I am not Utopia Silver nor am I a legal eagle, so I am hesitant to try to argue the LEGAL merits of the case other than state the facts as I know them to be along with my opinions, and I readily confess to not knowing either REM or RES from a french fry. Could you perhaps enlighten me, since the common online Bar definitions I looked at are not clear.
Now, given my admitted limitations, I will take a stab at replying. Looking at the passage:
He owes no duty to the state since he receives nothing therefrom beyond the protection of his property and life. His rights are such as exist by the law of the land that is long antecedent to the organization of the state,
offhand I would say that the states and other government institutions have used the establishment of additional agencies and "benefits" to erode the rights and freedoms of the individual, however constitutional or not that may be, and however opposite that may be to the founding fathers intentions.
Clearly, to me, the individual was intended to be the supreme sovereign and the government his servant. In the event of state governments, all it owed the citizen was the protection of his rights and property. What has evolved is very much the opposite.
I also believe that it is important to understand that this case began as an FDA complaint about customer testimonials of the benefits they perceived from taking colloidal silver (which just happened to be a top target of the FDA because of the threat it poses to the products of Big Pharma) to a state agency, the state Attorney Generals Office, whose officers turn out to also be commissioned officers of the FDA (which Utopia Silver has proof of thanks to a mailing error by the state, much to their embarassment), and that the state AG office turned to yet another state agency (the State Health Department) whose officers are ALSO commissioned officers of the FDA in order to harass and persecute Utopia Silver.
It is telling to me that part of the state AG office's contention of jurisdiction was the mere fact that Utopia Silver signed for a certified letter from the AG and that the judge's ruling, in part, cited the fact that Utopia Silver made requests of the court (defining contesting jurisdiction as a "request" in and of itself) and that merely conducting business with the court also established jurisdiction.
Even the code cited by the State is the US Code (20 and 21), and US Code itself is not law, but rather snippets of law cobbled together and used as a kind of commercial code, which often times has been found to be invalid in actual application when the actual core laws are examined in full and applied to the case.
Perhaps other salient points are:
1. It is my understanding that contracts which contains hidden elements are not valid contracts. There is a legal term for this I cannot immediately call to mind, but am sure you can supply.
2. There has been no complaint of any injury in this case - and there can be no crime unless there is an injured party. Instead, as stated previously, was initiated by an FDA complaint, and the nature of the complaint was unlawful claims according to their own definitions of what constitutes such claims. In other words, the mere testimony of an individual can be considered to be an unlawful claim by the company who sold the product that makes a natural substance (remember them doing it to cherries?) and/or dietary supplement a drug and thus subject the seller or manufacturer (Utopia Silver is both in this case) to having to prove it's safety through a process that excludes natural and unpatentable substances due to the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes, and which the track record indicates is no guarantee of safety at all.
I might also add that at least two former Supreme Court cases have found that the First Amendment does indeed apply to commercial speech as specifically applies to vitamins and minerals and that the FDA has the ability to accept a simple disclaimer and allow claims of health benefits to be made - but so far that exception has been extended only to big corporate food makers such as the big cereal makers. Keep in mind that, under the law, dietary supplements are considered food. I suppose the reasoning is that cherries and natural supplements represent a greater danger than do processed foods that have the nutrition processed out and chemicals added in for shelf life, taste, texture and color.
In my opinion, that is all just a sham and one of many barriers that have been erected to circumvent DSHEA and keep dietary supplements from cutting into what mainstream medicine and big pharma think are their exclusive marketplaces: our bodies, and, again in my opinion, regardless of the legalese it all comes down to, the government is using trickery to establish jurisdiction and it is very revealing about how they trick all of us into submitting to any number of jurisdictions and control that we are not legally or constitutionally bound to do.
In the end, Vulcanel, I believe that when a thing is wrong it is wrong no matter how many do it and no matter what justification or law may be used to support it, And when a thing is right, it is right no matter how few do it and no matter what laws or justifications may be presented to prevent it being done. And this thing is plainly wrong. As is, to me, it plainly right for us to stand up for our rights to address our own private health issues however we see fit, and put whatever we see fit into and onto our bodies, no matter what that might be.