"We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people." - Barack Obama [emphasis mine]
This quote is from a decidedly non-libertarian, spineless, tax-feeding, stammering, socialist. But I chose this quote for one reason, and that is to illustrate that the word Iranian should be replaced with United States. Or, for that matter, any government in the entire world.
You see, every government is based on certain principles- violence and injustice. And these "violent and unjust actions" always take place "against its own people." In the case of some governments, especially that of the United States of America, violence and injustice is actually exported to other countries for their displeasure. Of course, being that they have no representation in, or recourse from, the invading government, the tyranny is especially bad. Because, after all, as Michael Ledeen said, "[T]he defense of the country is one of those extreme situation in which a leader is justified in committing evil." [emphasis mine] And by committing evil, he of course means killing innocent human beings who have lives and families and hopes. Also, they have nothing to do with being able to keep the country defended. Committing the evil in the first place is what makes the country insecure.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
"He alone is great and happy who requires neither to command nor to obey in order to secure his being of some importance in the world."
"He alone is great and happy who requires neither to command nor to obey in order to secure his being of some importance in the world." — Johann Wolfgang von Goeth
What Is Anarchy?
by Butler Shaffer
I have mixed feelings about the use of labels to describe philosophical views, whether of myself or others. It is difficult to avoid doing so because our efforts to understand and communicate about the world necessarily involve the use of words and words are, as Alfred Korzybski warned us, abstractions that never equate with what they are meant to describe. His oft-quoted statement that "the map is not the territory" offers a caveat whose implications for confusion are further compounded when addressing such abstract topics as political philosophy.
One philosophical abstraction that seems to befuddle most people is "anarchy." To those challenged by complexity – such as radio talk show hosts and cable-TV "newscasters" who are convinced that all political opinions can be confined to the categories of "liberal" and "conservative" – the word anarchy evokes an unfocused fear of uncertain forces. Images of bomb-throwing thugs who smash and burn the property of others are routinely conjured up by politicians and the media to frighten people into an extension of police authority over their lives. "Disorder" and "lawless confusion" are common dictionary definitions of this word.
That there have been some, calling themselves "anarchists," who have engaged in violence on behalf of their political ambitions, is not to be denied. Nor can we overlook the provocateuring occasionally engaged in by undercover policemen – operating under the guise of "anarchists" – to justify harsh reprisals against political protests. But to condemn a philosophic viewpoint because a few wish to corrupt its meaning for their narrow advantage is no more justifiable than condemning Christianity because a man murders his family and defends his acts on the grounds "God told me to do it!"
As long as a president continues to rationalize war against the Iraqi people as "operation freedom"; as long as the Strategic Air Command insists that "peace is our profession"; and as long as police departments advertise that they are there "to serve and protect," intelligent minds must be prepared to look behind the superficiality and imagery of words to discover their deeper meaning. Such is the case with the word "anarchy."
The late Robert LeFevre made one such effort to transcend the popular meaning of the word when he declared that "an anarchist is anyone who believes in less government than you do." But an even better understanding of the concept can be derived from the Greek origins of the word (anarkhos) which meant "without a ruler." It is this definition of the word that members of the political power structure (i.e., your "rulers") do not want you to consider. Far better that you fear the hidden monsters and hobgoblins who are just waiting to bring terror and havoc to your lives should efforts to increase police powers or budgets fail.
Are there murderers, kidnappers, rapists, and arsonists in our world? Of course there are, and there will always be, and they do not all work for the state. It is amazing that, with all the powers and money conferred upon the state to "protect" us from such threats, they continue to occur with a regularity that seems to have increased with the size of government! Even the current "mad cow disease" scare is being used, by the statists, as a reason for more government regulation, an effort that conveniently ignores the fact that the federal government has been closely regulating meat production for many decades.
Nor can we ignore the history of the state in visiting upon humanity the very death and destruction that its defenders insist upon as a rationale for political power. Those who condemn anarchy should engage in some quantitative analysis. In the twentieth century alone, governments managed to kill – through wars, genocides, and other deadly practices – some 200,000,000 men, women, and children. How many people were killed by anarchists during this period? Governments, not anarchists, have been the deadly "bomb-throwers" of human history!
