Ron Paul at DUI School

Ron Paul at DUI School

by John Armstrong

strongarmedjohn@yahoo.com <mailto:strongarmedjohn%40yahoo.com>

a.. So what is your government really attempting to accomplish by creating and enforcing the laws that brought you here today?

To reduce the highway mortality rate from alcohol and drug impairment requires altering culturally rooted behaviors. Behavior-al change may best be accomplished through ongoing programs of vigorous enforcement, coupled with ambitious education and information activities. Thus, there is a broad range of issues involved with alcohol and drug enforcement on the highway. Effective DWI Statutes.

Let me break this down for you:

Altering culturally rooted behaviors = Changing the way people act by changing the way they think.

Ambitious education and information activities = propaganda (like the stuff we've been watching in this class the government made you attend because you broke a law they created even though you didn't harm anyone).

Just in case I wasn't clear enough, altering culturally rooted behaviors with ambitious education and enforcement activities has a simpler name: Brainwashing. And unfortunately, they are very good at it.

Want a couple of examples? Fill in the blanks. The number one leading cause of death in America is _________. A drunk behind the wheel of a car is as dangerous as a ___________ _____. If you said, "smoking" or "obesity" for the first one and "loaded gun" the second one, give yourself a gold star.

What do both of these things have in common? Both play on fears, and people who are afraid are easier to control.

A decade ago it was smokers who were the threat. In order to address this "issue" our government used our money to fund a ton of questionable "scientific" studies (about things like the DANGER of second hand smoke for instance). This caused people who weren't personally affected by the freedom limiting laws these studies ushered in to clamor for them because of the "safety" they provided. The propaganda was so good that the people who chose to smoke went from being someone who smoked to a being a "smoker" which carried a massively negative connotation. When people think that your choice to smoke is going to kill them, it's hard to find anyone to stand up for your right to do with your body what you please. And because of the dehumanizing collectivist "smoker" description, nobody cares if your rights are violated. Overweight (by FDA description) people are next as we gear up for the War on Obesity.

The loaded gun thing is no different. When a person who drives after having a few drinks turns into a "drunk driver", it's hard to find someone who doesn't believe that you got what was coming to you. Think of how an overwhelming majority of people thing of "drunk drivers". As I'll demonstrate later, this "loaded gun" statement is absolutely ridiculous, but so is the statement "with liberty and justice for all" yet millions of school kids recite and believe it daily.

Ask yourself this question: What is really scarier, a drunk driver mowing you down in cold blood or a government who decides what's best for the collective whole regardless of its impact on the individual and then uses its basically unlimited financial and media power to convince the masses that it's not only okay to create laws that interfere with individual rights but outright necessary before these "evil-doers" kill every innocent child in America?

a.. Were you really drunk when you were arrested?

Does it even matter? What is an "Effective DWI Statute"?

As we consider these questions, it is important to keep in mind that the real purpose of these laws is to alter culturally rooted behaviors, not to determine whether or not you actually deserve to have your freedom (financial, employment, time, unalienable rights) taken from you because of your actions. This is obvious from the following statement found in the same document cited above:

While substances affect different individuals in differing degrees, laws should emphasize the impairment of the driver-not the type, legal or illegal, or even the amount of the substance ingested. The effects of alcohol consumption are well known. Although they vary with the individuals consuming it, all persons are thought to be impaired by alcohol when its concentration in the blood (BAC) reaches 0.08 percent. Statutes should provide that presumptive evidence, per se, exists to suggest that a driver's ability to operate a motor vehicle is impaired when his BAC exceeds

0.08 percent.

Think about this for a second. This is a publication from our federal government telling the states how they should construct their laws to alter behavior. It openly states that you as an individual may not have actually been impaired when you were arrested, but that matters none.

This .08 number is where all persons are thought to be impaired.

Below is a section from the Constitution's 5th Amendment.

It reads:

No person...shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.

What does that mean and how does it relate to the .08 thing? Before I get into that, let's look at something else from that little "Highway Safety Desk Book."

