What We Own . . .

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It’s interesting that the only things we can say we truly own we have no legal title to.

The clothes I am wearing, for instance. They are fully, meaningfully mine in that I have absolute control over them; the government (i.e., organized other people, who’ve empowered themselves to do violence to whomever the please, “legally”) doesn’t decree the style I am allowed to wear. No “shorts are unsaaaaaaaaaafe, you might scrape a knee.”

Or the size or the price.

There are cheap clothes and expensive clothes and practical clothes and hugely impractical clothes. 

I can wear my clothes as long as I like – no matter what anyone else thinks of them – and even if they have holes in them.

No inspections!

But the really defining thing as regards my ownership of my clothes is that I am not compelled to pay those organized other people – the “government” –  for the conditional privilege of being permitted to continue wearing them.

These organized other people who style themselves “the government” do not yet require me to send them a rental payment each year in order to be allowed to continue wearing the clothes on my back; if they did require such a payment – and had the legal ability to enforce it – then they would be the actual owners of my clothes, irrespective of any piece of paper I might produce – such as a bill of sale/receipt or a title indicating they are allegedly “my” clothes.

If they could require – and enforce – such payment I would merely be someone whom they’ve allowed to wear their clothes … and only for as long as I continue to pay them the required rent.

Interestingly, the law recognizes meaningful title to our clothes without our having actual title to them, or even (necessarily) a bill of sale. It is sufficient that we posses them – absent some claim that we stole them.

It is illegal – a crime –  for the government (those organized other people or just individual people, not organized) to take your clothes or to extort money from you, to restrain them from taking them today… but not necessarily tomorrow.

And if they do take them, at any time, the law considers them thieves – which of course, they are.

We are even free to destroy our clothes, if we wish – without fear of prosecution by the law. Other people – organized or not – may not like this, but there is nothing (legally) they can do to stop us, nor can they punish us for doing so.

Contrast the above – the absolute title in allodium (in actuality, if not literally) we enjoy with regard to our clothes and our other minor possessions – with the functionally meaningless “ownership” we have of things like vehicles, our homes and land, even our own bodies. 

Meaningless – titles of ownership notwithstanding – because we are not permitted to do as we wish with these things, including even our own bodies. Other people – “the government” – lay claim to them to one degree or another and express their claims via laws prescribing and proscribing what we may (and may not) do with these things we supposedly “own.”

These other people control the things which we delude ourselves into believing are our own things, because we have a piece of paper describing us as the owner.

The very same entity (and people) – “the government” – which confects the fiction of our “ownership”-  also confects the fiction of people compelled to deal with it (and them) as its “customers.” 

But owners – if the word has any meaning – control their property. Exclusively.

Just as a customer has an absolute right to say no.

An owner – by definition – doesn’t need to obtain permission from others to use his property in whatever manner he sees fit; if he does need to obtain it, then he is at best a steward of the property in question – an employee (at will) of the true owners, who may chasten, punish and (so to speak) fire him at their whim.

What sort of ownership is it when (speaking of a home or land) the alleged “owner” cannot even put up a fence or add a bathroom without prior permission from other people (i.e., this agglutination which styles itself “government”) and if he does so without their permission, opens himself up to ultimately murderous violence by armed other people, who will literally drag him off “his” property and seize it for themselves if he continues to insist on doing as he likes with it?

What does it mean to say that “slavery is illegal” when it is legal to plunder men, to take by force the product of their labor? To decree what a person may do with (or put into) “his” own body?

The legal prohibition of “slavery” is as meaningless as the legal fiction of  “ownership” of things we have title to but which others control and which those others can compel us to pay them rent for the conditional privilege of temporary possession – that possession contingent upon our continuing to pay for the privilege.

It is actually worse than meaningless – because the fiction of ownership dulls us to the reality of our indenture in perpetuity; to the hard fact that we literally own nothing except for the clothes on our backs and whatever small things we can carry that other people haven’t yet decided they own.

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26 COMMENTS

  1. The UNITED STATES is a Corporation (28 U.S.C. 3002 § 15(a)) There are no Governments, only Corporations. A Corporation is a Legal fiction that exists in you mind only.

    What you think is a state is in reality a corporation, in other
    words, a Person.

    “Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is Person.” 9 F. Supp 272

    There are no states, just corporations. Every body politic on this
    planet is a corporation. A corporation is an artificial entity, a fiction at
    law. They only exist in your mind. They are images in your mind, that speak
    to you. We labor, pledge our property and give our children to a fiction.

    • Interesting. I read the article and it of course references the “high end” Tesla. I had a chuckle when they said not to expect luxurious finishing with the Ora R1. Yeah, don’t expect that with a Tesla either. In fact I’m guessing the thing will be put together better than the p.o.s. Tesla and their piss poor finishing.

      • Hi c_dub,

        Have you seen the interior of the Tesla Model 3? It’s shamefully spartan for a $40,000 car. Most $18,000 cars have much nicer interiors – but of course, you can’t Virtue Signal in them!

        • Hi Eric,

          I’ve not had the pleasure. I’ll do a search. But I have seen videos of Tesla S owners showing the shoddy craftsmanship and panel gaps of their cars. Kia/Hyundai have better quality control.

          • Hi c_dub,

            It’s a sea of bleak plastic with a central and (cheap-looking) iPod-style touchscreen. Similar to a Prius, but the Prius lists for about $15k less to start.

    • Hi Rich,

      Precisely. The object of the exercise is not “electrification.” It is to make driving much more expensive, and technologically perverse, so as to control mobility.

      I have been screaming this into the wind for years…

  2. After “uncle” and his two “nephews” (state and county) shake me down, not much left to get ahead on. And to think there are laws against organized crime. I guess the real bosses in charge do not want the competition.

