With Liberty and Justice for All?

I have heard stories of the poor being penalized in the United States. Stories such as the one here ,outrage the social justice freak in me. However, I read a story today that has taken the cake. While our government hands failing banks trillions of tax payer dollars, while this economy is creating homeless families in numbers not seen since the Great Depression, while jobs are being lost at an explosive rate, and the Fed can’t account for 9.7 trillion dollars of OUR money–while the government is evicting Americans from tent cities forcing them to shelters, New York has decided that charging the homeless rent is a good thing.  That’s right. Taking advantage of homeless people and families who are working and trying to save to get out of shelters are now being charged up to half of their income as rent. This only applies to the poor who are actually trying to make a better situation for themselves by finding and keeping jobs. The people who do not work, of course are not being forced to pay anything. (story link here)
The policy of rent for shelter was enacted in 1997, but never enforced until this month. I guess in a failing economy, when a city does not have the privilege of printing money out of thin air like Washington does, the appropriate course of action to get more money is to squeeze it out of every citizen who can cough it up. Usually this money grabbing scheme is carried out in tax hikes, or police ticketing for speeding at 3 whole miles over the speed limit. Somehow though, the sudden enforcement of this law is particularly disgusting and smacks of tyranny.

Lets get something straight. There are those who are a “soak” on tax payer dollars. Drug addicts who are homeless, those who will not support their children, drunks who can’t hold a buck in their pocket longer than it takes to buy a bottle from the corner liquor store are people who line up for shelter and food every night of the blessed year, and they are not ever turned away or forced to spend a single cent for it. Charging those who are working to get a leg up in an economy that keeps knocking them down, is only forcing them to stay in homeless shelters longer. Then again, this is what the Mafia would consider a “deal”. Protection for dollars. It’s a deal that never ends. It’s the same logic – pay, and you stay. Except the paying families will no longer be able to save for an apartment to get out. The more money they make, the more money government takes. Maybe they should all quit and collect welfare for life, because it seems as if that’s what the government would prefer.

WTF
has our country come to when we shovel billion upon billions upon more billions of dollars on big banks
then force the working homeless to shell out half of their wages to sleep in a cot in a room shared with 20 other people??

To Whom Do You Belong? Welcome to Class Warfare

America is at that awkward stage; it’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. – Claire Wolfe

Have you ever heard of the Agorist Class Theory? No? That’s alright because I am new to the idea myself. Agorism–simply stated–is “a stateless society of peaceful black markets.” What the Agorist Class Theory does is it reforms Marxim’s idea of the class struggle. Proponents argue that Marx was partly wrong and partly correct in his thinking on class warfare, but that he errs in his identification of the oppressor of the proletariat (the common man). Marxism, in a nutshell, maintains that the relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (those who own the means of production aka entrepreneurs and the like) is simply a continuation of the ancient practice of slavery.

Agorism and Marxism agree on the following premise: human society can be divided into at least two classes; one class is characterized by its control of the State and its extraction of unearned wealth from the other class.

Thus for the Agorist, the class struggle is not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but rather, the producing class (all workers and entrepreneurs) versus the Political class as identified by Charles Comte and Dunoyer some 150 years ago:

The political class is the parasitic class that acquires its livelihood via the “political means”–through “confiscation, taxation, and other forms of coercion.” Their victims are the rest of us–the productive class–those who make their living through peaceful and honest means of any sort, such as a worker and an entrepreneur.

I believe the agorists to be correct in their revision of Marx’s idea on class and a class struggle certainly does exist in society. If you would like to be properly introduced to this idea, then I suggest that you read Agorist Class Theory by Wally Conger. The PDF is only 38 pages in length.