Personal Secession – The Way to Freedom

by Michael S. Rozeff

Certain people and groups in California want to ban male circumcision, and they are getting measures placed on local ballots for voting.

In Louisiana, there is some sort of law about the teaching of the creation of man in the public schools that has people who dislike that law all riled up and seeking repeal.

Women in Egypt are bitterly divided between those who favor sharia law for Egypt and those who favor secular law.

The State of Arizona has a law that legalizes medical marijuana. The Governor is suing the State of Arizona against this law because it conflicts with federal law.

President Bush "launched missiles and bombs at targets in Iraq" in March of 2003, an action of which 25 percent of Americans disapproved at the time. That figure rose to 53 percent within 8 months.

What do the above items have in common?

They all involve laws approved of by some and disapproved of by others. In all cases, there are winners and losers. The winners get their favorite laws passed. The losers have to obey.

In all cases, the losers have no choice.

You can’t smoke in a bar. You must use a bicycle helmet. You cannot use an incandescent light bulb. You cannot place phosphates in soap. You must use a front-loading washing machine. Your shower cannot pump at above a specified rate. Your toilet cannot go above a specified number of gallons. You must pay taxes for government programs. You must accept Federal Reserve Notes in payments. A bank must report cash transactions over a specified size. You cannot buy marijuana. You cannot simply buy a gun.

If circumcision is banned in San Francisco, those who want to circumcise their babies will have to go elsewhere. In Louisiana, the public schools, and maybe even private schools who can’t find an exemption on some grounds, will teach what the legislature tells them to teach. In Egypt, either sharia law will be in or it will be out, for everyone. In the individual states, either they will be allowed to pass medical marijuana laws or else the federal law will be the rule. Clinton, Bush, and Obama and the Congress will launch their missiles wherever they please even if large numbers of Americans disapprove, and they will extract the resources to do this in the form of taxes whether you like it or not.

These examples all involve voting and democracies, but the same division between winners and losers occurs in other forms of government such as monarchies and dictatorships.

They all have in common that there are always groups of people who want to impose their views on everyone. They all have in common that every such group aims to use government as the instrument to fulfill their ardent desires.

I feel sorry for the human race. The thinking and emotional makeup of most people are so impoverished that they cannot find a way to live without imposing their views on as many other people as they can. It is not enough for them to preach their views. They feel they have to pass a law or somehow use the government to make everyone else conform to their wishes.

I felt sadness when I read about the woman pushing for a circumcision law. It doesn’t matter what her reasons are. Everyone always comes up with reasons. Bush had his reasons. Obama has his reasons. The Louisiana legislators had their reasons. I’m not debating the reasons or the substance of any of these many debates. I’m not interested in choosing up sides.

I feel sad because the desire to pass a law and impose one’s own views on everyone else is, to my way of thinking, so stupid, so ignorant, so limited in vision, so immoral, so anti-human, so devoid of understanding, so unloving, so distorted, so anti-freedom, so anti-voluntaristic, so anti-individual, so unreasonable, so intolerant, and so against the person.

Government in its present condition is a factory that constantly manufactures new kinds of ropes, manacles, gags, and handcuffs with which it binds everyone. This is what most people accept.

I am amazed, totally amazed, that people do not see or admit the contradiction between the American rhetoric of freedom and what actually goes down, and between that rhetoric and their own attempts to vote in the candidates of their choice and impose their programs on everyone else!

Through the instrument of government, there are countless groups and political parties organized with the sole purpose of making slaves out of everyone. Is this not a self-evident truth? No, it is not, because every such group and party attempts to provide reasons why its program is a good thing. They would bitterly dispute my contention that their aim is to impose slavery on everyone.

One government for all cannot coexist with freedom. They are mutually exclusive.

Let those who wish to build missiles and shoot them into Tripoli do so at their own cost and risk and for themselves only. Let those who wish to form and pay for a military that trains every nation on earth how to interdict drugs do so at their own cost and risk and for themselves only. Let those who wish to form a legislature that enacts their version of religion do so at their own cost and risk and for themselves only. Let those who wish to pass a law that forbids drug use do so for themselves only. Let those who wish to pass a law that forbids circumcision do so for themselves only. Let those who wish to tax themselves and give the proceeds away to those in need do so for themselves only. Let those who wish to guarantee medical care for all those in their group do so at their own cost and risk and for themselves only.

If we actually want freedom and not slavery, we cannot have one government for all. Freedom and one government for all are inconsistent with one another. They contradict one another. To have one government and simultaneously to have freedom is an impossibility.

To arrive at greater freedom, one has to have the freedom to remove the manacles imposed by a government that presumes to be the government for all. One has to be able to opt out of government laws. One has to be able to secede personally from a government.

Personal secession manifests one’s personal freedom to choose a government (or no government) of one’s desires, by oneself or in association with other people.

For further reading on personal secession and secession by groups, one can use a search engine. After writing the above, I searched on secession movements. One site that came up was secession.net. Their statement of principles is well worth reading. They advocate something close to personal secession, namely, community-based secession. The difference between them is trivial.

For example, this site writes


PRIMACY OF THE RIGHT TO SECEDE

The primary political right of the individual and of political communities must be to secede from any larger political entity, whether they were born into it, were forced to join it, or voluntarily joined it. If one denies or relinquishes that right, one is little more than a slave--and no agreement to become a slave can be legally or morally binding.

