If as the cartoon says, a real person is not responsible for their strawman’s debts, how can they access their strawman’s credits, i.e. a paycheck made out to strawman “John Smith”. By what natural right can the “real” person claim it?
[QUOTE=dropzone]
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
As a lawyer, I can tell you that’s bullshit.
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[QUOTE=Spoons]
I’m also a lawyer, and I call bullshit on that video too.
[/QUOTE]
marcmcroy, look what you have done: Two lawyers are in complete agreement. No equivocating. No weasel words. No drawn out “Welllll,” followed by some legal gibberish. Just flat out “That’s bullshit,” and “Yup. Sure is.”
I hope you are proud of yourself.
[/QUOTE]
How do I report this to a moderator? I mean, if one more lawyer agrees… I mean, shit, it’s like deliberately dividing by zero and destroying existence as we know it. :eek:
We could have an awfully long discussion about this sort of phenomenon and why some people are so curiously fooled by it.
It’s not just the OPCA thing. I’d classify things like pyramid schemes, medicinal woo, Nigerian 419 scams and even conspiracy theories and the like in the same category of… I can’t think of a better term, really, than “Life Simplification Scams.” Scams that promise someone a way to make their life easier through a simplistic, kind of alternative-view-of-reality explanation of how the world works.
Making money and building retirement savings is hard. Here’s a pyramid scam that will make it easy!
Staying healthy, and even dealing with health care providers, is hard. Here’s a diet supplement that makes it easy! Shit, don’t even need vaccines anymore!
Understanding how the world works is hard. Here’s a conspiracy theory that makes it easy!
The OPCA stuff promises to make a person’s life easier. If you look at Mr. Meads, or a lot of people who get taken in by it, they’re people who have some sort of personal problems with the legal system or government. The judge in the Meads case notes that all types of people are taken in by it and seems almost mystified by the lack of common background; what he misses, because he is a judge and so he is blind to it, is that the commonality is that they all have legal trouble. Most people never, or almost never, interact with the judicial system; I’ve never been in a courtroom as a central participant in my life, and that’s not an unusual thing to say. Mr. Meads in particular had HUGE, complex legal problems. Look at what he himself said; “Just give me a divorce.” He was overwhelmed. He couldn’t take it anymore. OPCA gave him a quick fix; say the magic words and all your legal problems are over!
I do not know why some people get taken in by Life Simplification Scams and some do not; there seems to be a credulity gene, or something, that some people don’t have.
I think there’s a lot of truth to that, and yet it seems a significant number of these OPCA-types don’t have any legal trouble until they don’t register their car and then start in with the OPCA bullshit when they get pulled over for speeding and asked for their license and registration.
I’m not saying they all do - some people are just impressionable - but from reading the stories, I’d say a relatively high proportion of them have some sort of pre-existing beef with the tax man, the courts, a regulatory agency, or what have you.
As funny and irritating as thing sort of thing is, it’s also kind of sad. A person pointing to definitions they don’t really understand in Black’s Law Dictionary and claiming s/he has some sort of imaginary power over the legal system strikes me as being much the same as a person pointing to a Mercola snake oil article and claiming they know more about medicine than their own doctor. It could be that the person is a jerk, but quite often it’s that the person is confused, feels powerless, and is desperate for an answer or a solution to problems they cannot comprehend, either specifically or in a general, existential sort of way.
I’ve mentioned my Uncle John before in this sort of context. He’s like this; medicinal woo is his current thing, but he’s been into all the pyramid schemes too, and he’s interested in feckonomic theory like the gold standard and blather like that. He’s not a BAD man at all, though. He’s just dull and naive, and he had a pretty bad medical scare a while back where the emergency room didn’t do as good a job as they could have. He’s a perfect target for scamsters, because it’s so much easier to watch a 9-minute Youtube video on why the gold standard would save us all than it is to spend four years studying economics and taking exams and stuff - or for that matter to even read one single book (which I have encouraged him to do and he refuses.)
Life Simplification scams is a pretty good description of these things. I suspect that some people are just at a point in their lives where they are, for want of a better word, ripe for grand, overarching Theories of Eveything. Happens to teenagers first exposed to Rand, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, to Marx. To these people, however, the Grand Theory is not experienced as an unrealistic simplification; it is (by the light of their previous knowledge) a world-expanding experience. It is akin to the shock of 17th century readers of Newton discovering that the fall of an apple and the orbit of the moon are caused by the same thing.
