Lies the government told you (2 page)

What is it about the government and its agents and employees that they can lie to us with impunity, but we risk being sent to jail if we lie to them?

Throughout this book, I will suggest answers to these and similar questions. As I do so, you’ll see a chip on my shoulder. I am angry that we allow the government to lie to us, that we expect it to do so, and even take comfort in the illusions created thereby. When I told friends about the title of this book, I frequently joked that it would be four thousand pages in length. Most laughed; but none doubted that there have been enough government lies to consume that many printed pages.

When you recall that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States mandate a free and open society, one in which
the government works for us
, you can see where the chip on my shoulder came from. It is morally reprehensible for any government to lie to anyone over whom it has lawful authority. But in a free and open society where
we are the employers, and the government workers are the employees
, every government employee—from a public school janitor to a state governor, from a soldier to an FBI agent, from a cop to the President—has a lawful obligation to be truthful to his or her employers, and it is
utterly and completely and unconditionally unacceptable to treat as normal that they should lie to us.

And yet, treat it as normal we do. Just look at the names of the chapters in this book—from “All Men Are Created Equal” to “Congress Shall Make No Law . . . Abridging the Freedom of Speech,” from “Innocent Until Proven Guilty” to “Your Boys Are Not Going to Be Sent into Any Foreign Wars” to “We Don’t Torture”—and you will see the stuff of which historical myth is made. Every one of those well-known, well-worn, well-stated canards is a goal the government has never reached but claims it has. Each has become a bald-faced lie, a perpetrated myth, a grasp at power, a monstrous deception. And most of us recognize that.

Why do we believe government-generated myths? Why do we allow the use of myth to enhance government power? Why do we condone the government’s use of deception to crush our freedom, steal our property, and destroy our lives? And how does the government get away with all this?

These are the questions we will explore in the coming pages, as we tear through American history from 1776 to 2010, and expose the use of myth to seize power and the power of deception to delude the public. When the public is deluded by the very folks it has hired to defend its freedom, the delusion interferes with that freedom by denying us accurate information with which we can decide in whose hands we should repose government power. Would Americans have reelected FDR had they known that he
caused
the attack on Pearl Harbor? Would voters have chosen LBJ, the supposed “peace candidate” in 1964, had they known he was
secretly planning
to ramp up the Vietnam War? Would George W. Bush have been reelected in 2004 if we knew he was illegally spying on us, concocting evidence for war, torturing people, and
lying
about it?

Government lies take on a life of their own since they breed more lies to substantiate the original lies. Government lies induce government lawbreaking, and government lawbreaking means someone is suffering a loss of life, liberty, or property because of some event not caused by the person suffering; and it also means that the lawbreaker walks free in the corridors of power to strike again.

Government lies are a direct assault on freedom because, if believed, if accepted as truth, the lies dupe individuals into making choices they would not make were the truth known. Government lies seduce us into surrendering freedom and accepting unlawful behavior and irretrievable loss as somehow warranted, and they establish a precedent for similar thefts of freedom and personal loss in the future.

In my previous books, I have targeted government excess. In
Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws
, I argued that government lawbreaking is a serious, yet hidden problem recognized primarily by those who benefit from or are victimized by it, and if unchecked, will lead to tyranny. In
The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land
, I made the case that the feds have systematically stolen power from the States and freedom from individuals, under the guise of interpreting the Constitution, and much of that power and many of those freedoms will be impossible to reclaim. In
A Nation of Sheep
, I showed that government in America hates freedom, that it defends its power and not our rights, even though our rights are natural, come from our humanity, and as Jefferson stated, are “inalienable.” In
Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America
, I demonstrated that any government that thinks it can suspend the free will of the innocent is fatal to life, fatal to freedom, and breeds horrors that can last for centuries.

In the pages that follow, I continue with my theme that the government is not your friend. The lies told to us by our own government, and accepted by our grandparents and our parents and our children, have destroyed the lives, stolen the freedom, crushed the God-given rights, and seized the property of those who got in the way of official government deception. Why has our government rejected America’s first principles of individual freedom, guaranteed rights, limited government, free enterprise, private property, and the right to be left alone? And why has it denied doing so?

Before you start reading this book, I suggest you flip back to the quotations I have selected as representational themes of this book and reread them. Hold me to these themes, and at the end of the book, decide for yourself if I have supported them.

Come with me now on a tour of myth, power, and deception in America; woven into the fabric of our history, perpetrated even as you read this, and accepted by millions as the norm.

Lie #1
“All Men Are Created Equal”

On July 4th 1776, the thirteen United States of America declared independence from Great Britain and its tyrannical king, George III. The Continental Congress, in the Declaration of Independence, stated that “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
¹
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The delegates to the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration believed that government power is fueled by the consent of the governed, and that its primary purposes are to ensure the people’s freedom to pursue happiness and to protect their inalienable rights. King George III had never embraced this philosophy, and the bulk of the Declaration listed the ways in which he had abused his power: Great Britain taxed the colonies without granting them representation, prohibited them from trading with the rest of the world, and broke its own laws to exploit them. According to Congress, the King left the United States no alternative but to sever ties with Great Britain and form a new nation with its own government, one that would keep secure its people’s natural rights.

