The Commercial Maxims
For many people it might come as a surprise (in many cases a pleasant one) if they
were informed that essentially all of the law of the world is founded on, derived from, and is a
function of ten simple, essential, and fundamental Commercial Maxims—seven (7) basic ones
plus three (3) corollaries. These foundational principles/axioms underlie all of man’s law.
Notwithstanding the vastness and complexity of the law today, it is safe to say that all of the
world’s law is fundamentally a function of the ten Commercial Maxims. Although the dazzling
complexity and ever-changing forms, parameters, and labels obfuscate this fact, the essence of
the matter remains intact.
The Commercial Maxims constitute the basic rules involved in preventing and
resolving disputes, including relating in life and commercial affairs as if disputes might arise and
written proof of one’s position, in time and content, must be securely established. Although
commerce is usually thought of as “buying, selling, and trading,” all of man’s interactions with
his fellow man are considered as being “commerce.” Commerce encompasses all relationships
between people.
Black’s Law Dictionary, Fifth Edition, for instance, defines “commerce” as
follows: Commerce. “The exchange of goods, productions, or property of any kind; the
buying, selling, and exchanging of articles…. Intercourse by way of trade and traffic between
different peoples or states…including not only the purchase, sale, and exchange of
commodities, but also the instrumentalities and agencies by which it is promoted and the
means and appliances by which it is carried on, and transportation of persons as well as of
goods, both by land and sea…. Also interchange of ideas, sentiments, etc., as between man and
man.” Page 244
.
The Commercial Maxims codify the fundamental principles/maxims of law and
commerce upon which man’s law and governments have operated on this planet for at least
the past 4-6 thousand years. They constitute, as it were, the rules of the game. Part of the grief
of mankind today is that the vast, overwhelming percentage of the populace does not know the
basic rules of the game they are playing and are hence incapable of playing it. If one who does
not know the rules of a game is playing that game with others who are masters of the rules, the
outcome is a foregone conclusion: the one who knows the rules wins the game while the one
who does not know the rules necessarily loses. Such is the state of the world.
Elucidating the underlying, fundamental rules so that one understands what is going
on helps greatly in “leveling the playing field.” These rules, therefore, are set forth below with
the understanding that they operate within the context and setting of the universal Underlying
Principles. The Commercial Maxims are the most basic, enduring, and minimalist codification of
universal, real law extant on earth. They are very simple, largely self-evident, and based on
common sense. The Jews, for instance, have studied, analyzed, practiced, and refined
Commercial Law, founded on these Maxims, for thousands of years. This continuous, relentless,
single-minded absorption in the law over millennia has “worked the bugs out.” Every angle,
facet, ramification, application, and nuance of practice of Commercial Law has been seasoned
over time, and is deeply and thoroughly known by those who “own, run, and rule the world.”
Indeed, the “Elite” are precisely where they are because they do know this fundamental law, because it is real, that it must work, always works, and it is impossible for it not to work, since it is grounded in natural law.
Those who do not know and use the law by
which everything functions necessarily and always lose. This esoteric truth must be obscured
and concealed from the “masses” by every means possible. Otherwise, those who would rule
mankind would have no way of obtaining their positions of power, privilege, and plunder (all of
which are frauds). By knowing and using the law themselves and keeping the knowledge of
such law from the masses, the people are deliberately rendered defenseless, confused,
emasculated, dependent, helpless “sheeple,” considered as existing for the purpose of being
exploited, herded, sheered, gelded, and slaughtered at will.
The Powers That Be thus achieve and operate their monopoly on “law” (the very
thought is absurd, like stating one has a monopoly on light or life), by propagandizing the lie
that law is so complex, esoteric, obtuse, vast, and confusing that only they and their hatchet
men called “attorneys” and “judges” can administer it. The law is “mystified,” made into some
kind of quasi-religious cult, operated by a high priesthood that alone has the knowledge and
authority for operating the resulting “legal system” that rules the life of man. Law must be
transformed into a “closed union shop” such as the Bar Association, into whose hands the
people must entrust their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” without availability of alternative
sources of remedy and redress of grievances. Where can one go for relief when the fox guards
the henhouse?
