All levelly aside, the talks of mandatory or even incentivised national service is one scary thought. Now there is nothing wrong with some sort of service, but to have the government basically give somebody money in the form of tax brakes in order to get people to do some national service is kind of scary. That isn’t volunteer work, that is regular work. Nobody is going to want to volunteer at their local salvation army when the government can give out incentives that no other charity could possibly match. And of course the fact that the government will determine what is a worthwhile cause for this “service,” and you can be pretty sure that it will be the special interest groups that get all of these “volunteers” and any organization without friends in Washington will be left high and dry trying to compete with the government’s idea of service and its incentives that no private organization could hope to match. ]

Now get your students out there so they can become good little citizens in their government schools and their national “service.” It’s not like you will have a chance when they make service mandatory for all good little citizens, no matter what that silly little document called the constitution says about involuntary servitude.

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He was so close to turning his life around until the government gets wind of him. You see Larry was so successful in his shoe shine business and his turning his life around story that the local media picked up on him. Of course the bureaucrats can’t let a moving story like that continue, they must destroy all things good. Even though the local businesses had no problem with him shining shoes, the government couldn’t let it go. They demanded a $491 permit. A good chunk of his rent. Well, he went over and tried to pay, but being homeless he didn’t have a valid ID. He had pay money to have a copy of his birth certificate sent to him, and then he had to pay money to get an ID. But of course, the government just wanted to educate him. The “to be a slave” part must have been implied.

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In other words, the City of Nottingham has stolen the tiny helpless innocent daughter from this mother. A mother who has not harmed nor even shown that she is likely to harm the baby. It is beyond comprehension how we live in a world where these social workers are not already in jail and/or paying restitution to this mother for the pain and suffering they have caused her, instead of making money for the government by adopting the child out. These people are scum. They are reprehensible and are an embarrassment to the entire human race. If there are advanced civilizations out there watching us, the reason they have probably have not made contact with us is because they see people like this.

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According to the Chicago Tribune, a Libertyville Illinois women called the cops because her adult child was angry and depressed, and hitting the wall. It seemed that he had a gun and was contemplating killing himself. The cops came over, went upstairs to where the guy was and the guy ended up shot the back by the cops. For hours the cops wouldn’t tell this poor women what happened, except that they were calling an ambulance. They took her to the police station, and would not tell her that they had killed her son. The cops say he was pointing a gun at two cops that were down the stairs, but the mother says there was there was nobody on the stairs and that all four cops were on the second floor.

This really just goes to show you, that unless you really really need to, do not call the cops. It usually just ends up bad.

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J.H. Huebert had an excellent article last Friday about the US attempts to force the Swiss bank, UBS, to divulge information about US account holders to the IRS. These efforts are nothing less than an attack on Switzerland’s sovereignty in the form of its ability to establish and maintain its own banking laws.

This is the kind of arcane financial news that is easy to disregard. When people hear “Swiss bank accounts,” they may brush off the attacks as the problems of the ultra rich. If only we were so “unfortunate” to have this kind of problem to worry about, right? Unfortunately, however, I think we do. I believe that there is far more to this than a temporary, one-time money grab by the IRS from tax evaders. I believe this is also very bad news even for us “wage slaves.”

The day Mr. Huebert’s article appeared, the Justice Department announced that the US and Switzerland had reached an agreement in principle to settle the US lawsuit against UBS AG seeking the names of 52,000 account holders. No details of the agreement were released but, given the amount of leverage that the US can bring to bear on UBS’s operations in the United States, it would be astounding if UBS had not agreed to some major accommodation to US demands.

Let’s go back and supply a little context about how we get to this issue in the first place.

Like most countries, the US taxes its residents on income that they earn outside of the US. Unlike most countries, the US also taxes its nonresident citizens on their worldwide income. Solely by virtue of being born here, the US claims lifelong rights to your earning stream even if you take up permanent residency in another country. As a result, the US is constantly seeking ways, through treaties, laws or, now we see, international strong arm measures, to track the international financial transactions of its citizens, whether in the name of preventing drug trafficking, money laundering, tax evasion or other crimes.

