Tonight a son asks me to look over papers he will submit to a corporate employer. The arrangement for him to make sandwiches for you and other customers brings him to a legal apex, a balancing point. If he steps ahead, submits the papers, is engaged, has his name placed on the schedule and receives wages in Federal Reserve Notes or accepted electronic equivalents, he allows presumptions about tax liability and his legal status to attach themselves to him.
He becomes a federally identifiable employee. He is an actor in the official and regulated economy. He is not working for himself. As an employee, he is not exercising a right to make a living. He is rather operating on a legal plane under federal statute. It might be declared that he radiates prima facie evidence that he is a U.S. person, a person subject to compulsion, a person subject to claims and obligations rising from customary interpretations of tax law upon his wages. He emanates, if you will, a set of facts that make him presumptively not free, but an employee. ‡
Engagement in the official tapeworm economy puts him with many Caucasian middle and upper class people.
Several kinds of people avoid this economy. Immigrants, for one, out of fear of deportation, eschew the regulated and taxed economy in Chattanooga. Others are people of legal principle who operate as free men; I would include in this group a handful of free men and others standing on ancient rights such as the right to travel. Another set would include scofflaws, who accept they are liable to claims from that economy and its regulators, but who simply refuse, in a rebellious and contumacious spirit, to cooperate. Such people border on the anarchist, and would reject even constitutional and lawful claims upon them. They reject God’s tithe as much as the U.S. income tax.
Undeclared people in Beijing; declared one in Chattanooga
Undocumented people are a growing phenomenon not just in the U.S. and Western countries facing financial crisis, but in China.
Beijing’s deadly one-child policy, called jihua shengyu, is translated as family planning, but encompasses a grander idea of controlling population growth pursuant to society’s needs. As grand as its ideals may be, China is suffering from a population implosion and a graying of its population. The ban on children has created a class of “black permit” children, or illegal and undocumented children. Three million a year are born by hook and crook to parents intent on refusing compliance with the law. Wealthy people pay fines to have second or third children. Others take part in “birth tourism” by birthing a baby in Hong Kong, or fake divorces, bribe physicians to certifying a second child as a twin or taking drugs to ensure triplets.
I mention the “black permit” children of China because Chattanooga has them, too. One Tulis son, however, is not among them.
To land his job, he fills out a form W-4, the “employee’s withholding certificate allowance,” a U.S. department of treasury internal revenue service document “so that your employer can withhold the correct federal income tax from your pay.” The son signs his name on a line that says, “Under penalties of perjury, I declare that I have examined this certificate and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it is true, correct, and complete.” He has done no research on whether there is any federal tax due from his pay. He cannot possibly have examined the form to know if it is correct. The boy’s name, address and social security number turn the key to lock him, for now, out of the free market.
Next is Form I-9, employment eligibility verification, from the federal department of homeland security, U.S. citizenship and immigration services. Tulis gives his DOB, SSN, address (street name and number) and signs under penalty of perjury. He checks the box that is is “a citizen of the United States.”
Presumptions of liability
Under terms of that document it is demanded that he present either (or both) a social security card or a birth certificate. Now the birth certificate from Georgia’s state registrar and custodian and director of vital records, gives his name as Josiah Eduard Tulis. The social security card, which the instructions demand he sign right away, identifies him as JOSIAH EDUARD TULIS. Though he has not signed the social security card, as you can see, once he does, he consents to have his flesh and blood person, the natural person in his persona propria, to be custodian for a legally separate entity, a legal avatar, JOSIAH EDUARD TULIS, by which means government will threaten him, order him about, control him until he dies and lies cold in the grave. Not only is that avatar and artificial and corporate identity subject to commercial government, but the harrowing experiences of identity theft or identity confusion that strike flesh and blood people.
Unless, of course, he sues for liberty either by leaving employment and working for himself under God and under protection of his constitutional rights in an unregulated calling, or by suing for rescission of contract in chancery court, claiming constructive fraud against Uncle and his social security administration, and freeing himself from the number that converts him into a sort of chattel.
— David Tulis hosts Nooganomics.com live weekdays on Noogaradio 92.7 FM in Chattanooga.
‡ Minority may save him. Nothing he does legally as a minor is binding, and can be denied under the presumption of unfitness because of lack of legal consent to contract.
Sources: — Kim Wall, “What China’s ‘One-Child Policy’ Really Looks Like — a View from the Grassroots,” Tealeafnation.com, March 17, 2013
— Malcolm Moore, “Chinese hiding three million babies a year,” The Telegraph (telegraph.co.uk), May 30, 2010. One man, Fu Yang, with seven daughters, has had to flee across three provinces and hide children with friends.
— Malcolm Moore, “336 million abortions under China’s one-child policy,” The Telegraph (telegraph.co.uk), March 15, 2013. This figure since 1971 seems tiny — only 13 million abortions a year under one-child law pressure.