The law should require all drivers to submit to a chemical test, or tests, at the option of the arresting officer, to determine the level of alcohol and/or drugs in their blood, as a condition of holding a driver's license. Consent to a chemical test should also be implied when a driver is incapacitated or killed while driving a motor vehicle.

In order to deter impaired driving, the penalty must be sufficient to outweigh the relatively low risk of apprehension.

"No Person" = an individual = you. As an individual you have individual rights, not collective guilt because of an arbitrary government selected number representing the amount of alcohol in the bloodstream of a "drunk driver."

Due process = innocent until proven guilty. In this particular case, that means proven to be impaired--not THOUGHT TO BE IMPAIRED because of an arbitrary number.

Another tenet of due process is that the "punishment should fit the crime." The "crime" most people commit when charged with a DUI is making wide turns, swerving, or failure to maintain control of a vehicle. The punishment recommended here obviously violates this Constitutional right. You are being punished not only for you, but also for everyone else who doesn't get caught since there is a "relatively low risk of apprehension." Why is there a "relatively low risk of apprehension"?

Because the overwhelming majority of drunk drivers make it home safely, eat something fattening, and pass out (or do other things if they happen to come home with someone else they met at a bar, but that's a whole different story).

And I may be crazy but "requiring drivers to submit to a chemical test" or else lose the liberty that comes from driving seems an awful lot like testifying against yourself since whatever you blow is certainly going to be used against you in court.

Were you deprived of life? How have you been affected because of this "crime" you committed although you hurt nobody?

Were you deprived of liberty? Were you put in jail? Are you able to drive freely?

Were you deprived of property? Your money is your property. How much of that have you sacrificed individually in order to help your government alter culturally rooted behaviors? Was your car towed without your consent? Did you have to pay to retrieve it? If you have multiple offenses, was your vehicle seized and sold at auction? If so, were you compensated for it?

a.. Well if those things are true, how has this happened?

I know history and government classes were boring and the Constitution may not mean much to you, but it is an incredible document. In actuality it is a Contract between "We the People" and our government. As with any contract, when one party benefits from violating the contract, the other party suffers. Think of it like this: if you had a contract with someone to build a house for you and they knew you'd never read the Contract or they could convince you that it was "too complicated" to try and understand, the person building your house could build it with substandard materials and charge even more than what was in the contract and you would may be upset but you'd have no recourse since you hadn't read the contract.

Who would benefit? The contractor. Who would suffer? You. Our federal government is the contractor in this example, and you are still you.

On the other hand, if you wanted to allow the contractor to build you a brick house instead of the vinyl one in the original contract, you could-by changing the contract. We can change ours-it's called an "Amendment" (amend means change).

a.. So what's the purpose of this Contract?

To establish a government that protects the freedom of the people. That's it.

And how does the Contract do this? By severely limiting the role of the federal government. The people who wrote it knew things would change, that's why they put a way in there to change it, complete with easy to read instructions. And only the people can change it, not the government. They knew how tyrannical a government could become if it were allowed to change the Contract without the direct consent of the people. As Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."

Every President and Congressman takes an Oath of Office to "Preserve, Protect, and Defend the Constitution of the United States of America" (aka your rights). They don't swear in to "Protect Americans from drunk drivers" or to "Defend people against poor personal choices which may kill them."

a.. But it's the state that charged me with this crime, not the federal government.

Yes, that may be true. And the states may have a right to make a law restricting drunk driving (as long as your rights aren't violated in the process) according to the 10th Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

But consider two things: The reason these laws exist in their current form is due to Federal Government suggestions. If States don't comply with these "suggestions", they don't receive funding for highway projects. Secondly, enforcing these tyrannical laws wouldn't be possible without federal government funding. And if the states don't do what the federal government tells them to do, they not only lose highway funds, they lose out on enforcement funds as well. This is how they mandate a "national" drinking age which ironically enough was raised due to MADD lobbying as a way to reduce underage impaired driving fatalities (which it didn't). But it did expand the role of the federal government.

