David Olofson is sitting in jail. Like many non-violent citizens who represent no threat to anyone, Olofson is a victim of paper pushers and their endless rule books.

There are several ways for a person to unintentionally commit a felony, but most of them are looked at by prosecutors, judges, and juries as the accidents they are and dealt with accordingly. Such is not always the case however, especially when firearms are involved; for the past 2 years David Olofson has been learning that the hard way. Olofson is a regular guy who happens to be fond of AR15 style sport-utility rifles. He loaned a rifle to a friend. While the friend was shooting it he moved the safety switch to a point beyond the Fire position. The rifle fired a couple of short bursts and jammed. Someone at or near the club called the police to complain about machinegun fire. The police notified the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and David Olofson was subsequently charged and convicted of illegally transferring a machinegun.

You may not be a weapons collector, as Olofoson was, and as I am. You should still be worried. If the government can arbitrarily make up its intrepretation of its own unconstitutional rules as it goes to the point where the intrepretation doesn’t match the reality of the situation then it isn’t just people who collect guns that are in trouble - we’re all subject to the whims of dishonest bureaucrats who believe they are demigods.

As the years pass I find myself having a harder and harder time respecting the rule of law. That is because the rule of law is increasingly corrupt. Intent used to matter. That is no longer the case.

The cornerstone of this charge is the government’s contention that it doesn’t matter whether a gun fires multiple shots as a result of malfunction or modification because the law defines a machinegun as; “… any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” While on the witness stand, firearms expert Len Savage asked the Assistant US Attorney prosecuting the case if that would make his grandfather’s old double-gun a machinegun if it malfunctioned and fired both barrels with one pull of the trigger. The AUSA responded by paraphrasing the legal definition of a machinegun with emphasis placed on “any weapon which shoots… more than one shot… by a single function of the trigger.”

What I or any reasonable person would call a weapons malfunction is being used by our federal government to put a non-violent citizen who represented no threat to anyone in a cage and hold him there for a period of years. That is unconscionable.

These people intend to control us all one day, from the moment we are born until the moment we stop breathing. By these people I mean petty bureaucrats. I mean the enemies of freedom. I mean the faceless men and women who, by typing something on a keyboard thousands of miles away are able to turn you into a criminal in the eyes of the law without you even knowing anything just happened. These are the modern evil wizards of our time, and they are plotting to take over the kingdom.

If you care at all about freedom in America, I encourage you to donate whatever you can to David Olofoson.

Some college bureaucrats around the country are banding together to send a message that the federal nanny system isn’t working in regards to drinking age.

Top university officials in Maryland - including the chancellor of the state university system and the president of the Johns Hopkins University - say the current drinking age of 21 “is not working” and has led to dangerous binges in which students have harmed themselves and others.

Six college presidents in Maryland are among more than 100 college and university presidents nationwide who have signed a statement calling for a public debate on rethinking the drinking age.

One of the biggest gripes I’ve had with the drinking age is the mentality that goes with it. Parents should set the drinking age. When the state sets the drinking age it sends a subtle message that the state owns you. This is the same message that is sent with any prohibition type rules, regulations and legislation.

If you believe, as I do, that you own your own physical being and your own mind, then the state has no place telling you which substances are legal to put into your body. As long as you are not injuring other people you cannot commit a crime by ingesting a substance. Injuring yourself is not a crime because you are damaging your own property. The problem with this is that our current society teaches that the state has an obligation to take care of all of us individuals collectively. That means that all of us are expected to give up individuality to some extent.

We teach young adults that they are not responsible enough to decide for themselves what they put into their bodies instead of explaining the available options and allowing them to decide for themeselves in responsibly managed environments. Because of the nanny state, young adults have to hide their experimentation with substances that alter reality. This means that they are more likely to get into serious trouble or be injured during the learning process.

Instead of patronizing young people, we should teach them individual responsibility. Few legal adults, no matter how young or old, want to be coddled and talked down to. It’s time we recognized the hypocrisy of making someone a legal adult at 18 while telling them they are still not responsible enough to consume an alcoholic beverage. It’s time we understood that prohibition always causes more problems than it addresses.

Soon to be President Barack Obama has a plan that involves how much of your money the government will take away, by force if necessary. Some people won’t pay anything. Some people will pay a lot. The plan, like those that have come before it - the only constant being that tax rates have grown vastly since World War I - is based not on common sense or fairness, but on economic voodoo.

Senator Barack Obama declared recently that he wants to “reform our tax code so that it rewards work and not just wealth.” We think that is a great goal if it means a simple tax system with low marginal tax rates. Unfortunately, a close inspection of Obama’s proposals reveals something disquieting: he would raise marginal tax rates for many middle-income taxpayers, a bad move for anyone seeking to promote economic growth.

Although Obama is offering a new series of tax breaks, they undermine rather than improve economic incentives. First, whether or not you get those breaks will depend on your income. In Washington, taking away tax breaks as families work harder to make more money is called a “phase-out.” Economists have a different name for it—we call it a tax. Reducing a person’s tax credit as his income goes up also reduces his incentive to earn more income.

The keys to our current tax system are manifold. Although touted as voluntary, our tax system is based on force. If you don’t pay whatever the government determines you should pay then force comes into play. First you are threatened. Then your wages are garnished. If you continue to try and avoid paying whatever “fair share” the bureaucrats say you owe the rest of the country, you’ll end up in jail, with all your real property forfeit to the Fed. If you ask questions about the laws that entitle the government to seize however much of your money it wants, you’ll soon find yourself surrounded by armed goons.

