Imagine, if you will, a fantastic near future in which the United States is facing an unmitigated economic implosion. Not just a mere market crash, or a stint of high unemployment, but a full spectrum collapse driven by unsustainable debt spending and hyperinflationary printing. The American people witness multiple credit downgrades of U.S. Treasury mechanisms, the dollar loses its reserve status, devaluation of the currency runs rampant, and the prices of commodities and imported goods immediately skyrocket.

In the background of this disaster, a group of financial elite with dreams of a new centralized economic and political system use the chaos to encourage a removal of long held civil liberties; displacing Constitutional protections they deem “outdated” and no longer “practical” in the midst of our modern day troubles. This group then institutes draconian policies through the executive orders of a puppet president, including indefinite detention, assassination, and even martial law against citizens. For now, let’s just refer to them as “The Swedes”….

The Swedes have an extraordinary array of technological tools at their disposal. The kind of equipment dictators like Stalin and Hitler would have killed for…literally. This technology is so pervasive and so unprecedented in the history of tyrannical governments that average people shiver at the very thought of resistance. The Swedes seem to be invincible.

Some Americans think about escaping to a foreign country before the zealots totally dominate, but ultimately, running is meaningless. The Swedes want a global control grid, not just an American one. Eventually, the expatriates will have to face the music as well.

Others believe that they can take their families and hide alone in far off mountains to wait out the storm, but they do not consider what will happen to their country and its principles while they curl up in a ball and pray that the catastrophe does not touch them. They forget that survival is hollow if one finds himself and his culture enslaved in the meantime.

And yet others, those who are aware of the consequences of unchecked oligarchy, decide to build communities of liberty minded individuals in preparation for the dangers ahead. They seek local and national solutions, social and political. However, always in the backs of their minds sits the understanding that these situations rarely if ever solve themselves, and rarely if ever end peacefully. Despots only respect one thing – Power. Those who refuse to fight back are, in their eyes, nothing but an easy meal, like a wounded animal in a forest of wolves. This third group of awake Americans comes to realize that one day the Swedes will move with severe aggression, and will have to be physically stopped. But how…?

With modern computer-driven weaponry at their fingertips, any resistance appears futile. Some Americans, though, do their homework, and discover that most successful revolutions against better equipped opponents utilize low tech methods in highly intelligent ways. They study the inherent weaknesses of the enemy weapons platforms using readily available online manuals and scientific journals. They realize that these pieces of equipment costing millions of dollars each can be defeated using methods that cost little more than pocket change. A war of economic attrition ensues, whereby the Swedes find themselves completely dependent on systems that cannot be maintained without substantial financial sacrifice. With each new piece of hardware, comes an even more frustrating strategy of defiance. Here are just a few examples…

CCTV Surveillance Grid

Sam is a Liberty Movement sympathizer caught in the city during the establishment of a high-tech surveillance grid in his hometown. The dastardly Swedes relish the idea of being able to keep tabs on every person everywhere. They even establish a database in the heart of Colorado which collates information in real time, allowing them to build and organize files on millions of citizens. The success of this grid depends greatly on the capacity of their CCTV cameras placed in an ever expanding spider’s web across heavily populated regions. The cameras use biometric data collected and stored by airport body scanners which the “extremists” often refer to as “naked body scanners”. The data allows computers to quickly match specific body signs to identity.

The Swedes told the public that their data would not be saved for future reference, but of course, this was later found to be a lie. It did not take long before the scanners were moved from the airports, to train stations, to bus stations, to federal buildings, to street corners for random shakedowns. Sam knows that if his file is pulled up by one of the cameras, he is in serious trouble, and so makes plans to escape the city limits. With curfews being set earlier and earlier in the evening, he decides to make his move before it is too late.

The night vision and thermal vision capabilities on the latest CCTV cameras makes disguise nearly impossible. Makeup and prosthetics help to hide bone structure, and a knee brace helps to change the gait of Sam’s walk, but Sam also knows that the thermal filters on the cameras are actually able to see the heat of blood flow through facial arteries, which act as a face fingerprint. There is no low-tech way to forge this face fingerprint.

So instead, Sam decides to block the camera system’s ability to use thermal vision at all. He does this with a few dollars and a hat, gluing small Infrared LED lightbulbs into the cap along with a tiny battery source. The IR lights drown out the CCTV ability to make any clear distinctions in his face, thus preventing any positive ID. Sam is clever, and plants similar IR devices on other people without their knowledge, diluting the attention of Swedish law enforcement officials who are left wondering if their cameras are malfunctioning or if their city is swarming with “terrorists”.

Fingerprint Scanners

Angela is a worker in a Swedish detention facility. At first, she believed that all the people quartered in the facility were terrorists who represented a threat to innocent lives. But, over time, she came to realize that the true innocents were being housed in the prison, most of them detained for no more than criticizing Swedish policy or protesting a political injustice. Angela makes plans to steal confidential information on the camp from her boss’ office and hand it over to the resistance. Unfortunately, her boss uses a fingerprint scanner to unlock his door. Luckily, she had done research into fail-test methods for such scanners in scientific and security journals and learned how to make molds using latent fingerprints.

RFID Chips

RFID chipping is all the rage with the Swedes, so of course they were more than keen to introduce the intrusive technology to the U.S. once the control grid was established. The tiny inexpensive chips allowed tracking of nearly everything, from retail habits, to civilian movements, to common monetary transactions. Evan, a computer hobbyist and quiet supporter of the Liberty Movement, found that without certain RFID designations, many goods could not be purchased, at least in bulk. Only Swedish officials had the ability to go anywhere and to buy what they needed.

Evan found a solution, not necessarily “low-tech”, but easy enough to make using common materials and a basic knowledge of electronics and programming. His idea? Build an RFID Emulator/Cloner.

The cloner had the ability to read particular RFID chips, even from a distance, and to then copy their unique signal. Evan was able to clone any chip anywhere and then implant the code on an RFID card or any other item containing a chip, making life easier for him, and information easier to get for others.

GPS Tracking

Evelyn was a political activist and independent journalist before the crash. Her writing had become quite prominent in freedom minded circles, but the dollar had fallen, and with it, the Constitution had been scrapped. Her criticisms of the Swedish controlled government were well known, and she had heard stories of liberty writers “disappearing”. She decided to leave the confines of the city to stay with a friend before the noose was tightened completely.

As she entered her vehicle and made her way outside the city along backroads, away from the highway and possible checkpoints, she noticed that a nondescript car seemed to be shadowing her from a distance. She made a few unplanned turns, and did not see the car again for twenty minutes. Then, it appeared again, at the very edge of her mirror’s field of vision. She realized that she may have a GPS tracking device implanted somewhere in her car, and to find it quickly would be impossible. Thankfully, she had purchased a GPS jamming device months ago, which allowed her to block any GPS transmissions within a small to medium radius. The device was furiously labeled by the FCC as “dangerous” and “illegal to use”, however, they remained very easy to buy until the crash.

Electronic Surveillance In General

Whether it be a CCTV camera, or a body scanner, sometimes the best option is not to evade or disguise, but to pull the plug entirely. At least, that was James’ point of view after the control grid went into overdrive and he couldn’t walk his dog without a blue-shirted Swedish agent fondling him on the sidewalk or forcing him to walk through a body scanner. Finally, he had had enough, and so, decided that if they wanted to track every move of every person, it was going to cost them.

Using commonly available parts, James built a personal EMP device. Its range was dependent on the size of the power supply he tied to it, but when used properly, it would zap anything with a circuit within several feet of him.

