Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of Freedom's Creed. Today is January the thirteenth, 2022. It's hard to believe. If you're like me, it seems like the older I get, the faster the years seem to go by. I don't know what it is, but it just happens. Um, I hope your new year is off to a great start, and I will say happy new year to all of you. I suppose that I can wish someone a happy new year, or we can wish people a happy new year. Two or three weeks into the new year, you know, it gets about February or March. We just don't do it because it's sometimes awkward, and it's one of those unwritten rules that we get into February and March, and well, you know, the new year is well on the way. In all seriousness, I do hope that the new year has started off wonderful for each of you, and that you are planning to accomplish some wonderful things in the new year. I know I do, and hopefully I can move past the how can I say this, the new year's resolution phase and actually get into accomplishing the things that I want to do uh for the new year. So anyway, let's go with it. I started the podcast back in March of 2021 when we were a good year, actually, right at a year, into COVID-19. And for the most part, I have refrained from talking about this virus for the whole time since I started the podcast. I may have touched on it here and there, but I've not really ever dedicated a lot of time to talking about this virus, the so-called pandemic. But I'm actually going to dedicate some time in this episode to talking about it. So stick around for later in the episode as I talk about this. And it's to the point where I've got the feeling that I just can't not talk about it, mainly because it's conjured up some of the most divisive tones we've ever seen in our country. And it's something that is very troubling to me, uh, but we'll talk about that more momentarily. I'd like to begin talking about the power of the federal government. And if you think it's too much or not enough, does government have a role to play in our lives? I suppose that that is debatable. But yes, the government does have a role to play in our lives. I think, I think it's minimal, it should be minimal anyway, but it seems like over the last probably half of my life that government has begun to exact a lot of power and control over the citizens of our country. So, yes, it is debatable about whether or not government does have a significant role or even a role to play in our lives, but again, that's debatable. Can government really tell people what they will or will not do? Think about that question for a bit. Can the government really tell people what they can and can't do or what they will or will not do? And you say to yourself, well, no, we're we're free. We're free to do whatever we want. So long as we're not hurting anyone else or disobeying the laws of the land. But think about taxes. Can the government tell you to pay your taxes? Yes, you better believe it. It absolutely can tell you. And if you don't pay your taxes, then you will suffer the consequences because you will have all the resources of the federal government in the IRS coming after your butt if you don't pay your taxes. What about a speed limit? How much control does the government have over speed limits? Well, signs are posted all over the highway and in town. They tell us how fast we can drive. Obviously, all of us have driven a lot faster than the posted speed limit. So we do have a little bit of control there, I suppose. Uh you take your chances and you get a ticket if you get caught by the police. What about a curfew? So let's say, oh, I don't know, during the riots of 2020 in the summer, there were a lot of riots. And there were even curfews put in place by some governments, some jurisdictions, I guess. And whether or not people abided by those curfews, well, that was their choice. If anything like martial law was ever to be invoked, then a curfew is set. Well, you're either going to abide by the curfew or you're going to get arrested. Now, unfortunately, it seems today that in our world, if you are a certain political party or if you believe a certain way, you may or may not get arrested, or you may not be held for very long in police custody. Now, I don't know what a political party or a particular belief or ideology has to do with obeying and disobeying the law, but this is the society that we're living in in 2022 now. And what about vaccinations? Can a government tell the people that they will be vaccinated? Now, a civilized society, of which I think we still are, accepts that there are rules that govern behavior. That if we don't abide by these rules of behavior, that utter chaos and even anarchy can and will result. Yet we saw this in the summer of twenty twenty, that we had complete chaos and even anarchy in some locales in this country. And look at what happened. You be the judge of whether or not people were held to account for their actions or not. I for one, I for one, have a lot of questions about all the things that went on then, not to mention what happened on January 6th, 2021, but not talking about that today. As far as I'm concerned, there's a fine line between government encroachment and freedom and liberty. Now, if everyone respected the rights of others, there'd be little, if any, need for laws or government to enforce those laws. Unfortunately, we're not there. We're nowhere near that place. And I suppose it's been that way from the beginning of time. There's always been a need to try to regulate the behavior of people by establishing certain laws and rules governing behavior. Of course, when you throw emotions, anger, and all of those other strong emotions into the mix, it doesn't matter what the laws say. People are going to do what they want to do. And in fact, they do what they are not willing to control themselves to do. Yes, you have to be in control of yourself. Doesn't matter what