Blagnet.net

Statolatry on the radio

A quibble I have with women, by and large, as regards their moral-political thought processes is that they are too hesitant to take a definitive side, to make a polarizing statement, to pronounce a strong (negative) judgment of people, ideas, or institutions. I made sure to say “by and large” because this is simply more true of women than men and doesn’t apply to everyone. I’m curious to know whether you agree with that assessment.

The particular woman who prompted me to write this today is Trudi Daniels, the news lady on the Drew & Mike show on WRIF-Detroit in the morning. It is easy to tell she is a pretty big State lover when they talk about news and politics, because the guys on the show are Ron Paul fans and they absolutely loathe Hillary Clinton, which they bring up every time they can. And they aren’t big fans of Barack Obama, either. One thing Mike Clark mentions probably more than any other political issue is socialized medicine, which frightens and worries him as much as it does me. The guys agree, and they all occasionally drop a Paulian opinion about the government or the candidates. But she’s always trying to interject her mitigating comments, or explain what Hillary or Obama meant by this or that statement, or tell one of the guys, “That’s not exactly true” or “There’s more to it than that” or something along those lines. What results is that the guys who actually run the show keep her more in check than she does them. If she were the news reporter for a show hosted by liberal wingnuts, she would probably go to town with her Hillary (or Obama) adulation and nanny-state socialism all the time.

I had her pegged as a typical wishy-washy liberal bed-wetter, but today I found out she is an ignorant and dim-witted Statolatrist. (Maybe there’s a difference, I don’t know. If there is, it’s only in degree.) In their discussion of the FLDS ranch raid in Eldorado, Texas, she said something to the effect of, “What I don’t understand is if their informant, ‘Sarah,’ was in Colorado, why wouldn’t they follow up on that? Aren’t they able to do that? Trace her number, find her address, or something? Why would they follow through with the raid if they knew or might have known the caller was far away, wasn’t making substantial accusations, and was probably pulling a prank?”

Are you fucking kidding me? Are you that naïve and gullible? Are you that brainwashed by the boobs in the MSM (you are one!) and the crooks and liars in the professional criminal class that you think neither local nor state nor federal cops would raid the compound of a cult, with tanks and full body armor and all kinds of extremely destructive (not defensive) weapons, on a pretense that was shaky at best? Why wouldn’t they go ahead with it even if the probable cause was not, in fact, all that probable? Have you lived this long in the 20th and 21st centuries without ever having the slightest inkling that maybe the types of people who are attracted to the higher levels of government, especially the law-enforcement branches, are the ones who enjoy and seek the exercise of power over others, especially by force—the more violent, the better?

The reason they raided the compound, kidnapped the children, and accused the adults of various violent crimes, without any real evidence, is because the cops and politicians will suffer little or none if they are wrong. What are the victims going to do? Sue them? Get money from them? No—get money from the taxpayers. What else could they do? Secede from that law-enforcement body and subscribe to a different service from a different entity? That’s what they sort of tried to do already, unofficially; that didn’t work!

But the adults were the ones who ran the cult and wanted to separate (hide?) themselves from Texas state law; this is about the children. The main legal justification for raiding a compound where hundreds of adults lived and kidnapping hundreds of children was that underage marriages and pregnancies may have been taking place, which is a violation of the children’s rights. The children are rightfully considered largely helpless by the State, and officials all think their rightful public duty is to protect children from crimes.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that most libertarians and other people who care about reducing State power (Constitutionally or revolutionarily) do not and would not justify the brainwashing, confinement, underage marrying, or underage impregnating that may or may not go on in this or any other cult. We do, however, have a very practical and utilitarian side to our moral and ethical reasonings—contrary to popular belief—and we assert loudly and confidently: MOST PARENTS KNOW BETTER HOW TO RAISE THEIR CHILDREN THAN ANYONE WHO WORKS FOR THE STATE DOES. We realize that whatever wrongs some neglectful, fundamentalist, evil, or stupid parents might inflict upon their children, the quantity and degree of such injustices pale in comparison to the injustices that will be inflicted upon child and adult alike by a state that is given enough power to combat such injustices. We realize that if you give a state the jurisdiction and power to decide unilaterally what is appropriate and inappropriate for a parent to do, that state’s power will grow such that the crimes it commits against the citizens at large will outweigh the crimes that would be committed by evil parents in both degree and number. If you are skeptical of that assertion, ask yourself: How many compounds did the FLDS cult members raid, with tanks and other destructive weapons, to kidnap other people’s children for the children’s own good? How many Branch Davidians did the polygamists in Eldorado murder? How many innocent drug users have the FLDS polygamists kidnapped, beaten, and enslaved in cages with serial murderers and rapists? How many 18-to-22-year-olds have the FLDS polygamists forced into military slavery and sent to die in a non-threatening country halfway across the world? How many other Eldorados and Wacos are there going to be, after the Imperial Federal Government and the state of Texas have broken their Constitutional limitations so many times and committed such injustices for the good of the people? You can’t give the State any power without it taking too much power. This is the utilitarian argument for libertarianism.

I try to keep in mind, as should you, Frederic Bastiat’s complaint, “[E]very time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.” I don’t know what, if anything, would be a good or right thing to do for the children who are born into the FLDS compound and remain there for all their lives; I know I would hate living there and would curse fate for giving me such a life (then again, if I were born into it, I might not know any better…). I don’t know what could have been done to help those children, those wives, or any other children and women in similar situations, in a free society; my guess is next to nothing. Certainly nothing forceful. Maybe there is no right answer for many of them. They’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Their lives will obviously be worse if they are forced into Texas’s foster-child system; there should be no argument over that. The only clear thing that emerges from this debacle is what should already be clear: State solutions are absolutely, positively always worse than the problems they purport to solve, and the governments of this country have too much power, and are too eager to exceed even that.

I never planned on writing three posts, much less three consecutive ones, on the FLDS compound raid, but I think I’m done with it, unless and until, of course, more State injustices occur in this case, which actually seems pretty likely.