Just ask Edward and Elaine Brown of New Hampshire. You’ll have to visit them in jail to do so. The couple is currently sentenced to 63 months in federal pound me in the ass prison for refusing to participate in the “voluntary” tax system because the government wouldn’t answer their tax questions honestly.

The law they were accused of violating was the personal income tax law and the Browns asked to see the law before they handed over any more money. Their quest for proof of the existence of such a law began over 10 years ago when they first found out the income tax was being misapplied to include taxing all Americans labor. Once the browns realized they, along with the rest of us, were being defrauded of our hard worked labor by the irs they decided to make a stand and challenge the government, not only for themselves, but for the rest of the people in this country, so that they also will be made aware of the terrible injustice being carried out on each of us every day.

You may agree or disagree with the Browns methodology. That’s your right. However, I would strongly encourage you to take a few moments to understand how the upcoming Obama presidency is likely to affect your pocketbook.

While Obama has publicly embraced a tax rate of 40 percent for couples earning over $350,000, his tax policies would result in a staggering 45 percent effective marginal rate in the $110,000 to $120,000 income range for this family. That is 11 percentage points higher than under current law.

Here’s a graph:

Bear in mind that if you ask to see the current tax law, no one will be able to show you anything that a) is Constitutional or b) vaguely resembles a coherent, interpretable English document. The current federal tax code is purposely obtuse and also completely against the highest law of the land, the United States Constitution. At least, that is my opinion.

One question I’ve always asked those who feel it is OK for the federal government to skim money off of every paycheck I’ve ever earned is: if God himself only requires 10% why is it OK for people I’ve never met to take more than that? No one has ever given me an answer that made any sense.

Fighting the tax man may be difficult and dangerous, but it is also a moral imperative. I have the audacity of hope on my side.

Remember those “rebate” checks Uncle Sugar sent out earlier this year? They failed to achieve a “stimulus.”

The evidence is now in and that optimism was unwarranted. Recent government statistics show that only between 10% and 20% of the rebate dollars were spent. The rebates added nearly $80 billion to the permanent national debt but less than $20 billion to consumer spending. This experience confirms earlier studies showing that one-time tax rebates are not a cost-effective way to increase economic activity.

These conclusions are significant for evaluating the likely impact of Barack Obama’s recent proposal to distribute $1,000 rebate checks to low- and middle-income workers at an estimated cost of approximately $65 billion. His plan, to finance those rebates with an extra tax on oil companies, would reduce investment in refining and exploration, keeping oil prices higher than they would otherwise be.

I fail to see how giving me back some money that you’re just going to steal again from my next paycheck is going to solve 50 years of rampantly irresponsible entitlement programs and the deleterious effect said programs have had on the American public, which is now, by and large, a bunch of whiners and gimme, gimme sycophants who vote for whichever stinking rotten liar promises the most free stuff.

The poor effects of the Bush tax rebate as fiscal stimulus, however, let Feldstein now attack the Obama plan for a $1000 tax rebate.  Nothing wrong with that - McCain has nothing better however - but what Feldstein doesn’t say is that if you follow the logic of his two op-eds (and this is not something I would necessarily buy into) the conclusion should actually be that fiscal stimulus would work better if it ran through government spending.

Government will always do the most expensive and least efficient possible job of managing any given problem. Government has no motivation to solve any given problem because if it did, then it would have to shrink itself. How many bureaucrats do you know who would be willing to eliminate their own job?

How anyone could possibly justify tasering a restrained human being nine times is a mystery to me.

WINNFIELD, Louisiana (CNN) — A police officer shocked a handcuffed Baron “Scooter” Pikes nine times with a Taser after arresting him on a cocaine charge.

Baron Pikes, 21, was Tasered nine times by a police officer in January in Winnfield, Louisiana.

He stopped twitching after seven, according to a coroner’s report. Soon afterward, Pikes was dead.

Now the officer, since fired, could end up facing criminal charges in Pikes’ January death after medical examiners ruled it a homicide.

Dr. Randolph Williams, the Winn Parish coroner, told CNN the 21-year-old sawmill worker was jolted so many times by the 50,000-volt Taser that he might have been dead before the last two shocks were delivered.

Nine times for what? The man was not actively in the process of committing a violent crime when he was arrested. Nine times. He was handcuffed. Even if he was struggling and spitting, cursing and biting, or acting out violently I cannot imagine he was moving after nine taser shocks.

Nothing really shocks me anymore - I’ve seen too much of what humans are capable of. The longer I study our legal system though, the more I realize it is not designed to help citizens and protect us from one another. The legal system enables and encourages an us against them mentality between the bureaucrats who support the system and the segments of society who have decided that our system of rules is not for them.

While some of the lawbreakers are violent people who need to be put down like dogs that is the exception to the rule. In the case of Baron “Scooter” Pikes we have the typical legal authoritarianism against criminal anarchist scenario. The legalcrats tell us that Pikes got what was coming to him because he was being uncooperative. Death seems like a pretty harsh penalty for being uncooperative.

Williams, who ruled Pikes’ death a homicide in June after extensive study, said Nugent fired his Taser at Pikes six times in less than three minutes — shots recorded by a computer chip in the weapon’s handle. Then officers put Pikes in the back of a cruiser and drove him to their police station — where Nugent fired a seventh shot, directly against Pikes’ chest.

Folks, if you support this kind of behavior by your peace officers, then damn you to hell. No one needs to be tasered seven times in a row. If this guy was resisting after being tasered six times then he was superhuman, which I don’t believe for a second.

You think this could never happen to you? Just keep supporting the growth of the police state and roll the dice. In the mean time, I hope Mr. Pikes family sues the hell out of Winnfield. I hope the town goes bankrupt and the officers involved are convicted of felonies so they can never “serve and protect” anyone like this again.