Brush Fires of Freedom

The State is not an end, the State is a means.

The State is not police or courts, it is not law. You can hire security, or pay for arbitration. You can be obligated to fulfill a contract. Yet the State is capable of much more, it is used to educate, build roads, provide health care, deliver mail, design cars, and raise children.

The State is not defined by what it produces, it is not a service, it is method of production.

It is the method of taking. It is both immoral and impractical, no matter what service is being provided. The State is the administrator of taxation. It can not be reformed, whether it is the king or the People who are taking, makes no difference. It is the method itself that is defective, not the administrator.

The only alternative to the State is freedom, where production occurs because of consent. This is the method of ownership, contracts, and trade.

Its an all too common modifier. We hear about over taxing, over spending, over regulation.

Its a strange indictment. Its not a legalistic term, we do not hear of over robbing or over battering. It implies more a sense of stewardship or worse, that the State is damaging its own interesting by its actions.

Rudy Giuliani, who champions lower taxes because of Reagonics, subscribes to that second view. He believes that lowering taxes will increase his revenue. Although this is not an issue for the Central Government of the United State of America, which has no budget constraints thanks to its monopoly on counterfeiting. 

It is not a moral indictment, only a pragmatic one. No one can overspend to an extent that is immoral, only to the point of it being harmful to themselves. 

People who are against "over" taxing, like Rudy Giuliani, are not necessarily natural allies of people who are against taxation, like us anarchist. There is no more a connection than between people who are opposed to spending money liberally(i.e thrifty people) and Communists opposed to money all together.

Consider this scenario, police meaning to a serve a no-knock warrant get lost and mistakenly end up invading the wrong house. The home owner, defending his home from unidentified assailants, fires at and kills an officer. Who is to blame?

One defense for the officers jumps to mind, the home owner should have known that they were police officers, if for no other reason than no simple criminals would employ such bold and violent methods of entry. In addition to not being factually correct, it also fails as a defense because the homeowner, being a good citizen, is far more likely attribute the act to thugs rather than public servants.

But clearly the blame lies on the officers, as they failed to perform their duties correctly, by invading the proper house. This event could have been prevented most easily by the officers, who both made a thoughtful decision and performed an action removed from routine, rather than by the home owner who made a decision under stress while believing himself to be in normal circumstances. We must conclude that the officers were where they did not belong and the home owner acted justifiably towards armed men who presence infringed on his rights.

There could be other scenarios where officers have no legitimate reason to enter a home. Suppose the warrant was served at the correct house, but the inhabitants were innocent of the charge, that officers were sent to collect drugs that do not exist. The home owner would not have any reason to act differently than he did in the first scenario, and the presence of the officers would be still unjustified and infringe on the owner's rights. This change in the scenario does not require a change in our conclusion.

The last scenario involves a mistake not in enforcement of a law, but in the creation of that law. This time the warrant is served at the correct house and the house really does contain the sought drugs. In this scenario the home owner is more likely to identify the intruders as police, as he is actually guilty. But what about the presence of the police, what is there purpose for being there? They are enforcing a law who's stated purpose is to infringe on the property rights of others. The only difference between this scenario and the previous two is that the officers are not accidentally infringing on a person's property and his peaceful use of it, they are deliberately doing it. Should the home owner fire on the officers, I still see no reason to change our conclusion on who is at fault.

That conclusion is from a legalistic view point, not unnecessarily a moral or philosophical one.  Libertarians may choose to not endorse violent defenses against the State's abuses*, but they can not support legal retribution against the rebels. Legality involves what you will be deliberately punished for, morality involves what you should do.  Not resisting the officers would probably provide a more desirable outcome for home owner, even if he is legally in his rights to defend his property. Mathew's acknowledgment that "all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword" was a moral statement of the impractically of violence, it is not a legal code that promises retribution to violators. 

*I do not endorse violence.

On May 1st 2003, George Bush announced the "end" of "major combat operations" in Iraq. At that point 139 Americans had died. Now, more than 4 years later, 3,815 members of the American Military have been killed in Iraq.  The American death toll pales in comparison to the number of dead Iraqis, what is significant is that peasant militias have managed to kill 27 times as many Americans as Iraq's central government did.

America is on the losing side of an arms race that has been going on through out history.

Kingdoms and empires are built on power disparity. War has always been the realm of the elite. A privileged warrior class, well practiced and armored, decided battles. Homer acknowledged this through the character Achilles, who demonstrated the power that even a single one of these warlords had in deciding the outcome of a battle and the importance of their armor, something that only the rich could afford.

As wealth disparity changed, so did war. Both the Greeks and the Romans rose to power by fielding citizen armies. Their middle classes(built on slavery) supplied large numbers of soldiers able to supply their own weapons. This grew the warrior class and as war became more populist, so did governance!

But with the accumulation of capital and the march of technology that power disparity is ending. From Longbows to Firearms to IEDs. From Agincourt to Lexington to Vietnam.

Mechanics and chemistry have made natural strength meaningless to martial prowess. And no longer does wealth disparity necessarily mean power disparity, guns are cheap, plentiful, and require little training. Where capital is plentiful, labor becomes relatively more valuable. The wealthy seek to employ their capital to maximize their manpower, yet a tank that can be destroyed by a homemade bomb is as relevant as knight that can be killed by a peasant's musket.  Guerrilla warfare continues to increase in lethality.

As the State's dominance of warfare has diminished it must depend even more on ideas to maintain its existence. Only two empires survived the surge of nationalism and firearms in the Post-World War II era, the US and the USSR. Both were chimeras using populist rhetoric to justify state control.

The American Empire's military supremacy over the world today is without precedent. It could send its military any where in world (not to mention completely annihilate it with nuclear weapons). The power disparity between it and other militaries in the world is immense, yet it has failed to successfully occupy the ex-colonies it has invade, countries that had been governed by the Japanese, French, and English empires only decades earlier.

Its very possible that by the time the American Empire falls no amount of military might will ever be able to recreate it.

P.S.

If anyone has any feedback or relevant sources, I'd love to hear it.