[2002-05-14] "The Delusion of Limited Government"

[DennisLeeWilson]

[2002-05-14] "The Delusion of Limited Government"
http://atlasshruggedcelebrationday.com/simplemachinesforum/index.php?topic=94.msg211#msg211

Several articles are in this category, starting with one of the same title by Butler Shaffer

From: DennisLeeWilson-Ariz-Wyo  (Original Message) Sent: 12/6/2006 12:53 PM

http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer17.html

The Delusion of Limited Government
by Butler Shaffer

The other evening, I watched C-SPAN coverage of the Cato Institute’s 25th anniversary dinner. It was interesting to observe various speakers pulling from their pockets small, leatherette-bound booklets, published by Cato, containing both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. They held them up and recited the oft-quoted mantra of the evening: "free markets and limited government." The ceremony reminded me of nothing so much as the practice in China, during the Cultural Revolution, of true believers carrying – and quoting from – the little red book of Chairman Mao’s aphorisms.

This mantra continued to be invoked throughout the evening, as the speakers lamented the parallel diminution in liberty and expansion of state power: increased economic regulation, governments siphoning off some 45% of the wealth produced each year, and decreasing parental control over government schools (references to war as the most flagrant expression of statism were carefully avoided, however). As I listened, I asked myself: what objection do these people really have? They celebrate the Constitution, carrying it around with them like a book of catechisms and, at the same time, complain that this document has not restrained the power of the state!

There is an innocence, born of years of institutional conditioning, that leads most people to believe that the destructive powers of the state can be limited by the drafting and adoption of constitutions. Such hopes were expressed by seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers who, building upon the capacity of private contracts to define the limits of interpersonal behavior, sought to extend such benefits to the social realm. But the abstract reasoning that underlay such expectations was soon confronted by the experiences of Realpolitik.

One would have thought that a group of people who believed in "free markets" would be astute enough to recognize the self-interest motivations that underlie all human behavior; and would further perceive that creating an instrumentality of coercive power would be far too dangerous a temptation to place before men and women. No more than should a bowl of candy be placed before a group of children with the expectation that it not be touched, should we expect political systems to be immune from mischief.

Given that a government, by definition, enjoys a monopoly on the use of force within a particular territory; and given that human beings are motivated to pursue their self-interests in the least costly method to them of doing so, what reasoning or historical experience would lead one to the conclusion that people would be disinclined to use the power of the state to advance their interests? And if some would be tempted to employ such powers to their advantage, why would we not expect others to do so as well? Furthermore, why would we not expect the state, itself, to formulate its own self-interest agenda to aggrandize its only available asset: coercive power over the lives and property of people?

The "limited government" advocates respond to such questions by invoking the power of words as a restriction on state power. The Constitution contains language that carefully defines the purposes and limitations of governmental authority, and state action that exceeds such limits will be acknowledged as "unconstitutional." The arrangement sounds so rational, but fails to take into account one of the fundamental shortcomings in all language: words are abstractions of reality and, in order to be applied to the world, must be interpreted! Alfred Korzybski stated the proposition more succinctly: "the map is not the territory." At best, words give us only approximations of shared meanings, and our efforts to communicate clearly with one another necessitate our use of as much precision as we can muster. Around the edges of every word, however, is a fuzziness that invariably succumbs to the Korzybski principle.

The following example will make the point. The produce manager of a grocery store has one aisle devoted to "fruits" and another to "vegetables." In which aisle should he put peas, tomatoes, and avocadoes? Taxonomically, they belong with the other fruits, but by custom they are eaten as vegetables.

The fuzziness problem becomes even more troublesome as we move into words of a more abstract nature, such as we find in the United States Constitution. This instrument of allegedly "limited powers" contains a preamble that defines its purposes as the creation of "a more perfect Union," which will "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty." The specific grants of power to Congress are then spelled out in Article I, which include, among others, the "Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." How do such words limit governmental power? What more would any tyrant need to justify his actions than these?

But Article I goes on to provide, among others, the power "To Borrow Money on the credit of the United States," "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes," and "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof." Where, in such words, does one find any clearly defined restriction on government power?

What do we mean by "Justice": is it, to paraphrase Thrasymachus, only whatever is in the interest of the stronger party, or nothing more than the redistribution of violence? Is the "general Welfare" to find expression in the utilitarian principle of "the greatest good for the greatest number," or "the greatest good for the greatest guy?" Against what must we mount a "common defence": the "heartbreak of psoriasis?" Bad breath? Bad music?

Korzybski’s admonition is revealed in the irony that the same words conservatives see as limiting governmental powers, liberals see as providing a means for the expansion of such powers! Words – particularly those as general as are used in the Constitution – must always be interpreted and, as Anthony de Jasay has so insightfully stated it, "collective choice is never independent of what significant numbers of individuals wish it to be." Conservatives continue to wrap themselves up in the kinds of knotted thinking about how the Constitution is what keeps the government from doing all the terrible things that it does. Nevertheless, the harsh reality is that there is nothing the federal government does that cannot be interpreted as being within the meaning of these empowering words!

Suppose that you and I enter into an agreement by which I will have complete control over all your assets – your bank accounts, investments, real estate, etc. – subject only to the proviso that my authority can only be exercised for your "welfare." Don’t you see how I could rationalize an attractive salary, health care and other fringe benefits, a new car and office space, and trips to foreign countries (to check out alternative investment opportunities, of course) as being necessary for my efforts on your behalf? A court of law might conclude that I was engaged in over-reaching, perhaps, and restrain my ambitions. But courts are part of the enforcement machinery of the state, and have little incentive to confine governmental powers, even if they were otherwise inclined to do so.

For those who would put their faith in the judicial branch of government to restrain the powers of the state, take a look at how the courts have interpreted both congressional powers, and the "bill of rights’" supposed limitations on such powers. Government authority has been given an expansive definition, and individual liberties a narrow one. The courts are continually declaring that the "necessary and proper" clause "is not limited to," or that the "commerce clause" is "not confined to," or that some other grant "does not restrict" the government in some way. By contrast, First Amendment "free speech" rights "do not include," or "freedom of religion" "does not mean," or some other right "does not extend to" an activity the state wishes to restrict. "Free speech" has long been subject to a "clear and present danger" test – a limitation not found in the First Amendment – leaving us with the realistic interpretation that the state may not restrict free speech unless it chooses to do so!

Once an agency of force has been set up to govern the lives of people, there are no words or other magical incantations to which resort may be had to guarantee the limited exercise of such powers. A friend of mine, Sy Leon, illustrated this with the following example. Suppose that the Constitution limited the federal government to only one function: to "regulate time." Play around with such words, yourself, and you will see how the present federal power structure could be rationalized from such "limited" authority. Legislation could be enacted providing that "no one shall spend his or her time working for less than $5.80 per hour;" "no one shall spend his or her time driving an automobile at a speed in excess of 55 mph;" "all persons between the ages of 18-35 shall spend two years of their time in military service;" "no one shall spend their time using marijuana or other defined drugs;" etc., etc.

When we recall that the Soviet Union had a constitution – modeled after the United States Constitution – it should be evident that liberty can never be guaranteed by the scribbling of words on parchment. Those who wave copies of the Constitution around as symbols of their liberty, remind me of dogs who have learned to carry their leashes in their mouths.

A society will remain as free or as enslaved as the conscious dispositions of individuals determine it shall be. Just as the roots of oppression are found in passivity, the foundations of our liberty reside in highly energized and focused minds that insist upon their independence. There are no shortcuts, no structures or doctrines that can be erected, no hallowed documents to be revered, to save us the effort of continually challenging those who would presume to exercise authority over our lives.


May 14, 2002
Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail: bshaffer@swlaw.edu ] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law.

Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
 

[DennisLeeWilson]

From: DennisLeeWilson-Ariz-Wyo Sent: 2/17/2008 2:44 PM
 
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle456-20080217-02.html
 

THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 456, February 17, 2008
"Just Say No—To Victim Disarmament!"

The Last Test of Democracy: Part One
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

Something is deeply wrong with the American political process.

That's the only way to explain why, despite polls showing that 70% of us want the wars in the middle east ended and our troops brought home now, the probable nominees of the "major" political parties are a warmongering lunatic and a "peace candidate" who says he wants to bomb Pakistan.

