Publisher’s Note: I cannot recall all the hundreds of times I have had to respond to the minarchists who crowd the libertarian ranks regaling me of their Rube Goldberg contraption that would make limited government the final solution to all the world’s political problems. Newsflash: none of it works. Fiction tends to craft a narrative framework that essays can’t get close to in communicating ideas. If you get a chance, read Eric Frank Russell’s masterpiece, “…And Then There Were None”.
MYOB! -BB
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.”
– H.L. Mencken
A week until the latest slave ballots are cast and then I can stop being surrounded by the annual nonsense of voting for vandals. I can’t drive anywhere in my small burg without spying all the campaign litter cluttering the roadside trumpeting the joys of selecting either dumb or dumber to rob you, tell you what to do and wage war on everything you do or say.
Funny, it’s like all the private criminals running for office locally so they can go ”legit” but once ensconced in the elected throne, they will do what they always do; screw a figurative gun into you temple while they grab your wallet and threaten you with fining, kidnapping, caging, maiming or kill depending on your level of resistance. And, of course, they will employ their legions of attack coproaches that you and your unborn progeny pay to prowl the streets looking for new residents of the gulag.
I think I have written enough over the years about the gulag totalitarian state that everyone enjoys calling America. I’ve published a book that speaks to the imbecility of limited government and its brain-dead adherents. Mind you, I used to be paralyzed from the neck up myself and believed in the nonsense of voting, limited government and the distinct possibility that if we got just the right humans in office, we’d skip down the yellow brick road with no need for anything while politicians would spew magic fairy dust out of their asses and we’d think it was air freshener.
But, no, grown ups have discovered that all politicians are psychopaths and sociopaths; it is only the parasite class of the political nomenklatura who continue to be the nation’s largest gathering of adult toddlers outside of Hollywood.
So if you haven’t read my book, I wanted to provide the reader’s digest version of why limited government is impossible. There is no historical precedent whatsoever east or west of a statist entity arising out of the ashes of the latest secessionist movement and able to control the size it grows to as the cancer of the state metastasizes with time. None. Revolution either wholly transforms an existing government or rends chunks of an existing polity into another totalitarian aspirant in its embryonic stages squealing to grow into the abomination that is government today and has been government always.
I am technically an anarchist but the term grates me. Not only because it is weighted with historical contexts that make people fill their pants but because of the lack of specificity in definition. I am an abolitionist. Let’s clear up the semantics. Abolitionism is far clearer than the muddied nonsense of anarcho-communist, -syndicalist, -socialist and all the other Judea People’s Fronts crowding the aisles of Libertarians-R-Us. It bears an especially sharp contrast against all the other collectivisms. I am certainly 95% an-cap as a philosophical species and I also suspect I am the thinnest of libertarians.
Harness the Austrian critique to Rothbard and that distills the philosophy. I never use the term voluntaryist because I think one could be a commie and faithfully employ the term much like the IRS fiction that the income tax is voluntary. It is also mispronounced constantly. It is why you can look through all my writing and rarely if ever find me using that as an identifier. I practice linguistic specificity because as my mind ages I get more and more addled and try to keep it simple.
Abolition means that the ownership of other humans is wrong whether chattel, regulatory, tax or whatever conditions you wish to apply. It also means I possess no rights that force others to do my bidding which is why I think modern juries are a sham not only because of the behavior of robed government employees but the penalties of not complying when summoned by the King’s men to “serve” in the kangaroo courts is heavy with threat and malice for non-compliance. How appropriate though for the injustice system in the USSA.
In that very limited context, any transaction that obviates the ability to opt-out and involves coercion to action absent consent is wrong. The sole exception is the informed consent of a contract and even that must respect the Zero/Non-Aggression Principle (Z/NAP).
That being the case, any statist government is wrong and only self-governance applies.
