For those that missed it, the Vancouver Canucks hockey team lost game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals and soon after much of downtown Vancouver was on fire – cars flipped, shops burned, fights and
more.

I was there, living downtown, for the last hockey riot, in 1994.  I remember well the smell of tear gas and watching the battle below from my apartment.

Anarchists

As I watched the Twitter feeds and the “Vancouver Riot Pics” Facebook page I was waiting for the inevitable.

“This is anarchy!” they shouted.  Vancouver’s police chief even blamed the entire riot on anarchists in a Vancouver Province article.

As with most things, people were immediately searching for someone to blame.

Those to blame were obvious:  Roberto Luongo and the Sedins!

Just kidding.  (But, really, Luongo was terrible – he was pulled countless times in the playoffs – and the Sedins were -11 and -9 for the playoffs (compared to Bruin’s players Bergeron (+15) and Marchand (+12)) – the real question was how did Vancouver even come so close to winning?)

However, as bad as the Canuck’s star players were they were not to blame for the riot.

And, even less to blame, are “anarchists”.

The word anarchist has been skewed over time – mostly by the government and the media – to try to make those who do not like governments out to be people who bomb places and light cars on
fire.

The word anarchy comes from the Greek, anarchos, meaning “having no ruler,” an-, not, and archos, ruler.  And, all anarchism is, is a form of political organization that does not put one ruler, or ruling body, over everyone in a society.

When you understand that, then calling the people rioting in Vancouver “anarchists” makes no sense.

In fact, the people rioting are products of the state and are the opposite of anarchists.

How The Government Caused the Riots

(Only 1 copy remaining!)

Almost every facet of what happened in Vancouver was caused by the government.

First, many of the rioters were young people – prisoners in the public education indoctrination camps for the first 18 years of their lives.  Is it any wonder that, after 18 years of not being allowed to do anything, that a few people might take advantage of a few moments where they overwhelm/overpower their oppressor’s force (the police) to kick over a garbage can or break a window?

Second, the Government has made almost all forms of intoxication illegal – EXCEPT one of the most dangerous ones: alcohol.

Is it not bizarre that your average older person is adamantly against marijuana legalization but does not want to ban alcohol after seeing 100,000 drunken individuals rampage through an entire city?  Imagine if those rioters were all “wild and crazy” because they were high on crack cocaine – the outcry against crack would be ear-splitting.

If people had free choice of substances there would, almost unquestionably, be much less alcohol use.  Marijuana would likely be used much more regularly – and there is one guarantee that can be made here: If that crowd of goons in Vancouver last night were all stoned on marijuana not one garbage bin would have been tipped over.  More likely is that a number of them would go to the park to hold hands and sing some hymns about love – and then eat some potato chips.

Third, Canada is a massive welfare state.  Vancouver, being one of the only livable cities in Canada (it rarely gets too cold or snows as opposed to most Canadian cities which regularly see -40C/F temperatures for six months of the year) attracts throngs of Canadian welfare recipients who find their monthly welfare checks can be enjoyed much more in the rain rather than in the freezing cold.

Because of this welfare state there are very large amounts of people in Vancouver who are basically homeless and live off the system.  In fact, of the thousands of cities I have visited in more than a hundred countries, I can’t remember any place as shady, squalid and dangerous as Vancouver’s “East Hasting” area – an area which is only a few blocks from the riots last night.  (The photo to the right is just an average day in that part of town – this is not a photo of the riots!)

Many Vancouverites stated that many of the people rioting looked like “poor people from places like East Hasting and Surrey”.  And, they are probably right.

But, the thing that they don’t understand is that the system which they support (socialism/welfare) has created all those people.

In most non-western countries there are no homeless people… for two main reasons.  1) Welfare creates poor people as people decide to forget or not learn any skills and live off the system and, 2) All of the rules, regulations and laws – such as building codes – and inflation have priced many people out of the market for a home.

Who Really Caused The Vancouver Riot?

So, it is clear who is to blame: the government and its policies.  Yet, the government police chief and the media which just parrots government propaganda blame the exact opposite… people who weren’t even there and who had nothing to do with the riots: Anarchists.

Yes, it must be the anarchists, bellow the people!  We wouldn’t ever want to actually look in the mirror and see the real cause is the government and its policies which the majority of people support.

And what will be the outcry?  You can already guess.  We need MORE government!  MORE police!

They never learn.

Regards,

Jeff Berwick
The Dollar Vigilante

There Were No Anarchists In The Vancouver Riots was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Nowhere was this sentiment better expressed during the past few weeks than in the flood-stricken state of Queensland, Australia (and, more lately, in the state of Victoria, to Queensland’s south).

The rains that inundated an area the size of France and Germany (combined!) across the Sunshine State wrought havoc and destruction upon its people. Lives were lost, property damaged and industry crippled.

When the worst of Mother Nature’s wrath had subsided, Queensland residents were left with a monumental clean up.

To their credit, these individuals, in the face of near-immeasurable disaster, performed admirably. They did what came naturally. Contrary to the patriotic rally cries of politicians, they didn’t do what Queenslanders do; they did what good people do. And it was beautiful.

The general feeling was perhaps best summed up by Wally “The King” Lewis, a retired national football hero, who spent the last week of his holidays helping his fellow Brisbane residents prepare sandbags and to bail rising flood waters out of their homes. (It is worth pointing out here that, for many Australians, there is no higher office to be attained in the land than that of venerated sporting legend.)

