Ferguson Police vs. Rothbard’s idea of peace keepers

For decades I have been decrying the increasingly brutal militarization of the police at all levels in the United States. The latest atrocity to catch the public’s eye is the public murder of an unarmed young black man named Michael Brown in Freguson. Missouri on August 9th, 2014 by uniformed goons of the state.

If the brutal killing of Michael Brown in cold blood was not enough, the police then started harassing all sorts of other people going about their jobs and lives in innocence. Consider the Washington Post reporter who was arrested in a McDonald’s resturant for being a reporter.

The Huffington Post reported:

The Washington Post uploaded video of its reporter Wesley Lowery being arrested by police in Ferguson, MO on Wednesday night.

Lowery and The Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly were working at a McDonald’s when they were violently assaulted and detained by a SWAT unit before being released.

In the video, a police officer can be heard saying, “Get your stuff, let’s go,” and, “Stop videotaping, let’s grab our stuff and go.”

It is legal to film police activity. Lowery and Reilly were given no concrete reason for their arrest.

Police abuses of power have been common place in this country for ages. The first one I remember in my life was the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where the police beat people in the streets outside the convention. The police in those days were restrained and professional compared to today’s militarized sociopaths in blue preying on the innocent in all parts of America. As bad as the Chicago police acted, we can all wish for those days of no SWAT teams and no army gear in domestic policing.

Have the police always abused their power? Yes, history teaches that the police have always been prone to abusing the general public. Of course they often pick on the poor and powerless the most as you would expect from sociopath bullies. The main issue to me is the fact that the police are to the state as the edge of the blade is to the knife. The police are the violence that the state intimidates you with.

Some libertarians and “small government” conservatives believe in “minarchism” and claim that the police are needed to “keep the peace” in society. These people have drunk the poison that is the state and let the demon in the door by supporting the violent arm of the state. There is no reason to expect that the police and the “justice” system will ultimately be anything other than a police state. We can find no historical examples of any state that did not ultimately abuse its citizens: at least those seen as “undesirable”. The Germans called them untermensch. Every society has their “subhumans” who are brutalized, and the brutality will spread over time to more and more of the population.

What to do? Murray Rothbard believed that ultimately the answer was no state and no state enforcers. The society would govern itself via mutual, voluntary cooperation. But what about protection you ask? I could point out that you are getting precious little “protection” now. You are just lucky that one of the brutal goons has not noticed you yet.

If all property were really privately owned, then all of the problems of the state police become easily managed. The one who controls the property decides on who to hire to keep the peace on his property. For most it might be the agents of their insurance company and for commercial business it might be “rent-a-cops” hired on contract to provide a safe environment for the customers of the firm. These examples are just fast generalizations and entire books have been written on privatization of protection and law enforcement.

Police in a truly free-market would have a strong incentive to be courteous. They would have a strong incentive to refrain from the force and brutality that is an everyday part of the policing by minions of the state. The private police hired by owners of private property would have a strong incentive to please their clients, friends of their clients, and customers of their clients. A real free-market would reward the most efficient and courteous firms that provide safety and protection.

As I have written before, the police of the state are never your friend. Any “service” they provide you is just happenstance. (or you pay them extra for it) But the real message in all this is that it is the state itself that must go so that mankind can learn to live in peace and to prosper by mutual, voluntary cooperation.

 

 

Tax consumers and the brutality of the state

As the U.S. becomes more and more a police state, the population needs to realize that the government is not “us”. The government is the enemy that divides us into various groups in a divide and conquer strategy. It views the mundane citizen as a milk cow to produce the things that enables the government’s own agenda.

