Mao ZeDong is famous for the following insight: "All political power grows from the barrel of a gun." Law is fiction. Bullets are the reality. Law is simply a way of telling people what they must do (or refrain from doing) so that the government's men won't kill them with bullets.

When governments get out of control, as they have a conspicuous habit of doing, they begin to cheat on their own laws. Their agents start breaking laws, using flimsy excuses to justify themselves, and getting their excuses confirmed and upheld by the government's courts, which became corrupt at about the same time. At some point, it becomes clear that the law only applies to "the little people."

Lon Horiuchi, an FBI sniper, murdered a woman named Vicki Weaver. He shot her through the open front doorway of her home as she was holding her baby. The father caught the baby as its mother fell down and died. Lon Horiuchi has never been brought to trial for murder, and, in fact, a federal judge ruled that Idaho may not try federal agents for the murder of their fellow citizens. (Idaho had sought only to try Horiuchi for involuntary manslaughter, even though murder is obviously the crime he committed.)

Now, to the point. What I know about US federal laws gives me the impression that the USC (subsequent to the Constitution) has the general character of concealed pits, baited traps, and poisoned meat - obscured in a jungle of very technical legal language. Your federal laws are meant to be hard to understand and easy to break unintentionally. And that implies that your government wants at all times to have some excuse to arrest anyone... anyone at all.

There's a federal law, 26 U.S.C. 6011, which requires US citizens to file income tax returns. But there's a problem with it: it violates the separation of powers principle in the US Constitution by giving legislative powers to an official in the Executive Branch of government. It is one thing for a Treasury Secretary to make regulations governing the conduct of Treasury Department employees. It is something else, namely legislation, when his "regulations" affect the whole of American society.

An employer's operational policies aren't laws because they apply only to his employees and because an employee who does not like them can escape their effect by quitting his job. However, 26 USC 6011 says that the policies created by the Secretary of the Treasury apply to all US citizens, most of whom do NOT work for the US Treasury Department. In other words, the Secretary's regulations ARE laws because they have the scope and the compulsory character of laws.

The Executive Branch of the US Government is not supposed to legislate. The only exception is an emergency mechanism known as the Executive Order, which was intended to give US Presidents the power to lead troops in war, but which US Presidents have been abusing politically since the Administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Other than that, only Congress may legislate. That's what the first paragraph of Article 1 means: "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives." 26 USC 6011 is in conflict with that paragraph, and the matter becomes a question of which has the higher priority in US law.

But remember what Mao ZeDong said. The problem for Americans is that none of them dares to act alone. The US government punishes those who attempt to make citizens aware that some of the government's behavior with respect to taxation is illegal. When a North Dakota farmer, Gordon Kahl, did that, the IRS sent a team of US marshals to assassinate him, but they shot his son instead. Whereupon Gordon Kahl, all by himself, defeated the Marshals with his hunting rifle, killing two and driving the others away. Gordon took his son to a doctor, took his wife home, and disappeared.

Gordon Kahl had done the only thing he could possibly do in that situation. If the US Marshals had won the gunfight, not only would Gordon have been dead, it's likely that his wife and son would have been eliminated, too, as witnesses. Whatever he did, Gordon Kahl's doom was sealed when that IRS bureaucrat decided he was making too much trouble for the tax collectors and should therefore die.

After that first failed ambush, Gordon left North Dakota and took refuge in the home of an Arkansas family. Try as it might, the US government just could not find him... until the daughter of the man who had offered sanctuary went to the FBI and gave information in exchange for a cash reward. Did she do it for the money? Did she do it because she "felt" it was right? Did she do it because she was afraid of being punished if she did not do it? Nobody except that young traitoress really knows. But as the result of her choice, her father was imprisoned, her home was destroyed, and Gordon Kahl - really, an innocent man - was tortured to death by armed thugs who broke his bones with their rifle stocks, chopped away his hands and feet with an axe, and then killed him with a shot to the head.

So that's one way the US government keeps its "right" to violate the constitutional form of government. Terror. Though it rails night and day against Islamic terrorists, the US government is a worse terrorist than they are. It tortures men to death for trying to organize a tax rebellion, even though the tax-rebels are as much in the right today as they were in 1770. But it's called "terrorism" only when YOU attack THEM. The laws against terrorism, as against murder, only apply to "the little people." When the government doesn't hunt its victim down to give him the Gordon Kahl Treatment, they arrest him and put him in a prison cell with a group of men who have been unofficially employed by the government to torture him by homosexual rape. Federal agents occasionally threaten people with prison gang-rape (often referring to it as if it were some sort of joke) as a means of intimidating them into compliance.

US domestic policy is largely a matter of inflicting Stockholm syndrome on the American people. The success of that policy can be seen in the numbers of Americans who, knowing the corruption of their federal government and the evil and illegality of some of its practices, nevertheless declare their allegiance to it. The simple fact is that no American dares to act alone, and Americans have no organization whereby they may all act together to defy their government's illegal conduct en masse. Preventing such an organization from coalescing from Americans' inborn desire for freedom is one of the biggest jobs of the United States federal police agencies and their supporting propaganda arms.

Gordon Kahl and Mao ZeDong were both right. And so was Jesus, when he said that the love of money was the root of all evil. It is at least the root of much evil. The despicable actions of the US government's officers, agents, and stooges is mostly motivated by their love of the money paid them. They don't question the morals of their employer because it would jeopardize their income. Yet many of them, if they lost their federal jobs, would begin doing so before a season could change.

* Not be indicted for a crime that could potentially get you a sentence of a year or more, if you are convicted.
* Never have been convicted for a crime that could have gotten you a sentence of a year or more, even if the judge gave you a lesser sentence.
* Not be a fugitive from justice.
* Not be an illegal drug user.
* Not have been legally determined by a court to be mentally defective.
* Not have been dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Armed Forces.
* Not be an illegal alien.
* Never have renounced your U.S. citizenship.
* Not be under a restraining order for domestic violence, stalking, or making threats.
* Never have been convicted for a crime of domestic violence.