The government that emerged from the American victory in the Revolutionary War, however, did not treat all men equally. The United States Constitution, for example, contained provisions that implicitly and explicitly recognized slavery’s legitimacy, protected it as an institution, and insulated it from regulation or interference by the federal government. In fact, the government permitted slavery for almost one hundred years after Thomas Jefferson wrote the immortal “all Men are created equal” language. It was not until recently that the government’s behavior matched these words and African-Americans truly became equal under the law.

President Barack Obama stated that it is an American tradition that “all men are created equal under the law and . . . no one is above it.”
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The implication in that statement is false. It may be true that no one is above the law, but for much of American history, African-Americans were below it. The Founding Fathers, as brilliant and courageous as they were, lied to us. Abraham Lincoln, the so-called “Great Emancipator,” lied to us. The Supreme Court of the United States, in upholding Jim Crow laws, lied to us. Thankfully, one of the great things about this country is that over time, Americans get smarter. We recognize our transgressions and work to correct them. Some of the greatest advances in human rights have come after some of the greatest assaults on them. After 230 years of exceptional indignity, lawlessness, and bloodshed, we can now say that “all Men are created equal,” and mean it. But that was not the case in 1776.

Founding Slave Owners

Upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 20 percent of America’s population was enslaved.
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Most of the approximately five hundred thousand slaves living in the United States in 1776 were concentrated in the five southernmost states, where they represented 40 percent of the population.
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The Founding Fathers owned slaves. In fact, four of the first five American Presidents, including the still-beloved George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, owned slaves.
⁵

Thomas Jefferson condemned slavery and vehemently opposed its expansion. In his first term in the Virginia House of Burgesses, Jefferson proposed a law to free Virginia’s slaves.
⁶
In 1774, Jefferson urged the Virginia delegates to the First Continental Congress to abolish the slave trade.
⁷
According to Jefferson, “[t]he abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced. . . .”
⁸
Furthermore, Jefferson wrote a draft constitution for the State of Virginia that forbade the
importation of slaves.
⁹
Also, in a draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson complained of Britain’s introduction of slavery and the slave trade to the colonies.
¹⁰

Jefferson also played an integral role in enacting the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which quickened the westward expansion of the United States, while also providing that “[t]here shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory . . .”
¹¹
Later, in 1808, President Jefferson signed a statute prohibiting the Atlantic slave trade.
¹²

Jefferson should be admired for instilling in America the democratic and egalitarian principles that we hold so sacred today. The fact remains, however, that Jefferson owned slaves. At the time he wrote that “all Men are created equal,” he owned about two hundred slaves, and slavery played an integral role in his life.
¹³
Slaves constructed his majestic home and even his personal coffin.
¹⁴

According to Jefferson, African-Americans may not have been inferior to whites, but they certainly were different. In his book,
Notes on the State of Virginia
, Jefferson recounted his observations of the physical differences between blacks and whites
¹⁵
and wrote negatively and positively about African-American behavior.
¹⁶
For example, Jefferson noticed that as compared to whites, blacks required less sleep, but were more adventurous than whites.
¹⁷
In analyzing their mental capacity, Jefferson observed that blacks had better memories than whites, but could not reason nearly as well as their white counterparts.
¹⁸
From his observations, Jefferson concluded that by nature, African-Americans were not as intelligent as whites.
¹⁹
However, with respect to moral capacity (the “heart,” as Jefferson called it), Jefferson believed that God did create all men equal.
²⁰
Furthermore, Jefferson wrote that “nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that [slaves] are to be free,” and he believed that African-Americans had “a natural right” to pursue freedom.

Moreover, according to the historian John C. Miller, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson may have intentionally left “property” off the list of inalienable rights to pave the road for placing slaves’ human rights above the property rights of their slave owners.
²¹
Alexander Hamilton, a Founding Father who once owned slaves in New York, and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury, wrote in
The Federalist, No. 1
, written for the People of New York, and more broadly, the citizens of the United States, that signing the Constitution “is the safest course for your liberty, your dignity, and your
happiness
” (emphasis added). However, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states, in part, that “[n]o person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or
property
without due process of law” (emphasis added). In ratifying the Constitution, did Congress abandon Jefferson’s intent? Did it become less sympathetic to human rights? Did the Founders find no shame in condoning slavery as a property right protected by due process?

Regardless of his ideas on the equality of men, Jefferson believed that blacks and whites could not coexist as equals.
²²
He feared that if whites did not treat blacks paternalistically, there would be a race war resulting in the black race overtaking the white.
²³
Jefferson stated, “We have the wolf by the ears and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
²⁴
Nevertheless, Thomas Jefferson freed five of his slaves in his will, and even though Virginia law mandated that freed slaves leave the state within a year of their emancipation, Jefferson petitioned the Virginia assembly to permit his freed slaves to remain “where their families and connections are.”
²⁵
The Virginia assembly honored Jefferson’s request.
²⁶

George Washington, known throughout the ages as the “Father” of his country, was a Southern planter who owned and relied on slaves.
²⁷
Washington punished his slaves by whipping or selling them, divided their families so they would work more efficiently, and provided them with as little means as tolerable.
²⁸
He also raffled off the slaves of those bankrupt slaveholders who owed him money.
²⁹
Washington’s most gruesome act as a slave owner came in 1784, five years before he became President of the United States. In that year, Washington hired a dentist to extract nine teeth from the mouths of his slaves, and implant them into his own mouth.
³⁰