The risible idea that public servants share the burden of government when public servants are the burden of government is yet another ideological scale that the libertarian must remove from the eyes of the masses so that they can see the truth. The truth as classic libertarian class analysis demonstrates is that the State divides the people into two classes: tax payers and tax consumers. Tax payers are those who produce and exchange in the market. Tax consumers are those who live off of the production of those who exchange in the market. And without a clear delineation between who is a tax payer and who is a tax consumer, the tax payers will never see that they are the exploited class. They will never realize that the tax consumers live off of their production and that the tax consumers composing the ruling class uses tax payers own resources to crush their freedoms. Instead the tax payers will continue to think that their rulers are actually on equal standing with them. — Brutus

The tax consumers are legion. It is not just the “welfare queens” or the local bureaucrats that everyone loves to malign. The tax consumers are all those people who do not “produce and exchange in the market“. In other words, the tax consumers are those people who do not live by voluntary, mutual exchange but rather they live be coercion and threat — the state is their weapon. Everyone from the president down to the guy who runs the local street sweeping machine for the city are tax consumers and live by the force and brutality that is the state. This tax consuming class amounts to more than half of the country at the present time, so the battle for freedom and liberty is going to be a long row to hoe. America was founded on the ideas of the classical liberals but in these modern times we have rejected their policies as a people.

As the president claims that he can take the country to a new war in the middle east without any vote by congress authorizing the action we see some big government conservatives complain about “presidential over-reach”. But these same people who are worried about the constitutionality of the president’s claim are happy to see the vast amount of new private prisons being built to cage people for ingesting or smoking a weed without the expressed permission of the state. This is, obviously, unconstitutional to anyone capable of reading and understanding the document but our conservative friends love big and intrusive government as long as it is making people do what these conservatives think they should do.

But let us not just blame the neo-con war-mongers who are so beloved by the mainstream media these days. Anyone who believes in democracy or the collective will is responsible for the actions of the state that they support. Every instance of police brutality, deaths in no-knock drug raids by SWAT teams, massive “collateral damage” in our continuing brutal occupations in foreign countries, or any of the other countless wrongs committed by the state is a crime that all state supporters share in. It is like all members of a criminal gang share in the culpability of the crimes the gang commits. And so supporters of the state share in the responsibility for all the crimes of the state — yes even down to the public school teacher. There is no such thing as the ‘collective will.’ Democracy is merely tool used by the majority to trample on the rights of the minority; and those in control will ultimately use the state to trample on the rights of almost everyone. All states become ever more a police state.

The only real answer to our many problems is to stop asking the government to “fix things” in the first place. Don’t ask government to “create jobs” or to “fix” the situation in Iraq. Peace, prosperity and a state of well being can only be created by individuals agreeing to exchange their labor and capital by mutual, voluntary consent. The use of force cannot create freedom, either here or anywhere else in the world.

“It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. ……The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.” ~Ludwig Von Mises

The brutal killer Mao of China once told us that all government flows from the barrel of a gun. We must educate the population that it is the very entity, the state, that they ask to “fix things” that is the problem in the first place.

The Politicization of Diet and Medicine

I have noticed that medicine and nutrition has become so politicized that sometimes a person will not listen to reasonable dietary recommendations if those recommendations are “left-wing”. The premiere anarcho-capitalist site on the net, LewRockwell.com, seems to have become a “Paleo” diet site. At the same time some of the “whole foods, plant based” doctors veer off into worrying about catastrophic man made global warming on their sites rather than sticking to the science of health and diet. I had one friend who said that she mentioned “The China Study” to a friend and he rejected it as “a bunch of socialism”. What the heck is going on?

American health has been dominated by the government for well over a hundred years and we are now sicker than we have ever been. The cost of medical care is now at an all time high and the results are horrific. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other degenerative diseases are epidemic. The backbone of Western Medicine is primarily supported by prescription medication, surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatments. It is only through expensive and highly invasive procedures and treatments that American doctors seek to help their patients. I have never in my life had a doctor give me any useful advice on diet or treatment of a condition by dietary means.

How did we get to this point?

