Radical Views on Individual Rights and Freedoms

I had a recent discussion with a friend who holds some radical views on certain topics. I address 3 specific claims that he made during our discussion.

Claim 1: Roads are completely funded by gas taxes

This claim is really neither here nor there. I believe claims such as this one are made as part of the larger claim that we shouldn’t have to pay income tax.

Now often this claim is not made in reference to any particular country, state, or province, so it it hard to address (because different countries will have different policies on things like this).

Based on the following links it appears that in the United States most of the Fuel tax is applied to the development of roads, but it is not clear whether or not this covers *all* road infrastructure. I have also included 2 links to the BC government website which show that the PST does contribute to the fund to pay for roads in addition to the motor fuel tax.

Since roads are built out of the general budget, it is very hard to track down exactly which monies have been applied to building roads. I consider the point moot as it doesn’t really matter whether the money for our roads come from income tax or gas taxes or both. They come from taxes one way or the other. Of course conservatives who are philosophically opposed to income tax might (certainly would) take a different position on the importance of this point.

http://www.sbr.gov.bc.ca/business/Consumer_Taxes/Provincial_Sales_Tax/about.htm
“… an important source of funding which is used to support British Columbia’s roads, schools, hospitals and other community services.”

http://www.sbr.gov.bc.ca/business/Consumer_Taxes/Motor_Fuel_Tax/mft.htm
“British Columbia’s Motor Fuel Tax is made up of two components: provincial and dedicated taxes. The provincial portion goes to general revenue and helps pay for a wide range of government programs, such as health care and education. The dedicated portion goes to the BC Transportation and Financing Authority, Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority and the BC Transportation Authority
to help finance transportation projects in various parts of the province.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax
“In the United States, the fuel tax receipts are often dedicated or hypothecated to transportation projects so that the fuel tax is considered by many a user fee. In other countries, the fuel tax is a source of general revenue.”

http://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2009/05/do-roads-pay-for-themselves.html
“State motor fuel tax is collected from all over the state and goes into a single pool of revenue—about one quarter of which goes to fund education, and about three-quarters of which goes to the state’s highway fund, where it is spent on transportation uses and some non-transportation functions of government.

Then the state receives federal funds as the state’s share of the federal fuel tax; about 70 cents of every gas tax dollar Texans send to Washington comes back for road use.”

Claim 2: Income Tax Unconstitutional

I’ve heard this one a few different times from a few different people so I thought it might actually have legs. If you do a search on Google you’ll surely run across this short essay by a man who is convinced of the unconstitutionality of income tax:

http://www.prolognet.qc.ca/clyde/tax.htm
This author argues that income tax is unconstitutional and thus is illegal in Canada. He cites sections of the BNA (British North America Act) which he claims prohibits the fedreal government from imposing direct taxation on its individuals. He also cites the case of a deceased Manitoba resident named Gerry Hart, who allegedly avoided paying income tax for 50 years and won all of his 22 court cases against revenue Canada when they attempted to retrieve the money.

When I decided to look into the case of Gerry Hart, I found this page:

http://www.ownlife.com/tax/cases.htm

This page lists a number of court cases in Canadian history where individuals have attempted to fight income tax. In all cases, the courts upheld that the federal government CAN indeed charge income tax. In addition this page addressed the claims about Gerry Hart:

“the legend appeared in the Michael Journal, a somewhat religious newspaper produced in Quebec and distributed, for free, throughout Canada.

No case has been published which involved the making, by Gerry Hart or his company (Hart Electronics Limited), of a successful argument that the federal Income Tax Act is unconstitutional.”

So this claim appears to be a myth.

Claim 3: You don’t need a driver’s license or insurance to drive a car.

When the claim was made, the claimant did not know whether this was limited to a particular jurisdiction or if it was for any jurisdiction in the British Commonwealth. A little bit of Google searching has answered the question:

1. This is a debatable issue in the United States.
2. In Canada there is no debate.

In Canada it is clear that there no such “right to travel”. Driving is a privilege, NOT a right (http://fightyourtickets.ca/law/right-to-drive/): “Section 31. Driving a privilege:”

The United States situation is far more convoluted and it owes to its tumultuous history.