Because of the disingenuous manner in which this word has been employed, I endeavor to be as precise in my use of the term as possible. I employ the word "anarchy" not as a noun, but as a verb. I envision no utopian community, no "Galt’s Gulch" to which free men and women can repair. I prefer to think of anarchy as a way in which people deal with one another in a peaceful, cooperative manner; respectful of the inviolability of each other’s lives and property interests; resorting to contract and voluntary transactions rather than coercion and expropriation as a way of functioning in society.
I am often asked if anarchy has ever existed in our world, to which I answer: almost all of your daily behavior is an anarchistic expression. How you deal with your neighbors, coworkers, fellow customers in shopping malls or grocery stores, is often determined by subtle processes of negotiation and cooperation. Social pressures, unrelated to statutory enactments, influence our behavior on crowded freeways or grocery checkout lines. If we dealt with our colleagues at work in the same coercive and threatening manner by which the state insists on dealing with us, our employment would be immediately terminated. We would soon be without friends were we to demand that they adhere to specific behavioral standards that we had mandated for their lives.
Should you come over to our home for a visit, you will not be taxed, searched, required to show a passport or driver’s license, fined, jailed, threatened, handcuffed, or prohibited from leaving. I suspect that your relationships with your friends are conducted on the same basis of mutual respect. In short, virtually all of our dealings with friends and strangers alike are grounded in practices that are peaceful, voluntary, and devoid of coercion.
A very interesting study of the orderly nature of anarchy is found in John Phillip Reid’s book, Law for the Elephant. Reid studied numerous diaries and letters written by persons crossing the overland trail in wagon trains going from St. Joseph, Missouri to Oregon and California. The institutions we have been conditioned to equate with "law and order" (e.g., police, prisons, judges, etc.) were absent along the frontier, and Reid was interested in discovering how people behaved toward one another in such circumstances. He discovered that most people respected property and contract rights, and settled whatever differences they had in a peaceful manner, all of this in spite of the fact that there were no "authorities" to call in to enforce a decision. Such traits went so far as to include respect for the property claims of Indians. The values and integrities that individuals brought with them were sufficient to keep the wagon trains as peaceful communities.
Having spent many years driving on California freeways, I have observed an informal order amongst motorists who are complete strangers to one another. There is a general – albeit not universal – courtesy exhibited when one driver wishes to make a lane change and, in spite of noncooperative drivers, a spontaneous order arises from this interplay. A major reason for the cooperative order lies in the fact that a driving mistake can result in serious injury or death, and that such consequences will be felt at once, and by the actor, unlike political decision-making that shifts the costs to others.
One may answer that freeway driving is regulated by the state, and that driving habits are not indicative of anarchistic behavior. The same response can be made concerning our behavior generally (i.e., that government laws dictate our conduct in all settings). But this misconceives the causal connections at work. The supervision of our moment-to-moment activities by the state is too remote to affect our actions. We are polite to fellow shoppers or our neighbor for reasons that have nothing to do with legal prescripts. What makes our dealings with others peaceful and respectful comes from within ourselves, not from beyond. For precisely the same reason, a society can be utterly destroyed by the corruption of such subjective influences, and no blizzard of legislative enactments or quadrupling of police forces will be able to avert the entropic outcome. Do you now understand the social meaning of the "Humpty-Dumpty" nursery rhyme?
The study of complexity, or chaos, informs us of patterns of regularity that lie hidden in our world, but which spontaneously manifest themselves to generate the order that we like to pretend authorities have created for us. There is much to discover about the interplay of unseen forces that work, without conscious direction, to make our lives more productive and peaceful than even the best-intended autocrat can accomplish. As the disruptive histories of state planning and regulation reveal, efforts to impose order by fiat often produce disorder, a phenomenon whose explanation is to be found in the dynamical nature of complexity. In the words of Terry Pratchett: "Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. Chaos always defeats order because it is better organized."
