This occurred at a relatively unlikely place, the language-focused blag Lingua Franca. Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics and prolific language blagger, wrote:

The 1897 session of the Indiana General Assembly passed “A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth.” It asserted that (i) the ratio of the chord and arc of a 90-degree segment of a circle was 7/8; (ii) the ratio of said chord to the circle’s diameter (hence to the diagonal of a square inscribed in the circle) was 7/10; and (iii) the ratio of the diameter to the circumference was (5/4)/4. Pi must be equal to 3.2 for these things to be true. Yet the bill nearly made it through committee in the Senate, until one senator pointed out that it was ultra vires for the Assembly to define mathematical truth.

…when you assemble a few hundred ambitious people who managed to win elections and let them vote on proposed laws, you occasionally get silliness. Possibly about mathematical truth, or even linguistic truth.

The latter came up this past week when the French Senate passed a bill (already passed by the National Assembly in December) criminalizing a specific linguistic act: asserting that the slaughter of Armenians in Turkey during 1915 does not satisfy the definition of the word genocide.

This law (which President Sarkozy is widely expected to sign into law) makes it a crime to deny or “outrageously minimize” the number and motivation of the mass killings of Armenians. To assert the view “What happened in 1915 was not genocide” would be a prosecutable offense. The bill legislatively insists that a certain set of contingent historical events meet the criteria for use of the term genocide, and forbids asserting the opposite. If a document were found proving that all the killings of Armenians in 1915 were unintended side effects of a hyperspace bypass construction operation by extra-terrestrials, it would apparently be illegal for historians to discuss the document at a conference in France. This is legislative idiocy.
[...]
I have not expressed any opinion about the history. Since Armenian-Turkish journalist and editor Hrant Dink was murdered in broad daylight for treating the topic, I’m not exactly eager to. And my ignorance of early 20th-century Anatolian history is profound, so perhaps it’s just as well. But Mark Liberman noted on Language Log that The New York Times, after decades of demurral, reportedly decided in 2004 that “genocide” was and is an appropriate word for the events in question. (And you don’t turn the Gray Lady around easily—The New York Times still requires clause-initial whom, for heaven’s sake).

Mass killings of Armenians in Turkey as the Ottoman Empire collapsed appear to be copiously documented. My reasons for calling the French legislation crazy do not lie in any disagreement about the documentation. And I don’t care for wacky historical contrarians—nobody despises Holocaust deniers more than I do. I just think that it would be a monumental blunder to enact a law stipulating a point of lexical denotation. Insisting that you have to count the events as meeting the definition of genocide is as silly as trying to legislate the area of a square inscribed in a circle of diameter n.

The right way to handle thought crimes (or mathematical contradictions) is the American way: We grit our teeth and let people utter their loony ideas. We don’t use the criminal law to define their lexical denotations as erroneous or to forbid their ideas from being uttered.

Sarkozy isn’t Satan, and the fanatical Turkish denialism about 1915 is not virtuous or even sensible; but passing a law stipulating anything about how the word genocide is to be applied would be a stupid legislative mistake.

A commenter going by beedhamm wrote the following comment:

The main piece of support for your argument (something to the effect of it’s “legislative idiocy”) is stated here:

“The right way to handle thought crimes (or mathematical contradictions) is the American way: We grit our teeth and let people utter their loony ideas. We don’t use the criminal law to define their lexical denotations as erroneous or to forbid their ideas from being uttered.”
Now ask, what proof is there for this statement in the rest of your article? You’ve taken a serious, complex, nuanced situation and attempted to treat it in a lighthearted fashion, primarily by repeating something to the effect of it’s “a stupid legislative mistake.”

Perhaps a cognitive linguist, like Lakoff, would be better suited to comment on this issue?

I didn’t reply to this comment because I didn’t even know where to begin, perhaps largely because beedhamm failed to even make a point or state a single opinion, other than insinuating that Dr. Pullum’s conclusion is wrong and that a more detailed, in-depth, scholarly treatment of the proposed French law would lead to a different conclusion. Such a weak stance and absurdly heinous implication (that such laws aren’t mistakes and punishing speech can be desirable) were about par for the course for this morally questionable and intellectually bankrupt individual, as I discovered later.

Below that, an Armenian fellow whose name I will not paste because it was written in Armenian script, wrote:

Sound like you (the author) are one of the extremely uneducated (although have the opportunity to study whatever desired), wrongly self-confident Midwesterns that I’ve seen for years while studying there, that are no different from the uneducated (mainly cause they don’t have the choice to study), extremely ignorant immigrants whom I see every day now at the East Coast.

Please note that the language barrier has nothing to do with this Armenian’s misunderstanding of the principle of freedom of speech, as seen by the ensuing exchange. I responded:

Geoffrey Pullum: “Governments have no business legislating word definitions, any more than they have legislating mathematical relationships. We also shouldn’t silence, censor, fine, imprison, threaten, or otherwise punish people for the words they say and write that harm no one, however wrong or insulting they are.”

You: “You must be an uneducated, ignorant, privileged, out-of-touch moron.”

Nice job. You made your case really well, except I thought your Concluding Statement could have used a few more baseless insults.

This Armenian responded,

For your knowledge (since you need some): A word is the most powerful weapon existing on this planet (that is the same as religion, propaganda, etc.). So you agreeing with the thought “We also shouldn’t silence, censor, fine, imprison, threaten, or otherwise punish people for the words they say and write that harm no one, however wrong or insulting they are.” (by the way, see how it’s done? I mean the quotation) is another indicator of your low level education.

I ended my interaction with him with:

Just to clarify, you’re basically saying that it is ignorant (uneducated, stupid, wrong, unenlightened) to object to the idea that a government should define certain speech as harmful and punish users of such speech in proportion to the harm their words cause? Maybe you don’t realize how ridiculous that sounds to the English-speaking world. I didn’t think there was anyone outside of totalitarian governments who thought that way anymore. It is clear that nothing can be gained from interacting with such a sorry excuse for a human. Have a good life, and I hope you find your authoritarian police state someday.

(There was another brief exchange between us that was definitely hampered by the language barrier, but that’s not vital here.) Language barrier or no, this person’s intent is perfectly clear: The State should define certain speech or (mis)uses of words as harmful, should outlaw them, and should punish transgressors with the full force of the law.

I don’t care where you’re from, who you’re descended from, what your family or country has gone through, what your native language is, how fluent you are in the language you’re writing in, or what type of government you have lived under, there is NO EXCUSE for advocating the use of the police power of the State to punish people’s words or ideas. Boycotts, fine. Retaliatory slander, fine. Peaceful protests, fine. But this Armenian would lock you and your family in a cage for years for saying the wrong words in the wrong context. Those are monstrous thoughts written by a monstrous person, plain and simple. We (well, especially I) use all kinds of colorful language to describe people whose ideas and actions are abhorrent, so perhaps some of their meanings or effects get watered down on the internet. Well, here we have as clear-cut an example of a fascist, authoritarian, hateful, uncivilized, Statolatrist barbarian as I have ever had the displeasure of interacting with. Over the last couple years, spurred mainly by my own regret at how I responded to some people in internet discussions and the unpleasantness I felt when people were assholes to me, I have committed myself to responding politely and respectfully to others at all times, much to my and their mutual benefit, I’m happy to say. (You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?) However, I have no sympathy for anyone who would ever even consider taking such an anti–free speech position, and such a pathetic excuse for a human being deserves no respect, politeness, benefit of the doubt, or moderation in our condemnation of his opinions or exposure of his depraved, wretched character. As Professor Farnsworth would say, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

beedhamm responded to my first comment as well:

When did we agree that the deniers of genocide use “words … that harm no one”?

I suspect that we have to be a bit more careful to make sure that when we write “no one” we don’t just mean “me and the people like me.”

Again, he fails to really even make a point, other than to imply that words do, in fact, harm people, and by failing to qualify his statements with at least an admission that censorship laws can be a bad idea, he implies that they are good ideas, specifically the French genocide law. Therefore, I decided to take him behind the woodshed:

Of course words themselves harm no one, except emotionally and psychologically to the extent that the victim lets them. I guess you should be arrested and charged with a crime for harming my emotional state? Should I be arrested and charged with a crime for insulting you and the Armenian person above? How about if I said these things in the wrong locations:

The Holocaust never happened. Hitler was a great guy. No events in or around 1915 could be considered genocide, especially as concerns Armenians.

Those are all false statements and terribly offensive and ignorant, but no one was harmed by them. Yet according to German law and soon-to-be French law, I could be punished by law for typing them within their borders. That is absurd. If you disagree, I doubt either one of us will gain much by continuing this discussion.

Do you think it’s morally unjust right now, i.e., an attack that should be punishable or defensible by force, to deny that Armenians were the victims of genocide? Or is it only wrong after a government outlaws it? If it has always been harmful since 1915, then what action or recourse should victims of such denial have been taking all these years? Surely they are right to strike out in self-defense in response to such offenses. What compensation are they due? If it has always been morally wrong, then surely it is wrong everywhere, not just France or Turkey or Armenia. Plenty of Armenians live in the U.S. What punishment should the New York Times be subject to for refusing to acknowledge it as a genocide? Surely if it’s wrong, period, regardless of law or geography, then I should be put in jail or fined heavily (or retaliated against in self-defense by all my victims) for typing it to prove a point.

Furthermore, surely there is not just one word in all of the French language that the government should determine the definition of. What other words fit the criterion of requiring definition by the government? What words in the English language fit the bill?

Is denying that Armenians were the victims of genocide a punishable offense if any human sees or hears it? Or just Armenians? Should the severity of the punishment be proportional to the number of humans or specifically Armenians who are exposed to it? What about someone who copies and spreads a speech or writing with such denials? Should this person be commended for alerting the Armenians (or all humans) to such offenses, or should they be punished similarly to the original perpetrator for spreading such lies? The words themselves do harm, remember, so it can’t matter why that person was motivated to spread the offending speech or what context it was done in or what commentary the spreader appended to the genocide denial. (You can’t rob someone and say “Theft is wrong” to avoid punishment. If the words do harm, the offender must be punished, right?) If someone wrote it in a private, personal journal and it was discovered happenstance by a visitor, should that offense also become punishable? After all, the words themselves are harmful. What if no Armenians actually saw it? What if only a single half-Armenian saw it? Should the fine be reduced by half?