The Body Scanners were useless. RFID tags went blank. CCTV cameras shorted. They would eventually be replaced, but the cost would be high, and as long as he didn’t get caught, James could experience, at least for a short time, the America of the past…

Sound Cannon / Silence Gun

Mary had seen her family in poverty, her country in ruins, and her government turn to outright treason. In her mind, the only recourse left was to take to the streets. However, this proved to be almost as useless as participating in the election process. New sound cannon vehicles were deployed in waves along with riot police to quell any and all protests, no matter how peaceful in nature.

Mary learned two things quickly. The first: always bring a gas mask to the party. The second: always think simple when faced with technological tyranny.

The sound cannon blast was terrible, making concentration difficult and causing panic amongst the protestors. Even worse though was the Silence Gun.

Which actually recorded and then projected back a person’s voice only a split second after they began to talk, causing mental confusion and eventually, frustration and silence. The device was popular at political events where activists were likely to interrupt a candidate’s teleprompter speech to expose the public to a few truths. Mary was not a hacker, or a military specialist, or a technician of any kind. So, she wore ear plugs. Problem solved.

Night Vision / Thermal Imaging / Predator Drone

A considerable threat to those who decided to fight back against the Swedes was the widespread usage of night vision and thermal imagers by troops sent to hunt down and capture dissenters (the Swedes called them “enemy combatants). The use of FLIR cameras on aircraft and the feared predator drones were especially terrifying to those who knew very little about how such technology actually functions.

David, an insurgent against Swede governance, was tired of hearing about how the Predator Drones would be the doom of all who defied the establishment. He felt that this outlandish perception came more from the fact that the drones had no human passenger, and so, no potential casualty risk. The concept of facing down a machine that feels no combat apprehension is certainly disturbing, but not insurmountable. At bottom, what the enemy cannot see, the enemy cannot kill. And so, instead of trying in vain to fight the drones and their thermal / night vision on the terms of the oppressive military presence, he decided to make their vision advantage irrelevant by studying IR evasion used in sniper training.

Regular night vision relies, in most cases, on the use of an IR light which bounces off targets within the field of view. This is often referred to as “Active IR”. Thermal Vision reads existing IR at a different wavelength, usually in heat producing or high IR producing bodies, called “Passive IR”.

For evading Active IR night vision, David found that regular camouflaging methods along with smoke worked well. For defeating night vision altogether, he found that bright IR flashlights and floodlights, and even regular bright lights like camera flashes, shined directly at the target wearer of the night vision device, would be blinded for a short period of time, leaving room for escape.

Thermal vision evasion was more difficult. David and his team first studied the IR Emissivity Tables of common everyday materials.

[And how to check emissivity here.]

All objects above the temperature of absolute zero release a certain level of electromagnetic radiation, which thermal imagers pick up and translate into a visual picture. Hiding one’s heat signature is difficult, but not impossible. The key, as David learned through military sniper training manuals and combat analysis, was to match his IR signature with that of his surrounding as much as possible.

He fashioned a hooded cloak using a material that would block much of his initial warmth, then lined the inside of it with emergency space blanket material, which reflects back around 90% body heat. The cloak design worked well because he could easily take down the hood and unwrap himself when not in immediate danger, allowing the material to cool as he walked.

Then David attached local vegetation to the material to help match its IR Emissivity to the surrounding foliage. This combination reduced his thermal signature drastically. Overhead drones could not identify him clearly as a human, if they were able to see him at all. Ground forces were a greater threat, but the element of surprise was still possible for the insurgents with cloaks.

In combat, the tandem dangers of drones overhead and ground forces in pursuit with thermal vision made life difficult. David carefully studied field guides to Predator Drone strengths and weaknesses.

David and his team then utilized a special strategy under these extreme circumstances called “False IR Signature”.

Operating in bad weather gave the freedom fighters an instant advantage. Heavy rain washed away thermal footprints and obscured body heat. Thick cloud cover made image integrity poor. Contrary to popular belief, the drones had many downfalls, and their eyes were limited in numerous ways.

When in the middle of combat, where drone surveillance was most dangerous to low-tech resistance, multiple fake IR signatures were created using whatever was available. David used a combination of IR Chemlights and hot burning road flares thrown all over the field to misdirect drone cameras. With IR hotspots everywhere, the thermal cameras had no idea where to focus, let alone which targets were real, and which were fake. IR strobe light flares flashed intermittently causing even more confusion, and masked to some extent muzzle flash from firearms.

Larger objects could also be faked using pieces of metal heated with fire, or even heated metallic balloons arranged in a sizable pattern to mimic a hot running car or tank. Drones would zero in on false targets and unleash missiles, only to waste the expensive ordinance on party favors and scrap. Through David’s knowledge and efforts, the game had become more level.

Technology Or Force Of Will?

Technological weaponry and surveillance should never be underestimated. Today’s advancements are terrifying, devastating, and were designed after decades of trial and error in peripheral wars and burgeoning dictatorships around the world. A technology cannot be defeated by someone who does not respect its capability. That said, in the end, wars are not won with fancy gadgets alone. All conflicts are decided by a primary driver; force of will.

Who has the strength of spirit to endure the longest? Who has the intelligence to outwit the technology? Who knows exactly what they are fighting for and why? These questions decide victory, not unmanned aircraft and computers.

In the introduction, I joke a little about the state of our Republic, but sadly, the fictional accounts above represent realities that Americans today must consider as practical and possible in the near future. “The Swedes” are not illusion, but a parable of the kind of totalitarianism that arises in the midst of any culture dominated by elitism and collectivism. Whether you believe this is realistic or not in our nation today I suppose is dependent on your level of awareness surrounding current events. My goal in covering the information above is not to convince you one way or the other of the dangers ahead. The point is to redistribute the knowledge so that one day, in the event that the stories portrayed turn out to be more true than you realize, you may have the ability to do something about those troubled times as an effective champion, rather than a helpless victim…

Regards,

Brandon Smith

Low-Tech Solutions to High-Tech Tyranny was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

We read those words to that effect from an article linked to by a libertarian website we visit very regularly.

“In Zimmerman’s case, Martin was an athletic six-foot-two-inch tall football player that had him on his back pounding on him. Martin got what he deserved.”

So wrote Paul Huebl, a former Chicago cop and proud member of the Screen Actors Guild.

We’ve tried to avoid having to write anything publicly about the shooting of Trayvon Martin. It’s too obvious a move for the black anarcho-libertarian to spout off on the matter. But we feel we must let our thoughts be known…

You see, dear patron, we spent a few years of our adolescence in the Central Florida town just south of where Trayvon was killed. We have some experience with being black in that corner of the world.

Further, the public voices who dwell close to our philosophical sphere seem to be saying some questionable things in their rush to defend gun ownership and denounce sleazy race-baiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Like Thomas Sowell, the black conservative and intellectual who agreed with Geraldo Rivera’s advice to black and Hispanic youth to not dress to look so threatening.

First a few things about that part of Florida…

Like Caesar’s Gaul, Florida is divided into three parts…

South Florida as centered around the Miami-Dade metro area is essentially a continental Latin and Caribbean colony.

Central Florida is dominated of course by Orlando. It’s bloodless and its claim to fame is a tourist trap ruled over by a mouse created by a Nazi-sympathizer.

People often say that Florida isn’t really “The South”. And they’re right. But North Florida isn’t really part of Florida as much as it is the southernmost region of Georgia.

Once you head north of Orlando, the descendants of Castro-generated refugees and Jewish retirees become a distant spectacle. Much more immediate are the Confederate flags, monster trucks and occasional white supremacist tattoo.

Geneva, Florida, is just a few miles north of Orlando and a few miles east of Sanford, Florida, where George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin to death.

