I was reading a post on the Rio Norte Line.  It was written by a friend of mine, so I want to be sure to make it clear that I am not hostile to him.  Nor do I disagree with the essence of his post.  He is writing in opposition to government oppression, and I am certainly in allegiance with him on this point.  However, what struck me is the use of the word “Capitalism.”  For some time now, something has not been sitting right with me concerning the way we use the word.  It was when I read my friends post that the problem suddenly struck me, and the ramifications of my realization are as sweeping as those of realizing that the Constitution does not contain the principles and ideals of the Declaration.  This realization is really rather simple – so simple that we do not see it.  Capitalism is not the same thing as the free market.

We should start by asserting an eternal truth: that the natural order of economic activity among men is that of the free market.  It is only in and through the free market that the economic activates of humanity can conform to Natural Law.  Therefore, whenever a system is found that restricts or constrains the free market, that system is not a free market system and is in conflict with Natural Law.

That said, let’s start by looking at the definition of the free market:

free market

: an economic market or system in which prices are based on competition among private businesses and not controlled by a government

Now, look at the definition of Capitalism:

capitalism

: a way of organizing an economy so that the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) are owned by individual people and companies rather than by the government.

OK, now, let me show you how profound the difference between the free market and Capitalism actually is, and – at the same time – how easy it is to miss this difference. But first, let us start by stating that the free market means freedom of activity for all individuals in the market.  Now, with this notion in mind, let me ask you a simple question:

What stops a private person from becoming just as much of a dictator as the head of a government?

Do you understand the point here?  I will understand if you do not.  I didn’t – not for many years.  And even then, I only understood that I knew something was wrong with my use of these words.  I sensed the problem with their definitions, but it wasn’t until this morning, when I read my friend’s post, that it suddenly came together.  So let me try to help you see what I now see.

Assume we have a man who owns and runs a hedge fund.  Assume he becomes so large and powerful that he can crash the financial systems of entire nations, and that he can use this influence to manipulate or even replace national governments.  Now ask yourself: can the free market exist with the presence of such a person operating inside of it?

Now, what if there is another man who starts a business that becomes so powerful he can use his money to seize control over and direct a nation’s education system for his own purposes.  He then changes that education system to test and indoctrinate children.  The ones who show an aptitude for being useful o him are set on one path so they can work for him, while the rest are placed on another path where they will be controlled by a system he helps create.  The smart ones will become his employees; the rest will be turned into a controlled market.  Can the free market exist with such a man operating inside it?

Think about this for a moment.  Both men own their corporations.  This means they are private citizens.  Both men operate within the letter of their nation’s laws.  So they are legal.  But both men are so powerful that they can either manipulate the market by destroying the financial system, or by literally altering the society that uses that market.  Now, is that the free market?

Now, consider this.  Both men are real; both men live in the United States; and both men have actually boasted that they are doing exactly what I just explained.  Now, do you still believe that Capitalism is the same thing as the free market?

By the way: those two men are George Soros, who jokes about destroying nations as a hobby, and Bill Gates who openly boasts that his contributions to Common Core are “developing new markets and customers.”  Look it up for yourself.  That way, you’ll be more likely to believe it for yourself than if I explain it to you.

[NOTE: this is one of those times where our enemy should be consulted, because he can actually be better at describing us than we are ourselves.  In this case, I am referring to a Socialist definition of Capitalism.  In many respects, the Socialist critique of Capitalism is much more accurate than the Capitalist wants to accept.  At the same time, the Capitalist’s critique of the Socialist’s answer to these problems is dead-on accurate.  Capitalism ‘can’ operate in a benign manner, whereas Socialism can never do so.  This is because Socialism cannot exist without being forced on society where Capitalism can function according to free market principles.  It is all connected to the heart of the people running the system.  If they are a good and moral people, Capitalism will be more like what it was during the time of our founders.  However, if the hearts of the people running it are evil, then…  Well, then we will have people gleefully boasting about destroying nations and indoctrinating children.]

Let me just say this as forcefully as I can: anyone who argues that the Second Amendment does not protect the individual’s right to keep and bear arms is either arguing from ignorance or lying!  In most cases, primarily those of average citizens, they argue from ignorance instilled by our schools and our media.  But in the case of those who are in positions to know better, they are most always lying to you.  They may argue that the Second Amendment applies only to the ‘militia,’ or they may argue about the definition of the militia or even that the need for the Second Amendment has passed.  But everyone – everyone – who makes an argument like that is a tyrant who is seeking control over you – everyone!  There are no exceptions!  You can see it in this story about a former member of the Supreme Court who is lying about the Second Amendment for the purpose of establish control over the population at large:

Former Member of the Supreme Court Wants to Add These Five Words to the Second Amendment

Now, instead of quoting the founders, or worrying about the definition of militia, or even debating whether or not the Second Amendment is obsolete, let me go straight to the Declaration of Independence to explain why everyone who claims the right to bear arms is not an individual right is wrong.  Then you test my explanation against what the founders believed to see whether you think the founders would have disagreed with me.  Just keep in mind, this requires that you know and understand what the founders believed: specifically, Natural Law and Natural Rights as Locke explained them.