Minarchists are the wild-eyed utopians, not abolitionists. Day after day, I am queried by the usual suspects in a panicked falsetto “…but, but who will [fill in the blank] if the government isn’t there to bully me to action or screw a gun to my temple? ANSWER ME!” It proves to me again and again that collectivism is the creed of the adult toddler.
Limited government is the impossible dream because it never happened anywhere on Earth.
Once the most apparently banal notion in a tacitly (BS) consensual document like the Constitution empowers a central government to do anything, it will metastasize like a cancer. Thought experiment: what if all the Constitution read was simply:
Article I, Section 8, Clause 3:[3] [The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
That’s it.
Nothing else…nothing. In 1794. Washington would have used that as pretext to march against the tax evaders using some penumbra he deduced from a government panel (ten years before the Supremes granted themselves that right ex post facto ergo propter hoc in 1803).
Fast forward to the ICC in 1887 and then the infamous Wickard v. Filburn in 1942 and all the nonsense in between and ever since. From one sentence, the Feds, Hamilton’s merry band of Communards, would erect a huge formerly limited government apparatus to gobble up all the liberty and freedom it could consume and raising taxes along the way to fund their regulatory excesses. Of course, all of this would be attended by enforcement mechanisms for local consumption and enormous armies and navies to enforce “border protections” for extra-interstate commerce and all the justifications for leviathan government the bureaucrats would fabricate to build the monster.
Limited statist government is IMPOSSIBLE.
So if you are still dim-witted enough to go to the polls on Tuesday or worse, think the Constitution is an engine for freedom; you have some explaining to do to your children on why you insist on making their adulthood so miserable and wretched.
“If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.”
– Joseph Sobran
Room for thought…I also thought I was an anarchist all these years, but the term just didn’t sit right. Not sure that I’m an abolitionist either. Sound like someone trying to free the slaves, which I don’t care if others want to remain slaves or not. So for now I’ll have to stick with anarchist. Thanks for the article. Very good.
FD,
An abolitionist may be active or not but he sits philosophically opposed to the state in principle and in fact.
Wilberforce when he accepted the leadership of the abolitionists in the UK: If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.
Bill
It begs the question, is a little bit of slavery acceptable? Is a little bit of larceny OK? How about a little bit of murder?
Answer these questions honestly, simply consider them in context, you get the answer to the question of not only the state, but every form of government devised, including “limited government”. Which is the ultimate soft gentle well-meaning delusion and folly of men. IE, somebody has to be more powerful than everyone else for any form of government to work. To suppose otherwise is ignorance at best and self delusional at worst, and going to the extreme of self destructive tendencies in some people, suicidal.
Go ahead, bind your liberty, compromise your utter dignity, with the shackles of limited government, of the constitution, of administrative law, of a little bit of surrender of your self determination, your safety, your general welfare and happiness, and those who you have passively granted just a tiny bit of power to know better or serve your best interests, over these your gift of fundamental primal natural personal belongings of your very existence, what makes you a man, and those you bow down to, those you have bent your knee to, get away with anything, including murder, including public death sentences of whomever is politically expedient at the time and place of your masters choosing.
Limited government?
Are you some kind of crazy whacky nuts in the head?
Tell me, just how has this idea and guarantee of limited representative republican form of government worked out?
(and i thought magic beans, hope and change, unicorns, and utopia was reserved for the statist quo)
The idea limited government is acceptable because unlimited government is not acceptable, but no government and total self determination is an insane idea advocated by crackpots is a contradiction terms so far out there no wonder it is so difficult for parchment idolators see at least the merit in the idea. They can’t see past the truth none of it has ever worked as advertized to begin with, as promised, as conned. They can’t see they have nothing to loose and everything to gain. But what is so stunning, so incredibly funny, it is not limited government which does not work, it is they themselves which does not work. By that I’m saying, it is not that we who want no government, who say Myob! and I…won’t! who are wrong, it isn’t even a question of wrong or right, it is a question of brave hearts and getting down to brass tacks, of spitting on your hands grabbing the bull right by the balls and going for it. It is giving the bastards the fucking finger, a hearty fuckyou! It is a matter of doing the deed and no excuses allowed, a matter of being free, a freeman. It is a matter of hard gritty work required to have no government, of being moral men who respect the freedom of others no matter what. Those are hard things which require perseverance and indomitable will and faith. It requires hard men who use reason and look truth in the eye and never blink or flinch.