If the so-called “Rulers of the World” did not withhold from general understanding
the knowledge that the foundational principles of real law are few in number and easily
mastered by everyone, and that all of the documents and instruments used in all law and
commerce are likewise few in number and comprehensible to laymen, such con men would
have to abandon their aristocratic “titles of nobility” and find real jobs based on genuine
productivity, contribution, and “win-win” interactions with their fellow man. It is empowering
and exhilarating to understand that the ever-changing, monstrous vastness of “law” can be
distilled into a handful of universal principles that can be contained on a 3” X 5” card, and that
all of the legal documents and instruments functioning today can be mastered by nearly
anyone.
Attorneys and Judges deliberately conceal the fact that the only significance inhering
in court cases and statutes consists of the simple and universal principles of commercial law
codified by the Maxims. All legal documents, proceedings, and processes are obscured by renaming and mislabeling said documents and processes in accordance with whatever degrees of
multiplicity and complexity are needed for preserving its inaccessible aloofness. Law is made
diffuse, enormously complex, and allegedly far beyond the ken of regular folks. With knowledge
of the truth underlying all of that misdirection and deception, i.e. seeing through the Wizard’s
Light Show, you can understand what is happening and place yourself in a position of mastery
of the situation instead of being relegated to the status of a confused, helpless victim forever in
the dark and at the mercy of those who exploit your ignorance of the rules and processes by
which law (i.e. organized, deadly force) operates. In short, “Know the truth and the truth shall
make you free.”
As mentioned above, the word “commerce” encompasses all interactions and
interchanges between people, including exchanges of such “non-commercial” things as “ideas,
sentiments, etc.” The fundamental principles and precepts of universal commercial law that
have for millennia formed the underpinnings of civilized law on this planet are both biblical and
non-biblical, i.e. their truth and validity is a function of themselves and the long-accepted usage
and practice by many cultures and peoples, in diverse forms, throughout the world for
thousands of years.
These fundamental Maxims of Commerce, which underlie all commercial
documents, instruments, and processes, are enumerated herewith (with biblical references in
parenthesis):
1.. A workman is worthy of his hire
(Exodus 20:15; Lev. 19:13; Matt. 10:10; Luke 10:7; II Tim. 2:6. Legal maxim: “It is
against equity for freemen not to have the free disposal of their own property.”).
2.. All are equal under the Law
(God’s Law–Ethical and Natural Law). (Exodus 21:23-25; Lev. 24:17-21; Deut. 1:17,
19:21; Matt., 22:36-40; Luke 10:17; Col. 3:25. Legal maxims: “No one is above the law.”;
“Commerce, by the law of nations, ought to be common, and not to be converted into a
monopoly and the private gain of a few.”).
3.. In Commerce truth is sovereign
(Exodus 20:16; Ps. 117:2; Matt. 6:33, John 8:32; II Cor. 13:8. Legal maxim: “To lie is
to go against the mind.” Oriental proverb: “Of all that is good, sublimity is supreme.”).
4.. Truth is expressed by means of an affidavit
(Lev. 5:4-5; Lev. 6:3-5; Lev 19:11-13; Num. 30:2; Matt. 5:33; James 5:12).
5.. An unrebutted affidavit stands as the truth in Commerce
(1 Pet. 1:25; Heb. 6:13-15. Legal maxim: “He who does not deny, admits.”).
6.. An unrebutted affidavit becomes the judgment in Commerce
(Heb. 6:16-17. Any proceeding in a court, tribunal, or arbitration forum consists of a
contest, or “duel,” of commercial affidavits wherein the points remaining unrebutted in the end
stand as the truth and the matters to which the judgment of the law is applied.).
7.. A matter must be expressed to be resolved
(Heb. 4:16; Phil. 4:6; Eph. 6:19-21. Legal maxim: “He who fails to assert his rights has
none.”).
8.. He who leaves the field of battle first loses by default
(Book of Job; Matt. 10:22. Legal maxim: “He who does not repel a wrong when he
can, occasions it.”).
9.. Sacrifice is the measure of credibility
(One who is not damaged, put at risk, or willing to swear an oath that he consents to
claim against his commercial liability in the event that any of his statements or actions is
groundless or unlawful, has no basis to assert claims or charges and forfeits all credibility and
right to claim authority.) (Acts 7, life/death of Stephen, maxim: “He who bears the burden
ought also to derive the benefit.”).
10.. A lien or claim can be satisfied only through rebuttal by Counteraffidavit point for-point, resolution by jury, or payment
(Gen. 2-3; Matt. 4; Revelation. Legal maxim: “If the plaintiff does not prove his case the defendant is absolute.
Perhaps the simplest way of expounding on the nature and validity of Commercial
Law is to comment on each of the Maxims in the order given.
