PHILOSOPHIES OF THIS WEB SITE

Americans have lost many of their freedoms, and have been lulled into submission and compliance gradually by propaganda and coercion. The right to travel has been declared a "privilege" granted in return for various automobile fees, drivers licenses and airport molestations. Slavery has been instituted by direct taxes on labor and wages. Public debt and obligation has been imposed upon Americans when they had no part of creating that debt. The State no longer protects the rights of individuals, it now protects mainly government itself at the expense of private individuals' money and freedoms. Police forces have become militarized. Many of the benefits and principles of the American Revolution of the late 1700's have been lost and are no longer truthfully or adequately taught in our public schools. Children are taught not to value freedom, but to accept State control and become dependent on institutional patronage, so the coming generations will have little capacity to maintain a free State without major educational efforts from the private sector.

Several generations of Americans have traded rights and freedoms for perceived "benefits" from government. The results have been massive public debt, wars that make no sense and never end, state sponsored assassination and torture, millions of Americans dependent upon redistribution of public largesse, crippling taxes of all kinds that, when totaled, exceed 70% of personal earnings, massive and ongoing expansion in the size, wealth, authority and secrecy of government, major government intrusions into personal privacy, and major perversions and violations of America's founding principles by deed and statute.

FREEDOMTAKER.COM endeavors to be one of the ways that Americans recover their rights, self-sufficiency and prosperity, not to mention our integrity and global reputation.

FREEDOMTAKER, GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND MAXIMS:

He who fails to assert his rights has none. (This is not how it should be, but that is how the courts treat people, so we all must know, and be prepared to assert our rights at all times.)

If you must apply or petition for freedom from another, you are not free. The only freedom you have is the freedom you imagine for yourself and actively REQUIRE others to observe.

It is a duty to take freedom for yourself, and it is a crime to take the freedom of another.

Freedom does not come to you from the Constitution, the government, the Bible, God, your parents, a company, politician or bureaucrat. Freedom exists at the instant you claim it, and it usually vanishes when you fail to defend it.

FREEDOM IS FREE unless someone is trying to take it from you, which is nearly always the case. That means it is useless to generally favor freedom as a concept. We must be vocal and active. We must deal directly and firmly with the person who would take our money or property, or who would penalize us when we have harmed no one.

America is not made great by people pledging as servants, but defending their rights and property as sovereigns.

There are those who believe that freedom is granted by God. While everyone has a perfect right to their religious beliefs, and we grant that many of the principles of freedom originate from the moral teachings of religions, this site does not attempt to affirm or expound religious principles. It may be said that God gave us the power to claim our freedom, but God did not give us the freedom itself as can be seen by the billions of people on earth of all religions who are currently suffering from various deprivations of freedom. We can't give them freedom because we don't own their freedom. We can only help them know that they do have the right to freedom and the power to take it for themselves. This is a website for people, regardless of religion, to find information, assistance and inspiration in the exercise and defense of their freedoms. Freedom must be seen and protected for its own value, not as a means to affirm religious principles. Freedom and religion may be mutually supportive, but they are not mutually dependent. You may need freedom to exercise religion but you should not need religion to exercise freedom.

FREEDOMTAKER does not use the American flag, the eagle or the star to identify the FreedomTaker concept. The concept of freedom is larger than any country, race, civil or social system. Even animals require freedom to have a certain quality of life. While efforts like FreedomTaker may be identified by some symbol or logo, freedom itself has no logo, symbol, members, leaders or oath. To be human is to have the right of freedom. And freedom takes different forms as it is imagined and claimed by different people. Just as freedom cannot be prescribed or granted, only claimed and taken, the look and feel of freedom is only what the individual makes of it for himself or herself. There are as many different kinds of freedom as there are individuals who see themselves as entitled to freedom. Freedom is not what you may do, it is what you do. Freedom does not exist when it is defined or codified, freedom only exists when and how it is exercised.

Freedom, as any endeavor, is best achieved through non-violence, however, because freedom is a natural and essential right, when freedom, life and property are assaulted they sometimes must be defended in kind.

The concepts of "safety", "security" "order" and "necessity" are the most common excuses used to deny freedom. Almost invariably when those things are promised, all that is delivered is a reduction in freedom and an increase in institutional control and exploitation of private individuals without any particular benefit to society. Government causes and promotes fear to empower itself as the "solution" to the "problem".

