Fed

By Dan Popp

Now all the authorities, they just stand around and boast / How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms into leaving his post. – Bob Dylan, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"

Once when I was a little boy, I announced that I was running away. My dad said, "OK, I'll help you pack."

I remembered this when I heard that North Carolina and Texas were pushing back against the Obama regime's latest assault on reality: trying to force schools to admit boys into girls' restrooms. Here we have barbarism in a nutshell: "Confess that my fantasy is reality, or I'll shoot! Because, compassion." This time, the tyrants aren't threatening to shoot, exactly. They're threatening to cut off "federal funds."

What are federal funds?

Federal funds are our funds – property that the national government has confiscated, mostly unjustly, from us. So why does this money go from your wallet, all the way to Washington, then back to your State? Because it's a bribe. Because it gives DC more power. Because we allow it to. We the People, the Sovereign with whom the Buck truly Stops, have condoned this national corruption. We let the Feds pay our guardians, the States, to look the other way while our new overlords do any unconstitutional thing they damn well please. The Newspeak name for that is "revenue sharing."

Cities even have their hands in the till. Our mayor ran for re-election on the boast that he had brought "federal dollars" into our burg. Imagine that! He and the city council were so inept in their budgeting that the city would have gone bankrupt if they hadn't stolen from cities that had their financial act together. The mayor was re-elected.

A couple of States finally choosing to stand up to their Parent in DC is like me at four years old threatening to strike off on my own. It's a little comical.

Consider this lesson from the New Testament:

Now [Herod] was very angry with the people of Tyre and Sidon; and with one accord they came to him, and having won over Blastus the king's chamberlain, they were asking for peace, because their country was fed by the king's country. On an appointed day Herod, having put on his royal apparel, took his seat on the rostrum and began delivering an address to them. The people kept crying out, "The voice of a god and not of a man!" And immediately an angel of the Lord struck him because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and died. (Acts 12:20-23, NAS95)

We never want to be in a position where we're fed. Dependency is infancy, and once we're out of infancy we must not go back. If our sustenance comes at the will of someone else, we're worse than his slaves. We are his children, or perhaps his pets. We bite his hand at our peril. States will never contain and control the national government until they refuse its illegal payoffs. They have to stop being fed.

The citizens of Tyre and Sidon weren't totally wrong. This fraudulent puppet of the Romans had become a god over them, with the power to kill and to make alive.

No politician should ever have the power of life and death over you unless you're an evildoer. That was, in fact, the contract that the Founders forged on our behalf: Only after we've been convicted of a crime may the government declare us worthy of death. Only after our guilt has been assured may it take our possessions or our freedom. But we became covetous. We fell faithless. We begged government to do the work of God. The voice of a god and not of a man! we cried to our idols atop Olympus-on-the-Swamp. Feed us! Take care of us! Bless us, O gods, with other people's stuff!

And of course, Educate our kids! "Free, compulsory education" sounds really good until you think about it. Government teaching whatever it deems best? Government removing religion, and thus morality, from the entire course of instruction? Government growing its own mindless supporters like human batteries in The Matrix?

I'm glad that some parents and some States are trying to protect kids from danger in the bathroom. But it's too bad we weren't as quick to protect them from danger in the classroom. As Chesterton warned, "The State didn't own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school."

Our government has become godlike, Herod-like. Judgment has been pronounced. The worms are feeding. They won't stop until they've devoured the host.

© Dan Popp