The Lost Horizons News

The in-depth, real story behind the Sixteenth Amendment;

A simple little model of just how the "income" tax works;

Cognitive stumbling blocks exploited by tax agencies against liberation-seeking Americans;

The disturbing relationship between the "income" tax and the Federal Reserve;

Why tax reform ideas like the "Fair Tax" are not only unnecessary, but completely counter-productive and even dangerous;

Why the "income" tax is what it is, and has to be;

The truth about common myths and misunderstandings within the "tax honesty" movement;

How to think clearly about the tax, the law in general, and the voracious state;

Plus,

A sordid little passport application scam revealed;

How to know if you're in denial about the current crisis in America;

Whether the Constitution is going to save you, or is it the other way around?

The truth about paper "money; government schools; the Second Amendment...

...and much, much more!

Most intellectual exercises require a bit of equipment if one is going to profit from the effort. If, for instance, the goal is to bulk up one’s understanding of what is going on in the marketplace and why, it is important to keep on hand and in constant view the basic laws of supply, demand, and the function of prices; and a comprehension of what constitutes real money as distinct from fiat currency and other types of “securities”.

Where economic behavior and processes are concerned, equipment of this sort is not a matter of “perspective” or “position”. It is not a matter of one’s ideology or politics or preferences, with its utility in economic analysis being therefore a matter of choice. In economics, the principles of supply, demand, price and money are principles in the hard sense of the word-- inescapable realities which WILL have their effect, regardless of our ideology, politics or preferences.

A failure to acknowledge these principles and their inevitable effects won’t make their effects vanish. On the other hand, a failure to acknowledge these principles when attempting to exercise one’s understanding of economics will ensure that gains from the effort will never appear.

Economic analysis unanchored in the core principles of the dismal science is like exercising with styrofoam barbells. One may work vigorously all day long, but will have nothing to show for it but the same flab with which one began, a circular rut worn into one’s synapses, and a disinclination to soon return to a study that has proven to be a greater source of confusion than of illumination.

Useful and productive consideration of government and law, particularly Constitutional law, also requires the firm possession and crisp deployment of certain basic pieces of intellectual equipment. Some of these are very simple to state and understand.

For example, there is the core principle that when a government is established by an explicit charter, that is, by a constitution, any act or behavior which is outside the scope permitted by that charter, or which is prohibited by it, is inherently and inescapably an act or behavior devoid of general governmental authority. Such behavior simply is not, and cannot be, that of the established government acting in its capacity as such, since the establishing instrument does not provide for it, or specifically provides against it.

The implications of this simple principle are similarly straightforward. For example, if the United States Constitution is the instrument by which a general government is established, and that Constitution specifies that, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,” then any act of Congress abridging any freedom of speech is self-evidently not an act of that government acting in its capacity as a government, and is devoid of general authority. Such an act can impose no obligation or restraint on any undistinguished person-- at least, not as an expression or invocation of any legitimate general legal jurisdiction possessed by the Constitutionally-established government.

Another of these basic pieces of intellectual equipment is an understanding of the fact that no governmental enactment is legitimate unless it is an expression of the deliberate purpose and intent of those to whom it statically applies. That is, unless the members of a polity have deliberately delegated an authority upon which a government enactment can be based, that enactment possesses no general authority over those members.

Yet another of these basic pieces of intellectual equipment necessary to the productive consideration of government and law, and perhaps the most important, is an understanding that members of a polity are incapable of delegating any power to any government or other agent which they themselves do not individually possess to begin with. If you can’t do it, you can’t give someone else permission to do it...

Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens