26 Jan The Goals of Government and the Desires of Free People by Kaiser Leib

As Bill continues his hiatus, and in the future, ZeroGov will continue to accept guest essays. Essays are subject to editing for mechanics, but not content. If you’d like to contribute, please send your submissions to thirdgun at hotmail dot com and kaiserleib at gmail dot com.

Ask ten people what purpose the government serves, and you are likely to receive ten very similar answers. Government provides for the common defense, they’ll say, or guarantees that society runs smoothly. Perhaps they’ll mention the benevolent safety net that our social programs provide, things like food stamps or public education. Depending on the respondent, they might even mention roads, the internet, or other infrastructure needs. Some might mention conceptual goals like democracy, equality, or scientific advancement.

These are legitimate goals, all of them. People ought not to be subjugated by foreign powers. Mutually beneficial exchanges benefit us all. That the poor do not starve, that children learn to read, that we have access to  transportation and that these words are transported to as if by magic over a distance of many miles – these are good things. Any rational creature, having fully considered the implications of the alternatives, would agree.

The distinction, then, between our non-violent anarcho-capitalist philosophy and the philosophy held by those who believe that we must have Government lies not in the ends we wish to see achieved, but in the means we wish to use to achieve those ends. We do not want to see the poor starve, or the world’s children rendered illiterate. We do not want to return to the days of travel by horse and carrier pigeon. We’d like to have a say in our own destinies, and to see new breakthroughs in all sorts of science.

What we do not want is for a different human being, be he a king or a president, to presume that he knows how society might use our resources to feed the poor, educate the ignorant, or travel from our homes to our workplaces. We do not want Washington to decide what is best for Montana, or for Phoenix to decide what is best for Yuma, or even for 101 Maple Street to decide what is best for 203 Oak Street. We want to achieve the same safety and freedom and betterment that Government falsely promises, but we want to achieve it in our own way, of our own accord.

To conflate opposition to taxation and government oversight with opposition to these other goals is an intellectual trap, one into which we must take care not to fall.

Copyright © 2011 by zerogov.com

17 Jan Spooner Lives! by Bill Buppert

The “National” system so called, is in reality no national system at all; except in the mere fact that it is called the national system and was established by the national government. It is, in truth, only a private system; a mere privilege conferred upon a few, to enable them to control prices, property, and labor, and thus swindle, plunder and oppress all the rest of the people.

-Lysander Spooner

I was amused to be at the Freedom Summit in Adam Kokesh’s room in early December with some other friends and at one point one of the fellows was haranguing us about “getting back to the Constitution”.  As if we ever left that wretched compact with leviathan government.  At one point, another worthy said that maybe we should pay more attention to Lysander Spooner.  Indeed.  For plenty of freedom advocates, it begins with Rand or von Mises or Rothbard and a host of other luminaries who saw through the collectivist sham.

For others, Lysander Spooner is the strike of the match.  I was introduced to Spooner through a great book by the magnificent James J. Martin in Men Against the State. Among the several forgotten heroes from the 19^th century, Spooner stands as a titan.  He made a rather interesting point concerning the Constitution in that he claimed that no document can bind a man if he is not an active signatory.  You can see where this would be rather problematic for a government and why the concept is roundly condemned in a court system staffed by robed government employees for whom honor and fidelity for justice will be observed as long as their masters approve.

Spooner is the gateway drug for maximum liberty.  If you pay close enough attention to his arguments and patterns of thinking, you come away thinking that the entire rotten collectivist project is not only desperately lacking in intellectual rigor but is founded first and foremost in an evil premise.  The premise of all collectivist and statist projects is initiated violence against ALL humans.  For the system would collapse if the fear of the monopoly of force were not the schwerpunkt of all actions from the enforcement of tax collection and aggression to the most banal of offenses, if one citizen not a member of the nomenklatura got away with it, revolution would follow shortly.

We here in Arizona are obliged to stop at US Border Patrol suspicionless checkpoints to establish citizenship bona fides.  One must answer the question of your US citizenship status or you are detained.  If you simply drive through the checkpoint without stopping and ignore the revenue officer’s flashing lights (you paid for through taxes), you will be subject to maiming or killing if you continue to disobey.  Cops are the clearest explication of what government is in all its naked glory, there is no more compelling example of what is wrong with government. Period.

I realize that this violates the Fourth Amendment but when has a mere piece of paper ever stopped a government?  As I have mentioned before, we are as much a nation of laws as Zimbabwe is the premier example of prudent fiscal and monetary policy.  You are a citizen of a nation that officially tortures, kills US citizens without a trial and uses a quaint fiction of democratic consent as the usual suspects drive the economy over a cliff with all the driving experience of a four-year old’s first navigation of a car.  The point is that a nation of laws is a misnomer.  No nation has or is presently not bifurcated with two sets of laws – one for the cattle in the tax jurisdiction and one set for the rulers who manage and administer the feedlot. If you doubt this, find the answers in this pop quiz:

• In every case of police brutality in which the death of the victim at the hands of the police results, what proportionate criminal finding on the part of the cop(s) implicated is served on the heads of the guilty cops?  Good luck…

• What American President or Cabinet member has been held responsible for the policies enacted during their tenure that results in the material impoverishment of the nation which would include every administration since Grover Cleveland and many of his predecessors like the vicious proto-Stalinist Lincoln?

• Take a careful look at the criminal gallery of misfits pardoned by the Presidents when they leave office.  I do thank Gerald Ford for his pardon of Robert E. Lee 110 years later.

Spooner has this whole system pegged and pinned down in the nineteenth century with an aplomb that still leave s one admiring the breadth and depth of his achievement.  Of course, it is not common knowledge because the inclusion of Spooner in the pantheon of accepted American thinkers would quickly show the system for the evil and malignant sham that it is for freedom at the individual level.

Spooner avers on contracts:

To say that the state legislatures have power to declare what the obligation of contracts shall be, or what contracts shall, and what shall not, have an obligation, is equivalent to saying that they have power to declare what the Constitution of the United States shall MEAN. And us this meaning would of course be arbitrary, the legislature of each state separately might declare that it should be something different from what it was in any of the other states – and we might consequently have, in every state in the union, a different constitution of the United States on this point. Not only this, but every state legislature might alter, at pleasure, the meaning, which it had itself given to the constitution of the United States. The constitution of the United States, there­fore, might not only be different in every different state, but it might be altered in each state at every session of the legislature. Such is the necessary consequence of the doctrine, that the state legislatures have power to prescribe or determine what the obligation of contracts shall be, or what contracts shall be obligatory.

He establishes rather elegantly that obligatory contracts can take place between consenting individuals but not imposed on them without their consent.  Most reasonable men would agree to this but the moment the government or the Constitution is intoned, most folks lose their minds and in essence say that, of course, armed men may compel me through the threat of fining, caging, maiming and killing to whatever THEY claim I must do.

On the Constitution (of No Authority):

What was true of our ancestors, is true of revolutionists in general. The monarchs and governments, from whom they choose to separate, attempt to stigmatize them as traitors. But they are not traitors in fact; in-much they betray, and break faith with, no one. Having pledged no faith, they break none. They are simply men, who, for reasons of their own — whether good or bad, wise or unwise, is immaterial — choose to exercise their natural right of dissolving their connexion (sic) with the governments under which they have lived. In doing this, they no more commit the crime of treason — which necessarily implies treachery, deceit, breach of faith — than a man commits treason when he chooses to leave a church, or any other voluntary association, with which he has been connected.

In a fashion matched only by the pen of Murray Rothbard, Spooner makes the clear case for the immorality of fashioning a yoke on later generations without their consent and the concomitant evil and corruption that emanates form governments that practice this more subtle form of enslavement.

Randy Barnett, whose work on the Ninth Amendment is truly groundbreaking and liberty enhancing runs the lysanderspooner.org site at which most of his works are available free of charge.  We should be indebted to Dr. Barnett for doing this valuable service.

There is a three volume compilation of everything Spooner wrote [the staff at Zero Gov will gladly accept a donation of this set if any reader feels generous] but it is rather spendy and Barnett provides a good start electronically.  I would urge all my readers to set a goal for yourself to read Spooner on a weekly or monthly basis and make your way through his canon.  He not only was a great champion of liberty but provided a quite interesting and rigorous lesson in how to think critically on very complex issues and take them apart with alacrity.

As Benjamin Tucker says:  He was our Nestor in the pursuit of liberty; he was truly a weapon of mass destruction against big government, or for that matter, all government.  As abolitionists, we may be in the minority but we will always hail from the moral high ground.

His writing is a muse for freedom and a vital arrow in the quiver of liberty and abolition.

“What was true of our ancestors is true of revolutionists in general. The monarchs and governments, from whom they choose to separate, attempt to stigmatize them as traitors. But they are not traitors in fact; in-much they betray, and break faith with, no one. Having pledged no faith, they break none. They are simply men, who, for reasons of their own — whether good or bad, wise or unwise, is immaterial — choose to exercise their natural right of dissolving their connexion with the governments under which they have lived. In doing this, they no more commit the crime of treason — which necessarily implies treachery, deceit, breach of faith — than a man commits treason when he chooses to leave a church, or any other voluntary association, with which he has been connected.

This principle was a true one in 1776. It is a true one now. It is the only one on which any rightful government can rest. It is the one on which the Constitution itself professes to rest. If it does not really rest on that basis, it has no right to exist; and it is the duty of every man to raise his hand against it.

If the men of the Revolution designed to incorporate in the Constitution the absurd ideas of allegiance and treason, which they had once repudiated, against which they had fought, and by which the world had been enslaved, they thereby established for themselves an indisputable claim to the disgust and detestation of all mankind.”

-Lysander Spooner

11 Jan Failed Regicide and the Attempted Murder of Free Speech by Bill Buppert

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.

-H.L. Mencken

Political speech is now in the hazard thanks to the homicidal tendencies of a madman who gunned down a Congressman and a number of others folks in front of a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona on Saturday, 1/8/2011.  Mind you, the loon who committed this heinous murder apparently had no political agenda one could put a bead on.  Among his self-described favorite reads were The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf, sort of a greatest hits ensemble for the government supremacist crowd.  I suspect the usual suspects are rather peeved when this evidence comes out so early and makes them hesitant to pin the political rose if it points in their direction.  Keep in mind that Left and Right in the American polity, the office-holders in America are but a hairs-breadth away from the philosophy in both those tomes.  Both books are paeans to state violence and that is the sine qua non of all governments.

Do you doubt me?

We live in a country that maintains a murderous empire that straddles the globe and kills every day. It employs both occupation forces and robot killers to do the deed and tens of thousands of women and children have been added to the butcher’s bill in foreign lands.  At home, we have an active policy of torture, we bury humans in a prison system outside of the already pathetic Constitutional safeguards and a government that thinks it can kill ANYONE at will.

The same government maintains a sophisticated system of wealth extraction of all its “citizens” (read that as feedlot cattle), makes every CPA and bank a non-funded IRS agent and facility respectively and has erected a multitudinous set of laws that is so vast not even the system understands how to administer it.  To make all of this stick, legions of “law enforcement” personnel are deployed across the land to detain, beat, cage and, on occasion, murder to keep the system afloat.  But that is not enough, on top of all that is a vast intelligence apparatus that has cast Mordor’s eye inwardly upon the land to seek out terrorists and whatever else fits that convenient moniker for cattle misbehavior across the fruited plain.

But that is not enough.

Now the rulers of the land are finally able to cast a net over the Internet and all media and haughtily call for rules and edicts to limit or fetter free speech if it threatens them.  Officeholders, that particular breed of psychopath that seek political office, are now starting to bleat in horror for their safety and hoping to translate that fear into another muzzle on the people.

It almost makes one wish the shooter in Tucson had some discernable political compass instead of the madness anyone can read in his actions and his mug shot.  At least then one could discern what his object were but so far he smells like the standard collectivist apologist we have grown so accustomed to seeing.

The state pushes, bullies, steals, thieves, cages, maims, kills and prostrates its citizens at the whim of their every political desire to tighten their death-grip on the smallest facets of our lives.  Every day.

Then one of the cattle pushes back and the state bellows in naked fear and lashes out at the whole of the people to mete out a punishment to all for the sins of a few.  Of course, this is the causus belli for almost every law on the books.

As an aside, we see that it is ordinary citizens once again who thwart an even worse mass murder and the cops, in their habitual role as historians, arrive after the fact.  Anarchy or a stateless society is not a society without rules, it is a society where the citizens can captain their own destinies and protect their neighbor in the absence of the “professionals”. The anarchists won the day again much like they have for other “terrorist” incidents happening throughout the land.  It seems the only lime law enforcement is on mission is when they are provoking the terrorist acts themselves.

We can only hope that Giffords recovers and lives a prosperous and rich life.

Initiated violence is never the answer and it will only get more of the same.  You can not beat the state at its most powerful natural ability:  the capacity to maim and kill without limit.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.  If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth:  if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Notes in the Margin: Grigg does a far more eloquent exposition on this subject in his latest essay: https://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2011/01/cult-of-sanctified-violence.html

An excerpt:

Americans were not admonished to observe a moment of chastened silence in memory of the victims of that exercise in criminal violence. This is, in part, because observances of that kind would quickly become tedious: Since 2008, Pakistan — a country with which the government ruling us is not formally at war — has endured at least 250 drone attacks, in which roughly 1,400 people have been killed.

According to the most conservative estimate of “collateral damage,” only a tithe of those slaughtered through drone strikes are “militants.”

Copyright © 2011 by zerogov.com

07 Jan If Government is the Answer, You Must Have Asked the Wrong Question by Bill Buppert

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”

– H.L. Mencken

The two primary reasons most people want government to exist is for protection and advantage.  When I say most people I am excepting that smaller group of people who actively seek to rule others;  the socio- and psycho-paths among us who have a deeper need and selfish interest in championing the furtherance and expansion of government.  The yen for protection speaks to the fear most folks have of being unsecured in their safety and existence and the mistaken assumption that their subsequent surrender of their right to defend themselves will make them safer.  The advantage speaks to the need to have some external entity play umpire and ensure that everyone conducts themselves by a “consensual” playbook which of course leads to gaming of the system exemplified for example by preferential treatment codification in law for special interests.  We know that neither of these ever ends well for the individual historically.  There may be other tangential reasons but these two elements comprise the lion’s share of the twisted rationalizing that passes for thought on why government should be the overweening and powerful monster it is today.  Government is the gateway drug to mass tyranny.  Please spare me the soliloquies of “limited government”, an ahistorical chimera if ever there was one.  There is simply no historical record, Eastern or Western, of the existence of one.

One hears even the most committed government supremacists prattling on about the inadequacies of this policy or that and the often comedic second order effects and unintended consequences of the implementation.  The government authored crises tumbling over one another until you hear intellectual giants like Ghoulsbee (sic) over the weekend mewling about the necessity to increase the debt ceiling or the economy will collapse.  Deja vu.  Somewhat like a person or company insisting that their already unmanageable credit line be increased or doubled or they won’t be able to meet their obligations.  If we don’t flatten the Earth immediately, it will continue to be round.  You will note that demonstrable proofs or historical case studies verifying the substance or utility of this notion are not entertained.  The Keynesian game is up and its bankruptcy there for everyone to see but the believers think that with enough heel clicking and wishful thoughts, their caustic economic illiteracy will become reality.  This is what ALL non-Austrian  economists have come to;  nothing more than court apologists for what can only be termed bad alchemy heavily laden with the polar opposite of any critical thinking whatsoever.  This is also a result of the meme that is currently in vogue that there are human structures and creations “too big to fail”.  This is, of course, a fatuous and silly notion; for governments are designed from the beginning by their very structural necessities to be self- destructive mechanisms that not only cause irreparable harm to themselves over time but grind untold millions of lives into dust and ruin in their path.

Much like the Monolith Monsters in that delightful 1950s B-Movie, government grows and grows until it collapses under its own weight and contradictions (note that Marx got that one sideways, again).  The historical record is strewn with massive corpse count after corpse count of attempts by well-intentioned government supremacists to build the shining city on the hill time and again.  From Mesopotamia to Rome to modernity, the most flawed and morally handicapped men rose to Olympian heights granted with God-like powers on the monopoly of violence and coercion that is the hallmark of ALL governments to despoil, deprive and deny men their liberty and their lives.  Of course, the magisterial histories written over time have always given grand stories of the trials and tribulations of the great men overcoming obstacles to the imposition of organized crime and violence on the masses.  There have some minor aberrations in this history like the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence but these were made null and void within several generations of their acceptance or adoption.  The Constitution being the most proximate example of liberty extinguished in a generation.  Merely statistically insignificant speed bumps in the continual steamrolling and abolition of individual volition in favor of a collectivist zeitgeist.

Individual liberty is an historical aberration and that is an unfortunate fact.

Take heart, for there have been individuals in history who have stood athwart this seemingly unstoppable monster and found ways to injure it or impede its progress such as Wilberforce or the Anti-Federalists, both of whom deserve your closer attention.  There are actually legions of others who have contributed in smaller ways such as Lysander Spooner and the individualist anarchist brain trust in 19^th century America, the filial progeny of Milton Friedman (certainly not Milton who gave us some of the gravest injuries to liberty in the 20^th century) and the emerging Austrian David against the collectivist Goliath.  I can put it no more eloquently than Lysander Spooner did in his letter to Grover Cleveland in 1886:

“To say, as the advocates of our government do, that a man must give up some of his natural rights, to a government, in order to have the rest of them protected the government being all the while the sole and irresponsible judge as to what rights he does give up, and what he retains, and what are to be protected — is to say that he gives up all the rights that the government chooses, at any time, to assume that he has given up; and that he retains none, and is to be protected in none, except such as the government shall, at all times, see fit to protect, and to permit him to retain. This is to suppose that he has retained no rights at all, that he can, at any time, claim as his own, as against the government. It is to say that he has really given up every right, and reserved none. . . .

It is especially noticeable that those persons, who are so impatient to protect other men in their rights that they cannot wait until they are requested to do so, have a somewhat inveterate habit of killing all who do not voluntarily accept their protection; or do not consent to give up to them all their rights in exchange for it.

If A were to go to B, a merchant, and say to him, “Sir, I am a night-watchman, and I insist upon your employing me as such in protecting your property against burglars; and to enable me to do so more effectually, I insist upon your letting me tie your own hands and feet, so that you cannot interfere with me; and also upon your delivering up to me all your keys to your store, your safe, and to all your valuables; and that you authorize me to act solely and fully according to my own will, pleasure, and discretion in the matter; and I demand still further, that you shall give me an absolute guaranty that you will not hold me to any accountability whatever for anything I may do, or for anything that may happen to your goods while they are under my protection; and unless you comply with this proposal, I will now kill you on the spot,” — if A were to say all this to B, B would naturally conclude that A himself was the most impudent and dangerous burglar that he (B) had to fear; and that if he (B) wished to secure his property against burglars, his best way would be to kill A in the first place, and then take his chances against all such other burglars as might come afterwards.

Our government constantly acts the part that is here supposed to be acted by A. And it is just as impudent a scoundrel as A is here supposed to be. It insists that every man shall give up all his rights unreservedly into its custody, and then hold it wholly irresponsible for any disposal it may make of them. And it gives him no alternative but death.

If by putting a bayonet to a man’s breast, and giving him his choice, to die, or be “protected in his rights,” it secures his consent to the latter alternative, it then proclaims itself a free government, — a government resting on consent!”

Spooner is experiencing a renaissance of sorts and I am happy to make my own small contribution to that.

We are truly living in an age when so much information is available and all the tools of liberation are at our disposal that the government has to work doubly hard at maintaining that the emperor is properly attired.  This is one reason they cling to the stranglehold they have over ALL government education in America and monitor and encourage the government-media complex to contain the “proper reading” of reality as we know it.  This is also why you see the dramatic push for more government intervention in the internet with the demise of the old media titans in newspaper, radio and television.  The internet is a true bottom-up revolution in mass communications as evidenced by the tiny audience that deigns to read my scribbling.

The total and apparently synchronized destruction of the Western way of governance is underway regardless of the efforts of these failed machines to reckon a course to safety.  Greece was a bellwether and the inevitable collapse of the Western remnant is underway despite the best efforts of the Marxoid Key[ne]stone Kops at the helm.   It is rather amusing in a morbid way to watch our worthies in the US Federal government ignoring every possible avenue that expands individual freedom in a futile bid to preserve their rotting and dissolving feedlot system in the tax jurisdiction handily referred to as a nation state.

From this mess, we will see either a resurrection of more of the same or enough folks will finally wake up and see that government has always been the reason for their destitution and deprivation and not a bulwark against it.

Do your part, citizen: resist the state.

Notes in the Margin: I was a guest on Marc Stevens’ No State Project on Saturday 1/8/2011.  See:  https://marcstevens.net/

“That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support.”

-Lysander Spooner

Copyright © 2011 by zerogov.com

04 Jan And When Restitution is Impossible…

Kaiser pens a great blog over at https://kaiserleib.com/blog/.  He is also a senior editor over here at Zero Gov.

He worries over some of the implications of the non-aggression principle which is central to the thinking of ethical anarchists and abolitionists everywhere.  He raises a number of prickly observations that should concern philosophers of liberty.

While I abide by the non-aggression principle, a bothersome problem has always been how you respond to acts veiled in violence but championed on the grounds of the greater good like taxation.   Taxation is acknowledged by folks in my small circle to be an act of theft which by extension is an act of aggression but the response must be tempered proportionate to the offense.  Stack on all the other daily and eternal attacks by the state on the individual and a clear state of war against the individual is in play.  That is the distillate, when does our characterization of that aggression precipitate a violent response on the part of the individual?  Should that be entertained as a possible solution or is Gandhian-style non-violent non-compliance the answer?  Will the violent reaction by the state against the latter lead to the former response on the part of individuals?

One has to examine whether this aggression is rationalized by the victim to avoid the implication of having to respond to stop it.  Do individuals really want to resort to violence to right this obvious wrong?  One can even characterize this refusal to resist as an act of moral cowardice and I am guilty as charged.

I do think there is some insight from Butler Shaffer on the issue of violence. To wit:

“One can no more advance liberty through violence than he can regain sobriety by embracing an alternative brand of alcohol. The state is a system that enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence. It is no answer to this destructive menace to introduce a competitor who employs the same means and seeks the same ends, namely, to construct society on the principle of the power to compel obedience to authority.”

Shaffer also has some provocative thoughts on property where everything is property and that predetermines responses.  Should a man be shot for stealing a loaf of bread?  I think not.  Should he be caught and restitution demanded?  Absolutely.

What if a private enterprise came to you and said that you will surrender 60% of your income (the aggregate of American taxation) on pain of fines, caging, maiming and death for non-compliance?  That would be an act of war.  This is the discomfiting and ultimately biggest question.  The state considers this piracy on the high seas and naked theft in the private sector, yet it is the very model for the way their business is conducted.

This is certainly one of those thought experiments where far more questions than answers rise from the effort of trying to discover what course of action to take. -BB

Justice’ refers generally to the concept of moral rightness, and the administration of punishment when that morality is breached and wrong is done. I believe that restitution for the wronged is the purest and best form of justice that is available. While it may leave the wronged party dissatisfied, it does him more good than to harm, imprison or kill the offender.

Sometimes, restitution is impossible, or at least impractical. Not all things are directly replaceable by money, and some one-of-a-kind objects may be declared priceless. Human life, of course, fits this criterion. Injuries are amenable to compensation in some senses, but not in others – a man with a broken back may be compensated for lost wages, but it’s difficult to say what quantity of money is “fair” to repay his lost quality of life.

Not all wrongdoers have the capacity for restitution, either – a thief with poor work ethic, no job skills and no funds in reserve would be hard-pressed to make meaningful restitution to the victims of his thefts, for instance. A drunk driver may be unable to make restitution if his actions destroy another driver’s vehicle, regardless of the damage to life and limb. Setting fire to the Mona Lisa would not much damage the French government, but it would not be a crime for which the rest of humanity could be properly compensated, either – the cost of restitution would be difficult to determine, and most likely exceed the arsonist’s means many times over.

See the rest:  https://kaiserleib.com/blog/?p=206

31 Dec Village Praxis: Police Encounters or Why is This Public Servant Hitting Me With a Stick by Bill Buppert

A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him (a) from his superiors, (b) from his equals, and (c) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls…Here, though the common man is deceived, he starts from a sound premise: to wit, that liberty is something too hot for his hands—or, as Nietzsche put it, too cold for his spine.

– H.L.Mencken

Not until 1829 did the United Kingdom officially inaugurate the use of police forces with law enforcement powers.  This may have dovetailed nicely with van Creveld’s assertion that emergence of the state as we know it today was coincident to the creation of a large bureaucracy to give the King eyes and ears to stretch his control of the realm.

Formal police departments were created in 1838 and 1845 respectively in Boston and New York City and even these early states of police development in these united States were plagued by corruption as Grigg has so ably documented for us.

There were attempts to professionalize the police forces starting in the 1920s but even these started to surrender early to the inevitable corruption in the nexus of swimming with criminals and the invariable temptation by the government to pass an avalanche of population control measures disguised as laws to fence in and micromanage the behavior of individuals and groups.  Whether the huge cavalcade of malum prohibitum laws passed, rules to empower the national security garrison state or the erection of legal barriers to competition, the mission of police quickly spun out of control to embrace every possible human activity.  The storied notion of a police state quickly metastasized into the present state of America today.  While all of us are subject to being caged for the rest of our lives on trumped-up charges that no reasonable man can apprehend even outside the Kafkaesque world of terrorism jurisdictions, the sheer profligacy of laws on the books begs the question of how to defend yourself against an assault by the state without very deep pockets and competent legal counsel to fight the infinite resources of the state.

It takes years for the wheels of justice to creakily come around to indicting and ultimately punishing the armed tax-eaters even when they shoot innocent civilians in cold blood, if held accountable at all.  The combination of the militarization of Mayberry and the spread of no-knock warrants to the terrorism venues in the 2000s and the ratcheting up of the drug war have led to the terrifying society we live in today.  Police work is one of the least dangerous professions in the world today yet the costumed agents of the state are the most lethal government instrument in every American city.  The legions of stories of police brutality are so numerous that a library could be created documenting the incidents.  The police have become so brazen because they quite literally have a license to kill if one were to examine the punishments meted out to misbehaving police officers in departments across the land.  Paid administrative leave, reemployment at competing departments and very little sentencing for misbehavior unless it becomes too obvious an embarrassment such as the Katrina incident mentioned above.

While initially the patina of the pursuit of true criminality was the object of police forces and their supporters, this quickly turned onto a curious regime of thug worship and absolute obedience to these officers of the law.  That is why the American gulag system today is three times the size of the peak population of the Russian gulags under Stalin when one considers the Americans on probation, parole and in cages.  Most of these confined Americans are in on non-violent drug offenses or political crimes like gun paperwork violations or the participation in consensual crimes like blackmail, gambling or prostitution.

There are mountains of original research available for an academic entrepreneur who wants to make their mark.

• How many times have resisting arrest offenses been committed by folks with no criminal record nor a history of violence?

• How many shooting incidents involving police have been justified by the force employed?

• How many innocent civilians have been maimed or killed in no-knock warrants on the wrong address?

• Why should ordinary Americans be brutalized by the police for non-violent offenses?

• Why are non-lethal means so often lethal in application whether through tasing, strangulation or other means?

The list is endless and the police apologists are out in force constantly speaking to the fine upstanding young men and women putting their lives in the line.  What ridiculous propaganda.

We have reached a tipping point in America where every member of every American family is a potential victim of the armed tax-eater colossus astride the population.  I penned an essay several years ago calling for the reduction and elimination of ALL police forces in these united States because we simply cannot sustain the risk against our remaining freedoms with these armed government bureaucrats growing in power with every year.

Police forces yesterday and today are the primary means the state uses to reduce and consume what freedoms we have left.  There is no other institution outside of tax collection agencies that has the breadth and scope of power to turn the whole nation into a very large jail cell.  Do you really think that nice young man with the buzz cut and bloused combat boots who stops you for a traffic violation does not have the potential to maim or kill you and get away with it?  If you do you are naïve.  Traffic law is all about revenue and nothing more and nothing less.  If it were about safety, why not simply assign insurance points for bad drivers instead of fining them? Because the fines are the entire reason they do what they do.  The speed camera debacle in Arizona put the lie to the government droning about safety.  The cameras did not reap the revenue expected, in no small way due to brave civil disobedience on the part of the drivers, and the entire system was eliminated.  But I thought it was about safety?  Police are empowered to forcibly remove your blood on the roadside in the state of AZ to test for blood alcohol content.  Exsanguinations indeed.  You read that right; the armed tax-eaters here can extract your blood AGAINST your will at a traffic stop, for a thought crime, because that is what drunk driving is.  It is an industry much like the seatbelt laws; yet another pretense to pull over drivers and see if there is an opportunity to either enhance revenue and/or put another citizen behind bars for an undetermined amount of time.

Fred Woodworth has been publishing a journal call The Match out of Tucson, AZ for over forty years and he has column in there call “Who the Police Beat”.  He has been sounding the alarm on police brutality for that entire time and the reading is hard to digest when you read incident after bloodthirsty incident of maimed and killed people brutalized and worse at the hands of the police.  They are out of control and they are the starkest indicator that any patches of freedom left can be erased overnight.

Many have sounded the call that the military is increasingly the greatest threat to ordinary Americans but the cops are.  They will obey and do what they are told.  Why else would you see incident after sickening incident of women severely brutalized at the hands of the police?  These are only the reports that surface in the news and there most likely are plenty of incidents that simply go unreported.

It is time to stop the idolatry and hero worship of one of the worst offenders to the shredding of human liberty.  I would submit we don’t even need line officers at all.  How often do the cops actually stop crimes in progress?  How often do they arrive at the scene after the crime has been committed?  How often are the incentives for maltreatment of civilians codified in their procedural rules?

In my worldview, of course, no government police functions would exist.  Period.  All would be handled by private Dispute Resolution Organizations (DRO) and David Friedman has even gone so far as to illustrate quite convincingly that the incentives are so perverse in government policing that it should be razed and eliminated entirely.

Peace officers used to have a charter to pursue criminality and most notably malum per se laws but those days are long gone.  I have outlined in detail before the absolutely insane raft of laws in America that has made everyone a potential criminal.  Don’t believe me?  Try traveling by air or refuse to stop for the flashing revenue officer in your rear view mirror.  Watch what happens.  We have quite literally become hostages to the police state.  No one is out of danger.

