A LITTLE REBELLION

Don't Vote!

Before the mid-term elections, I blogged about why voting has very little practical or philosophical merit for the future of individual liberty, peace, and the tenets of a liberal (free) social order.

Sure, there may be instances where voting can have short-term benefits --a tax cut, legalizing or decriminalizing drugs, the extension of marriage rights-- but these are tantamount to cowardly getting on our knees and begging our state rulers for longer chains. In the long run, however, consenting to the guns at our necks, which the act of voting does, is a self-defeating and even counterproductive option.

I owe many scholars, philosophers, theorists, books, and essays to these conclusions because I myself used to be under the spell that as long as we get "our guys" in charge, everything will be fine.

But thanks to the influence of these intellectual giants --Lysander Spooner, Murray Rothbard, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, and Emma Goldman just to name a few-- I have washed away my naive faith in politics and that social problems can be solved and/or addressed by the violent and coercive methods of state power.

This is the reason I do what I do, why I write this blog, why I end up spending hours at bars talking politics and philosophy with strangers, why I have dedicated myself to peaceful revolution. My only aim is to live as free and with as much dignity as possible in this statist world, and to convince, not force, others to throw off their chains and embrace the beauty and responsibility of liberty.

Here is Elisee Reclus, in Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, explaining better than I ever could why we should not vote.

EVERYTHING that can be said about the suffrage may be summed up in a sentence.

To vote is to give up your own power.

To elect a master or many, for a long or short time, is to resign one's liberty.

Call it an absolute monarch, a constitutional king, or a simple M.P., the candidate that you raise to the throne, to the seat, or to the easy chair, he will always be your master. They are persons that you put "above" the law, since they have the power of making the laws, and because it is their mission to see that they are obeyed.

To vote is befitting of idiots.

It is as foolish as believing that men, of the same make as ourselves, will acquire in a moment, at the ringing of a bell, the knowledge and the understanding of everything. Of course it is so. Your elected person shall have to legislate on every subject under the moon; how a box of matches should or should not be made, or how to make war; how to improve the agriculture, or how best to kill a tribe of Arabs or a few Negroes. Probably you believe that their intelligence will grow in proportion to the variety of subjects they have to give their minds to; but history and experience teaches otherwise.

The possession of power has a maddening influence; parliaments have always wrought unhappiness.

In ruling assemblies, in a fatal manner, the will prevails of those below the average, both morally and intellectually.

To vote is to prepare shameful treachery and traitors.

Read the rest here.

Anarchy: True Checks And Balances

The Ninth District U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco, in a recent case, validated the legality of the current CIA practice of flying "terrorism" suspects to foreign countries to be tortured. The ruling also reinforced the incredibly broad powers of the President to invoke the "state-secrets privilege" to stop lawsuits against the U.S. government. The rationale? "National security," of course.

What a perfect Orwellian word. You could fill a library with the crimes and bloodshed committed in its name.

"National security" does not mean the protection of the citizens' liberty and property, of course, but the protection (and expansion) of the political structure of the State and its corporatist buddies that benefit from government subsidies and the restriction of competitors. If perpetual war really made us safe and free, how come every U.S. war leaves us with fewer civil liberties, higher taxes, and more debt?

The Ninth Circuit's ruling also pokes holes in the arguments of proponents of "limited government." Having three branches of government (legislative, judicial, and executive) was supposed to provide effective checks on each other, "ambition to check ambition" as James Madison put it.

But the idea that a government court would tend to rule against the expansion of government power not only borders on absurd, but also has hundreds of years of evidence in this country alone to refute it. Like nearly every attempt to "reform" or check the power of the State, it has been futile.

The Founders were absolutely correct when they, standing on the shoulders of philosophical giants, argued in favor of restricting the occasional propensity of man to violate his neighbor's liberty and property, settling on the idea of checks and balances.

But the tragic mistake was assigning the job of protecting people against theft and coercion to the State, an institution that exists solely due to theft and coercion. It's like putting Ted Kennedy in charge of an AA meeting. Creating checks and balances against power is absolutely essential in a free society, but how can this ever be possible under the centralizing tendencies of a State?

Later on in his life, even Thomas Jefferson came incredibly close to rejecting the necessity of the State, and perhaps he was right. Societies that have had smaller states or no state at all tend to be more decentralized, where a market order emerges based on private property, voluntary exchange, and mutual aid. Jefferson's friend Thomas Paine recognized that a huge majority of order and civilization we enjoy comes from the combination of man's nature as a social being (commerce and cooperation) and man acting in his own rational self-interest.

