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Save the Children, Ruin the Country Sam Aurelius Milam III
It's clear that the child support fanatics have no regard whatsoever for constitutions, rights, property, or people over the age of 18. They'll trample anything or anyone for the sake of their own pet agenda using kids as an excuse to control the behavior of people they don't like. It's equally clear that while they're in control we can have children or we can have rights, but we cannot have both. Frankly, I'd rather see the children suffer if the only alternative is the destruction of every vestige of liberty that might otherwise exist. While the child support fanatics are in control, those are the only alternatives. Remember, those fanatics aren't concerned about the children after they're adults. They don't even think of them as people. They see them as a tool to impose a belief system on politically incorrect parents. However, we aren't doing the children any favors if our method of providing for them now guarantees the creation of a slave state for them to inhabit after they're adults. Drug Money NEW YORK (AP) The Treasury Department wants to make it harder for drug cartels to move money out of the United States by requiring that non-bank wire transfers of more than $750 be reported to the government, The New York Times reports. This rule, which has been in effect in New York City on an emergency basis since last summer, is credited with a four-fold increase in seizures of drug money being shipped out of the country. The current reporting threshold elsewhere in the country is $10,000. Monday, May 19, 1997
Wednesday, May 21, 1997
AP NewsBrief by AMY FINKELSTEIN. Delivered via the Farcast(TM) business intelligence service <http://www.farcast.com>.
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Anarchy,
Monarchy, Malarkey
Sam Aurelius Milam III
Many people confuse anarchy with chaos, which is an entirely different thing. Chaos is disorder. Anarchy is order achieved without government coercion. Anarchy has probably never existed, at least not for very long or over a very large area. This is true because of two features of human nature. The first of these two features is that no matter how good things are, some jerk will always find a way to create a problem. When faced with this kind of situation, people have four choices.
Buck passing always seems like the easiest way out. Actually, it's a bad idea. When people empower a third party to regulate the behavior of some obnoxious individual, they give power over themselves to that third party. It isn't always obvious, but the power to regulate the behavior of anyone is also the power to regulate the behavior of everyone. This power is government, which began when the first victim failed to solve his own problem and gave someone else the authority to do it for him. Government is a consequence of the "easy way out". Given these two features of human nature, government is probably inevitable.
Since the justification for government is to solve problems, it follows that the more problems there are the more justification there is for government. It isn't surprising, therefore, that government "solutions" to problems create more problems (and more difficult ones) than they solve. It's known as job security. As the problems multiply and worsen, people in government service (PIGS) can justify more government. Democracy is a currently fashionable form of government advertised as a remedy to the problem of bad government. It returns the responsibility back to the people. However, people are clever at avoiding responsibility and give it right back to the government again through the peculiar mechanism of elected representatives. Of course, once the people use their vote to elect representatives instead of using it to make decisions, then it isn't really a democracy any more. It's a strange kind of oligarchy; an elected one. It isn't a democracy unless all decisions are made by the people. Not to be outdone, the elected oligarches delegate the responsibility for problem solving to bureaucrats. As I said, people are clever at avoiding responsibility. Two hundred years of this particular experiment in buck-passing provides convincing evidence that by starting with what existed in 1789, people will always end up with what exists today. It can best be described as bureaucratic tyranny.
The dismal outcome of this experiment in democracy is all the reason anybody should need to try something different. Maybe some other form of government would be better, so what are the choices? What about a monarchy? At least a king might respect noblesse oblige, and have some regard for his subjects. A democracy certainly doesn't. Also, at least on rare occasions there will be a good king and, if a really bad one takes the throne, perhaps he can be killed. I doubt if there will ever be a good democracy and it appears that nothing can be done about a really bad one because a bureaucracy cannot be assassinated. Another virtue of monarchy is that many of the king's most serious threats will be from intrigues within his own government, giving him an incentive to keep his government small so he can supervise it effectively. No such incentive to smallness exists within a democracy. However, the most important virtue of monarchy is that a king can call a spade a spade, and a good king will do so. If a king grants a privilege, everyone knows it's a privilege. Nobody calls it a right. Veracity is a great virtue. A democracy must always promise what it cannot deliver rights and freedom to get votes. Yet, what passes for a right in a democracy is actually a privilege. What passes for freedom is actually permission. It is all dispensed at the whim or discretion of the various bureaucracies.
