What We Owe, by Eric Peters

You owe because you owe and don’t ask questions. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

We are regularly told that we “owe” money to the government; it literally says this on the forms we’re obliged by law to fill out each year that oblige us to provide information that could be used against us by the same government that says we “owe” it money – and so much for the Fifth Amendment that says we have a right to not be forced to self-incriminate.

Kind of like the way the First Amendment doesn’t apply anymore when the government uses proxies such as “social media” to censor free speech; which is pretty clever, one must admit.

And the way the Fourth Amendment is suspended at airports and on the “public” – that is, government-controlled – roads, when the government’s courts say it’s “reasonable” to subject people to random searches, without probable cause to suspect a crime has been committed or is about to be committed – provided there is a “compelling” interest in randomly searching people just-because.

And so it goes.

But what – if anything – do we owe our fellow man?

It cannot be money or any other material thing – absent having incurred a debt of some kind – because if not, to say money or material things are “owed” is to say what a mugger says in a dark alley. Just without the mugger’s straightforwardness. Which is why, of course those who mug us legally do not use straightforward language. They use inverted language.

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