At the same time, the only potential potentate who wants what we want—and also promises to force the government into compliance with the Constitution, which was supposed to be its basic operating system—has been as crudely and blatantly shut out of the corrupt electoral process, by both government and mass media, as if he were a black political activist in Selma, Alabama or Oxford, Missiissippi in the 1950s.

Tammany Hall's notorious 19th century Boss Tweed may have said it out loud in public first: "I don't give a damn who votes, as long as I do the nominating," but the sentiment is straight out of Alexander Hamilton's personal philosophy of power above anyone and anything else.

Little wonder, then, that our civilization presently finds itself in worse shape, politically and economically, and in greater danger of some kind of violent and bloody Wagnerian collapse, than at any other time during its long, ugly, war-torn history, including World War I, World War II, the Great Depression, and the egregiously misnamed Civil War.

There was nothing civil about it.

In the wake of whatever happened on September 11, 2001 (whether anybody likes it or not, the facts of that event, including who was responsible, are far from settled), a fat, lazy, corrupt, rubberstamp Congress passed the so-called "U.S.A. Patriot Act" apparently without even reading it (some politicians claim there were no copies available to read—which should have caused them to reject it on the spot) destroying financial, communications, and medical privacy in this country, and with them, the tattered remains of the fundamental human right to trade with anybody for anything. Among many other new lows, for the first time, the law restricted constitutional and other rights during the period of an undeclared (and therefore totally illegal) war.

In addition to creating a new category of crime called "domestic terrorism", the act allowed the indefinite detention of a steadily widening variety of individuals, secret, warrantless searches of people's homes and businesses, and other violations of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. (Freedom to travel without harrassment or intrusion had already been obliterated more than a generation earlier.) In short, with one stroke of a President's pen, America completed what had been, until then, a slow, steady, gradual descent into police statism.

The act (and supporting legislation that came later, such as the deceptively-named "Military Commissions Act" and H.R.1955/S.B.1959) mandated "studies" of biometric identification systems—I recently wrote an article about the way "studies" rapidly become law—the early origins of the notorious "No-Fly list" at airports, and fat "security" contracts for fascistic corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, the latter of which has since become a worldwide military power with a greater armed presence in Iraq than the United States government.

Meanwhile, a brand new and overwhelmingly powerful secret police establishment with the Joseph Geobbelsian monicker "Department of Homeland Security", arose to prominence and has come to dominate all other American law enforcement organizations, Constitutional or otherwise.

But that was only the beginning. The Patriot Act, scheduled to sunset in 2005, was renewed with disgusting haste and followed by Patriot II, giving the government even more power at the expense of what had been unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human rights.

All in all, it has been a time of bitter disillusionment. The nation's courts, for example, particularly the United States Supreme Court, have revealed themselves to be fully as corrupt and unreliable in their stewardship of the Constitution, especially of the Bill of Rights, as Congress, or even the mass media Thomas Jefferson believed—falsely, as it turned out—would preserve them. If somebody set out from the beginning, with the deliberate intention of destroying American civilization, he would be following exactly the same policies—running the Abraham Lincoln playbook—that George W. Bush is following.

Allow me to repeat that, because it's important. If somebody set out from the beginning, with the deliberate intention of destroying American civilization, he would be following exactly the same policies—running the Abraham Lincoln playbook—that George W. Bush is following.

Notably it was Dishonest Abe who first suspended habeas corpus, but Republicans are nothing if not pathetic creatures of nostalgia and will do absolutely anything to bring back the "good old days" of Lincolnofascism.

Cures? The list of cures is endless: abolish sovereign immunity, disarm the feds; demilitarize the cops; outlaw the secret ballot; send the politicians (including the President and his Cabinet) into combat first; abolish limited liabilty, outlaw fractional reserve banking, repeal every law passed since September 11, 2001, repeal every law passed since 1912. And no, I'm not kidding about any of those or a half a hundred more I could have written down here. But the problem remains the same as it was before: no real reform effort can get any traction when the system is run by crooked politicians and the whorish media.

Face it: in the kingdom of bananas, he who has the most bananas is king.

The 2008 presidential election is the last test of the Democratic Experiment in America. So far, it's failing badly. If Ron Paul and his message of peace and the rule of law continue to be excluded, that will be the end of a political system that was probably phony to begin with.

It will be our task—that of America's libertarians, and those individuals who waged the Ron Paul campaign, to decide upon the next step. I have three ideas for getting the traction we need and using it to change things for the better, forever, whether those who falsely believe they own the country—and our lives—want them changed or not.

Anybody interested?

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo" May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was published by BigHead Press www.bigheadpress.com has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at www.Amazon.com, or at BillOfRightsPress.com.
 

[DennisLeeWilson]

From: DennisLeeWilson-Ariz-Wyo Sent: 2/25/2008 3:59 PM

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle457-20080224-02.html
 

THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 457, February 24, 2008
"Media so putrescently corrupt they
glowed in the dark like rotten fish"

 

The Last Test of Democracy: Part Two
Putting Teeth in the Bill of Rights
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attribute to: The Libertarian Enterprise

It always comes as a surprise—to anybody who was taught history by the public school system—to discover that the rebel side didn't win the American Revolution, at least not in any technically military sense.

Stick with me, now, it'll all be relevant in a minute.

The historic fact is that our rebellion was part of something larger going on between England and France. After a certain point, it became too expensive—economically and politically—for George III and his boys to go on trying to keep us pesky colonials down. I'm told that there wasn't even a formal peace treaty ending our fight with the King, just a paragraph in a bigger document pertaining to the two kingdoms, a mere afterthought, as in, "Oh, yeah—and the formerly British occupants in certain parts of North America are now on their own."

In part, this happened because the same issues that had sparked our rebellion—Navigation Acts imposing tariffs considered crippling in those days, that had the effect of forbidding trade with any but the mother country—were just as unpopular and subject to resistance elsewhere in the empire. Look up Dr. Syn: The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. It seems that Danger Man and The Prisoner was also a tax protestor.

Exactly the same is true of the Vietnam War. I don't know how many times I've had to listen to veterans and chickenhawks alike complain that "our boys weren't allowed to win" that war, that "we" could have won if only we'd had the guts, or we could have simply slagged Hanoi, instead, and turned all of North Vietnam into a gigantic glass parking lot.

Aside from the utter lack of morality it betrays, the objection is infantile, childish, like a toddler throwing a tantrum because Mommy and Daddy—who have minimum wage jobs—won't buy him a pony. I could do anything—I could literally fly to the Moon—if I had 20 billion dollars. But the simple fact is that the war had already cost too much, in millions of dollars spent every day, in both American and Vietnamese lives (they killed 60,000 of us, we killed 2,000,000 of them), in irrevocable cultural distortion, and the loss of freedom at home.

Some armchair pundits whimper that our national will had flagged, but it wasn't a matter of our will, but of our won't. The Johnson Administration had two or three different kinds of rebellion in the streets at home, so in the end, the old bastard simply quit, the way his successor Richard Nixon would, for different reasons, a few years later.

Good times...

But I digress.

The point is, you don't have to win to beat the other guy, you only have to make his win too expensive. As Pyrrhus said, after an extremely costly defeat of the Romans, "Another such victory and I am undone."

For almost forty years, now, I've been watching the Libertarian Party try to achieve what amount to revolutionary goals by working "within the system". Like many of my readers, I've shivered in the rain or broiled in the sun collecting petition signatures, exhausted myself in what turned out to be comic relief campaigns, been held up to ridicule by media so putrescently corrupt they glowed in the dark like rotten fish, only to see our hopes dashed cruelly in elections rigged in several different ways against us by those who own the process.

The only thing that makes today's Ron Paul campaign different is how openly crooked the establishment has been in opposing it. You're seeing it, too. From denying this year's only peace and freedom candidate his rightful place in the debates, to failing to count his votes—or simply giving them to another candidate—the system has proven willing to destroy itself in order to save its clients and patrons.

For four decades we have been playing on their field, with their bat and ball—and more importantly, their umpire—and wondering why we can never win. It is time to change that, and I believe I know how.

Think about the American Revolution, think about the Vietnam war, think about Pyrrhus. What if there were a way to double the cost of the other guy's victories? What if we could make staying in office so costly they were forced to change their system, either to accommodate us or to exclude us completely—which would destroy their system altogether?