But these eureka moments can be as profoundly misleading as they are profoundly striking. Those who have been to the intellectual rodeo more than once know to be hesitant before giving their hearts to them. To the experienced, the fact that a system explains too much is frequently a weakness; to the naive, that is its great appeal.
People who have given little thought to the nature of law beyond the simplifications and heroic myths they learned in primary school can, rendered ripe by some adverse legal experience, be intellectually bewitched by a series of thoughts that promises to provide an overarching context to what they thought they knew.
As to Sovereign citizen ratbaggery, the common law is nothing like they think it is. It is not “thousands of years old” as the OP thinks. There has always been some system of law, to be sure, but the common law, recognisable as such, is hundreds of years old. It is a hodgepodge of individual decisions on the arcana of contract law, property, damages and all the tiny details that necessarily emerge from centuries of bickering by lawyers. It is not the fount of all wisdom- it happily contemplated slavery, and was atrocious to women. Its failures became so apparent that courts of equity arose to ameliorate obvious injustice that emerged from its rule-bound, process obsessed flaws.
And one of the common law’s primary rules, in existence for as long as the common law has been recognisably in existence, is that it is subservient to statute. Let me repeat that for the benefit of the OP - one of the fundamental internal rules of the much vaunted common law is that it falls if statutes override it. This must obviously be so, or else how could democratically elected legislatures pass laws at all? Courts would simply shrug, ignore the statutes, and go on making decisions in accordance with the common law as before.
A further rule of the common law is that if people disagree over the content of the law, the court decides who is right. It is for at least this reason that courts have coercive powers at all. To give a common law example, A sends a letter to B offering to sell 100 widgets. B accepts, and writes a letter to A accepting the offer. A says the letter of acceptance never arrived. B sues. A says the law of contract requires a communication of the acceptance, otherwise how can I know what my contractual obligations are? B says I did all I could, and committed resources on the basis that I would receive 100 widgets. How could I know the post would fail? The court then explains the content of the law (the postal rule - Google it) and says B wins. It doesn’t help A to whine “But that’s not fair!”. Someone had to win. At some point there was not a rule to cover that situation. Then, in 1810, there was. A had to suck it up. His subjective belief in what the law was, or even ought to be, doesn’t matter because the rule is the court decides.
Same with SovCit arguments. You put up your arguments, but if the court is against you, you are wrong. Doesn’t matter how sincere your belief or how strong you thought your arguments. Legal reasoning does not involve the same intellectual tools as reasoning by scientists or mathematicians or engineers. To a mathematician, if a judge ruled that pi=3, he could appeal to mathematical reasoning that demonstrated that pi=/=3; moreover, the world would continue to stubbornly refuse to behave as though pi=3.
But with law, there is no equivalent of a mathematical ideal to appeal to. As was said in a post above, there is no platonic ideal of law out there in the ether somewhere that has to be uncovered in the way physicists turn up physical laws of nature. The law is exactly and precisely what courts and legislatures say it is, and that’s an end of it. Of course it is entirely possible to argue what the law should be, and there are processes for changing it. And sometimes the law is unclear, so people chance their hand in litigating different views. The courts then make a decision, and that determines the point. The courts have determined the point for all SovCit arguments. They are wrong.
Sometimes I feel like screaming at people like the OP that repeatedly post nonsense…but then I realize that without threads like this I wouldn’t learn from posters like Noel Prosequi.
I feel the same way. Excellent post, Noel, and thanks!
Does this mean I can stop hearing Joni Mitchell singing “I was a free man on the land / I felt better than alive …” ?
No?
Here’s what I don’t get about the whole OPCA. My personal opinion is that the government (especially the Feds) intrude where they have no Constitutional right to be and that SCOTUS (Raich and DOMA decisions not withstanding) has made it so the Feds have absolute power. If I wanted to go with the whole FotL and SC I would simply use the 10th Amendment, the tax code and the documentation of court procedures (what is that called?) Now understand that I don’t necessarily agree with everything I will say am I’m pretty sure it won’t stand up in Court but to make a point.
