A Call to Action Common Sense for Our Time is a book for all of us. It serves as a guide to better understand why we have such difficult problems in our country today and why these problems never seem to go away. This book gives us the tools to understand the communities, organizations, and factions that possess the power to dominate our airwaves and in many ways our lives but more importantly this book provides a clear recommendation on how to improve our influence over these communities through the power of the U.S. Constitution.

A Call to Action

Common Sense for Our TimeBy Gregory H. Grzybowski

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Gregory H. Grzybowski
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-6160-3

Contents

Acknowledgements..........................................vForeword..................................................xiiiIntroduction..............................................xviiChapter 1: On Human Nature................................1Chapter 2: The Primacy of Property........................15Chapter 3: On Organizational Tyranny......................33Chapter 4: On the Inverse Rule of Law.....................47Chapter 5: On the Tyranny of Taxation.....................53Chapter 6: Synopsis.......................................73Chapter 7: A Call to Action...............................79Notes.....................................................87Bibliography..............................................91List of Figures...........................................93

Chapter One

On Human Nature

The Basic Necessities of Humanity

Over the ages of recorded history, there has been a great deal of discussion concerning the basic needs and duality of humanity. I do believe it is valuable to briefly discuss this subject for your benefit so that you might better understand the constraints and challenges caused by our own humanity when we seek to move men and woman to action.

First and foremost, for a civilization of any type to exist, its members must agree upon an informal contract at a fundamental human to human level. They must share the same viewpoint on a number of important beliefs, values, and cultural expressions. This agreement creates a bond of fellowship that keeps those members together in times of hardship or turmoil and provides a certain measure of community that not only helps differentiate that civilization from others but also provides those members a sense of identity and belonging unique among themselves.

In order for this contract to occur between fellow human beings, certain basic necessities of man must be satisfied in order for individuals to have the time and mental focus to complete the contract. Chief among these basic necessities are an individual's need to exhibit their own Identity, as well as, their need to be accepted by their fellow human beings as a valuable and worthwhile member of the community. Therefore, individual identity and individual acceptance into the group are two key and inseparable traits of the human condition. These conditions must be satisfied in a majority of citizens for a civilization to form and persist.

Without the satisfaction of these two basic necessities, human beings are not able to assemble into larger communities and build stable and lasting societies. The inability to satisfy these two basic needs of the human condition is a catalyst for individuals to pursue drastic and quite often violent means to achieve them. This state of affairs results in prolonged periods of anarchy until some dominant force is able to regain control and establish the provisions for these two basic needs. It follows that any society or civilization seeking to form and persist for any length of time must ensure the conditions exist to provide the citizenry with the opportunity to satisfy individual identity and group belonging.

It is possible that people can be forced to obey and disregard these basic necessities but only for a short time. We can see this fact in practice with the example of the establishment of the Soviet State in Russia in the 1920s. Individuals were forced to give up their individual identity for the benefit of the overall society. This was done through forced reeducation, concentration camps, and outright mass murder. Despite all of these measures, the desire of the individual to maintain an identity could not be eliminated and the Soviet State eventually fell with existing institutions such as the Eastern Orthodox Church still thriving even after roughly seventy years of persecution. As the Soviet example illustrates, even the threat of death eventually wanes as the human spirit demands recognition and a means to express itself. This is why true tyrannies do not long endure.

The only way for a civilization to survive is to satisfy these human needs in the correct proportions so as to make both the individual and the community remain in balance and committed to the survival of the civilization. Therefore, most successful civilizations allow an individual maximum freedom until the extension of that freedom infringes on the rights of another individual's freedom. This is where a mutually agreed on rule must intercede to avoid conflict and possible long term damage to the civilization. These rules in a governed society are called laws.

It is important to distinguish here that not every "law" today is truly a law but rather a legal extension of the means of control over individual liberty by external self-interested sources such as a government bureaucracy and affiliated interest groups. All so called "laws" that do not address the compromise between the freedoms of individual citizens in order to ensure the maximum freedom for both while still ensuring that the impact to individual identity and group belonging for those individuals is minimally impaired are not laws. I will discuss more about the true nature of governing law and its association with individual liberty in Chapter 4.

The duality of humanity is composed of the desire to remain an individual and stand apart from other people and the desire to belong to the group. As a matter of pure logical thought, these two aspects of the human condition stand in stark opposition to one another. If we were to continue further we might draw the obvious conclusion that no human being could ever be at peace or in balance with two opposing aspects of their nature.

However, if we were to draw this conclusion we would be wrong. This is because the human condition also possesses the ability to compromise between these two aspects. An individual's ability to compromise is one of the greatest qualities of the human condition. Without the ability to compromise there would be no ability for individuals to exist in larger groups and, consequently, no ability for a larger society of human beings to exist. It is the quality of compromise that gives mankind the ability to build and sustain a society and a civilization. However, like anything, compromise can be taken to extremes within a civilization. This is a subject I will also discuss a bit later. Suffice it to say that if you compromise your beliefs, values, and cultural homogeneity to such a level that they no longer exist then the art of compromise has gone too far.

Compromise is a limited commodity in a human being and each individual's capacity to compromise varies dramatically. There are individuals who will accept nothing but their way and storm against society and other individuals in an attempt to force their will upon them. There are others who will accept almost anything to the detriment of themselves or their possessions because their primary interest is to get along with everyone else no matter the cost. In both cases, the individual is creating conditions for themselves and those around them that are not conducive to a balanced society. Namely, a properly balanced environment between individualism and group belonging.

I have found through my study of history and various cultures that the majority of human beings are willing to compromise to their detriment so they can belong while only a few stand out from the...