It all scares the living bageezus out of the just a little bit of a safety net cause I’m ascared to be totally responsible of my actions and life crowd.
It terrifies them. Deep down they are afraid. And they know that little voice mewls and whines in their heart of hearts that it needs somebody who will hold it’s hand and keep it safe.
Nasty?
Hateful I am?
Ya well, I’m not interested in being a slave.
And if somebody has a problem with me being a freeman, they really got a problem with being free themselves.
Myob!
Bill –
This is perhaps one of the most lucid pieces written about minarchism and limited government. Written by Amanda Billyrock –
“This is the last argument I will direct toward self-professed “minarchists”. After that, I have no more time for reactionaries or reformers. The free society offers too many exciting prospects for me to continue to waste time.
The constant minarchist refrain is this: “Life, liberty and property. Life, liberty and property. Governments do and *must* exist to protect life, liberty, and property.”
And this is why that attempt at logic would not fool even a half-witted child:
PROPERTY: A government cannot exist without taxation. If taxes are “voluntary”, they’re not called taxes. They’re called donations or purchases.
A tax is a seizure of property. Therefore, government *cannot* protect your property when it must first *confiscate* your property for its very existence.
LIBERTY: If you do not allow the government to confiscate your property, they will come to your house seeking to take your liberty. They *cannot* protect your liberty when their existence necessitates that they *take* your liberty if you don’t relinquish your property.
LIFE: If you attempt to physically defend your property and/or liberty when they come to take them, state agents will take your life. Guaranteed.
And so it is proven: the state CANNOT protect your life, liberty or property when it must threaten all three in order to EXIST.”
Like you, I don’t like using the “a” word as in anarchist because the media has perverted it to mean someone violent, Molotov cocktails and all that. I’m not much on labels anyway. So I have settled on defining myself to others as an anarchist who believes in active, non-violent resistance. Typically I have to explain further what I believe but that is a starting point. I am convinced that 99.999% of people out there are statists to one degree or another. They cannot fathom a society that does not embrace government of some kind. It just goes to show you how successful the Prussian influenced government schools have been.
David
David,
Brilliant elucidation on the part of Billyrock.
Link please.
Agreed on your last statement toward our statist neighbors.
Bill
Bill –
Here you go – https://www.everything-voluntary.com/2014/01/re-minarchy_9.html
David
Shakespeare:
“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
I believe there is no legitimacy of government as it exists. Its entire reason of existence once created is to survive its illegitimacy.
It is a downward slope greased well.
To try to reason the idea of government as good is impossible.
Truth demands it so.
Reason tells the idea of authority external to ones self is an illusion. There is no greater authority but yourself. Why in the face of absolute truth of this would you submit to authority of others, why would you give authority to others? If you are free? Give away your authority, essentially for free, and then pay an extortion for what you gave away?
Something is terribly wrong with this picture.
Fate or Faith. Which to choose?
There is no going back to the heady days of the declaration of independence. That brief moment in time, a window of opportunity in which the world was stood on it’s head. The moment when legitimacy and authority of the state was questioned and found an illusion.
There is only the future, which has two paths. One path is the definition of insanity, humankind doing the same thing it has done repeatedly for 5000 years, hoping for different results. The other path is as Albert Camus put it: “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
The future of rebellion is unknown. It is the way of such things. But that is what makes it so beautiful and alluring, exciting and frightening all at once.
