Blagnet.net

It IS happening here

Republocrats currently use fear-mongering on two big issues to garner support for their various State interventions into our lives—terrorism for some, global warming for others. Perhaps it can be said that libertarians also use something akin to fear-mongering in our debate and discussion, though of course I think it is real and legitimate. The issue we focus on is much broader: the encroachment of the State into our private lives and the increasing subordination of the individual to the almighty, all-loving, all-caring State.

Neocons, socialists, and other State worshipers justify these encroachments and scoff at our hysteria with several poorly thought-out points, chief among them: all the good and great things State coercion and income redistribution have accomplished; the absolute metaphysical necessity of a powerful government as the only and final legal authority in a society, to prevent chaos from reigning in the streets; and the assertion that life in the Western world is pretty nice, we have it pretty good, we are relatively free, and compared to other times and places we haven’t much to complain about, so all of our talk about socialism and totalitarianism and erosion of the Constitution and economic/monetary intervention reducing the quality of life is bogus hogwash, meant to scare up support for greedy, heartless capitalism.

Since that first point is just sad and pathetic, let us address the other two. All (outspoken) anarcho-capitalists are familiar with the horror-stricken objections and subsequent smug derision directed at them from people who learn that they oppose the very existence of monopolistic government. Luckily I don’t have to make up what I think would be a representative example of such Statist objections; I can simply copy and paste one from my friend, who is a lawyer:

But what would empower the private court to be able enforce its rulings? What you call for is flat out anarchy…. There would be mass crime and killing in the streets if no one had the authority of the law to fear and respect. All private business would completely shut down because no one is going to bother manufacture products that anyone can just come along and copy or steal from you. People would live in complete and utter fear for their lives.

I have a better question: What would force the government to follow its own rules, and what would force it to follow the rules that it makes for its subjects?

Before you post a comment saying, “The approval and consent of the people, in a democratic state, will keep the government’s power in check,” let me remind you that such idiocy will remain on this website for all to see for probably the remainder of your life, so you’d better think of a response that has some basis in realism or historical fact.

The fact of the matter is, even here, in the freest country on Earth, people’s civil liberties and private property rights—even the ones that hardcore Statists agree exist—are being assaulted by law-enforcement officers with no accountability, no retribution, and no recourse for the victims. It happens much more often than you think. A quick perusal of Manuel Lora’s blag will give you a hint of this.

A few of the more appalling examples I’ve encountered recently:

J.D. Tuccille writes about Dibor Roberts, an immigrant from Senegal who was attacked by a police officer on a dark and deserted road.

Along Beaverhead Flat Road, an unlit, unpopulated route through the desert, she suddenly saw flashing lights in her rearview mirror. Fearful of stopping on a deserted stretch of pavement, especially in light of reports she’d heard of criminals impersonating police, she decided to proceed to a populated area before stopping the car, the nearest such area being Cornville, an unincorporated settlement along the road to Cottonwood. She slowed her car to acknowledge the flashing lights and continued to drive. Her decision wasn’t especially unusual—in fact, it’s recommended by some police departments. …

On Cornville Road, well before the populated area, Sheriff’s Sergeant Jeff Neunum apparently tired of waiting for Roberts to reach a settled area. While he was, in fact, a police officer, he now proceeded to justify every fear an American may have about rogue cops. He raced his cruiser in front of Roberts’s car, forcing her off the road. He then smashed her driver’s-side window with his baton and grabbed a cellphone she was using to check his identity. Accounts vary at this point. While police deny it, the press has reported that Neunum dragged Roberts from her vehicle, threw her to the ground, and handcuffed her while driving his knee into her back.

All of this because she was going 15 miles over the speed limit on a deserted rural road. …

Roberts faces two felonies charges: unlawful flight from a law officer and resisting arrest. Resisting arrest? Well, Sergeant Neunum apparently injured himself while breaking into Roberts’s car.

But Sergeant Neunum doesn’t stand alone. Yavapai County Sheriff Steve Waugh may be many things, but disloyal to his troops isn’t one of them. Amidst mounting protests and public outrage, Waugh held a press conference on January 15 to defend his hot-headed officer’s abuse of a scared woman on a lonely road. He voiced his full support for Neunum, faulting the sergeant only for cutting off Roberts to force her to the side of the road. …

Dibor Roberts now faces felony convictions and prison time all because she was scared by an unexpected confrontation on a dark and deserted road. As it turned out, she had more reason to be afraid than she knew.

Sergeant Neunum is still roaming the roads of Yavapai County, comfortable in the knowledge that he can abuse innocent people and still enjoy the support of Sheriff Steve Waugh.

Absolutely despicable. Appalling. Frightening. Bordering on evil. I’m referring, of course, to the State-worshipers who defend the State’s near-complete immunity from its own laws. The policemen in this story and the thousands of local, state, and federal agents who are like them are much worse.

