English: This image is of economist Walter Block teaching economics in a Loyola University New Orleans classroom. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Let me help with understanding what I’m going to say here. First off, I had once gone from Marxist/Communist to syndicalist-anarchist (something like the “anarcho-communist” idea) precisely because I couldn’t trust people to govern themselves. My reasoning back then articulated like this: if you can’t trust people to govern themselves, you can’t trust them to govern other people. About that time I became a missionary, more concerned for the poor than ever, and all people that needed the truth.
So let’s see:
Q (Question or Comment): With no government than anyone (or group) who has more than others can buy more armed security to enforce their will on those who have less resources. There is nothing to stop bad guys from forming coalitions to gang up on smaller communities and take them over by force since there is no governmental power to stop them.
A: The Second Amendment debate should bring to clarity the principle that self-defense is much more effective than giving up your freedom –even some of it– in exchange for security. Give ’em an inch, they take a mile. Like Ron Paul said, the only legitimate purpose of any government is to protect its jurisdiction from violation of individual rights.
The problem is that you are trusting a band of strangers with protecting you from other bands of strangers. If it’s a “government”, however, you get protection the same way you get protection from a “Mafia”. If you pay, you get some protection –often not very good because who else can you call, so it is with monopolies– and you get to keep both your legs. Unless one of the rulers needs one.
Q If one does not want to use the term “mercenary” they can invent whatever euphemism they wish and call it a third party mechanism…
A-Euphemisms like “government”, except that’s involuntarily imposed force. And just like with the Army “volunteers”, many “mercenaries” are driven by other than monetary considerations. In self-defense, many of the “volunteers” will be just like the revolutionary militia, and today’s independent militias, people defending their lives, their families, their own children, like the independent militias that Mexicans are now forming to defend themselves against the gangs. Like some citizens of Detroit who have armed themselves for protection, because the police force are now useless. Precisely because under the “democratic-republican” Detroit government not everybody played fair. Especially the elected legislators and executives, and now even the judges are ordering the city to stiff the creditors that trusted them and pay the taxation without representation that previous city officials and unions colluded to burden them with.
Q The fact is they fight for money and not principle and can be paid off by your enemies.
A [Ed-Like moles, or governments of corrupt sellouts like in Congress. The fact is, all of us have wrong reasons we do many right things. This
thought also ignores the fact that giving you good service for
your money is a principle worth more than money. Protecting
people is a good career. It is the first early motivation of
may policemen, in fact, who make a career of it, paid for
their services. Yet the very police is who we are talking
about. If they were more directly beholden to the people they
ahem, “serve”, we would have much less abuse and corruption in
their number.A In a democratic republic you are free to hire your own self
defense so there is no denial of freedom.A [Ed-Unless you have to defend
yourself against that government. Try buying raw milk in a
co-op and get arrested in the “Republic” of California.Q One is free to dream that they can provide their own security on
either a personal or community basis against any threat but they
are assuming everyone else will play fair and continue to ignore
the myriad of scenarios that can develop in a world without
government.A-No assumptions at all except that all central planning scenarios come with all those flaws built in.
Who really believes they can defend against a foreign invasion
with an army of locally hired of rent a cops thrown together by
few communities who decide they will participate?A- The farmboy revolutionaries that defended the USA against British attacks are an excellent example. A rag-tag band of “backward” mountain men are
defeating the most powerful Army in the whole world as we speak. Bill Maher said once that the Second Amendment is moot because the government has tanks. Tell that to the Taliban. The militias in Iraq say Phooey too.Otherwise, why would our own “democratic republic” government
of the USA have such a fanatical fixation on disarming the
entire civilian population?
Government can become oppressive. True. People with no government can also form groups and become oppressive. Also true. The fact that anyone can be corrupted is hardly a case for ” no more rules”. It seems better time would be spent working on small government within a republican ( small “r”) model following constitutional principles.