If you do a search on Google for “Right to travel” you’ll discover a slough of websites that are run by “patiots” and “freedom fighters”. You’ll almost always find that these sites are linked to, or contain information about, conspiracy theories such as the NWO or FEMA death camps. All of these sites are showing the same information and citing the same sources to argue that Driving is a right that is protected under the constitution of the United states (under the section of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness) as a right and not a privilege. They all cite a number of court cases to support their point, but the main court case that gives this position legs is the supreme court case Thompson vs. Smith, 154 SE 579 where they quote:
“The Right of the Citizen to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, either by horse drawn carriage or by automobile, is not a mere privilege which a city can prohibit or permit at will, but a common Right which he has under the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

If you dig you can even find a pre-filled afidavit on which you can fill in your name and state to present to the court to declare that you don’t need to have a driver’s license in order to drive. (http://wgns.net/LegalResearch/PDF/AFFIDAVITS/Aff-RighttoTravel.pdf)

Now this has not been tested in court recently (as far as I can tell in the past 60 years) so I would suspect that these arguments would hold any water in a court these days. There was a case in 1986 where someone tried to argue similarly and lost (http://www.stormfront.org/forum/sitemap/index.php/t-18216.html – 03/27/86 The City of Spokane, v. Julie Anne Port), but the ameteur commentators insist that she simply made mistakes in her arguments.

I could not find any reputable sources that even commented on the issue. This yahoo answers thread (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080825104610AA0HxeH) contained a decent response:

“This question gets asked and asked and asked here. There are also many many many court opionions that have addressed what you have asked. The Constitution does not address flying planes without a license or hacking into someone’s computer. Doesn’t mean you can though. The Constitution is a guideline that is continually interpreted by the Supreme Court.

You have a legal right to drive. On the cases you list, you gloss over statements the court makes like may not prohibit AT WILL or WITHOUT DUE PROCESS. State and federal government cannot deprive you of the right to drive “just becase”. They can, however, enact laws that protect the rights of every driver on the road – like making sure a 5 year old isn’t behind the wheel, or that someone who is legally blind is not behind the wheel, or requiring licenses and registrations so that if you are in an accident there is a way for you to seek reimbursement, to put up toll booths to pay for road construction, to ensure that cars being driven have passed inspection so that wheels don’t come flying off cars, to put up traffic signals so there is order to traffic flow, etc.

As you present in Boggs – “statutes that violate…..common right and common reason are null and void”. It is obviously common right and common reason to set up a system to regulate traffic and drivers. It is not a violation of this right to require that you stop at stop signs, drive at reasonable speeds, lose your license for driving while intoxicated, etc. If states did not require this, other people on the road would be deprived of “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.”

Any reasonable person must realize that licenses are important for public safety. This is one major reason for the disagreements between the left and the right in the states. Many from the south are fixated on individual rights to the exclusion of consideration to how those rights affect others. That is where these types of bogus arguments come from. I mean, really!

Refernces:
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/39244

http://www.landrights.com/The%20Charles%20Sprinkler%20File.htm

http://wgns.net/LegalResearch/PDF/AFFIDAVITS/Aff-RighttoTravel.pdf
This one is particularly entertaining:

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/sitemap/index.php/t-18216.html
(03/27/86 The City of Spokane, v. Julie Anne Port)

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080825104610AA0HxeH
“This question gets asked and asked and asked here. There are also many many many court opionions that have addressed what you have asked. The Constitution does not address flying planes without a license or hacking into someone’s computer. Doesn’t mean you can though. The Constitution is a guideline that is continually interpreted by the Supreme Court.