Through a series of crises and accidents your editor came to spend his early teen years as a resident of Geneva. The town is home to just a couple thousand souls or so. The downtown has a section full of older homes, a section of newer tract homes (where your editor lived), three churches, an elementary school, a couple of gas stations, one post office, one feed store and one stoplight.

The rest of the place is a smattering of multi-acre properties, dirt roads and swamp.

While Sanford lies directly east, Oviedo, FL, is just south and to the west. Oviedo is a very nice, suburb of Orlando. It made at least one “100 Best to Live in the U.S.” list one year. The road from Oviedo becomes Geneva’s First Street. There is a specific moment as you travel along that road that you sense you’ve crossed some ethereal veil. It happens within a second or two of leaving the “Welcome to Oviedo” sign behind.

The new, colorful subdivisions stop abruptly. Wide open pastures take their place. Tiny herds of cattle and the occasional horse or two alternate with lone houses in big fields as you drive along.

You notice more pickup trucks, quite a few of them on giant tires. The few other cars you see on the two-lane road move more aggressively.

Twenty years ago when your editor’s mother bought one of those newer tract homes, one of the neighbors painted “NO NIGER” in huge red letters on our mother’s garage door. We assume the vandal meant “NO NIGGER”, but we also assume it was also dark when he wrote it and he lost track of how many g’s he’d already written.

A few months later someone left a pathetic attempt at a chemical bomb on the front porch of our family’s house. Our mother called the sheriff. The deputies told her that had the bomb worked, it might have killed her.

That was all over twenty years ago. But just a few years ago the son of the other black Caribbean family in town was carrying his own young son on his shoulders when he was run over by one of our neighbors.

The brother and his son survived with only minimal injury. The neighbor went to jail for a long time. The attack was racially motivated.

Back in January, 2010 we were visiting the old homestead, we were hit by a speeding truck as we walked along the road just beyond our mother’s house. The hit was surely accidental. It was the response of everyone involved that made us mad. And reminded us what the life of a black man is worth in that town.

The driver stopped, ran over to our prone form and asked us angrily what we were doing “in the middle of the road” as we lay moaning on the lawn where we’d landed. The owner of the home also seemed mad that we had landed on his lawn and had created trouble for the driver. Once we recovered our senses and realized that we were neither dead nor crippled, a fight very nearly ensued.

To heap even more insult to our relatively minor injuries, the emergency crew who came out (at our mother’s insistence, not our own) seemed annoyed at us, too.

We never lived in neighboring Sanford itself. But we spent an awful lot of time there. On the way to the city itself from Geneva, there is a little “Chocolate Village” called appropriately enough Midway. A poor black neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. Out of the 1700 or so people who live there 1600 are black while only a few dozen are white.

Sanford itself is a much bigger town with over 50,000 residents. Over half of those are white and a little less than a third black. The black population is largely concentrated in the Goldsborough neighborhood.

Sanford’s neck isn’t quite as red as Geneva’s, but there is still that uniquely Southern flavor of black-white tension on the air. Your editor can taste it every time he lands at Orlando International Airport. It increases the farther north you go from the airport and from Orlando. You could choke on it in Geneva. It’s not as bad in Sanford, but it’s still there.

Here’s an anecdote not from personal experience, but culled from the Wikipedia page on Sanford:

“On October 23, 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers announced that they had signed Jackie Robinson assigning him to their International League team, the Montreal Royals.

“Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager believing he ‘knew’ Florida, thought his team could train there ruffling as few feathers as possible. Robinson and his wife were instructed by Rickey not to try to stay at any Sanford hotels. He and his wife didn’t eat out at any restaurants not deemed ‘Negro restaurants.’ He didn’t even dress in the same locker room as his teammates.

“As soon as the citizenry became aware of Robinson’s presence, the mayor of Sanford was confronted by a ‘large group of white residents’ who ‘demanded that Robinson…be run out of town.’

“On March 5th, 1946, the Royals were informed that they would not be permitted to take the field as an integrated group. Rickey was concerned for Robinson’s life and sent him to stay in Daytona Beach. His daughter, Sharon Robinson, remembered being told, ‘The Robinsons were run out of Sanford, Florida, with threats of violence.’”

“In his 1993 book, ‘A Hard Road to Glory: A History Of The African American Athlete: Baseball’ tennis great Arthur Ashe wrote in response, Rickey ‘moved the entire Dodger pre-season camp from Sanford, Florida, to Daytona Beach due to the oppressive conditions of Sanford.’”

Source

We share these anecdotes so you understand our bias. And not so much to explain Zimmerman’s actions — he was an overzealous cop wannabe whose stereotyping got him in over his head — but to explain the police response.

Black life doesn’t hold so much value in the region Trayvon was killed. And we sadly report that it often doesn’t have much value in the eyes of people with whom we tend to agree on other things like liberty and the right to bear arms.

It saddens us to be on the side of the national healthcare types on this one. (But again, we’re neither conservative nor liberal in any modern sense, but in love with liberty and the markets they foster.) Even if Trayvon got violent with Zimmerman…even if Zimmerman was getting the worst of it in a scuffle…he was the aggressor. He gave Trayvon reason to feel the need to defend himself. Zimmerman was the one “acting suspiciously.”

(Zimmerman also strikes us the type who admired authoritarian power and made up for his inadequacies by carrying a gun. But we don’t know the man personally and could be wrong. His idea of self-defense, however, seems in line with U.S. foreign policy: antagonize and escalate after the violent response.)

Lest you get us wrong, we believe in the right to bear arms to be as essential as the right to own property and to do as you will with your own body. We also believe in the absolute right to self defense and to stop violence toward your person and property with force.

But that doesn’t mean you get to create the situation in which you have to defend yourself.

Zimmerman is not white. Not really. But he stands in for all the white “conservatives” out there whose love of freedom extends only as far their right to bear arms. It doesn’t cover the non-white elements in “their” country, nor the Ay-rab countries their “conservative” political actors attack.

So no, Zimmerman isn’t white. But he has become the avatar for a large swath of the population who will never under any circumstances be sorry to see the Second Amendment used to lay waste to a young black man who probably had it coming.

Had Trayvon or any other black man behaved as Zimmerman had toward a white person…if a white man had been beating on then been shot by a black man who had been shadowing him…That is to say, if the races of the actors had been reversed (again counting the “white Hispanic” Zimmerman as a stand in for the white Second Amendment lovers who fantasize about some black punk giving them an excuse), then the gun rights crowd would be singing the opposite tune.

They would have decried the black man for stalking the white man in the first place. They would have cheered the white man for pummeling his black stalker. They would have called for justice for the fallen white man and for the imprisonment and even death of the black shooter.

As it is many liberty and guns types see a smoking gun and big, dead, black kid and honestly don’t see a problem. They can’t believe the rush to judgment. Granted, the media is making the usual circus of this…And those charlatans Sharpton and Jackson are all over this like flies on a corpse…

And maybe therein lies the problem. Being black has become so politicized. The state is so involved in being black that blacks can’t help but live politicized lives. And have the occasional politicized death.

Economic integration — being useful in the marketplace — was resulting in social integration before WWI. Then along came the state with its wedge in the form of Jim Crow laws. So after the state prevented the natural integration of white and black, it took it upon itself to force integration at a later date. To make it a violent political matter when markets had been doing it peaceably.

After making integration as violent as possible, the state further amplified the divide between blacks and whites. It’s the state that cripples blacks with the crack cocaine of welfare. It corrals the visible mass of them in public housing and rewards them for creating one-parent homes. It traps their children in bottom-of-the-barrel public schools where they learn nothing.