About twenty-five years ago—long before the Internet became a daily (make that hourly—or minutely) part of our lives—my wife Cathy and I had an idea we called "The National Recall Coordinating Committees"—note the plural, it'll be important later. Cathy was a typesetter in those days (this is a lady who keeps huge catalogs of different typefaces in the bathroom the way I do Cartridges of the World), and we were accustomed to creating extravagant letterhead stationery with unlikely names on it, sometimes just for our own amusement.

The Libertarian Enterprise began as that kind of an idea.

But we wondered what would happen if a politician received a letter with that heading on it, "The National Recall Coordinating Committees", asking him about his position, say, on firearms ownership. Would it be more intimidating than any other mail he received? We didn't know, and we didn't try the idea, because we were struggling just then to stay alive, and other things seemed more important.

Cut to the 21st century, when an idea can be flashed all over the world in seconds, and massive numbers of Americans are increasingly angered by a government that seems to exist only for the purpose of draining them dry and denying them their rights. It seemed bad in 1983, but by those standards, we're living in an Orwellian nightmare today.

Now imagine tens of thousands of Ron Paul partisans looking around for something to do with themselves after the Republican convention. The good doctor has stated on repeated occasions that he won't run as an independent. To their number, add massively unhappy members of the Libertarian Party, thwarted once again by a political system designed only to keep incumbents in office. Stir in a powerful, well-mirrored website that will gather information at the national, state, county, and municipal level on recall and impeachment procedures, help people find each other and organize, report on efforts underway, and on results.

Suddenly the Bill of Rights has started teething.

This is something that can go on all year, every year, instead of just election time. It's an undertaking that does not focus itself on a single candidate—who may be an embarrassing idiot or a weakling, but is the only person available or willing to run for office. It's an activity in which each and every individual participant can be an equal spokesman. It's not meant to replace the Libertarian Party but to operate in parallel with it—and Democrats and Republicans are free to jump on the bandwagon if they can agree to a few underlying principles.

The first of these underlying principles is that the first ten amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, means what it says—what its authors meant it to say—and is the highest law of the land. In an increasingly lawless society, no state- serving court ruling or legislative act will be permitted to change that.

The second underlying principle is that nobody has a right to initiate physical force against anybody else for any reason whatsoever.

Yes, I know these ideas may be a bit of a stretch for Republicans or Democrats (and some libertarians, apparently), but in those areas where they want what we want—getting rid of a specific politician—they may be willing to expand their consciousness enough to form an alliance. Rather than recognize these ideas as the eternal values they represent, they will see them, in the beginning as the rules of the game.

And that will be enough, at first.

From the website, we establish—charter—state, county, and municipal satelllite organizations. We compile existing legal procedures and assist in managing actual recall and impeachment campaigns. We agree, from the outset, that we're only going after politicians and bureaucrats who have committed "crimes against the Constitution", and we avoid areas of conflict—abortion comes to mind—where the general freedom movement finds itself hopelessly split.

We use the plural, The National Recall Coordinating Committees, to remind everyone that we are everywhere and though you can run—and even win—you can't hide forever if you use your political office to destroy individual liberty. This will speak to national parties that will eventually come to see such miscreant politicians as an expensive liability.

And above all, we remember that, while the overall objective is a free society, even when we "lose" a recall election we win, because we've raised the enemy's cost of doing business, handing him a Pyrrhic victory.

The National Recall Coordinating Committees™ all rights reserved.

Next Time: Crime and Punishment

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo" May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was published by BigHead Press www.bigheadpress.com has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at www.Amazon.com, or at BillOfRightsPress.com .
 

[DennisLeeWilson]

http://tinyurl.com/NUREMBERG-II

See at
http://www.cafepress.com/artemiszuna/1951959

SEE UPDATE, CLICK IMAGE BELOW...:
http://tinyurl.com/USA-War-Crimes

Shadow Court Finds Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld Guilty of War Crimes

From: DennisLeeWilson-Ariz-Wyo Sent: 3/3/2008 12:01 PM

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle458-20080302-02.html
 

THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 458, March 2, 2008
"I've about had enough of this fascist crap"

  
The Last Test of Democracy: Part Three
They Hang War Criminals, Don't They?
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

Want to change the world?

I can tell you how in just two words — well, a word and a number: NUREMBERG II.

I don't mean to be enigmatic, here, and I will explain exactly what I mean, I promise. You see, I used to wonder what was wrong with America's Founding Fathers, that they neglected to include a rigorous penalty clause as a part of the first ten amendments to the brand new Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights. It seems to me that when you make a law — in this case, the highest law of the land — you need to spell out what it's going to cost the guy who breaks it.

As Thomas Hobbes put it, "The Covenant without the Sword is a Crock of — " Well, you get the general drift. Hobbes was such a fun guy.

Time passed, I learned a great deal about the principle advocate of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, and I wondered less. Hamilton was hell-bent on creating a "strong central government" for a gaggle of states considerably less united than they are — or were ever meant to be — in our time. Just to give you an idea of what the man had in mind, he wanted people to address President George Washington as "Your Majesty".

And what did little Alex want for himself? He wanted to be the Premier, the Prime Minister, the Grand Wazir, the Power behind the Throne. Hamilton saw the new government differently than most revolutionaries, as a source of boundless wealth for himself and his buddies.

So did his principal disciple, Henry Clay, who invented a little something he called "the American System", which would effectively reverse the Revolution by taxing international trade far worse than the British Navigation Acts ever did, enriching a handful of mostly northeastern business interests at the involuntary expense of many others, generating vast socialist make-work programs — "internal improvements" — roads and canals which ought to have remained the exclusive purvue of the free market, bribing taxpayers with their own money.

Of course none of this would be possible if the states retained their sovereignty, but Hamilton's and Clay's biggest fan, Abraham Lincoln, took care of that, and all it cost was the lives of 620,000 people.

But I digress.

I still wonder about James Madison, who actually wrote the Bill of Rights. His idea, I think, was to satisfy Thomas Jefferson, the leader of opposition to the Constitution, along with others like Patrick Henry (the "rat" he "smelt" was Alexander Hamilton), that individual rights and "states' rights" would be considered sacrosanct under the new charter. My impression is that Madison was sincere, but I could be wrong.

However it happened, here we are today, with no teeth in almost certainly the most important law written in human history — which tells how we got into this mess, but not how we're going to get out of it.

We should have had public trials, long ago that would indicted, tried, and, upon conviction, disposed, under due process, of thousands of federal goons and their political pimps who have come to believe — mistakenly — that they are above the highest law of the land. Abraham Lincoln should have faced just such a tribunal, and the fact that he didn't is one of history's greatest tragedies, and probably the primary reason we're stuck with would-be dictator George Bush, now.

And will be with would-be dictator Mad John McCain, would-be dictator Hitlery Clinton, or would-be dictator Barack "Kablamma" Obama.

What we need instead is going to look a lot like the war crimes trials held in Nuremburg, Germany, immediately after the Second World War. Hell, there's even a tiny little town in Pennsylvania called Nuremberg, just waiting ...

The trouble is, what laws apply to these cases?

Happily, there are a couple of bright spots to be seen in this otherwise gloomy cavern America seems to have stumbled into. Maybe more than a couple. I'm not a lawyer — nor do I play one on TV — but I believe there is enough law out there to cobble together credible charges against miscreants who have ignored or violated the Bill of Rights.

To begin with, take a long, hard look at Title 18 of the federal code, Sections 241 and 242, which makes it a crime to deprive people of their rights "under color of law". That's pretty much all that the government does these days, and I can see hundreds of thousands of convictions in the future far rosier than we have anticipated until now.

There's also a Fourteenth Amendment ban on acting in rebelling against the Constitution — a politician or bureaucrat guilty of that can be removed from his position and forbidden ever to hold office again.

For those who don't like the Fourteenth Amendment (and they are many in the general freedom movement), Article VI, Section II, in the main body of the Constitution makes "the judges of each state" responsible for upholding federal law in their jurisdictions. With any luck at all, the phrase "hanging judge" could acquire a whole new meaning.

And then there are the post-World War II Nuremberg precedents themselves, which created the concept of "crimes against humanity" and stretched the necks of various Nazis and Japanese officials who had committed them. It's fair to say that this was controversial at the time, and it still is in some circles. But it was government that made this bed, and it is government which should now be forced to lie in it.