You have a legal right to drive. On the cases you list, you gloss over statements the court makes like may not prohibit AT WILL or WITHOUT DUE PROCESS. State and federal government cannot deprive you of the right to drive “just becase”. They can, however, enact laws that protect the rights of every driver on the road – like making sure a 5 year old isn’t behind the wheel, or that someone who is legally blind is not behind the wheel, or requiring licenses and registrations so that if you are in an accident there is a way for you to seek reimbursement, to put up toll booths to pay for road construction, to ensure that cars being driven have passed inspection so that wheels don’t come flying off cars, to put up traffic signals so there is order to traffic flow, etc.

As you present in Boggs – “statutes that violate…..common right and common reason are null and void”. It is obviously common right and common reason to set up a system to regulate traffic and drivers. It is not a violation of this right to require that you stop at stop signs, drive at reasonable speeds, lose your license for driving while intoxicated, etc. If states did not require this, other people on the road would be deprived of “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.”

http://www.uslawbooks.com/travel/travelcites.htm

http://www.bcrevolution.ca/bc_court_of_appeal.htm
http://fightyourtickets.ca/law/right-to-drive/

Open Source Business Models

Looking at open source business models, it can be difficult to find something that looks viable. Here are a few models along with my assessment of their pros and cons.

1. Pay for support and Consulting

In this model you provide the software for free and open source, but charge for consulting and support.

Pros:

  • Easy model to understand – you just charge an hourly rate for consulting and support.

Cons:

  • Since you don’t get paid for the 90% of your time that you spend developing the software itself, you are forced to charge 1000% of your required hourly rate just to make ends meet.
  • You would be better off finding another open source project that someone else is sweating over and just charge for support on that one. Don’t waste your time developing anything new.
  • If you insist on this business model, you’ll be in direct competition with anyone else that wants to set up shop to do consulting on your software – and they can charge 10% of your price since they don’t have to spend time developing the software.
  • This only works when your software is something that people generally require support for. If your software is too well made, then people won’t need support or consulting.
  • Gives incentive to make software that is complicated and hard to work with .

Conclusion: This one’s a big loser.

2. Charge for add-ons

With this model your primary product is free and open source, but you charge for add-on modules.

Pros:

  • If you have a large user base this is a good way to give you a relative monopoly on the market for your add-on.

Cons:

  • The open source culture may resist attempts at monetization of this sort. Users of free software often resist or resent attempts to add pay software into the mix.
  • You must have a very large user base for the market to be big enough to support add-ons.

Conclusion:
This model has potential if done the right way.

3. Charge for Documentation/User Manuals

With this model you provide the software free and open source but you charge for access to the documentation. This model could work well for software that requires documentation to take advantage of (e.g. software frameworks, libraries, or complex systems that are managed by an administrator). In fact, in certain cases this has the same effect as charging for the software while keeping the software itself open and freely distributable per the spirit of FOSS.

This is because those people who are explicitly using your software and its features will need to purchase the documentation (so it’s kind of like purchasing a license for the software itself), but they can still freely distribute the software itself as part of their own projects (so it retains the basic freedoms that sit at the core of the FOSS movement).

Pros:

  • Could work well for technical projects or software components that rely heavily on documentation.
  • Acts like commercial software for revenue (1 documentation license per user).
  • Software remains freely distributable.

Cons:

  • Only works if the software is heavily dependent on documentation to use.
  • Gives incentive to create software that is difficult to figure out (non-intuitive).

Conclusion:
This is a good model for technical software.

4. Donation-ware

This is the model where you offer your software up for free and ask (beg) for donations. This is a ridiculous model. It is not even a model so it isn’t worth a pro-con matrix. There are no Pro’s. I am philosophically opposed to the concept of donation-ware. I am a software developer, not a charity. If someone feels compelled to donate money to a cause, there are thousands of good causes: Cancer, Haiti, etc.. But don’t donate it to a software developer (unless he’s creating software to cure cancer).

You will NOT make any money by asking for donations. At most you will make a few people feel good about themselves for donating a dollar or two.

5. Advertising

With this model you treat your software as a means to generate traffic to your website and you try to turn that traffic into money either through selling another product, or through sponsorships.

Unless you get a ton of traffic, this model likely won’t make you enough money to pay for your webhosting plan.