Commonwealth versus State

 I heard this often enough while in prison - commonwealth were different from states. We had plenty of people in Fort Dix FCI from Virginia and Pennsylvania. I never tried to explain the difference, their opinions ran close to the theological, and I never found it profitable to argue someone out of their beliefs. All that can be done in the face of wrongheadedness is education.

Today, Merriam-Webster's word of the day included a link to this article, What's the difference between a commonwealth and a state?

There are four states in the United States that call themselves commonwealths: Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The distinction is in name alone. The commonwealths are just like any other state in their politics and laws, and there is no difference in their relationship to the nation as a whole.

 So why are they called commonwealths? Well, their constitutions simply deem them such. According to one commonwealth's web site (Massachusetts—the one in which Merriam-Webster is headquartered), the term commonwealth was preferred by a number of political writers in the years leading up to 1780, when the Massachusetts constitution officially designated the state as such; the preference is believed to have existed perhaps because there was "some anti-monarchial sentiment in using the word commonwealth."

This seemed to then and still does to belong with other superstitions of the incarcerated which might all lumped under the sovereign citizen umbrella. I found online A QUICK GUIDE TO SOVEREIGN CITIZENS, which I think does a good job of showing the nature of these ideas. That people take these ideas seriously showed to me the failure of the American education system. Crazy has many homes in America besides Marjorie Taylor Greene. Now, about the extent of these ideas, I offer up Torres v. Fla. Dep't of Corr.:

 

Florida law requires Defendant to "protect the public through the incarceration and supervision of offenders." Fla. Stat. § 20.315(1). Defendant employs officers to oversee its inmates. Those officers enforce rules to ensure prison security and public safety. Some rules prohibit the possession of contraband. One such rule, Florida Administrative Code Rule 33-602.203(7), which the parties call the "UCC Contraband Rule," prohibits the possession of "any forms that may be used in the fraudulent filing of Uniform Commercial Code liens and/or publications that promote this practice."

Defendant promulgated the UCC Contraband Rule to curtail fraudulent activity, particularly by sovereign citizens. As explained by Carter Hickman, a Correctional Services Consultant for Defendant, "[t]he U.S. Department of Justice defines sovereign citizens as a domestic terrorist movement comprised of a network of loosely affiliated individuals who hold extremist beliefs that federal, state, and local governments are operating illegitimately." "Sovereign citizens often engage in many fraudulent financial schemes, often targeting government officials with various tactics used to harass, intimidate, and psychologically threaten them . . . includ[ing] creating fraudulent liens representing a fabricated debt supposedly owed by the government official to the sovereign citizen."

You may not recognize how crazy this idea is. The UCC is a state law. If state government is illegitimate, then how is it a state law is not also illegitimate?

America, home of the moron and land of the crazy.

But back to the idea of a commonwealth, how many states do promote the good of all its citizens?

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