'Never Come Back from Copperhead Road'
In a sense, government agents are just a different kind of criminal…
Most people believe in your right to defend yourself in exigent circumstances. In the moment, when your life or safety is threatened, you may take whatever steps are necessary to repel the threat.
Beyond that, agreement declines.
Some believe you should allow yourself or your home to be robbed rather than use physical force. They fail to grasp that property is not only necessary for life, it is an extension of one’s self-ownership. (Then again, there are a lot of things that people fail to grasp.)
Some believe only the “authorities” should own guns. Yeah, that’s right, we’ll all just sit and allow ourselves to be assaulted and robbed. The police will save us. Don’t even get me started.
But then a different kind of question arises. What if the violence isn’t exigent at all? What if it’s ongoing?
We have spoken about it many times before, and we will speak of it again: government is violence. Government itself is a constant attack.
Taxation is theft. Taxation is slavery.
All laws invented by legislatures are a violation of rights. If the law comports with natural law, then it is unnecessary. If it does not, then it is impermissible. Either way, statute law is not needed. Natural law principles can be stated simply in a written constitution, and then actual cases can be adjudicated in (private) courts, using an organic, common-law process: emergent order + accumulated human wisdom.
All force or threat of force against peaceful individuals is morally impermissible..and yet that is definitionally what government does and is.
All violations of consent are morally impermissible, and the normal behavior and very existence of involuntary government are a constant violation of consent.
It gets worse. Not only are government officials and enforcers engaged in a constant attack against you, but the whole system pits your fellow man against you too.
Every government employee is stealing from you—at least to pay his salary, and sometimes more. Every special interest…every recipient of welfare (corporate or individual)…every player with government connections. Every public school teacher. Every policeman. Every voter who votes to have things taken from you, and laws imposed upon you, without your consent. And that is just about every voter.
The whole system is the initiation of coercive force against you.
As we know, protective force is morally justified against coercive force, and at one level of analysis, protective force would be justified in response to all of this. But…
As I will argue in the coming months, there are ethical, practical, and social reasons why a different approach is required: Evolution rather than revolution. Escape rather than imposing our way of life on anyone else. And yet, the emotional effect remains: once you know that you’re under constant attack, you feel it and you hate it.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I were watching a movie in which agents of the US Treasury department were chasing down criminals, and I suddenly realized I was siding with the criminals. Their “crime” was what, exactly?
Their crime was not giving the government its cut. Government is a racketeering operation— a mafia operating under the presumption of legitimate authority.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, government “revenuers” would travel around collecting their cut of alcohol sales and shutting down moonshine operations. Why would they want to shut down moonshine operations? Because they cannot collect their cut of moonshine sales.
Yes, government engages in some rights-protective activities (in an inefficient and ex ante rights-violative way). But at its core, government is a racket, imposed by violence, and granted the presumption of legitimacy. No matter how disgusted you are by it, it’s probably not disgusted enough.
So, for today’s #FreedomMusicFriday, I am going to post a song1 about…
Rural people trying to make a living and the revenuers trying to claim the government’s cut.
The enslavement of the draft: Do what we say, fight where we say, kill whom we tell you to kill, die when we say die.
An asymmetric/guerrilla response to this constant condition of low-grade oppression.
On this last point…
I am not recommending violence. Indeed, as I have repeatedly stated, I believe a peaceful, evolutionary response is what is needed and has the greatest chance of success.
Still, the song is damned satisfying to listen to. Follow along with the lyrics. You’ll see.
Does anyone think that the cultural assassination of all things Dixie, Rebels, the Southern Cross, etc was really about erasing the "racist history" of the South, burying it, symbols so offensive to blacks, that even the Dukes of Hazzard had to be given cement feet and tossed into the ocean? Or perhaps it was because cultural icons of disobedience to illegitimate, corrupt, crooked authority might give people who've had a belly-full ideas about disobeying illegitimate, corrupted, crooked authority?
Once upon a time, even as I was growing up, James Dean was famous for his "Rebel Without a Cause" image. Billy Idol for his "Rebel Yell" music. The Dukes of Hazzard for General Lee (and Daisy Duke shorts)?
From my question it's pretty obvious I think all that burying of our nation's history, its rebellious icons was purposeful, and really had nothing to do with slavery and racism. What say you?
Flattenin' the hills...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqm4k1UOiPI
On what seems to be the eve of another war, another overthrowing of a regime causing chaos, another group of war pigs revving up the military industrial complex, its hard for me to watch billions more of our tax money go to killing people while homeless vets sleep in boxes. Have we learned nothing from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria?
DC is a violent crime ridden shit hole. Maybe the war pigs should clean up their own house before blowing up another country.
You played this song a little while back as a cover. Here’s the original with a great original video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQUXuQ6Zd9w