A couple of mechanically printed schoolchild letters crossed the desk this week. The most charming?
(start ital)"Dear Editor,
"Hi my name is Stephanie and I am a grade 6 student at John Muir Middle Schoolin wausau,Wisconsin.I am writing this letter for Langauge Art's Class.This letter will tell you some reasons why you should fill out your census forms so read on and find out.
"One reason is so the taxis will lower.
"Second reason is to know how many job's to provide for people and how much mony to pay them.
"Third reason is you might get funding for roads or schools. Fourth reason is to count all the people we need to feed and if we need to add on to anything.Because the goverment helps pay for people that are counted and if your not you end up paying more in taxis and other things go up.
"Fifth reason is if you don't hand in your census form in time people will come to your door and ask you in person and that cost mony too.So hand in you census forms before it's to late. ...
"Sincerly, Stephanie T."(end ital)
Dear Stephanie:
My, how pleased the taxpayers of Wausau, Wisconsin must be to know the "mony" looted from their paychecks is going to continue your course of government instruction (and useful civic exercises) at a school named for the founder of the Sierra Club, where after five-and-a-half years of government instruction you believe the common euphemism for those seizures of "bread from the mouth of labor" (that's Jefferson, as I'm sure you know) is spelled "taxis."
We could also go into that annoying apostrophe you keep using to form your plurals, not to mention your spelling. (The apostrophe replaces the "e" in the "es" which Old English used to form the (start ital)possessive(end ital) case, remember? Or did teacher skip that lesson to make time for the "Letter-Writing Exercise" from your shiny government-supplied "Census Kit"?)
Instead, let's concentrate on the important stuff: 1) Hit the space bar after each of those little dots called "periods," will you? 2) Since this was obviously a classroom exercise, you might also want to ask teacher to go back over the part about "proofreading."
But teacher's real error in judgment may lie in allowing you to expose to the general public the underlying assumptions you and your classmates reveal in your letters.
Listen up, Stephanie, honey: We Americans live under a system of government called a constitutional republic, in which the central government in Washington is not supposed to be "providing jobs" for people, nor figuring out how much "mony" to pay them.
Unlike those eastern European regimes fled by my grandparents and (presumably) your great-grandparents, the central government in America has a sharply limited list of powers and duties, each specifically spelled out, and I can't find the ones you mention anywhere on my list, which is called Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution. Have teacher show you her copy.
Anyway, no government can really "create" jobs, even if it claims to. Even to fund "public works" projects, government has to take money from private persons and corporations, who could otherwise use those funds to hire more workers of their own -- at far lower overhead.
Government never creates anything. It just shifts stuff around. That's called "redistribution." Like the way struggling young Wisconsin couples, now trying to save up to start families of their own, are being taxed, their wages "redistributed," to pay for your welfare education there at the John Muir Youth Propaganda Camp for the Lexicographically Deprived.
You say another reason for the census is to "count all the people we need to feed and if we need to add on to anything."
Who is this "we," Stephanie? Do they send you and your classmates envelopes full of cash from Washington, which you then use to buy food for the poor? I doubt that. I think when you say "we," you really mean "the government."
But here's another hint: The government doesn't feed anybody, either, except sometimes its own soldiers. The reason you get fed is because your parents use the money they earn at work (after our friend the government takes 40 percent off the top) to buy that food. And I doubt they need to check any census reports to figure out how many places to set at the dinner table.
In fact, Stephanie, that Constitution we were talking about no longer authorizes any federal agency to ask us about our race -- let alone our earnings, our education, our mental health, or our breeding or bathroom habits -- all stuff demanded on many of those census forms that teacher wants so badly for us all to return. (Have you asked her why? Have you asked her how much of her paycheck now comes from Washington? Have you asked her to explain the "Hatch Act"? Can you name any other 20th Century governments that have used their control over the children to manipulate parents' behavior?)
What the Constitution actually says is that the federal government can do its best to count us once a decade, to figure out how to apportion seats in Congress, as well as for the apportionment of "direct taxes."
That's right, Stephanie. Far from lowering our "taxis," Washington can (start ital)raise(end ital) direct taxis -- uh, taxes -- based on how many of us they manage to count.
Didn't teacher look that up for you? It's Article I, Section 2.
As for your final argument, that "if you don't hand in your census forms in time people will come to your door ... and that cost mony too": Awww. "Mony" they would otherwise spend funding mass torture and the burning of productive coca fields in Colombia, setting the stage for your little classmates to ship out to Bogota in a couple more years? "Mony" they would otherwise spend to launch astronauts into space, there to go around and around, studying each other's urine production? "Mony" they would otherwise spend seizing civilian firearms and locking up the most entrepreneurial 25 percent of our young black men for made-up, bureaucratic crimes, until respect for the law vanishes entirely?
Money they would otherwise spend funding the John Muir Middle School, in Wausau, Wisconsin?
You're breaking my heart, Stephanie.
By the way, you didn't mention the fines. If filling out the Census forms is so good for us, why does your employer have to threaten to fine us if we don't? And did you notice where U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon granted attorney Mark Brewer a temporary restraining order last week in that Census suit filed by five residents of Houston, Texas?
"For the moment, this will prevent prosecution against any American who chooses not to answer questions other than the number of people living at their address -- that's all tht's required by the Constitution," attorney Brewer told WorldNetDaily.
"Unfortunately, we know the government is capable of misusing census data," he said. "The federal government was only able to find, round up and imprison Americans of Japanese ancestry in 1942 by the illegal use of Census Bureau data. ..."
"The Census Bureau cannot extract this information under threat of criminal prosecution -- that was the issue I presented to the court," Brewer said. "The government lawyer told her that he can ak anything he darn near pleases -- where does it stop?"
Please tell your teacher, Stephanie: I think millions of Americans are about to show the federal government where it stops.
Do you have a recycling program for rejected government forms, there at your Middle School? Don't you think John Muir would have wanted you to?
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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