Again, I am not calling for police reform or better protections for citizens or revamping the criminal justice system, I am calling for a wholesale elimination of the entire system from cops to the corrupt court system with the robed government employees to the penal colonies that dot the landscape.  I am calling for an armed citizenry unrestricted in weapons choice and employment against initiated aggression.

So until the day arrives when we are liberated from the horrific occupation of the thin blue line, quite literally the largest street gang in America, how do you protect yourself?

Know your rights. Never, never, never talk to the cops.  They quite literally do not know the law and the system coddles their ignorance by piling on charge after charge if they are intent on getting you caged.  Watch the ACLU video on Flex Your Rights.  Alan Korwin has written a brilliant book that all of us who tote guns everywhere should read and has a unique approach to the Miranda warning.  Always refuse a search. Period.

Get competent with firearms and carry. Call 911 and die.  Never call 911 because you are simply inviting a fishing expedition.  Cops are historians and detectives even more so.  Your protection is up to you and the cops have no legal duty to protect you as an individual.  You are on your own and when they arrive they will most likely accost you.  Get competent with empty handed martial arts especially very effective zero to sixty defensive arts like Haganah.

Know a competent defense attorney ahead of time.   It pays to hire the very best and it is prudent to shop now before you need them.

Record the cops’ behavior if the opportunity arises.  Sunshine is a fine antiseptic for misbehavior on the part of the armed tax-eaters and they hate it.  There is plenty of technology for both video and audio recording.

Work to convince people that freedom is an obligation that does not require we be yoked by armed tax-eaters who are a far greater threat to average Americans than any criminals.

I don’t hate cops, I simply don’t need them.

“The police cannot protect the citizen at this stage of our development, and they cannot even protect themselves in many cases. It is up to the private citizen to protect himself and his family, and this is not only acceptable, but mandatory.”

– Jeff Cooper

Copyright © 2010 by zerogov.com

28 Dec War is the Health of the State and the Death of the Rest of Us by Bill Buppert

“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” – George Orwell

I was chatting with my sainted bride at breakfast this morning and she related to me that she had heard a story on National Pinko Radio discussing the forced evacuation of Times Beach, MO during the Christmas season in 1985.  Two thousand residents excepting one elderly couple left.  God help the elderly couple today for they would have probably been tased or shot for their refusal to abandon their own property at the government’s pleasure.  In the brief quarter century since then, the government has become quite a bit more militarized at home.  Allegedly, for the first time since the Founding, an entire town had been forcibly evacuated outside of wartime, with merely the clothes on their back.  Apparently, the EPA had discovered high levels of dioxin which forced an immediate evacuation.  Imagine waking up on Christmas Eve and seeing government employees in ridiculous spacesuits standing in your yard and forcing you to leave immediately.  Or else.

Times Beach, MO

There is no doubt that dioxin is poisonous in quantity and harmful to humans but the heavy-handedness of the government in addressing the problem is typical and yet again, the germination of the problem in Times Beach was a result of a subcontractor spreading waste oil on dirt roads to quell a dust problem after he had contracted to disposing of waste from a facility charged with manufacturing Agent Orange during the American Vietnam conflict, Hoffman-Taff which leased to NEPACCO.

Again, we discover yet another germination of problems in America with government’s obsession with waging war.  I have written in the past on the increasing militarization of American society accelerating with the entry into WWI in 1917 and the unique synthesis of fascism and a national security state that has led us to the juncture we are at today.  We are waging war on four known fronts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen and involved in countless unacknowledged mischief around the globe in the War on Terror ( a critically misguided euphemism if ever there was one) stacking up enemies faster than we can maim and kill their wives and children.

I suspect that there is a doctoral thesis or two here to examine how sustainable the American economy is without the warfare state.  The enormous increase in defense expenditures (and the appropriate slice of the DOE, intelligence community and Fatherland Security tangentially related to the Pentagon activities) has warped any reasonable calculation of the crowding out of private capital and peaceful investment.  I am constantly in awe of the lefty collectivists whose abhorrence of war can evaporate overnight when one of their own gets in the White House.  The economy has been in the virtual thrall of government planning for so long that the combination of the monopoly money scrip issued by the FED, massive resource mismanagement, regulatory warping of unfettered market decisions and the crushing tax burden on the productive classes is leading to the final act in the American parabola.  We are on the downward slope and the financial apocalypse will be worthy of the demise of the other great empires that have crash landed in the refuse of their own epic mismanagement and corruption.

I don’t have the answer but my economic antennae tell me that we have been sating ourselves at the War Trough for so long that it has permanently warped our ability to have an economy built on peaceful exchange on two levels:  in the respect of unfettered markets and the production of non-war related goods and services.  One merely has to read von Mises and Hazlitt to realize that the glazier is wearing a uniform.  I often wondered that if the government ever got wind of Hazlitt’s “broken window” fallacy, they may in the best style of the odious and tyrannical Paul Krugman, propose we destroy one American city every year to provide a rebuilding project for the masses.  Who knows, maybe they could riff on the dioxin excuse used on the poor town of Times Beach.

I happen to live in one of these national security bubbles in southern AZ where the local military installation is the heart of the economy and its demise would make the area virtually unlivable because everything and everyone depends upon the base for their material living.  We are almost immune to the rampant and deepening unemployment embroiling the nation.  This may be one of several hundred such burgs throughout the US not to mention the gargantuan military-industrial sector proximate to Mordor.   When the inevitable collapse of the currency or whatever other economic Black Swan befalls us happens, these pockets of apparent prosperity will dry up and blow away.  This present Depression is unique in that all the factors that will deepen it and expand the misery are being followed to the letter by the rulers in DC:

• Keynesianism rules the intellectual roost
• Spending cuts are institutionally impossible
• Federal Reserve policy exacerbates weakness in the diminishing fiat currency
• Decision-makers still think anything Krugman says is credible
• The war on the world continues unabated
• Forced wealth redistribution continue through the tax system and spending programs
• The regimist house economists continue to wage a viscous war against small businesses

If an enemy of these united States wanted to set in motion a program of savage self-destruction, they would elect these rulers we have now and allow the system to maul and flog itself into a maelstrom of bureaucratic suicide.  We take such pride in being the exceptional nation that we have failed to look closely in the mirror and see the imperial etching and scarring of Rome on the cratered visage in the looking glass.  All imperial powers die and our morbid self-deception about imperial behavior has merely caused us to find another name for our self-murder.

Imagine a country that was non-interventionist with the wealth and resources of America.  What would happen if the enormous tribute we paid through taxation, regulation and misplaced resources of time and wealth were used for peaceful purposes?  Would that production of peaceful goods and services in essence speak to the need to pursue paths of non-violence in the way we live every day?  Has the unique brand of warfare/welfare state that is America permanently scarred most folks thinking to such a large extent that the moral imagination to consider peaceful cooperation with neighbors is out of the question?

If you don’t live in a homeowners association, find a friend who does and you will find that even the most banal of human activities – home ownership – has a tremendous amount of threatened violence built into it.  If you refuse to comply with their many demands, they have the ability to levy fines enforced by the proxy of state violence leveled against your refusal.  We travel to other end of the spectrum and you cannot read the news without discovering that we have killed more women and children with robot aircraft.  Everyday.  If a foreign power were doing that to your neighborhood, would you submit (yes, I see all the emphatically nodding heads on readers in the American Northeast but your culture is distinctly more Soviet and submissive than where I live in the American Southwest)?  Would this make you want to emulate that country?

We are a nation that has been at war for so long, we do not know anything else.  Except for a relative quiet period from 1932-41, we have been bayoneting the planet since 1890.  From China to Russia to every port in between.  The exceptional nation is built on not minding its own business and insisting on micromanaging everyone around it.  The United Kingdom is a perfect example of Buppert’s Rule of Empire:

“Whatever an empire practices abroad, no matter how noxious the policy, will eventually be used at home with a vengeance.”

