Identity theft affects a person’s avatar, or his legal identity. Mischief against an avatar entangles a flesh-and-blood human being. (Photo Page 1, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 8, 2015)
By David Tulis
It’s hard to fix into the same spot questions about the coming financial meltdown and your personal legal status as a public person.
If my reading of economic theory and free markets is accurate, the republic faces a financial disaster that will ruin many common people on Main Street in Chattanooga. The main features of the debacle are loss of public confidence in the paper dollar; plunges in public markets; losses in the federal government of both financial credit and public compliance; civil strife; growing hatred of Uncle Sam; emboldened states’ rights; and inflation.
Free markets will be the answer to many problems after the deadwood of government controls and cartel capitalism is burned away. State solutions will be repudiated and much of life will drift toward being private.
But what about state people — people who are public actors? These include cops, retirees, TVA office staffers, soldiers, IRS agents and people who surveil metadata at the NSA. But the category of state people includes “civilians” whose legal identity is tied up with government and corporations.
Life of a natural person
The opposite of a public person is what we might call a natural or private person. Every newborn is a natural or private person until his parents get busy submitting him to the state. A few adults in the U.S. are natural or private persons, often out of conviction and as a matter of moral or religious principle
The man who declines to get a birth certificate and SSN for his newborn daughter wants her to be a private and natural person. That status is distinct from what is fair to call a public or corporate person. You and I are no doubt among the latter. I know only a few people in the former category, and among the men in that group several have fought for their liberty in court.
The private person is essentially INVISIBLE to the state and its creatures, namely corporations. Without the legal connections that create the avatar, the natural person lives a quiet and personable life in the natural and physical world, in the cash economy, enjoying personal relations and the exercise of ancient rights going back to the Magna Carta.
He can enjoy these rights even though the national government in the U.S. has long drifted toward absolutism and what the founding fathers such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson called tyranny or despotism.
Matters of common right
The private person travels the roads freely and not in commerce; he is not using the roadways for hire in the shipment of either goods or people. The private person exercises his rights to make a living for himself as a matter of common right, his activity innocent of all harm and among other human beings. His commerce is not based upon permission, and is personal in nature, not professional. (Professions such as engineering and accounting are regulated by law.) He lives life in a relational economy, invisible to those who would insist he has no right to act that way, and who would insist he appear before them to petition for permission to continue.
A private person marries as a matter of right at common law, and does not obtain a state marriage license. Under Obergefell v. Hodges, states have capitulated their ancient prerogatives to regulate marriage. States should be faulted for their presumption in acting against common law rights to marry, but at least ascertained marriage as being only between one woman and one man. A private person disregards the statutory regime entirely as illegitimate and not worthy of recognition. He marries at common right, knowing the marriage is enforceable, proprietary and binding if five conditions are met. (Capacity, consent, consummation, cohabitation and holding forth.) States should, at most, record marriages, and as the universal misreading of Obergefell will persist, they should back out of the marriage enterprise entirely. In Tennessee a group of legislators such as Rep. Rick Womick are thinking just that.
A private person has a legal identity in his enfleshment, one easily established by oath. Authorities who insist you must have a government-issued ID forget that a witness in a criminal or civil trial affirms as fact (if unrebutted) his identity by stating his name and place of residency. For the facts of a person’s identity to be established, one need do no more. A private person establishes his identity by similar means. These assertions of fact can be made a matter of legal record, such as by affidavit by one’s self or by another. Unrebutted testimony is presumed true.
A corporate person appears to have many advantages denied the private person. They come to him through his avatar, or legal persona or handle through which he is managed by the state, and through which his sins against the state are delivered upon the flesh and blood person. The corporate person acts through limited liability. He is subject to demands for vaccination, to proposals to receive free public schooling, to the duty to obtain permission to use the public roads. He is able to draw on Social Security benefits before and after retirement. He is able to sign up for SSI, or supplemental security income, if he has at least a partial disability. He is able easily to enter state academic sanctuaries such as University of Tennessee-Chattanooga and to obtain favors from civil authority, such as grants or subsidies for his business.
Voluntary compliance
His duty as a beneficiary of the public trust is to comply in every way and to make no dissent about the viability or the virtue of the public system. The public person does everything by permission, and is terrified by private initiative, relying on police for his personal protection and FDIC for securing a deposit at a local bank. He subjects himself to economic coercion that requires him to sign up children into the system, as one lie about IRS Form 1040s begets a train of other obeisances.
A public person accepts duties as his because everyone else assumes that duty is theirs, as well, though he never checks the law. A public person finds convenience in groupthink and being part of the public herd, and is glad to be a part of the great American way. His falling victim to identity theft is simply a cost of doing business (http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-identity-theft-sticks-you-with-hospital-bills-1438966007).
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