OK, the right to self defense is a Natural Right.  It is the Natural Right the founders claimed to justify their action to break away from England.  As a Natural Right, it is inalienable.  That means it can neither be given nor taken away.  Self defense includes any and all means of defending one’s self, and that most definitely includes weapons.  Self defense is not limited by society because it is an inalienable right.  It cannot be given or taken away.  So this means you have the right to use a bat, a knife, a sword, a pistol, a rifle – even a machine gun to defend yourself…if that is what you chose to use (incidentally, machine guns are primarily defensive weapons when employed by military forces).

There you go; that’s all there is to it.  You have an individual Natural Right to defend yourself.  It cannot be given or taken away – period.  This right to defend yourself includes the right to use weapons to do so, and that includes fire arms.  And this is exactly what the founders meant when they wrote the Second Amendment: that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.  Anyone who seeks to infringe on that right is seeking to disarm you.  They are trampling on your inalienable Natural Rights.  And that is the act of someone who wants to control you, not protect you.  After all, if you surrender your right to defend yourself, are you now placing yourself at their mercy?  And does that not mean you have given them control over you and your life and property?

So understand this and never forget it.  Any attack on the individual right to keep and bear arms is the act of a tyrant – period!

Now, a word from the founders – just because:

* James Madison: Americans have “the advantage of being armed” — unlike the citizens of other countries where “the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

 * Patrick Henry: “The great objective is that every man be armed. . . . Everyone who is able may have a gun.”

 * George Mason: “To disarm the people [is] the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”

 * Samuel Adams: “The Constitution shall never be construed . . . to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”

 * Alexander Hamilton: “The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.”

* Richard Henry Lee: “To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.”

And there are so many, many more just like these.

Our society tends to equate the notion of fairness with that of justice; treating them as though they are interchangeable concepts.  While this may be true if their definitions are carefully and clearly asserted, in practice, they most often do not mean the same thing.  In fact, they usually express opposing ideas.  One is objective, the other subjective.  One deals with universal principles that apply equally to all societies and which do not change with time; the other deals with popular sentiment and is subject to change between societies and times.  One is subject to reasoned correction; the other is subject to emotional manipulation.  One is a foundational principle of liberty; the other is an enemy of liberty.

Justice is the impartial application of the law as derived from the principles of Natural Law. It is rooted in universal principles that apply to all people, everywhere and at all times.  These principles do not change with societies or time.  They are founded upon the first principle that the individual owns his own will. Justice recognizes the equal claim every individual has in this first principle and in the rest of their Natural Rights.  It protects the individual from encroachment upon these individual rights so that the individual can be secure enough to exercise liberty.  Should someone encroach on the rights of another, justice provides a means of restraining that encroachment and making restitution when necessary.  And, should a law be made that violates the principles of Natural Law, justice provides a path of reasoned correction to put the law back in harmony with those principles.

On the other hand, fairness is a biased assertion of individual opinion.  It is rooted in assumptions that change with societies and over time.  These assumptions are not fixed; they change frequently, even within a given society.  They are founded primarily on the notion of what ought to be as opposed to what is.  Fairness subjugates the rights of the individual to the enforcement of these notions of how things should be.  Fairness provides no protections to the individual, nor does it provide for a reasoned path of correction.  In fact, fairness admits to the ‘right’ to make law as necessary to further the purpose of whatever it is believed should be as opposed to what is.

EXAMPLE: justice upholds Natural Law whereas fairness most often undermines it.  The battle between a free market and Marxism is the perfect example.  The free market (not Capitalism) is the Natural Order of economic exchange among free men.  Marxism is the subversion of this Natural Order in order to establish the Marxist ideal of how men should conduct their business.  The free market is based on the objective principle of merit in which justice seeks to insure a level playing field where every individual can compete without having their Natural Rights encroached upon by others.  Marxism is based on the subjective notion that fairness requires all people to be equal in material terms, in which case, justice is perverted to the enforcement of whatever is thought necessary to enforce material equality. The proof that the free market is the Natural Order came during the Communist Revolution in Russia, where the Communists were forced to return to free market principles to keep the nation from starving.  Justice seeks to protect the individual; fairness seeks to enforce an idea.  As such, they are not equal, they are opposites.

“A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either.”

 –Thomas Paine

In other words, the government can never be above the law.  When government that operates within its delegated authority (i.e. the law), it is legitimate and enjoys the trust and support of the people.  However, when government assumes authority it does not have by setting itself above the law, then it loses the trust of the people and ceases to be legitimate.  It is at this point that tyranny begins. Furthermore, this principle is eternal: it does not change with time, place or ‘technology.’