I went to an antiwar rally last month at which there was a counter-demonstration by the usual suspects in the conservative realm with their “We Support the Troops” mantras, it happened to be smaller than the leftish contingent opposing the War on Terror (or Terrible People or Evil or Life or whatever it may be right now).  I found the sentiments of the lefty folks curiously bipolar in that they wanted to cease violence abroad but were happy to champion their socialist nostrums which are the real forms of domestic violence.  Several of them sported T-Shirts which sported a slogan reading:  Say No to Torture.  The counter-demonstrators made fun of these slogans.  Consider what I just said.  It belies a tacit agreement that the torture and physical or psychological maiming of other human beings is fine.  That is where our virtue barometer has fallen.  If one follows a timeline from birth (abortion) to torture to the death penalty, you can see that the people have a complicit agreement that their government may forfeit their lives at will and they will sign off on it as long as they are not the subject of such violence themselves.  If that is not a component of evil, I do not know what is.

We are one of the first empires in history that insists that all economic gain be negative in return but the primary mission of the empire appears to be to sustain a bloated and ineffective military hyper-power presence around the globe.  Whether it is the Navy’s emerging readiness difficulties afloat, critical manning shortages in the volunteer force or the dead-end programs which abound throughout DoD, the paradigm is in big trouble.  Programs which at times have multimillion dollar awards to the companies call “cancellation fees”.  One can treble the budget of all these government agencies and within a couple years they would be back at the trough begging for a new infusion of cash.  This is the nature of bureaucracy as von Mises instructed years ago.

“The bureaucrat is not free to aim at improvement. He is bound to obey rules and regulations established by a superior body. He has no right to embark upon innovations if his superiors do not approve of them. His duty and his virtue is to be obedient.”

So now we have the worst of both worlds:  a militarized state with a will to rule the world and the creeping red carpet of violence starting to spill over into the homeland.  I am not speaking to the “global terrorist” threat but the domestic terrorism practiced by the government on a daily basis whether the all too familiar police abuses or the increasing surveillance on every human transaction in America.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells us that “ [a] state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”

Not to worry because on the one hand, all empires collapse of their own outlandish weight and excess but on the other hand, the death paroxysms can be a threat to every man, woman and child living in the country.  Take heart in the fact that all empires collapse and dissolve.

I know I tend to prattle on about the likes of Wilberforce and Spooner but those two worthies provide us with the vision to know that what may not be today can be tomorrow and again, we owe it to our children.

Give peace a chance.

“For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice”

– Baruch Spinoza

Notes in the Margin: I will be on the Peter Mac show on 12/29/10 at 1900-2000 CST and we will be discussing defense issues and future privatization.

I also ran into the keenest four minute video that clearly explicates why government is wrong at the most base level.  See:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGMQZEIXBMs

I have updated and annotated the Media and Interviews page to make it easier to navigate.

Copyright © 2010 by zerogov.com

23 Dec Justice for Gary Tyler by Kaiser Leib

Gary Tyler

The conviction reached in the greatest sham trial these united states have ever known remains intact. It may remain intact forever, or nearly so. This is despite a complete lack of physical evidence, testimony given by witnesses all of whom later recanted, and long-term public outcry.

The convict is a man named Gary Tyler, and his case may be the most prominent example of government racism in the 20th (and now the 21st) century.

In 1975, two decades after Brown v. The Board of Education, Destrehan High School was to be integrated. The tensions resulting from this activity resulted, as might be expected, in fights between students. This prompted the school’s administration to cease the day’s indoctrination activities and send the black students home. Their bus was attacked by more than a hundred whites upset about the integration. One of them, a thirteen-year-old boy named Timothy Weber, was shot and mortally wounded. The police chose then-sixteen Gary Tyler as the victim of their “investigation,” and at that moment, his fate was sealed.

The investigation of Weber’s death found no gun in the black students’s bus or on the ground outside; perhaps the prosecution would have us believe that Gary Tyler threw the bullet with his hands. Tyler was beaten (that is, tortured) by the police in an attempt to force him to confess. Other witnesses, too, reported police intimidation.

The dishonorable subhuman David Duke of the KKK arrived in Destrehan, ostensibly to bring security in to protect white citizens against violence. I assert that he may have had ulterior motives for visiting, and implore the reader to draw his own conclusions.

Gary Tyler was tried as an adult and sentenced to death by electrocution. He was saved from this fate only because Louisiana’s capital punishment law was declared unconstitutional in 1977, and he was sentenced again, this time to life in prison.

Tyler’s case was appealed and his conviction overturned. The state appealed that appeal, and had him convicted again. In 1989, the Louisiana Board of Appeals ruled in favor of a pardon, but the spineless Republicrat governor Buddy Roemer declined to pardon him, fearing that such an act would cost him reelection. (He lost anyway, coming in third behind fellow loser David Duke and the alliteratively-named former governor and perennial racketeer Edwin Edwards.) Since then, his cause has been championed by journalists, celebrities, and organizations like Amnesty International.

Gary Tyler’s plight is not unheard of. It ought to serve as a rallying cry for all those who oppose the oppressive nation of the government (in)justice system. It ought to cause riots in the street, not occasional protest songs and news articles. Every democratically elected Louisiana Governor since 1975 (representing the will of their people, remember) should be publicly shamed for their failures to pardon him.

Above: this man should pardon Gary Tyler.

There is no conclusion to this essay, no call to action or argument. I have proven no thesis, and convinced you, reader, of no new philosophical idea. If anything, this is an illustration of one more government clusterfuck, one more unintended consequence of the state. There may be many more such clusterfucks in the legal system; many more men, black, white, or azure may rot in prison despite their innocence, their cases kept out of the public eye by obscurity and misfortune rather than fault of their own. Some may disagree with me as to the legitimacy of most modern laws, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who publicly favors holding in cages for life persons who’ve broken no laws. If there’s a possible state-sponsored solution to this institutional evil, I’d love to hear it.

20 Dec Village Praxis: Advanced Civilian Armament Program Part I

“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look
upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”

– Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi

To a certain extent, Gandhi is one of the intellectual patron saints of this blog and it is only appropriate to let him introduce the latest installment in the Village Praxis Series.  I would like to thank Hillary Clinton for inspiring the title and intent of this series but in the spirit of her entire life, we employ the opposite meaning that would make that female variant of Josef Stalin blanch.  As a collectivist extraordinaire, she is philosophically wrong in most everything she speaks to and has ghost-written for her.  Therefore, in a twist on Orwellian Doublespeak, we wish to ensure that the Village in this case takes the initiative to make a U-turn and go in the opposite direction from Clinton’s totalitarian vision in her book, It Takes a Village.

Skip L. is done with the Ama-gi guide he put together for our village reformation project.  He has done a thorough examination of our needs here that would make Boston T. Party proud.  As with most of these kinds of evaluations, they tend to be climate and topography specific.  Our present location is in the high desert at approx 1600 meters with mountain peaks approaching 2500 meters on occasion.  Climate is certainly mild compared with the north Idaho climes we are formerly accustomed to.  While our winter nights can reach freezing temperatures, it is rather rare to have blustery days below 60 degrees Fahrenheit during the day even during winter. On the other end of the scale, it is rare to have more than one week out of the year with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.

In the desert where we live, this is not the Sahara and we have plenty of low height vegetation that will prick, prod and sting you if you mess with them and the same applies to the local fauna among which the vipers tend to be the most unpleasant but the designer saw fit to attach warning devices on them.   The ideal camouflage for our environment tends to be Multicam or British Desert DPM although one of my lads has discovered that the old Gulf War I “chocolate chip” pattern is especially useful here.   Mind you, depending on the threat profile, the goblins may have access to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or man-portable thermal imaging which may obviate any camouflage you may employ.