How about implicit denial? Is that an aggression against person or property that should be punishable by force of law? For instance, someone talks about Armenians or Turks in or around 1915 but simply fails to mention the word “genocide”. What if they use all kinds of other words, like massacre or slaughter or travesty or injustice, but implicitly deny that it was genocide by avoiding this specific word? Surely that must also be wrong, not just after Sarkozy signs the bill but every day since the genocide ended (or even during it). What if future books about genocide are published that do not mention anything about Armenians? How about any current books about ethnic cleansing or genocide that might not mention the Armenian genocide and thereby implicitly deny it? By your logic, such books must necessarily be banned in France, and unless you’d say that right and wrong depend only on the law, such books should be banned everywhere, forever, in self-defense to prevent further harm being done by the words on their pages. If anyone’s definition of right and wrong depends on what laws politicians write and pass, then they can’t carry on an intelligent conversation with me.

The reason Dr. Pullum did not offer a detailed or academic defense of his contention that this French law is the wrong way to deal with offensive speech is probably partly because none is needed. It is self-evident. One’s innate right to free speech is not bound by anyone’s sensibilities or any laws, and certainly not math or history. If you agree with such censorship and dismissal of free speech, then, well, I would certainly want nothing to do with authoritarians of your ilk. Denying someone of a part of their property and liberty for typing or saying something offensive or insulting would be a far worse crime than any the offender supposedly committed. The words themselves are not harmful, not in any way that falls under the purview of law. And to re-state Dr. Pullum’s point, it is simply self-evidently absurd to suggest that any government can or should define words and punish people for their misuse.

I could have gone much farther than this reductio ad absurdum, but I doubt he got very far into my rant or understood how the absurdities that would result from censorship laws expose the inconsistency and untenability of his position. It is not possible to retain any semblance of a principled moral or political philosophy or even to put on a show of being a civilized, respectable, intelligent human being while asserting—even failing to deny—that words and ideas inflict harm upon others in ways that should be punishable by the State.

I am saddened to learn that many European and Asian countries already have laws against genocide denial, not just Germany. You might say, “Oh, now that you see how widespread genocide denial laws are and how acceptable they are to hundreds of millions of people, do you want to tone down your attack of the supporters of such laws?” Quite the contrary. They are all objectively, verifiably, undeniably wrong, just as all murder, rape, taxation, conscription, and all other free speech–abridging laws are wrong. It is quite possible that Holocaust deniers deserve for bad things to happen to them, but I’m thinking more in a karma-driven way, not through the police power of government.

If I had to guess, based on spelling and (lack of) opinions on the merits of free speech, I would guess beedhamm is from somewhere in the Eastern hemisphere, perhaps Germany (“hamm”?) or somewhere farther east, where the innate right of free speech is less universally acknowledged than it is in North America. Therefore, it might be far past noon where beedhamm sits and longs for the kidnapping, beating, and imprisonment of people who misuse the word “genocide”, so I will take his current silence as an admission of defeat and acknowledgment of the beatdown I handed him (or her).

For example, Congressman Darrell Issa has proposed the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) act, which Google, Twitter, Facebook, and other powerful internet companies endorse. To the extent that it takes powers away from the federal government and nullifies previous laws, I applaud it. But I don’t trust 99% of politicians at all, and I distrust 100% of the rent-seeking corporate–State system of governance that we have. I don’t think either would allow a sustained defense of our online freedoms.

The U.S. government has already signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and the European Union will soon follow. A bill dubbed Ireland’s SOPA is soon to be enacted without a vote in its legislature. The FBI shut down MegaUpload.com and arrested four of its employees outside of the U.S.’s borders, in New Zealand (with cooperation with foreign authorities, of course). Universal Music Group (UMG) steals people’s music and takes down their original, non-pirating, legally compliant YouTube videos with the power and privilege it has gained from its collusion with the Imperial Federal Government.

What have people’s protests done to stop governments from accruing these restrictive, violating, wasteful, wealth-destroying powers? What has “democracy” done, for that matter? What will any amount of protesting, voting, petitioning, or lobbying do to stop the future encroachments that are guaranteed to be tried this year, and the next, and the next?

The problem with Rep. Issa’s OPEN act is that the internet and the realm of IP/copyright need fewer laws, not more. Repealing old laws like DMCA, renouncing ACTA, and doing something to prevent the MPAA and RIAA from influencing law in any way would actually help. How in the world can we accomplish that in this day and age? Most liberals will never vote for a civil-libertarian congresshuman, senator, or president who also has libertarian-ish economic stances, and most conservatives refuse to vote for anyone who isn’t an authoritarian, paternalist warmonger (i.e., State worshipper). (Observe the extent to which the Tea Party has been diluted from a position of strongly advocating actually smaller government to “well, lower taxes and fewer business regulations would be preferable.” At least, that’s my perception of them.)

I also applaud the Occupy protesters and the SOPA protesters, who made millions if not billions of people more aware of their issues and sympathetic to their causes, and in the latter case, who actually seem to have influenced policy for the good.

I don’t think it will last long, unfortunately. Our ardor and stamina in defending our rights just don’t exist. Our quality of life will have to be severely, immediately, and clearly impacted by a law for widespread protests and backlash to defend us against our corrupt political system for long. There will be another SOPA/PIPA, and it will pass the House and Senate and be signed by the president, probably President Obama. It won’t be egregious and alarming to most people, but it will be bad enough. Liberal and conservative voters will pat themselves on the back for being reasonable, realistic, and bi-partisan and defending themselves against the horror of SOPA, and the professional criminal class will chuckle to themselves saying, “Stupid, gullible SOPA protesters. That’ll teach ’em what standing up to our authority will get them.”

I thought the case against Amanda Knox was so circumstantial and sensationalized that a conviction would be a terrible injustice, and I think this is even more obvious today. As I wrote in 2009, the Statolatry, the demonization of any suspect that the State brands as guilty, and the blood-lust to convict and execute them led to the overblown media coverage, the caricaturing of Amanda Knox by nearly everyone, the calls for her head, and the eventual conviction.

What does she do about those four years of her life that she lost? What does anyone do about them? Who pays for those mistakes? Would a free market for courts and justice hold people more accountable for their mistakes or reduce the frequency of mistakes? Even the IRS gives you a refund if you overpay your income taxes. What accused murderer gets retribution after being acquitted? Why are judges, juries, lawyers, and the court systems so rarely held responsible for ruining people’s lives like this? I’ve heard of wrongful conviction lawsuits or settlements, but I doubt any is forthcoming here.

Many people scoff (or worse) at anarchists for proposing to dismantle an entire system because it has some flaws. The reason we want to abolish monopolistic criminal justice systems is because the monopoly is the root of all its injustices. No one has any say in the standards or structure of the laws and legal systems they are held to (if you counter that voting is their say, then you have obviously not been paying attention to the laughable level of justice and accountability that politicians and their cronies in financial firms and other huge corporations have been held to in the last decade). The State is so rarely held accountable for its mistakes, including ruining millions of people’s lives, like Amanda Knox, that it’s a wonder that more people don’t see that its lack of accountability to the people is by design, not by accident.

Notwithstanding the reminders from the likes of Noam Chomsky that the FBI (and, I presume, the CIA?) has no proof that Osama bin Laden orchestrated or ordered the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Eric Margolis’s matter-of-fact assertion that “Bin Laden long claimed he had no role in 9/11,” to me it seems extremely, vanishingly unlikely that bin Laden was not a murderer. Many Muslims whose judgment isn’t clouded by all-consuming hatred of the Great Satan recognize that bin Laden killed more Muslims than non-Muslims. In this case, as with presidents and dictators who are accurately called murderers for the deaths they ordered, I call bin Laden a murderer if he never pulled the trigger or pushed the detonator that killed any innocent. Without having analyzed any of the FBI’s, CIA’s, or anyone else’s raw intelligence data or other evidence, from my blagging chair I would put bin Laden’s likelihood of guilt as high as O.J.’s. Besides, he has loudly and proudly claimed responsibility for many non-9/11 murders.

If he is a murderer, then isn’t death a suitable punishment for his crimes? Doesn’t one forfeit his right to life when he maliciously (i.e., not in self-defense) kills innocent people? I think libertarian justice theory is even divided on this issue: some say no one should kill another except in self-defense, some say taking the life of a proven murderer is justified, some say the alleged killer must be convicted in some type of trial according to the legal (or anarchic protection and insurance) system of the victims or their representatives. I’m probably biased by emotion and circumstances, but I tend to think that every relative or friend of anyone killed by bin Laden’s terrorist attacks, which includes people of many nationalities and includes more than the 9/11 attacks, would be justified in seeking retribution in the form of retaliative killing, given that his guilt is proven. Some, including myself, say that his guilt is already proven, so the formality of a trial might not be strictly necessary. A trial would be preferable, though, for several reasons, as follows.

You could say that our Imperial Federal Government was acting as the representative of bin Laden’s thousands of American and non-American victims and exacting their revenge (justice?) for them, given its superior resources. However, I don’t think the State has any more justification to take someone’s life than it has to do anything else, no matter how justified that State’s subjects would be individually and no matter how heinous the crime. (I vehemently oppose the death penalty because the State should definitely not have permission to kill anyone, less so than any of its other activities.) If Chomsky and Margolis are right, then the Imperial Federal Government would not be justified in punishing or seeking justice against bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks. If most other people are right about 9/11 or at least about the thousands of other people bin Laden has murdered, then those people and their governments would be right in seeking justice or revenge (not the same thing). Therefore, I cannot conclude that it was necessarily right for the State to take bin Laden’s life, but killing a mass murderer per se certainly isn’t the worst thing the Obama regime could have done.

