My thoughts for the day

It seems logical that if our families have to balance our budgets and live within our means, then the government ought to do the same.

The problem is that we do not function on a level playing field.

Suppose we are a start-up nation. What would we use for money? Gold or silver? What if we were on an island and had no gold or silver? What then? Use fish for cash? Shells? White stones?

If individuals created their own money, they would have to "monetize" some asset that they own. I give you a piece of paper that says IOU my car, house, dishes, or property. That IOU could get traded as a real asset to purchase other things in the neighborhood. If everyone were honest, each IOU would be backed by some real value. That is money. It would all represent individual debt.

But if we created a government and gave it the sole power to create money, what assets would the government have to monetize? It is (as has so often been said) the full faith and credit of the nation, based upon the economy, the gross national product, what the people collectively have to offer. In other words, it is based upon the collective wealth of the entire nation, rather than upon individual assets.

As long as the government-issued money supply was roughly equal to the assessed value of the nation itself, it could be considered "honest money." All money would still be IOU's, but it would be interest-free money. In such a case, government should live within its means and mandate a balanced budget.

America did this fairly well in the first century of its existence. Wars did cause deficits, of course, but they had a taxation system of tariffs and excise taxes on goods which could pay for all of this. There was no tax on people's right to work ("wages"). The founders believed that governments were under God, and only God could grant "rights" to men. Governments gave privileges only, and only those privileges could be taxed.

One's right to work was a God-given right, so it was not to be taxed. But the question came up in the early 1900's: Can government tax a corporation? They agreed among themselves that corporations were created by governments and hence operated on "privilege." Corporations were man-made "persons" and were therefore servants of government. So they passed the Corporate Tax Act of 1909.

A few years later, they turned this into a Constitutional Amendment (the 16th Amendment), also known as the "Income Tax Amendment." This institutionalized corporate income as taxable. It still did not tax personal wages, however, because "income" was defined by law as corporate income.

The Supreme Court subsequently upheld this in its rulings, insisting that the 16th Amendment gave Congress no new taxing power. It was still unconstitutional to tax wages. So they did what governments do best. They redefined the words in the minds of the people. The average person does not know that words used on the street do not have the same meaning as words used in the language of law. It was not long before "income" was assumed to be anything that an average person earns--including wages.

This was how the people began to accept the idea that wages were taxable "income." Once that Constitutional hurdle had been overcome (not by law, but by common practice), the government then began to rely more and more upon wage-taxes, rather than by tariffs and excise taxes to pay the bills.

Finally, the time came when they advocated "free trade," and began to abolish those tariffs altogether. America had functioned on tariffs for a long time, as the Constitution mandated. But now government depends almost completely upon taxes on wages.

As government ceased to recognize God as the giver of all "rights," the lines were blurred between privileges and rights. I have heard Senators speak of rights and privileges as if they were interchangeable terms. There are no true rights apart from what God gives. There is no such thing as "gay rights," for instance. There is only government-granted "gay privileges," because God never granted homosexuals the right to marry or to have sexual relations. That is only a privilege that governments grant when they cease to recognize their position "under God."

People now appeal to governments to grant them rights, when in fact it is the duty of government to enforce the rights that God has granted. One of those rights is the right to work. Our Declaration of Independence says that "all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In 1886 the Supreme Court discussed this very thing, saying that "the pursuit of happiness" was one's right to work and that this right meant that wages were not to be taxed.

In the early 1890's congress passed a law taxing wages, and the next year the Supreme Court threw it out as unconstitutional. So certain power brokers knew that the only way to gain control over the people was to dethrone God and usurp the power to grant rights. This occurred in the face of the Pentecostal movement in the early 1900's. They were able to do it because those Spirit-filled Christians became more concerned with obtaining the power of the Spirit than with biblical law which regulates government.

And so, even as Pentecost was denominationalizing in 1910, the bankers were plotting in secret at Jekyll Island to take over the finances of the US government by writing the Federal Reserve Act. Pentecostals got so excited about the gift of healing that they left matters of government to evil men. The result was that we all came into bondage to Mystery Babylon in spite of the tens of thousands of men and women who found healing.

I see irony in all of this.

The Federal Reserve Act was passed in the Senate on Dec. 23, 1913 with only 5 senators present. The rest were home for Christmas. It was thought to be just a "routine banking bill," and very few knew that it would bring America into financial bondage. The bankers thus induced the government to give it the right to create all money in America and to loan it to the government at interest.

Then they fomented World War I, which cost America so much money that within 20 years the US government was flat broke. The interest on Fed loans soaked up all of the honest money that had been created earlier. Then in 1933 the bankers foreclosed on the American government, and the people became enslaved unknowingly to Babylonian bankers.

After 70 years of this (in 2003), America invaded Iraq, which is the old territory of Babylon, and overthrew the "Nebuchadnezzar" of the day, Saddam Hussein. President Bush was unaware that he was establishing a precedent for the overthrow of Mystery Babylon itself. Somehow, this situation with Iraq has everything to do with the fall of Mystery Babylon today. The US invasion of Iraq prophesied the overthrow of Mystery Babylon.

Many Christians think we are about to enter into a Babylonian captivity, which they equate to "the great tribulation." The fact is, we have nearly completed our captivity, but few saw it because it was a "mystery" (i.e., secret, hidden). The collapse of our Babylonian debt-money system will certainly cause some people "tribulation," but this is actually good news, not bad.

By the Hezekiah Factor, I think it is likely that we will see another culmination point in 2013, since that is 10 years past 2003 (and 80 years after 1933).

By the same token, we have already observed that 1913 + 70 years was 1983, and then the Hezekiah Factor from that date came to 1993--the end of the Church's 40-Jubilee "wilderness" cycle. That was when the Church began to be set free from the house of Saul and when David began his rule.