I have some slight disagreements with Skip on his guide but they are merely nitpicks in an otherwise masterful guide.  Skip used the noxious term reconstruction in a positive sense and that is regrettable for those of us who hail from Confederate households (the Confederacy is not a region but a state of mind).

The weapons systems we adopted or are in the process of leveraging are designed for one rather simple task which becomes complex over time and distance:  to increase our immediate defensive envelope from one meter to a potential of  1600 meters using various tools in the quiver.

Skip and I developed the sidearm philosophy with a single guiding purpose which is one pistol family with slight variations in attributes but identical in functionality.  There will be endless debates on the efficacy of the 1911 versus the Glock and I wish to offer this one olive branch:  we have chosen and trained on the Glock with the modifications noted in the Praxis but if you or your village has mastered a different handgun system, great.  Thank you for not outsourcing your self-defense to a proxy (government) which in the end will turn it on you.  This suits our needs and yours may be different.  Skip uses the term concealed carry and I have since started using the term discreet carry because language unconsciously informs our thinking and I am not trying to hide anything nor do I like the implication.

When we first started examining rifle choices over a decade ago, we went to the FN-FAL platform as the primary for ourselves and our family members and both evolving technology and genetics forced a complete reevaluation of that decision.  We have since started moving to an AR platform based .223 and .308 system for matching the ubiquity and availability of weapons and training and adopting the lesser .223 cartridge for the family members who will NEVER field a .308 in any configuration.  Hence the decision to change platforms;  again, I cannot quibble over Skip’s recommendations except to add that a three-point sling is preferable to a two point and the addition of a Viking Tactical Loop Sling is vital to increased accuracy for the shooter especially the .308 platforms.  You will also note that as heretical as it may appear, we have not jumped on the gas piston technology and are still going with the direct impingement systems due to emerging drama over accuracy issues with the gas piston systems.

I am also hopeful that we will find a Tactical Latch that will not ventilate your sternum every time you go on a long yomp with it.

Please note that all the prices are subject to change in the Praxis but they are there as a relative guide.

I will let Skips’ recommendation for a pistol PDW/CCW speak for itself.  That is the only significant philosophical departure he and I have in the entire Praxis and I will not be adopting it.  I do think it may have an ideal “Michael Collins” deep carry urban rig utility but I am still a skeptic.

Skip and I also thought long and hard on the adoption of the Hard Target Interdiction Rifle (HTIR) and settled on the caliber of .338 Edge and he provides a great guide map on how to get there. The goblins own the Close Quarters Battle (CQB) environment but as history and our present difficulties in the Middle East show, the competent infantry half-kilometer rifleman will rule the roost and the ability to stretch that envelope to 1600 meters is even better.  Mind you, a curious combination of genetics and your willingness to train will be required to achieve any degree of mastery in the 800 meter plus combat environment and does it well.  I would contend that there are only a very small percentage of active riflemen who are even capable of this.  Not only is there a tremendous financial investment of nearly 10k per rifle when one factors in the training and ammunition and rebarreling necessary to master the system.  This is where the costs may be prohibitive in both money and time to become expert in a rather arcane skill set.

Per Skip’s recommendation on mission sets, I would offer that consideration be given to Level III versus Level IIIA armor for ballistic protection if you choose to not get Level IV.  I would also recommend that you consider that purchase now instead of later because it is only a matter of time before the rulers consider the private ownership of armor to be beyond the ken for them.  These bundles of kit also imply a tremendous amount of homework to see what fits your personal profile and the area of the country you live in.

One can infer from even a casual glance that this is not for the financially faint-hearted nor for folks pressed for time they can allocate to proper training.  It is one thing to have the kit for any enterprise you embark on but it is quite another to become competent with it.  The occupation dissenters in Iraq and Afghanistan are giving the world’s hyper military quite a difficult time with primitive but effective weapons technology because they have taken the time to train and acquaint themselves with their tools to include their hometown advantage.  Training is the most valuable resource you have when it comes to weapons, period.

Here at ZeroGov, we do not endorse a pacifist philosophy which appears to be a sure road to extinction.  We are opposed to ALL initiated violence on principle but endorse the use of elective (dueling) violence and defensive violence to protect village and kin from aggression.  Like the Free State Project, our mascot is the porcupine which is only harmful if messed with.  F. Paul Wilson gave us this from THE SECOND BOOK OF KYFHO [Keep Your F**king Hands Off] (Revised Eastern Sect Edition):

Never initiate force against another. That should be the underlying principle of your life. But should someone do violence to you, retaliate without hesitation, without reservation, without quarter, until you are sure that he will never wish to harm – or never be capable of harming – you or yours again.

Imagine a world in which individuals or cooperatives would react in that fashion to any violent government intervention in their lives; before long, government would be resting comfortably in the dustbins of history where they belong.

Remember, weapons and their associated kit are only a small part of the preparedness profile necessary to be ready for what government has created – a big bloody mess with unintended consequences all over the place.  America will be an amusement park ride for the rest of its short-lived history remaining.  Your ability to care for your family and let them prosper in the coming bad times is your mission and if you leave it to the authorities, you are wrong.

Here is the link to the Praxis.

My friend Nathan C sent this terrific critique of the Guide:

1. Plug in Glock handle may make it harder to remove mag if stuck.

2. Extended slide release not so important if people learn to not use them at all. It is better to grab the slide and rack it.  I never use that little mag release thingy [very useful in wounded defender drills, actually indispensable]

3. DMR 5.56 is great, I run a 16″ Recce.  I am still supersonic out to 800 yards so that is what my range is in my opinion.  The 77 gn bullets hit the steel so hard at 800 they disintegrate.  Imagine being hit by a .22 LR going 1100 fps second that weighed 77 gr. The DMR you show would have another 200 fps, so supersonic range is out to 900 or so I think. It is important people know that they need a fast rate of twist to shoot 77 gn smk, at least 1 in 8 but I run 1 in 7 twist.  I have been promoting the Recon 5.56 as a standard caliber/rifle in my circle. I know that 308 is the caliber of choice amongst preppers, but I got my reasons.  Compatible magazines, parts and ammo just seem like such a great idea. I was also led down this path by Marcus Luttrell’s book.

4. Optics are essential and you are missing out if you never had the chance to shoot a scope whose knobs and reticle both speak the miliradian language.  MOA is a dinosaur that will be extinct in the next 20 years.  Get in now on the ground floor of Mil/Mil and be seen as pioneers. Other nice features are zero stop, 1 or 2 turn knob, front focal plane and variable power. SWFA has a 3-9 power that fits most of these criteria for a paltry $500 (demo) I have their 10x and am very impressed with it.  Unfortunately it is not illuminated.  Personally I like US Optics and Nightforce the best but expensive for sure.  I have been driving a 1.5-6x USO for a few months now and I am very impressed.

5. The Harris bipods are much better with the notched legs and the “pod-lock.” [Versapod is even better]

6. I have read quite a few neg reviews on the Newcon rangefinder. I am leaning toward the Swaro or the next step up is the Vectronix I think. For under 800 yards the Leoupold is OK.  I am a little embarrassed to admit I don’t own a good rangefinder right now.  I will soon fix that though.

7. I have an Eliseo tube gun chassis on order that I think is a good way to go. 20 MOA rail, AI magazine compatible, and Rem compatible for around $700.  I hope to have this up and running as a 308/260 Remington switch barrel in the next few months.

8.  I know you guys have put a lot of thought into this and I appreciate it.  I hope one of my ideas will bring you at least mild amusement.

9. In the future I will attempt to lure you to the dark side of suppressor ownership and to the dark realm of the 300 AAC Blackout formerly known as 300 Whisper.