I won't bore you with many more history details, but trust me when I tell you that nobody who truly understands the purpose of the Constitution (ensure freedom, limit the federal government) would ever read this line:

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

Which is found in Article 1, Section 8 and think that the government has a right to create programs to fund aggressive DWI enforcement. But this is exactly the clause cited as the reason they have power to do so. It's called the "Commerce Clause" and was meant to, for example, keep someone in Virginia who sent money to a horse farmer in Kentucky from being screwed over and never receiving a horse due to the horse farmer's claiming "you're in Virginia; I'm in Kentucky; screw you."

But now it somehow means that they can take money from you and give it to a state law enforcement office in order to deprive you of your God-given rights in an attempt to alter your behavior through vigorous enforcement of effective DWI statutes.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but your government is not supposed to protect you from your own stupid decisions.

But it isn't supposed to punish you for them either unless you hurt someone else. If you'd killed or hurt yourself when you were driving drunk, too bad.

If you had hurt or killed someone else, you should be in prison or worse.

If you'd broken something, you should have been made to pay for it. But you shouldn't be a "criminal" for making a poor personal decision that harmed nobody. Even the government produced "Handbook" I've cited doesn't say that the purpose is to "prevent people from killing or hurting other people" it is to "reduce highway mortality rate" (by violating your Constitutional rights in order to brainwash the public).

The government is supposed to protect your liberty not find any way possible to take it. Here's another Thomas Jefferson (he was a smart dude) quote about that:

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law', because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

a.. So who really gets harmed by your "criminal" activity?

Organizations like M.A.D.D. would have you believe that the people who are harmed are the "innocent victims" slaughtered by maniacal sociopathic drunks. These victims are always sweet little prom queens who made straight A's and had promising futures until people like you ripped it all away. They started this propaganda campaign full swing back in the 1980's (which is why many of the videos you've seen in this class are from that era). Drinking related accidents increased last year, so the propaganda machine is gearing back up for another run in an attempt to get rid of drunk driving permanently by getting the government to force auto manufacturers to install the locking devices on all cars and developing technology to tell if you've been drinking (along with more aggressive DUI enforcement of course).

There was a time when an officer who pulled you over when you were drunk would ask you to pour out your beer, follow you home to make sure you made it safely, or if you were really messed up even take you home and leave your car sitting until you could return the next day to get it.

So I ask you again, who is really being harmed by your "criminal activity"?

1. The American Taxpayer. In 2008 alone, over $135,000,000 in taxpayer money was spent by the NHTSA (the people who wrote the report I cited earlier) solely on DWI issues. Of course this agency is just one division of the Department of Transportation that just requested $68,199,000,000 (That's $68 Billion) to do all kinds of fun stuff with in

2009 to keep us all "safe." You could buy a lot of cab rides with that.

2. Individuals. Like you.

As the old maxim states: there are three types of lies:

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. And it is the third type that help feed the first and second types in order to turn people who drive after drinking into "drunk drivers." Let's take a different look at the numbers:

In 2006: 38,588 people died in car crashes. 15,945 were alcohol related of those 11,180 were single vehicle crashes.

In 1994: 36,254 people died in car crashes. 14,814 were alcohol related of those 10,017 were single car crashes.

First of all let's take out those single car crashes. Why should the single car crashes be excluded? It's not the government's job to enact laws to protect you from yourself. If it were, they could make you go on a diet or force you to sleep 8 hours a night. The notion of protecting you from you is preposterous (in the words of Ron Paul) and in absolutely no way represents what America is supposed to be about. Other people who shouldn't be included are the people who voluntarily choose to get in the car with a drunk driver and the kids who don't have a choice and are the responsibility of the irresponsible person driving.

Once we take those people out of the statistics, you find that there were 4765 innocent people killed by drunk drivers in 2006 and

4797 killed in 1994.

So after spending literally Billions of Dollars chasing the myth of "Safety" 32 more people were killed by drunk drivers in 2006 than in 1994.