Speaking to National Nine News from the waterlogged front yard of a neighbor – whom he had never met – Wally said, “If someone’s doing it tough, I think it’s the right thing to do to put the hand up and ask them if they want any help.”

The interviewer then turned his microphone to another volunteer. “What was your reaction when Wally Lewis turned up?”

Typifying the laid back disposition of the crowd, the young man casually replied, “[Laughs] Yeah, I was a little surprised but…you know…people help out. It’s all good.”

The Australian people appeared to be perilously close to discovering something very important about themselves; something, perhaps, they’ve always known; an instinctual tendency toward human solidarity, the natural urge to help a neighbor in distress, to lend a hand; in short, to volunteer.

Alas, barely had the first piece of debris been cleared away when the media, as it typically does, lost sight of the bigger picture. Alongside inspirational stories of non-violent, voluntary cooperation, the local papers turned their attention to the state’s role in the cleanup. Should the state and federal governments remain focused on returning “their” budgets to surplus, or should they deploy funds to assist those in need of help? In other words, how “best” should the state spend its citizens’ money…as if the only just, honest option had not already expired on point of expropriation in the first place? [The answer, in other words, is not to steal it.]

While sifting through the news reports and reading comments about what the state “should” do, we wondered how people who are so ready to do what is natural, to cooperate freely with neighbors and “mates down the street,” could so miss the overarching lesson in all this tragedy. Why do hostages of the state turn to their captor when it comes to arbitrating issues of freedom, issues they are, individually and through voluntary cooperation, demonstrably capable of resolving for themselves?

Perhaps it has to do, at least in part, with the misrepresentation of the concept of anarchy itself; a misrepresentation that serves not the interests of individuals, but of the state itself. We are taught that “anarchy” means violence, looting and the aggressive form of chaos that all-too-often flourishes in the wake of natural disasters. We are told that this is what happens given the absence of state control. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state IS control. It is the very incarnation of force and violence from which it purports to protect us.

As Murray Rothbard, the man credited with having coined the term anarcho-capitalism, expressed in Society and the State:

“I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.”

We can expect nothing more from an agent of force than that which is its primary, defining characteristic; namely, more force. A mule is no more capable of giving birth to a unicorn than the state is capable of “granting” freedom.

Last night, with all this in mind, your editor telephoned his father. Dad lives about an hour south of Brisbane, where the post disaster clean up continues. In the aftermath of the flood, volunteer posts were set up around the city where groups of concerned individuals could assemble to donate their time and/or resources to help get the place back on its feet.

“Sixteen thousand people turned up to help on the first day,” Dad told us. “They came with their own equipment and made their own way there. In the end, they had to turn people away.

“I put my name down to lend a hand,” he continued, before adding, with sincere disappointment in his voice, “but I haven’t been called up yet.”

Then, as a man who has spent his life helping people, he added, enthusiastically, “but I’ve still got two more days of holiday left, Sunday and Monday. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to get up there and help out then.”

To those who would argue that coercion is necessary to foster freedom, that force is a prerequisite for peace and that the expropriation of individuals’ property on threat of violence is compulsory to fund an agency that, alone, is capable of guaranteeing safety and prosperity, we say: you don’t know the real meaning of anarchy, you don’t know what voluntarism is and, until you do, you will never know what it means to be truly free.

Thank you to all the people in Queensland – and around the world – who do understand these concepts and, through their fine example, prove statists everywhere and always wrong on a daily basis.

Regards,
Joel Bowman
Whiskey & Gunpowder

January 24, 2011

In Praise of Anarchy was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Doug: I find the concept of a necessary evil rather repugnant. It’s largely sophistry, usually trotted out to justify some type of criminality. Can anything that’s evil really be necessary? And can anything that’s necessary really be evil?

Entirely apart from that, people say the state is necessary because that’s all they’ve ever known. But it’s not, in fact, part of the cosmic firmament. There have been times and places in history when central authority was so distant, or negligent, that the people did function — and prosper — in what was essentially a functioning anarchy.

David Friedman draws attention to medieval Iceland as one example of this. I recommend his book The Machinery of Freedom for lots of great discussion on how society would work without the dead hand of the state suppressing it.

L: And the reality is that there are all sorts of private institutions that provide regulatory and governance systems, from private cities like Disneyworld, to Underwriter’s Laboratories that puts “UL” seals on electronics they deem safe, to churches, some of which govern their members’ most intimate life functions — all through voluntary subscription.

The Mormon Church, for example, exerts a very significant amount of regulation of the private behavior of its members. I’m not a Mormon, of course, but I’ve lived in predominantly Mormon communities, and I have to say they tended to be cleaner, nicer, safer, etc. I’d say the Mormon religion exerts more control over its adherents than any state’s laws have ever exerted over citizens — but those regulated like it. They believe they benefit from it, and most important of all, they are physically free to leave any time they want.

Not so for the state. This is why I’ve said in the past that the state is not a necessary evil but merely necessarily evil.

Doug: Good example. The Amish and Mennonites provide other examples, although religious communities are entirely too uptight to suit my taste. And UL is a good one too, because people worry that businesses would all turn rapacious if the state weren’t there to regulate them. But electronics producers are not required to get UL seals on their products. They go to the extra expense of meeting UL standards because they know they’ll make more money if their products have the UL seal of approval on them.

L: Best Western hotels are the same way. Best Western doesn’t own the hotels; it’s largely a private regulatory agency that inspects hotels and gives those that make the grade the right to put a Best Western sign out front, which is worth a lot to a small mom-and-pop joint.

