Our Threatened Freedom

Are We Robbing Widows

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 129-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 129

Dictation Name: Vol. J - Part 12 - Are We Robbing Widows

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Are we robbing widows? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

When is your property not your property? The answer to that question is any time the federal and state governments choose to claim, tie up, or regulates your property; they feel free to do so. The Farm Journal cited a case of a Missouri farmwife whose husband died. It was harvest time, but she could not use the farm machinery to proceed with harvesting. For her to have done so was held to be illegal, since they were in her husband’s name, and tied up in the estate. With all her grief’s and cares of widowhood, there was now added another. She had to hire men and machines for the harvest.

Now I know that lawyers can give me long reasons why this was so, citing laws, cases and precedents. The fact remains that the whole thing stinks. We are robbing widows.

Our lawmakers seem to feel that widows are chickens to be plucked, not human beings. I wonder how state and federal legislators can look at the estate, death and inheritance taxes and regulations they have passed, and still look in the mirror without throwing up.

A woman can work alongside her husband to develop a farm or a business; she can be as much a part of it as her husband, sometimes more so. However, unless they have seen a lawyer and prepared for death, she is likely to see the taxman rob her of much that she has spent years working for. Even seeing a lawyer is not enough, the laws are changed almost every year so that a good legal provision of last year may be no safe guard this year.

Isn’t anyone ashamed or angry about all this? Are we living in a society where the state and federal governments are so much at war with us that we must retain a lawyer to protect ourselves?

Our Washington politicians scream every time there is talk of a tax cut about the harm it will do to the poor. Has it never occurred to them that maybe taxes are making us all poor? Does it never bother them that they pass laws aimed at robbing widows?

We have several organizations of senior citizens in this country. Why are they not doing more to protect widows and survivors?

Death is a sufficiently sad time, without being made more so by acts of Congress. It is high time we told our state and federal representatives to show more consideration for widows and orphans. We have many ugly taxes on the books, but perhaps none of them half so bad as those which tax death. Something is seriously wrong with a society which tolerates such a tax.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.