A – Who said “No more rules”. That’s a straw man argument. The rule that counts more than any other should be the “non-aggression principle“. See:http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Principle_of_non-aggression
Walter Block explains it well:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2003/02/walter-block/turning-their-coats-for-the-state/
Someone who does not believe in government of any kind has no reason to quote the Bill of Rights since without a government to enforce it, it is just a piece of paper.
A – I quote the Bill of Rights because they actually support the position, because if you read them properly, they are not grants of privilege by government, but they are declarations of what are universally held rights in the sense articulated in the Declaration of Independence as “unalienable”. It was a compromise demanded by patriots that did not want a strong federal government.But as we can see from events and history in the real world, if you disqualify my arguments on that basis, yours are disqualified by the proof in the real world that your very government is ruled by that Constitution as “the Supreme Law of the Land“, but that very same government has broken almost every one and in the most massive scale possible:
The First: “Free-speech zones“
Second: Gun control laws. Supreme Court legalized “reasonable” infringement legislation. In New Orleans the police went door-to-door confiscating arms without warrants or due process at all. The first gun control laws in the U.S. were Jim Crow-motivated laws meant to prevent even free blacks from owning them.
Third: To my knowledge, the military has not commandeered quarters in any house, even as “prescribed by law”.
Fourth: Recent revelations by Edward Snowden and the brave reporters of The Guardian have exposed the blatant and still now unrepentant violation of the right of the people “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects” in the unconstitutional seizure of the “effects” of EVERY ONE of the regime’s subjects in the United States. Having been exposed, they say “So what? It’s to keep you safe from bad guys”. The Fourth also says must have a warrant –from a genuine independent court, not a kangaroo court, and not a self-written– naming the person and things to be seized. And there’s nothing about allowing the right to a censorship on the target of such a warrant, as we now face with the Patriot Act. A librarian was charged with a felony for just showing one of these warrants to an assistant.
Fifth: They had this guy in Boston how many hours? As soon as he knew his rights he shut up. But the same Justice Department that was so worried the FBI might find out something from this violation of rights is the one that violates every American’s “Fourth Amendment” right all day every day.
Sixth: Speedy trail, confrontation of witnesses: Not just the rubber-stamp FISA courts (NSA director: You can’t lie to us anymore, we all know they’re kangaroo, else they would not approve the unconstitutional requests for blanket coverage, seizure of all those records). There is the case of the U Florida professor arrested (and convicted? deported?) based on what the government called secret evidence that they could not even show the judge in the case.
Seventh: The president, we now know, issues regular kill orders against anybody he wants to. Rand Paul forced the Attorney General to admit the government has no legal authority at least to kill Americans on American soil if there is no imminent danger, but the history of lies and conviction for Contempt of Congress shows we cannot trust their word. Not to mention executing acts of war (like drone attacks overseas) without the constitutionally required declaration of war by Congress.
Eighth (Cruel and Unusual Punishment): Now the president who as candidate opposed the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo, now defends them as necessary. Nothing like a political campaign to bring out the liar in the worst characters. (Not to mention that the nests of rape, murder, assaults on prisoners convicted for non-violent offenses themselves, in my opinion, themselves constitute cruel and unusual punishment.)
Ninth: Ha, the Congress over the last twenty years, with the happy cooperation of the worst of the bankers, has violated every other natural right that got in their corrupt way, including that of property, with the Fed, the New Deal, The Great Society, the right to free trade and free exchange of goods and services.
Tenth: Of course the Congress has used the carrot-stick approach and a blatantly unconstitutional perversion of the interstate commerce clause to entice and coerce the states to doing things that were not in the jurisdiction of the federal Congress to influence. Holder tried a pathetic attempt to stop the flood of states declaring it illegal for anyone to cooperate with federal officials in violations of the Second Amendment. Holder used the “supreme law of the land” argument, by which he meant that the federal government has a “right” under the “supreme law” clause to become a dictatorship whenever it feels like it.
So yes, in the real world, I believe using the Constitution is a good way to educate the people, and by golly, if we can agree to push at least for respect and obedience to the US Constitution, that would be better than the present condition by astronomical scales.
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