Liberty Minute September 18 2014

It was a Roman tax census that took Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, where the Christ Child was born.

A few years later, points out Lew Rockwell in his new book Against the State, the information collected by the Roman government was ?used for more than just taxation? when its local ruler ?decided he wanted to find the Christ child and kill Him.?

During the first century A Jewish sect called the Zealots ?saw complying with the census as equivalent to submitting to slavery. Many ended up paying for their principled stand with their lives.?

Significantly, for a thousand years following the reign of Emperor Constantine, ?no central government was in a position to collect data on its citizens,? Rockwell continues. This happy state of affairs ended with the Norman Conquest of England and the creation of primitive information-gathering methods that are the ancestors of the modern census ? not to mention the IRS and the NSA.  

Census data were used by the US government to imprison innocent Japanese-Americans during World War II. Germany used similar methods to identify, imprison, and murder Jews. Any government that conducts an inventory of its subjects intends to expropriate or exterminate them.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.