The future of the state is a pretty sure bet. There is no limiting it. Limiting government is the ultimate oxymoron. There is nothing within the construct of government of any kind in which limits are a determining feature. There can’t be, because if there was such a thing government could not function. It is anathema to everything the state is. Limited! What a joke! You ever see government self limit itself?
Limits in government, limited government, is as mythical a creature as the Nonesuch.
So I have a question, it is a doozy. It is the litmus test of freedom.
Who understands the existential threat to authority armed freemen represent better than the psychopaths controlling our governments of America? Right down to your local crooked police officer and building inspector?
Explain how “limited government” will limit that authority.
Explain how this bloated leviathan can be limited?
By whose authority?
What authority?
Authority that doesn’t even recognize any authority but it’s own?
And even sometimes not even it’s own authority?
And we abolitionists crackpots?
Hello!
Boon,
Not crackpots simply the only ones looking at the world as it is and how it should be with reality far more cogent than most. The working assumption is that any government employee or collaborator is ultimately an agent of the state and an ambassador for SLAVFOR.
Bill
Hey! I like being a crackpot. Crackpots got rights too you know. Crackpots are trouble makers.
Seriously, if they call us crackpots, we got em right where we need em. They are paying attention in a fashion. That’s a good thing. The truth of abolition and secession in a time of universal denial of its relativity is a revolutionary idea. Have to start someplace. Might as well make your detractors mad with dissimulation, drive nuts, it causes the thought leaders to have to justify the unjustifiable, gets em outside their comfort zone, and too, because eventually the ones with common sense and the flexibility of thinking beyond accepted dogma become enlightened, attrition of the faithful of parchment worship eventually leads to revolutionary ideas and rejection of accepted thought.
…and then there where none
“So if you are still dim-witted enough to go to the polls on Tuesday or worse, think the Constitution is an engine for freedom; you have some explaining to do to your children on why you insist on making their adulthood so miserable and wretched.”
Look, it was this way when I was born, so I did not make ‘their adulthood so miserable and wretched.’
Just how do you plan on reversing this wretchedness? It’s obvious voting doesn’t work; what does?
What works?
Myob!
I…won’t
What works is that which begins with each of us and spreads. You know the answer just as I do. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. You know what it takes. You made the choice now you have to understand that choice and what you do about it.
The simple explanation is that as every generation passes and it gets worse and worse, we have only the person in the mirror to blame.
And indeed, you will be alone when you boldly proclaim that you are Spartacus.
Aaah Spartacus! He fought, how he fought. But he fought. It seems he and his compatriots didn’t win for lack of enough hearts and minds. I think he was ahead of his time in some respects, or maybe the time wasn’t right.
I think in any battle the partisan must make his adversary fight on the ground and time of the partisans choosing. Always. There are many battle grounds. Is it fair to contend it is not force of arms which will win abolition of the state, it will be force of will and the determination in the hearts of those who choose to be free who will be free. That is the battle ground here I think.
Change your thinking. Secession and everything is not possible without such a thing.
I’m saying, tyranny, the leviathan, its just not possible without people, and people who go along with it. People who control its character and the force it is. After all, government no matter its form is constituted of people. It is not some soulless entity. The inverse is true too.
I was having a conversation with a passenger in my cab about part of this issue. He said “Well, without government, who would build the roads?”
I briefly covered some ideas about who might build the roads in a free society, how some roads might be toll roads, and some kept up by local communities through contract, etc. As we turned onto his street, I noticed a sign that said, “Private road. No city services” on it. The roads were in much better shape here than the ones we just turned off of.
“Well who does the roads in this neighborhood? ”
“We do.,” he said.
“Well, there you go. You’re driving on your answer of who will do the roads if there is no government.”
“But do you know how much I pay in home owner fees???”
I think one of the biggest obstacles to getting people to be abolitionists is all the “free stuff” the government promises.
Think it about it Paul, maybe the largest obstacle to abolition of government is not government but those who cling to the idea a piece of parchment is necessary to exist?
