Submitted by Lindsay Perigo on Sat, 2016-07-02 07:33

I wrote this, and published it here, in 2009. The case for it is even stronger in 2016.

A Second Declaration of Independence

When in the course of human affairs it becomes necessary for citizens to break the political chains that hitherto have bound them, and to reclaim the individual sovereignty which is their birthright, it is opportune and appropriate for them to declare the causes which have impelled them to self-liberation. We, the freedom-loving citizens of the United States of America, choose to do so at this historic moment.

We hold these truths to be demonstrable: that all human beings are endowed by their nature with certain inalienable rights, which are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and private property; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers—and only such powers—from the consent of the governed; that all laws legislated by governments must be for the purpose of securing these rights; that no laws enacted by government may violate these rights; that all citizens are equal before such laws; and that whenever any government becomes destructive of these rights, it is in rebellion against its citizens, who may then remove it and institute new government.

Now is such a time.

The history of government in the United States is that of a long chain of abuses and usurpations of the individual rights of the citizenry, culminating in an unprecedented level of such abuses by present government, federal and state, which have reduced the status of our people to one of servitude. Ownership of each citizen's life has been wrested from the citizen where it belongs and vested in government where it does not.

Government has made of itself a blood-sucking Leviathan, a drooling, hydra-headed monster of regulation and prohibition, of force and terror. It has drained the life out of commerce and trade. It has practised confiscation of the rightful earnings of our citizens on a scale hitherto unrivalled, and with the proceeds of that confiscation erected a multitude of new bureaucracies and sent hither swarms of officers to harass the people and eat out their substance. It has bestowed upon its revenue-gatherers tyrannical powers of search and seizure, of confiscation of private savings and possessions, of coercive extraction of information; in the exercise of these powers, its gatherers have ruined livelihoods and destroyed lives. It has grown bloated from the use of confiscated moneys, devising ever-more-unconscionable forms of the squandering thereof. It has secured its power to plunder and terrorise by bribing the parasitic with the earnings of the productive. It has cultivated inequality before the law on the basis of race, class and gender. It has forbidden the citizens to exercise the prerogatives of ownership over their lawfully-acquired lands and enterprises, and punished them for the productive use thereof; it has vested actual control of such lands and enterprises in itself and its agents. It has claimed ownership of the minds of the citizens, seeking to proscribe the expression of thoughts of which it does not approve; it has claimed ownership of the bodies of the citizens, proscribing the ingestion of substances of which it does not approve; it has deprived citizens of their liberty and their property for the ingestion of such substances. It has made consensual, victimless activities criminal; it has made coercive activities legally permissible and been the chief practitioner thereof. It has seized children from their parents and forced the citizens to sponsor the dulling of young minds in its classrooms; it seeks to forbid parents to educate their children other than by its own warped, politicised dicta. It seeks forcibly to monopolize the medicines of the citizens and persecute the providers of alternatives; it seeks to criminalize the non-purchase of a medical product. It has dishonoured its contracts and required citizens to identify themselves on demand, assuming unto itself powers of arbitrary detention and arrest. It seeks to disarm the citizens so as to protect itself from rightful rebellion, and forbid them to defend their own lives and properties, while most egregiously failing to do so itself. In its attempt to finance its unconstitutional activities and scope, it has placed its citizens in involuntary servitude to it and foreign tyrants.

Government, in short, has committed itself and its agencies not to upholding the rights of the citizens who maintain it, but to trampling most brutally and routinely upon them. Government is thereby in rebellion against the Constitution it is sworn to uphold and against its citizens. It has thus rendered itself unconstitutional and illegitimate.

We, therefore, the liberty-loving citizens of the United States, in the name of that which is the glory of man—his sovereign, reasoning mind—do solemnly reclaim the freedom that is our birthright. We declare that our country is henceforth free again; that we are absolved from all further allegiance to the present government of the United States, which is hereby dissolved; that the laws of this country shall henceforth be based on a single moral premise, which is the expression of the afore-mentioned rights, namely: no person or group of persons may initiate the use of physical force or fraud against any other person or group of persons, and the only justification for the use of force is self-defence against those who initiate it; that the government of this country shall have no other function than to formulate, enact and uphold such laws; and further, that so to secure and glorify the supreme values of reason and freedom in human affairs, we pledge our most diligent, reverent commitment, our lives and fortunes and our sacred honour.