Although I greatly prefer the charges to read "crimes against the Constitution".

I can hear you saying, "What good is this idea? It's a pipe-dream! It'll never happen!" And that, of course, is the best way to guarantee that it never will. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu pointed out a long time ago that if you can make your enemy believe that he's already beaten — before the battle begins — then he will, in effect, defeat himself.

I imagine the expression, "You can't fight City Hall" is pretty popular.

Down at City Hall.

On the other hand, like a lot of the ideas I've offered to the general freedom movement (and why do I have the feeling that I've never communicated this adequately? Oh, yeah — because we're still not free!) it doesn't have to happen in every detail, from beginning to end, in order to make badly needed changes happen. All it has to be is shared aspiration — Americans used to have those, although most of my readers are probably too young to remember it — and a credible threat.

Some people call that a "meme". The idea "NUREMBERG II" has to show up as a sticker on the bumper of enough cars [or mentioned in enough articles...Dennis] so that people will scratch their heads and ask themselves, "What's this Nuremberg II stuff all about? It has to be grafittoed in enough places (taggers can be bribed you know) — like Kilroy or Simon Jester — that those who see it believe it's a swelling, unstoppable grassroots movement. It needs to be on letterheads, in billboard advertisements, in the .sigs of millions of e-mail messages so that it becomes a movement in and of itself.

And it has to become widespread and popular enough to withstand the inevitable attempts of its enemies to flush it down the memory hole.

When a traffic cop pulls you over, he won't know what NUREMBERG II means, at first. Then it'll make him mad (this is the hard part we must resolve to survive). Then it'll make him hesitate before he comes on too strong. And finally, he'll put a bumper sticker just like it on his own car — and maybe the car the police department issues him, as well.

So how do we make it happen? To start, with a website — and lots mirror sites across the world so the effort can't be broken by enemy action — that will explain the concept and suggest measures to be taken. We'll need more articles, some of them exploring other existing laws that could be used against those who erroneously believe they own us.

And even more articles, appealing to every American subculture, explaining just what living in a Bill of Rights culture could mean to them.

And someplace for people to get bumper stickers, t-shirts, and so forth.

When do we start?

We have already, the minute you started reading this.

What do we do next?

Stay tuned for the next and final article of this series.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo" May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was published by BigHead Press www.bigheadpress.com has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at www.Amazon.com, or at BillOfRightsPress.com .
 

[DennisLeeWilson]

From: DennisLeeWilson-Ariz-Wyo Sent: 3/10/2008 5:28 PM
 
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle459-20080309-02.html
 

THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 459, March 9, 2008
"There is no more useful death than
in the act of killing tyrants."

The Last Test of Democracy: Part Four
The Great Moratorium
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

In 1972, when I was 26 years old and had been a libertarian for a full decade already, I attended a week-long seminar in Wichita, Kansas hosted by the local 7-Up bottlers and the Love Box Company. It was conducted by perhaps the freedom movement's greatest educator, Robert LeFevre.

He wanted everyone to call him "Bob".

Bob said a great many things during those almost magical 40 hours, and I remember a surprising amount of what he said verbatim, even today, 36 years later. (At my age, I've discovered, time flies whether you're having fun or not.) One of the things he said is that there were "on the books" at that point in time, an estimated 15,000,000 federal laws.

I have had a number of individuals argue with me about that figure since then, but none of them has ever offered me a credible counter- estimate, and I have seen the endless rows of lawbooks myself, in libraries and lawyers' offices. If the true number were only a third, or even a tenth of that estimate, clearly we'd still have far too many laws. And, as Bob reminded all of us, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse".

Some of those millions of laws represent legislation properly introduced, shuffled through committees, and voted for on the floor of the House of Representatives or the Senate. But a great many more of them — possibly as many as 99 percent — consist of various rules and regulations voted on by nobody, but simply promulgated and shoved down our throats by various agencies full of appointees and bureaucrats, often in direct contradiction to what the legislators originally intended.

And of course, a number of those laws consist of nothing more than judicial reinterpretations that many complain actually constitute the passage of new legislation by judges. Even worse, as America continues to slide down the slimy slope into fascist dictatorship, there is an increasing tendency of "law enforcement" agents to make up the law as they go along, out in the field. With so much legislation already on the books, and its precise meaning perfectly unclear even to those who wrote it, the law becomes whatever minions of the police state say it is.

The vast majority of the existing body of law, and of new law passed every year is, of course, thoroughly unconstitutional. Article 1, Section 8 lists those functions of government that are legally permissible. Anything the government does that is not on that list (probably 95 percent of its current activities) is a clear violation of the law, and the individuals who perform those functions for the government — politicians, bureaucrats, cops of various kinds — are criminals.

When I was a kid, I often heard newspaper and radio editorialists whimpering about the "do-nothing congress" that was failing to crank out enough new legislation to satisfy whatever statist crackpots — they were usually left-wing socialists in those days — were doing the editorializing.

These were the Eisenhower years, I confess, and even as a fairly naive youngster, it occurred to me that, after almost two centuries, the powers that be ought to have passed more than enough laws by now. At that point, I'd spent my entire life — exactly like any kid — being told what not to do. It seemed to me that there was enough of that crap already going around to last us for at least a hundred years.

The more I've thought about that idea over the years, the clearer it has become to me that the indispensable first step toward restoring our freedom in this country, and, at the same time, the ultimate goal of any organization advocating freedom, should be a constitutional amendment forbidding any new legislation for at least that hundred years.

Let's call it "The Great Moratorium".

(For some time, now, I've intended to write a series of stories about the period in history following ratification of this amendment. The first of them, TimePeeper is currently being serialized at www.BigHeadPress.com.)

At minimum, such an amendment would provide that, from the date of its passage forward, for a full century, no new legislation may be passed at any level of government — be it federal, state, county, municipal, or any other level — especially including rulings by the court system that, in effect, constitute new law, and treaties of any kind.

Nor may any new regulations be promulgated by any agency of the government.

The only exceptions would be bills of repeal, initiated referenda getting rid of old laws, rulings that declare existing legislation to be null and void, and the official disbandment, dissolution, or abolition of various arms, wings, legs, or other appendages of the government.

Perhaps I should have said, "amputation".

And because nothing political occurs in a vacuum and the opponents of this concept would be inclined to see the handwriting on the wall and attempt to make the most of whatever time they believed they had left, the amendment would automatically repeal any and all legislation rammed through in the final year (or two, or five, or ten) before its ratification.

Naturally, there would be draconian penalties for any violation of this new "highest law of the land". For a long while now, I've been interested in seeing the ancient federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay fully rejuvenated and dedicated exclusively to the incarceration of government lawbreakers. I'm more than confident that tourists on excursion cruises (especially those individuals who had never "benefitted" from indoctrination by the public school system) would pay a reasonable amount for small packages of meat with which to keep the bay's famous sharks interested in hanging around the prison island.

In the meantime, having nothing better to do with themselves (that would show above their newsdesks, anyway), the broadcast media might begin to measure the accomplishments of the nation's legislatures, not by the number of laws they pass, but by the number of laws that they repeal.

The Great Moratorium. And when the century is over, we'll make it permanent. Perhaps ultimately there may only be one law, the Zero Aggression Principle, forbidding the initiation of physical force by anyone — especially government — against anyone else, for any reason whatever.

We might then begin to count ourselves as civilized again.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo" May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was published by BigHead Press www.bigheadpress.com has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at www.Amazon.com, or at BillOfRightsPress.com .
 

[DennisLeeWilson]

From: DennisLeeWilson-Ariz-Wyo Sent: 3/23/2008 7:33 PM

About half way down (I changed the text to red) and thru to the end, he makes some crucial points about constitutional governments.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/shaffer5.html

Law as 'Reason' or as 'Violence'?
by Butler Shaffer

The other day, I received an alumni fund-raising letter from my old law school. It opened with a post-September 11th quote from a present faculty member who praised our current civilization, declaring that one of its most impressive accomplishments has been the development of a "legal order committed to resolving disputes between humans by reason and not by violence."