What should it have done, then? All of bin Laden’s victims and their military representatives, if you want to call them that (they don’t represent me, that’s for damn sure), had four options as I see it: do nothing about him, assassinate him, issue drone bombings and missile launches in the hopes that you kill him (and inevitably kill innocents in the process), or capture and try him for his murders. First, what were the legal and practical options the President had?

Professor Jon Silverman discusses and weighs all the legal avenues Obama (and Bush) could have taken regarding bin Laden. I liked that column both because and in spite of the fact that he doesn’t draw any solid conclusions.

This article by Emma Mustich of Salon.com, “Was killing bin Laden legal?”, is a thorough but brief must-read, even to those who recognize that legality rarely has anything to do with right and wrong. But if you’re going to talk about bringing someone to trial, then the realities of law and legality are unavoidable. Mustich writes:

Der Spiegel spoke Tuesday to University of Cologne professor Claus Kress, who questioned the legality of the terrorist leader’s assassination, insisting that justice is “not achieved through summary executions, but through a punishment that is meted out at the end of a trial.” According to the Spiegel:

Kress says the normal way of handling a man who is sought globally for commissioning murder would be to arrest him, put him on trial and ultimately convict him. In the context of international law, military force can be used in the arrest of a suspect, and this may entail gun fire or situations of self-defense that, in the end, leave no other possibility than to kill a highly dangerous and highly suspicious person.

[...]
Elsewehere in the media, James Downie quoted an explanation offered by one of his New Republic colleagues, who does believe the killing of bin Laden was legally justified:

“There are targeted killing issues where the legal background is complicated,” says Brookings fellow (and New Republic contributor) Benjamin Wittes. But, as it turns out, “[t]his isn’t one of them.” One week after the September 11 attacks, Wittes explains, President George W. Bush signed Public Law 107-40, in which Congress authorized the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” No one fit this description more closely than Osama bin Laden. (By contrast, the NATO missile strike in Tripoli that allegedly killed Muammar Qaddafi’s son Seif Al Arab and three of his young grandchildren this past weekend has elicited greater controversy, because the U.N. resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya, among many other differences from 107-40, did not include an authorization of force against Qaddafi or his family.)

For their parts, co-founders of the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law John Norton Moore and Robert F. Turner have argued that bin Laden’s killing was legal according to the U.N. charter as well as Security Council Resolution 1373, passed within a month of Sept. 11, 2001, which emphasises “the need to combat by all means … threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.” Turner adds: “The targeting of Osama bin Laden is no more an assassination than was the intentional downing in 1943 of a transport aircraft carrying Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Killing the enemy during armed conflict is not murder.”

Finally, professor Scott Silliman, who is executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security at Duke, told the Christian Science Monitor he has no doubt that bin Laden was “a lawful target”; the CSM also spoke to American University’s Stephen Vladeck, who expressed satisfaction that the U.S. government had “d[one] everything by the book.”

Glenn Greenwald (surprise) exposes the lie that bin Laden was armed or fighting back when he was captured or shot, making the SEALs’ shooting of him definitively non-defensive.

Thus do some scholars consider the targeted killing legally justified because, (a) he’s a murderer and, (b) it’s war, while some reject that conclusion because killing would only be justified in immediate self-defense, even in war.

It is important to remember that, like it or not and agree with it or not, the Imperial Federal Government is at war with Al Qaeda and the jihadists. Many people recognize that as horrible and murderous as the jihadists are, they are waging their war in response to American foreign policy specifically, not wealth or freedom. Even so, it is possible and, I think, useful to consider this war on terrorism and the hunt for bin Laden from the perspective of those fighting the war and those who support it (including the Statist and militarist legalities discussed above). Osama bin Laden did declare war on the “Great Satan” and all that entailed for him (innocents, military, and politicians). Therefore, it is at least possible to understand why military leaders would use any and all means necessary to cripple the threat (short of killing innocents; that is never understandable except as an honest mistake).

Is it a given that in a war, the leaders must not be targeted for death? Churchill and the American leaders did not regret the decision to hold Nazi war criminals on trial (more on that below), but was von Stauffenberg unjustified in attempting to assassinate Hitler? What if some French or British or American or Russian or Polish people helped him do it? (Maybe they did, I don’t know; I can’t stand Tom Cruise.) Would that go against the doctrines of war? Would some Allied soldiers have been wrong in shooting at or bombing Hitler or Himmler or Goebbels or Göring? Why in the world would that have been a bad thing? Was the aforementioned downing of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s airplane wrong? Why is it acceptable in a time of war to kill other soldiers but not target their leaders for assassination? Should French and Polish civilians and soldiers have tried to arrest every Nazi who marched into their countries instead of killing them? No, okay, then why not try to kill military leaders instead of arresting them (and instead of inflicting civilian casualties)? What if, instead of fire-bombing Dresden, the Allied leaders put together a team of Navy SEALs to assassinate only top Nazi military brass? How could that possibly have been a bad thing? Perhaps only the initiator of the murders, an unprovoked, non-defensive murderer, can rightly be retaliated against with killing? Can’t these questions be extended to any war and any war leaders? And make no mistake about it: Osama bin Laden was a war leader, according to himself and just about every government on Earth.

Therefore, attempting to put myself in the shoes of those engaged in this war, I can at least understand the decision to kill instead of arrest. Perhaps, as in any situation, if you are not shooting in immediate self-defense, then shooting is not permissible? Perhaps it is not considered acceptable for leaders to try to assassinate each other, whereas it would be justifiable for individual victims, their families and friends, or conscientious objectors on either side to assassinate a leader believed to be a past and future murderer? If so, then it would be acceptable to assassinate a murderous American president, which it decidedly is not.

I am left to conclude that within the realm of this war and considered from the perspective and interests of those fighting it, targeted assassination is understandable, but from a consistent, objective, self-defensive and not offensive, justice-seeking standpoint, capturing and trying bin Laden would have been preferable. If some stupid American jury or biased international jury found him not guilty, which would be a plainly incorrect decision, only then would I consider it justifiable to go all Dexter on him and bring him to justice where the “law” couldn’t. (Keep in mind that any jury could only find bin Laden not guilty for the purpose of sending the message, “Well, American presidents and generals are more guilty, so I won’t convict him until they have been,” which is irrelevant and immaterial to a murder trial.)

Which brings us to what Glenn Greenwald calls “the Osama bin Laden exception” and the legal and moral implications it entails. As John Cole says,

I’m the hypocrite here. I’m stridently against extrajudicial killings, the death penalty, targeted assassination, etc. I’d wager most of you are, too.

But when I heard that Osama had been killed, I’ll be damned if I didn’t think “Thank God that monster is gone.” Sure, in my ideal world he’d be brought back to the US, tried, and then imprisoned for the rest of his life. But you know what? I can not honestly say I give a damned that he took a double tap to the skull. Sorry. And I’d be also willing to bet that is where most of you all are- this may or may not have been legal, but you don’t give a shit, because that scumbag is at the bottom of an ocean somewhere and got what he deserved.

At an initial, emotional level, it’s hard to disagree. I do feel hypocritical and inconsistent. I feel glad and relieved that he’s dead. I almost wish I didn’t. It’s hard to see anything morally wrong with the retributive killing of a proven murderer per se. But I’m still forced to conclude that any killing not in self-defense should be avoided. Most especially, the State should not be permitted to get away with extralegal, extrajudicial actions of any kind. In this I do see many things morally and practically wrong with the State even having the powers or capabilities to carry out targeted assassinations, not to mention all the other things that any State with such powers will do (is already doing!). This is why I made the disclaimer above that the Obama regime killing bin Laden per se isn’t entirely bad, but many things implied and entailed by that decision and action are very bad.

What does the bin Laden capture-and-kill imply about the Imperial Federal Government’s boundaries (legal and moral) and the leeway it takes with handling justice, whether legal or not and whether towards American citizens or not? Could you imagine needing to quote anyone other than Glenn Greenwald on this issue?

My principal objection to it [the "bin Laden exception"] — aside from the fact that I think those principles shouldn’t be violated because they’re inherently right (which is what makes them principles) — is that there’s no principled way to confine it to bin Laden. If this makes sense for bin Laden, why not for other top accused Al Qaeda leaders? Why shouldn’t the same thing be done to Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. citizen who has been allegedly linked by the Government to far more attacks over the last several years than bin Laden? At Guantanamo sits Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged operational mastermind of 9/11 — who was, if one believes the allegations, at least as responsible for the attack as bin Laden and about whom there is as little perceived dobut; why shouldn’t we just take him out back today and shoot him in the head and dump his corpse into the ocean rather than trying him?

Once you embrace the bin Laden Exception, how does it stay confined to him? Isn’t it necessarily the case that you’re endorsing the right of the U.S. Government to treat any top-level Terrorists in similar fashion? Again, this isn’t an argument that the bin Laden killing was illegal; it very well may have been legal, depending on the facts. But if we just cheer for this without caring about those facts, isn’t it clear that we’re endorsing a dangerous unfettered power — one that runs afoul of multiple principles which opponents of the Bush/Cheney template have long defended?

For me, the better principles are those established by the Nuremberg Trials, and numerous other war crimes trials accorded some of history’s most gruesome monsters. It should go without saying for all but the most intellectually and morally stunted that none of this has anything to do with sympathy for bin Laden. Just as was true for objections to the torture regime or Guantanamo or CIA black sites, this is about the standards to which we and our Government adhere, who we are as a nation and a people.

The Allied powers could easily have taken every Nazi war criminal they found and summarily executed them without many people caring. But they didn’t do that, and the reason they didn’t is because how the Nazis were punished would determine not only the character of the punishing nations, but more importantly, would set the standards for how future punishment would be doled out. Here was the very first paragraph uttered by lead Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson when he stood up to deliver his Opening Statement:

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.

And here was the last thing he said:

Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will, in all countries, may have “leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law.”
[all emphasis Greenwald's]

I actually believe in those precepts. And if those principles were good enough for those responsible for Nazi atrocities, they are good enough for the likes of Osama bin Laden. It’s possible they weren’t applicable here; if he couldn’t be safely captured because of his attempted resistence, then capturing him wasn’t a reasonable possibility. But it seems increasingly clear that the objective here was to kill, not capture him, no matter what his conduct was. That, at the very least, raises a whole host of important questions about what we endorse and who we are that deserves serious examination — much more than has been prompted by this celebrated killing.

