Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Lew Rockwell: Liberation from the state...

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” So said Thomas Paine in Common Sense, a pamphlet that sparked the American Revolution. We face similar trying times today. The American government embroils us in destructive, costly, and illegal wars. Under the malign management of the Fed, money and credit are subject to inflationary pressures that, as Austrian business cycle theory explains, lead to depressions. The government subjects us to a crushing tax burden. Our civil liberties are under continued assault, and the government claims the right to kill us without trial. The government’s excuse for this is the unnecessary “war on terror.” If we didn’t intervene abroad, there would be no terrorist blowback against America. In any case, the threat is grossly exaggerated. As if this were not enough, the government also wages a harmful “war on drugs” that puts thousands in jail and discriminates against blacks.

Matters are no better at the state and local levels. The police are supposed to protect us, but all-too-often, they kill us instead. SWAT teams sometimes go to the wrong address on their misbegotten drug raids and then kill and brutalize innocent victims. State and local governments take over our property under “eminent domain.” These governments also take away our money through taxation. The state school system has failed miserably. It subjects its young captives to compulsory indoctrination, designed to get them to be pliant to the depredations of the government.

The list could go on and on. These evils are not the product of temporary malfunctions in the state. To the contrary, the state is by nature evil. As Franz Oppenheimer and his disciple Albert Jay Nock showed, the state began in violence and it has always been an instrument of violence. It is a means by which one group in society can exploit the rest of us. St. Augustine said, “Without justice, what is the state but a great robbery?” Without justice — the state by its nature cannot be just. Full story...

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