There is nothing particularly remarkable in this man’s observations: one would find virtually unanimous agreement with such sentiments at any gathering of lawyers, judges, politicians, or other professional groups. What is noteworthy in his words is how far removed they are from the reality they purport to describe. Like so many of the litanies and bromides by which most people sustain their faith in systems such as the state, these words have a reassuring quality to them, at least as long as one does not examine them closely.

My experience in analyzing institutional behavior for many years has convinced me that, when those in power speak incessantly of one thing, they invariably mean its opposite. Ronald Reagan’s insistence on "getting government off people’s backs" was a cover for his administration expanding federal power. So, too, the current President Bush is in the process of putting together a Draconian police-state, the elements of which comprise his "Operation Enduring Freedom." Apparently what Mr. Bush has in mind is that the United States government has been "enduring freedom" long enough, and intends to bring it to an end!

The idea that modern "law" substitutes reason for violence as a means of resolving disputes is but another of these propositions that camouflages its own contradictions. That such ideas can be mouthed by their defenders with the utmost sincerity illustrates the effectiveness of the illusion.

There have been times in which "law" was, indeed, a means for peacefully resolving disputes. The ancient system known as the "law merchant," for example, developed among men of commerce as a way of settling quarrels in the marketplace. Judges were men well-experienced in the customs and usages that prevailed in various trades. When a dispute arose – such as when a buyer thought he had been dealt with dishonestly by a seller – it would be brought before one of these merchant judges who (a) heard the facts, and (b) rendered a decision based upon his knowledge of business custom.

What was most interesting in this tradition was that the merchant judges had no formal means of enforcing their decisions. The judges were more like arbitrators, whose decisions the losing parties were free to ignore without repercussions from the state. And yet, these judges’ decisions were almost universally upheld. The pressures of the marketplace – such as the ostracism of those merchants who would not abide by a judge’s decision – provided the most effective means of enforcement.

The attitudes of the merchant judges were remarkably different from modern-day judges: the former would often be heard to state that their function was to "find" the law (i.e., by discovering the customs and habits that prevailed among men of commerce), while the latter tend more to the view that their role is to "formulate" the law (i.e., to construct rules out of their own preferences instead of out of the common expectations of people in the community).

Over time, the political system took over the roles of these merchant judges, and "law" became more completely politicized. Because the state enjoys a monopoly on the use of force within a given area, its strong arm is now available to enforce decisions formulated by the legal system. Should anyone doubt that our formal system of law is grounded in violence, they need only consider the punitive prospects of refusing to abide by the decision of a court. Further evidence of the coercive nature of modern law can be found in a reading of federal or state statutes, which bear the ultimate sanction of "fine and/or imprisonment" for the violation of legislative mandates.

There is an illusion, shared by many intellectuals, that there are processes of "reasoning" which, if properly engaged in, will lead to conclusions that are free of the preferences and prejudices of the one engaging in such pursuits. What such people fail to understand is that to "reason" is to do nothing more than develop "reasons" to justify one’s desired conclusions. The word "rationalize" (i.e., to attribute one’s behavior to plausible motives while ignoring their true purposes) is particularly revealing. Does anyone doubt that Osama bin Laden and George Bush have articulated "reasons" for the violence each seeks to impose upon the world? The violence of the Holy Crusades, the Inquisitions, the Nazi holocaust, the Soviet and Maoist butcheries, and the nuclear slaughters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were all conducted by those who had clearly expressed "reasons" for their actions.

Perhaps the most significant example of the effort to produce a legal system grounded in "reason" instead of "violence" can be found in the creation of constitutional governments. The basic premise of constitutional systems is found in the fiction of a "social contract," whereby millions of free individuals would create a government which would, by virtue of specifically enumerated powers within the constitution, be limited in the scope of its authority. That such systems have never been created by unanimous agreement, but have always been imposed by a minority upon the rest of the population, should have been a tipoff as to the fallacies upon which they have been grounded.

But if the coercive origins of constitutional governments are not enough to convince one that violence cannot be restrained by such devices, perhaps the history of the 20th century will provide insight. Suspicions might first be aroused by the awareness that the Soviet Union operated on the basis of a "constitution" – modeled upon the American system, complete with a "bill of rights." But further evidence can be found within the history of the United States Constitution itself.

If one reads a history of the cases decided by the United States Supreme Court, one finds the following fairly consistent patterns: (1) powers granted to the federal government have been given expansive definitions – as witness the court’s "reasoning" that the "commerce clause" powers are not "limited to" economic transactions that cross state lines, but may be used to force social change, control undesirable personal conduct, and virtually any other end Congress might have in mind. Likewise, the "necessary and proper" clause has not been confined to such measures as are absolutely essential to some stated end, but has been expanded to embrace any means that are convenient to such purposes.

(2) At the same time, personal liberties that were supposed to have been protected by the "Bill of Rights" have been given a very restricted definition. Case after case reverberates with such phrases as "freedom of religion does not include," or "free speech does not mean," or the 13th Amendment prohibition against "involuntary servitude" "does not prohibit military conscription or jury duty." Perhaps the best evidence for the incessant restriction of liberties under the Constitution is to be found in the 9th Amendment, a supposed "catch-all" for all other liberties not enumerated within the Bill of Rights. Only a small handful of cases have ever found such additional "rights" that were subject to 9th Amendment protections.

For those who still cling to the sentiment that formal, politically-backed systems of "law" can divorce themselves from the underlying violence that defines such systems, I draw your attention to the events of the past two months. An imperial president declares "war" upon an ill-defined "enemy," without feeling any need to have an obsequious but thoroughly marginalized Congress exercise its constitutional authority to make such a declaration. There followed a mixture of legislated enactments – usually by 100-0 Senate votes – executive orders, and proposals for practices that would allow government agencies to wiretap our telephones and Internet communications and enter our homes without our knowledge or consent; allow for the indefinite incarceration, torture, or even assassination of "suspected terrorists," as well as secret military trials for such suspects; increased inspections of our persons; as well as proposals for national identity cards, mandatory smallpox vaccinations (based upon purely hypothetical threats), and the employment of the U.S. military to police the American people. Various rationales have been offered by the defenders of such practices.

Contrary to the sentiments expressed by the aforementioned law school professor, those who have recommended "reason" in place of the "violence" now being practiced by massive government bombing abroad, and police-state mechanisms at home, find themselves accused of cowardice or appeasement. Some jingoistic militarists have gone so far as to suggest prosecuting, on charges of treason, anyone who opposes this now-described "permanent" state of war! To those who have watched the untold number of "Nazi holocaust" films and wondered: "how could the German people have gone along with such tyrannical measures?," they can now find the answer in the ease and quickness with which so many Americans have, with barely a whimper of doubt, rationalized the creation of tyranny in their own land.

For those who are willing to move beyond their high-school civics class conditioning, and examine what is implicit in all political behavior, it should be evident that the experiment with "constitutionalism," though offered with the best of intentions by our ancestors who believed that power could be limited by reason, has proven an illusory dream. The bloody, tyrannical history of the 20th century gives us a perspective that requires us to abandon such naïve hopes. In the words of Anthony de Jasay, in his book Against Politics: "collective choice is never independent of what significant numbers of individuals wish it to be." There are no principles, no matter how carefully articulated, by which the forces of state power can be restrained when they have their "reasons" for resorting to "violence!"



November 17, 2001

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail: bshaffer@swlaw.edu ] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law.

Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com
 

[DennisLeeWilson]

From: DennisLeeWilson-Ariz-Wyo Sent: 4/19/2008 10:36 AM
 
[The article is quite good. I have added some comments and/or emphasis in red and within square brackets--dlw]
 
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff202.html

Why Limited Representative Government Fails
by Michael S. Rozeff

Government failure

This article presents a theory of why limited representative government fails. I cannot launch into that theory without first asking the reader either to agree with me that it does fail or to accept that premise provisionally inasmuch as I intend to explain why that failure has happened.

When I say that government has failed, I mean, for one thing, that it has failed the American people at large, or that it has failed to enhance the general welfare as it makes the claim to. [Forget "general welfare". It has failed to protect life, liberty and property and instead is the greatest violator of each! dlw] Government has succeeded in enriching and empowering certain specific persons and groups, but that success, from the viewpoint of the population at large, is simply evidence of failure in my terms. I also mean that limited representative government has failed on its own terms by not remaining limited.

