Crazy, Lazy and Cheap

Now it turns out that guy who killed those police officers in Baton Rouge is part of the sovereign citizen movement, a group the FBI lists as domestic terrorists. This means he was crazy as well as a terrible person.

Have you read about these people? They sound legitimately crazy, lazy and cheap. The list of their adherents reads like humanity’s greatest hits and includes one of the Oklahoma City bombers and those winners who fought with the Bureau of Land Management because they didn’t want to pay taxes.

Sovereign citizens try to argue that they are not bound by any federal laws because the government is illegitimate and they are only citizens of they state in which they reside. Basically, they try to get out of the laws that bind the hoi polloi by arguing that they just don’t have to follow laws. I imagine that’s what they teach on the first day of law school: That people don’t have to follow laws if they declare they don’t believe in them. And of course, they refuse to pay taxes, not out of cheapness, but out of some brave protest against paying for services that benefit them.

These people believe the county sheriff is the highest law enforcement officer in the country (I guess since there are 356,000 county sheriffs in America, they each rule their own little fiefdoms), just to give you an idea of the level of logic here.

I read something once where sovereign citizens believe that if they send a very specifically worded letter to a judge, that judge will have to unlock their secret account in the Department of the Treasury and give them a bunch of cash. They must write these letters in red pen because red blood flows through their human veins or some nonsense. In these letters, they also write their names with weird capitalization and punctuation to differentiate their real selves from the corporate identity that the United States assigned them at birth, to which their parents consented by signing their birth certificates. I assume the sovereign citizen gift shop is filled with tinfoil hats of all sizes.

I have no patience for whatever nonsense people like these spout out. If you don’t feel like paying taxes or submitting to laws, stop waving the Gadsden flag and admit that you’re a cheap person who is trying to evade responsibility. If you really insist on opting out of taxes and federal laws, you should at least be intellectually consistent and reject any common benefits we receive from paying taxes and also reject any protection from those federal laws that you believe are illegitimate.

As high-minded as sovereign citizens try to make their cause sound, they just seem like lazy people who resort to the tantrum all lazy people throw when someone asks them to follow a rule: to scream “I shouldn’t have to!” There are plenty of things we “shouldn’t have to” do but we do them anyway because we’re adults. Join us.