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No, what led to problems for Santos was that he didn't pay the toll or the fines. His beliefs for doing that are actually irrelevant to what happened to him for not doing that. Lots of people don't pay toll when they're supposed to: That doesn't make them a Freeman-on-the-Land.

There was a similar story here in NZ a while ago, a guy regularly used a toll road without paying, ended up with fines of around $70,000, got taken to court... What happened to him afterwards, whether he paid the fines or whether he went on the run, I don't know because unfortunately (or should I say, fortunately) he doesn't have cultish followers like you to report on his every move. As for his personal beliefs in the matter, the court would have cared less since those have no bearing in the facts of the matter -- it just applied the law.

All you've done here, Jeffery, is tell us a story about a person who didn't pay the toll on a road, didn't pay the fines for not paying the toll, who ended up with a warrant out for his arrest. You've then linked that to Freeman-on-the-Land to make some sort of point. Which point is what?

You say you wrote the OP with the intention of starting a "discussion". A discussion about what?

You say the reason Santos refused to pay the toll was his Freeman belief about Right to Travel. Yet apparently his Freeman beliefs about right to travel don't extend to travelling in an unregistered vehicle, which is a big feature of that particular Freeman belief, and as the Wikipedia page you linked mentions, there are many people who believe they shouldn't have to pay a toll on that road. This would suggest the person in your story (Santos) may have had other reasons for not paying the tolls, reasons that have nothing to do with Freeman-on-the-Land beliefs. Or are you trying to suggest all those other people have Freeman beliefs, too?

But even if the reason he didn't pay the tolls had to do with his beliefs about right to travel, the point is what he believes is actually irrelevant... at least to the courts it is, if not to his followers.

If you intended this as some sort of cautionary tale about Freeman and their belief about right to travel (using as your example someone who you perceive to be a "guru") then you've obviously failed to understand the mentality and motivations of people who are prepared to go out and act on their Freeman beliefs in the way you claim Santos has done. Rather than deterring or warning away those people, a story like this simply reinforces their beliefs: Santos is a martyr to them. They already know they're supposed to pay a toll, so you're your story about Santos (or any one else) getting in trouble for not paying a toll is hardly enlightening to them -- they wont be doing it because they're unaware of that any more than Santos himself was unaware of the fact. So your post about your "guru" Santos is hardly instructive in that respect.

If you intended your post to initiate a discussion about Freeman and their wrongful beliefs about right to travel then most of what you've written is irrelevant.

What are the Freeman beliefs about right of travel and why are they wrong? Do you even know? The fact that you've put the term right to travel in quotation marks would seem to suggest that you believe that there is no such thing as a person's right to travel, that "right to travel" is just a figment of Freeman imagination. If that is what you believe then I'd say you're as ignorant as any Freeman... perhaps more so.

Or perhaps you recognise that humans do indeed have a right to travel but it's enough for you to simply say the Freeman interpretation about it is wrongful without bothering to explain why. It's one reason why I find you Quatloosian/anti-Freeman types so tedious: You lot are neither instructive or constructive; just a bunch of bores slapping each other on the back.

By the way: I think you'll find there's a limit to how much community service a court will give a person (in NZ the limit is 400 hours and for paying off fines it is worked out at about $50/hour) and using the $28.80/hr figure you've given for Australia, for Santos to pay off his $132,000 fine in community service he would have to do almost 5600 hours. I doubt it was ever going to be an option.

Actually, the real question is: Why do you and your Quatloosian cohorts et al perpetrate this "victims" myth; for what purpose do you try to create these Freeman-on-the-land victims where none actually exist?

I'm sure you like to couch your quest to discredit Rob Menard as a noble endeavour; as a public service of sorts; as a case of you and your cohorts protecting those venerable people (verily, the Public!) from the depredations of the wicked Freeman "guru". However, like Rob Menard himself, you lot are only preaching to the predisposed and I doubt you've ever "saved" anyone in that respect.