In other words, free market anarchism --the abolition of coercion from human relationships-- is checks and balances taken to its logical extreme.

Which is why it doesn't shock me that the Ninth Circuit justified the torturing of innocents or the right of Obama to do anything he wants as long as it's in the name of "national security;" government courts have been rubber-stamping the expansion of government power for centuries. After all, if absolute power corrupts absolutely, why wouldn't they?

UPDATE: The always great Glenn Greenwald has the best analysis I have found so far on the Ninth Circuit's recent decision here.

LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT...

Over the weekend, Wikileaks finally released over 91,000 classified documents it has obtained concerning the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

And the leaked documents reveal some truly frightening facts. Hundreds of civilians killed, covert killers, torture, and a sharp increase in Taliban strength in power as opposition to the occupation grows are just the most eye-opening aspects of the leak.

Despite their supposed "opposition" to each other, liberals and conservatives* have united in one great, common cause: the defense of these U.S. government war crimes.

All day, right-wing radio has dismissed the Wikileaks leak as a "non-story." So what if a bunch of civilians were killed and the U.S. government intentionally hid it from us? According to Rush Limbaugh, the U.S. killed hundreds of thousands of civilians by bombing Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Tokyo, so what's the big deal? This is war, kill them all!!!  It is truly amazing what some people will do and say to rationalize MASS MURDER.

Not to be outdone, the very liberal publication Mother Jones took time to spit on Wikileaks. After all, "their" guy has the massive power of the State in his hands, so we wouldn't want to be too critical would we?

And don't forget about the statist mainstream press. When Wikileaks released the video of U.S. Apache helicopters strafing civilians in Iraq, CNN edited out most of the actual footage to make the U.S. government not look so bloodthirsty. Nothing to see here, American sheeple, go back to Tiger Woods and Mel Gibson.

Immediately after Wikileaks released the classified documents, the U.S. government publicly condemned it, saying that it "threatened national seccurity." And actually, they're right. This leaked footage definitely threatens the security of the national thugs in DC and their immense power, which is why it is going after Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, with far more zeal than say, Osama Bin Laden.

Meanwhile. the heroic solder, Bradley Manning**, who supposedly helped leak the Afghan War documents (as well as the Apache helicopter footage) may face 52 years in prison.

I can just hear the voices of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Orwell whispering, "We told you so....nothing good can come from centralizing power into a political State." Every facet of life then becomes attached to it like leaches. The press becomes eager to please their masters rather than expose them, to attack any signs of rebellion or disloyalty as sedition.

This is what 21st century America has come to: the war criminals in the U.S. government are always given the benefit of the doubt, while whisteblowers are locked in cages.

*It actually makes sense that the mainstream left and right are so eager to hush this story and defend the DC regime. After all, it takes two steps at a time to march, like ants, and go forth to kill for the State. Left-Right-Left-Right-Left-Right....

**UPDATE: It is an uphill climb, but thanks to the power of the web, it is much easier to learn the truth and help combat government abuse. If anyone is interested at all, I highly recommend going to http://www.bradleymanning.org/ to get the full story on this American patriot.

Happy Secession Day!!!!!

To me, the 4th of July is more than just bbqs, hot dogs, fireworks, flags, and great weather. Don't get me wrong, these peaceful traditions are an important part of celebrating American independence and sharing a common ideology.

But what it's also about, though rarely ever mentioned, is the idea of secession. Although it might have scary connotations in today's celebrity-news infested, mass mediocrity America, secession is nothing more than political divorce, the peaceful parting of ways from an institution that no longer serves its required purpose.

We all remember Jefferson's self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence about how "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Beautiful, poetic, and the backbone of a liberal (i.e. free) order.

But Jefferson's next sentences reveal the DOI for what it was: a revolutionary secessionist document, a big middle finger to King George III and tyrants everywhere. He continues:

"That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness

......But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."

Now THAT is an idea I can get behind.

And just take a look at the grievances that sparked such revolutionary and timeless words. Jefferson complained that King George III placed himself above the law, kept standing armies and placed the military as the highest position of importance in society, cut off trade, taxes without consent, and depriving people of the benefits of trial by jury.

Fast forward 234 years, and aren't Jefferson's complaints just as, if not more, valid now? Washington, DC has grown to be the largest, most deadly, and most intrusive government in history, wielding a global empire abroad and police state at home funded by massive taxation and inflation.

For the sake of our liberty, our property, our security, and our future, isn't it time secession made a comeback?

(via Examiner.com)