After public education destroys their minds and welfare destroys their work ethic, the state creates quotas to get unqualified blacks into the job market. This only increases resentment from whites. Meanwhile blacks are kept from any meager but honest employment by means of minimum wage laws.

These laws strongly discourage employers from hiring anyone whose labor isn’t worth at least the minimum the government sets. If an employer MUST pay at least $7.25 per hour and a young black man’s skills are only worth, say, $5.00 per hour (because he is a product of public schooling, public housing and welfare), then that young black man will simply not be hired. That young black man will be further driven away from becoming a contributing member in the markets and therefore civil society.

Also the state persecutes blacks mercilessly when they engage in the most attractive trade available to the majority who won’t make it in music or sport, a trade that exists because of unreasonable prohibitions on human choice.

So the state does everything to shape dependent and resentful adults. Then the state’s wage controls keep young black people out of the labor market. Then it punishes them harshly for engaging in the black markets it creates with its senseless prohibition, often setting them on a lifelong cycle of incarceration.

The state has helped craft members of the black race into objects of hate. Parasites in weird dress, speaking in alien tongues. Their natural habitat is surely the prison, where more today reside than were enslaved in the early 19th century.

By “helping” blacks, the state turns them into subhuman caricatures. By making them its wards, the state creates a concentration of hopeless, dangerous, ignorant poverty with its own subculture and dialect. The state creates a population that the white majority views with unease at best and hatred at the worst.

So black men will always “have it coming” in the eyes of many in the liberty and guns crowd (to which your dark-skinned editor belongs). As long as so many black lives are shaped by the state’s inherently destructive assistance black men will always be deserving of suspicion in the eyes of those who have no biological urge to view them as extended members of the human family.

It’s natural enough for humans to identify along lines of kinship. Ethnicity is just extended family after all. And it’s unreasonable to expect people not to favor family. But the market provides a civilizing effect by rewarding cooperation, providing mutual gain and creating tolerance for those who aren’t related to us and don’t share our exact tastes. We manage to get along with each other in the market place where we interact and are rewarded for serving each other well.

Politics will have none of this. It thrives by amplifying divisions, creating social friction within and war without. Where markets demand peace and cooperation, politics demands conflict, otherness and hatred of it.

“Look at him!” the whites with guns cry about slain Trayvon. “He looks like a thug!” Tall, athletic, wearing that black dress code. Gold teeth. He was already dealing with that plant the government doesn’t like, according to the reports.

Nowhere in all this do those who are satisfied with Trayvon’s death say what Trayvon was actually doing to warrant Zimmerman’s attentions. Besides walking at night while black.

They will often ask what Trayvon Martin was even doing in a gated community. They sniff out the marijuana possession and the more recent Facebook photos. But they seem to have keep missing the part of the story that explained that Trayvon was on his way back to his father’s house in that gated community. They mock as biased the sympathetic note in the media’s voice, then cherry pick the parts of the story that suits their practiced narrative.

Trayvon was walking back home. But he had the misfortune of looking like the state-fostered cartoon that stirs the base, clannish reaction within whites.

“Hell, if I’d seen him there,” the white ones who tend to have the guns say, “I’d have wanted to confront him, too. And I wouldn’t have lost a wink of sleep over shooting him.”

Perhaps the only acceptable behavior from black men is to avoid areas where they’d make whites nervous, especially at night. Should they be confronted by a non-white, the only correct response is apologetic submission.

Maybe it’s not enough that black men not wear hoodies. Perhaps the good ones ought to wear iron collars to let non-whites know they are not looking for trouble, are not dangerous and can be trusted.

Regards,

Gary Gibson

Did Trayvon “Have It Coming”? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Consider the Free State Project. It is an attempt, and a surprisingly successful one, to inspire a political migration by lovers of liberty to New Hampshire. It is not about lobbying, forming a political party, populating a real estate development or anything like that. It is about seeking a place to live and let live in these times when the political culture seems to be about everything but that.

The idea is to gather people with some consciousness of the idea of liberty so that they can live peacefully among friends and influence the political culture in a way that brings more freedom or at least protects what we have. As the statement that Free Staters sign says: “I will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of civil government is the protection of life, liberty and property.”

I had heard of this movement for years, but, frankly, didn’t pay much attention to it. I suppose that with only a passing glance, it seemed sort of cranky and unworkable, just another scheme. I was completely wrong. This is a serious movement that is achieving real results, as I observed when I was invited to attend the annual Liberty Forum in Nashua, N.H.

Why New Hampshire? It is the “Live Free or Die” state without a sales or income tax. It has low population density, which increases the chances that the influence of the libertarians can be felt in the culture and the Statehouse. It has lower business regulations than the rest of the country, and wonderful homespun culture that turns out to be highly tolerant toward cultural and political eccentricity.

The whole notion really began in 2001 with research by political scientist Jason Sorens, who was then studying at Yale University. He observed that the influence of the libertarians was muted by their sheer geographic diffusion throughout the country. If they could gather together in one place, they could achieve that critical level of influence over political affairs that would create a tipping point against statist-style management toward individual liberty.

It turns out that there is a huge tradition in American history for this type of political migration. The Mormons did this in their trek across the West to finally land in Salt Lake City. The Amish did the same. But it doesn’t have to be about religion. This migrating impulse also populated Texas in the early 19th century, when the pioneering spirit drove a whole generation to settle this wild country.

Actually, if you think about it, the entire Colonial period was shaped by cultural groups arriving to settle in coherent communities formed around certain themes of safety and liberty. Puritans, Catholics and borderland immigrants all coalesced in geographically defined areas. Then there were the Quakers, the Mennonites and innumerable anarchist sects of the 19th century that formed their own communities. In all these cases, they found the liberty and security they were seeking. Rather than merely dreaming of a new life, they worked to put their dreams into practice in whatever way this world allows.

The Free State Project is different from these only in the sense that the invitation is to move somewhere within the state. And the driving force is simply to be left alone. It turns out that being around others who share your values helps that goal. If the police pull over a Free Stater, I’m told, a dozen others show up within minutes with video cameras. If you go to jail, there are people to defend you to the press. And there is something to say for living among people you can trust, especially in these times when the government is urging everyone to rat out their neighbors, friends and family for any reason.

There is a huge diversity among the 4,000 people who have identified themselves as Free Staters. In my trip, I met attorneys, teachers, bakers, software application developers, people who mint coins, welders, natural statesmen, bloggers, physicians and people from every walk of life one can imagine. Some are religious and some are not. Some look like crazy mountain men, some have oddly dyed hair, some wear suits and ties. They are single, married, young, old, whatever.

Free Staters take any job that suits them. Some run for office, and win, which is not entirely difficult in a state with 400 representatives in the state legislature. Others stay out of politics completely. Some are independent contractors who can relocate, so they choose this state. Others are craft makers who sell their wares from their house or online. Some are wealthy; some are poor.

Their reasons for coming to New Hampshire are all over the map. I met one young person who had graduated from high school two years ago with straight As and a perfect transcript for going to any college she wanted. But she didn’t want to deal with the debt, was tired of the indoctrination and had seen too many people waste four or eight years in school and not find any work afterward. She didn’t want that for herself. So she works various jobs, pays the bills, enjoys a rich social life and is completely happy. Most kids of her generation can’t say the same.

Some of the currency in use in New Hampshire

At the opening reception of the Liberty Forum, I stood back, studying the huge crowd with puzzlement at first — the culture of the event might best be described as bourgeois bohemian — but then it became clear to me what was going on. These people were extremely well-read. They had developed a love of liberty, and it became a passion in their life. They realized that freedom is the precondition for everything else in life we love. Without freedom, all dreams die. But they weren’t satisfied to read and reflect. They wanted to do something real, something practical. Moving here and joining this movement was best hope they found.