Doug: There are lots of private regulatory services. Insurance companies also exert a lot of influence on the insured, who have to go by certain rules to stay insured. And, of course, there’s a huge private security industry used by those who want to protect their assets, rather than call 911 after they’ve been robbed, etc. All by subscription.

You don’t need government for anything; if something is needed and wanted, an entrepreneur will provide it for a profit. And do so far better and cheaper than anything a government could possibly hope to.

The economic arguments for a free-market anarchy are overwhelming. I’m of the opinion we’d already be living with the technology of Star Trek if it wasn’t for the state slowing things down. But that isn’t the reason I’m an anarchist. The real argument is moral and ethical.

L: You know, I keep sending “unsubscribe USA.gov” messages to Washington, but I never get a response.

Doug: Good luck. To them, you’re cattle. They care only so much as you and all the others don’t stampede. Other than that, you exist for their benefit and have as much say in the matter as a steer.

L: Maybe that’s true for most people, but I can still vote with my feet. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again. And so have you. Which is why I was looking at property in your neck of the woods in Argentina.

Doug: It makes a lot of sense to be in a place where they have to treat you as a guest, to be courted, rather than an asset to be exploited. Of course, all governments are dangerous, destructive, and annoying. But the ones that are incompetent and disrespected are easiest to deal with…

Anyway, love to have you as a neighbor.

This brings up another problem with the nation-state — it forces obligations upon you. I’m a big believer in being neighborly, but when the state tries to force you into a relationship with other people, it only breeds resentment. I like communities that are self-selecting, where you can assume neighbors share some basic premises about the way the world works.

L: I loved the Estancia. Those mountains would probably convince me if you and your friends didn’t. But anyway, there are a million directions we could take this conversation, a million objections I could raise for you to answer, but I’d like to move from theory to practice. Even to those who agree with you, at least in spirit, this all sounds very theoretical — of no practical consequence since the whole planet, as you’ve observed, is covered with nation-states.

I’ve been your friend for the better part of 20 years, and I’ve worked with you closely for most of the last six of those. I know this is not all theory for you. You live your philosophy. I’ve seen you get up in front of a large lecture hall with hundreds of people and tell them that the whole of the law should be: “Do what thou wilt — but be prepared to accept the consequences.” They laugh or roll their eyes, depending on their beliefs, but I doubt many realize that you are not only completely serious, but that that is exactly how you live your life.

You’re not shy, but you’re not a braggart either, so I’ll go ahead and say that I have watched you match deeds to words. You routinely go in “Out” doors, you light up under “No Smoking” signs, you walk through metal detectors with your belt on, you get back on polo ponies regardless of what your doctors tell you, you leave your electronics on when all the other sheep on the airplane turn theirs off… I could go on and on.

The beauty of it is that most of the time, nothing happens. You did exactly as you pleased, hurt no one, and enjoyed life on your own terms. On the occasions when some busybody does confront you, you usually respond calmly and say, “Oh. Well, what should we do about it?” The worst that happens when you are confronted is usually that you end up where all the submissive people put themselves to start with. Sometimes you even fight back. I’ve watched you make fools of airport security guards or take your business to another hotel.

The important thing is that you start out doing what you want, not what the busybodies want. You may end up penned in with the sheep sometimes, but not as often as most people would think. And you start out doing things your own way. I admire the heck out of that.

Doug: Well… You’re Don Lobo, a well-known anarchist in your own right — well known for not cooperating with the state. But, like you, I’m very easy going, and always try to observe others’ rights to the fullest.

While it’s true the most basic law is “Do as thou wilt — but be prepared to accept the consequences,” you can extrapolate that out, as a practical matter, to two others. One, do all you say you’re going to do. And two, don’t aggress against other people or their property. Everybody understands those laws, and you don’t need a corrupt, and corrupting, government to elaborate on them any further, as far as I’m concerned.

The people I like to hang out with, like you, observe those things. Besides that, I find you’re quite good at keeping your cool while questioning minions of the state… maybe you do it just to see if there’s actually a real human in that uniform they wear.

L: Okay, okay, but I don’t want to comment in print on all the things I’ve done. The point here is not to flatter you, or myself, but to point out to people that submission is a choice, not a foregone conclusion. Freedom is something you never get by waiting for permission but by exercising it as vigorously as your creativity and energy allow. By pushing back against the barriers — like when you told the Inn at Aspen where to shove the city’s “No smoking in the bar” rule, and that you’d accept the responsibility if the mayor walked in.

In the most general terms, I think it’s a mistake to think of freedom as a noun, rather than as a verb. And your actions show the world the consequences of doing freedom, rather than waiting to be given freedom.

Doug: Well, that’s true. And, not to pat myself on the back, it’s worth noting that there have been times when I’ve had my setbacks and even a substantial negative net worth — but it was my problem and nobody else’s. So not having any money is no excuse for not taking charge of your own life and living it the way you want to. I wasn’t given freedom by my parents or the government.

L: Hear, hear! So… Investment implications?

Doug: Attitude is everything, and that matters. If you let yourself be treated like cattle or herded like sheep, you won’t invest so as to maximize your freedom. There’s a lot we could say about this, but we’ve gone on long enough. The place to start is with diversifying your assets across political jurisdictions, making it harder for each would-be Big Brother to corral you. This is a rule almost everyone forgets — but it’s the most important single thing in today’s world.