When a government becomes large, it becomes coercive. This is unavoidable. When a government becomes coercive, the particular forms of that government become irrelevant. A coercive democracy is no better than a coercive monarchy. The ultimate solution, of course, would be to solve our own problems and dispense with government. However, it's generally illegal for people to solve their own problems when government is pretending to do it for them. This is condemned as "taking the law into our own hands," even though the people are the original source of lawmaking authority. If the establishment of government is inevitable and irreversible, then the next best answer is to make it as small as possible. Any small government (whatever its form) is better than any large one. Objections to this idea generally present the spectre of small governments falling prey to larger ones. There are at least two answers to this objection. The first answer is: if that were continued at the top of page 3
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a probem, then there would no longer be any small
governments left on Earth. The second answer to the objection is
that if the conquest of a small government by a larger one is bad, then
the objection defeats itself. That is, the small government was better;
too bad it was overrun by a larger one.
The question isn't whether small government is better. This has been adequately acknowledged.
The question is how to keep it small. How to keep a government small? You must find your own solution to the problem. No one can do it for you. Isn't that, after all, one of the points of this article? Consider your solution carefully, however, before you start. Re-examine it frequently thereafter. It's far more difficult than you can imagine to correctly predict the consequences of your actions, and ...
Acknowledgments My thanks to Sir Donald the Elusive for paying the production costs of this newsletter. My thanks to Hillary Clinton for being Bill's wife instead of mine. editor
Letters to the Editor Dear Sam, I appreciate your running the piece "Tap A Shoulder, Go To Jail." [May issue, page 2] It is very difficult for most people in this country to understand how our criminal justice system brutalizes people over trivial offenses. Consider the millions of people jailed for victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, pornography), regulatory violations (such as the federal wetlands statutes), or for political reasons (tax resisters, radicals of the far left and right in jail on trumped up charges). All this is lost in the general hysteria about crime. "Law and order" conservatives and the major media give a completely distorted picture of crime, one which rebounds on them. A case in point is the National Rifle Association. Just about every issue of the American Rifleman magazine is replete with rantings about "violent street thugs". This is followed by demands that the government jail just about everyone forever! The fact that many "criminals" are people like your friend Hal, arrested over trivial offenses, is totally beyond them. There is no small irony here in that the government is using many of the "tough" laws that "law and order" types have promoted to persecute gun owning conservatives. But what do they expect that the government is going to allow large numbers of citizens to go about armed? Yet for some perverse reason, the NRA promotes partnerships with law enforcement. When the government decides to confiscate all guns, it will be the local police who will do the majority of the dirty work (just as they do in the drug war). A recent issue of the American Rifleman had an editorial complaining about asset forfeiture, zero tolerance and RICO laws. Incredibly, the NRA is claiming that it has been "liberals" who are behind these laws. Total nonsense. These laws were put into place by the "law and order" types themselves. Conservatives are finding that as a friend of government they are its very next victim. Joseph; Burbank, California
(E-mail to the editor via Pharos) Remember, when the government comes for your guns ....... give them your ammunition first! R B; Colorado Springs, Colorado
Jan; Firth, Idaho
Editor, In Ron Paul's article "A Police State," [May issue, page 3] he says that the Waco slaughter was "all over a $200 unpaid federal fee." In all the articles I have read about that incident, nothing was said about it. If more information is available, I would like to hear about it. Ron Paul also says that the role of the FBI changed in the 1930's. It is common knowledge that it was changed in the 1920's in response to the murders of FBI field agents1 during their war on organized crime during the prohibition era2 .... Under George Washington, Alexander Hamilton called out the militia to force the producers of distilled spirits to pay an excise tax. The wrong side won. Ever since then, if any individual or group defies the dictates of the government, an armed force is raised to "restore order." The most recent examples are Wounded Knee, Ruby Ridge, and Waco.3 Pedophiles, pushers, and cultists are currently being used as an excuse to increase the size of the armed force that will ultimately be used to disarm every Citizen of the United States of America .... James; United States of America
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