The first thing is
The powers to the United States are explicitly laid out and if it is something like the 55mph speed limit or drinking age, Congress has no right to get involved and SD v Dole and the ACA case was decided incorrectly in that the tax and spend clause does not allow Congress to legislate anything via pursetrings but only to carry out those things explicitly in Article I Section 8.
The tax code is so convoluted that even tax agents can’t calculate the correct tax on a moderately complicated case and thus there is no way anyone can find out correct taxes and so the fact is that merely filling out tax forms to the best of your ability is an illegal act. Let’s add the fact that “income” is whatever the IRS says it is i.e. everything including stuff that is not income (like losing a house to foreclosure).
But as complicated as taxes are, the court system is worse. It is at the point where no one can utilize the court system themselves without an (unaffordable) attorney. I know for a fact that there are school districts and corporation that encourage common people to sue them as they know that right or wrong, the person will bankrupt themselves and never see a dime in damages while the people with money simply write the expense off on an accounting line. The criminal legal system is getting more like Kafka’s “The Trial” every day.
There are certainly elements of truth to what I just posted and you will all agree or disagree to what level, but that’s not the point. The point is with just those three elements, I can form a coherent, intelligible (and almost intelligent) argument that justifies everything the OPCA crowd believes without resorting to natural/God-given/inalienable rights to do whatever I want or that SAINT CAD, legal entity is different than Saint Cad, human or that my birth certificate is a legal contract between me and the state that I did not consent to or the logical fallacy that since Admiralty Court flags have to have gold fringe then every court with a gold fringed flag is an Admiralty Court.
So why do most FotL or SC or whatevers find themselves incapable of making an argument that makes sense, is self-consistant and at least sound like plausable legality?
Look, the cartoon was an exact demonstration of why the FOTL theories are just wrong.
So, the government tricks you into consenting to their jurisdiction, then they can do whatever they like with you–enslave you, take your property, perform medical experiments, whatever. And we miserable sheep go along with it, because we don’t know that all we have to do is not consent, and the government is powerless! And the government doesn’t want us to know this, otherwise we’d all be free instead of slaves.
Except the government thugs don’t have to trick you. All they have to do is use force. Like, if you don’t pay your taxes, they’ll try to trick you into consenting to pay the taxes. But what happens when you cleverly refuse to consent, and you dodge all their tricks and traps? You don’t have to pay taxes, right? Wrong, because if you don’t pay your taxes they’ll send you to jail anyway. That’s because they can do whatever they like, they’re the ones with guns.
Or take the example of the fishing incident. Marc argues that the fish belong to God, and God gave him the right to use the fish. And the game warden who came along and hassled him didn’t have any right to do so. All he had to do was not consent, not be tricked into granting the game warden jurisdiction, and the game warden would be helplessly reduced to threats and bluffs, but powerless in the face of a free man.
Except that’s not true. The game warden treated Marc just like everyone else he finds poaching fish. Marc’s careful refusal to enter into a contract with the game warden had absolutely no effect.
Likewise the whole theory of the legal strawman, which is the way the government controls you. They DON’T NEED TO DO THAT. All they have to do is pass laws that the courts and cops and prison guards will enforce. They don’t have to pass a law that says your legal strawman is obligated to pay taxes, and then trick you into believing that means you have to pay taxes. They just have to pass a law that says flesh and blood humans, created by God in the image of God, have to pay taxes. And then you, the human being, have to either pay taxes or face the consequences of not paying taxes. That means you’re either going to jail, or you’ll have to carefully conceal your actions so that the cops and courts and government accountants don’t find out. There’s no opting out, because the cops and courts won’t agree to let you opt out just because you avoided entering a contract with them.
Well, that’s just it. Throughout the history of the common law there has been an unstated – sometimes stated – assumption that the law is what it is and always has been, and judges do not make it but “discover” it; leaving it usually unexamined as to whether the law’s ultimate roots are in immemorial custom or natural law, assuming there’s a difference. Other theories of jurisprudence really did not emerge until the 19th Century.
I think perhaps the SC/FOTL have absorbed just that aspect of the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence, and have run with it to the point where they have entirely conflated common law with natural law. And natural law cannot be altered or amended by any court’s decision or legislature’s act, no more than can the laws of mathematics.
Hmm… that makes me wonder as an aside if there is any similar phenomenon to the SC/FOTL in any Code Law country, or if it would just be meaningless to even bring up in that case.