Human liberation never happens in a social or cultural vacuum. The great steps forward in the history of liberty were preceded by periods in which the social and practical infrastructure had undergone years of development and maturation. The American Revolution was the culminating moment of 150 years of Colonial experience with liberty. The abolitionist movement was preceded by many years of the development of a robust culture and experience of free men and women in both slave and nonslave states. The repeal of Prohibition was made possible because of the giant network of speak-easies and bootleggers and the ever-increasing demand of the population for the freedom to drink.

Perhaps, then, it is necessary that people take up the charge to live their own visions of liberty in whatever way they can, even in open defiance of our overlords, in order to prepare the ground for a brighter future.

A film has already been made about the movement: Libertopia. News coverage is increasing. And the movement is clearly growing as trends in the U.S. get worse and worse. And after this election season, when it becomes very obvious to disillusioned liberty lovers around the country that national politics are now and will forever be hostile to the philosophy of individualism, I can easily imagine that the Free State Project will have another wave of immigrants ready to wave the flag: “Live Free or Die.”

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker

The Free State Project: Political Migration in Our Time was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

The backdrop is this… A small Lutheran school in Michigan (the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School) hired Cheryl Perich to teach many subjects, including theology. After a semester, she developed narcolepsy and said she couldn’t show up for work for a month after the Christmas break. The kids would just have to wait.

But in this competitive market, failing to deliver educational services could be financially devastating, not to mention very detrimental to the kids. So the school hired someone to take her place. When Perich finally showed up for work, she sensed that she had been replaced and prepared a disability lawsuit. The school tried to give her benefits in exchange for resigning, but she refused. So she was finally fired for insubordination and causing disruption.

It’s not a particularly unusual case. Businesses face this sort of thing all the time. The way the law works, businesses are routinely blackmailed by disgruntled employees who demand to be paid, even though they aren’t wanted. It’s beyond me why a person would want to work at a place where he or she is not wanted, but that’s the way it is. And the law, citing their “civil rights” to other people’s money, usually comes down on the side of the worker.

The EEOC decided in favor of the Perich, but the school persisted, and the case went to the high court. Here the justices delivered a surprisingly sensible decision on interesting grounds. The Constitution says that the government can’t interfere with religion. Perich was teaching religion at a religious institution. For the government to demand her reinstated, it would be a clear imposition on this institution and an obvious violation of the First Amendment.

“Requiring a church to accept or retain an unwanted minister, or punishing a church for failing to do so,” said the court, “intrudes upon more than a mere employment decision. Such action interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs. By imposing an unwanted minister, the state infringes the Free Exercise Clause, which protects a religious group’s right to shape its own faith and mission through its appointments.”

Darn right. But wait! What about her “civil rights”? The court said that whatever the employee’s legal rights would be in a normal commercial institution, they can’t possibly apply in the case of a commissioned minister of a religious institution. Otherwise, we would have the government effectively deciding who must or must not be a minister, which obviously contradicts the whole point of the First Amendment.

The language of both the majority and concurring opinions makes a series of uncommonly sensible points. The concurring opinion by Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan points out that it is part of Lutheran teaching that disputes be handled within the community and not be taken to secular courts. But this teacher, Perich, totally disregarded this core principle and immediately started threatening the school with a lawsuit.

Your eyes just pop out to read the court wholly endorsing the Lutheran view: “Hosanna-Tabor discharged the respondent because she threatened to file suit against the church in a civil court. This threat contravened the Lutheran doctrine that disputes among Christians should be resolved internally without resort to the civil court system and all the legal wrangling it entails.” For courts to interfere “would dangerously undermine the religious autonomy.”

Again, darn right.

But you know what the problem here is? The court wrapped its defense of freedom here in clerical robes only. In order to enjoy the autonomous right to hire and fire, you have to be a religious institution, and it has to pertain to someone who is teaching, however little, some aspect of doctrine. That’s the right decision, but why shouldn’t the same principle apply across the board to all commercial institutions and, indeed, to all private institutions? Why should religious institutions be the exclusive beneficiary of a laissez-faire policy?

All businesses, all nonprofits, all private clubs, all neighborhood associations have internal policies and should enjoy the right to manage their own affairs without government intrusion. To impose a government plan on their labor policies is a serious compromise of rights and liberties, which must always include not only the right to associate but to disassociate.

The critics of the case worry that the decision is too broad, so broad that the court didn’t even bother to define what a minister is. The critics are completely wrong. This court decision is the right one, but the problem is that it is too narrow: In the name of freedom, all privately owned groups should be granted the same right to manage themselves.

Interestingly, this case even has implications for the current political war over Mitt Romney’s activities at Bain & Co., a private equity firm that specializes in corporate restructuring. Its work can result in either profits or losses, expansions or closings. People are hired, people are fired. Who decides? The owners and managers do — in response to market trends — so it should be always and everywhere in a free society.

Newt Gingrich, apparently, doesn’t like this idea. He calls Romney a corporate raider who needlessly puts people out of work — as if Gingrich knows better than the stockholders how to run a company.

A particular issue for Gingrich concerns a steel mill in Kansas that Bain was instrumental in closing, leaving massive job losses behind. Hello? Steel? Its production was once integral to the U.S. economy, but those days ended some 30 years ago when overseas companies demonstrated that they could do the same thing at a fraction of the cost. Is Gingrich really suggesting that every means should be used to keep steel plants open, even if it means looting American businesses and consumers who are forced to pay the highest possible prices for no good reason?

This way of thinking puts Gingrich on the side of Cheryl Perich: against the rights of the property owners. Just as the Supreme Court said, such a system would involve massive coercion against people and intolerable intrusions into the private affairs of others.

Whether it is a tiny religious school or a multinational corporation, up with freedom of association and freedom of disassociation! That’s the way liberty works. Its genius is its capacity to adapt the economic environment to a changing world, so that we stay on the path of growth to support rising living standards for humanity. The stasis of a socialist, state-run economy is not an option in today’s world, and neither is the economic stagnation that comes with national protectionism and special privileges for workers. You can’t have genuine profit and expansion without the possibility of losses and plant closings, and without the owners of institutions having control over who can and cannot get paid for services.

What applies to the Lutheran school should apply to every sector of society that is privately owned, whether or not their workers are called ministers. It is not only religion that needs protection against government interference. Everyone does. Granted, this would be a gigantic step in the right direction.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker

Implausibly, Freedom Gets a Boost was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

It’s true that mail still has a place in the digital world, as the post office says. But the government shouldn’t be the institution to run it. It already has competitors in package delivery but the government stands firmly against letting any private company deliver something like first class mail. And so it has been since the beginning. The state and only the state is permitted to charge people for non-urgent paper mail in a letter envelop.

It’s a control thing. The government is into that. And it is far from new.

Do you know the amazing story of Lysander Spooner? He lived from 1808 to 1887. His first great battle was taking on the post office monopoly. In the 1840s, he was like most people at the time: fed up with the high prices and bad service. But as an intellectual and entrepreneur, he decided to do something about it. He started the American Letter Mail Company, and his letter business gave the government some serious competition.

It opened offices in major cities, organized a network of steamships and railroads, and hired people to get the mail to where it needed to be. His service was both faster and cheaper than the government’s own. Then he published a pamphlet to fight the power: “The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails.” It was brilliant. It rallied people to his side. And he made a profit.