I would like to recommend a book here. Along with Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness, I’d say it’s the most important I’ve ever read, and had the most practical effect on my thinking: The Market for Liberty by Tannehill. It describes, clearly and precisely, how a society without government would likely work. Best of all, it’s now a free download from the Mises Institute’s web site. If you understand the basics, you’ll feel much less obligated to support the destructive institution of government — because you’ll know it’s unnecessary.

L: As we covered in our conversations on currency controls and living abroad – and Argentina, of course. What else?

Doug: Don’t feel guilty about finding the lowest-tax jurisdictions for reporting your income, owning property, etc. Shopping with your feet is not only your human right, it’s a positive good for the whole world; the more everyone shops for the least onerous governments, the more governments will have to compete for being less onerous, and the better off we’ll all be.

L: And the easier it will be for people to exercise their freedom as you do. What about trends?

Doug: Just the ones we’ve already covered — but now the need to take action is getting more urgent. I see that the new employment bill Obama just signed has new currency controls buried in its guts. It doesn’t necessarily prohibit anything new. But it has new reporting requirements and penalties. It’s an overture to what’s coming. As Mencken said, nobody’s life or property is safe while Congress is in session.

L: I figured you were right about this being in the cards, but I have to admit it’s started sooner than I thought it would.

Doug: Sometimes I hate it when I’m right. And I still think things will get worse than even I think they will. Remember my mantra: Liquidate, Consolidate, Create, Speculate.

L: No specific investments?

Doug: Nothing looks particularly good to me right now, except gold. If you don’t have a serious position in gold, you should build one post-haste — with as much as possible outside of the U.S.

Regards,
Doug Casey and Louis James
Whiskey & Gunpowder

April 19, 2010

Anarchy Is the Solution to the Evil Idiocy of the State, Part II was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Doug: Sure. If people aren’t open-minded enough to even consider an alternative view, they’re their own worst problem, not my ideas. In point of fact, anarchism is the gentlest of all political systems. It contemplates no institutionalized coercion. It’s the watercourse way, where everything is allowed to rise or fall naturally to its own level. An anarchic system is necessarily one of free-market capitalism. Any services that are needed and wanted by people — like the police or the courts — would be provided by entrepreneurs, who’d do it for a profit.

Look, I’d be happy enough if the state — which is an instrument of pure coercion, even after you tart it up with the trappings of democracy, a constitution, and what-not — were limited to protecting you from coercion and absolutely nothing more. That would imply a police force to protect you from coercion within its bailiwick. A court system to allow you to adjudicate disputes without resorting to force. And some type of military to protect you from outside predators.

Unfortunately, the government today does everything but these functions — and when it does deign to protect, it does so very poorly. The police are increasingly ineffective at protecting you; they seem to specialize in enforcing arbitrary laws. The courts? They apply arbitrary laws, and you need to be wealthy to use them — although you’re likely to be impoverished by the time you get out of them. And the military hardly defends the country anymore — it’s all over the world creating enemies, generally, of the most backward foreigners.

In a free-market anarchy, the police would likely be subsidiaries of insurance companies, and courts would have to compete with each other based on the speed, fairness, and low cost of their decisions. The military presents a more complex problem, beyond our range here.

L: That’s a lot for most mainstream folks to swallow at once, Boss. On the other hand, the way I see it, it would be inconsistent with my libertarian principles to demand that anyone agree with me — but I don’t need to be helping those who would enslave me to make money anyway. That said, let’s try to ease into this…

Doug: So, let’s start with a definition. Many people think of anarchy as being chaos. They see riots and chaos on TV from some place in conflict and think, “What anarchy!”

L: That’s if the talking heads don’t tell them that what they are seeing is anarchy to begin with.

Doug: Right. But chaos and bomb throwing are not anarchy. Chaos is the actual opposite of anarchy. Anarchy is simply a form of political organization that does not put one ruler, or ruling body, over everyone in a society. Whether that’s actually possible is a separate matter. This is what it means. And I see it as an ideal to strive for.

L: I’m looking at Webster’s, and it says that anarchy is: A: Absence of government. B: A state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority. C: A utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government. People might say you’re focusing only on C.

Doug: Look at the etymology. It comes from the Greek anarchos, meaning “having no ruler,” an-, not, and archos, ruler. Definition B has come into popular use, but that doesn’t make it right.

“Anarchy” is a word that’s been stolen and corrupted by the collectivists — like “liberal,” It used to be that a liberal was someone who believed in both social and economic freedom. Now a liberal is no better than a muddle-headed thief — someone who’s liberal only with other people’s money.

I refuse to let the bad guys control the intellectual battlefield by expropriating and ruining good words.

In any event, there’s no conflict whatsoever between anarchy and the rule of law, since there are private forms of law and governance. That’s what Common Law is all about. So the correct definition is a combination of A and C.

But I never said a truly free, anarchic society would be a utopia; it would simply be a society that emphasizes personal responsibility and doesn’t have any organized institutions of coercion. Perfect harmony is not an option for imperfect human beings. Social order, however, is possible without the state. In fact, the state is so dangerous because it necessarily draws the sociopaths — who like coercion — to itself.

What holds society together is not a bunch of strict laws and a brutal police force — it’s basically peer pressure, moral suasion, and social opprobrium. Look at a restaurant. The bills get paid not because anybody is afraid of the police, but for the three reasons I just mentioned.