Of course, it is theoretically possible that SC/FOTLs will understand and accept that all of that will happen, and yet persist in doing what they do anyway, in a sort of Cloward-Piven strategy to bring down the state legal/judicial system by clogging and jamming it.
In fact, I think I’ve read that some have recently adopted that as a stated strategy, but I can’t find the cite.
(In Cloward and Piven’s scenario, back in the 1960s, registering for welfare everyone legally eligible for it would clog the system and precipitate a political crisis leading to the more sensible or at least lefty solution of a guaranteed national minimum income for all. In the SC/FOTL scenario, paralyzing the judicial system is supposed to . . . actually, I’m not sure what comes next.)
I am glad my post was well received, and thank you to those who found it useful.
I am emboldened to make another point, which is what is it with SovCits and their obsession with Black’s dictionary? Law dictionaries do not serve the function SovCits seem to think they do. In school debates, students are encouraged to use the tactic of starting with a dictionary definition of key terms in the topic and developing an argument from there. That’s fine for debates at that intellectual level - it at least reinforces the intellectual discipline that debate has to be about more than just making shit up.
But as someone up thread pointed out, real world legal arguments don’t proceed like that. The reason is that the definitional content of many, perhaps most, words used is heavily context dependent. For example, the word “man” in some contexts means adult male, in others adult human, and in still others, any human. It simply is quite useless to take a definition of “man” that might have been valuable in one context and triumphantly assert that it means the same in all contexts. And that is for a relatively simple word. The problem is exponentially more complex with a nuanced word like “jurisdiction”. No dictionary will be able to do justice to the subtle complexities that arise in considering the concept.
For that reason, law dictionaries are of little use for professionals, although students find them helpful in coming to terms with the law’s jargon. They are useful to professionals where an obscure word like “feoffment” pops up. They are also useful (but not often) as a research resource in some situations. The way they are organised is that a term to be defined is listed, then there is typically citation of a series of cases where an attempt to define the word was made, with little extracts of a sentence or so from the cases to summarise the point. A lawyer will then go to the actual cases cited and see if the context in which those cases were decided helps or not, but it is the cases that make the argument, not the dictionary compiler’s attempt to summarise things.
I say “not often” useful because there are better legal research tools for this sort of thing. The problem for dictionaries is that they are never complete in the sense of containing an exhaustive list of all major decisions on a point, which is what lawyers need. They are designed to give a flavour of the meaning, and to be a springboard for further research, but little else. They are most certainly not, in the lexicographer’s jargon, “prescriptive”.
Thus, the central conceit of SovCit arguments that they are cutting through bullshit to get back to some basic propositions taken from the dictionary is completely misplaced. Black’s dictionary does not provide a collection of axiomatic principles from which debate may start, nor is it intended to. If SovCits wanted something approximating reasonably authoritative statements of the old common law, they would start with treatises like Coke, or Littleton, or Blackstone. But they rarely seem to. And even if they did, context is all. Just finding a quote and shouting “Gotchya!” doesn’t work. Legal arguments are not conducted as an exercise in assembling “axioms” taken as quotes from old sources in some sort of exercise that mirrors Euclid. It doesn’t, and can’t, work that way.
But they’re hard! 
There’s certainly a rich tradition of Anarchism in Code Law country, but I’ve never heard of Anarchists proclaiming pseudolaw to justify their positions.
AIUI the assholes in Keene, New Hampshire, the trials they post on YouTube aren’t even worth the price of admission.
CMC fnord!
Again; it simplifies. If you can find a simplistic, short explanation of what X means in Black’s Law Dictionary, it can serve as a sledgehammer of an argument. To the unwise and the ignorant, a definition is a very easily understood “truth.”
I would again point out that this definitional approach to debate is very common among the ignorant. Look at people who’ve been sucked in by the gold standard idea; a common theme is that we have to go back to the gold standard because fiat money has no “value.” But that’s based on only a single example of what the word “value” is. In the real world, where economists examine value and utility and such, the value of something is an incredibly fluid and complex thing. Concepts like “value” cannot be reduced to a single definition. The value of money can only be understood though a nuanced, detailed examination of what money is and how it works and what value is.
Look at how many people are easily bamboozled by words like “organic” and “toxins,” for that matter.
Damn he’s onto us…:smack:
Also I would point out that words are only words, the English language is a combination of words, so pointing to one without context is lazy.