It’s not a good precedent, and it doesn’t speak highly of the moral character of the leaders who issued the order.

Before concluding with what bin Laden’s death implies for the future, I wanted to revisit the natural emotional responses of John Cole and myself that I touched on above and those of others around the world.

Perhaps my relatively sheltered, comfortable life and my lack of exposure to non-fictional death and violence bias this feeling of mine, but I can’t completely relate to those who say they find nothing (or very little) positive in any human’s death. For example, some commenters at Bob Murphy’s blag, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, Robert Higgs, and surely thousands of others around the interwebs and millions of others around the world find no joy or happiness in the death of even a mass murderer, and that isn’t just people who adored bin Laden and supported his ends and his means. As I said above, I couldn’t describe my reaction as joy or happiness when I first saw the news on TV, but I was definitely glad and relieved. Still positive emotions, but I just didn’t feel strongly about it. Maybe that’s only because our own murderer-in-chief ordered the mission and would receive much praise and credit for it.

One thing I was positively disgusted by and not conflicted at all about was the celebration from Americans that Sunday night. In Washington, D.C., in New York City, at the Mets–Phillies game, which is the main thing I was watching that night. It was pure collectivist, militarist, nationalist jingoism. The first thing that the footage of the impromptu celebrations and chants on Pennsylvania Avenue reminded me of was the audiences at the hangings and beheadings on the TV show The Tudors. They were (depicted as) bloodthirsty, barbaric animals who savored the sight of the king’s justice being done, believing like sheep that anyone the king ordered to death must be an awful sinner who deserved to burn in hell for all eternity. That is exactly what those celebrators and chanters are: bloodthirsty cavemen with iPhones and American flags instead of clubs and loincloths. Seeing that spectacle on TV actually gave me a little satisfaction at the moral high ground I (like to think I) have over the liberal Democrats who claim to be so much more understanding, fair, sympathetic, and certainly not militant or jingoistic. But they are just like the neoconservatives they so despise. Liberal Democratic Obama voters (past and future) probably constituted the majority of the celebrators on Pennsylvania Avenue that night, and my opinion of them is even lower because of it. I hadn’t known it could go any lower.

However, it should be noted that not only in degree but also in kind, there is a difference between Americans celebrating the death of a mass-murderer and Arabs celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At first glance, the libertarian or other-anarchist or general anti-militarist might say, “Americans cheering bin Laden’s death are cheering from the same perspective and for the same reasons as Arab America-haters cheering the deaths of Americans, because those Arabs see Americans as responsible for the deaths of many of their compatriots just like Americans see Al Qaeda as responsible for the deaths of many Americans.” This viewpoint fails to distinguish between collective responsibility (which in this case does not exist for the American victims) and individual responsibility (which in this case does exist for bin Laden).

Rather, Noam Chomsky’s analogy is p-… p-… perrr-… (I can do it)… perfect (wow, that was hard):

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

Considered from this perspective, it definitely doesn’t make bin Laden’s murder something we should rejoice about or something we should have aimed for specifically; I don’t want George W. Bush or Barack Obama assassinated, especially not by some Iraqi or Afghani paramilitary unit, possibly because I am an American like them and naturally exhibit some nationalistic, tribal solidarity with them, and possibly because that’s an awful, hypocritical, counterproductive goal for the freedom movement. Therefore, if I don’t want one mass-murderer assassinated, I shouldn’t want the other one assassinated. This solidifies my position above that in the absence of a life-threatening situation, the Navy SEALs should have captured bin Laden for trial and execution rather than summarily executing him.

And isn’t it odd how Obama and so many Americans cite this as a testament to national greatness? I thought it was so arrogant for Obama to say that this operation proves that “America can do whatever we set our mind to.” He wasn’t the least bit humble, apologetic for all of that other death and destruction he and Bush have caused in the meantime, or thankful to any other nation except Pakistan (which was probably a token thank-you to mitigate the inevitable cries of “Pakistan obviously isn’t our ally!”). Robert Higgs was as disgusted by this claim of “greatness” as I was:

First, I dislike the whole idea of “the greatness of our country.” Countries cannot be great. They are abstractions and, as such, they are incapable of acting for good or for evil. Individual residents of a country may be great, and many Americans are great, because, to borrow Forrest Gump’s construction, “greatness is as greatness does.”

The caretakers who comfort the sick and dying are often great. The priests and friends who revive the will to live in those who have lost hope are great. The entrepreneurs who establish successful businesses that better satisfy consumer demands for faster communication, safer travel, fresher food, and countless other goods and services are great. The scientists and inventors who peer deeper into the nature of the universe and devise technologies to accomplish humane, heretofore impossible feats are great. The artists who elevate the souls of those who hear their music and view their paintings are great.

But mere killing is never great, and those who carry out the killings are not great, either. No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart.

Finally, as for the ramifications and the bin Laden–less future we have ahead of us, Laurence Vance, Anthony Gregory, Robert Higgs, Eric Margolis, and Justin Raimondo (and hundreds if not thousands of others whom I haven’t read) have said the cost of 5,000 American lives, a million Iraqi lives, trillions of dollars, and perhaps unrecoverable (in our lifetimes) civil liberties was not worth it to kill one man, however hated and dangerous. As those and others have also noted, bin Laden’s death doesn’t portend the end of anything, really. As Anthony Gregory writes elsewhere,

The smarter liberal media are playing this up as a repudiation of the Bush approach to the war on terror. Yet this only makes sense if Obama himself had actually repudiated that approach. He has instead tripled down in Afghanistan, continued the war in Iraq, multiplied the drone attacks many times over, and continued to treat international law as well as the U.S. Constitution as flexible rules in the waging of war and enforcement of national security. Insofar as Obama is implicitly admitting none of this was necessary to catch Osama, he should be criticized for persisting in it, not hailed as a hero of foreign policy restraint.

Indeed, Obama promises more war: Osama’s “death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must – and we will – remain vigilant at home and abroad. . . . The cause of securing our country is not complete.”

Glenn Greenwald writes,

But beyond the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice, there are two points worth considering. The first is the question of what, if anything, is going to change as a result of the two bullets in Osama bin Laden’s head? Are we going to fight fewer wars or end the ones we’ve started? Are we going to see a restoration of some of the civil liberties which have been eroded at the altar of this scary Villain Mastermind? Is the War on Terror over? Are we Safer now?

Those are rhetorical questions. None of those things will happen. If anything, I can much more easily envision the reverse. Whenever America uses violence in a way that makes its citizens cheer, beam with nationalistic pride, and rally around their leader, more violence is typically guaranteed. Futile decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may temporarily dampen the nationalistic enthusiasm for war, but two shots to the head of Osama bin Laden — and the We are Great and Good proclamations it engenders — can easily rejuvenate that war love. One can already detect the stench of that in how Pakistan is being talked about: did they harbor bin Laden as it seems and, if so, what price should they pay? We’re feeling good and strong about ourselves again — and righteous — and that’s often the fertile ground for more, not less, aggression.

I fear that the combination of this celebration of “greatness” at a military accomplishment and the fact that we will now be living in a permanent national security state without a Public Enemy No. 1 (or much concrete success to show for our ongoing efforts) will only embolden the Imperial Federal Government’s efforts at home and abroad, weaken Americans’ opposition to the national security state, and encourage more encroachments of our civil liberties, because without bin Laden to serve as a cause célèbre, people will just become accustomed to the national security state as a way of life. Maybe no matter what, with or without a cause célèbre, the national security state was doomed to persist and expand.

My current concern is the misguided vitriol directed by liberals at Tea Partiers and the former group’s lack of any position to be criticizing anybody’s politics.

Perhaps the rare liberal who visits our little blag will take issue with the loaded language I used in the title: “haters”. My word choice was deliberate and accurate. Most liberals hate the Tea Parties and every single little, last thing that they stand for. Most liberals seem to have nothing but ridicule and scorn for the embarrassing Tea Partiers and their benighted selfishness and racism. Most liberals would not listen to half of what any Tea Partier had to say except to use it as ammunition for their rants about how horrible Tea Partiers have to be to object to all the plans that the liberals have for everyone. I do not say liberals hate Tea Party participants themselves, because I would not put words that personal into other people’s mouths, and most people at least recite the empty, semi-Christian defense “I don’t hate the person, I hate the act.” On the internet, on Facebook, on TV and radio, the sentiment is clear and almost universal: liberals hate the Tea Parties’ ideas and demonstrations the way any group with power hates protestations against and threats to that power.

Consider the most recent Tea Party gatherings, the anti-tax protests on April 15th. Obviously I strongly sympathize with their message on that day and agree wholeheartedly with their goal of reducing taxes. What sentiment therein do liberals find so objectionable? “Leave us alone,” “Stop taking our money,” “Stop spending our money on things we don’t want,” “Stop threatening and imprisoning people for keeping their own money”? These messages, at least, are completely defensive. “Stop doing this, stop doing that, let us govern our own lives.” There is no inherent malice, violence, or any type of aggression behind a defensive message like that, yet liberal Democrats find it worthy of scorn and hatred. Contrast that with the messages almost every Republocrat politician campaigns on: “These are my plans for everyone,” “This is what I will do with your money,” “This is what I will force everyone to do,” “This is what’s good for the whole nation.” Please don’t pretend the plans and promises of politicians require no coercion and carry no threats of punishment for non-compliance, and please don’t try to twist anti-tax protests into something the slightest bit coercive. Leave such bald dishonesty for the politicians.

While it’s true that I’m probably inserting my own ideas of what I would be protesting at an anti-tax (or other anti-government) rally and not considering the full scope of what various neocons and other dupes have said at other rallies over the past year (for example, here is an issue I agree with liberals on and that does, in fact, make Tea Partiers an embarrassment), I’d wager that the whole of the Tea Parties’ message is no more violent than the ideas of their detractors.