In August 2007, Jeff and Nicole Rank were arrested for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts. As far as I can tell, there is no “other side of the story” involving violence or disruption or even any kind of disorderliness. Just peacefully and calmly protesting President Bush at a speech he was giving in Texas. With the help of the ACLU, they sued the federal government and won a settlement of $80,000. That is the approximate yearly income tax burden of three or four American families. Three families paid taxes for an entire year to reimburse these two Americans for the crimes of the State. They can’t have their money back. They can’t send their kids to college with it. They can’t pay some of their mortgage with it. They can’t save it for retirement. They certainly can’t opt out of such a heinously dysfunctional system and purchase something they’d want with their own money. Pay it, or be killed.

Many objectors will be puzzled at this example because they consider it a case where the system worked. Worked! Ha! The very fact that such blatant and egregious violations of anyone’s freedoms, by the very State that exists to ensure and protect them, could even be possible in a system of governance is reason enough for any freedom-loving person to reject such a system outright, regardless of any other redeeming qualities it might have. That so-called conservatives would continue to support a regime that is even capable of such absurdity is proof of how morally bankrupt and philosophically clueless they have become.

Radley Balko often posts updates about Ryan Frederick, a Virginia man who shot and killed an undercover cop in self-defense when the cops broke into his home for a drug raid. Here is his first post about it and here’s a recent update about this sad story. Balko sums it up nicely:

Ryan Frederick was arraigned today. He was charged with first-degree murder, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, and…simple possession of marijuana.

That’s right. Though police still haven’t told us how much marijuana they found, it wasn’t enough to charge Frederick with anything more than a misdemeanor. For a misdemeanor, they broke down his door, a cop is dead, and a 28-year-old guy’s life is ruined. Looks like the informant mistook Frederick’s gardening hobby for an elaborate marijuana growing operation, and those Japanese maple trees for marijuana plants.

Don’t forget about Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old woman who was killed by Atlanta cops in a drug raid. Even worse than Atlanta is the entire state of North Carolina. It ruined the lives of the three completely innocent Duke lacrosse players, and Michael Nifong has suffered almost zero so far. (Though it should be disclosed that, for my purposes, anything less than life imprisonment alongside murderers and rapists counts as almost zero.) You can bet your house that the first two judges who allowed Nifong’s illegal and immoral investigation to happen will not suffer the first bit, and neither will the next judge who has similar lapses, nor the next, nor the next. Ever hear about the Little Rascals Day Care case? No? You need to read more.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, more examples of egregious law-enforcement abuses, if only I had run a blag since high school or had the foresight to save all of them. These are not isolated incidents, and they are not atypical. If the system did anything that an intelligent person could misconstrue as “working,” then the system would have been abolished about 80 or 90 years ago. It wasn’t, but continues to get worse. The system doesn’t work because a State that judges its own propriety and pays no price for being wrong will continuously grow more intrusive and more criminal.

Liberal Republocrats who think of themselves as civil libertarians will say they shouldn’t be blamed for any drug-war-related crimes of the State because they oppose prohibitions on drug use, prostitution, and other illicit behaviors. It’s all the fault of Christian conservatives, see. Funny, I don’t seem to recall too many Democrats in Congress introducing legislation that would end the War on Drugs recently. Maybe I missed it. If it is so obviously evil and harmful, why do you continue to support the politicians who give it their explicit support? Your actions speak louder than your words.

What makes libertarians unique in the midst of so many Statists is that we realize how unrealistic it is for a State to grow big in one area but not in another. Liberals want social freedom but economic slavery. (Neo)conservatives, as it stands today, may talk about economic freedom but they certainly don’t seem too adamant about freedom of any kind. Libertarians care about freedom from the State per se, and one of the most important things we realize is that middle-of-the-road policies are figments of the Statist’s imagination. They are bound to lead towards totalitarianism. A particular power given to the State absolutely always causes more problems than it solves, which leads to cries for more State interventions; and each power the State takes seems to make the next one easier to take. Before long, as we have witnessed in the Western world from the 19th to the 21st century, it will take another and another until it can just take them at will without any consent at all. That is what we witness in the realm of law enforcement today.

Which brings us seamlessly into that third Statist assertion I mentioned earlier: we are still quite free and, when you think about all the other people who have lived in other times and places, we have it pretty damn good. True, but that sounds to me like voting for the lesser of two evils while openly admitting you are voting for evil. The problem with the free-and-rich-by-comparison argument is that we are, in fact, much, much less free than our own countrymen were only a century ago, and the acceleration of law-enforcement abuses indicates that our very basic freedoms don’t have long to live. Along with that, the interventions of the State into the economy are actually making us poorer, due to inflation, an entirely State-caused housing crisis, imminent socialized medicine, and stifling taxes and regulations in every industry at every level. It isn’t getting better.