We are easily made afraid by disorder. We forget our need for freedom but we never forget our need for "order". That is human nature. Tyrants may therefore easily enslave us by causing chaos and fear, then offering us some kind of contract promising order at the expense of our freedom. That way they do not have to force our compliance, we simply volunteer for slavery. Our willingness to trade freedom for order is a low-level primal impulse easily exploited by narcissists, psychopaths and agressive personalities. This is well understood by power hoarders. They know, to maintain power and control, they must continually create fear and chaos and they must continually offer themselves and their programs as offering hope of a solution to the chaos they create, although solutions rarely materialize. This pattern and tactic of social manipulation, sometimes referred to as the "Hegelian Dialectic", is common and consistent throughout recorded human history.

Failure to protect your own freedom is to weaken and threaten the freedom of others. Those who assault our freedoms point to the compliant as normal and the non-compliant as deviant. It is just the opposite. The highest condition of power and consciousness for any individual is to be master of all that affects him or her. Attainment of freedom is only the beginning of self realization. Learning and creativity are suppressed at times and places where freedom is denied.

Taking the wealth, earnings and property from someone by force with the feeble excuse that it must be given to someone else is not compassion, it is tyranny. Charity, to be moral and just, must be voluntary.

Freedom is not possible in a system of "majority rule", or any other system of "rule" by a collective or central authority. Freedom is only possible in a republic where those who wish may live as self-avowed sovereign individuals protecting their own rights, actions and property unmolested and without impediment unless they commit harm to others, and then the obligation is to the harmed party, not the government.

Taxes on personal labor and earnings is slavery and unpaid servitude. It is criminal theft and denial of human dignity and right.

Corporations are fictitious fabrications and they have no rights or entitlements and cannot be harmed. Only human beings have rights. Animals have rights but have little capacity to defend those rights, so that defense may sometimes become our mission.

Taxes, fees, licenses, permits, penalties or other encumbrances on harmless behavior is oppression and is morally not permissible. Those who enforce such menace against free innocent people are deeply obligated to the subjects and victims of their enforcements.

Seek no benefit and pay no tribute to distant collectives. Maintain your individual sovereign authority against all threat and temptation.

He who stands for freedom at the expense of his own life has bought freedom for millions of others. He who trades freedom for comfort or convenience has cost freedom for all those in his community.

Taxes on, or revenue from harmful behaviour (profit from destruction) constitutes a moral hazard for the taxing agency because it will promote violations for profit. The more difficult the compliance, the more profit for the state. Taxes and fees on harmless or beneficial activity is detrimental to the public interest because good deeds are thereby discouraged. Therefore all taxes are punishment, damage and harm to society. Those who earn must demand and claim the right and power to determine the appropriation of their earnings.

Government may never presume any right or entitlement to take private wealth and property. Wealth and property must be offered, conditionally offered or not by the rightful owner.

No government may rightfully adopt the posture or character of anything but servant. All government derives all authority from the governed even if it is taken by force. An individual may, at any time, reclaim his authority from government. He may refuse, revoke and breach any contract imposed by force or coercion or without disclosure or consent.

Excess power and wealth, if an offense, is better defeated by individually empowered organized social opposition (boycott, non-compliance) than by creating and empowering even more wealthy enforcement institutions to "fight against" the power and wealth of other institutions and individuals. While an unpopular tycoon cannot force us to support his enterprise, an unpopular government can and does force our unwilling support by way of law, weapons and prisons. To choose government is the abandonment of all further right of choice.

Any collected wealth may be diverted to corrupt or unintended application, and history shows that it always is. Therefore the collection and management of of wealth should not be allowed to any public entity, agency or officer. Wealth and property must never be seized or forcibly diverted from the individual who has earned it by his labor.

Centralized and collective power and wealth are always corrupt, self-serving, secret, unaccountable, diverted, wasteful and impossible to contain in size, wealth and greed. Any authority and power collected centrally is authority and power that is lost individually.

We hjave been told by our media, schools and politicians that to debate gender differences is discimination. That is nonsense. To deny gender differences is do deny reality. Women in general may be prone to misappropriate power by thinking "I will disempower the bullying men around me by supporting a central authority that will enforce equality." By that thinking, power that was lost temporarily is given up permanently. The woman has more chance to ovecome the bullying man than she does against the bullying government, yet the woman is always tempted to empower government or some central authority against the man. This tendency is fatal to the freedom and prosperity of everyone in society. Women should never be bullied by men or governments, however women who achieve true equality and equity generally do so with their own wits, resolve, strength, ethics, personal alliances, and by wiselky exploiting opportunities, not by any institutional intervention or legal advantage. A woman is never more powerless than when commanded, controlled and taxed by the government she has empowered. We are conditioned to think that men who seek freedom are "scary" and women who seek more laws and rules are making themselves "secure". It is quite the opposite. Centralized and concentrated power is, by far, the most dangerous and destructive thing the planet has ever, and will ever see.

