A couple of nights ago we were going through our set of Fantasy Island DVDs when I saw a scene that quite adequately describes the American people and their relationship to their government.

In the scene, a new Marshall had come to town and witnessed a robbery in a general store. The following dialogue is what ensued after the criminal exited the building:

Marshall: What's going on here? Why didn't you stop him?

Shopkeeper: Like Jake Armstrong over at the Hardware? He tried to stop one of them last week; left a widow and three kids.

Marshall: But you people outnumbered him four to one and you let him steal you blind.

Customer 1: Like I told you, none of us ever should have come here. It's a mistake that's turned into a nightmare.

Marshall: Maybe if you had the guts to handle punks like that it wouldn't be a nightmare.

Shopkeeper: He'd have killed us, you saw that.

Marshall: All I saw was a man bluff you into submission. He saw that you were afraid and he took advantage of it.

Customer: We're alive, that's a certainty. Maybe he was bluffing, maybe he wasn't. Right now, I'll take the certainty.

Doesn’t that describe the average American whenever a government bureaucrat comes stomping around their house demanding money? Let me tweak the wording a little bit to see if I can bring it into focus for you all. Let’s set the scene as an I.R.S. agent just gets done stealing somebody’s house and all their money from their bank account (the I.R.S. is an illegal enterprise, not authorized by the Constitution to function within the several States, so the comparison with a criminal is apropos):

Dave: What's going on here? Why didn't you stop him?

Taxpayer: Like Ed and Elaine Brown? They tried to stop one of them in 2007; they’re now rotting in jail for the rest of their lives.

Dave: But the American people outnumber the I.R.S. a thousand to one and you let them steal you blind.

Neighbor: Like I told you, none of us ever should have come here. It's a mistake that's turned into a nightmare.

Dave: Maybe if you had the guts to handle punks like that it wouldn't be a nightmare.

Taxpayer: He'd have killed us, or put us in jail, you saw that.

Dave: All I saw was a man bluff you into submission. He saw that you were afraid and he took advantage of it.

Neighbor: We're alive, that's a certainty. Maybe he was bluffing, maybe he wasn't. Right now, I'll take the certainty.

Fear and intimidation is where the government gets its power. Government produces nothing. It is a consumer, it is a thief. It relies on threat, duress and coercion to scare people into doing business with it. Unlike an automobile service shop, or a grocery store, where people voluntarily choose which one they’ll do business with, government has assumed the role of a thief, a common criminal, that uses guns and a misdirected sense of “authority” to compel people to do business with it. Most people comply because they’ve been taught to “stay in line, follow the rules” all throughout their public school years (schools that are funded by money that government stole to begin with) and that behavior is reinforced by the mainstream “news” media every night on television.

It doesn’t have to be like that. We don’t have to be ruled by criminals. However, until we decide we are going to shed our fear of them and stop allowing them to bully us around, the government will continue to grow, steal, extort, imprison and kill with little fear of repercussions from the people it seeks to dominate, steal from, and ultimately destroy.