Government lawyers in the Pentagon are demanding that California National Guard members who took bonuses to sign up for re-enlistment and future possible deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan ten years ago, now have to pay back those bonuses. The government was not authorized to make them.
Now, how likely is it that the service members knew that government officials were unauthorized to offer the bonuses that helped the government to solve its shortage of war-fighters? Of course most people hearing about this wonder how hard it would be for them if the government asked them to pay back $15,000 the government may have given them 10 years ago for any reason.
But worse than that, the government is compounding its mere incompetence with a very dramatic fraud. Men extended their enlistments knowing they would likely be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan and might lose their lives or their limbs or their minds fighting there. But now they learn that the bonuses were a case of fraud upon their trust in their government! Effectively, it was just a trick to help the government steal their labor, their lives, their limbs, and their minds.
Well, what can you expect of a government that expects everyone except high politicians and high bureaucrats to obey the laws? It is government by fraud for the fraudsters laid heavily upon the defrauded. This is a fine substitute for the Rule of Law. The People are now no more than fleeced sheep in the hands of these monstrously evil rulers. There is a multitude of such frauds, but this is one of the more egregious of that multitude.
Update: Today, 27 October 2016, the policy of recovering the bonus money was revoked due to complaints by some Congress members, at least some of whom recognized the offering of bonuses to be later taken back as fraud.