I came across a column about the April 15th anti-tax Tea Party in my very own town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was written by a liberal named Rick Keith who made some good points and several bad ones. He attended the April 15th Tea Party on the University of Michigan’s campus and reported on the hypocrisy he saw in the Tea Partiers. The worst part, which could have been turned into quite a humorous column, was that Rick Keith pretended to give half a flying fuck about the United States Constitution. Being much more of an adherent to Lysander Spooner’s position on the Constitution than to the strict Constitutionalism of someone like Ron Paul (whom I still openly supported in 2008 and would support again in 2012), I would not be too interested in defending the Constitution too vigorously. Keith’s purpose in arguing Constitutional points with the Tea Partiers was not, I imagine, to convince them that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are defending the Constitution much better than the Tea Partiers’ ideal politician, nor to convince them that he loves the Constitution more than they; rather, he was trying to expose their hypocrisy by showing them that many of the things they want and the things they benefit from are unconstitutional. I don’t imagine he was successful, especially at that anti-tax rally, as there was no income tax in the original Constitution and the central government functioned just fine for 125 years without one (excepting Lincoln’s war taxes).

He is well informed but misinterprets many things with typical liberal-Democrat bias, so I’ll give a brief summary of the lukewarm attacks he managed to make on the hypocrisy of the Tea Partiers and assume he speaks for most liberals:

They recited the Pledge of Allegiance, for some reason, and Keith probed the speaker to tell the socialist, Statolatrist history of the Pledge. He got no response. That’s a good point, and I commend him for knowing his history and speaking up about it.

A doctoral student spoke out against government spending and praised private enterprise, even though though the student engages in federally funded cancer research in federally funded buildings at a federally funded university.

Some local conservative talk-radio host confused the TARP bank-bailout program with Obama’s stimulus spending package. This conservative “didn’t mention the Stimulus’s $140 billion tax cuts to the ‘We’re Taxed to Death’ audience, nor the hundreds of billions to create jobs in rebuilding a crumbling infrastructure, increase efficiency and advance new technologies.”

Needless to say, Keith disagrees with the Tea Partiers’ preferences about what they would like to do with their own money, and he points out that Exxon paid no income taxes to the Imperial Federal Government last year by funneling taxes through offshore subsidiaries. See, Exxon’s taxes are relevant because in the liberal Democrat’s mind, if one company weasels out of its taxes, that means all companies are rolling in profit and no one is being overtaxed, so the Tea Partiers’ complaints about being “taxed to death” are hypocritical and based entirely in fiction!

The Tea Partiers’ idol, Ronald Reagan, cut taxes and simultaneously over-spent, and Reagan and G.H.W. Bush bailed out banks and created soaring debt, all of which these Tea Partiers supported or would have supported.

The Tea Partiers are also apparently hypocritical because the federal government subsidizes all kinds of industries but the Tea Partiers don’t want this to extend (further) into health care. According to Keith, federal government subsidies = subsidies that the Tea Partiers support, so suddenly opposing Obamacare makes them hypocritical?…

Either way, I’m sure there are inconsistencies in there, and I’m equally as sure that Keith’s exposure of them involved a little bit of reaching and no small amount of hypocrisy of his own. Luckily for me, I am not hampered by any association with conservatism, support of any political party, attendance at any Tea Party rallies, or misunderstanding of history, economics, or political philosophy, so I can tear into Rick Keith’s pathetic delusion of American politics at will:

Rick Keith, by your assistance in putting both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in power, you are an accomplice to murder like every other Democratic- and Republican-voting American in the last century. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Koreans, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, Africans, Arabs, Serbs, Croats, Kosovars, Afghanis, Pakistanis, and Americans is on your hands. All of you. Every president you have supported is a war criminal who belongs in prison next to the ones you’ve hated, and you are an accomplice to their crimes.

The Clinton-led NATO bombings of Yugoslavia/Serbia were unconstitutional and murderous, as are Barack Obama’s continuing airstrikes on Pakistan. The Drug War and the very existence of the Federal Reserve are unconstitutional as well. While it is legitimate to bring up the Tea Partiers’ inconsistencies in their support of strict Constitutionalism solely to point out their errors, even if you don’t support strict Constitutionalism yourself, the politicians you so idolize do swear to uphold the Constitution and are bound by the laws of their office, so by their own rules, they are criminals. Very few of the trillions of dollars your president and your Congress have spent have any remote justification in the Constitution, anywhere.

The boring, lame argument that people who receive or benefit from government money are hypocritical to oppose government spending is simply lazy. It is not possible to avoid government-provided products or services, but we can still point out the injustice of funding them coercively and promote their more efficient provision by companies and communities, privately and voluntarily. It might surprise you to learn that that cancer research student is not solely responsible for the state of public and private education and does not control the sources of funding that pay for biomedical research in this country today. On the contrary, it is your fault that no one can do privately funded research or get a privately funded education in the sciences.

Obama’s stimulus plan will have proven to create mostly government jobs and government debt, exactly as Herbert Hoover and FDR did. If you really wanted to improve the economy and unemployment in the long run, you would have supported tax cuts and spending cuts, so that people can spend their money as they see fit and not as politicians see fit.

You fail to mention that Barack Obama voted for the TARP bailouts, making him a contributor to that inflationary, impoverishing debacle. Conservatives are hypocritical (or at least dumb) for supporting Reagan’s cut-and-spend policies, debts, and bailouts, so all of the present-day liberals are, too, for calling out the Tea Partiers on it while simultaneously supporting the exact same things when Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Ben Bernanke do them.

Rick Keith’s and every other liberal’s idolization of Bill Clinton, saying he brought us “prosperity (with tax increases), based on emerging technologies, a new infrastructure and the Information Age,” belies a strong bias, something that will probably, unfortunately, survive through Obama’s deficits and unemployment. Your misunderstanding of economics is not surprising, so let me tell you a little something about the business cycle and the federal reserve. The “good times” of the 1990′s weren’t so good, because much of that growth you liberals love to extol was fueled by debt enabled by the federal reserve, which came back to hurt the economy when the tech and dot-com bubbles burst. Inflation enriches people in the finance industry temporarily and impoverishes everyone in the long run, and that’s what we’ve been seeing throughout the existence of the federal reserve, including during the Clinton administration. Government spending can only be wasteful in the long run because those expenditures are not subject to the price system or the profit and loss of the free market, so that spending and investment that made us so rich in the 1990′s is one of the hundreds of things that made us poorer now. I repeat: the “good times” of the 1990′s weren’t so good, just like the “good times” of the housing bubble weren’t so good.

Lastly, we come to Obamacare, liberals’ standard for all that is great about the Savior of America and Congress’s wise spending under the guidance of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. This is disgusting power grabbing and vote buying at its worst. “Debacle” will not begin to describe this when my children are grown up. “Debt” will scarcely mean anything anymore when the printing presses inflate the money supply constantly to give stuff away for free when all the Baby Boomers and unemployed stiffs don’t have to pay for anything and health care providers don’t have to make any economic decisions. Medical charity, which used to provide for the indigent, has already all but disappeared and will, in fact, be outlawed. The price competition that improves quality, increases number, and decreases price will also be outlawed. In his column, Rick Keith accuses conservative Tea Partiers of working to “tear down excellence” by “elevating mediocrity.” The more government controls medical care, the more this becomes true: equality is increased by bringing everybody down to a common level. Outlawing economic calculation on the free market absolutely cannot and will not make anything better or cheaper for the masses. (Not that the market hasn’t already been screwed up by decades of government interference.)

The Tea Parties have been infiltrated by neocons, anti-immigration flag waivers, bland supporters of a little less government but only domestically, and straight anti-Democrat simpletons because those are the types of people who predominate in the non-Democrat American populace. Similarly, the April 15th anti-tax Tea Party rallies were so strongly ridiculed because the type of people who predominate in the Democratic ranks are blind Statolatrists who oppose any and all governmental cuts (non-military, of course) and despise the idea of people keeping more of their own money that should be the government’s. If this were inaccurate, then liberal Democrats would have something nice to say about the anti-tax protests and would have opposed some of Barack Obama’s and Congress’s spending/stimulus/bailout actions. But they haven’t, and they won’t, because they are blind followers of just about anyone with a (D) after their name, especially when those Democrats propose to take more money from people who earned it and give it to others.

Some unspecified time in my past, I received a potential-juror questionnaire that I was required to fill out and mail back to the courthouse to determine whether I was suitable to serve as a juror. I ignored it and threw it in the trash. “Fuck that, they can come and get me,” I said. It wasn’t a summons; if I didn’t return anything, what difference would it make to them? The threats of enslavement and murder were not entirely explicit, so I decided to ignore it. Then two or three months later, I got an identical letter, except I think it said “Second notice” on it or something similar, so I thought I’d better fill it out and return it. I did and received an official notice of conscription shortly thereafter.

Much to my surprise, I was being conscripted to serve in a federal district court 45 minutes away. How ridiculous, stupid, and impractical. It should be pretty widely agreed-upon, among libertarians and non-libertarians alike, that no free society would conscript innocent citizens to do anything, especially something they aren’t particularly qualified for or enthusiastic about, and especially for which they would be inconvenienced and made poorer by an hour-and-a-half commute on several dozen occasions. This was not a one- or two-day, local criminal or civil trial or anything; it was an 18-month commitment for which the jurors would be required to meet three or four Wednesdays per month every single month. That’s because this wasn’t your typical jury duty; one of the few things I do respect about this process and its requirements is the oath of confidentiality I took, but you might say this jury could be described as “great, dignified, exalted, majestic, illustrious, or eminent.” (Not that I would.)

You might be appalled at the level of situational or medical burden that jury duty must impose upon a person before he can be excused from this involuntary obligation. “Eight months pregnant? Yeah, and your point is? You live an hour and a half away and your commute would therefore be three hours every time? Cry me a river. You’re a student who has mandatory Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes? Next.” Absurd and appalling. I won’t say anything about my observations in particular, but I have heard that if you’re unable to drive and you have five adopted special-needs children for whom you are the primary caregiver, the judge and prosecutor must have a private huddle to determine that, yes, that qualifies as a legitimate excuse to preclude you from juror conscription.

