Posted on 01/14/2016 7:03:00 PM PST by huckfillary
Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.
In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.
What makes anyone think that government officials are even trying to protect us? A government is not analogous to a hired security guard. Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please consumers in a competitive market. Instead, they are born in conquest and nourished by plunder. They are, in short, well-armed gangs intent on organized crime. Yes, rulers have sometimes come to recognize the prudence of protecting the herd they are milking and even of improving its ‘infrastructure’ until the day they decide to slaughter the young bulls, but the idea that government officials seek to promote my interests or yours is little more than propaganda—unless, of course, you happen to belong to the class of privileged tax eaters who give significant support to the government and therefore receive in return a share of the loot.
In regard to the so-called social contract, I have often had occasion to protest that I haven’t even seen the contract, much less been asked to consent to it. A valid contract requires voluntary offer, acceptance, and consideration. I’ve never received an offer from my rulers, so I certainly have not accepted one; and rather than consideration, I have received nothing but contempt from the rulers, who, notwithstanding the absence of any agreement, have indubitably threatened me with grave harm in the event that I fail to comply with their edicts.
Every year, on Veterans Day, orators declare that our leaders have gone to war to preserve our freedoms and have done so with glorious success, but the truth is just the opposite. In ways big and small, direct and indirect, crude and subtle, war—the quintessential government activity—has been the mother’s milk for the nourishment of a growing tyranny in this country, and it remains so today.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am — not stuck in the middle, but hovering above the entire farcical spectrum, weeping as I behold my fellow man’s devotion to political illusion and self-destruction.
H. L. Mencken famously said that “every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.†By now, however, I am no longer ashamed, because I do not identify with the government under which I live. Rather, I view it as a criminal organization that without provocation has chosen to make war on my just rights—not only mine, of course, but everyone’s. Although this vile enterprise is my problem, because it robs and bullies me relentlessly and without mercy, it is not my responsibility: the nail is not the hammer.
It is a sound interpretive rule…that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all.
Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.
Voting, the be all and end all of modern democratic politicians, has become a farce, if indeed it was ever anything else. By voting, the people decide only which of the oligarchs preselected for them as viable candidates will wield the whip used to flog them and will command the legion of willing accomplices and anointed lickspittles who perpetrate the countless violations of the people’s natural rights. Meanwhile, the masters soothe the masses by assuring them night and day that they — the plundered and bullied multitudes who compose the electorate — are themselves the government.
People and their values are almost infinitely diverse, and people will never agree on many elements of social arrangements that might be subjected to uniform rules of governance. Hence, the greater the scope of strictly individual self-determination, the lesser the scope of governance, and the greater the tolerance with which people live and let live among their fellows, the more peaceful and flourishing society will be
As Herbert Stein commented in the 1980s, after having observed the process at close quarters for nearly half a century, businessmen “had learned to live with and accept most of the regulations.†Disturbed only by new and unfamiliar regulations, “they regard the regulations they are used to as being freedom†(1984, 84).
General George C. Marshall’s words, making “sacrifices today in order that we may enjoy security and peace tomorrow†(qtd. in Neumann 1953, 549).9 The claim was either a mistake or a lie, however, because the U.S. government did not need to go to war, not even in the world wars, to preserve its people’s essential liberties and their way of life. Neither Kaiser Wilhelm’s forces nor Hitler’s—and certainly not Japan’s—had the capacity to deprive Americans of their liberties, to “take over the country,†to “destroy our way of life,†or to do anything of the sort. This country has always contained persecuted minorities, and it still does, but since 1789 the only government on earth that has had the power to crush the American people’s liberties across the board has been the government of the United States. U.S. participation in World War I was
Nearly all libertarians were once conservatives or progressives or independent statists of some stripe. But scarcely any conservatives, progressives, or independent statists were once libertarians. This asymmetry in the direction of ideological migration is interesting and perhaps informative.
The government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged ‘services’ and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.
A valid contract requires voluntary offer, acceptance, and consideration.
Anarchists are useful idiots that the totalitarians use and immediately liquidate.
The range of useful idiots for totalitarians to use and dispose of does not consist solely of the anarchists. No one not in the tight circle of the totalitarian’s sphere is sacred. Eventually all are chewed up by the gang leaders.
Psst! Run your ass off!!!
Anarchists and potheads go hand in hand
If Mr. Higgs wants anarchy, I’ve got a couple of neighborhoods on the South Side and the West Side of Chicago I can direct him to.
Higgs blowson ?
Anarchists killed many people in Spain leading up to and during the first year of the Spanish Civil War. Eventually their own allies (the Communists) killed their leaders and pressed them into government units in 1937; they were too extreme even for the communist government. They were the most determined to erase the Old Order by murder, while the communists knew they needed some of the Old Order to survive.
George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was influenced by those events; he supported the anarchists, and directed his ire at the communists after the 1937 purge. His criticisms could be applied to the Obama administration today: Great victories reported where there had been no battles (see Obama on foreign policy, the environment) and complete blackouts of bad news (see unemployment and race relations under Obama, as well as the disastrous ObamaCare fallout).
Seems like they killed Archduke Ferdinand and the Misses. Started a little party called The Great War, later known as WWI.
Interesting that the reasons that killing snowballed from an isolated assassination into global conflict were the various pacts between the governments involved. What could have been something relatively local expanded because of governments, not because of anarchists.
Do you think trying to overthrow a government might cause a conflict?
I went to the museum in Vienna that has Ferdinand’s car with a couple bullet holes near the top of the rear door. Also the uniform he was wearing.
Seems like he wasn’t very tall.
I believe they gave us “May Day” after the Haymarket Square bombing; President McKinley was killed by an anarchist as well.
Not nice people...
First-rate reading list!
However, those entangling alliances, the ones George Washington warned us about, managed to draw nearly all of Europe and Russia into the conflict. What should have been a local matter became a global one, and that bloodbath set the stage for the next World War, as well as the rise of Communism in Russia and eventually the cold war and proxy conflicts during and since.
Kaiser Wilhelm sent for Lenin, who was in Switzerland, and had him go to Russia in hopes of stirring up trouble at home for the Czar, in order to render Russian military efforts ineffective, and free up more troops and materiel for the Western Front. That worked superbly, as the monarchy was overthrown in Russia, leading to the USSR.
Funny thing about WWI was that it was a family feud. The leaders of the major players were the kids of Queen Victoria.
Nature abhors a vaccuum. In human nature, someone always wants to tell others what to do. Some mutual effort is needed but it seems the proper balance of individual freedom and group pressure is elusive. Maybe that’s why the folks in charge want to ban guns.
Yep. The Kaiser, Czar, and King of England were cousins.
Yes, you have - it's the Constitution. The weakness of the Social Contract theory in this context was pointed out by Edmund Burke two centuries ago: only the first generation under any such contract actually gets to debate the matter, and those who follow are under a "take it or leave it" status, with the exception in the case of the Constitution that "amend it" is a valid, if difficult, option. It is a little difficult to imagine an improvement on that admittedly ad hoc solution.
I grow weary of anarchists who are deliberately myopic on this point. There is no tabula rasa and there never was. All political solutions proceed from their originating environment and move forward from there. Only God gets to decide the whole thing all over again and He has a disturbing habit of wiping the planet clean in so doing.
The Constitution itself is an ad hoc solution and as such inherently imperfect, but given a choice of operating under its strictures or under any other in historical evidence, I'll take the Constitution. It's enough of a social contract to keep us from killing one another over politics, after all, and if that's all it serves to effect it's worth the effort. YMMV.
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