In the 1860s, the American medical profession was significantly different in nature from that which we see today. The profession was unlicensed and anyone could set himself up as a physician with only market forces determining who would be successful or not. There were many medical schools and the overwhelming majority of them were privately owned and operated. There was great opportunity for any prospective student to enter even the best medical school and learn the healing arts. With free entry into the medical profession and with medical education readily availably and inexpensive, the nation saw large numbers of men enter into the practice of medicine. It has been said that in 1860 there were more doctors per capita in the U.S. than in any other country in the world. There were 175 doctors per 100,000 in 1860 according to the census of that year.

With the competition being what it was, by the 1870s many orthodox doctors desired to enlist the aid of the government to restrict the flow of doctors into the field. To restrict and control medical schools was one of the main goals.

The most effective and tireless spokesman for the economic benefit of regular physicians was the American Medical Association and it had three goals. The first was the establishment of medical licensing laws nationwide to restrict entry into the profession and thereby create a situation of fewer doctors than the free market would have otherwise provided. This would secure an advantaged economic climate for the doctor. The second goal was the destruction of the proprietary medical schools and replacing them with government controlled non-profit institutions of learning who would serve a smaller and more select student body. The third goal of the AMA was to use the licensing laws and government controlled medical schools to eliminate any heterodox medical sects and enforce an approved medical orthodoxy.

In 1910 the AMA’s Flexner report declared that a surplus of substandard medical schools in the country were producing a surplus of substandard doctors. The AMA convinced lawmakers to shut down “deficient” medical schools and of course the AMA was held as the ultimate authority on what schools were “deficient”. They were able to cut the supply of doctors by 30% in short order. This choke hold on supply has continued to today. For example, there have been no new medical schools opened in the U.S. since the 1980s even as the population increased dramatically.

The AMA has practiced an aggressive turf-protection war that does not allow nurses, midwives, physician assistants and practitioners of alternative therapies (such as chiropractors, natural hygiene, or naturopathic medicine) to offer standard treatments for routine illnesses without physician supervision. The once robust industry of midwifery has been virtually destroyed thanks to the intense lobbying against it by the medical industry. Most states ban this honorable practice and thereby help to keep health-care expensive and lucrative for the anointed doctors. Milton Friedman wrote in 1961 that the AMA’s licensure and other efforts to control the supply of doctors and services produced a net reduction of quality of care. He wrote in Capitalism and Freedom, “Licensure has reduced both the quantity and quality of medical practice, … It has retarded technological development both in medicine itself and in the organization of medical practice.”

American medicine has been taken over by corporatist interests. The research labs, clinics, regulatory agencies, medial press and journals, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, your personal general practitioner, and all the rest are all products of the domination of medicine by the government. This fascist system is committed to treatment of symptoms of disease and not curing the underlying causes of disease. There is a reason that the life expectancy in some backward nations exceeds that of the United States and you will never hear about it from your AMA loving doctor.

I once went to my doctor and my blood pressure was sky high. The doctor told me that I would be on three blood pressure medications for the rest of my life. I told the doctor that I would find a way to get off those medications and he said that was not possible. Within six months I was off all medication and my blood pressure averaged better than 120/80. The doctor was amazed. How did this happen? I did it simply by eating right and losing weight. A dietary approach to healing is just not part of modern medicine and it will never be as long as the government controls medicine for the benefit of the doctors, hospitals, big phrama and so on rather than for the patient.

Health care is just one more area of our lives ruined by governmental intervention.

Private Property in Society

There has been a lot of back and forth lately between libertarian supporters of property rights and those who call themselves libertarian (or even anarchist) who think that no one may “own” anything. And so, this post was born in my mind to address a few aspects of the nature of private property and society.

Is there any social problem which, at its core, is not produced by a disrespect for the inviolability of property interests? Wars, inner-city gang conflicts, environmental pollution, the curricula of government schools, the “war on drugs,” restrictions on free expression, affirmative action programs, monetary inflation, same-sex marriages, realty, eminent domain, taxation, gun control, displaying the “Ten Commandments,” violent crime, rent control, terrorism, government surveillance of telephone and computer communications, zoning laws and urban planning, prayer in schools, government regulation of economic activity, . . . the list goes on and on.