L: I saw some of this in Argentina over the last few days. Here we are at your Harvest Celebration. Two hundred people, most of whom have never met before, a hundred miles from nowhere — I don’t know if the nearby town of Cafayate even has a cop, but if it does, he’s well hidden. For all anyone can see, it’s us, the grape vines, and the mountains.

And yet, there was order. The Estancia is private property. Your people organized things, and the guests went along with it and had a great time. Why? I don’t think many of them calculated the odds of getting killed if they tried to use violence to get everything they wanted, though a rational person making such a calculation would decide it wasn’t worth it.

Most people are brought up to be decent, and the people you tend to attract have a certain moral fiber. In other words, the event was governed by a culture of voluntary and honorable cooperation.

Doug: Just so. It’s like when people form lines at movie theaters or ski lifts. There doesn’t have to be a cop with a gun there to make everyone take turns. Everyone knows that if they take turns, it all works out better for everyone — and they are brought up to act that way, so they usually don’t even have to make that calculation.

A more obviously government-like example is Disneyworld, which is nothing less than a private city, complete with numerous rules that would be called laws if it were run by politicians instead of a corporation.

Why would anyone go along with rules that aren’t laws? Because they want to go to Disneyworld. They agree, and for the most part, they go along, and if they cause too much trouble, Disney kicks ‘em out — which they have every right to do as owners of their private property.

As Pareto’s Law indicates, there’s inevitably a bad element in most places. 80% of folks are truly decent, and 20% are perhaps problematical. And 20% of that 20% are bad apples. You have to have a culture that keeps them hiding under rocks, rather than rising to the top — as they wind up doing quite often in government.

The reaction of a person to the idea of a truly free society is an excellent moral litmus test. The more negative the reaction, the more likely you’re dealing with a sociopath.

L: What would you say to people who point out that when the government collapsed in Somalia a few years ago, bloodshed ensued, or that when the government disappeared from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, ugly chaos did erupt?

Doug: It’s as you said: a cultural matter. If you have people who’ve been brought up to believe that the only limits on what you can or should do is the force exerted by the authorities, it’s no surprise that when the greater power disappears, they reach out to take whatever they want, by force.

That’s clearly the case in Somalia, but it’s also true of the people stranded in New Orleans, who were primarily those with no money to flee — in other words, the inhabitants of government housing projects. It’s not politically correct to point this out, but those people had, on average, a distinctly different culture from that of the average American.

Actually, ex-police states are the most dangerous places — like Russia in the early ‘90s, the Congo in the early ‘60s, or Haiti today, because they have a culture of repression that’s like a pressure cooker. When the lid comes off, it’s a mess.

L: I seem to recall a flood in West Virginia in recent years that wiped out half of a small town. Instead of raping and robbing each other, those not hurt helped the victims. They housed them, fed them, and even helped them build new houses. And no one made them do it. It wasn’t a case of better government — it was just their culture to do so.

Doug: And culture is a matter of education, which means that societies that function on voluntary cooperation, as in Cafayate, Disneyland, or the town you’re talking about in West Virginia, are possible.

There is nothing in human nature that makes it impossible to create a society of people who respect each other’s rights and follow accepted systems for working out differences, like getting in lines at movie theaters. There would still be criminals and sociopaths to deal with, as these occur in a standard distribution in every population — but the point is that the society doesn’t have to be built around an essentially criminal organization, the state.

L: And those sociopaths would be limited to whatever mischief they could wreak personally, instead of having access to the machinery of the state to multiply the harm they can do. But I think most people would balk at your characterization of the state as essentially criminal.

I know that’s a big topic people have written whole books about, but can you give us something brief to substantiate your view?

Doug: Well, it’s really not that complicated. We can probably agree that it’s wrong for me to point a gun at you and take all your money. Some people might feel sorry for me if I did that to buy medicine for my dying mother, but it’s still a crime, because it violates your human rights. And it’s still a crime if I ask someone else to do the same thing for me — and still a crime if a whole bunch of people vote to ask someone with a spiffy uniform and a badge to do the same thing.

It wouldn’t matter any more if a group of people calling themselves Congress went through some rituals that involved a leader putting some ink on some paper and said a violation of your rights was now “legal” than if a witch-doctor told a tribe’s warriors that it was okay to take slaves and sacrifice them to the gods. Laws are just a “civilized” man’s taboos.

L: Obamacare is a case of exactly this. Socialized medicine puts you and me in the position of the tribe’s sacrifice, because the mass of voters want free goodies at the expense of those who produce more than they do.

But to get back to the word “criminal” — you’re saying that the state is inherently criminal because it violates human rights. But does it have to be that way? Didn’t Ayn Rand have an idea for a kind of government that would not violate anyone’s rights?

Doug: I don’t think she ever came up with a detailed plan. I find it interesting that her “Galt’s Gulch” in Atlas Shrugged was clearly a private city. It was built on land owned by Midas Mulligan, and people who bought in agreed to his terms. There was no mention of police or elected officials. What Rand said was that a moral government could not violate anyone’s rights, and that meant raising revenues through user fees and other voluntary means — no taxes. That’s a great step in the right direction, but leaves a lot of unanswered questions as to how to do this.

Here’s the rub; imagine that the Quebecois decided unanimously that they really didn’t want to be part of Canada anymore but wanted to be an independent, French-speaking country. So they peacefully vote and take their marbles to play their own game. In doing so, they don’t violate anyone’s rights, so there is no moral way the government of Canada can stop them. They could use force, but that would violate the rights of the Quebecois, who would not be hurting anyone. And if the Quebecois could do this, so could Disneyworld, or your neighborhood — or you individually.