So long as it conforms to the principles of the Natural Right to Contract, a ‘constitution’ is the written form of the Social Contract.  As such, it defines the authority that a particular society will grant to its government.  This is called delegated authority.  Inherent in the word delegated is the notion that a person is appointed or elected to act on behalf of others.  In this sense, government is nothing more than the people delegated to exercise and enforce the terms of the Social Contract by exercising the collective authority of every individual they are representing.  So long as the people who are representing us act within the confines of Natural Law, then their actions – and by extension, the government – are considered legitimate.  However, should the representatives of the people step outside of the terms of the Social Contract, they do not change those terms or create a new government; they break the law and destroy the constitution.  If the Peoples’ representatives assume powers that were not delegated to them, or which are in violation of Natural Law, then those representatives have broken the law.  If this state is not corrected by other representatives acting within their properly delegated authority, then the government ceases to exist and the people who have seized the just authority of the State enter into a state of war with the people they were supposed to be representing.  At this point, a state of tyranny exists and the People are justified in claiming their Natural Right of self-defense to alter or abolish the old Social Contract and write a new one.

It has become something of an accepted maxim that income inequality is an evil or injustice.   What’s more, it is equally accepted that those on the low end of the income inequality re somehow victims who bear no responsibility in their economic situation.  Now, set aside the fact that these notions are decidedly Marxist in their perspective and, as such, suffers from all the internal fallacies as Marxism.  Just, for the sake of argument, let’s accept the assertion that income inequality is an evil totally outside the control of those whom it affects.  Let’s look at what this means in terms of the Marxist solution of wealth redistribution.  But first, let’s accept a simple assumption: that whoever feeds you is the person who controls you.  This is simple human nature, for, without food, you cannot sustain your life.  So, if you rely on someone other than yourself to sustain your life, that person effectively rules over and owns your life.  Now, let’s look at how redistribution of wealth is connected to this assumption.

This is actually an easier point to make than many try to make it seem.  We need look at little more than the information presented in this story:

60 Percent of Households Now Receive More in Transfer Income Than they Pay in Taxes

Read the details in this story.  It accounts for the usual objection, “Well, those figures don’t account for all the taxes people pay if they work, or when they buy stuff.”  The simple truth is that the majority of Americans now receive more money from the government than they pay into it.  So where does the government get that money?  Well, they print a lot of it, and that is direct theft from everyone who uses the dollar.  But the majority comes from those who actually pay taxes.  This is a fact.  It doesn’t matter how they acquired their money, or whether or not they got it ‘fairly.’  All that matters is that the government is taking from 20% of the nation to feed the other 80%.

Now, if the government is taking the money it needs to feed 80% of the people from 20% of the people, do you really think that 20% has no control over the government?  The government is not stupid; it knows that, if that 20% stops working, the government will collapse under the civil unrest that will follow when there is no more money to feed the people.  So this gives power over the government to those 20% who are paying the bills.  This is the source of the Leftist argument that big business and the rich rule society.  The truth is, they do, because the same money the government takes to pay off the people and keep certain Parties in control of the government also controls that Party – to an extent.  It is nothing more than ‘the rich’ feeding both the masses and the government.  And if the rich ‘feeds’ the government, it controls the government.  But if the government is feeding the masses, then the government controls the masses.

What happens next is the government tries to wrest some control from its masters by playing the force of the masses against those masters.  The government controls most the social institutions which are used to shape and direct public opinion, so it can focus the anger of the people on ‘the rich,’ thus creating the perception that the government is ‘protecting’ the people who feed it.  But if the government pushes too hard, ‘the rich’ can still bring it in check by threatening to starve it.  And this is the point: in the end, whoever feeds you controls you – period.  And look at the real losers in this struggle: the people claiming to be the ‘oppressed’ masses.  No matter which way this struggle turns, 80% of the people have made themselves dependent upon someone other than themselves to feed themselves.  So that 80% has accepted slavery – period.  It’s just human nature, and the government and ‘the rich’ know it.  They are exploiting it to maintain their power and prestige.  This is why Frederis Bastiat said:

“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Bastiat was correct, but the answer to this vicious cycle is contained in his words.  What do you need to do to be free?  You need to make sure you are the source of your own food.  It is that simple.  And the only way you can do that is to be responsible for yourself, to be self-sufficient.  And the government and ‘the rich’ know it.  This is why they both work so hard to convince you that you can’t do things for yourself:

These slave masters want to keep you on their plantation, but they know that – at least in our society – they can’t do so through brute force (yet).  So they have to convince you to become their slave of your own free will.  They need you to make yourself dependent on them for your food.  They need you to accept their lies.  And that is because they know that, if you reject them and start doing for yourself, they no longer have any control over you accept brute force – and they have not yet been able to confiscate your weapons, so they know that might not work.  This also applies to ‘the rich.’  If we stop working for their big corporations and we start our own small businesses and do our business with those local shops – even if it cost a little more – then the major corporations will starve.  And if their slaves in the government have already lost their control over you, then ‘the rich’ will have no way to control you, either.  And that is where Natural Law shines through.

Natural Law is designed so that we are all responsible for ourselves.  Yes, we have duties to others, especially families, but we do not have a Natural Right to demand anyone else do anything for us – including feeding us.  That is the work of charity, and charity must be voluntary; it cannot be forced or it ceases to be charity.  So, when Natural Law rules, people take responsibility for themselves.  They feed themselves.  And this provides a natural insulation against tyranny: because you depend on no one other than yourself and God to feed you.  It is this simple.