In my estimation, the American version of limited representative government has certainly failed; and I do not think it would be difficult to reach the same conclusion for many other similarly structured governments around the world. This is not the place to argue that case. I merely point to a few facts to ease acceptance of this statement. The most obvious fact is that America no longer has limited government. Governments at all levels absorb approximately one-half of all the income produced by the American people. Next, we can recount a long list of failed government endeavors. They include, in my view, everything that government does, from a to z. But if that opinion is too extreme for many readers, then merely think about the following failures. The War on Poverty has failed. The War on Drugs has failed. The War on Terror is a consequence of failed government policies aiming at national security. Furthermore, its execution has failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense has failed; the U.S. has had a series of serious and unnecessary wars and crises from its inception. The regulation of money by a government agency has failed to produce stable money and instead has produced economic instability, including the Great Depression. Urban development engineered by government has failed. The education system run by governments is well-known to have failed our children. The Medicare system has failed. It has succeeded only in driving up costs and reducing the quality of medical care; it will soon require massive infusions of funds. The Social Security program has failed. Not only does it have numerous negative effects, but even as an investment it is producing negative returns for those who are now paying the taxes. The attempts by the government to control energy production and use have failed. The attempts to control agricultural production have failed. The space programs have failed to pay for themselves. The infrastructure of the country is deteriorating and evidences government failure. Air travel is worse than years ago and betrays failure. Household incomes have stagnated for years as a consequence of failed government economic policies. The government has failed to control immigration and the borders. [I view that last item as meddling where it has no Constitutional authority. See my published articles especially "Immigration control is UN-Constitutional!"  dlw]

Although I believe that this government has very seriously failed at everything it has touched, I do not think it’s necessary for me to argue that limited representative government is a complete or utter failure. I accept the proposition that our constitutionally limited government has been better for us than would have been a totalitarian government or a government that imposed a command economy. This isn’t saying much. (However, I accept the likelihood proposed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe that we would have been better off under a monarchy.) So when I say that our limited representative government has failed, I mean that, while better than some other even worse or dreadful alternatives, it still has not lived up either to its own charter as a limited government or to its own goal of enhancing the general welfare. On its own terms, the American form of government has failed. That is, in part, what I mean by failure. But I also think of it as a failure in absolute terms because of the dire effects that its specific failings have had on the American people. And, lastly, I think of it as a failure in terms of better forms of government that may lie ahead of us that will surpass the existing form.

As we search for a better form or forms of government, it will help us to understand why this form has failed. That is the purpose of theorizing about the failure of limited representative government.

I select two key features of our government, that, at its inception and in theory, I take to be its signal qualities. These are that its powers and scope are limited by the Constitution and that those people qualified to be voters elect representatives to make laws and govern them. The American system is much more than this. The country has been built on ideals of freedom, private property, and rule of law. Government is more complex than the two aspects of limitations and representation. Our government incorporates ideas of divided government, checks and balances, and so on. But many of those institutions were designed to fulfill a more basic theme. As I see it, the whole idea of American government was that it was to be a restrained government with limited powers and a government responsive to the people forming it. It was meant to be government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Executing that vision seemed, at the time, to require that such a government be representative or at least that was the result of the Revolution. The people would not directly govern themselves. They would choose others as their agents to do the governing, and they would exercise control over these agents by periodic elections. (I am, by the way, in this article ignoring other basic criticisms of the Constitution such as that its aim was not to produce limited government in the first place and that its validity is questionable.)

The premise of government

I come to my theory. It has four elements that together explain why limited representative government fails us. The first and most basic reason has to do with the representative part of the arrangement. The premise of our representative government is that other people than ourselves can govern us. I call this premise into question. It will appear from my list of government failures that when several thousand people elect Rep. Goodman to represent them and she collaborates with other representatives elected by other thousands of people, the resulting deliberations of the representatives do not produce government on behalf of the general welfare of all. More importantly, I say that it cannot produce such an outcome while simultaneously enhancing the general welfare and maintaining individual freedom. I say that the process of representation necessarily sacrifices both welfare and freedom. The basic reason for this is that I am the only person who has the capacity to govern myself, and the same goes for you and every other responsible adult. The other side of this coin is that a representative’s use of power to direct behavior necessarily sacrifices the interests of those who lost out in the legislative voting process.

Each of us is the only person who knows specifically what enhances our specific welfare. And each of us is the only person who freely can control our specific behavior so as to improve our welfare. We are unable (incapable) of delegating this information to others in real time as we face the changing circumstances of life. The costs of discovering and communicating this information are simply too high.

No biennial or even continual electronic polling can even come close to accomplishing such a feat. And if we transmit what information we can to others so that they may govern our behavior, we are not only giving up our freedom but also ensuring that they will fail to do what is in our interests. Even if representatives received such polling data, they would have no way of aggregating them so as to govern our behavior without harming some persons while helping others. Representatives are unable to determine individual welfare, and they cannot possibly deliver the general welfare, to the extent they can determine it, without doing violence to the individual welfare of many constituents.

I do not, as I might, need to argue that there is no such thing as the general welfare. I am not saying that each of us should go his own way and do whatever he likes in an atomistic and Hobbesian society. No, not at all. Human life is shot through and through with the need for and adoption of cooperation and coordination with others. Hobbes failed to see this. He writes: "Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man." But the facts of life are different. The occasions for managing our behavior in conjunction with others far outweigh those in which we act in entirely solitary fashion. There can be and are joint choices that bring about the general welfare of all of those choosing. And I am saying, in opposition to Hobbes, that those cooperative interactions can only be achieved and can only be successfully achieved by our direct and hands-on actions, not by the indirect method of political representation. Representatives and representative government do not achieve cooperation. They cannot do so. They achieve a semblance of cooperation, in that government will create some mutual action; but since the government will, when all is said and done, impose a solution and individuals will have to accept that decision, the result cannot even be called cooperation much less successful cooperation. Government is the opposite of cooperation. It is not mutual effort achieved harmoniously by give-and-take or teamwork or confederacy or coalition or partnership. Government simulates these things. Government imitates cooperation, but government is actually power and the use of power.

Hobbes conceived that we could not achieve cooperation without a State to keep us all in awe. He was incorrect (self-contradictory) even on his own terms because the State itself is an aggregation of men in an organization, and he assumed that it would somehow maintain itself by some cooperative means or other. He did not propose another State to control the behavior of those men in the first State. If men can cooperate within a State without being controlled, then they can cooperate without a State and don’t necessarily need it to keep them in awe.

Besides, there are strong incentives for cooperation, especially when people transact repeatedly. Cooperation in repeated games is now a well-established research finding. See here. As the author tells us, "Repeated-game theory offers a beautifully simple answer to the question of why selfish agents should cooperate: namely, they should do so to ensure continued cooperation in the future."

The alternative to representative government is self-government. The cooperation and coordination that we seek has to be sought and delivered by us as individuals, not by representatives, in order not to give up both freedom and welfare. In order to do that efficiently and effectively, I suggest that self-interested behavior such as is studied in game theory is not enough. We must develop norms of integrity and trust. We must share an appropriate ethic and/or law. There must be some source of authority in a community and it will have to manifest itself in a shared ethic, but that authority and ethic, which will be essential for self-governance to succeed and work, cannot be found, identified, devised, or implemented in a representative government. It has to lie well beyond the reach, tamperings, whims, and manipulations of representatives. It has to be stable, true, and just; and it has to lie within each person’s ken. [I recommend the Covenant of Unanimous Consent which is based on the moral code in Galt's Oath and the Non Aggression Principle. See my articles on the Covenant -dlw]

I am, of course, only briefly outlining what I believe is a better means of achieving the general welfare. I regard government (including limited representative government) as an ersatz self-government. It is a substitute and a makeshift, a counterfeit like its fiat money. It is a passing phase in human history. The success of the State owes to many factors, one of which is the State’s ability to imitate self-government. Even to distinguish government from self-government and present them as opposites in their essentials is made difficult because of the trappings of self-government that the State employs.

The conflict between limited and government

The second element of my theory helps explain why our limited government has failed to stay limited government. The limit in limited government is, practically speaking, almost unlimited. Why is this?

My argument assumes that human nature or the human brain operates in an intensely logical fashion. We adopt premises and then follow out their implications.

