Frontiersman, March 1994

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Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief: A Satirical Essay
by Sam Aurelius Milam III

Part 3: He caught a crooked cat
Who caught a crooked mouse
It has been said that Policemen and Criminals come from the same cultural origins.¹ Be that as it may, they do visit (or occupy) many of the same institutions, one might call them clubs, and they consume a considerable amount of one another's resources. The commitment of Police resources to the pursuit of Criminals is a warm endorsement for the criminal sector. Were it not for the frequent diversions provided by hard working Criminals, the Police would be forced to call upon their own imagination and ingenuity for something to do, and would most likely fall to bickering among themselves, or petty harassment of the Citizens. Since acts of constituted authority are usually difficult to distinguish from acts of other forms of authority, it is important to control the Police.² To this end the welfare recipients can be of great service to society, as I shall now demonstrate.
Many methods of controlling the Police have been tried. Direct opposition has been tried repeatedly, but has the disadvantage of direct and usually damaging involvement of the group that should be most protected from the Police, i.e., the Citizens. Control by legal constraints is the method most strongly promoted by government, in spite of the obvious fallacy of using laws to control the law enforcers. This type of intentional myopia is typical of government. Intimidation works poorly, if at all, because Policemen are inherently more intimidating than Citizens. Sniping is too slow to be effective. Furthermore, Citizens must snipe on their own time and at their own expense. Policemen get paid for it, and supplied with arms and ammunition. After some consideration, it becomes evident to the scholar that diversion by Criminals has all the advantages. The Citizens don't have to be bothered by direct contact with the Police. The Criminals and the Police keep each other well occupied,³ allowing both the Police and the Criminals to feel needed. Bleeding Hearts and Do-Gooders, naturally, have a field day. Since any increase in the criminal sector provides more work for the Police, the erstwhile recipients of welfare can be of great value to society. That is, in addition to the financial benefit, CRIME would result in an added degree of protection of the Citizens from the Police, a definite social advantage. Even this, however, isn't the ultimate benefit.

Coming Soon:

Part 4:
And they all lived together
In a little crooked house

Project for PIGS
by Sir Cuitous Writley
Most People In Government Service (PIGS) could probably be kept busy with completely harmless activities
Continued at Busy, page 2

If Truth were the only weapon in the world, the U.S. government would be totally unarmed.

Buck Hunter Shoots Off His Mouth
Dear Buck
In general, what do you think of opera?
— Music Lover

Dear Music Lover
I guess she's OK, but her show doesn't really have all that much music, does it?
Dear Buck
Why do you give people such weird answers?
— Abby

Dear Abby
You write your column, I'll write mine.

If you started repealing laws purely at random, you'd have about a 99% chance of improving things.

This statement was at one time attributed to a convicted felon who, just before he was executed, objected that besides being untrue, it was unnecessarily insulting to criminals. He had, he claimed, read it in the Police Gazette.

Police organizations cannot be prevented. They are the forerunners of all government, which cannot exist without them. Therefore, the best that can be expected, given government, is some form of control.

This, it turns out, isn't without its disadvantages, as I will explain in the discussion of Racket Ratcheting, next month.

EVOLUTION IN ACTION
GUN CONTROL: LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND STATISTICS
by Robert Ettinger
Reprinted from The Immortalist, Volume 25, Number 1
24443 Roanoke, Oak Park, MI 48237, January, 1994

The relation to immortalism and cryonics is only tangential, but sometimes we can't resist straying into these areas. Most of us are greatly concerned with freedom, and threats to freedom threaten almost everything.

STATISTICAL FRAUD. Let's look first at an item from Medical Abstracts, Nov. 1993:

GUNS IN THE HOME: MORE PERIL THAN PROTECTION
Homicide -- violent death at the hands of another -- is the 11th leading cause of fatalities among all age groups and the second leading cause of death among Americans age 15 to 24 years. With so much violence in our society, many people think their best protection is to own a gun. That's a fallacy, according to a new study of 388 homicide victims who were killed in their own homes. Compared to households in the same neighborhood where no homicides occurred, research showed that the risk of homicide was nearly tripled In homes where a gun was kept. In almost all cases, the homicide was committed by a family member or close acquaintance and wasn't associated with forced entry into the home. But even in cases of forced entry, there was no evidence that gun ownership provided any protection against homicide, the authors say. (A.L. Kellermann et al., New England Journal of Medicine 329:1084, Oct. 1993)

To the hurried or the unwary, this may look credible and reasonable; actually, it is an egregious example of statistical fraud.

"... even in cases of forced entry, there was no evidence that gun ownership provided any protection against homicide." But the study only included cases where homicide did occur! Successful defense cases were not included. Gibber, gibber.

Another gibberish sentence says that risk of homicide was nearly tripled in homes with guns, "compared to households ... where no homicides occurred." This ratio would actually be infinity, not three. Maybe this particular gibber was the abstract writer's, rather than that of the study's authors.

COUNTRY STATISTICS. Sometimes the gun-control crowd claim crime is lower in countries with strict gun controls. There are no reliable statistics on this -- too many variables. In Switzerland every adult male is required to keep arms, and there is no crime wave there. In Israel most households keep arms, and crime there is much lower than here. See also the reprint below on Florida.¹

FALSE PREMISES. Beyond this, the premises are false. If our only concern were to minimize casualties -- which is the implicit assumption of the "control" crowd -- almost everything would be illegal, certainly including automobiles, not to mention tobacco. Freedoms include risks.