"Anarchy" is an expression of social behavior that reflects the individualized nature of life. Only as living beings are free to pursue their particular interests in the unique circumstances in which they find themselves, can conditions for the well-being of all be attained. Anarchy presumes decentralized and cooperative systems that serve the mutual interests of the individuals comprising them, without the systems ever becoming their own reasons for being. It is this thinking, and the practices that result therefrom, that is alone responsible for whatever peace and order exists in society.
Political thinking, by contrast, presumes the supremacy of the systems (i.e., the state) and reduces individuals to the status of resources for the accomplishment of their ends. Such systems are grounded in the mass-minded conditioning and behavior that has produced the deadly wars, economic dislocations, genocides, and police-state oppressions that comprise the essence of political history.
Men and women need nothing so much right now as to rediscover and reenergize their own souls. They will never be able to accomplish such purposes in the dehumanizing and dispirited state systems that insist upon controlling their lives and property. In the sentiments underlying anarchistic thinking, men and women may be able to find the individualized sense of being and self-direction that they long ago abandoned in marbled halls and citadels.
What Is Anarchy?
by Butler Shaffer
I have mixed feelings about the use of labels to describe philosophical views, whether of myself or others. It is difficult to avoid doing so because our efforts to understand and communicate about the world necessarily involve the use of words and words are, as Alfred Korzybski warned us, abstractions that never equate with what they are meant to describe. His oft-quoted statement that "the map is not the territory" offers a caveat whose implications for confusion are further compounded when addressing such abstract topics as political philosophy.
One philosophical abstraction that seems to befuddle most people is "anarchy." To those challenged by complexity – such as radio talk show hosts and cable-TV "newscasters" who are convinced that all political opinions can be confined to the categories of "liberal" and "conservative" – the word anarchy evokes an unfocused fear of uncertain forces. Images of bomb-throwing thugs who smash and burn the property of others are routinely conjured up by politicians and the media to frighten people into an extension of police authority over their lives. "Disorder" and "lawless confusion" are common dictionary definitions of this word.
That there have been some, calling themselves "anarchists," who have engaged in violence on behalf of their political ambitions, is not to be denied. Nor can we overlook the provocateuring occasionally engaged in by undercover policemen – operating under the guise of "anarchists" – to justify harsh reprisals against political protests. But to condemn a philosophic viewpoint because a few wish to corrupt its meaning for their narrow advantage is no more justifiable than condemning Christianity because a man murders his family and defends his acts on the grounds "God told me to do it!"
As long as a president continues to rationalize war against the Iraqi people as "operation freedom"; as long as the Strategic Air Command insists that "peace is our profession"; and as long as police departments advertise that they are there "to serve and protect," intelligent minds must be prepared to look behind the superficiality and imagery of words to discover their deeper meaning. Such is the case with the word "anarchy."
The late Robert LeFevre made one such effort to transcend the popular meaning of the word when he declared that "an anarchist is anyone who believes in less government than you do." But an even better understanding of the concept can be derived from the Greek origins of the word (anarkhos) which meant "without a ruler." It is this definition of the word that members of the political power structure (i.e., your "rulers") do not want you to consider. Far better that you fear the hidden monsters and hobgoblins who are just waiting to bring terror and havoc to your lives should efforts to increase police powers or budgets fail.
Are there murderers, kidnappers, rapists, and arsonists in our world? Of course there are, and there will always be, and they do not all work for the state. It is amazing that, with all the powers and money conferred upon the state to "protect" us from such threats, they continue to occur with a regularity that seems to have increased with the size of government! Even the current "mad cow disease" scare is being used, by the statists, as a reason for more government regulation, an effort that conveniently ignores the fact that the federal government has been closely regulating meat production for many decades.
Nor can we ignore the history of the state in visiting upon humanity the very death and destruction that its defenders insist upon as a rationale for political power. Those who condemn anarchy should engage in some quantitative analysis. In the twentieth century alone, governments managed to kill – through wars, genocides, and other deadly practices – some 200,000,000 men, women, and children. How many people were killed by anarchists during this period? Governments, not anarchists, have been the deadly "bomb-throwers" of human history!
