Redemption

Conversion Is a Red Herring: Why Status-Based Remedies Fail

A master principle that sits beneath nearly every foreclosed sovereign-citizen remedy on this site. The movement believes the system 'converted' the living person into a commercial or 14th-Amendment entity, and that reversing the status — accepted-for-value, the strawman, natural-man declarations, redemption, a UCC-1 against the birth certificate — defeats liability. But the system does not need to convert anyone. Once conduct is characterized (as commerce, as a crime), the apparatus reaches through to the living being directly and asymmetrically: it attaches the burden side of the legal relation — duty, liability, punishability — while withholding the correlative benefit side. United States v. Amy (1859) states the mechanism with brutal candor. The payoff: status-based remedies do not each fail for an idiosyncratic reason; they fail for one reason — they target status when the reach-through is conduct-driven. This is a deeper diagnosis than impedance/routing: it is a category error about the theory of liability itself. Verdict: supported.