The government hated him and his company and began to litigate against him. It dramatically lowered the price for its services, and used public money to cover its losses. The goal was to bankrupt Spooner, and it eventually succeeded. Spooner’s private postal system had to be shut down. It’s the same way the government today shuts down private schools, private currencies, private security, private roads, private companies that ignore the central plan, and anyone else who stands up for freedom.

From this one anecdote alone, you can see that the post office is hardly a “natural monopoly” — something the government has to provide because free enterprise can’t do so. It is a forced monopoly, one kept alive solely through laws and subsidies. If the post office closed its doors today, there would be 1000 companies rushing in to fill the gap. Just as in the 1840s, the results would be cheaper, better services. The government runs the post office because it wants to control the command posts of society, including communication. The Internet as a global communication device snuck up on the state before the state could kill it.

Let’s return to the 19th century. Spooner didn’t go away. He was more than an entrepreneur. He was a brilliant and pioneering intellectual, as the collection The Lysander Spooner Reader makes clear. He was a champion of individual liberty and a passionate opponent of all forms of tyranny. He was an abolitionist before it became fashionable but he also defended the South’s right to secede.

Most incredibly, he was probably the first 19th century American to return to the old anti-Federalist tradition of post-Revolutionary America. He did this by asking the unaskable question: why should the US Constitution — however it is interpreted — be binding on every individual living in this geographic region?

This document was passed generations ago. Maybe you could say that the signers were bound by it, but what about those who opposed it at the time, and what about future generations? Why are the living being forced to live by parchment arrangement made by people long dead? Why are the living bound by a privileged group’s interpretations of its meaning?

In his view, people have rights or they do not have rights. If they have rights, no ancient scroll restricting those rights should have any power to take those rights away. Nor does it matter what a bunch of old guys in black robes say: rights are real things, not legal constructs to be added or reduced based on the results of courtroom deliberations. Plenty of Americans before his time would have agreed with him! It’s still the case.

Now, keep in mind that Spooner lived in a time where the living memory of these debates had not entirely disappeared. He knew what many people today do not know, namely that the Articles of Confederation made for a freer confederation of states than the Constitution. The Constitution amounted to an increase in government power, despite all its language about restricting government power. Remember too that it was only a few years after the Constitution was rammed through that the feds were suddenly jailing people for the speech crime of criticizing the US president!

Spooner spoke plainly: what you call the Constitution has no authority to take away my rights. Hence his famous essay: “Constitution of No Authority.” In “No Treason” he argues that the state has no rights over your freedom of speech. In “Vices Not Crimes,” he shows that people in any society are capable of doing terrible things but the law should only concern itself with aggression against person and property. Reading them all together, as they are in this book, is a radicalizing experience — a liberating experience. It makes you see the world in a completely different way.

It’s true that they aren’t teaching about Spooner in public school. But he was a giant by any standard, the 19th century’s own Thomas Jefferson (but even better than Jefferson on most issues). There is still so much to learn here. It’s no wonder that his legacy has been suppressed.

This edition of his best work is published by Fox & Wilkes, an imprint of Laissez-Faire Books. Incredibly, you are still permitted to buy this and read it without getting arrested — for now.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker

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

I have this contrarian view not because I am cynical or pessimistic, but because I have thoroughly studied this set of rules or “law of the land,” and found them to be antagonistic to individual liberty and state’s rights, and sympathetic to big government. When one compares the constitution that was replaced, The Articles of Confederation, there is little doubt of this truth. Lysander Spooner said this:

“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”

In my opinion, there is no doubt that the constitution fully authorized the government that we had and still have today. It is also true that any set of rules is powerless to stop tyranny unless the people enforce and demand compliance on a constant basis. This has never been the case. Even if it had been followed to the letter, it is obvious that liberty would still have been compromised.

Before the current constitution was drafted, there was never any mention or acceptance of the notion that there was a (U)nited States, or that any single nation existed with power over the states. Quite the contrary was the case. It is very troubling that so many Americans have been fooled into believing that the constitution is the basis of our freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth, and nothing could be more misunderstood!

Recently, those like Tom Mullen and Bill Buppert have explained thoroughly why the constitution is not what it is made out to be, and many others have properly denounced this misleading document as well, but the general thinking is still very misguided. Most continue to laud and worship this very flawed piece of parchment, and continue to believe that it is the creator and savior of liberty. Liberty lies in the essence of man, not in documents secretly drafted in the dark of night by the few. The free spirit of the people must awaken before any real freedom becomes evident, and in that awakening they must realize the great importance of the individual and of individual responsibility.

My intent here is not to claim that our original constitution, The Articles of Confederation, were a perfect set of rules, or that any set of rules established by simple men could be perfect. My intent is to expose the lie that is our current constitution. If we as a people could see the truth of why our original constitution was completely scrapped in favor of our current one, maybe a more widespread anger would arise. Once it is accepted that the Hamiltonians in 1787 staged a coup to destroy states rights in favor of federal power, and to destroy individual liberty in favor of nationalism, then maybe more will begin to question their false idolization of the constitution. One could only hope for such an awakening.

Before this constitution, there was no power whatsoever for the federal government to tax. That was left entirely to the individual states. Now the Feds have an unlimited power to tax. In Article 1, Section 8, the taxing clause states, “Congress has the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” I see no limits mentioned here whatsoever, and given the term “General Welfare” of the (U)nited States, there is no reason to believe that any restriction was intended. Many so-called constitutional scholars will argue this, saying that all spending must be “constitutional”, or within the confines of the taxing and spending clauses, but these arguments can easily be refuted given the broad and sweeping language in this section. This was in my opinion done explicitly by design. Article 1, Section 8 is nothing if it is not an all-encompassing, unrestricted, and explicit enabler of unlimited governmental power.

Anyone can check the definitions during that period by simply going to the dictionary of that time, Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. It is immediately obvious that there was little difference in the meaning of general welfare at the time of the founding as there is today. But this is just one example of the obvious misunderstanding by so many in modern times.

Under the Articles of Confederation, there was no president. There was no supreme court. There was no federal taxation, and certainly no immoral income tax. This meant that there was no IRS. There was no federal control of interstate commerce. Congress could not raise an army or draft troops. What this meant, was that the states were sovereign, and no national government existed in any real sense. Because of this, freedom flourished, and tyranny was not evident. So how is it then that this very pro-central government, federal controlling, and powerful national governing system could be created by the same constitution that supposedly set us free? Why were the Articles scrapped entirely if freedom of the people and state’s rights were the objectives sought? I can tell you; at no time did those who supported the drafting and ratification of the U.S constitution in 1787 consider individual freedoms!

There are those who would offer that the Bill of Rights adopted several years later corrected the obvious problems that plagued the constitution, but that thinking is based on the false logic of gullible minds. While those amendments certainly were restrictions on government power, they did nothing to change the original intent, that being one of granting massive and in many cases unlimited power to a federal government.

The constitution allowed for the usurpation of power by the executive branch, it allowed federal courts to approve and sanction authoritarianism by the government over the people, it allowed for legalized forcible theft by the federal government in the form of taxation, and it allowed the federal government both the ability to collect taxes for war, and to also prosecute those wars. These egregious powers given by the constitution to the central government are completely antithetical to liberty, and should never have been considered by any men of character.

The people did not establish our constitution, nor was it inspired by divine intervention as so many suggest. It would be difficult for me to imagine that God would have a hand in the destruction of our inherent and natural rights. No, this flagrantly flawed document was designed and implemented by a few corrupt men led by Alexander Hamilton. Their agenda was guided not by any desire to achieve liberty for all, but by a grand lust for power and control. Had that not been the case, the Declaration of Independence would have been the guide for any new set of rules, and our original constitution would have been even more scrutinized instead of being replaced.

