In Search of Competency

The Bouvier's Law Dictionary of the mid 1800's defines the word license to mean “a right given by some competent authority to do an act, which without such authority would be illegal.” I wonder how Bouvier defined competent.  

Now, everybody knows that I hate being quarrelsome, but it seems that we should give serious thought to seeking out authorities who are at least competent enough to give us fair warning that signing applications for licensure will bind us to the ever changing corporate ordinances of the corporate state. This is a truth in advertising issue, and one supposes that had people been warned by truly competent authorities back when the first sales pitch for licensing was touted, they might have found other interesting uses for those applications before the whole thing caught on.  

It’s safe to assume that the news was as controlled in the 1800’s as it is today and that the bulk of the American people didn’t have the slightest inkling that the Forty-First Congress of the United States, Session III, Chapter 61 and 62, Section 34 enacted on February 21, 1871, stated that the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is a corporation that has jurisdiction only in the ten mile square parcel of land known as the District of Columbia and to whatever properties are legally titled to the UNITED STATES. Amazingly, that news has been, to a large degree, stifled to this very day.  

Originally, corporations were those businesses carrying on substantial trade between countries and with other governmental entities for profit.  However, after 1871, that substantial trade also included the newly incorporated US government. So, what kind of trade, I ask, could be more substantial and profitable than trading bullets and bombs with other business partners?  

Wars tend to frighten people. After all, the enemy wants to kill us all, right? Or at least so they tell us. Germany was the enemy in 1917, and it seems that eventually, even German Americans bought into the idea that their former countrymen wanted to murder them in their beds. So in 1917 it was decided that anyone who came to America from a country designated an enemy of America must be licensed. They were dangerous, you see, and whatever these interlopers did in their personal and business lives might hurt real Americans, so licenses were forced upon them to prevent such potential threats. The government had to keep track of the bad guys and make the Homeland safe from the evil terrorists of the Fatherland.  

In March of 1933, the wording was changed to include the rest of the American hooliganry on the list of potential terrorists with the stroke of a pen. Model citizens suddenly became enemies of the corporate state through the simple deletion of the phrase that had formerly excluded them. They didn’t even know they had become dangerous suspects, but over time, successive generations of Americans blandly accepted that designation through increased licensing, fees and permits covering nearly every facet of their lives in the name of safety and security, from themselves. We’re all Germans now. Al Qaeda. Terrorists.  

The list of enemies and terrorists has grown now to include the entire world; and it appears that the only exclusions on their current list, besides themselves, may be names of international corporations, foundations and NGOs that were cleverly redefined as persons by the empirical corporate state. And speaking of taking license, individuals are now defined as corporations by that same entity. Who exactly are the wordsmiths that dream up such creative and deceptive uses of the English language?  

With our unflagging support every slouching step of the way, every resident of America can now be tracked at any given time to within a mile or two of their current location using nothing but the artificial commercial identities that we apply for and flash so willingly at anyone who wants to see them. The only exceptions to that rule would be the millions of illegal aliens, who are now scheduled to receive their own personal tracking devices called driver’s licenses. Additionally, the Homeland’s competent (there’s that word again) protectors can use this multitude of identifying licenses to levy unspecified charges against any one of us, their enemies, for imagined and unsubstantiated endangerment to the mother corporation simply for our stated opinions, yet they couldn’t track down the alleged and still unidentified terrorists of 9/11 or the Wall Street short sellers who profited so handsomely from those 3,000 deaths.  

So, you think you should have a chip implanted in your neck like Bowser’s so you won’t get lost or hurt? You think they invented those color codes to protect you from harm? And you think billions of licenses for everything under the sun can make you safe from fraud and corruption?  

Think again. Does your driver’s license prevent you from driving like a maniac, or is it rather the sense of impending doom that terrifies you into slowing down if you get a little crazed behind the wheel? More importantly, does having a license to drive prevent the guy in the car next to you, drunk or otherwise, from driving like a maniac? Maybe he just doesn’t share your sense of impending doom. We certainly know there are plenty of licensed maniacs on the highways at any given moment in time, and if they’re ever ticketed at all, it’s only by sheer happenstance since there’s never a cop around when one is needed anyway.  

Does a license to practice medicine prevent inappropriate and potentially deadly drugs from being prescribed by doctors? Does completing requisite training and paying annual licensure fees guarantee that the nurse who’s counting out your pills and drawing the doctor’s orders into the syringe is a competent (there’s that word again) individual?  

Does a license to do business prevent illegal and immoral business practices from defrauding consumers?  Does passing a bar exam and hanging a framed license on a wall to practice law guarantee any justice?  The only thing you can be certain of is that the beautiful handwritten calligraphy on that license won’t be entered as evidence on your behalf, and it won’t win your case regardless of how just it may be. You can take that to the bank, Esquire.  

Does having a marriage license guarantee that the relationship will survive past the honeymoon?  

Now, if you could have answered any of these questions in the affirmative, licensing might make some kind of sense, and this commentary would not have been written. As it turns out, however, you couldn’t; and it becomes glaringly obvious that the corporate nexus of federal, state and local governments is the single beneficiary of licensing. It exists for the sole purpose of tracking and controlling its subsidiaries, potential competitors and enemies, and that, of course, would be us.   

So many lone voices of past generations have cried into the wind to expose this evil love triangle. Fortunately the voices are less alone today and increasingly, with little regard for personal safety, hundreds have taken up the defiant chorus and thousands more are quietly, but with grim determination, working to reassert their own independence, taking bold and unprecedented steps to un-incorporate from the nexus by every means available to them.  

Disentangling from the morass that is the corporate government is a resolution not to be made flippantly, but for those who hold liberty dearer than any illusory and fleeting sense of safety or security, that choice was made for them a century or more prior to their own births by the sins of the fathers. Who knows the story of each one? Who knows what limits were breached before the need to strike a blow for liberty drove them forward to rectify the sins of the past and the present, come what may.  

These, then, are the genuine liberators who deserve rose petals strewn in their pathways. But rather than receiving the gratitude and respect due to them, these champions of liberty are all too often greeted with haughty and vulgar accusations and threats originating from the allegedly competent authorities of the corporate state. That should be expected, however it is beyond baffling that their accusations and threats are then echoed and embellished upon by the very imprudent vassals they seek to free. There is no longer any doubt, they are their own worst enemies.