In each such instance, conflicts are created and maintained by government policies and practices that forcibly deprive a property owner of decision making control over something he or she owns. Whether the ownership interest is in oneself, or in those external resources that a person requires in order to promote his or her interests or to otherwise express one’s purpose in life, the state is inevitably at war with property owners. ~ Law Prof. Butler Shaffer

One of the problems that arise is that most people don’t understand the definition of ownership in the first place. Ownership means that you have total control over the use of a thing. You may use it, give it away, leave it to whomever you choose when you die, or exercise control over the property for any other purpose. In this meaning of ownership we see that every state that has ever existed was socialistic to some degree or the other.  No matter what form the state’s government took, the state claimed the rightful authority to control the individual’s property anytime it saw fit to do so.

The communist system is based on the premise that the state owns all productive assets and that there is no private ownership at all. Other socialist systems nationalized only certain tools of production and communication, at least openly, but all socialist systems asserted the right of the state to take anything at any time from any subject under its rule. Fascism is a socialistic system in which title to property remains in private hands, but control is exercised by the state and always remember that control is ownership. In reality, the modern U.S. is not all that unlike the fascist systems of the past.

The question of how property is to be owned and controlled and who has this control is the most fundamental question we must address because the answer tells us whether the state owns us and we are slaves, or if we own ourselves as free men and women. We hear many claims that the communist regimes of the U.S.S.R. were the polar opposite of the fascist Nazi regime and most people do think of these two regimes as polar opposites;  but they were exactly the same in that the state claimed total control over the lives and property of every single subject within its geographic borders. Both systems thought that no one could exist outside of the state. These two states were both extreme examples of the totalitarian state — modern real world examples of dystopia.

All political systems are wars against the private ownership of property but most desire to hide that fact and so build up myths that make it appear like the people are able to “own” property and personal items. The state does this by excluding property rights from almost every political argument or policy. For example, if a company pollutes a river and thus harms people downstream, the company will face sanctions for breaking the law of the state and harming the environment, but in a just society it would be the owners of property downstream that would bring suit against the company for damages to their righfully owned property.

Ludwig von Mises once wrote that private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy. He wrote that private ownership was the institution that characterizes the market economy and if it was absent then there could be no question of a market economy. The U.S. is a country that pretends to be a market economy but, in fact, is a crony-capitalist or corporatist economy.

We could go down a list of “social” problems and see that each one is easily solved if there is private ownership of all things, but becomes intractable if the matter rests in the hands of the state. One of the most important examples is the difference between a crime committed against a victim like murder, rape, assault and so forth and a “victim-less crime” like drug use, prostitution, gambling and so on.  Victim-less crimes are an assault against the property rights and liberty of the people. I have every right in the world to bet my money on a pony if I chose to do so. The criminalization of any voluntary action is a violation of individual property interests.

Should prayer be taught in schools? What about the new Common Core State Standards for Math and Language? If there were no government schools and all education was a private mater then there would be no controversy at all. It would be a matter of the family’s choice on how and were to have their children educated.

We should all know about the economic problem often called “the tragedy of the commons” were “public” property is mismanaged and overused while private property is maintained and used as wisely as the owner can. The state can not manage anything as well as the highly interested private owner can, nor can the minions of the state even have access to the vast array of information that is available. What over 300 million Americans know by daily observation and experience is not available to a relatively small, finite bureaucracy in the capital.

Individual liberty and social order are the two sides of the same coin. Individual liberty can not give rise to the voluntary and mutually beneficial division of labor that leads to social order and stability without the basis of private property.  If “everyone owns a thing” then in reality no one owns it, but in fact the criminal gang called the state does. The modern Americans who call themselves “liberal” (but are anything but that) love to claim that they are working for “social justice” by using the state to impose their vision upon the rest of us by force, fraud and intimidation. In reality, they are just making all of use poorer than we would otherwise be as they make themselves feel good. As the wag once said, it is easy to be very generous with other people’s money.