The tiniest allowance of central authority is a cancer that will never stop growing. Centralized power must be agressively and continually reduced and maintained at the minimum level for strictly defined and specific purposes and never considered to be a device of general social or economic solution.

If there were no law or government most people would be peaceful and harmless to each other and would, untaxed, have the resources to defeat and banish the bad actors. America now has more citizens imprisoned per capita than any other nation on earth because a way has been found to profit from that. There is no need or net benefit for centralized control or exploitation and abuse of human beings for "the greater good" if people are trained and encouraged from birth to assert and defend their rights and act in righteous honor toward others.

The illusion of central control causes individuals to fail in responsibility and personal excellence. When responsibility is centralized, individuals no longer see themselves responsible for their own actions.

An individual's true power lies in himself, his family and his immediate voluntary community and nowhere else.

There is no such thing as a global leader or a global citizen. Citizneship and corporation are fictional and false constructs useful only for maintaining social control matrices. As a species, we are all connected spiritually, humanity anywhere is connected to humanity everywhere, however, governments and political regimes are not important to that connection. Our connections are determined by how we treat each other as individuals, not what our governments do for us.

Those who see a tyrranny growing and try to warn others can feel some resentment as the tyranny grows and others ignore or ridicule the warnings. If someone warns you of lost freedoms, you had best heed the warning or, when the revolution starts, you will find yourself under the bus.

Just as it is not moral to take the freedom or rights of another, it is not possible to give freedom or rights to another. If something is given, loaned or sold, it is a benefit or privilege, but it is not freedom or rights. You must concieve and secure your own liberty and you must oppose those who deter you from doing that.

"Citizenship" is a CONTRACT between an individual and a political body. All contracts must be intentional by all parties, voluntary, fully disclosed, subject to revocation and recorded to be valid. Presumed "obligations" to government are seldom any of those things.

An individual may not rightfully be obligated by his silence or by presumption or implication of any law, policy or custom. Tragically and inexcusably, courts uphold policies where individuals are obligated without disclosure and without their consent.

Fiat (unbacked) currency is worthless and subject to abuse by its issuers against its managers. Debt-based fiat (unbacked) currency is fraud and theft because it may be created by one party to the obligation of another without consent. Any currency issued with debt in excess of its own worth is fraud and is unsustainable racketeering.

The use of interest-bearing debt is unsustainable, unnatural and unwise. We have been conditioned to accept the use of credit as "normnal." The use of credit often leads to irreperable debt slavery. The only reason we need to buy homes on credit is because we cannot own property or pass homes to our heirs without taxes. Everyone alive should have right of inheritance without taxation, registration or reporting.

Charity is done by people, "redistribution" is done by theft. Institutions which are morally flawed enough to steal wealth for "redistribution" have no moral capacity to distribute it justly, honorably or equitably. Predictably over time, government itself winds up consuming most of the wealth it takes.

The above statements are simply declarations of individual freedom. If you feel empowered by them you may benefit from participating in this web site. If you feel threatened or disturbed by them then you may be wrongly taking the freedom of others for your own benefit. This site is dedicated to non-violent and race-blind restoration of freedom to individuals who seek it while recognizing the social and economic damage done by those who take the freedom of others. We urge everyone, whenever possible, to seek to fulfill their needs through self reliance and voluntary charities before relying on coercive systems of taxation, coercion, force and state violence.

Our governments and private monopolies are now so massive that the majority of society's wealth is consumed by institutional overhead, corruption, waste and service to public debt. The product of government is no longer service to us, it is now control of us and service to itself. If our central collectives were eliminated or permanently reduced to a small fraction of their current size, wealth and power, the abundance that society would experience would be beyond our current imaginations.

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MORE DISCOURSE ON FREEDOM

DEFINITION:
"Collective": A system of rule or social control by a central authority. All forms of government such as Democracy (majority rule) Communism, Facsism, Dictatorship, Monarchy, etc. are collectives. In a collective, individual freedom and determination is subordinated to a centralized authority outside the individual's direct control. A collective imposes any number of obligations, behavioral expectations and/or promises benefits to various classes, or it levies and redistributes benefits from a slave class to a privileged class. The term collective refers to, for instance, virtually all forms of government, large employers and imembership organizations that impose or expect conforming ideological views and loyalty among their members. In a collective, individual thought and authority is given over to a general set of policies which may be rigid or controlled buy an elite cadre. To promote collectives as "for freedom", propaganda may employ terms such as "Freedom Collective", "Freedom Organization", "Freedom Club", "freedom membership" etc. Those terms are oxymorons. Freedom is manifest by individuals for themselves, not by organizations upon individuals. If an organization provides it, it is not freedom, it is a benefit of that organization as a collective. Preservation of freedom for individuals can only be done by preventing and limiting the power and authority of collectives.
FT

FOR HOW MANY PEOPLE WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE RESPONSIBLE?
Many people are attracted to collectivist systems for a sense of personal security.