Because of the disingenuous manner in which this word has been employed, I endeavor to be as precise in my use of the term as possible. I employ the word "anarchy" not as a noun, but as a verb. I envision no utopian community, no "Galt’s Gulch" to which free men and women can repair. I prefer to think of anarchy as a way in which people deal with one another in a peaceful, cooperative manner; respectful of the inviolability of each other’s lives and property interests; resorting to contract and voluntary transactions rather than coercion and expropriation as a way of functioning in society.
I am often asked if anarchy has ever existed in our world, to which I answer: almost all of your daily behavior is an anarchistic expression. How you deal with your neighbors, coworkers, fellow customers in shopping malls or grocery stores, is often determined by subtle processes of negotiation and cooperation. Social pressures, unrelated to statutory enactments, influence our behavior on crowded freeways or grocery checkout lines. If we dealt with our colleagues at work in the same coercive and threatening manner by which the state insists on dealing with us, our employment would be immediately terminated. We would soon be without friends were we to demand that they adhere to specific behavioral standards that we had mandated for their lives.
Should you come over to our home for a visit, you will not be taxed, searched, required to show a passport or driver’s license, fined, jailed, threatened, handcuffed, or prohibited from leaving. I suspect that your relationships with your friends are conducted on the same basis of mutual respect. In short, virtually all of our dealings with friends and strangers alike are grounded in practices that are peaceful, voluntary, and devoid of coercion.
A very interesting study of the orderly nature of anarchy is found in John Phillip Reid’s book, Law for the Elephant. Reid studied numerous diaries and letters written by persons crossing the overland trail in wagon trains going from St. Joseph, Missouri to Oregon and California. The institutions we have been conditioned to equate with "law and order" (e.g., police, prisons, judges, etc.) were absent along the frontier, and Reid was interested in discovering how people behaved toward one another in such circumstances. He discovered that most people respected property and contract rights, and settled whatever differences they had in a peaceful manner, all of this in spite of the fact that there were no "authorities" to call in to enforce a decision. Such traits went so far as to include respect for the property claims of Indians. The values and integrities that individuals brought with them were sufficient to keep the wagon trains as peaceful communities.
Having spent many years driving on California freeways, I have observed an informal order amongst motorists who are complete strangers to one another. There is a general – albeit not universal – courtesy exhibited when one driver wishes to make a lane change and, in spite of noncooperative drivers, a spontaneous order arises from this interplay. A major reason for the cooperative order lies in the fact that a driving mistake can result in serious injury or death, and that such consequences will be felt at once, and by the actor, unlike political decision-making that shifts the costs to others.
One may answer that freeway driving is regulated by the state, and that driving habits are not indicative of anarchistic behavior. The same response can be made concerning our behavior generally (i.e., that government laws dictate our conduct in all settings). But this misconceives the causal connections at work. The supervision of our moment-to-moment activities by the state is too remote to affect our actions. We are polite to fellow shoppers or our neighbor for reasons that have nothing to do with legal prescripts. What makes our dealings with others peaceful and respectful comes from within ourselves, not from beyond. For precisely the same reason, a society can be utterly destroyed by the corruption of such subjective influences, and no blizzard of legislative enactments or quadrupling of police forces will be able to avert the entropic outcome. Do you now understand the social meaning of the "Humpty-Dumpty" nursery rhyme?
The study of complexity, or chaos, informs us of patterns of regularity that lie hidden in our world, but which spontaneously manifest themselves to generate the order that we like to pretend authorities have created for us. There is much to discover about the interplay of unseen forces that work, without conscious direction, to make our lives more productive and peaceful than even the best-intended autocrat can accomplish. As the disruptive histories of state planning and regulation reveal, efforts to impose order by fiat often produce disorder, a phenomenon whose explanation is to be found in the dynamical nature of complexity. In the words of Terry Pratchett: "Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. Chaos always defeats order because it is better organized."
"Anarchy" is an expression of social behavior that reflects the individualized nature of life. Only as living beings are free to pursue their particular interests in the unique circumstances in which they find themselves, can conditions for the well-being of all be attained. Anarchy presumes decentralized and cooperative systems that serve the mutual interests of the individuals comprising them, without the systems ever becoming their own reasons for being. It is this thinking, and the practices that result therefrom, that is alone responsible for whatever peace and order exists in society.