I believe that the way that we operate is basically syllogistically. Our behavior is virtually always logical and that logic can be understood in the following stylized way. It as if we adopt premises or beliefs or propositions, and that is the critical step in our thinking and behavior. After that, it as if we logically draw inferences from those premises. Those inferences then guide our behavior.

I assume that people differ mainly in their premises, but in virtually all instances of normal functioning, they process these premises in a logical way. This holds true even for many people we may regard as mentally disturbed or people whom we call insane who we know are not. If a schizophrenic person hears a voice that says "You have no left arm," that person may accept that as a premise and begin behaving as if he had no left arm. We will think that the behavior is crazy, but the schizophrenic brain is acting logically. To understand a person is to understand the premises that person holds. Once those are grasped, the behavior of that person follows logically.

Now, there is in fact some limit to following out the implications of premises. We do look at results. If by following out some premise, we encounter difficulties or fail to achieve an improvement, we may well revise that premise or drop it. We may adopt a new premise. But my emphasis on logical behavior that follows from accepted premises says that there is quite a bit of stability to our basic premises. We do not alter them quickly or lightly. Survival and success depend on adjusting to changed circumstances, and human beings do adjust. But the speed of adjustment is an empirical variable. It should be fast when a process really changes, but it should be slow when a process really does not change. Faced with a noisy environment and difficulty in knowing what’s really what, we often tend to stick to our guns. We hold onto our premises until we are quite sure that we should change them. Generals are always fighting the last wars. Speculators are always looking at the behavior of past markets. Quick adaptation to surrounding change and events is not the most common behavior.

Applied to government, this theory says that we human beings who accept the premise of external government (which is not self-government) will follow out its implications. If we accept the Constitution, then we will follow out its implications. If it contains within it the seeds of unlimited government, then we will follow them out because we accept the basic premise of obeying the Constitution. There are limits, as I said, and the War for Southern Independence showed that such limits existed in the minds of many just as they do today. However, the end result in 1865 was a re-affirmation of the Constitution [as if brutal conquest by military force and 620,000+ dead Americans can be considered "re-affirmation" of anything - dlw]. Subsequently we have followed out its implications relentlessly, even if that required heavy doses of Supreme Court interpretations and the unopposed expansions of executive and legislative powers. The limits in government proved to be highly movable, elastic, and extendible.

If we accept the premise that other people than ourselves can govern us, which is indeed our most basic premise, then we will follow out the implications of that premise. What are they? This premise suggests that it is better and right for us to turn our own government over to other people. This is what having a "government" means. We shall therefore have no objection if that government governs, and if its scope over our lives increases, we will have a tendency to accept that as beneficial and proper. It is an implication of this premise that others are better equipped to govern us than ourselves. Our logical facility goes to work once we accept the premise of (external) government as opposed to self-government. We accept more and more government. We allow others more and more to rule us and order our behavior.

Once we accept the premise of government, even if it be limited government, we tend to follow out the implication of having others govern us, which is that more government is desirable. The two concepts, limited and government, logically conflict with one another. If we the people have in mind the limiting of government as a premise, that notion is closer to self-government. But if we choose to have government at all as a premise, it is not self-government. There is a definite conflict in premises here. The most likely result of this conflict is that one of the premises will tend to be submerged or forgotten or eliminated. We cannot behave in two conflicting ways at the same time. Another possibility is that our behavior will alternate, depending on which premise comes to the forefront.

This conflict between limited government and simply government has evidently been resolved in favor of dropping the limited part in favor of the government part. One reason for this is that those whom we elect have a bias toward using and expanding government, while we have a tendency to accept the government we grow up with (discussed below). They believe in government, which is why they are in it. They have a tendency to soft-pedal the limited aspect in favor of actions that expand the government. They have the power to expand that government, and they have innumerable devices and tools to accomplish that. Meanwhile, we who have deputed them to govern tend to accept the resulting government as a logical consequence of having a government in the first place.

Voting plays a part in this acceptance. By voting, we can maintain the fiction that we are in control over the government. We can imagine that government is limited. We can view the voting cum government as a species of self-government, rather than the imitation that it is.

A basic reason why we have big government is that we have accepted the premise of government.

Two psychological factors

The third and fourth reasons why limited representative government has failed have to do with human psychology. I focus on one psychological element in the governed and another one in the governors.

We who are governed have a tendency to accept the society around us. Whether this is inherent in human nature or taught or both, it is there. Whether it is a matter of rational economic calculation, it is there. Most of us do not make waves. We take society and government as given and we work within that context. We accept the status quo.

If we come into a society with small government most of us tend to accept it. If we come into a society with big government, most of us tend to accept that. If we come into a society that accepts government per se, then most of us will accept that. Furthermore, that tendency to accept will be reinforced by social norms and by various rationalizations. Hence, even though government is failing us, we tend to accept the premise of government by others of ourselves and we tend to follow out the implication of that premise, which is that more and more government is a good thing.

The fourth element I shall point to is the will to power that is present in human beings and particularly present in those who seek office. It is not even necessary for me to construe this will to power as a negative thing or as a will to dominate others in order to explain the impetus for limited government to fall by the wayside and for the representatives to gain more and more power. The offices-seekers can all be altruists or do-gooders. They can all believe that they are acting in the best interests of the American people or mankind as a whole. What is required in their psychology is simply that they believe in government. They believe in the use of power. And they seek office because they have a greater measure of the will to exercise that power. Once in office, they exercise that power and, because they regard it as a good thing, seek to expand that power. The result of the presence of government combined with the human will to power is that government expands its scope.

Summary and conclusion

Government has failed us. Our limited representative government has failed us. Government fails.

Historically, we have assumed that government is a good idea. By government we have meant choosing other people to govern us and giving them the power to do so. We have thought that this is self-government, but it is not. It is the opposite of self-government.

Having adopted the premise of government, we have logically followed out the implication that government is a means to achieve such ends as the general welfare. The premise of government being good has been our religion and we have followed it religiously. We have retained and expanded government. This process of expansion was helped along by our tendency to accept the society and government around us and by the tendency of those in government to expand the powers that they seek to hold and exercise.

We thought that we could have limited government, but these two terms are in conflict. We resolved that conflict by dropping the limited concept and retaining the government concept.

When we the people accept the premise of representative government, we are making a fateful decision. We are accepting a method of pseudo-cooperation, pseudo-freedom, and pseudo-welfare improvement. Representative government does not deliver freedom, welfare improvement, or cooperation. To achieve these, we need a different premise. We need self-government.

  April 17, 2008

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail: msroz@buffalo.edu ] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York.

Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com

Michael S. Rozeff Archives

[DennisLeeWilson]

From: DennisLeeWilson-Ariz-Wyo Sent: 12/8/2008 12:42 PM

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle496-20081207-05.html

THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 496, December 7, 2008

Is America a Democracy?
by Russell D. Longcore
russlongcore -+at+- bellsouth.net

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

A nubile young woman entered a bar wearing very suggestive clothing, leaving little to the imagination. More than one young man offered her money for her services. She was quite offended and protested her virtue to the bartender. He explained to her that if she were wearing a policeman's uniform, it would be logical to assume that she was a cop, even though she was not. However, that night she was wearing the "uniform" of a hooker, and should not take offense when mistaken for one.

Benjamin Franklin said, "Actions speak louder than words, but not nearly as often." My own variation on that phrase is, "If you want to know what's important to people, don't listen to what they say, only watch what they do."

The united States of America was organized as a Constitutional Republic. But the American Federal Government is not now, and has not been for at least 150 years, a constitutional republic. And, contrary to what I hear most politicians, news reporters and school teachers say, it's not a true democracy, either. To know what political form the government of the early 21st century has taken, we must look at its "uniform"... what it's actually doing in real time.

And what of that American Constitution? I have long wondered how all three branches of the Federal Government continue to operate without consideration of the strictures of the Constitution. Then I read Lysander Spooner's booklet entitled No Treason, written in the late 1800s, making the irrefutable argument that the Constitution never had ANY power, and is neither law nor legal contract between any parties.

It all made sense. The elected class knew what I had only just discovered. They knew that the Constitution was a dead letter... a meaningless document with no legally binding power. It served, and still serves, as an icon, but an icon that has been swept clean of all original meaning.

So what is it?