Instead, after 224 years, we now have exactly what the original ruling class desired, an all-powerful central government ruling over the lower classes. This is a rule by the few over the many. As Aristotle said: “rule by the few is aristocracy in its ideal form and oligarchy in its perverted form.” The elite class holds all the cards, while the rest of us now struggle under the thumb of tyranny!

Regards,

Gary D. Barnett

Gary D. Barnett is president of Barnett Financial Services, Inc., in Lewistown, Montana.

Still Fed Up With Constitution Worship was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Market for Liberty imagines a totally free society; one with no government intrusion whatsoever; one in which the free market is left to respond to the demands of individuals, without recourse to institutionalized coercion — implied or actual. Is such a stateless existence even possible, much less preferable? Or, as so many contend, is it merely an academically contrived utopia?

Morris and Linda Tannehill address all the usual fears and protestations that a truly non-governmental — i.e. anarchist society — conjures up.

Whenever there arises in conversation the mere suggestion of a totally free, laissez-faire market, the possibility that human beings might even be able to survive (much less thrive) without the safety net of State control, apologists for “benevolent government” invariably step atop their soapboxes and ask:

“Yes, but who will provide education for the masses, if not the public schools?” or “Who will care for the sick and weak, if not the public hospitals?”

Indeed, these are questions that deserve thoughtful, honest answers. But these questions assume realities that are not in evidence.

They suppose that “the public” (i.e., the state) actually has money to “provide” these services, rather than, as is actually the case, first having to expropriate (steal) it from private, productive individuals. Furthermore, the fallacy of benign governmental control relies on the idea that governments can provide essential services more reliably and cost-effectively than the private sector.

In other words, the government’s obligation to provide essential services is more reliable and effective than the private sector’s opportunity to provide essential services. Admittedly, this debate does not lend itself to easy, black and white conclusions.

But as the Tannehill’s argue persuasively, the free market provides solutions that governments would never dream of. “The big advantage of any action of the free market,” contend the Tannehills, “is that errors and injustices are self-correcting. Because competition creates a need for excellence on the part of each business, a free-market institution must correct its errors in order to survive. Government, on the other hand, survives not by excellence, but by coercion; so an error or flaw in a governmental institution can (and usually will) perpetuate itself almost indefinitely, with its errors being ‘corrected’ by further errors. Private enterprise must, therefore, always be superior to government in any field.”

[It is worth mentioning here that corporations acting in collusion with the state are NOT private enterprises as the Tannehill’s define them. They are simply entities that have co-opted the government’s “gun-for- hire” to do their dirty work for them. Think Wall Street “bailout” recipients and their army of D.C. lobbyists. Indeed, think any institution at all that seeks unfair protection or promotion from the state.]

The lines on the battlefield between the comfort of State control and the liberty of anarchy are familiar to all. The State is a protector, one side argues. The State is a prison guard, the other side argues.

• How, the statist is heard to question, might common disputes find resolution without the currently preferred monopoly of the state’s courts?

• What about private monopolies that would ruthlessly jack up prices and bleed us working class proletariats to death?

• By what means might a laissez-faire society offer protection from foreign aggressors?

• How might the personal liberties underpinning the whole system be protected if it were not for the tireless work of the state’s police and its myriad other law enforcement agencies?

• Indeed, the statist continues, how would “the law” itself even come into being, and in what shape would it find application, in the absence of the all-knowing, all-powerful state?

The Tannehills address these anxieties thoroughly and logically. “Freedom is not only as moral as governmental slavery is immoral,” they write, “it is as practical as government is impractical.”

Discussions criticizing the state’s myriad shortcomings and follies are many. The Tannehills’ Market for Liberty takes the extra step in providing viable, concrete solutions to state-sponsored dilemmas. The Free Market, they argue, can correct the State’s tendency toward costly excesses, and can do so peacefully and voluntarily, simply by following price signals from the market itself.

Market for Liberty is, for all intents and purposes, a very real, practical solution set to those most commonly presented excuses for acquiescing to governmental authority. The government is not merely a “necessary evil,” the Tannehills argue. “It is necessarily evil.”

Of course, Market for Liberty does not project a utopia in which acts of violence simply disappear and where every individual immediately sets off on a long road to perfection. Rather, the authors illustrate how individuals acting in their own self-interest, coming together to engage in mutually-beneficial exchanges, are thus incentivized to act with honesty and integrity.

“The history of governments always has been, and always will be, written in blood, fire and tears,” the Tannehills assert. In Market for Liberty, they show how freedom is not only an alternative to the State, but a far superior one worth, at the very least, our immediate and undivided attention.

Regards,
Joel Bowman
Whiskey & Gunpowder

May 11, 2011

Freedom Naturally: A Review of Morris and Laura Tannehill’s “The Market for Liberty” was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Unfortunately, the quality of this adaptation is representative of its low budget and brief production time. The film meticulously retains the original plot of Rand’s opus, going so far as to lift much of the dialogue directly out of the novel. However, due to the large amount of material being covered, the result leaps through the original plot line in a somewhat disjointed portrayal, which can be difficult to follow. While Johansson is to be commended for finally bringing Atlas Shrugged to cinema after almost 40 years of negotiations, delays, and difficulties, it is disappointing that the end result is not more impressive.

Despite the film’s mediocre quality, its end was met by a surprising response in Reno on Saturday. As the main character, Dagny Taggart, climbs a flame-engulfed hill to be confronted with the destruction of petroleum magnate Ellis Wyatt’s oil fields — the lifeblood of what little remained of the American economy — she screams in terror. The camera pulls away, revealing Wyatt’s parting farewell: “I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It’s yours.”

The crowded theater began to applaud.

While some people of all ideological persuasions, including libertarians, find Ayn Rand’s rather idiosyncratic beliefs and obscure moral code distasteful, the theater’s reaction captures the hidden resonance of her greatest work on grounds she would not have completely anticipated. Indeed, many of the film’s difficulties are less the fault of the director, and more of Rand herself. The primary protagonists of the book are emotionless industrialists, stilted and one-dimensional in their behaviors, thinking only of metal, railroads, and factories.

Atlas Shrugged is compelling, not for its heroes, but for its villains. Published in 1957, Rand’s description of politicians and lobbyists in a time of economic crisis is almost prophetic. These Washington insiders scheme behind closed doors to retain and expand their power. In elaborate press conferences, they attempt to convince the unsuspecting populace of their legislation’s necessity by vilifying productive companies and portraying their own destructive, self-serving designs as being in the interests of the advancement of equality, stability, and progress.

For instance, in Atlas Shrugged, the lobbyist Wesley Mouch decries the capitalist Hank Rearden’s invention of a wonderful alloy that is stronger than steel. And last week, in the real world, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. took to the house floor to declare that Steve Jobs’s iPad was killing jobs. Congress must, according to Jackson, recognize that Apple is driving companies such as Barnes & Noble and Borders out of business, and the company should be stopped in the interests of fairness.

Jackson decried Congress for failing to foster “protection for jobs here in America to ensure that the American people are being put to work.” It’s as if he wanted us to believe the printing press was harmful to the economy because it decreased the demand for scribes. Such a condemnation of a successful business and a demand for protection of failing industries could easily have been lifted directly from Rand’s novel.

However, the similarities are not restricted to a lone Democratic congressman. Similar absurd arguments were bountiful on both sides of the aisle in debates about policies ranging from Obamacare to the bailouts. Americans are directed to believe that if they would just allow the federal government to act in order to prevent further change in the economy, then stability could be restored.