Political thinking, by contrast, presumes the supremacy of the systems (i.e., the state) and reduces individuals to the status of resources for the accomplishment of their ends. Such systems are grounded in the mass-minded conditioning and behavior that has produced the deadly wars, economic dislocations, genocides, and police-state oppressions that comprise the essence of political history.
Men and women need nothing so much right now as to rediscover and reenergize their own souls. They will never be able to accomplish such purposes in the dehumanizing and dispirited state systems that insist upon controlling their lives and property. In the sentiments underlying anarchistic thinking, men and women may be able to find the individualized sense of being and self-direction that they long ago abandoned in marbled halls and citadels.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
"Thou inquirest what liberty is? To be slave to nothing, to no necessity, to no accident, to keep fortune at arms length."
"Thou inquirest what liberty is? To be slave to nothing, to no necessity, to no accident, to keep fortune at arms length." — Seneca
Incredible as it sounds, liberty is being a slave to nothing! Freedom means freedom! Not being a slave to the government, or political power, or taxes, or others' coercive control over your own non-aggressive actions.
Here is a story about a tax-feeder that I found particularly disgusting. The double standard which pervades our society, allowing the government and its' agents to commit crimes and evils which, if committed by a private citizen, would result in life imprisonment or death, is truly repulsive. The greatest mass murderer of time immemorial is indisputably the state, and the parasites which foist their political power upon the masses of the enslaved. Especially murderous during the last century has been the desire to conquer, destroy, murder, and oppress the peoples of the world in order to impose democracy upon them, regardless of their own desires.
Incredible as it sounds, liberty is being a slave to nothing! Freedom means freedom! Not being a slave to the government, or political power, or taxes, or others' coercive control over your own non-aggressive actions.
Here is a story about a tax-feeder that I found particularly disgusting. The double standard which pervades our society, allowing the government and its' agents to commit crimes and evils which, if committed by a private citizen, would result in life imprisonment or death, is truly repulsive. The greatest mass murderer of time immemorial is indisputably the state, and the parasites which foist their political power upon the masses of the enslaved. Especially murderous during the last century has been the desire to conquer, destroy, murder, and oppress the peoples of the world in order to impose democracy upon them, regardless of their own desires.
Killing With Impunity: A Police Prerogative
Posted by William Grigg on June 13, 2009 08:18 PM
New Jersey State Trooper Robert Higbee was in hot pursuit of revenue on September 26, 2006 when he ran a stop sign and his cruiser collided with a minivan. At the time Higbee was speeding in pursuit of a speeder, doing at least 65 m.ph. in a 35 m.p.h. zone.
The collision, for which Higbee was entirely to blame, took the lives of two passengers, 19-year-old Christina Becker and 17-year-old Jacqueline Becker.
Had Higbee been a productive private citizen as opposed to a tax-feeder of the enforcer caste, he would almost certainly have been convicted of vehicular homicide.
But thanks in part to the light touch of Superior Court Judge Raymond Batten and Cape May County assistant prosecutor David Meyer, a jury saw fit to acquit the trooper of the charge.
The court then dismissed charges of careless driving and failing to stop or yield at a stop sign, downgrading the offense of a single charge of “unsafe driving.” Fines and court fees totalled $728 — or $364 apiece for the two young women who were killed by Higbee as he tried to apprehend someone whose irresponsible driving didn’t take any lives that evening.
The Philadelphia Inquirer quotes Judge Batten as calling Higbee “a good person otherwise engaged in a lifetime of usefulness and doing good deeds,” and insisting that any term of incarceration “would yield no additional public utility.”
Now, had some mere mundane killed one of the state’s sanctified enforcers by running a stop sign….
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
"It must be obvious that liberty necessarily means freedom to choose foolishly as well as wisely..."
"It must be obvious that liberty necessarily means freedom to choose foolishly as well as wisely; freedom to choose evil as well as good; freedom to enjoy the rewards of good judgment, and freedom to suffer the penalties of bad judgment." — Ben Moreell
Far too many today instead think that liberty means choosing what is best for others and enforcing upon them.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
"The coming debate is not just about the freedom to make one's own medical decisions. It is about life and death."
