Bizarre Conspiracy Theory Garbage

Bizarre Conspiracy Theory Garbage

You know, with all the serious problems we are confronting as a society, there's just no time to waste on nonsensical conspiracy theories. Someone sent me a link to this essay about the UCC, gold fringes on flags, and assorted crazy stuff, all designed to prove that if you file the right paperwork, you don't have to file income taxes. (Well, I'm guessing; the essay is so poorly written at the end that it's hard to tell exactly what they are saying:

When you issue your credit to the bankrupt United States they have borrowed it from you and they owe you a return of principal plus interest. To accomplish this quid pro quo exchange, you must report every presentment you receive to the Internal Revenue Service which will, in its turn, adjust the books of account according to which corporation has been using your credit.

That is what the 1040 form is about, and what the 1099OID forms are about. When you report a presentment on a 1099OID forms you are reporting to the IRS to whom you paid taxes or to whom you issued your credit. And you can’t always know who that was because you don’t know how much of your credit was issued for paving the roads in your county or building the schools or funding that Wal-Mart or whatever.

The 1099OID form enables the money to return to its source – You.

One of the reasons that serious scholarly work has footnotes is so that you can look up the claims, and see if the sources say what the author says they do. Not in this "Why the UCC Filing?" essay. Yes, you could probably find the original source documents with a bit of work, but if someone is trying to write a persuasive essay about matters of fact, and they don't bother to give me clear-cut citations of sources, I make one of the following conclusions:

1. They didn't go to college (or even high school), and therefore have no idea why the scholarly apparatus of footnotes exist.

2. They wrote it from memory, without bothering to check if all the facts are correct.

3. They are hoping that you won't try to check up on their claims.

However, there's one claim made in this essay that was sufficiently easy to check that I spent a few minutes doing so:

Until the 14th Amendment in 1868, there were no persons born or naturalized in the United States. They had all been born or naturalized in one of the several states. Up until that point in time there was only state citizenship and was a result of state citizenship. After the Civil War, a new class of citizenship was recognized, and was the beginning of the “democracy” (not the de jure republic) sited in the District of Columbia. The American people in the republic sited in the several states could choose to benefit (receive a benefit) as one of these new United States citizens BY CHOICE (kind of).

This initial nexus for this new citizenship started with the birth certificate under the provisions of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921. This act required that all children born be registered by way of a certificate of live birth, in exchange for which they would receive back a birth certificate describing the property. The specific provisions of the act required that the statement of domicile of the property described on the birth certificate would be Washington, D.C.

When it comes to factual errors, let's just say that these two paragraphs are a target-rich environment. But for laughs, I decided to find out how the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921 required birth certificates.

My first guess was that this act required vital statistics on births (which nearly all states were doing by then) to be reported to the federal government, and someone confused this requirement with a requirement for birth certificates to be issued. But apparently no.

Birth certificates were issued in almost every state by this point. The primary purpose of this act was to improve pre- and post-natal care by increasing federal funding to the states to assist poor women. Bad idea or not, it wasn't what caused birth certificates, which were not, and are not, ownership certificates in any sense. Contemporary references to the act are quite clear about its purpose--to increase public health spending and education for pre- and post-natal care.

If there was some concern about expanding federal power over individual citizens, you would expect critics to make that argument. See Maine Governor Percival Baxter's argument against the bill here. He makes some legitimate arguments about federal vs. state power, but nothing that matches this wild description of ownership certificates.

Here's South Dakota's law implementing it: it's all about money going to help pre and post-natal care; nothing about birth certificates.

Nor does this 1922 reference work mention anything about birth certificates.

Or the speech introducing it in Congress.

Or this 1920 discussion of the proposal.

I can't find anything to support this claim about requiring birth certificates (or "ownership certificates") in contemporary sources. Now, that doesn't mean that it's wrong; perhaps there was indeed such a requirement in the bill, and no one at the time bothered to mention it--even critics. Or maybe the Bilderbergers (or the Rothschilds, or the Illuminati, or the Martians) suppressed all contemporary discussion of it--or have censored the Internet today so that you can't find it. But when someone makes extraordinary claims without any verifiable sources, it has zero credibility.

There is so much of this conspiracy theory garbage floating around out there (like the 9/11 Truthers, and "We never went to the Moon," and "Jewish doctors inject AIDS into black babies in the hospital") that exists for one reason alone: the belief that one has "hidden knowledge" is very attractive to people that would otherwise have to confront the vastly more common problem of government: stupid people with good intentions.