There’s no moral way to prevent peaceful secession — but if a state doesn’t prevent secession, it soon disintegrates. People always want to do things differently, and they would if the threat of force from the state didn’t stop them. Brute force — although gussied up with myth, propaganda, and red, white, and blue bunting — is what holds the state together. That force is ugly and corrupting.

No matter how benign a state might be, even one that found a way to fund all of its activities without resorting to force, it must still violate the fundamental human right of self-determination in order to preserve its own existence. That’s why the state is inherently a criminal organization — it must rely on force. Even the best of them are never based entirely on consent of the governed; there is coercion of the non-consenting minority. And there are always some who do not consent.

Democracy is no solution — it’s just 51% bossing the other 49% around. For God’s sake, Hitler was democratically elected. Democracy is just mob rule dressed up in a coat and tie.

You and I do not consent to Obamacare, but we’re forced to accept it. Of course socialized medicine is totally counterproductive, as we discussed in our conversation on health.

I suppose I can live with the idea of a state, as long as there were about seven billion of them in the world — and everybody had one. That would show that the whole idea of the state is just a scam, where everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. But the only people who really benefit are the guys on top.

Doug Casey and Louis James
Whiskey & Gunpowder

April 14, 2010

Anarchy Is the Solution to the Evil Idiocy of the State was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It is a fascinating thing to behold.

• People can no longer imagine a world in which we could be secure without massive invasions of our privacy at every step, and even being strip-searched before boarding airplanes, even though private institutions manage much greater security without any invasions of human rights;

• People can no longer remember how a true free market in medical care would work, even though all the problems of the current system were created by government interventions in the first place;

• People imagine that we need 700 military bases around the world, and endless wars in the Middle East, for “security,” though safe Switzerland doesn’t;

• People think it is insane to think of life without central banks, even though they are modern inventions that have destroyed currency after currency;

• Even meddlesome agencies like the Consumer Products Safety Commission or the Federal Trade Commission strike most people as absolutely essential, even though it is not they who catch the thieves and frauds, but private institutions;

• The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sounds outlandish, even though we have a long history of both;

• People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didn’t create in America the world’s most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom – the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself – is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration.

This has profoundly affected the political culture. We’ve lived through regime after regime, since at least the 1930s, in which the word freedom has been a rhetorical principle only, even as each new regime has taken away ever more freedom.

Now we have a president who doesn’t even bother to pay lip service to the idea of freedom. In fact, I don’t think that the idea has occurred to Obama at all. If the idea of freedom has occurred to him, he must have rejected it as dangerous, or unfair, or unequal, or irresponsible, or something along those lines.

To him, and to many Americans, the goal of government is to be an extension of the personal values of those in charge. I saw a speech in which Obama was making a pitch for national service, the ghastly idea that government should steal 2 years of every young person’s life for slave labor and to inculcate loyalty to leviathan, with no concerns about setting back a young person’s professional and personal life.Now we have a president who doesn’t even bother to pay lip service to the idea of freedom. In fact, I don’t think that the idea has occurred to Obama at all. If the idea of freedom has occurred to him, he must have rejected it as dangerous, or unfair, or unequal, or irresponsible, or something along those lines.

How did Obama justify his support of this idea? He said that when he was a young man, he learned important values from his period of community service. It helped form him and shape him. It helped him understand the troubles of others and think outside his own narrow experience.

Well, I’m happy for him. But he chose this path voluntarily. It is a gigantic leap to go from personal experience to forcing a vicious national plan on the entire country. His presumption here is really taken from the playbook of the totalitarian state: the father-leader will guide his children-citizens in the paths of righteousness, so that they all will become god like the leader himself.

To me, this comment illustrates one of two things. It could show that Obama is a potential dictator in the mold of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, for the presumptions he puts on exhibit here are just as frightening as any imagined by the worst tyrants in human history. Or, more plausibly, it may be an illustration of Hannah Arendt’s view that totalitarianism is merely an application of the principle of the “banality of evil.”

With this phrase, Arendt meant to draw attention to how people misunderstand the origin and nature of evil regimes. Evil regimes are not always the product of fanatics, paranoids, and sociopaths, though, of course, power breeds fanaticism, paranoia, and sociopathology. Instead, the total state can be built by ordinary people who accept a wrong premise concerning the role of the state in society.

If the role of the state is to ferret out evil thoughts and bad ideas, it must necessarily become totalitarian. If the goal of the state is that all citizens must come to hold the same values as the great leader, whether economic, moral, or cultural, the state must necessarily become totalitarian. If the people are led to believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning.

On the face of it, many people today do not necessarily reject these premises. No longer is the idea of a state-planned society seen as frightening. What scares people more today is the prospect of a society without a plan, which is to say a society of freedom. But here is the key difference between authority in everyday life – such as that exercised by a parent or a teacher or a pastor or a boss – and the power of the state: the state’s edicts are always and everywhere enforced at the point of a gun.

It is interesting how little we think about that reality – one virtually never hears that truth stated so plainly in a college classroom, for example – but it is the core reality. Everything done by the state is ultimately done by means of aggression, which is to say violence or the threat of violence against the innocent. The total state is really nothing but the continued extension of these statist means throughout every nook and cranny of economic and social life. Thus does the paranoia, megalomania, and fanaticism of the rulers become deadly dangerous to everyone.

It begins in a seemingly small error, a banality. But, with the state, what begins in banality ends in bloodshed.

