The Great Law

The Race to Ruin

The Great Law

Durand or MEXICO?

Stephen L. Wilmeth

            A think tank in Mexico City is claiming the dubious distinction of Mexico having the current number one and number two most dangerous cities in the world.

            Both are on the American border in veritable wild west country. Where the giant O should be projected northward toward California is Tijuana. It is the new number one. It comes to the world stage decked out in its regalia of bloody colors with 134 homicides per 100,000 population (year ending 2019).

Coming in second and located nearly dead center on the border where the giant La Equis (X) can be seen across from El Paso, Texas is Juarez, Chihuahua. The metric that earns it the number two slot is 104 murders per 100,000 souls.

The question becomes are those numbers big departures from other cities that have been in the news in recent weeks? That answer seems to be yes when compared to Chicago which remains in the current news as a regular butcher shop, but where the 2019 count was 15.65 killings per 100,000 people. Los Angeles has dropped from 34.2 in 1980 to only 6.3 last year. New York beats both of its sister American cities by recording 17.8 per 100,000 but doesn’t come anywhere near the Mexican border towns for serious gun play.

Indeed, Mexico’s Citizens Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice seems to be accurate in their assessment, and … the combined efforts of the American congress is doing its level best of enhancing all the reasons why those towns are so dangerous.

Durand or MEXICO

It isn’t the first time that a political driver has made an international border dangerous.

Over a glass of gin in 1893, a British diplomat by the name of Mortimer Durand drew up one-page document outlining the 1500-mile boundary between India and Afghanistan. If we would have had any comprehensive world history in our backgrounds, we would be able to recall it by its name. The Durand Line became the administrated political division where violence was a way of life. It still is. Most will say it remains the most violent border in the entire world.

In fact, it is just one of the many chapters in place where America is hemorrhaging national treasure attempting to administer an impossible outcome. It is a place where various strong men and war lords recognize no authority and make a living by cashing in on chaos. Even the British finally recognized that it was a woefully failed endeavor to hold it all together and they abandoned their colonial, crown claim on the Indian side of that bloody boundary.

With the designation of the two most violent cities on earth on its frontier border, can Mexico now claim its northern border has displaced the Durand Line as the most violent and dangerous politically administered boundary in the world?

Change the names of the players, but they are all the same.

Autonomous cartels and gangs have replaced ungovernable warlords and tribesmen. The resolute and unsparing jurisdiction of Islam has been superimposed by the bedlam of narco money and gangdom, and … the overwhelming majority of all American leadership has no understanding of the premise of our founding concepts that would modify or alter the outcome.

The Great Law

In the ongoing unmasking that American history was as poorly taught in our past as world history, it has been revealed that Thomas Jefferson merely borrowed the cornerstone concept as set forth in the Declaration of Independence that We, Americans, were set apart from the rest of the world in the concept of our God given rights of Life, Liberty, and Estate (property). Of course, the most important concept of the entire American model, the cardinal right of Estate or private property, was corrupted by the insistence of the Adams and Franklin influence to insert pursuit of Happiness (whatever the hell that actually means).

That concept, however, appeared at least a hundred years earlier when William Penn promulgated the Great Law of Pennsylvania, which extended the right to vote to any man who professed a belief in God and met modest property requirements. Private property was hugely important. It was the defining demarcation of elevating the common man into realm of equality with his peers. Without it, the world would remain in the quagmire of one form of slavery or another. Without it, there would be chaos and continual upheaval and ruin. Without it, there would forever be the distinction and continuity of the elites and the masses.

Jefferson should have fought harder for that single, all important concept.

James Madison should have fought to make it the centerpiece of Article I in the Constitution rather than the corruptible legislative powers of mortal men. It is that important and it was and is recognized by only a handful of human beings.

That certainly applies to today’s leadership.

The Race to Ruin

Go ahead and call it communism if you want because that is what it is.

It deals with the vesting of the real cornerstone of the American experiment, the citizen, with his existence and the well being of a continued system. The Senate this week put yet another nail in our national coffin by passing its version of The Great American Outdoors Act pledging $900M per year for the purpose of buying up yet more of the American West. The federal crown already owns 61% of these lands.

There are consequences to idiocy. There are consequences of mob rule. There is no adherence to the one modifier of frailties of human nature.

The impact of its eventual passing will be heavily manifested on the MEXICO line. It is there the world should be learning a lesson rather than ignoring the reality of displacing private property with unmanageable federal commons.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “We have to seriously wonder how much cartel money is going into American reelection coffers.”


There can be no doubt of the importance our Founding Fathers placed on private property:

“One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle.” – James Otis

“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.” – John Adams

“Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.” – James Madison

“Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.” --- Samuel Adams

“Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.” --- John Adams

“No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent.” --- John Jay

“As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.” --- James Madison

"A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings." --- Thomas Jefferson

"All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety." --- George Mason

"No other rights are safe where property is not safe." --- Daniel Webster

"The moment that idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the Laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. Property must be sacred or liberty cannot exist." --- John Adams

Like Wilmeth, I wish they had been more explicit in both the Declaration and the Constitution. If they can be faulted, it is for not foreseeing what a property-eating behemoth that could be created by corruption of their original intent. They simply could not fathom the potential for change in the body politic with respect to property rights. For as Murray Rothbard has written:

Liberals generally wish to preserve the concept of "rights" for such "human" rights as freedom of speech, while denying the concept to private property.1 And yet, on the contrary the concept of "rights" only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard.
In the first place, there are two senses in which property rights are identical with human rights: one, that property can only accrue to humans, so that their rights to property are rights that belong to human beings; and two, that the person's right to his own body, his personal liberty, is a property right in his own person as well as a "human right." But more importantly for our discussion, human rights, when not put in terms of property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory, causing liberals to weaken those rights on behalf of "public policy" or the "public good."As I wrote in another work:

Take, for example, the "human right" of free speech. Freedom of speech is supposed to mean the right of everyone to say whatever he likes. But the neglected question is: Where? Where does a man have this right? He certainly does not have it on property on which he is trespassing. In short, he has this right only either on his own property or on the property of someone who has agreed, as a gift or in a rental contract, to allow him on the premises. In fact, then, there is no such thing as a separate "right to free speech"; there is only a man's property right: the right to do as he wills with his own or to make voluntary agreements with other property owners.2

In short, a person does not have a "right to freedom of speech"; what he does have is the right to hire a hall and address the people who enter the premises. He does not have a "right to freedom of the press"; what he does have is the right to write or publish a pamphlet, and to sell that pamphlet to those who are willing to buy it (or to give it away to those who are willing to accept it). Thus, what he has in each of these cases is property rights, including the right of free contract and transfer which form a part of such rights of ownership. There is no extra "right of free speech" or free press beyond the property rights that a person may have in any given case...

---Frank DuBois