I have to admit a certain admiration and almost liking of the judge who explained the whole process to us and its importance and our function in the criminal justice system. The judge spoke like someone who truly believed that a jury’s most important purpose was protecting fellow citizens against the government. S/He vehemently opposed the notion that any jury simply did the bidding of the judge and prosecutor, or that the jurors were simply an arm of the prosecutor’s office, carrying out its wishes, agreeing with it, and kowtowing to its expertise in complex matters. S/He brought this up several times and didn’t strike me as the politician-type who would say one thing and mean another.

On the other hand, s/he did not believe jurors had the right or the position to judge right vs. wrong, only the facts of the case and their relationship to the letter of the law. This was brought up only because of comments and concerns that I voiced. I felt, probably correctly, that I was alone in the room in my conscientious yet subversive objection to agreeing to submit a judgment of wrongdoing for actions I don’t believe were wrong. Maybe I can be more of a rabble-rouser than I thought (except, I guess, that no one else was roused, save by confusion and indignation at the first expression of anti-authoritarianism they’d heard in a long time). Prompted by prior mentions of drugs and guns by the judge and/or another juror, I brought up my objection to gun laws and drug laws and my inability—nay, refusal—to judge someone in the wrong for violating them, if they hadn’t harmed someone in the process.

Later during the voir dire, when jurors were asked to raise their hands and offer their stories of prior run-ins with the law that might bias them in the cases they might hear, one juror mentioned that his business was audited and he was kind of harassed by the IRS a decade or two ago. I hadn’t thought of the potential of hearing a case of tax evasion, but I realized then and there that I would never, ever, under any circumstances, whether they include other wrongdoings on the part of the defendant or duress (short of jail time) applied to me, vote in favor of the IRS. Never. Tax evasion is a noble act, and if people can get away with it, I say more power to them. The IRS is the aggressor and the defendant is the victim in any case of tax evasion, and I would not punish a victim of the IRS’s predations. If jurors are supposed to consider only the facts of the case, then please don’t blame me for taking all the facts into account, including that all taxation is theft and tax evasion represents an act of self-defense.

Don’t worry; I didn’t say nearly all that. I was not eloquent, forceful, or convincing in my comments. But I made points that many reasonable people agree with.

The other jurors came from all walks of (American) life, and most seemed smart, reasonable, and common-sensical enough. I think they’d make a fine jury, save their sheep-like attitude towards following orders and obeying the law even if they believe them to be wrong.

Because of my expression of support for the principles of jury nullification and eventually mentioning the words “jury nullification,” the judge explained that it was actually illegal, wrong, subversive of the rule of law that binds society, and not backed by any English common-law or American legal tradition. This could be true, but juror conscription, sex-discrimination, and the Three-Fifths Compromise are also part of American legal tradition, and that doesn’t make them right.

The judge clearly believed firmly in the separation of powers by the system of checks and balances in our Constitution, and s/he supported the jury’s position as defender or buffer of fellow citizens against the State. This is why s/he believed it was not the place of jurors to make law; that’s for the legislative branch. (I could mention that it is most certainly the function of the justice system to judge the law; that’s exactly what judicial review is!) On either four or five separate occasions, not in one long speech or un-separated by other matters, the judge stated in no uncertain terms that it was totally and completely illegal, wrong, inappropriate, and un-American for a jury to arrogate to itself the power of deciding on the validity of the law in addition to the facts of the case. It doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter what you want, it doesn’t matter if anyone was harmed—the jury should decide on whether the facts of the case indicate a violation of the law, and vote “objectively” in accordance with those facts.

I find this disgusting and abominable.

I cannot and will not vote against my conscience, and I cannot and will not violate my conscience to avoid breaking the law or to send someone else to prison for actions that I don’t believe warrant it. There is nothing about any legislator, governor, president, or any other elected official, or lawyer, or judge, or Department of Justice official, or their position, or any other regular citizen like myself, that makes them suited to outlaw something but makes me unsuited to deem that law unjust and invalid. The fact that legislators were voted in by other people, even a majority of voters in a given region at a given time, or the fact that a majority of citizens in this region at this time agree with the law, does not make any law the slightest bit more just, nor does it make it just to imprison someone for violating it. Might does not make right, and the majority should not rule. Six billion people vs. one does not make the one any less justified in his opinion. If I am to judge someone’s guilt, I will make that judgment using my own sense of justice and my own conception of right vs. wrong, and no other criteria.

The easiest and, unfortunately, most prevalent example of the propriety of judging the law instead of the facts is drug laws. I believe most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal, and I won’t participate in adding to that harm by punishing someone for violating them. I shouldn’t have to remind anyone of the monstrous crimes against humanity that have been committed by people who were “just obeying the law.” Right and wrong exist prior to and independent of legislation.

So after the voir dire, before we were dismissed for lunch at 1:45, a few pairs of people were told to switch seats. Apparently our order had some meaning or function. I ended up being the last “alternate” juror, as opposed to one of the first-string jurors originally. It doesn’t seem like there should be anything wrong with this, but really I think there is. The jury system is set up to weed out people who will vote with their own mind and in a way that is subversive to the State’s wishes. I’m sure you’ve heard this before. I experienced it first-hand.

To tell you the truth, I felt a little guilty for saying things that would rub the judge and prosecutor the wrong way and set off alarms in their head that I was not suitable to implement the State’s laws. And I felt bad about feeling bad about that. I felt ashamed all around. But I shouldn’t have; I didn’t “get out” of jury duty; I didn’t say 10% of what I thought about monopolistic government, monopolistic law enforcement systems, juror conscription, and a society that shuns people who would vote their conscience instead of kowtowing to objectionable laws.

I possibly could have had a chance to help put corrupt politicians behind bars, and when I heard that was one of many possibilities, I wanted to leap at the opportunity and keep my mouth shut. Instead I was honest. I’m not going to feel bad about being honest, and I’m not going to feel bad about demurring at the idea of serving the State mostly involuntarily for a year and a half. It was probably one of the more convenient times in my life to undergo such an endeavor, but I would either hate myself for it or come under some kind of stress for promising to uphold the (potentially objectionable) law and then blatantly violating that promise on day 1. Then again, if you want jury-duty advice for the future, know this: you can vote exactly how you want and voice any objections you want, without fear of judgment or repercussions, because no one besides the other jurors—not the prosecutor, not the judge, not even the stenographer or interpreters or anyone else—can know how you voted on anything, ever. At least not in that type of jury.

I’ve heard the reasons why regular, lay citizens should be extracted from their normal lives and forced into jury duty; they sound like good reasons on the surface. But why shouldn’t laymen be conscripted to serve as judges? As lawyers? Oh, are those too specialized positions to leave in the hands of laymen? How about serving as courthouse janitor once every few years? How about substitute teachers or DMV workers or receptionists? There is nothing about jurors that precludes them from being professionals, educated and specialized, just like there’s nothing that precludes every function of the government from being privatized (or abolished!). I know it’s hard to put myself in other people’s mindset sometimes, but I honestly think this is one issue where wacky libertarians like me and others can find common ground. Juror conscription is a violation, it’s impractical, and it has facilitated a State-serving function of the courts, which is the opposite of how juries should be and certainly the opposite of what the founding fathers wanted.

That said, in the future, if I’m conscripted into regular jury duty, I might see if I can swallow my abhorrence of the monopolistic court system and help fight the State from somewhere other than my computer chair. It probably won’t be such a terrible thing. Just think: if you were the sole person responsible for a hung jury on a drug trafficking or gun possession charge, you’d be a minor hero for a day. I don’t know how much you’re told about the particular case before you start serving, but if I can keep an innocent person out of prison, if only temporarily, I will lie to the State to stab it in the back.

David R. Henderson writes about its pro-capitalist, anti-corporatist message, focusing largely on the inconsistent stance that one particular Objectivist, Edward Hudgins, takes:

But I don’t think Avatar is an attack on capitalism. One could leave the movie and have no idea, based on just the movie, about James Cameron’s view of capitalism. And while it did have some clichés (most movies do), I didn’t find it loaded. So what is Avatar? In fact, Avatar is a powerful antiwar movie—and a defense of property rights. For that reason, I found it easy to identify with those whose way of life was being destroyed by military might.

In fact, the defense of property rights in Avatar is so clear that, at one point in the movie, when the bad guys are justifying their war on the grounds that they need “Unobtainium,” I turned to a libertarian friend and said, “This is the Kelo decision.” Recall that the Supreme Court, in Kelo v. City of New London, decided that it was all right to take Suzette Kelo’s property from its low-tech use as a house so that a major corporation could use it for a “grander” project.

Which brings me back to whether this movie was an attack on capitalism. I think not. To the extent that it makes any statement about capitalism, Avatar is a defense of capitalism. Capitalism is based on property rights and voluntary exchange. The Na’vi had property rights in the crucial tree and various other properties surrounding it. Did they own it as individuals or as community tribal property? We can’t be sure, but probably the latter. They had refused to sell the property to the outsiders. There was nothing the outsiders could give them that would make it worth their while. What should we, if we are good capitalists, conclude? That, just as in the Kelo case, the people currently sitting on the land value it more than the outsiders. The land is already in its highest-valued use. Hudgins and Salam could argue that that’s implausible. Surely there would be some finite price that the Na’vi would take in return for the Unobtainium. Maybe, maybe not. But once the Na’vi have made it clear that they’re unwilling to exchange it, that should be the end of things, shouldn’t it?

Today is Veterans’ Day, formerly called Armistice Day. But, our exalted warmongering Statolatrist congressmen and senators and presidents couldn’t have a holiday that celebrated the end of a colossal State endeavor, so in 1954 they renamed it Veterans’ Day.

The attention paid to Veterans’ Day and the misconceptions this holiday brings forth have annoyed me to the point of writing a short post about such misguided military-worship. ESPN is heavy into this spirit, broadcasting College Gameday from the site of the irrelevant Navy–Air Force game last Saturday and SportsCenter live from West Point Academy this morning. For the last week I’ve heard a seemingly constant stream of TV and radio commercials and discussions and interviews in which someone “salutes our troops” or thanks them for “protecting our freedoms” or says “they allow us to live the lives we do.”