US taxpayers are required to report, and pay taxes, on interest or other earnings derived from foreign accounts. Unlike US banks, which will send you and the IRS a Form 1099 each year, foreign banks do not have an obligation to report your earnings to the IRS. Accordingly, the IRS is keenly interested in finding out from you whether or not you have any such foreign accounts.

Schedule B to Form 1040 (used for reporting interest and dividends) asks, “At any time during (the previous year), did you have an interest in or a signatory or other authority over a financial account in a foreign country, such as a bank account, securities account, or other financial account?” As described by the law firm of Bove & Langa in an on-line article about this matter, the answer to this question has serious potential consequences:

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First we attacked Afghanistan. Then we attacked Iraq. Now the U.S. has it sights set on Switzerland.

Peaceful, neutral Switzerland? That’s right. What’s the crime? It’s not sponsoring terrorism or harboring weapons of mass destruction. No, in the eyes of the U.S. government, Switzerland has done far worse: it’s kept money out of the hands of the Internal Revenue Service, money to which the IRS may not even be entitled under any law anywhere.

The U.S. and Switzerland are headed for a diplomatic showdown as the IRS demands that Swiss bank UBS turn over the names of 52,000 U.S. clients in the mere hope of exposing them as tax evaders, prosecuting them and taking their cash.

The IRS has already succeeded in going after one prominent user of UBS’s services: Igor Olenicoff. The billionaire, who has a home in Laguna Beach’s Emerald Bay, pleaded guilty in December 2007 to filing a false tax return, then sued UBS, contending bank advisers’ advice landed him in trouble.

Now the IRS wants more: that list of names. But the Swiss government has so far stood its ground. It understandably doesn’t want to let the IRS do this because of Switzerland’s longstanding strict banking-secrecy laws, which provide criminal penalties for disclosing client information. Plus, the Swiss have this crazy notion that their own laws – not ours – should apply in their own country.

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by Stefan Molyneux

“Put down the gun, then we’ll talk.”

One of the most difficult – and essential – challenges faced by libertarians is
the constant need to point out “the gun in the room.” In political debates, it
can be very hard to cut through the endless windy abstractions that are used to
cover up the basic fact that the government uses guns to force people to do
what they do not want to do, or prevent them from doing what they do want to
do. Listening to non-libertarians, I often wish I had a “euphemism umbrella” to
ward off the continual oily drizzle of words and phrases designed to obscure
the simple reality of state violence. We hear nonstop nonsense about the
“social good,” the “redistribution of income,” the “education of children” and
so on – endless attempts to bury the naked barrel of the state in a mountain of
syrupy metaphors.

It is a wearying but essential task to keep reminding people that the state is
nothing but an agency of violence. When someone talks about “the welfare state
helping the poor,” we must point out the gun in the room. When someone opposes
the decriminalization of marijuana, we must point out the gun in the room. When
someone supports the reduction of taxes, we must point out the gun in the room
- even if one bullet has been taken out.

So much political language is designed to obscure the simple reality of state
violence that libertarianism sometimes has to sound like a broken record. We
must, however, continue to peel back the euphemisms to reveal the
socially-sanctioned brutality at the root of some of our most embedded social
institutions.

I was recently involved in a debate with a woman about public schools.
Naturally, she came up with reason after reason as to why public schools were
beneficial, how wonderful they were for underprivileged children, how essential
they were for social stability etc etc. Each of these points – and many more -
could have consumed hour upon hour of back and forth, and would have required
extensive research and complicated philosophical reasoning. But there was
really no need for any of that – all I had to do was keep saying:

“The issue is not whether public schools are good or bad, but rather whether I
am allowed to disagree with you without getting shot.”

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You don’t have to be a dedicated libertarian, an anarchist, a front porch radical, an anti-government adherent, or a tea party insurgent to take exception to the government’s coercive political process that seeks to master you and crush your independence. All you have to do is recognize how the political system functions and determine the legitimacy of its tactics by applying some really basic analysis and concepts.

