As a preface, the United States does not have a free market economy. The United States has a massive bureaucracy that feels impelled to fiddle with various sectors. Each regulation they put in place removes freedom from the market. I’m not sure what exactly the name of our economy is, but it is not free. Because many people believe the U.S. has a free market economy, their thinking is based on a false premise. That leads to false and incorrect conclusions.

One distortion caused by believing the US economy is free, is lost understanding of value. Or maybe it’s easier to understand what I’m trying to say if I say that we can no longer calculate value. Expecting each individual to make value decisions is a cornerstone of a free market economy.

Not being able to make value-based decisions, makes our daily lives much more difficult, and it has closed our minds to an important part of making value-based decisions. The time you spend reading this article, is a value based decision. For whatever reason, probably many you can articulate and many you cannot articulate, you decided that reading this article is worth something to you right now. There is a value based component: you’re reading it instead of something else; and there is a time component: you’re reading it now. You can easily see, now, that you have made a bunch of decisions about where to allocate your time, and a bunch of decisions about relative value. You’re reordered your entire life to read this article.

In the frame of a free market economy, this is the same decision you make when you decide to spend some of your hard-earned money. You make a value based decision on which good or service to purchase, and you make a time based decision on when to buy it.

Having an economy that is “free market” in name, but is not a “free market” in many aspects has the same insidious effect on your thinking. You do not notice, or are not as irritated by government intervention on when and how you allocate your time. Their intrusion into when and how you spend your money enables their intrusion into when and how you allocate your time.

They also intrude on when and how you think. The wide spread corruption of the media, justice, and their mega-phones of big tech, demonstrates our government’s willingness to infringe our your right to think what you want to think, whenever you want to.

Does that help expose the massive failure of the United States’ people to hold our government accountable? Instead of having our government create opportunity, competition, and choice, Americans are allowing and encouraging our government to control when and how we allocate our time, and even when and how we think.

Be free! Return to the principles of a free market economy and reject this government that believes in control instead of liberty.

It is common in the United States that people are pilloried for “judging.” Don’t judge me. You shouldn’t judge. He who judges, by the same standard will he be judged. The biblical principle is correct, the other two statements are based on a false premise.

To get through a day, you must make judgments. You have to judge people. You have to decide how to act, react, and respond to them. But there is a major facet of judgment that is not taught or understood.

You can judge actions, you cannot judge intent or motive.

January 6, 2020 was a shot heard around the world, and I am convinced that the reverberations caused by (a) a stolen election, (b) the framing of innocent citizens as terrorists, and (c) the desolation of justice; continue to build into a cataclysmic event that can only be stopped by swift and immediate restoration of individual liberties, justice for all, and a national repentance that returns our primary allegiance to God.

No human, alone, is capable of bringing that repentance about. We are in a waiting period. Waiting for a great awakening. Waiting for critical mass that starts a righteous crusade to obey God, accept Jesus as our Messiah, and love all God’s children.

The tyranny that surrounds the few remaining eternal souls is insurmountable. The price demanded of those souls is their physical life, their liberty, their happiness, and their family. To stand up is to lose everything in this world.

“but for the elect’s sake, whom He hath chosen, He hath shortened those days.” - Mark 13:20

People around us lie all the time. If we watch carefully, we find that we lie all the time. Sometimes it is a “white” lie; something that is not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Sometimes it’s a big old fat and blatant lie caused by some moral, mental, spiritual, or other deficiency. All lies are caustic and damaging, but their negative result is proportional to the magnitude of the lie.

Consider the case when when my son asks me, “Dad how was your day?” I may respond, “it was just fine, thank you.” That may not be the entire truth. It’s very possible that I am dealing with things that he should not know about, or perhaps isn’t prepared to deal with. At his stage of development, when I say it was just fine, that could mislead him. I don’t mislead him knowingly, I am just giving him what he needs to and can hear. This lie could have some damage. He does not know that I am, perhaps, fragile and need respite; it informs and shapes his decision making process based on partial information. However, he also knows that his Dad reserves the right to say things are fine, when there may be issues the I am dealing with. Is it a lie? It’s an incomplete truth for sure.

Now consider the case when Hillary Clinton says the election was not stolen. Or that she had no involvement in the Steele dossier. This lie is so stupendous that it causes cognitive dissonance in every rational person that hears it. It makes our brains hurt.

Obviously there is a great difference in the lie and the result of the lie. Hillary’s lie lead to the downfall of the United States government - no valid election has results in an illegitimate government. My incomplete truth may cause my son to make under-informed decisions regarding how to interact with me.

How do we gauge our responsibility to correct or deal with these instances? The measurement is simply, if you can take responsibility for and deal with the results, then the decision about what to say is yours’ entirely. In my case, if my son incorrectly gauges the level of interaction we should have, I know, potentially, where the error in judgment came from. That’s easy to work with, and I take that responsibility. In Hillary’s case, the free world as we know it has ended. She cannot control that outcome and, even if she wanted to, cannot accept the responsibility that comes with it.

The principle: Hillary’s lie is not recoverable - it cannot be covered.

I recently had the opportunity to sit on a mock trial jury. It was a unique experience for young legal minds to try to present their side of a case and my job, as a member of the jury, was to see if the prosecution was able to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. As physical evidence in the case was thin, it came down to a he said, she said kind of scenario. At that point, the jury was essentially tasked with parsing who was lying and to what degree and whether that degree had a bearing on the facts of guilt or innocence. In some senses, as we are all human and the basest of human instincts is self-preservation and thusly our narratives will lean that way without careful conscious effort at balance. To some degree, without objective evidence, these words could be construed as a “lie” depending on the vantage of the listener to the speaker. They may be true to the person speaking, and that includes the array of factors that could bear on their perception—i.e. “I didn’t hear the knock at the door” perhaps they didn’t because they were focused elsewhere but that doesn’t deny that the knock happened, so the other guy could equally and truthfully say, “I followed protocol and knocked before breaking the door down.”

At any rate, it struck me listening to the other jurors as we deliberated, that we all have a threshold before we shut off the inputs for additional information. One juror expressed, that as soon as the first witness said one thing that was contradicted by his written statement they shut down and decided the defendant was guilty because the story wasn’t straight. Interestingly enough, he was the first witness and all of the subsequent witnesses on both sides had statements that were contradicted on the stand, and had the person listened to all of them with the same attentive ear perhaps they too would have had reasonable doubt. I’m certain the man was guilty but not necessarily of what was being charged. Just as we humans, are all guilty, but not always of the immediate charges.

I personally, get overwhelmed with following the news and my threshold for new information is quickly met. I cannot stand to be lied to and that is the sense that I get when I try to sort out the truth of the world via the mechanisms of “news”. Though it is a painful process and overwhelming at times, to parse truth from lies, I do see a value in hearing the matter out. Just as in this mock trial, for me as a juror, there was value in listening to all of the “lies” and tossing the obvious ones to the side, in order to define the clear narrow pathway that could be the truth in the case. We must be vigilant to always be sorting and defining the pathway of the truth of the world around us, though it is often time consuming, frustrating and slow go by the nature of the sheer volume of incoming information. It is our duty to put in the effort so that when we do have an opportunity to render a verdict we can speak with confidence when we are tasked to be a member of a jury of peers.