These Freeman inspired ideas are so patently absurd that people soon enough figure out for themselves it's bunk, no one requires anyone else to warn them away. Meanwhile those people who are attracted to it or who actually put the nonsense to practice, those people aren't there because they honesty believe any of it is or will be accepted by the courts or any other authority (quite the opposite in fact) and they aren't going to be swayed or deterred by anything the anti-Freeman mob says -- in fact, all that probably only serves to stiffen the resolve of those people.

I would say that the successes of the anti-Freeman crowd probably equals the successes of the Freeman crowd, which is to say none or less than none. Indeed, from a certain point of view (i.e. mine) and in more ways than one, the Freeman and anti-Freeman zealots just look like two sides of the same coin.

So why does the anti-Freeman troupe persist in conjuring up these imaginary victims of Freeman ideas, these imaginary dupes of the "guru" Menard? Because without these victims their virulent pursuit of Rob Menard begins to look rather more tawdry than noble, begins to appear as a somewhat vulgar personal affair rather more than as any sort of public service.

Anyway, here's what Justice Rooke said of these so called gurus: "They must be stopped!" He then goes on to show that he's not the man to do that when he toothlessly condemns them to a medieval poet's version of Hell.

No one gets prosecuted for preaching Freeman nonsense any more than anyone gets prosecuted for preaching Christian nonsense, and the only way for either of them to be "stopped" would be to repeal the Bill of Rights. If that's what you want then you may be happier living somewhere like Saudi Arabia or Timbuktu.

By the way, if Rob Menard gets you riled up, you should tune in to the likes of Benny Hinn or Creflo A. Dollar some time -- they'll really blow your top! Menard's got nothing on them!

Certainly a grandiose idea, if not hare brained... Fortunately for everyone, though, there's nothing wrong or illegal with having grandiose and/or hare brained ideas.

Quite frankly, though, it's hard to take the man seriously.

Or you, QuatloosShill; it's hard to take you seriously when you apparently do take Menard seriously. It's also hard to take you seriously when you say: "He actually persuaded people, to their cost, that this was actually legitimate."

No, he didn't persuade anyone. That's just absurd.

Those people had absolutely no reason to believe any of this would result in them becoming legitimate police officers or in them being granted the same status as regular police. Anyone who tries to claim that is what they believed was at best pulling the wool over their own eyes.

Those three characters from Edmonton who were going around flashing badges with the words "peace officer" on them and telling people they were legitimate peace officers, they knew perfectly well they weren't legitimate peace officers. They also knew perfectly well that it's illegal to impersonate a police office, that it's against the law to give people in public a reason to believe they are legitimate peace/police officers -- and too bad if they didn't know that because ignorance of the law is no excuse.

These jokers from Edmonton are just another example of Freemen and their like trying to force people to accept their absurd ideas and as a result landing up in court to their inevitable cost. They weren't victims who were duped into believing they were legitimate peace officers; rather they were trying to dupe people into believing they were legitimate peace officers, and for anyone to try and claim they were acting in good faith is only trying to kid themselves. Is that what they tried to claim as their defence in court?

As for being part of a group (or starting a group) or for wanting to "keep the peace" there's nothing illegal or criminal about doing any of that. They can flash little badges in public and have a uniform and stuff, just like the boy scouts do, but the just can't call themselves peace officers or give the people a reason to believe they're legitimate peace officers. All they need is a change of name and they can carry on with what they were doing... but I doubt they'd want to do that since no one would take them seriously or grant them any authority. (Personally I think they should change their group name to something that has two Rs and two Ds then they can abbreviate it to R2D2.)

But honestly, the real wonder for me, QuatloosShill, is why people like you do seem to take seriously the patently absurd ideas of jokers like Menard.

You said: "Menard has since preached the same routine, even though he knows it is false, or at a minimum, it doesn't work.

This is a problem."

No, actually this is not a problem.

Presumably you believe this is a problem because you think people who are party to his "preaching" about law will end up in litigation which will inevitably cause them harm because, as you rightly point out, those ideas are not accepted by the courts and Rob Menard knows it. Therefore you believe Rob Menard must be, or should be, responsible for causing that harm to these people... if not fully responsible then at least partly responsible, eh.

If that's what you believe, my friend, then you are sadly mistaken.