It's not a Constitutional Republic. That form of government is based upon a separation of powers between the three branches of government, and was abandoned no later than 1865. In a republic, citizens elect representatives who receive delegated powers from those very citizens. Today's elected officeholder thinks himself a leader, not an employee, and ignores the citizens' wishes... until re-election.

The federal government is not a democracy, because it has not yet degenerated into mob rule.

It's not a true monarchy with only a King and no Parliament.

It's not a dictatorship, but it's close. Dictators can be elected into an office and then take over power from the rest of the government. Look at Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Is it Fascism? The American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as "a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism." I don't think that the American government has an overt policy of racism, but it certainly has all the other characteristics of fascism.

No, I think that the American government is a mixed breed of all of the above... a "mutt," if you will. I have recently begun calling he American form of government a "Parliamentary Pseudo-Monarchy," or PPM. Think about it.

The President of the USA is king, elected from the political class for a term of four years, eligible for only two continuous terms. He is elected, rather than being elevated from Prince to King from family ties or from conquest.

The President can do pretty much what he wants, with no balance of powers, true oversight or restrictions. Don't agree with that statement? Look at what Clinton and George Bush have done in their four terms. Most presidents since Lincoln have behaved in the same manner.

The Vice President is Prime Minister, also elected from among the political class. However, what used to be a mostly ceremonial position (breaking ties in the Senate and attending state funerals) now has vast power never before known.

The Congress is made up of two houses, the House of Commons (435 Representatives) and the House of Lords (100 Senators). These officeholders have all the trappings of the Peerage, but they can be elected to those positions, rather than being elevated by noble birth. They pass any laws they wish without any hint of restraint by such a thing as a Constitution or Magna Carta. Natural law is a joke to them. They have made themselves immune from most laws they pass that affect the rest of us commoners.

There are fifty Dukes, one for each state. You know them as Governors. They are also elected, with some Duchies (states) having term limits. Statistically, more Dukes have been elected King than any other government position. The commoners perceive Dukes as a mini-king, so election to King is just a managerial promotion.

The Justices of the Supreme Court are better known as the Court Jesters. The King does what he pleases. The Congress passes law as they please. Then, the Jesters put on their somber black robes (the powdered wigs would complete the Jesters' costumes, but never caught on here in the Colonies) and protect the functions of the Government who pays their salaries. They eat at the King's table, so why would you ever expect that they would take positions in opposition to the King and Parliament? To expect objectivity from the Jesters would be one of the greatest jokes of all.

The there's the subjects... the commoners. In a republic, the people hold the power and delegate a little of it to the government so they'll protect our natural rights. In the PPM we are the sheep to be shorn. We are the piggy bank to be raided. The King, Prime Minister, Lords and Dukes are our betters. They are the royalty, and they perceive themselves as more deserving, smarter, wealthier and more powerful than the citizenry.

And today, they're right. I'm not saying it should be that way... I'm saying that it is that way.

I hope you do not hold the illusion that America will ever retreat from the PPM form of government into the way our Founders meant. My opinion is that the American PPM will continue until it collapses of its own weight.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on September 18, 1787, Benjamin Franklin emerged from the meeting. A woman asked him, "Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"

"A republic, if you can keep it," replied Franklin.

We have not kept the Republic, to our shame.


Copyright © 2008, Russell D. Longcore.

Russell D. Longcore is one of those rare individuals who found the perfect career and loves every minute of his work. Russell has an insurance claims practice in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. In his career, he has handled claims as simple as a water leak in a home, and as complicated as multi-million dollar commercial property and liability losses. Russell has a breadth of knowledge and wisdom about insurance, money and life, and writes widely about those issues in books, publications, newspapers, magazines and blogs. He is married to "his redhead" Julie, and has three wonderful children, and three even more wonderful grandchildren.

Russell can be reached at:

Abigail Morgan Austin Publishing Company
1750 Powder Springs Road, Suite 190
Marietta, Georgia 30064
678-234-2923
Nationwide toll free voice and fax 877-688-5879
Email: russlongcore -+at+- gmail.com
Website: www.insurance-claim-secrets.com
 

[DennisLeeWilson]

http://mises.org/daily/4094

Arguments Against Anarchy

Mises Daily: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 by Jarret B. Wollstein

[This article is excerpted from Society Without Coercion.]



The belief that government is necessary to ensure social order is a pure superstition, based upon a psycho-epistemological process different in no important respect from the belief in goblins and witches....

At the outset, let it be made clear that government is nothing but men acting in concert. The morality and value of government, like any other association of men, will be no greater and no less than the morality and value of the men comprising it. Since government is nothing but men, its inherent authority to act is in no way greater or different than the authority to act of individuals in isolation.

If it is moral for government policemen to arrest suspect criminals, it is also moral for "private policemen" to do so. If it is moral for government to try and imprison men, then it is also moral for nongovernmental corporations to do so. Government has no magic powers or authority not possessed by private individuals. Let he who asserts that government may do that which the individual may not assume the onus of proof and demonstrate his contention.

The basic reason why a social order could, and would, arise in the absence of governments (as they are known today) is the fact that man has an objective need for social order and protection from initiatory force. This objective need would create human associations producing order in society. The morality and permanence of these associations will be determined by the morality and rationality of the men creating and working in them, as is the case for any social institution.

Perhaps the strongest attack on "anarchism" — certainly the most vitriolic — was made by Ayn Rand. In her article on "The Nature of Government," she states the following:

•     A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called "competing governments." Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists — who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business — the proponents of "competing governments" take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with every citizen free to "shop" and to patronize whatever government he chooses.
  
      Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.
  
      One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is obviously devoid of any understanding of the terms "competition" and "government." Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. One illustration will be sufficient: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones' house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith's complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.

Once one gets past Miss Rand's typically vitriolic rhetoric (which only indicates that Miss Rand is quite hostile to what she mislabels as "competing governments") one finds that she has essentially one argument. Miss Rand asserts that what is properly designated as "competing agencies of retaliatory force" or a free market of justice would not work, because the competing agencies would end up protecting criminals and shooting it out with each other. One can only term this a straw man argument.

The situation which Miss Rand "describes" is patently absurd. If competing agencies of retaliatory force protected criminals, they would not be competing agencies of retaliatory force at all. Rather, they would be criminal gangs, plain and simple.

Further, it would be sheer insanity for individuals "subscribing" to competing criminal gangs to live on the same "turf." In this respect, Miss Rand is correct. However, what I and every other advocate of a society without coercion are advocating are not "competing governments" (a misnomer) or "competing criminal gangs" (an ethical monstrosity), but "competing agencies of retaliatory force," which Miss Rand has in fact not dealt with at all.

In the situation described above, in which neighbors subscribed to competing police departments, what is certain (if they were in fact police departments operating on the basis of objective law, rather than criminal gangs operating on the basis of mob rule — which is what Miss Rand described) is that Police B would accept the validity of Police A, or in fact the validity of any reputable police department, and cooperate with them in the arrest of Mr. Jones. Police B certainly would not protect Mr. Jones from justice if there was objective evidence that Mr. Jones had committed a crime, nor would Police A proceed to attempt to arrest Mr. Jones unless there were such evidence. In this manner, objective law would eliminate coercive "shootouts."

Once competing police departments begin to function, standard operating procedures would be created to deal with such cases. At least two possible procedures come to mind: either by stipulation, the police department to which a man subscribed would be the only one which could incarcerate him; or, by stipulation, the police department where the complaint was filed would incarcerate him.

In the extreme, there would be little motivation for policemen to put their lives on the line for a suspected thief, and if competing police departments operated as Miss Rand falsely pictures, then they would quickly go out of business due to the attrition rate of policemen killed in the "line of duty."

This is only one of the flaws of Miss Rand's argument. Other problems include her failure to explain exactly how government can morally outlaw competing agencies of retaliatory force, or what it is that prevents the state police from shooting it out with the county police in similar situations. Clearly, both Miss Rand's premises and logic are in error in this case.

Jarret B. Wollstein works as an independent writer and direct-mail marketing specialist. He is a founder and director of the International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL), an international human-rights and free-market networking organization with members in over eighty countries. He is the author of hundreds of articles and four books, including Society Without Coercion (1969).Download PDF See Jarret B. Wollstein's article archives.

This article is excerpted from chapter 2 of Society Without Coercion: A New Concept of Social Organization (Society for Rational Individualism, 1969).Download PDF