  3. I’ve been dealing with a few extraordinary expenses lately, but just had to divert funds to pay for vehicle insurance and property (home) tax. Literally extorted funds for which I receive nothing, to the detriment of both necessary repairs and my personal health care.

    Yeah. We live in the land of the free.

    The masses are asses.

    • To expound a bit: I’m semi-retired (somewhat by choice) with very finite resources. I now have to take a couple of jobs in the self-employed sense to pay for the taxes and the insurance. I am forced to labor for at least a few weeks in order to send the fruits of that labor to someone else, or become the focus of violent force that will strip my “possessions” from me and possibly cage me or kill me.

      That seems to me to be the very essence of slavery.

      • Hi Bill,

        Ditto.

        I recently sent (under duress) about $1,100 to the local gang of secret thieves and murderers (per Spooner) who claim I “owe” them the money on account of my owning property (i.e.,my house and land) which they will allow me to use so long as I pay them.

        I could live on that $1,100 for two-three months, easily. Food, power bill, gasoline for the truck – etc. Or I could have set it aside for medical care I may (and probably will, at some point) need. But which I can’t afford to pay for – because the government stole the $1,100… and that’s just for half the year. My county shoves its paws in my pockets twice a year. So it’s $2,200 annually – which would (could) cover my living costs for four-five months or almost half the year.

        If it weren’t for all these extortions and thefts, I would not have to worry about money at all.

        But because of them, I do.

        • eric, it’s interesting in the same way looking for a particular piece of steel in your outdoor rack results in a rattlesnake bit when you reach for something. Suddenly everything else goes on hold

  4. Sorry for my ignorance but doesn’t one technically have a right to say no to the DMV thus making us a customer? That is one can choose not to get a driver’s license from the DMV. The consequence being one doesn’t get to “legally” drive. Because this is what the normies would argue. “You don’t have to do business with the DMV. You can tell them no meaning you have a choice. This makes you a customer.” Or is it the fact they have a monopoly on the roads thus negating any real choice meaning no, we’re not a customer?

    Or do you mean even if one forgoes getting a driver’s license from the DMV that we still have to do “business” with them because they require all of us to have a government-approved cattle tag (ID)? Thanks.

    • Hi c-dub,

      You can elect to not get a driver’s license – but you have little choice about getting a government ID, which is effectively the same thing – unless you want to (and can) live as a Non-Person, without a bank account, the ability cash checks or obtain employment (except off the books).

  5. Aside from the property taxes, in my county I can do anything and build anything on my property without a permit as long as it is otherwise not illegal (like making meth). Oh, there is an inspection for NEW septic and electrical work, but if you do the work yourself, nobody knows.

  6. The real trick is to get the serfs to love their condition. Distract them with social media, popular culture, drugs and they will not revolt.

  7. As much as the sovereign citizen crowd has their panties in bunch over property titles there’s really little more there than a government bureaucratic and sometimes incompetent record keeping exercise about who owns what. The taxation schemes would occur with or without title. Government could simply record what had the taxes paid and what did not. However this is an old fashioned way of forcing the populace to pay the king to live.

    The next phase is to transition from these taxation schemes to one where we don’t own anything at all. Not just a taxation model that masks a degree of serfdom and slavery but one were we truly own nothing much more than what we wear and can carry. This is the service model or what I call the rental economy. Everything is rented as needed. The moment you don’t have money you go without everything.

    The taxation model limits control. People can usually come up with the taxes each year. And if they don’t have the money it could be six months or longer before the next payment is due. Then even longer before government can take the property. This is a very poor form of control. Without that immediate consequence of being shut off entirely it doesn’t have that great of an effect of keeping people in line. To do that things get messy with raids and such. The rental economy achieves this.

    It will be arrived at making ownership burdensome, troublesome, and expensive. Then people will willingly sell their property into stronger hands. They will just rent. But rental payments never end. Also once the rental economy is moving property rights will be reasserted. Now the small time landlord is burdened with all sorts of laws that give renters leverage over him and requirements to take people using section 8. Watch those things slowly go away.

    The idea is to make it so when people get out of line they are simply turned off. Homeless and with nothing by the end of the month.

    • I saw this quite a while back and thought that people might understand and resist this. Nope. The normal folks I have shown this to (there is a video, of a statuesque woman pol pitching this) have not balked in the slightest. They think it is a great idea. Then again, they have houses they will likely never pay off, lease their cars and max the credit cards for unneeded trivial ‘wants’. I don’t even bother trying to explain what this entails for what is left of their freedom. They wouldn’t care.

      https://futurism.com/welcome-2030-nothing-privacy-life-better/

      We can’t win. The unthinking gimme dats outnumber us and would lynch us for a new iPhone if their betters offer the deal.

      • It has only been in the last few years that I finally figured out why old systems were accepted by the masses and were stable for so long. People don’t want to be free. They want to be taken care of.

        • The world is a scary place. Always has been. There’s comfort in childhood, knowing that your parents are in the other room protecting you. Some never outgrow that need. Hell, everyone wants to be an eternal child, without worry. That’s what keeps a lot of religions in business, the promise of an enteral childhood with God in heaven. And it is advantageous for us to have a social safety net of some sort, because going it alone when you are weak is a tough slog. We should be free to choose our own safety net.

  8. As I said in another thread, ask anyone who thinks they live in a ‘free’ country, “exactly what are you free to do without interference or regulation by others”.

    Same premise.

    The rationalizations, non sequiturs, misrepresentations and demonstrated ignorance of principle are epic. Their arguments are never to convince you, merely to maintain their comfortable self deception.

    Slaves don’t want to be told they are slaves and will exert considerable effort to convince you, and more importantly themselves, that their chains are actually jewelry.

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