the laws are. You should treat people kindly and try to respect other people, particularly those who may not have a belief like yours. So I'm not that naive to think that somehow we can we can do away with laws and everything will be honky-dory. No, uh, we had a debate, somewhat of a debate, during the riots of 2020, where there was this idea or notion that we could defund the police because somehow the police were our problem. Unbelievable. It's ridiculous. No, the police are not our problem. Law enforcement is not the problem in this country. Law-abiding citizens, that's where we need to look. And if people will just have enough decency to respect the lives of other people, then it makes law enforcement a whole lot easier. Another big question that I have is how does the government decide what it wants to enforce and what it is willing to ignore? Think about that question. I can tell you this with certainty: the government will never ignore the non-payment of taxes. Try it and see what happens. As a matter of fact, not even death will get you out of paying taxes, or perhaps said more completely and appropriately, it'll never get your family out of paying your estate taxes or any other tax that's associated with the one who was living and who is now dead. The government generally does not stop when it comes to the collection of taxes. Doesn't matter if the person is dead or not, they'll find someone to pay that tax bill. It's kind of scary. Think about the amount of people who die every year in the United States. And the government says, Oh yeah, we're gonna get those taxes dug on it. You know we will. Tens of thousands of people die every year in vehicle accidents alone. In fact, in the last 20 years alone, the lowest number of people who were killed in vehicle accidents has been in the neighborhood of 32,000 people. The lowest number. So tens of thousands of people are dying every year in automobile accidents. What about the hundreds of thousands who die from cancer every year? Or the hundreds of thousands who die from heart disease every year. There are around 50,000 people who die from influenza and pneumonia every year. Now, that's a lot of potential tax revenue that needs to be collected, and Uncle Sam is gonna do it. They don't care about somebody dying or the bereaved who are left behind to have to deal with the payment of these taxes. Now, I could go on here, but I won't. I think you get the picture. Now, if the government is perfectly fine mandating a vaccination against COVID, then why not mandate a host of other things that could potentially lead to cancer, heart disease, or seasonal influenza and pneumonia? Why not? Why not tell people that they can or cannot eat certain foods, that they can or cannot drink certain beverages, that they can or cannot smoke cigarettes or use any other drug, alcohol, no matter what it is, over-the-counter, illegal drugs, whatever. Why doesn't the government mandate that to save hundreds of thousands, nay, even millions of lives over the course of time? Why don't they do that? If it's good enough for COVID-19, if it's good enough for the government to mandate getting a vaccine against COVID, then it ought to be good enough for them to mandate any other behavior that leads to potential disease. Now I get it. Diseases and viruses, they're two different things. I understand that. And there were a lot of people who said, oh, no way, I am not going to get the vaccine because Trump says we should get the vaccine. Not that Trump had anything to do with the development of the vaccine. He didn't, other than maybe cutting some red tape. He had nothing else to do with the creation of the vaccine. And then when there was a party switch in the White House and the executive branch was now run by a Democrat, all of a sudden the vaccine was legit. No questions asked. How stupid is that? It's ridiculous. We have to take the emotional equation out of politics and out of ramming things down the throats of the American people based on emotion. It's disgusting. It's really hard for me to realize that two years have gone by since the world was introduced to COVID-19. Now, I remember how things used to be when I was a kid and when my children were young. Every year we had required vaccinations that I had to get as a kid, and that my children were required to get as well. And you know what? No one really ever questioned getting those vaccinations. We just did it because we knew that it was something we had to do in order to either ourselves get into school or our children to start another school year. There were people who, parents, I guess, who objected to the vaccinations, and they were commonly referred to as anti-vaxxers. They weren't necessarily ridiculed by the whole of society, or they weren't viewed as some kind of alien because they didn't want to get their children vaccinated. They had their reasons, and most people respected that. The consequences of that were, well, I don't know. I didn't really know anybody who refused to have their children vaccinated so they could get into school. It happened far away from where I lived, but I knew it happened. What they did and how they remedied that situation, I don't know. I don't know if they homeschooled or what they did. That's not the issue at this point. The issue at this point, and the question that I would ask is, what's changed? What's changed from how it was when I was a kid or when my children were younger and were going to school? I'll tell you what's changed. The government, particularly the federal government, has decided to involve itself unnecessarily, I might add, in the lives of we the people. And I think most of us are aware that when the government involves itself in the lives of the people unnecessarily, they tend to ruin things for everybody, uh, everybody except themselves, because they'll never ruin things for themselves. So long as they have their power and