Let me give another example of the banality of evil. Several decades ago, some crackpots had the idea that mankind’s use of fossil fuels had a warming effect on the weather. Environmentalists were pretty fired up by the notion. So were many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied because they had long ago conceded that there are some public goods that the market can’t handle; surely the weather is one of them.

Enough years go by and what do you have? Politicians from all over the world, every last one of them a huckster of some sort only pretending to represent their nations, gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and plan its weather down to precise temperatures half a century from now.

In the entire history of mankind, there has not been a more preposterous spectacle than this!

I don’t know if it is tragedy or farce that the meeting on global warming came to an end with the politicians racing home to deal with snowstorms and record cold temperatures.

I draw attention to this absurdity to make a more general point. What seems to have escaped the current generation is the notion that was once called freedom. Let me be clear on what I mean by freedom. I mean a social or political condition in which people exercise their own choices concerning what they do with their lives and property. People are permitted to trade and exchange goods and services without impediment or violent interference. They can associate or not associate with anyone of their own choosing. They can arrange their own lives and businesses. They can build, move, innovate, save, invest, and consume on terms that they themselves define.

What will be the results? We cannot predict them, any more than I can know when everyone in this room will wake up tomorrow morning, or what you will have for breakfast. Human choice works this way. There are as many patterns of human choice as there are humans who make choices.

The only real question we should ask is whether the results will be orderly – consistent with peace and prosperity – or chaotic, and thereby at war with human flourishing. The great burden born by the classical liberal tradition, stretching from medieval times to our own, is to make believable the otherwise improbable claim that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of orderliness.

To be sure, that generation of Americans that seceded from British rule in the late 18th century took the imperative of liberty as a given. They had benefitted from centuries of intellectual work by true liberals who had demonstrated that government does nothing for society but divide and loot people in big and small ways. They had come to believe that the best way to rule a society is not to rule it at all, or, possibly, rule it with the people’s consent in only the most minimal way.

Today, this social order sounds like chaos, not anything we dare try lest we be overrun with terrorists and drug fiends, amidst massive social, economic, and cultural collapse. To me this is very interesting. It is the cultural condition that comes about in the absence of experience with freedom. More precisely, it comes about when people have no notion of the relationship between cause and effect in human affairs.

One might think that it would be enough for most people to log-on to the World Wide Web, browse any major social-networking site or search engine, and gain direct experience with the results of human freedom. No government agency created Facebook and no government agency manages its day-to-day operation. It is the same with Google. Nor did a bureaucratic agency invent the miracle of the iPhone, or the utopian cornucopia of products available at the Walmart down the street.

Meanwhile, look at what the state gives us. The department of motor vehicles. The post office. Spying on our emails and phone calls. Full-body scans at the airport. Restrictions on water use. The court system. Wars. Taxes. Inflation. Business regulations. Public schools. Social Security. The CIA. And another ten thousand failed programs and bureaucracies, the reputation of which is no good no matter who you talk to. Now, one might say, oh sure, the free market gives us the dessert but the government gives us the vegetables to keep us healthy. That view does not account for the horrific reality that more than 100 million people were slaughtered by the state in the 20th century alone, not including its wars.

This is only the most visible cost. As Frédéric Bastiat emphasized, the enormity of the costs of the state can only be discovered in considering its unseen costs: the inventions not brought to market, the businesses not opened, the people whose lives were cut short so that they could not enjoy their full potential, the wealth not used for productive purposes but rather taxed away, the capital accumulation through savings not undertaken because the currency was destroyed and the interest rate held near zero, among an infinitely expandable list of unknowns.

To understand these costs requires intellectual sophistication. To understand the more basic and immediate point that markets work and the state does not, needs less sophistication, but it still requires some degree of understanding of cause and effect. If we lack this understanding, we go through life accepting whatever exists as a given. If there is wealth, there is wealth, and there is nothing else to know. If there is poverty, there is poverty, and we can know no more about it.

It was to address this deep ignorance that the discipline of economics was born in Spain and Italy, the homes of the first industrial revolutions, in the 14th and 15th centuries, and came to the heights of scientific exposition in the 16th century, to be expanded and elaborated upon in the 18th century in England and Germany, in France in the 19th century, finally achieving its fullest presentation in Austria and America in the late-19th and 20th centuries.

And what did economics contribute to human sciences? What was the value that it added? It demonstrated the orderliness of the material world through a careful look at the operation of the price system and the forces that work to organize the production and distribution of scarce goods.

Its main lesson was taught again and again for centuries: government cannot improve on the results of human action achieved through voluntary trade and association. This was its contribution. This was its argument. This was its warning to every would-be social planner: your dreams of domination must be curbed.

In effect, this was a message of freedom, one that inspired revolution after revolution, each of which stemmed from the conviction that humankind would be better off in the absence of rule than in its tyrannical presence. But consider that what had to come before the real revolutions: there had to be this intellectual work that prepared the field of battle, the epic struggle that lasted centuries and continues to this day, between the nation-state and the market economy.

Make no mistake: it is this battle’s outcome that is the most serious obstacle to the establishment and preservation of freedom. The political order in which we live is but an extension of the capacities of our collective cultural imagination. Once we stop imagining freedom, it can vanish, and people won’t even recognize that it is gone. Once it is gone, people can’t imagine that they can or should get it back.