While I am sure the purveyors of "ambitious education" and "information activities" would take these same statistics and cite a 10+% decrease in alcohol related fatalities, the point is missed. The only people who didn't "deserve" to die were the ones who were driving sober when an individual who was driving after drinking hit them (and is there any way to definitively know that this wouldn't have happened if the drunk guy had been sober? Perhaps that's why it's alcohol "related" instead of alcohol "caused" fatalities)

Let's do a little comparison:

4797 people were killed in a collision involving an individual who had been drinking.
22,242 died of poisoning (many by side effects of "safe"
government approved prescription drugs)
15,764 died from a fall.
12,574 died of suffocation.
1,200,000 adults were arrested for DUI.

Now get this-that Million Plus was only 2.9% of people who said that they had driven after drinking. That means that if everyone who actually admitted driving after drinking did it only once there were over 41,000,000 chances for a "drunk driver" to kill someone else. 4797 isn't that many. In fact, only .01% of drunk drivers kill someone (and that's assuming that every time they kill someone it's only one). That's one person killed for every 10,000 times someone drives drunk. What happens the other 9,999 times? The individual driving after drinking at worst either kills or hurts himself and possibly passengers who chose to get in the car, hurt someone in another car without killing them, or in most cases makes it home safely.

So the next time you hear some ridiculous propaganda about how a drunk driver is as dangerous as a loaded gun, you can ask the speaker of such propaganda which one they'd rather take their chances with. Someone would have to be as poorly skilled in shooting a gun as the government is good at creating emotional, fear based, freedom destroying, unconstitutional decisions in order to actually shoot you with those kind of odds.

There is absolutely nothing that justifies these tyrannical, life- destroying laws. It is sad that a few thousand people a year die because people drive after drinking. But by creating an "issue"
called "drunk driving" and creating criminals called "drunk drivers" and selling it through emotional propaganda, the general population goes mindlessly along with the song and dance. Less than 5,000 lives lost despite the laws vs. 1+ million lives ruined annually as a direct result of these laws. Think about that.

The only way this type of legislation could possibly be justified is through flawed logic and the assumption that even 5000 lives are too many to lose if something can be done about it. The flaw is the assumption that what they are doing about it actually works. If it did, there would be zero fatalities. The tragedy is that individuals' lives are destroyed because of the way the issue is addressed.

Keep in mind that our government doesn't solve problems; it addresses issues. Actually solving problems would reduce the size and power of the government, so it makes much more sense to create issues and then make laws to address them. Laws can't make you a better person. They can only make you a criminal. But these laws are for the "common good", I suppose. I mean, what parent deserves to see their kid die because of a "drunk driver"? We could prevent every crime in America. All we'd have to do is put everyone in prison. This idea of a "Common Good" isn't a new idea.

The following line is the first tenet of the platform of another historical figure you've heard of:

COMMON GOOD BEFORE INDIVIDUAL GOOD

You know whose platform that was a part of? A little guy with a funny moustache from Germany named Adolf.

The laws as they are currently enforced haven't been around that long, but we're reaching the point that people don't really question them anymore. As Thomas Paine wrote in the introduction to Common

Sense:

A long habit of not thinking a thing Wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.

Don't most people at least believe that it's "not wrong" to have DUI laws? By merely mentioning that these laws may be wrong there is certainly an "outcry in defense of custom", i.e. keeping the laws the way they are or even toughening them. Yet I am here to say that these laws are not right despite their superficial appearance of being so.

And as Dresden James said:

When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.

I'm sorry if I seem like a lunatic to you, but I'm not one complain about something and then sit idly by. When I wake up to something, I share it with as many people as possible because I also believe Jefferson when he wrote, "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."

This DUI thing is just the beginning. When you understand the insanity of everything our federal government does that starts with the "War on" or in the name of "safety" you will be up in arms, figuratively if not literally.

Unfortunately, you are a criminal now. Very few people will stand up for you because they haven't suffered and have been convinced that you deserve to suffer because of your heinous act of having a few beers after work and subsequently turning too widely into your driveway. Had you actually hurt someone, you'd be in jail-not in this class. Few will stand up for you now because you are a criminal.

As is written in a famous poem about Nazi Germany:

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

If you can see what's really going on here, will you use your 1st Amendment right to stand up for others while you still can or will you just be glad to get your certificate and go home? Either way it's your choice. Just like driving home after drinking should be.

Viva Liberty!