control, they'll make sure that they get theirs and screw the lives of everybody else. We have a president right now who has declared open season on the so-called unvaxxed. He has said that we are in a quote, pandemic of the unvaxxed, unquote. I think it's a pretty accurate quote. You can check it out if you want to. If you haven't heard that, try to find it somewhere. I know it can be hard sometimes to sift through all of the media and the giant complex that's out there for disseminating information in our society, but if you look hard enough, you'll find it. And if you're honest with yourself, you know in your heart that this is what he has said. And if you buy into this rhetoric, well, I'd have some things to say, but my mom would not appreciate the non-Christian way in which I would say it. Suffice it to say, this kind of rhetoric from the President of the United States is completely and utterly preposterous. And he has no business saying such things. Now, he also wants to do away with the filibuster in the United States Senate. A tactic, I might add, that he had no problem with when he was a sitting senator in the United States Senate. But now all of a sudden, he wants to get rid of it. When his party was the minority party, it was great to be sure to be able to use the filibuster. But now that there's an even split in the Senate, somehow he wants to get rid of that. And think about this there is a required 60 vote threshold to pass legislation in the United States Senate. That's there for a reason. If we get rid of the filibuster, then the minority party can just hang it up until the next election because they're not going to be able to do a thing. It's pathetic. So, in my opinion, ladies and gentlemen, it's plain and simple. The government right now is out of control. They seem to know no limits of the power that they have and the encroachment that they are enforcing on the lives of the American people. It's scary in a way and very troubling, to be sure. But in reality, do you want to know what the remedy is to all of this power and control of these crazed politicians? The remedy is the Constitution. The founders put constraints into the Constitution for a reason. The reason is to constrain bad politicians, power-hungry human beings, to try to limit their corruption and their lust for power and control. We just have to get back to the Constitution. It's viewed by some, and I think a very small minority of people as being somehow corrupted. It was pinned at a time when there was struggle in America for equality and equal rights. And so somehow in 2022, the Constitution is invalid. Well, it's not invalid. It's very much effective in our lives, and it can bless the lives of all people. I don't care what your race is, I don't care what your creed is, I don't care what your nationality is. Why do you think there's tons of people flowing into the country? They're not flowing into the country because we're somehow a totalitarian regime that inflicts harm on people for believing a certain way. They're flowing into this country because they want to have freedom. They want to have liberty. They want to be able to do what they want to do without being told what to do by the government. If you talk to anyone who comes to this country from another country, particularly a country where freedom is limited, they will tell you that this country is by far the most free and where the greatest opportunity resides. There's no other country that matches what the United States has to offer other people. And the Constitution is the reason for this. The founding documents of our country is the reason for this, pure and simple. But if we want to keep that standard of liberty and freedom alive in this country, we have to stand up to big government, to the bureaucrats, and to those who would seek to tear down this country, to in fact destroy the Constitution and put something else in its place. We have to root this out where we see it, no matter where we see it, no matter what political party it may reside in. It has to be rooted out, it has to be done away with. Because we cannot continue to reside in this country with the liberty and freedom that we have if we continue to allow the government to have the kind of control and the kind of encroachment that it has on our lives right now. I'm not advocating for insurrection. I'm not advocating for any sort of chaos or anarchy. What I'm advocating for is getting back to the Constitution, respecting the Constitution as the bedrock of our way of life. And if that bedrock, that foundation, is taken away, then the whole building is going to crumble. Well, I hope I've given you something to think about today and to contemplate seriously. As is customary on the podcast, I want to leave you with a quote, in this case, two quotes from Alexander Hamilton and one from James Madison. Alexander Hamilton said this quote Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint. Alexander Hamilton also said this The state governments possess inherent advantages which will ever give them an influence and ascendancy over the national government and will forever preclude the possibility of federal encroachments, that their liberties indeed can be subverted by the federal head is repugnant to every rule of political calculation. It would seem that we have moved far away from the idea that Alexander Hamilton gave to us, which is that if the federal government takes authority away from the states or from the people, that such things were looked at as being repugnant. Well, we're living in a state of repugnance right now, in my opinion. It's really pathetic. Finally, this short quote from James Madison, where he said, All power is originally vested in and consequently derived from the people. End of quote. Indeed, the Tenth Amendment states that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. Amen to that. If you can plan it, you can do it.