"The coming debate is not just about the freedom to make one's own medical decisions. It is about life and death. If we insist on a dynamic and competitive market, health care will be better, cheaper, safer, and more secure. If we go in the direction of new government programs, mandates, and price controls, we will see higher costs, more medical errors, more uncoordinated care, and more lives lost because people with government "insurance" nevertheless couldn't find a doctor who would treat them." - Michael F. Cannon
Subject: You'll regret it for the rest of your shortened life
Be ready, Congress plans to rush through a complete overhaul of YOUR health care this summer.
You can bet this so-called reform bill will...
* Be long, complicated, and packed with special interest favors
* Have massive consequences, both intended and unintended
* Add hundreds of billions of dollars to our already cancerous national liabilities
You can also bet that...
* More of your health care decisions will be dictated by bureaucrats, in a desperate attempt to control costs
* Almost no member of Congress will read the bill, or really understand it
* Any problems the bill creates will last for decades, and perhaps forever
Even so, many Americans want Congress to act, and it's easy to see why. Millions of people...
* Fear losing their health insurance if they lose their jobs
* Don't have health insurance through their employers and find it too expensive to buy as an individual
* Face bankruptcy if they have an expensive illness
* Find it hard to see a doctor, and are dissatisfied with the experience when they do see one
Doctors too are dissatisfied, and they're quitting in droves. The resulting overflow of patients is flooding into hospital ERs, straining them to the breaking point. These problems make people feel desperate, and eager to believe political promises. But if they do...
They'll regret it for the rest of their shortened lives.
We can know this because the proposed reforms further destroy the free market, just like earlier government policies that created the current problem. Think about it...
Health insurance is tied to employment because the politicians created tax policies that make it that way.
Health insurance is too expensive in part because state politicians impose special-interest mandates that price many people out of the market.
Health care costs too much because most of it is paid for by Medicare and Medicaid, or through tax-incentivized insurance that covers the medical equivalent of oil changes.
People find it unsatisfying to see a doctor because the politicians have created a system where your doctor works for the government, or for the insurance companies, and NOT FOR YOU.
Primary care doctors are quitting because Medicare and Medicaid pay too much for specialists, and too little for primary care.
The free market isn't the problem, it's the solution. The problem is the politicians, and the solution to them is YOU.
We need to fight the politicians' anti-market schemes with everything we've got. Some of this will involve specific campaigns, but to give ourselves flexibility, we've also created a generic campaign that we'll use today.
Tell your Congressional employees to reduce rather than increase government involvement in health care.
Use your personal comments to tell them that government created the health care crisis by destroying the free market. Mention tax policies that tie health insurance to employment, state mandates that make health insurance too expensive, and price distortions caused by Medicare and Medicaid.
To exceed the 36,512 messages we sent last month we need to send at least 1,715 messages today.
Thank you for being a part of the growing Downsize DC Army. To see how we're growing, check out the Keeping Score report below my signature.
Perry Willis
Communications Director
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
Monday, June 1, 2009
"Under [militarism] military men learn to despise constitutions, to sneer at parliaments, and to look with contempt on civilians."
"It is of the essence of militarism that under it military men learn to despise constitutions, to sneer at parliaments, and to look with contempt on civilians." — William Graham Sumner
Being a Marine, I've experienced this firsthand. Being in the military (or police force) gives men inflated egos, the idea that everyone should do exactly as you command, and the idea that civilians only posses the rights that you give them. It also leads to the idea of being above the law. Being an official murderer of the state makes you above reproach and anyone who gets killed in the cross fire is just collateral damage, too bad for them. The life of others becomes worthless, since they are just the subjects.
Being a Marine, I've experienced this firsthand. Being in the military (or police force) gives men inflated egos, the idea that everyone should do exactly as you command, and the idea that civilians only posses the rights that you give them. It also leads to the idea of being above the law. Being an official murderer of the state makes you above reproach and anyone who gets killed in the cross fire is just collateral damage, too bad for them. The life of others becomes worthless, since they are just the subjects.
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