What can hide muzzle flash, soak up recoil, confuse the zombies into looking for you where you are not, make your weapon much quieter, and entice timid people into having fun at the range? Sssshhhh.

10. I once asked a friend of mine whether or not he was worried that the authorities might not come one day and confiscate his weapons, as he had many suppressors and machine guns (all legall).  He was an Oathkeeper and a Ranger.

He said simply, “Oh, I’ll be long gone before that.”

I guess he had drawn a line in the sand, and dared them to cross it.

Notes in the Margin:

I found a bootlegged copy of my speech at the Freedom Summit on 5 DEC 2010 on the “The End of America: the Coming deSovietization of These united States”.  You will find it here:

I will post a cleaner copy as soon as it becomes available.

“There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.”

— Marcus Tulius Cicero

14 Dec Why We Fight For a World With No Government by Bill Buppert

“I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.”

-H.L. Mencken

Why does this site exist and what will you get out of it?  Every blog is something of a vanity project and a catharsis for thinking out loud and this suits both for me.  Aside from writing a book, a blog is a legacy that may last far longer than I do.  Nothing really disappears from the Internet and I am certain there are folks in the government who are always interested in maintaining a watchful eye on blogs such as mine because they represent the most direct philosophical threat to their very existence.

In an earlier phase of my intellectual development, I had been seduced by the heady siren song of limiting government which sounds like the most viable solution but on closer examination is the most silly of chimeras.  There is no historical precedent in the Western world throughout its entire history of a government birthing from calving off another or rising out of the ashes of extinction of the previous regime and containing themselves within the confines of power originally set forth at their germination. None.  There are plenty of empty promises and proclamations of purity but the usual suspects will be self-selected to seek to rule others;  most of whom are socio- or psychopathic.  Politics is nothing more than the nationalization of human transactions where the converse is the complete privatization of the planet; the latter is the charter of this blog.  Nationalization is the government seizure (there is no polite term) of a product, service or behavior.  This can happen with something as mundane as the circumference of grapefruit to something as epic in scope as the forfeiture of health care or the use of the innumerable malum prohibitum laws on the books.  For those who take a longer view of history, it becomes abundantly clear that governments in their life stages until their eventual deaths which are inevitable rarely seem to calculate second- and third-order effects of their meta-behaviors.  I always presume that while good intentions may be the standard apologia for the lion’s share of government action and behavior, this is simply an intellectual smokescreen with the same vapidity of hate crimes, hiding what is the nature of government which is the threat or use of violence against anyone or anything which either refuses to comply or pay the assessed tribute.  One should never measure a government’s behavior by its intent but the fruits of its actions.  And that is bitter fruit indeed for the totality of human history.  It is almost as if we have been in a fever-dream surrounded by inmates in a vast prison state which has effectively through indoctrination trained people to consciously think that harming others through fining, jailing, maiming and killing is the only blueprint for any possible society.  Think of that, a near consensus among thinking human beings that the only way to organize a just society is through terror.  Terrorism is the use of politically motivated violence against non-combatants or innocents in a kinder parlance.  One might say that the Global War on Terror which has exponentially increased the size of government has been pointed in the wrong direction.

We have friends and relations who enjoy boasting of law and order.  The tough guys who pronounce that the latest police beating was warranted and the prison rape the men will endure while caged for their sentence is perfectly justified for their crimes even if the offense were as banal as a paperwork violation, avoidance of taxes or an infraction against the tens of thousands of law no normal human could comprehend much less have an awareness of.  Remember that it is all about the law and not the human context because context is totally absent from government calculus.  It is part of its power.  I have mentioned before that every American is subject to indefinite detention in the alleged justice system the Federal government and its subsidiary political elements known as states have erected.  It is another tool in the arsenal of democracy that is the fancy name for mob rule subject to the kakocrats at the top of the system.  The government has been successful beyond their wildest expectations in creating a captive and occupied population from which they derive both their material succor and the sophisticated means to bully and control tens of millions of humans. The government must erect these officious and brutal means of suppression otherwise the small percentage of liberty minded folks who chafe at living on a feedlot and having their lives micromanaged would set a very bad example for the rest who would take notice of the people who elect not to abide by the system.  As with the likelihood of secession looming ever brighter, once the first person is allowed to opt out of the government confines, a stampede will commence that will be unstoppable.  This is why the IRS is invested with such formidable power to fine and cage recalcitrant taxpayers.

America has conducted a brilliant government campaign to put the state at the top tier of idolatry and the family and individual volition at the bottom.  This has been a two-tiered assault.  The government makes it very inconvenient to fight its depredations as an individual and ensures that the education system is kept in a tight orbit around government supremacism.  Most of my readers have attended some college and have seen first-hand the absolute monopoly of the government supremacist mindset among faculty, administration and student alike. When one suggests that non-violence may be a preferable building system for a peaceful society instead of the enslavement of government, one is almost universally scorned.  Is it not interesting that all the fevered anti-war rhetoric from the “left” has disappeared since the election of the latest scoundrel to the Presidency?  The collectivism permeates the American academy with very little exception and this from doyens in the humanities and social “sciences” whose jobs may belabor 8-12 hours per week unless they have paid teaching assistants available. The rest of the time certainly is not used to practice critical thinking but to sharpen the same weak-minded rationalizations of the academy to justify the ultimate goal of extinguishing every private aspect of human life.  They prettily dress the rhetoric is high-minded humanitarian goals but in the end they are the intellectual equivalents of prison guards in their moral imaginations.

And then we have the mooing from certain sections of the feedlot about the sacred Constitution and returning to our roots to regain our liberties.  Fat chance since the germination of that document gave us the leviathan we labor under today.

Here is a thought experiment for you:  the next time you have a convivial discussion of politics or society with your friends and family, tell them to see if they are capable of conducting the discussion without advocating the initiation of violence on their fellow humans.  See if the conversation about politics will in any fashion examine alternatives to inherent violence and compulsion.  While I despise the false front of Left and Right which are simply degrees of collectivism, you will notice that even the “peace” advocates tend to embrace the use of force domestically and the “hawks” tend to glory in the killing of humans around the globe.  Yet, it is hard to distinguish between them anymore especially since the latest occupant of the White House, despite a rather elegant Leftish pedigree, is indistinguishable in his actions from his neoconservative/socialist predecessor.  The government program of indoctrination has been so thorough that most will be speechless and unable to communicate because government is not about the noble ideas of securing rights or ensuring liberty but the cardinal opposite.  In its most naked and unadorned form, it is simply a cop.  Invested with all we have come to expect from that particular class: a base viciousness with no limit whatsoever in the ability to cage, maim and kill for crimes that would not exist within the realm of common sense or decency.  Killing in the name of love, indeed.

I plan on embarking on a quixotic and scintillating quest in the near future to explicate why cooperation and non-violence (except in response to initiated violence) are the preferable and virtuous way to order a society.  This may be a Sisyphean task but a necessary one.  We owe it to our children to offer a better future and not a more comfortable (for now) prison cell.

“A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases. The result — and a natural one — has been that we have had governments, State and national, devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth. And these crimes have been committed, and this war waged, by men, and the descendants of men, who, less than a hundred years ago, said that all men were equal, and could owe neither service to individuals, nor allegiance to governments, except with their own consent.”

– Lysander Spooner

Notes in the Margin: I am looking for original essays that explain why roads, law and a myriad of other “public” goods and services must be privatized.  Please note that my use of the word privatized does not mean the contracting out of a service by a government entity but the complete divorce from any government grasp or reach.  It will be published under your name and I reserve the right to edit for grammar and spelling but not content.

Scott Horton interviewed me for antiwar.com recently.  You will find it here:    https://antiwar.com/radio/2010/12/13/william-buppert/ Please be sure to add comments if you please.

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