It is this paltry masquerade of politicians feigning action and granting themselves greater power in the name of equality and economic stability that leads Americans to Rand’s story. Indeed, Republicans and Democrats both put on a charade of activity last week, claiming to remedy our nation’s budget woes. Both parties threatened to shut down the government over a series of austerity measures amounting to a final savings of $352 million this fiscal year. That’s $352 million out of budget deficit of approximately $1.6 trillion, or .02 percent of what would be required to actually balance the budget. Politicians bickered over funding for relatively low-cost line items like NPR and Planned Parenthood, all the while ignoring the harsh reality that our public debt is on track to surpass our GDP.

In other words, Republicans and Democrats have managed to mortgage the entire household worth of the United States. Their remedy for this self-imposed tragedy? Grant themselves greater power through increased regulations and rising taxes.

With each repeated failure of federal action to remedy our economic situation, politicians reveal themselves more fully to the American people as nothing but self-serving villains. Their strategy relies on the appearance of action coupled with soaring rhetoric to convince Americans of their good deeds. Meanwhile, these politicians are gambling with our lives and prosperity, risking the well-being of hard-working individuals in thoughtless policies designed merely to secure reelection.

It is due to her apt depiction of these self-serving villains that Ayn Rand’s novel has climbed to number four on the top-sellers list on Amazon and that the film is likely to do far better than its mediocre quality would merit. Americans are growing tired of politicians gambling away their prosperity to preserve their own power. The crowd in Reno applauded as Ellis Wyatt walked away, not because he was some great hero, but because they understood the pain of working tirelessly while a reckless and unproductive government needlessly spends away the results of your labor and rewards your hard work with mounting regulations.

The idea of walking away has become attractive — and indeed, Americans are increasingly leaving the United States for opportunities abroad, with record numbers emigrating to Australia and East Asia.

So long as Ayn Rand’s villains continue to resemble the reality in Washington, the story of Atlas Shrugged will remain popular. The average American may not be a powerful railroad executive or steel magnate, but most believe they are entitled to the fruits of their labor. Many are beginning to realize that their future is being gambled away by politicians whose only risk is losing the votes of the individuals who have lost everything.

Regards,
J. Patrick Rhamey, Jr.
Whiskey & Gunpowder

April 22, 2011

The Continued Relevance of Ayn Rand’s Villains was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

It is with great sorrow that much of the population of the planet now has Stockholm syndrome. They’ve grown to adore and fawn after their captors. Billions in the U.K. flock to see their slave masters inaugurated or wed. “Prince William of Wales has taken a bride,” they shout. “What a glorious day!”

The tax slaves happily pull up to checkpoints and show their documents. Papers please!  “Thank goodness for our overseers or we’d all be killed by communists!” Sorry, terrorists; we are the communists now.

Yet the prisoners don’t even notice that some of their shackles are starting to rust and fall to the ground. All of the wealth and prosperity has drained from the system now to the point where the entire control edifice is in danger of collapsing — yet the sheep see that as something to be feared, not cheered.

“The local police station is closing,” they cry. “Who will be there to fine us or give us a good tasering?” the people wonder. “Who will be there to show up well after any problem has occurred and write it down for us?”

It’s gotten so bad now, they say, that they may have to make some things legal. “We should make marijuana legal and then tax it and give the money to the overseers,” they say. “We must feed the State…Even if it means allowing some freedoms!”

Yet, when actually given the chance, via vote, the slaves line up one after another to deny themselves the right to have freedom of choice.

Goethe said, “No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”.

Land of the free? The poor American, chanting like a raving lunatic that they live in the land of the free when in fact they live in their own proprietary version of North Korea — and in some cases worse. North Koreans can open brokerage accounts in most countries in the world. Americans? Not allowed.

Home of the brave? They stand in line at airports, removing all metal objects, laptops, put their perfume in a see through plastic bag, for no explainable purpose, take off their shoes and belt — all without even being prompted and silently await their pat down.

But, perhaps through all the brainwashing, hypnotism and indoctrination via their 12-16 years of government ‘schooling’ and mainstream media they just don’t even recognize freedom anymore.

We must attack Mexico! They cry, “Mexico is a failed state!” as though that is a bad thing. Why, drugs aren’t even illegal there!  Roll out the B52 Bombers, they rail, to the man who holds the Nobel Peace Prize.

If he wasn’t so busy bombing four other countries, at the moment, he almost certainly would like to. But Mexicans aren’t Muslim and their oil supply is dwindling so they’ll just have to wait for their liberation.

Meanwhile on the streets of the United State they Twitter, they tweet, they Facebook and bleat, oblivious to any reality around them.

“Why do they hate us?” they ponder sometimes. “They hate us for our freedom”, the newscast replies.

Ah, yes, they say, it’s so obvious to see. They are just always going to hate us, because we live in the land of the free. Indeed.

Regards,
Jeff Berwick
The Dollar Vigilante
Whiskey & Gunpowder

April 15, 2011

Land of the Free, Indeed was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Making drugs illegal causes the price to increase, which motivates suppliers to enter the black market to make money. The state gets angry over this economic phenomenon, imposing harsher penalties and more brutally enforcing the laws. That causes prices to go up even more, which motivates more people to enter into the market as suppliers. Ultimately, the black market price gets so high that ordinary citizens are lured into the market in the hopes of scoring big financially.

All the bad consequences of the drug war, however, are not the primary reason for why we should legalize drugs. Freedom is the primary reason to legalize drugs. When the state has the power to put people into jail for ingesting a non-approved substance, there is no way that people in that society can be considered free.

A person is sitting in the privacy of his own living room. He decides to smoke marijuana, snort cocaine, or inject himself with heroin. The state — e.g., the members of Congress, the president, the DEA, the Justice Department — claim the authority to punish the person for doing that.

But it’s that person’s mouth, it’s his body, it’s his health.

Alas, not under terms of the drug war. The state says: We own you, we control you, we regulate you. You do as we say with respect to what you put into your mouth, or else.

How can that possibly be reconciled with fundamental principles of freedom? A society in which freedom is genuine is one in which people are free to engage in any activity, so long as it is peaceful and non-fraudulent. That includes, at a minimum, conduct that could be considered self-destructive.

You want to smoke? That’s your decision. You want to drink? That’s your decision. You want to ingest other drugs, no matter how harmful? That’s your decision. That’s what freedom is all about — the right to live your life the way you want, so long as you don’t initiate force or fraud against others.

Unfortunately, statists take an opposite approach. They say that every person ultimately belongs to society and, therefore, can be controlled and regulated by the state for the benefit of society. Since a person taking drugs is harming society, the collectivist argument goes, the state can send him to his room when he is caught violating drug laws, as much as a parent can do so to a child who violates rules on what he should and shouldn’t put into his mouth.

Most everyone now realizes that government officials benefit tremendously from the drug war, just as drug lords and drug gangs do. There is the ever-burgeoning business of asset forfeiture, including against innocent people, which is a way that the state helps fills its coffers without going through the legislative process of raising taxes. There are the bribes of public officials. And there are simply the jobs that the drug war produces — drug war agents, prosecutors, judges, clerks, and so forth. Thus, it isn’t surprising that among the people who still favor the drug war, government officials and drug lords are at the top of the list. Both groups would be put out of work immediately with drug legalization.

We live in a universe in which bad means beget bad ends. It is not surprising that the drug war produces nothing but bad consequences. Violating a fundamental principle of freedom — what a person chooses to ingest — brings about death, destruction, crisis, chaos, violence, corruption, and other bad consequences. Legalizing drugs would be a major step toward restoring the freedoms of the American people, while also bringing an immediate end to the bad consequences that the drug war produces.

Regards,
Jacob G. Hornberger
Whiskey & Gunpowder

January 21, 2011

The Evils of the Drug War was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.