1) A workman is worthy of his hire
(Exodus 20:15; Lev. 19:13; Matt. 10:10; Luke 10:7; II Tim. 2:6).
The eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal” (Exodus 20:15), signifies the
absolute right of every man to all honorably acquired property. This basic human right
originates fundamentally from the inherent, unalienable right of self-ownership and the freewill nature of man. If a man is the sovereign owner/steward of himself, and exercises his free
will for engaging in ethical use of faculties that result in his accumulation of property, said
property ownership is, ethically and existentially, inviolably the man’s own as distinguished
from the property of anyone else. No one has a higher claim on said property nor any right to
steal it by any means, whether by force or fraud.
Were this fundamental property right not universal and inviolate, no coherent basis
for interrelating could exist in the society of man. Man is a purposeful, goal-oriented being,
capable of abstract thought and free choice. People engage in thinking, use of faculties, and
expenditure of time and life-diminishing energy for the purpose of achieving rationally cognized
results. There are an infinite number of possibilities of thought and action. Inasmuch as man’s
manifest existence is finite, i.e. contained within boundaries, man must use his machinery of
thought and being in the ways that he comprehends as best further his well being, life progress,
consciously chosen duty, and priorities born of his world view. The I Ching comments on this
principle in Hexagram 60, “Limitation”:
“Therefore what concerns us here is the problem of clearly defining these
discriminations, which are, so to speak, the backbone of morality. Unlimited possibilities are
not suited to man; if they existed, his life would only dissolve in the boundless. To become
strong, a man’s life needs the limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted. The
individual attains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with these limitations
and by determining for himself what his duty is.”
If someone does not think, act, and exert life-diminishing time and energy for the
purpose of achieving specifically cognized goals, he cannot legitimately expect to realize the
ends he desires. It is both a biblical and Zen maxim that: “He who does not work shall not eat.”
The Bhagavad-Gita states in Chapter 3, Verse 8:
“Do your allotted duty. Action is indeed superior to inaction. Even the survival of your
body would not be possible without action.”
A Chinese proverb phrases the matter more caustically: “Some people sit around
waiting for a roasted chicken to fly into their mouths.”
Negating the legitimacy of property ownership by claiming that someone who works
is not thereby entitled to the anticipated rewards of his efforts makes a mockery of man’s
nature and life, as well as ethical and natural law. A man engages in a particular course of
action for the purpose of achieving anticipated results and if he did not thus expect his efforts
to accomplish the desired goals he would not act in the manner he considers to be the best and
most efficient possible means for achieving them. If his actions did not express his best possible
judgment it is safe to assume that he would be indulging in alternatives that he considered as
being superior. Moreover, man utilizes cause/effect natural law throughout all his goal-oriented
actions, i.e. the one acting attempts to discern the most effective and efficient means possible
to accomplish his goals. Invoking particular natural-law processes brings about the precise
consequences of whatever processes are used.
It is self-evident that stealing is a violation of ethical law inasmuch as the one who
performs the life-diminishing labor for acquiring the property necessarily has the highest, if not
exclusive, claim thereon. He is the one who decided, thought, acted, and utilized his faculties,
not someone else. Who can claim a greater right to someone’s property than the one who
acquired ownership by expenditure of thought, effort, time, and energy? Stealing a man’s
property is literally stealing a part of his life, since the time, energy, and effort the man
expended in earning the property is irretrievably gone and not the efforts of gods or men can
return the life-diminishing labor he expended in acquiring the property (even if the same or
similar property is subsequently bestowed upon the man). In the words of a Zen master, “An
evil done can never be undone.”
All governments exist by virtue of promulgating an endless panoply of alleged
“higher” reasons why the “government” is entitled to the fruits of people’s earnings instead of
the earners thereof. The terse Libertarian maxim is correct: “Taxation is theft.” As eloquently
expressed by Bastiat in The Law, when the law, which is force and can be legitimately used only
in defense of just rights to life and property, is perverted into an instrument of aggression,
slavery, theft, and plunder, it has destroyed its own object. Man’s history on this planet has
universally shown that the governmental approach to law is a catastrophe since it trashes
ethical and natural law, structures degeneracy through perpetrating fraud, deceit, violence, lies,
and every manner of crime in the name of law and justice, thereby obviating all hope for
coherence, integrity, and peace in the social order. All of this is borne of efforts to structure
organized and “respectable” ways to abrogate the First Maxim and expropriate the fruits of the
labor of others.
