Guapo wrote:Where does it say that we own the government in the constitution?

If you have a mortgage, who owns your house: you or the bank?

Anything that is in debt is owned by the creditors, is it not?

First, I'll say that I disagree with your basic argument. The basic principle of democracy (as I'm sure your political science classes have taught) is that sovereignty rests with the people. To argue a dististinction from "ownership," while in the limited sense accurate, represents in my view a mis-placed emphasis on semantics.

Nevertheless, even taking your logic, it is arguable that we do "own" the government.

http://www.mygovcost.org/2012/09/16/who ... 2-edition/

According to this information, US individuals and institutions, either privately, or through retirement funds (which I would argue also belong to the citizens they represent) "owns" over two-thirds of US government debt - well over a controling interest, in the business sense.

Yeah, I think you're dealing with semantics when your real gripe is that you pay taxes and you have very little control over how those taxes are spent. You would rather not pay taxes, keep your money, and have little or no government. There are countries in the world where there is little government and taxes are not collected. Of course, those countries are very poor and if you want to enforce a contract you better have your guns to do it. Libertarians want a society where they can make a nice living but they don't have to pay taxes that allow for that nice living to be made. Without a strong government no one had to recognize your property, there is no one to enforce any contracts you make, and there is no infrastructure necessary for business to be transacted. A wealthy Libertarian society is inherently impossible. Saying we don't own government sounds clever, but we live in a free society with the ability to make a nice living (even after taxes) and I have no problem writing checks to the government to make sure that continues

RW, that chart is vastly misleading. One of those "institutions" is the federal reserve. See here.

When you break it down into actual numbers, rather than just lumping everything into one, you see that the federal reserve is the largest debt holder.

The Federal Reserve is privately owned. We don't own any of it. It's bankers and bankers alone.

What you're misunderstanding is that the US Federal Government is not a democracy. It's supposed to be a Republic, but that's disappearing, too. It's an oligarchic republic now.

It's not semantics to say that because we have NO function of ownership that we don't own it. Freeman can come up with whatever assumptions he wants about what my "real gripe" is, but it's all simply his assumptions. I'm dealing with facts. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but everyone is not entitled to their own facts.