I’m reminded of the experience of an economist associated with the Mises Institute who was invited to Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union. He was to advise them on a transition to free markets. He talked to officials about privatization and stock markets and monetary reform. He suggested no regulations on business start-ups. The officials were fascinated. They had become convinced of the general case for free enterprise. They understood that socialism means that officials were poor too.

The economist listened to this point and kept waiting for the objection. He nodded his head that this is precisely what people will do. After some time, the government officials became more explicit. They said that they cannot simply step aside and let people move anywhere they want to move. This would mean losing track of the population. It could cause overpopulation in some areas and desolation in others. If the state went along with this idea of free movement, it might as well shut down completely, for it would effectively be relinquishing any and all control over people.And yet, an objection was raised. If people are permitted to open businesses and factories anywhere, and we close state-run factories, how can the state properly plan where people are going to live? After all, people might be tempted to move to places where there are good-paying jobs and away from places where there are no jobs.

And so, in the end, the officials rejected the idea. The entire economic reform movement foundered on the fear of letting people move – a freedom that most everyone in the United States takes for granted, and which hardly ever gives rise to objection.

Now, we might laugh about this, but consider the problem from the point of view of the state. The whole reason you are in office is control. You are there to manage society. What you really and truly fear is that by relinquishing control of people’s movement, you are effectively turning the whole of society over to the wiles of the mob. All order is lost. All security is gone. People make terrible mistakes with their lives. They blame the government for failing to control them. And then what happens? The regime loses power.

In the end, this is what it always comes down to for the state: the preservation of its own power. Everything it does, it does to secure its power and to forestall the diminution of its power. I submit to you that everything else you hear, in the end, is a cover for that fundamental motive.

And yet, this power requires the cooperation of public culture. The rationales for power must convince the citizens. This is why the state must be alert to the status of public opinion. This is also why the state must always encourage fear among the population for what life would be like in the absence of the state.

The political philosopher who did more than anyone else to make this possible was not Marx nor Keynes nor Strauss nor Rousseau. It was the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who laid out a compelling vision of the nightmare of what life is like in the absence of the state. He described such life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The natural society, he wrote, was a society of conflict and strife, a place in which no one is safe.

He was writing during the English civil war, and his message seemed believable. But, of course, the conflicts in his time were not the result of natural society, but rather over the control of leviathan itself. So his theory of causation was skewed by circumstance, akin to watching a shipwreck and concluding that the natural and universal state of man is drowning.

And yet today, Hobbesianism is the common element of both left and right. To be sure, the fears are different, stemming from different sets of political values. The left warns us that if we don’t have leviathan, our front yards will be flooded from rising oceans, big business moguls will rob us blind, the poor will starve, the masses will be ignorant, and everything we buy will blow up and kill us. The right warns that in the absence of leviathan society will collapse in cesspools of immorality lorded over by swarthy terrorists preaching a heretical religion.

The goal of both the left and right is that we make our political choices based on these fears. It doesn’t matter so much which package of fear you choose; what matters is that you support a state that purports to keep your nightmare from becoming a reality.

Is there an alternative to fear? Here is where matters become a bit more difficult. We must begin again to imagine that freedom itself could work. In order to do this, we must learn economics. We must come to understand history better. We must study the sciences of human action to re-learn what Juan de Mariana, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Frédéric Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Murray N. Rothbard, and the entire liberal tradition understood.

What they knew is the great secret of the ages: society contains within itself the capacity for self-management, and there is nothing that government can do to improve on the results of the voluntary association, exchange, creativity, and choices of every member of the human family.

If you know this lesson, if you believe this lesson, you are part of the great liberal tradition. You are also a threat to the regime, not only the one we live under currently, but every regime all over the world, in every time and place. In fact, the greatest guarantor of liberty is an entire population that is a relentless and daily threat to the regime precisely because they embrace this dream of liberty.

The best and only place to start is with yourself. This is the only person that you can really control in the end. And by believing in freedom yourself, you might have made the biggest contribution to civilization you could possibly make. After that, never miss an opportunity to tell the truth. Sometimes thinking the unthinkable, saying the unsayable, teaching the unteachable, is what makes the difference between bondage and sweet liberty.

The title of this talk is “the Misesian vision.” This was the vision of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. It is the vision of the Mises Institute. It is the vision of every dissident intellectual who dared to stand up to despotism, in every age.

I challenge you to enter into the great struggle of history, and make sure that your days on this earth count for something truly important. It is this struggle that defines our contribution to this world. Freedom is the greatest gift that you can give yourself, and give all of humanity.

Regards,
Lewellyn H Rockwell, Jr.
LewRockwell.com

January 26, 2010

Imagining Freedom with the Help of Mises was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

…

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves—-the union between themselves and the State—-and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they stand in same relation to the State that the State does to the Union? And have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting the Union which have prevented them from resisting the State?

…

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

…

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

…

Thus the state never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to nature, it dies; and so a man.

…

The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to—for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well—is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to lie aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which I have also imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

Henry David Thoreau
(Compiled by Gary Gibson)

December 31, 2008

Disobeying Civilly was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

This American government—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed upon, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedient, by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievious persons who put obstructions on the railroads.

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts—a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniment, though it may be,—

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero was buried.”

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders—serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few—as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men—serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,” but leave that office to his dust at least:—

“I am too high-born to be propertied,
To be a second at control,
Or useful serving-man and instrument
To any sovereign state throughout the world.”

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of ‘75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

December 30, 2008
Henry David Thoreau, 1849

Ideal Governance Is The Lack Thereof was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.