A similar false premise is that we are, or should be, concerned only with saving lives. Wrong. We are also concerned with saving freedom and dignity and property. I will shoot any intruder before I find out (the hard way) whether he wants just my property or also my life or body, or my wife's. I will not yell "Freeze!" and give him or his partner the chance to shoot first; I will just fire. After all, anyone who forces entry and comes past the clamor of the dogs is presumptively very dangerous.

Still another implicit false premise is that we are concerned with protection only against common criminals. Wrong again. We also want potential protection against police or armed forces gone amok. If the citizens have more small arms than the police and army, a dictatorship or abuse of official power is less likely. This was a primary consideration of the founding fathers.

HOW ABOUT THE IRRESPONSIBLE AND THEIR FAMILIES? An argument can be made that the stupid, the ignorant, the careless -- and their families -- need to be protected against poor judgment, fits of rage, etc. The correct answer is -- not at my expense. If they are maimed or killed, it's sad -- but it's evolution in action. Ideally, we will freeze them, and later revive and improve them. Meanwhile, we can spend some money on educational propaganda. The popular media in some cases are doing better and better jobs of informing people of risks and hazards.

THE BRADY BILL was wrong for two reasons. First, it will have only the tiniest effect on violent crime and will penalize only honest citizens, since violent criminals are already armed or will buy weapons illicitly. More important, its proponents have admitted -- openly, loudly, and often -- that this is only the camel's nose, their entering wedge in a projected campaign of ever more stringent controls. In itself it has little importance one way or the other, but it has made the defense of freedom more difficult.

Busy (from page 1)
by using a technique recently developed by the staff and editor of this newsletter. The method is intended to take advantage of the normal mentality of the bureaucratic mind,
Continued at Project, page 3

Frontiersman Editor's Note: I didn't re-print the Florida article.

Good Politics, Bad Medicine
by Sam Aurelius Milam III

On January 8, 1994, the San Jose Mercury News printed a letter by Ron Berti. In his letter, Mr. Berti stated:

"Health care cannot be a 'right' because, unlike real rights such as the right to free speech or assembly, health care costs money. If we say that someone has a right to health care regardless of his ability to pay, what we are saying is that he has a right to demand that everyone else in society cover the cost of his ailment, whether we like it or not. If that's true, where do we draw the line on other 'rights' such as food, clothing, shelter or my used Porsche? Asserting a right does not make it so."

The idea that anybody should be able to demand any medical treatment that he wants, and get it whether or not he can pay for it, is a stupid idea. It means that the sicker a person is, the more power he has to command others. The sickest person in the country is then the most powerful dictator, and the healthiest people are his most abject servants.

There's nothing wrong with a sick person asking for help, and there's nothing wrong with charitable assistance. But to call medical care a right is to denigrate rights in general. To make charity coercive destroys charity. People have always obtained whatever medical care they could, and beyond that either they got better, they stayed sick, they or died. Eventually, they died anyway. It's a necessary end; it's more dignified than vegetating in a tangle of tubes, wires, and hardware; and it has, if nothing else, the tendency to keep the world from getting more overpopulated. The pursuit of eternal life at our children's expense is a very selfish idea.

The belief that government can somehow mandate universal medical care is a dangerous fantasy. Any such scenario will give the government every excuse to define a prophylactic lifestyle for everyone, and to enforce it. There's already ample precedent for such supervision. If you think the government is intrusive now, just wait for a national "health care" plan to take effect. You ain't seen nothin' yet!

The Race for Genetic Technology
(And Some Members of the Race Against It)
by Sam Aurelius Milam III
Horses

Throughout history, people have been more dangerous than any weapon they have ever invented. People have been more destructive than any natural disaster ever experienced. They have been more repressive than any ancient god ever imagined. Eventually, someone has used every new technology, without exception, to harm or control other people. Today, scientists are inventing the technology by which man can at last demonstrate his real capacity for inhumanity to man. With the advent of genetic technology, terror has come of age. Nuclear weapons are paltry by comparison.

Before you applaud the alleged benefits by which genetic technology is acclaimed, try to imagine the worst people available in control of the technology. Imagine the harm they could do. Realize that their ability to deliver a specific genetic change providing a predictable adjustment in human character, and to deliver that change in an undetectable aerosol to an unsuspecting population, is only a molecule or two away. One day by simply taking a breath, you could fall under the control of a new and irreversible order of authority. After government has used genetic technology to design compliance into the people, it will be impossible to remove that technology from the hands of government. Compare this risk to the alternative of simply continuing to do without a technology that we have never had anyway.

All things considered, genetic technology isn't just a another tool for coercion. It makes coercion obsolete. Political science is no longer the silly contradiction in terms that amused us in the past. Today, it has taken on a whole new meaning, and despotism is paltry by comparison.

Project (from page 2)
and lock the PIGS into a cycle of
Continued at Day, page 4

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Day (from page 3)
nonproductive yet harmless work, whereby
Continued at Project for PIGS, page 1

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