For instance, let’s say I want you to stop smoking. I don’t like cigarettes, and I personally believe that smoking is an unpleasant and injurious habit. As a non-coercive individual, I may sit with you and explain why I think you should not smoke, and hopefully, I will use facts, or even opinions, to try and persuade you toward my view. Whether I am critical, or gentle, or even unkind, I am peacefully trying to influence your judgment on the matter. I have not used threats of punishment under the force of law, nor have I assembled a gang of armed bandits behind me to impose my views on you. If, on the other hand, you ask me to leave you alone, I’ll abide and retreat from your presence because anything less would be harassment, or aggression against your person. Voluntary human interactions that entail persuasion are rather simple in structure and are subject to some very necessary rules that shun aggression or force.

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A few days ago a man who could have caused my death died of cancer at the ripe age of 86. He never faced a War Crimes Tribunal. He should have, and in a just world he would have. His name was Lord Aldington, and only now did I learn he was responsible for the sheer terror my decimated family of four – grandmother, mother, younger sister and I – experienced in the brutal summer of 1945 while trapped by the Red Army in the vicinity of Berlin.

Below is a article on “Operation Keelhaul” and the man accused of having masterminded it. The article was written by one Srdja Trifkovic. (Dr. Rimland’s comments are ‘Zundelsite’).

By Srdja Trifkovic www.rockfordinstitute.org/NewsST121900.htm 12-19-00 (Dr. Rimland’s comments are ‘Zundelsite’).

Trifkovic: Lord Aldington, 86, a former British trade minister and Conservative Party vice chairman who filed one of Britain’s most famous libel cases against a man who labeled him a war criminal, died of cancer Dec. 8 at his home in Kent, southern England. In 1989, Lord Aldington was awarded $2.2 million in damages after winning a libel suit against historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant relative of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who had written a pamphlet accusing Lord Aldington of war crimes.

Zundelsite: Censoring history by way of libel actions is unfortunately the method the rich and well-connected use against their pesky critics.

Trifkovic: As a British army officer in Austria at the end of World War II, Lord Aldington — then known by his given name, Toby Low — oversaw the repatriation of thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav refugees [ Ed. ... and, of course, the ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union and the Baltic states] . Many were subsequently killed or interned in prison camps.
At the libel trial, Lord Aldington agreed that the refugees’ fate was “ghastly” but said he had not known that many faced execution if returned to their homelands (The Washington Post, December 9, 2000).

Zundelsite: To assume that a high-ranking British Army officer in the field, whose unit daily interrogated refugees and prisoners-of-war, all of whom had either fled from, fought against, or at one time were part of Stalin’s army, is stretching credulity a bit too far. Only a fellow Lodge or Club member sitting as judge on a bench in London could be hypocritical enough to seem to believe such an answer.

Trifkovic: An obituary sometimes begs a thousand words – well worth doing in this case, especially since it’s been over a decade since we wrote about Aldington, Tolstoy, and one of the greatest untold tragedies of World War II. Zundelsite: The tragedy was not untold. There were millions of people affected by it, and detailed accounts have long been written about it. Only the British, and to a lesser degree, the American power elite suppressed it, because their clique had formulated and approved these vicious pro-Communist policies in Teheran and Yalta. They are co-guilty of what happened. They share in the responsibility for these atrocities.

Trifkovic: This is a story of heinous crimes that went unpunished and of establishment conspiracies to cover them up, of a miscarriage of justice, of one man’s quixotic efforts to tell the truth and another’s quiet campaign to keep it suppressed.

Zundelsite: Is it really “quixotic” to expose the deliberate murder of millions? At least there is now an admission that one man – not to mention his network of accomplices – tried to suppress this crime.

Trifkovic: The story starts at Yalta in February 1945, when the return of all Soviet citizens who found themselves in the Allied zone was demanded by Stalin — and was duly agreed to by Churchill and FDR. Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs liberated by the Allies were sent back home, regardless of their wishes, and regardless of what Stalin had in store for them.

Zundelsite: What does that make Churchill and Roosevelt? Knowing and willing accomplices who had for years been briefed about Soviet war aims and the policies of Stalin and the behavior of his secret police and murderous Red Army. Yet they agreed to hand these people over!

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