Hey you guys, what about a flag of secession and abolition?
Something with Myob! And or I won’t emblazoned across it?
We have a flag already. It’s called the Jolly Roger.
HL Mencken: “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
Raise the pennant of liberty! Cutless between your teeth, a pistola in each hand…into the breech brothers!
Bill I think you are profoundly correct.
It is time to come in from the cold. No time like the present as they say.
Enough of this politically correct bullshit. The hell with any and all stigma. Abolition’s time has arrived. It must be embraced fully, with all the gusto and fervent reverence it deserves. If for no other reason but is is the only viable alternative to 5000 years of tyranny. Abolition is the true 5000 year leap. Not the pseudo-liberty false bill of goods and administration of freedoms by elitist cabal sold as sovereignty of the individual.
What is wrong with calling a cat a cat. Abolition, anarchism, secession, it is what it is.
There no way out of the bind we are in other than rejection of the state and all who adhere to it’s ways. That is a fundamental truth. A reality that can be ignored but which the consequences can not be for much longer.
As an aside, abolition of and rejection of the state is something those running the state are obviously concerned to a very high degree with repressing.
The reject wall street false narrative and camps filled with less than sane thinking and criminal characters, various other false flag events, the creation of crisis’s as means to manipulate thought and reaction of the public, the total absence of mention of what little people and grass roots tea party adherents honestly desire and call for, even mention of this years voting scam cycle and the rampant discontent and disenfranchise of 10’s, even hundreds of millions of voters frustrations of the course being foisted upon them, is quashed by the tyranny of media messaging. It is all for keeping enough in the dark where a plurality of commonality and thought is engineered to founder in a pitch black wasteland of disconnect and dissimulation in order to deny coalition of thought and movement of like minded people. A component of divide and conquer.
Like an armed citizenry, and the power of free thought and the pen, these things are all that stands in the way of absolute power. Abolition is heady stuff. Like those other things they really boil down to self determination. Poison to the leviathan no less. If there are too many people who reject the state, there are too many to stop the legitimate existence they represent, the legitimacy they spread, and the inherent sovereign nature they are.
In this time of universal deceit, the truth of us no matter how it is accepted or not, whether pogrom as radicalism or painted as extremism, it still sticks out like a sore thumb. A lot of people are far into searching for answers, for alternatives which viably fill needs for being another way. This in itself is primal desire for something better, like a splinter in the mind, it worries its way through ever more inklings something is terribly wrong, but denied the knowledge, the enlightenment of the truth and the alternatives, movement towards abolition is stymied and waylaid.
The thing is to put into action a campaign which ideally is simple, ingenious in implementation that once begun is self perpetuating, viral in it’s spread. Something simple but elegant. A symbolic logo, something which culturally is recognizable, but one has to begin to access the truth it profoundly but surreptitiously symbolizes. Something wholly nebulous and grass roots. Something once understood can be accepted as ones own symbol of liberty and defiance.
The ageless axiom of bringing a horse to water yet only the horse will drink if it chooses is the threshold which people must lead themselves is a profound prerequisite of a great enlightenment and movement to abolition. And only in this way is a movement, at least in it’s beginning creation of a plurality, possible.
I say all that, if my grasp of abolition is accurate, due to the primal nature of true liberty and freedom, as it is the nature of it and the human condition, inextricably intertwined but curiously difficult to recognize, but once it is recognized, it is indelibly etched in ones mind and spirit, it becomes the penultimate paradigm in sovereign existence.
Bill,
H.L. Mencken’s quote is prophetic, in the realization when a man understands the enormity of illegitimacy of government and all its trappings, the politically/culturally accepted world around him becomes a wasteland. It is barren on a societal level of the essential elements which constitute abundance of life, fruitfulness, and general happiness. Of course ones personal spiritual and economic happiness is and always has been a matter of self determination, and should never be confused with that of the masses in general. But no man is an island, for we all live on God’s green Earth together for better or worse.