As Justice Rooke observed in the reasons for his decision in the Meads v Meads case: "Courts have commonly rejected claims by OPCA litigants that their actions were in good faith or innocent". He also noted: "The justices of this Court routinely encounter OPCA litigants who seem quite willing to 'pull the wool over their own eyes'."

People who are recipient to Rob Menard preaching about matters of law are not being harmed any more than they are by someone preaching about laws from the Bible or by watching any of the many Law & Order-type programmes that fill the television screens.

For those people who decide to go off and actually practice what Rob Menard preaches, far from being some sort of innocent clean slate corrupted by exposure to Rob Menard as you try to portray them, Burnaby, these people will have been predisposed to the ideas preached to them (e.g. to evade taxes, to not register their vehicle, to avoid financial obligations, to get something for free, etc., etc.) and they will be well aware that what they're trying to do is essentially faulty. Far from being the unwitting victims of a scam perpetrated on them by Rob Menard, as you apparently believe (or want others to believe), they are in fact willing participants in whatever scheme they're involved in to further their own predisposed interests.

People who attend to Rob Menard preaching about matters of law have no reason to believe that he is any sort of legal professional or that he is imparting professional legal advice; people have no reason to believe he is anything more than some bloke down at the pub who has an opinion about how he reckons some aspect of the law works. Even if people give him money or otherwise pay to be party to his sermons still doesn't give anyone a reason to believe they're receiving information or advice that will be accepted by the courts or any other authority.

Like any ordinary person Rob Menard is free to have and to express an opinion or a view about any aspect of the law he wishes even if his view is wrong or is contrary to the crown's position, and even if he knows it is wrong. Rob Menard is under no obligation to correctly interpret the law since there is no reasonable expectation that anything he (or any other ordinary person) says about the law will be legally correct or acceptable to the courts or the crown.

Given there can be no reasonable expectation that anything he says about law will be accepted by the courts or anyone else, it is entirely incumbent on a person to properly verify any legal information they may be in receipt from him before they go ahead and use it -- and that's regardless of how sound or reasonable the information may seem to be to them. But that's not what these people do -- quite the opposite.

Even though they claim to do research (they call it doing their "due diligence") what they do instead is dismiss any information or advice that disagrees with their scheme even if it comes from sources who they have no reason to distrust or doubt, such as friends or family or people who are legal professionals, will dismiss that in favour of anything that supports their scheme, even from sources that they have no reason to trust or expect to be either legally correct or to have their best interests at heart.

These people do not require Rob Menard to inform them that the schemes he preaches about won't be accepted by the courts. Beyond the fact they have no reason to expect anything Rob Menard tells them will be accepted by the courts, they also know as well as you and I and everyone else that these schemes are wrong-headed and faulty and would never be accepted by the courts, they know as well as everyone else that no one in society conducts affairs in the way their scheme demands but they wilfully go against their own common knowledge and forge ahead anyway and try to force it. As well as that, as well as their own common knowledge telling them it won't be accepted, in the past few years their "research" will undoubtedly have made them aware of the Meads v Meads case in which Justice Rooke explicitly states that none of these so-called OPCA schemes has ever been accepted by the courts nor will they ever.

These people have got no excuses for the way they decide to act -- but you do try to excuse them.

These people -- who you try to portray as some sort of victims whose actions, or "fires" as you put it, Rob Menard should be responsible for -- these people are not acting with anything that even approaches good faith or honesty and to try and suggest otherwise is just pulling the wool over your eyes or our eyes. When they go off and try these things they're acting no better than Rob Menard is when he also tries doing the same thing, but you only cast one of them, Rob Menard, as a villain and the rest as victims. That's just perverse. They're all as dishonest and as culpable as each other when they wilfully practice their little schemes.

Except you don't really even condemn Rob Menard that way: For you his culpability lies in preaching nonsense about law, which he is actually entitled to do, more so than in the actual practice of it. Or so it seems to me.

As for the crowd of de-taxers who you purportedly have some admiration for... Yeah, well, those people are not being any less dishonourable simply because they advertise their court failures after the fact. An honest person, or a person who was acting in good faith, would run their tax avoidance idea, their "loophole", past a chartered accountant or a tax lawyer before they actually put it into practice.