Um, how? Who steals our money, kidnaps and imprisons us for harming no one, cripples businesses, dumbs down schools, devalues our currency, imprisons us for trying to use another one, violates our right to control our own bodies, outlaws self-defense, destroys families, rigs the court system to favor convictions and plea bargains over acquittals, deliberately and systematically enriches the powerful and well-connected at the expense of the common man, outlaws private protection and arbitration systems, and, oh, yeah, inspires hatred and terrorism across the globe? The Imperial Federal Government!

The military is not a sector of the market nor an extension of the populace; it is an arm of the State. It does what politicians and generals want it to. It is not possible for the military’s objectives to be in line with those of the public because the military wants what the State wants, and what the State wants is in direct opposition to what the people want. If this is not true, then why must the State institute a coercive monopoly and murder anyone who defies it?

The reality is that the exploits of the military result in less freedom for us because in every State in mankind’s history, military interests were used as justifications for expansions of State power; these powers, by their very nature, reduce the overall freedom of the State’s subjects. Second, the American military does not protect anyone’s lives but rather does quite the opposite. Noble though the intentions of the individual soldiers may be, the military endangers non-aggressing bystanders in foreign countries directly by its attacks on other people and indirectly by inspiring more military/insurgent activity; the Department of Defense kills thousands of soldiers and puts thousands more in danger with its military adventurism; and it endangers Americans by inspiring terrorism on our own soil. (Mark my words: America’s war on terra will bring suicide-bombing to the streets of American cities as exists in Israel and Iraq.) Lastly, the Department of Defense flat-out wastes literally hundreds of billions of dollars per year; this does immense harm to our economic and financial well-being, so, no, those servicemen and -women decidedly do not “allow us to live the lives that we do.”

A standard response might go like, “Well, yeah, but it could be even worse if a foreign power took over because our military didn’t protect us.” Not only is this not true for the United States, it has been true for very few countries in the history of the world. Probably some European countries in WWII, which was a direct result of the USA’s entry into WWI. Claiming a strong (enough) military is necessary to protect us against potentially terrible conquerors is typical Statist thinking: solve one problem caused by the State with more Statism: States exist solely to take power and money away from their subjects, so you want to strengthen the “defensive” arm of our State to protect us against other ones?

Sure, there could be a despotic foreign power that threatened the lives and freedoms of people living in North America, as other countries have been threatened occasionally throughout history. But the only thing that threatens to take the lives and freedoms of Americans today is the Imperial Federal Government. The military and all its brave soldiers, who go through a hell of a lot more hardship than I probably ever will, does not act in the interests of the American people and is used by politicians to justify further encroachments of our liberty.

They are forever oblivious to the harm the State does to any child’s education, so they think simply requiring children to receive more of it will make them better-educated. This is similar to the imposition of new taxes to pay for things the people don’t want and the enforcement of new regulations to fix economic problems that the government caused in the first place. More rules, more requirements, more bureaucracy, more taxation, more coercion.

Children are subjected to an alarming amount of Statolatrist propaganda from the very earliest stages of schooling, which is proudly lauded by Obama maniacs but which detracts from the quality of their education. Statolatry itself doesn’t make people worse at math, reading, or writing, but it has obviously facilitated the continuing, government-mandated decline in those basic areas of education. The more people who are brainwashed into the peculiar belief that the State should educate people, the more people who will support its idiotic, bureaucratic impediments to good education. And it doesn’t matter how well Americans can do calculus, critique literature, or write eloquent presidential speeches; if they support the absurd socialist agenda that Obama is trying to force upon his subjects, they are doing more harm than good—more harm than they could ever do if they were ignorant, stupid, and not a cheerleader for the Almighty State.

I imagine most Obama maniacs will support these proposals because they are coming from our Savior himself but also because they love the State and anything that expands it. But the most important issue here is not the content of the proposals themselves; it’s the fact that they will be coming from a very few people who will force their ideas on the entire nation. The fact that any apparatus or infrastructure exists that would allow for a single edict to govern that many people’s lives is of primary importance—obviously the content of its edicts will serve only to enhance and enlarge it, so the existence of the Department of Education and the power given to a single president over so many people’s schooling should alarm everyone, with condemnation of the specific proposals following as a corollary. It will not alarm most leftists. They vehemently opposed No Child Left Behind because George W. Bush signed it into law, and then later they found rationales (all valid ones, I surmise) to support their knee-jerk reaction; they will undoubtedly support Obama and his Education Department’s proposals because they come from Obama, and then later they will find rationales to justify their continued support despite clear evidence that they are biased tools.

Notice my use of the term “school year” in the first paragraph. Does it bother you that we gloss over the singular, all-encompassing term “school year” as commonplace and obvious in meaning? There should be no “school year”! There should be no bureaucracy or secretary or president who decides what the school year is! That’s the problem: the unilateral power of the State to define the “school year” and do all the other things it does under the pretense of educating children!

If people want some solutions to the deficiencies in schooling, particularly class time, that children are given, they should look to the absence of family, community, and individual responsibility in children’s education. These are direct and predictable consequences of the State’s involvement in anything. I am not surprised that Obama’s proposals will put even more of the children’s time under the purview of governments and necessarily less in the company of family members—people who should (and would, in a free society) be more influential in their education. Children should be playing and exercising more, spending more time learning from their parents, more time with their siblings, more time in extracurricular music or sports lessons, more time learning how to make their own decisions, and less time in the vicinity of bureaucrats with education degrees.

The idea that more government schooling will educate children better smacks of the dim-witted Statism that also led people to advocate throwing more and more money at failing schools. Here are four easy solutions to America’s educational shortcomings: 1. Eliminate the monopolistic Department of Education (and the ability of any criminal, elected or unelected, in the federal government to make any decisions about any child’s education but his own). 2. Abolish all taxes everywhere that in any way fund any public school or public-education-related endeavor. 3. Abolish all laws that are in any way related to home-schooling. 4. Remove all restrictions, regulations, and barriers to entry for private schools.

Libertarianism is individual liberty, personal sovereignty, voluntary association, and moral egalitarianism for all people. By “moral egalitarianism” I mean everyone is equally imbued with and bound by the same rights and the same moral obligation to respect the identical rights of others; no one has the right to do anything that anyone else may not also do. I think the existence of those rights and the non-aggression principle that follows from them come as close to epistemological certainty as they can get, and the burden is on Statists to explain why these principles are imaginary, illegitimate, or impractical and why they have the right to threaten murder on any who would assert these rights.

I doubt very many people oppose those beliefs in principle. What they oppose are their fantastical imaginings of what those beliefs would imply in practice. At the same time they remain willfully ignorant of how the State opposes those innate rights—is essentially the institutionalization of the negation of liberty. What they refuse to grasp is that the very existence of the monopolistic State implies threats of murder to anyone who secedes or doesn’t participate. As hard as it is to come to grips with, Statists must realize that peaceful abstention is a violation of their moral code, and that this is abominable.

It would be helpful to the blogosphere and to the worldwide discourse on political philosophy in general if a significant number of Statists would challenge themselves as far as they could with this question: “If the first principles that libertarians endorse are right and just, then why does (my vision of) their practical implementation strike me as so frightening, so horrific? What experiences, conditioning, or other principles make me either (a) reject the implementation of those principles anyway, and/or (b) insist that Statism and not freedom are the natural corollary of those principles?”

Most people’s experience with states, living their whole lives under one, never considering what true freedom can do for a society and not looking too closely lest their Statist foundation be shaken, causes them to believe that states are a force of good even when the balance of evidence is against them. So they lash out in ridicule at libertarians instead of focusing their skepticism on their own beliefs, which is where everyone’s skepticism belongs at first.

In the comments to Radley Balko’s very good, polite, short post about Ted Kennedy, a few peculiar Statist sentiments blemish an otherwise sensible discussion about the lack of merit in Ted Kennedy’s career and agreement with Balko that Kennedy shouldn’t be venerated simply because he’s no longer eligible for the census. On the other hand, they did provide me a good starting point for yet another instructional blag post.

As you could have guessed, the contentious comments concerned Balko’s opinion that we shouldn’t admire Kennedy’s “ability to use politics, as opposed to civil society, to solve problems” and that “Getting elected to political office in itself adds no value to society as a whole”.

One commenter began,

Huh? How would be have better effected change via civil society? Presided over the local kiwanis club? Written the Great American Novel? Become a pundit? Blogger (journalist)? CEO?

Always interesting to hear what libertarians value, how small-minded they are – I guarantee there’s total radio silence on the passing of major business figures, however they themselves used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests. However corrupt and crass they are within their own sphere.

Instead of living off of the labor of captive taxpayers and voting to take and spend more of their money every year, Kennedy could have spent his inherited wealth on charity, community organizations, and private businesses that provided goods and services to people who wanted them, voluntarily. The reason people donate to non-profit organizations and do business with private companies is (usually) because they want to, because they prefer the goods or services more than they prefer the money they part with and more than the goods or services they could get elsewhere. The reason the state and federal governments have to take your taxes upon threats of murder is because the government is not voluntary and people don’t want to give their money to it. Even Ted Kennedy himself didn’t want to give more of his money to the Imperial Federal Government than he had to…otherwise he would have. He could have worked for free, but he didn’t.

In this instance, we see that the commenter’s failure to understand that “civil society” is superior to government action results from his failure to understand what “government action” implies: Submit to their edicts and give them your money, or they will take the money plus penalties and they will enter your home or business to make you comply; insist on keeping your money and living your life how you please, as is your perfect right, and they will enslave you in a metal-and-concrete cage for five or ten years; resist their beatings, kidnapping, and enslavement, as is your perfect right, and they will shoot you. It is not possible to misunderstand that the State and all its agents are the aggressors in this scenario—in the real world, every day.

