site is all about - so, let's get started! Join this community and find out how many there are with the same urge to live free.

The Power of Nightmares

"In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life, but now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand."

This is the start of part 3 of the BBC documentary series 'The Power of Nightmares.' The videos are freely available on the internet and I ran into this part 3 in Google video while searching for something completely different (to paraphrase a completely different BBC film series - in case you don't recognize that immediately, it's from Monty Python.)

This part is, like the others, one hour long, but I just had to spend the time to watch it because it fits so much into what we are doing here on this site, that I could consider this study-time. In case you want to spend the time, here it is...

What fascinates me most about this firm, is the fact that it plays hand in hand with the philosophy we promote here at NoFearIRS, that there is actually no, or very little, reason for the fear we are creating for us. Or, as in this example, allow others to create in us.

Do you notice that I really avoid to say that these politicians create the fear? They don't - they might try, but in order to be successful we have to agree with them and allow the fear to enter us. There just is no way around it, that each and every one of us is responsible for what he experiences. In this case at hand, if we do experience fear, we allowed this fear to enter while we had the choice not to do it.

Films like the one above make it easier to accomplish the feat of letting attempts to scare just ripple off of us. They make it a bit easier in the beginning, but they are by no means necessary. Even if the whole of experts and scientists want to tell me that we will fall off the edge of the world if we sail too far, I don't have to listen to them. Columbus was one of them who did not. Or Galileo Galilei, or many others who created an abundance of progress for mankind.

So, make your life, and the correct decisions within, a bit easier by watching the video, or go to the internet archive and watch the whole series 'The Power of Nightmares'. You will even find an ISO images to burn a DVD from to watch on your TV. As I am writing this I am at 6% downloaded and it will probably go all night. But I certainly want that film physically in my hands to be able to show others.

What kind of question is that - if you have killed any children lately?

Obviously most of you will proudly proclaim that you don't kill or maim children. There is the rare exception, but most of us will really believe that we do not kill children, but maybe we should take another look.

let us start with looking at some pictures so that we get in the mood...

Also this one is still rather easy to handle...

Let's get a little bit tougher...

How about some classics that you might have seen before...

But now let's get real tough, but I still really want you to look...

And this one really seems to be dead - I mean like in 'DEAD'...

And now imagine that I have the galls to say you are responsible for all that! And I really mean YOU - the person here in front of your computer reading these lines.  I know you are feeling a lot of objection down there inside of you, but I can't, and would not,  release you from this uncomfortable feeling, that this might in fact be true.

If there is not at least a little voice that tries to tells you, yes, you are responsible for that, then this is probably the wrong article for you to read and you should type YouTube into your browser and forget about what you saw here.

OK, you are still here, good - then there is a chance that we can change something about that. Only if we face what really IS, do we have a chance to make changes.

Obviously you see where I am aiming at, right? All these atrocities are committed by some form of government, and all these governments get the money from - whom? - the good tax-payers of these governments, right? Sometimes the citizenry is coerced into paying at gun point, sometimes it gives freely because they believe in the good intention and righteousness of 'their' government.

There is no way around it - the money to buy the bullet, that blew off that boys leg, was paid by somebody and it might well have been you through your contribution on tax day. For most of us that would be hard to live with, wouldn't it?

Many of you have the excuse that they did not have a choice but to pay, otherwise they would have gotten into trouble. That might certainly be true, but if you trade the life of another human being for your own convenience then I actually don't want you to continue reading my words - please go back to America's Funniest Home Videos.

... still here?

Good! Now we are getting somewhere, but I am sure that by now the group of my readers has considerably thinned out. There are not that many of us that have principles strong enough to overcome the fear of the tax collected and stand up to the egocentricity of staying out of trouble whatever the cost - - for somebody else.

If you are still with me now but have not taken steps yet to stop the money flow to buy more bullets or napalm you must have been doing something to silence that nagging voice inside of you. Which did you chose? Did you give freely to charity, did you adopt a foster-child in the developing world or have you joined the peace corps?

I personally was in the second group - and am actually still part of it. The first adopted foster children I had were taken over from my father when he passed away. He had made the commitment to support these two children in Africa up to the age of 18 and I kept that promise in his name. Later, within my own family, we continued with a new set of children after these first two graduated from the Childreach program, now called PlanUSA. I still believe that it is a good idea to help children this way but I know that I can do a lot more by taking the funds away from the people who create those inhuman conditions in the first place, getting rich while doing so.

I can certainly not tell you what to do. Despite the first amendment I would be accused of interfering with the administration of the tax laws, if I would tell you to shut off the money flow to such immoral and unethical causes. So I will not because I want to continue ranting, but I can ask you to scroll up and look at the pictures above once more and then make your own decision.

If you are not quite at the point where you want to take responsibility for some children on the other side of the world that you never have, and never will have, anything to do with, you may take, for now, a bit more egotistical point of few. Let us take the golden rule of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Doesn't that mean that if you buy bullets to maim or kill  the children of other parents that you want those parents to buy bullets to kill your child or children? That hits a little bit closer to home, doesn't it?

I know, I am pretty mean, but I want to give you this last picture on your way as you go on making money and paying it to the henchman...

Footnote:

Did I mention that anything a government does is done better by a profit oriented enterprise - just in case you want to argue that most of your taxes pay for schools and roads and all the good stuff. Why? Because they are using hammers that cost six bucks instead of sixty.

Even defense can be handled that way. A big poster on the internet: Osama Bin Laden - Dead or Alive - One Billion Dollars! What chances, do you think, bin Laden would have had? Very efficient, a lot cheaper, and that little boy above  would not have that box closed permanently over him. But as you gave our 'leaders' all that money, they needed to spend it to show you that it was correct that they collected it from you.

Now...

if you want to change something, but that fear of the taxman with the gun is bugging you so much that you are just frozen, there will be help to overcome that on this site. Start by registering and let me know that you are willing to make some change.