Liberty is not Utopia, but reality

Liberty is not Utopia, but reality

(My Clovis News Journal column for December 13, 2013)

Is libertarianism, and its notion of "everything voluntary", Utopian?

Libertarians would point out the belief that government can be restrained and kept to a safe minimum is highly idealistic, and goes against the evidence of history.

Believers in the possibility of good government blame everyone and everything other than the institution itself for its consistent failures. Or they simply deny the failures.

They'll claim if Americans would just restore the Constitution- by which they mean get government to agree to strictly obey its charter again- everything would be fine.

It's not a matter of restoring the Constitution. Constitutions can't stop bad people with political power from eventually doing whatever they want to do. Expecting the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution as a barrier to government power is a refusal to see where the justices' loyalties lie. Governments will never restrain themselves, and voters will always seek to vote themselves handouts, favors, and privileges, regardless of what a constitution allows.

Additionally, the government faithful will insist if we would only elect "the right people" the country would stop going in the wrong direction.

The fact is the "right people" are never even allowed to get nominated, much less elected, and even when half-way decent people are elected they immediately become corrupted by the system they were elected to change.

No person can represent a huge group of individuals with opposing opinions and conflicting morals. It is impossible. Instead he will represent only himself and tell you why you are wrong to disagree with him. Then, if he's in the majority in his particular government, he'll impose his will on you, under threat of violence.

Woe to you if your conscience tells you what he demands is wrong.

Even under the "best" government, the inevitable is merely delayed. History shows that republics always turn into democracies, and democracies always become tyrannies. The only variable is how quickly it happens. The idea that there's an optimal amount of government is like imagining there's a perfect amount of cancer. Above none, I mean.

The biggest complaint most non-libertarians have with our philosophy is that it allows no double standards to enable their favorite use of coercion. What is it you wish to do to others, using government, that you know would be wrong to do as an individual?

Libertarianism accepts flawed human nature. It accepts that power corrupts. That's not Utopian, it's reality.

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Any chair in a bar fight?

Confession time:

For my CNJ column this week I am using two things I don't "believe in" to try to speak to those who believe in both.  Those things would be the Bible and the US Constitution.

Last week a friend pointed out to me that in my CNJ column I had written "Aggressive violence and theft are the proper purview of laws" and commented "it sounds to me like you are backing off a notch from a pure anarchist/voluntaryist position."

Which I'm not.  I explained that to me, the only real law is Natural Law, and all others are counterfeit "law", and to denote them I put quotation marks around the word "law".  Which the newspaper sometimes edits away.  Natural Law addresses aggressive violence and theft- all written "laws" are unnecessary or harmful.  Or both.

Which brings me back to the upcoming column.  I do try to tailor my newspaper columns to the local audience, which is overwhelmingly "Christian" (at least in self identification) and "conservative".  So, I try to remember that and use it, without watering down my core message.  I may not always succeed.

Still, I feel an explanation is in order when I give too much weight to things I don't believe in an attempt to get a message across to those who do.  Yeah, it sometimes leaves a foul taste in my mouth.  I hope it doesn't come across as dishonest.  I hope the truth still shines through.

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I was wrong: Cops aren't "rabid"

I have often referred to enforcers and other aggressors are "rabid", but I was wrong.

Rabies is always* fatal and incurable.

That doesn't describe the affliction cops and other thugs have.  Nope, they have staties.  

These "statid" individuals are very dangerous, but they are less infectious than it might first appear.  In fact, unless an individual is infected while an infant or a young child, they are probably immune to the disease.  It is very difficult to transmit staties to someone able to think for themselves in a rational and logical manner.

I have also found that staties is curable.  There's not yet a large rate of success, but it does seem to be increasing over time.  I, and a lot of other people, keep searching for the cure.

Thank you for your contributions which help fund the research.  Together, we can find the cure.

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*With, I think, two individual exceptions so far.

Ex-cop, still a pig, murders man for texting

Because texting is a capital offense- especially if you upset a cop by doing it.  Anti-"texting and driving" rules just reinforce this behavior in enforcers- and apparently in ex-enforcers, too.  After all, if texting is sometimes justification for escalation of violence, all the way up to and including murder, why not always?

I have seen a few comments along the lines of "once a pig, always a pig"... and in this case it seems to be an accurate observation.  Although, as I have said before, some of the ex-cops I have known make me look like a cop-lover by comparison.

"I can't believe people would bring a gun to a movie," said a witness... yet had the murderous ex-cop still been in uniform, no one would have uttered such stupid words- even had the exact same scenario played out.  It's not about the gun or the location, it's about a lowlife enforcer scum who believed his "right" to not be annoyed was worth more than someone else's life- it's about a cultivated sense of entitlement.  Because such people are out there, you should "bring a gun" everywhere.

Yes, I would be annoyed if someone were loudly texting during a movie (which wasn't even the case here, since the movie was yet to begin), but I have the sense not to murder someone for doing so.

The murdered man's family is lucky the murderer is an ex-cop; if he were a current enforcer the murder would be ruled "officer safety" and "within departmental guidelines", and knowing he would be let off with a short paid vacation, the murderer might just have finished off the wife, too, instead of "only" injuring her and murdering her husband.

I wonder how many more people will choose to blame the tool rather than the murderer or the enforcer culture that created him?

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