We have the situation were there are “things” and “land” on this earth that have economic value because people need or desire them. We have far more needs and desires than we do things, so there must be some way to balance out the needs and desires of the many — a hard task for anyone or any group to do. The way to do it is to let the free market and private property sort out the needs and desires via the free economy where the price signal will properly ration these “things”. It is only through the peaceful market rather than by the force of the state’s guns that we may achieve the maximum peace, prosperity, and pleasure in this world.

If you find someone who claims to be an “anarchist” or a “libertarian” who is against private ownership, then you have found one who is deluded or untruthful. There is no freedom without private ownership of property. Maximum liberty is when there is no state at all and all property is in the hands of individuals or groups of individuals.

Authentic Liberalism

So what is “liberalism” to the average American? I bet most people would say a “liberal” is a Democratic Party voter who favors gun control, abortion, wealth redistribution, compulsory public education, government control of almost everything in life, gay rights, belief that human economic activity endangers life on the planet, and so on with a large laundry list of “causes”. Most people would also say that an American “liberal” is the opposite of an American “conservative”. “Liberals” in the U.S. also love to call themselves “progressive”.

Outside of the U.S. there is a different view of what it means to be a “liberal”.  Outside America “liberalism” is quite distinct from the modern American definition. Liberalism overseas is in the tradition of Adam Smith, John Locke, and Frédéric Bastiat. Ralph Raico once wrote a wonderful description of the classical liberal tradition which is still close to just “liberalism” is some countries but the very opposite of “liberalism” in the U.S.

Classical Liberalism, or “liberalism” outside the U.S., is the political creed of those who favor liberty over the state, practice peace rather than war, and believe that the laissez-faire market, property rights and voluntary cooperation is the foundation of a just society. They see nothing wrong with wealth accumulation as long as it was accumulated  by the peaceful and productive means of voluntary free exchange and not the political means of plunder and government privilege.

Well informed readers will recognize that Classical Liberalism is the forerunner of the modern libertarian movement. There are a few modern Americans who self-identify as “liberals” who still claim the legacy of Classical Liberalism for themselves in spite of the fact that classical liberalism is the direct opposite of the state-worshiping “liberalism” of modern America. The classical liberals believe in individual liberty, distrust government, and believe in decentralization and the self-organizing effectiveness of society. In short, my friends, the very opposite of today’s Democratic Party Liberals who favor tax and spend with total control of our lives by the central government.

I once wrote “I want the term “liberal” back!” and I still do. After all, modern American Liberalism is totally inconsistent with the traditions of classical liberalism and modern libertarianism. The modern “liberal-left” talks about humanitarianism and putting people above profits but they favor the iron fist of government domination over the voluntary cooperation of free individuals. People just don’t do what the modern liberal totalitarians think they should do!  Now these statists will usually try to obscure the fact fact they favor total government control by claiming that they do not favor state violence and besides that we all are ruled by government with our consent.  (I never gave my “consent”, did you?)

The state is God to the American liberal-progressive mindset while the libertarian (classical liberal) is not looking for a Utopia on earth but just the maximization of freedom, progress, happiness, and material well being through voluntary cooperation.

The American left-liberal joins the American conservative in being soft on the police state and the imperial war machine. Oh, each side will often decry the other’s wars but nothing changes as one side gets power and the other loses. A change in administration in D.C. often does nothing to end foreign wars but rather we often see a renewed fierceness in foreign aggressions with a change in administration. And both the “liberals” and the “conservatives” love the militarized police since the police is to the state as the edge is to the knife.

The classical liberal tradition needs to re-claim the term “liberal” if we can, but more important than terms is the fact we need to recapture the philosophy of the classical liberals. That would be a wonderful first step towards ending the present police state and world empire that is the U.S. After that, perhaps we can move on to overcoming any State rule at all.