If committing the atrocious offenses of not sharing much of your money and behaving or doing business in frowned-upon ways is enough to warrant the death penalty, then surely actually threatening people with murder and interfering with their lives in myriad ways is a crime against humanity that removes all pretense of legitimacy from their operation. If you would claim the latter response is necessary and proper for the former offenses, then it still remains to be explained how non-violent non-participation ranks as criminal, or even dangerous, to the Statist. The laws and the infrastructure to make and follow through on the threats precede any act by any citizen; in fact, they predate even the birth of every citizen (except at the founding of a new state); so they cannot reasonably be passed off as a response to a preexisting danger.

Doubtless the true believer would respond, “But it is in man’s nature to be contentious and violent; the preexisting State with its threat-and-punish infrastructure keeps everyone civil, cooperative, and happy.” Glossing over the fact that this is simply false, it is obvious that elected and unelected officials are not angels; they are impaired by the same shortcomings as everyone else. Further, it is obvious that the types of people who are attracted to the violent, deadly police power of the State suffer from even greater hubris, intolerance, greed, and megalomania than the average person and in proportion to the power they aspire to attain.

I have stated what principles libertarians value and gone into a little detail about what we oppose in the State. So we’re “small-minded”? Believing in the strength of community, free exchange, voluntary cooperation, and the physical, emotional, and psychological independence from the controlling hubris of others—the conviction that the answer to many of our material and psychological problems is in ceasing to kill, threaten, and coerce each other—this is small-minded? You can’t possibly comprehend what is implied by our statement “peaceful action is a better way to effect change than is governmental coercion”—what’s implied is an all-encompassing, revolutionary conception of community, law, economics, war, peace, and everything else about human interrelationships—and still refer to it as small-minded.

The better libertarian thinkers (and those of us who follow them) rail against “major business figures” who “used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests” as fervently as we do against the government agents themselves. See, for instance, this masterful essay by Roderick Long, this Kevin Carson column, and this post of mine. Maybe my fellow libertarian blaggers can leave some more links in the comments; there must surely be 100 easily accessible anti-corporatist writings that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

The commenter continued,

You could say the same you said here about FDR or Lincoln: proper management of the state, and the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world – it’s oh-so-dirty. Libertarians would rather sit on a perch apart from it all, sometimes hiding their eyes, sometimes throwing peanuts, or pretending like all problems can be solved via a little Mill or communitarianism. And that there’s a nice clean wall between politics and everything else.

7/15/2050: Radley Balko dies, contributed not much of anything because he spent his life as a journalist, and on the basis of a little Rand and Econ 101 and utilitarian philosophy decided that it would be of some value to humanity or even his community to give the stock libertarian take on whatever was at the top of the news cycle. And what do journalists really do for us anyway?

Obviously you are not paying attention.

We could say the same about FDR or Lincoln? Child, much, much worse has been said about FDR and Lincoln, and deservedly so. They are more responsible for our corporate-military-socialist state than any other two people. The death and impoverishment they permitted to be visited upon innocent people is, quite possibly, incalculable.

It is almost unfathomable to me that anyone could think the State is “the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world.” I shall take the liberty of assuming this statement refers mainly to economics—the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy our needs. The claim is that the government can take care of any problem or need that arises in a community better than the free market—especially in the 21st century with technology making the entire world more connected than ever and the pace of business faster than ever. Though my libertarian readers are already familiar with Ludwig von Mises, Statists would benefit—if only to bring a little more knowledge and sophistication to the debate—from reading Mises’s seminal essay on why socialism can’t calculate and Murray Rothbard’s perspective on Mises, his opponents, and the calculation debate.

Without reading an entire economics essay, Statists could just answer me this: How is it that elected officials and coercive referendums voted for by “the people” are better able to govern society than the cooperative choices and economic exchanges made voluntarily by “the people”?

If the “collective action problems” he refers to are legal and court systems, his position is no less secure. Check out my posts about Anthony de Jasay’s masterpiece The State (here) and Bruce Benson’s masterpiece The Enterprise of Law (here and here).

Another commenter answered his smear that libertarians, journalists, and others outside of the professional criminal class do nothing for society:

MLK never had to get elected to spur social change.

And BTW, Radley helped get a guy off of death row because of his work. More than I can say for Ted Kennedy. Other journalists have also managed to force a president’s resignation over Watergate and bring to light the massacre at My Lai just to name a couple of things. I would say that journalists have done more to expose corruption and spur change than any politician ever has.

We don’t just sit on our perch either. Go check out the work that Libertarians have done at the Institute for Justice and FIRE. Real results that actually matter to every day people who are being mistreated by peaceful legislators and their good intention regulations.

The discussion was mostly downhill from there:

“Working as a legislator isn’t a peaceful way to make change. After all, the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance or else we would be imprisoned or fined. There isn’t anything peaceful about that at all.”

And here’s the reason folks, why libertarians will never have any serious chance as politicians in the country. Nutters.

“the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance”

And he was elected to do so as public official by you, we, the people of the country, along with the other 99 senators. You’re acting like this is a dictatorship.

It is more common than I would have thought, though no less peculiar, for Statists to justify a rights-violation because multiple people commit it rather than one. What difference does the number of people committing it make? Seriously. Blags have comments for a reason. I like getting comments.

Referring to the same passage that the previous person thought was “nutters,” the original Statist commenter wrote:

This is childish. You need to grow up. It’s not different from me saying that prisons are bad because people get locked up against their will, but refusing to take on what to do about murderers.

What to do about power and how one should distribute power is the paramount question for any society at any time in history, and solutions are judged in terms of bad and less bad. If you can’t bring yourself to stare it in the face and maybe try to make the best of it, your opinion on anything to do with politics is worthless. You don’t get to complain and be taken seriously if you want to hide.

What is childish is the Statist attitude that the majority should rule, that people who peacefully abstain are somehow doing some unspecified thing that endangers your person or property, and that everyone who disagrees with your grand vision of how to run the world should be punished and made to comply. I can think of nothing more childish in the political arena. You have made no effort to understand any theory of ethics or morality, nor anything like property rights or economics. Literally the only framework you go by is “majority rules.” You don’t appreciate that people have good reason to object to their freedoms being put to a vote and to complain after losing the vote. You refuse to see how pointing guns at, restricting the preexisting freedoms of, and taking property from people who haven’t harmed or even threatened anyone is worse than the hypothetical harm that they might have done; that the government agents are committing aggression even by their own standards. You are unable to understand how anyone could object to being lorded over by a charlatan with a bright smile and a fancy suit, nor have you shown any ability to grasp how rights or freedoms could exist prior to and independently from a monopolistic state. Your political philosophy begins and ends with “majority rule.” This is the single least nuanced idea in the history of the world since “woman submit to man because he is stronger.” You are a childish buffoon who should have NO SAY in how I or any other human being run our lives.

Our objections to the aggression that defines states are very different from objecting to locking real, actual aggressors up in prison (though you just said “people” and libertarians know that governments should lock up their own people before anyone else). Your analogy looks, to me, like this: illegitimacy of legislation : no alternative to legislation :: illegitimacy of prison : no solution to murder.

Okay, analogies weren’t your strong point in fifth grade. You are ignoring stuff YOU WROTE, in the same discussion thread. Our alternative to governmental legislation is offering a goddamned product to people and selling it to them for an agreeable price. Writing a book. Starting a charity. Educating your own children instead of leaving it to the State. Et cetera, et cetera ad nauseam. These are the things you ridiculed in your first post as being ineffective compared to coercive legislation. Libertarians have plenty of solutions to murder, and all crime. Eliminating the police state is a nice first step.

Distributing power is not the paramount question for all societies. It is protecting individual rights, which allows real community to develop voluntarily and “organically” and which allows for the material progress that has increased our standard of living over the centuries. When private property rights are protected and individuals have a sincere, personal, reciprocal interest in the well-being of their neighbors, then power and many other things will be distributed more heterogeneously. Surely you don’t think giving power to politicians and taking it away from the public will distribute power in any just way? If you’d like a scholarly but brief and accessible discussion on the distribution of power in society, read the first part of Our Enemy, the State by Albert Jay Nock.

You seem very dissatisfied with this country. There are plenty of other ones out there. Why don’t you try the libertarian oasis of Somalia? You won’t have to worry about the pesky ‘dictatorship of the majority against the minority” (also called Democracy) there! You’ll be free to do as you please. No pesky governments to get in your way (they won’t even bother to build your roads!)

If things get too tough, you can always try your luck in the socialist hellhole of Sweden or Norway :)

Seriously, most of you sound like Ruby Ridge wannabe’s under a guise of reading a few Ayn Rand books, which is why you won’t be taken seriously.

Personally, if I were going to compete for a Special Olympics medal on a political website, taking the contradictory stance from what I know most readers there take, I would go to some effort to gussy up my arguments and review my thought processes to make sure I was representing my ideology well. You know, being a good ambassador for libertarianism.

None of that for these Statists. Why don’t you try the Statist’s wet dream of North Korea, or Cuba, or Zimbabwe? You gave the worst example of (what you misunderstand as) anarchy; it isn’t fair to counter with the worst examples of your beloved monopolistic States? Oh, there’s only one type of anarchy but many varied and sundry types of states. I see. And that American and Ethiopian military force attempting to impose order but, somehow unsurprisingly, only supplying murder, terror, and destruction to Somalia—you gonna pin that one on the anti-military, non-interventionist libertarians, too? You haven’t made sense yet; you might as well shoot for the moon and hope some more of your hysterical mischaracterizations of libertarianism stick for your Statist brethren.

We have observed no fewer than two of the classic inane, ignorant dismissals of libertarians in a single comment thread about Teddy freaking Kennedy: “You’re always free to move elsewhere” and “Oh, you’re just a stupid Randroid.” Add a third item to the list of ideologies Statists don’t understand. OBJECTIVISM IS NOT LIBERTARIANISM! WE ACTUALLY DON’T LIKE EACH OTHER VERY MUCH!

Sorry for rambling. I got up on my soap box for the first time in a while and wanted to flesh out my thoughts thoroughly. It’s clear from reading the whole discussion thread that brief, pointed criticisms of their statements are insufficient to sway them in the least. I know this was old hat for my libertarian colleagues; this was written to any and all non-libertarians, so I hope they read it and find some sense in it, coming away with a better understanding of freedom and the State than Radley Balko’s commenters came with.