They wish taxpayers, the state or some large institution to take responsibility for their personal security and well-being.

They assume that forced redistribution of wealth will work in their favor.

They believe that if they are, or appear to be needy or poor they will experience the up side of the redistribution. Since when do the poor not have to pay taxes? When we encourage redistribution we are simply agreeing to be taxed to feed a monstrous bureaucracy and corrupt political machine.

Of course, most of the "redistribution" winds up in the hands of the collective's elites and insiders, and "the poor" often contribute more than "the rich" per dollar earned. Then, of course, the promised benefits are often denied or fail, or even worse, the recipient becomes dependent on the assistance permanently when he otherwise may have attained self-sufficiency, independence and self reliance.

The distributed benefits, if they materialize at all, do not cause individual prosperity or security, only dependency, control and a crippling drag on enterprise, innovation and prosperity for all of society because every dollar of taxation is a discouragement to enterprise.

Even if equitable redistribution were possible, the illusion of individual security under collective patronage has one very obvious flaw. To gain that illusion of personal security we must each, in the case of national collectivism, volunteer to personally guarantee the security of 300 million other Americans including millions of bureaucrats, political insiders, war makers, corrupt government contractors, foreign dictators, failed bankers, pork barrel squandering and of course greed, skimming and corruption at all levels by all sorts of players. Any collection of revenue becomes an irresistable target for the worst parasites ion society. Over time, more and more of the wealth is lost to waste, embezzlement, corrution, debt and misappropriation ubtil the system crushes under it own weight.

In the welfare state, each individual is held personally responsible to fund and support ALL members of society which leads to some absurd injustices such as some poor person's sales tax helping pay for the bailout pof a bank.

So the simple question is this: Are you better off taking responsibility for yourself, your family and your community, or being forcibly held responsible for millions of greedy, corrupt and uinproductive strangers who will never get enough of your money and property? And when you are held to such extreme and limitless debt, what happens to you, your family and your community as your resources are drained for distant programs and the enrichment of the administrators?

When the welfare recipients and administrators don't know you, they don't care how much they take from you or how much that damages you. They will always take more today than yesterday and then more tomorrow. We are now at the breaking point.

Even if a welfare system were "effective" at reducing poverty, any system of redistribution loses most of it's resources to waste, corruption and mismanagement. Forced redistribution is the most expensive way there is to accomplish anything because those kinds of revenues are so likely to be mis-handled.

Incentives and propserity for individuals is far higher in a "You keep and manage what you earn" system. It has been shown that those systems are far more effective at dispensing charity for those who are needy and under duress becuase the resources needed for charity are kept in the community and not depleted by central hoarding authorities and massive government infrastructure.

The poverty level in America has grown to four times its size per captia since the creation of the welfare state under Lyndon Banes Johnson in the 1960's. Trillions have been spent and the results are exactly the opposite of what was intended and promised.

When "benefits" were offered to "the poor", creating for the first time an actual reason to be poor, there were eventually four times as many "poor" and the number will grow indefinitely. 50 years of that has already put us all in impossible debt to our taxing agencies. 

So, at the very best, and by any measure, our welfare and social "safety net" systems are a total failure. At worst, they have destroyed incentive, opportunity and basic freedom by creating a huge ball and chain around the necks of every enterprising, productive and ambitious citizen and putting the poor in an inescapable prison of dependency.

Welfare and subsidies, personal, corporate and "foreign aid" have been the most expensive, disastrous and counterproductive experiments in America's history, perhaps even moreso than war. 

The escalating nature of welfare is now making the cost to society spin out of control. We are now, as they say, running out of other people's money. It is clearly unsustainable and with so many people now dependent it will end very badly as their "benefits" eventually must disappear through the floor.

As our economic and monetary system reaches end times, the people who will be most seriously damaged, literally in a contest of life and death, will be those who are in debt and those who are dependent on external support.

This is the time to become self sufficient, and to develop support systems within our communities, but self sufficiency cannot be attained without first claiming the freedom necessary to make decisions for ourselves, to keep what we earn and to command our own destinies.

FT