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Certainly citizens create governments in the first place but that doesn't change the fact that without government you can't maintain the complex society these "sovereign citizens" take for granted. Without it there are no roads. There are no trucks. There are no guns. Obviously that doesn't mean we have to love our current governments. But we should recognize the benefits they provide.

As for the Whiskey Rebellion, I'm actually pretty well informed. I've read most of the publicly available books and taken advantage of local resources. I live in Western PA. In fact, spent bullets from the Battle of Bower Hill could well have landed on what is now my front yard. The most recent work, William Hogeland's The Whiskey Rebellion is very readable and gives a good overview of frontier discontent with eastern governments.

But I would say that a good place to start would be the classic The Whiskey Rebellion by Thomas Slaughter. It covers the basic misconceptions such as the idea that the unrest was due to whiskey itself. You see, transportation was so difficult that distilling was the only way for trans-Appalachian farmers to get their crops to market with a chance to make a profit. Also whiskey was relatively compact, stable, and fungible. With the chronic shortage of hard currency it was frequently used as a substitute medium of exchange. In the East a tax on whiskey was a tax on entertainment. In the West a tax on whiskey was a tax on life. A tax far too many families couldn't afford.

Westerners objected to the whiskey tax on this basis. Not that the central government didn't have the authority to tax them but that the tax was punitive in the backwoods. It was especially galling given that the government was failing to do what Westerners wanted most: exterminate the Indians. After Falling Timbers life became much safer for the white invaders and Western discontent subsided somewhat though periodic agrarian unrest remained a fact of life in the new nation until 1811 when the 1st Bank of the United States (with its tight money policies) lost its charter.

The reviews are BY FAR the most entertaining thing about this book...

https://www.amazon.com/Stronger-Together-Hillary-Rodham-Clinton/product-reviews/1501161733/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_acr_sr?ie=UTF8

Read this book..

You look up the book on Amazon and the guy they use for a quote is Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Guy Yarvin), the man who gave us the "Dark Enlightenment" during the Obama years. That the blurb mentions "detrimental robots" makes me ask, is this guy up on the Shaver Mystery, does he believe that there are underground robots in caverns or is it a metaphor?

Right wing? Yeah... Right. Try reading his book here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00BLPJNWE?pc_redir=1395542195&robot_redir=1

FBI murders surrendered Oregon rancher LaVoy Finicum with his hands up. Part 2, as per eye witness Victoria Sharp. Jan 27, 2016. 55-year-old veteran, a published author (http://www.amazon.com/Only-Blood-Suffering-LAVOY-FINICUM/dp/193773594X), and an expectant grandfather LaVoy Finicum is survived by his wife and 11 children, 7 of whom were adopted.

>Government agencies should not be used to intimidate and harass political opponents. Period. If you accept such practices then you accept tyranny.

.... and you disagree with that statement because if you agree with it then you have to accept that a wrong was committed by a government agency. It's not that these groups shouldn't have had their applications examined. It's that they were specifically targeted to be harassed by the government for political reasons. When the government uses its force to silence dissent then you have the beginnings of tyranny. That's not a "knee-jerk reactionary" as you call it, that's fact.

You might want to step back to the Bush days and read this book by a liberal who was pointing out why actions just like what the IRS did were so dangerous when the Bush administration did them. She was right of course. She's also smart enough to put politics aside and say that the same actions by the Obama administration are equally as bad.

epic fail. He needs to read War is a Racket.

> No, deciding that US policy is world domination of both friend and foe is conspiracy theroy

The US has a long documented history of overthrowing the governments of our "allies" -- ask most people from Australia or New Zealand, for example. Or ask Saddam Hussein.

Heck, we even have a history of waging literal terrorist attacks on our allies, e.g. Operation Gladio, push our allies to the political right and to be more militaristic.

We've also overthrown dozens of countries, both democratic and non-democratic alike. Former State Dept. historian William Blum wrote a book on the topic, Killing Hope.

As to the cited quote about us taking over the world, that is one journalists opinion from reading Pentagon documents -- and our actions match his summary very, very well.

> "Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival…to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union and southwest Asia." -- US Dept. of Defense Planning Guide, 1992, announcing its plan to dominate the world.