The point I’d like to make is rather philosophical, but it has none the less great practical import on our daily lives.
I look all around, I see so much searching for the “right” answers, the right politicians, the right laws, the right thinking, the right direction, the right everything, and all along everyone is looking in all the wrong places. And the answer is right there in front of them. Right there for the taking and it costs nothing, it is profitable beyond measure, easier to attain than any alternative known to mankind. All one has to do is grab it and make ones own.
I see this desert of individual thinking along the line of self actualization. It is like the world has lost its soul, it has admitted itself with abandon to serfdom and this dirg of ignorance of ones place in the world as individual, as ones own master, as ones true savoir in the physical world, as the answer to ones happiness, is a notion so far removed from the lexicon of ideas it is mind blowing.
It is the simplest of things, though it is a leap of logic and faith of great and noble proportions, it is still the simplest of things once attained.
It is not government, the state, tyrants and crooks, psychopaths and sycophants who rule the roost by force, it is people themselves who really make the abomination of the state possible, and it is people who hold the keys to their imprisonment or freedom.
But what is so amazing is the answer, the right answer, is right there, so easy to get to, and all it takes is a little truth, a little thinking, a little courage, a little defiance, a little humility, a little faith, and the state, it’s actors, and all its illegitimacy becomes a paper tiger, a joke, a laughing ridiculous farce, an idiots con, bereft of all justification.
All across the blogsphere, the liberty movement, the III per centers, the constitutionalist movement, the alternative media in general, it has all come to a dead end, the thinking and platitudes, the blind repetition of dead cat bounce proclamations where redress of wrongs requires going back to the roots of the wrongs to begin with will somehow save us from the leviathan, the very thing that made the leviathan possible to begin with, that these are the answers to tyranny, that the right to bear arms to voting is the panaceas of salvation. And all along this thinking is up against a brick wall and no one can see it. It is a dead end, there is no path beyond this because if these magical things are obtained, it still does not address the crux of the matter. That those ideals are not the remedy, but that those ideals are a natural outcome of abolition of the state. They are born out of true self determination in every sense. That as long as any state, or organ of power greater than a mans liberty exists, none of those ideals are safe, and the only safety, true happiness and prosperity, is derived individually, via self determination and minding your own business.
I know reality is it is incredibly difficult for people to make that leap of logic. But what is it in the human condition that something so beautiful and simple is so difficult to grasp?
An interesting bit of early American history of why “abolitionists” today may be maligned.
https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-evolution-of-antiracism.html
Bill –
Most people confuse the declaration of independence with the constitution. There is nothing in the constitution that remotely indicates that whatever rights you have are granted by God or a creator. Not one sentence or phrase. That is the problem. The declaration correctly stated that “…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. This notion was not carried forward in the constitution. And unfortunately the declaration of independence is of no legal value in this country. The courts never refer to the declaration when deciding case law.
Herein lies the biggest problem with the constitutional republic that rules this country. The negativism of the declaration gave way to positivism when the constitution was ratified. And precisely why this country has been failing ever since. Unless and until people fully understand the difference between negative law and positive law they can never fully grasp the concept of liberty. Negative law (such as the Ten Commandments) tells us what we cannot do while positive law tells us what we must do. This is the difference between freedom and tyranny. Positive law based systems permit government to grow unabated. Laws multiply like rabbits until you have something like the Federal Register which is hundreds of thousands of pages long and the average person commits multiple felonies each day.
The bill of rights provides limited protections via “civil liberties”. The notion of civil liberties is one of the biggest cons in American history. “Civil rights” are diametrically opposed to liberty. “Civil rights” teaches what its name implies: that our rights descend from the State. “Civil” comes from the Latin civis, meaning “citizen” and therefore under the government’s control. The declaration told us that our freedoms come from God while the constitution tells us our freedoms come from government. And what the government can give you they most certainly can take away.
Best wishes,
David