The conundrum, of course, is that while on the one hand a substantial portion of
mankind may be incapable of self-government (a hypothesis that is only an arbitrary postulate),
no externally imposed government can compensate for the lack. The best that can result from a
man-made government, i.e. a legal-force institution, is that restraints on human action,
interference in people’s exercises of free will, are used for the purpose of protecting life and
property. In doing, however, a government uses organized force for imposing some contrived,
abstract, finite, and arbitrary order onto the natural condition that would otherwise exist if
people were left free. Through state rulership, artificial palliatives, superficial
behavior/conditions borne of coercively re-configuring the manifest expression of life, are
proffered either as “solutions” (which they are not and never can be), or at least superior to
leaving people free.
Whenever society has a government with some alleged overarching “right” to steal
wealth instead of everyone in the culture honorably gaining through constructive/productive
use of faculties and quid-pro-quo honorable exchanges, the society is “legally” structured on a
hopelessly self-contradictory, unethical, and schizophrenic basis. Organizing life in such a way
pre-ordains the civilization to disintegration by systematically rupturing both natural and ethical
law. Only the real thing is the real thing. Plastic models of how things “should” be,
superimposed by force, neither are the real thing nor can cause its spontaneous manifestation.
A man-made government is therefore an outside-in/top-down artificial order and set
of processes imposed by physical force over and against the self-existing transcendence of an
organic, inside-out/ground-up holistic unfolding of life. As stated, the catch-22 of man’s
condition is that while a substantial proportion of the populace of this planet has not awakened
and spiritually evolved to the place that they are naturally able to govern themselves, any kind
of “other governing” organization that might be structured as compensation for the lack is a
fraudulent, invasive, distorting, falsifying, and a disruptive failure method. Any such “other governing” utilized as compensation for lack of sufficient inner/existential development not
only cannot bring about what can ensue only by virtue of self-existing suchness spontaneously
manifesting transcendence in its natural fullness and integrity, but all such approaches
necessarily stifle, destroy, suppress, and obviate the possibility for the desired situation to
manifest. The bottom line of the matter is that the problem, and its solution, is inner, spiritual,
and existential, not political. Namely, the cause of the problem is insufficient consciousness,
development, and love; the cure is more of those things. Only the actual reality can be and
engender a true, self-existing condition that satisfies the heart and soul of man and fulfills life.
Since all governments exist by non-disclosure, there is therefore no true meeting of
the minds between the people and the government, i.e. there is no actual agreement. Such a
situation is institutionalized lying—perjury by omission and misrepresentation. No government
ever does, or can, provide full disclosure of all of the rights, privileges, and immunities the
people forfeit in exchange for submitting to government rule, nor does—or can—any
government articulate what honorable goods and services are provided by the government as
valuable consideration, so that the resulting interaction can constitute a bona fide contract
enforceable at law. If no genuine agreement exists—or can exist—from the outset, no valid
contract can exist. The situation is a fraudulent, criminal con game that establishes a condition
of “mixed war” whereby the government is inherently and permanently at war with the
“governed.” Governments can exist only by deceit, misrepresentation, and concealment of
material fact in contract, and cannot otherwise exist at all. Establishing any kind of human
government, i.e. an organization on the basis of which some men (those occupying positions of
“authority” in the institution) may “legally” take things of value from others without open,
honorable, good-faith, quid-pro-quo exchange, i.e. “win/win” interactions, inherently abrogates
the First Maxim. All governmental power is discretionary, and must be or it is not power.
Discretionary power is privilege, which is fraud.
The point of this discourse, including what might be considered a “digression” into
the nature of law and government, is that this First Maxim is in a sense the foundation of
everything. It is the essence of the Golden Rule, the entire basis of law and justice, the core and
point of a contract and all contract law, and the basis in society of peace, stability, coherence,
and sanity. When that which poses as “law” is the institutionalized abrogation of this First
Maxim, confusion, frustration, futility, and ultimate ruin are the inevitable results. Such a
pattern characterizes the history of man’s civilizations on this planet.
late 14c., “act of governing or ruling;” 1550s, “system by which a thing is governed” (especially a state), from Old French governement “control, direction, administration” (Modern French gouvernement), from governer “to steer, be at the helm of; govern, rule, command, direct,” from Latin gubernare “to direct, rule, guide, govern,” originally “to steer, to pilot”(see govern). Meaning “governing power” in a given place is from 1702.