Hopefully the above examples have conveyed my point that Americans are not actually a very free people. We are getting less free. We are getting more dependent on the State. We are either getting poorer or are getting richer much slower than before. A recession is imminent, may be here already. People are afraid of their government, and should be. People are killed by their government. People are imprisoned in hellholes with serial rapists for possessing taboo substances, or for even less than that. The State doesn’t suffer. The State doesn’t shrink. The State can’t be fixed, argued with, or opted out of. Millions of people vote against the evil State and its enablers, and they get less freedom and more socialism. Their vote is worthless. Their preferences are forbidden. The system doesn’t work. That is the very antithesis of freedom; it is fascism, it is socialism, and it is the epitome of evil in this world.

Socialism is here. Militarism is here. Near-totalitarianism is coming. Americans want it. Americans are asking for it. Americans are doing it to themselves. They think hardcore socialists like Barack Obama or authoritarian megalomaniacs like Hillary Clinton are the answer to a century of socialism and megalomania. They think that is change!

Libertarians aren’t fear-mongers and we aren’t getting all hysterical over nothing. Life in the United States isn’t so good, at least not for the several million people who are the most direct victims of the State’s economic/monetary interference or its law-enforcement abuses. The State is ruining people’s lives every day, and all we hear from most voters, writers, politicians, and pundits is more, more, more government! We must have the State as the ultimate legal authority in a given geographical area, so that it can murder, beat, imprison, rob, and terrorize its subjects, with nearly complete impunity, or else private citizens might do those things! In a passage of The State that I have already blagged about, Anthony de Jasay discusses the impossibility of an impartial state. Since you Statists aren’t too bloody likely to read it, I’ll paste the final paragraph of that chapter for you:

In conflict with his own kind, he would have the faculty of appeal, of recourse to a superior instance. Freedom from conflict of like with like, however, puts him in potential conflict with the higher instance. In opting for the latter, the possibility of recourse is given up. The state cannot be seriously expected to arbitrate conflicts to which it is an interested party, nor can we invoke its help in our quarrels with it. This is why accepting private interference, no matter how much it resembles “Darwinist sweepstakes,” is a risk of a different order from that of accepting state interference. The prudential argument against putting public in place of private constraints is not that one hurts more than the other. It is the somewhat indirect but no less powerful one that doing so makes the state unfit to perform the one service for civil society which no other body can render—that of being the instance of appeal.

To briefly return to the real-life objection that a real-life Statist friend made,

But what would empower the private court to be able enforce its rulings?

I haven’t answered that here, nor did I try, but I did offer a much better question: What empowers the people to force the monopolistic State to follow its own rules? What empowers the people to ensure the monopolistic State follows at least some of the same rules the people are subject to? What empowers the people to hold the monopolistic State accountable? If you answered “checks and balances” and “democratic voting,” then congratulations on proving another point of mine, to wit, that if the abuses and corruption we observe in the United States can happen, after only 2+ centuries, even with the supposedly brilliant constraints that were written into the supposedly brilliant Constitution by the supposedly brilliant Framers, then what does that say about the nature of the State in general? That the freest country on Earth, with a federal system of governments so brilliantly constrained by the Constitution, could descend to fascist socialism so fast, is an indictment of your very idea of monopolistic government.

What you call for is flat out anarchy….

What you call for is flat-out socialist Statism, with a State that is completely unaccountable and completely unconstrained by any rules, guidelines, market forces, morals, history, or common sense.

There would be mass crime and killing in the streets if no one had the authority of the law to fear and respect.

There is mass crime called taxation and inflation, and there seems to be an alarmingly high number of killings executed by government officials, with little or no punishment and certainly no changes apparent on the horizon. There is mass killing in other countries called warfare, mass killing in our country called terrorism, directly incited by our own government. There was massive slavery and murder called military conscription at numerous times in our past. We do fear, but certainly do not respect, the law and its enforcers.

All private business would completely shut down because no one is going to bother manufacture products that anyone can just come along and copy or steal from you.

All private businesses and their workers and the unemployed are currently impoverished and constrained by oppressive theft and threats—otherwise known as taxation and regulation—or else they are enriched at the expense of others with the help of the regulatory State. Inflation makes everyone poorer in the long run, which is the direct result of the existence of the Federal Reserve.

People would live in complete and utter fear for their lives.

People do live in complete and utter fear for their lives, from their government.

The only argument the Statist has left, as far as I can tell, is to assert that all these things would be even worse in the absence of a monopolistic government, but given the superior capacity of the free market to provide every single other good that it has ever been allowed to provide, the Statists are, to put it mildly, unlikely to win that argument.

Thanks to the Statists’ insistence on an unaccountable legal system, an ultimate legal authority that cannot be opposed or opted out of, we have abuse after abuse after abuse. The civil liberties violations of the neocons of the Bush regime are the direct and entirely predictable result of the State’s legal impunity, not of over-zealous Christian conservatives or opportunistic fighters of the war on terrorism who use an evil foreign enemy to justify the taking of our freedoms. It is happening here because there is no other option and the State is never punished, and it will continue to happen, probably at an accelerated rate, in the foreseeable future.