Secession of individuals and communities does not have to mean war and violence. It should be a natural evolutionary feature of all political entities. Communities can form networks or confederations, since secession is accepted by both in principle. However, communities will not form "federations" which by definition do not allow secession. We will suggest practical and nonviolent means by which such separation can occur and the kinds of networks and confederations that could be created to replace oppressive nation states.

COMMUNITY-BASED SECESSION:

In the name of nationalism, religion, ideology, tradition or "the common good," the governments of the world suppress individual liberty and individuals' control of their own communities. Special interest- corporate- state- bureaucratic- military elites worldwide tax, regulate, bully, beat, prosecute, jail and execute citizens into submission. They discriminate against, rob, ethnically cleanse and genocide members of oppressed racial/ethnic/religious/regional groups. Without government control, these elites would have little real power over individuals and communities.

The concept of individual liberty is simple: individuals should be free to do whatever they please as long as they don't harm others by using force or fraud. This is the basic ethical tenet or "golden rule" of all religions, one corrupted by layers of theology and ritual and centuries of kowtowing to political authority. Individual consent–not some nationalist, racial, religious, tribal or, ideological construct or "social contract"–is the only legitimate basis of any social, economic and political organization. However, supporting the idea and value of individual liberty is not enough to obtain liberty. We must support institutional structures that make it impossible for public or private entities to crush individual liberty.

Contrast personal secession with the U.S. government’s notions of "security" and "democracy" and "welfare" for all of America. The U.S. vision is actually a highly limited vision that pretends to be a universal vision. Its thrust is to the common and general. It is certainly a monopolistic vision. Ultimately, it is a static and one-sided totalitarian vision. A totalitarian vision within the United States is continually being enacted and made real. It is not that of Orwell or Huxley although some of their elements are present. At present it is a suffocating and deadening vision in which political correctness holds sway and in which government makes countless rules that control many aspects of life, while allowing outlets in certain directions that vent the pressures. The government’s vision is of oneness, sameness, monotony, regularity, perfect safety and security, regimentation, and boredom. It crushes the personal and the individual.

The U.S. government is even making strenuous efforts to promote this vision in foreign governments.

Democracy is not freedom. It is the suppression of freedom. This takes different forms in different countries. In America, the current obsession is with security and safety in every aspect of life. The government intrudes everywhere with these as its rationales. This is the American totalitarianism.

Personal secession allows for multiple visions of life and living. It allows for dynamism, creativity, personal development along new lines, invention, discovery, and adventure. It allows for variation and newness. It allows for development along unexpected lines. It allows for mistakes and learning from mistakes, new and untried ventures, new ways, new customs, and new ideas. It allows for personal risk-taking. It emphasizes the personal and individual. It is pluralistic. It is voluntaristic.

Personal secession means freedom and all that freedom entails.


June 6, 2011

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Dominationand the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.

Individual Secession

By a Texan currently living abroad

Some years ago I listened with keen interest to a speech by a professor from Alabama speaking about how Americans had tried “State Secession” twice. It had worked once and it had failed once. While we all look forward to the time that we might go for “the best of three”, there remain some things that one can do as an individual. They fall in the category of Individual Secession. Individual Secession comes in many flavours and the applications are as diverse as the people who implement it.

For some, it begins with taking our children out of government indoctrination centers, and arranging for private or home school solutions. That is as much an act of secession as anything else, and has been resorted to by literally millions of parents at this point. Believe me, it concerns the Central Planners, when those fertile brains are removed from their dominion. (It’s always touching to see their “concern for the children.”)

Others have walked away from churches which teach false doctrines, or left social clubs and even jobs over issues they feel are inimical to their family or the entire country. In fact, it’s an American tradition to quit when you don’t like the way things are going – to just walk away. That’s why songs like, “Take This Job and Shove It”, resonate with the American working man. Indeed, “I was lookin’ for a job when I found this one,” was a theme long before it was a song.

In 1865, and for a decade following, Southerners emigrated from the South in such numbers that it constituted one of the great migrations of Western Civilization. Much has been written of the fact that the American West draws its independent nature from Southerners who had no intention of living with the boot of Yankee occupation squarely on their neck. Most of them fled west to Texas and beyond.

Tens of thousands, however, went to different countries. Not a few went to England and Scotland. Many thousands went into Mexico. Between ten and twenty thousand went to the most famous settlement of Americana, leaving an interesting cultural impression upon the region, where ante bellum cotillions are still danced, and the most Southern accents you can imagine are still spoken by the older descendents. Most, however, returned to the US, and found their way west. The primitive conditions and foreign cultures were difficult on all, and the distance from families was not worth the price, especially when locals were not necessarily welcoming of these strange new immigrants.

Where did we all come from in the first place? There is not a single American or European (or Asian or African, for that matter), who does not descend from an immigrant at some point. We are a nation of immigrants, legality notwithstanding. And those who came, did so under conditions far more difficult than what we face today. They left family behind, without benefit of FaceBook or e-mail for daily communication. They went to a strange culture, often a strange language for a couple of major reasons – the chance to own their own land (private property) and/or the necessity to flee tyranny. (The two are often related.)

In the late 18th Century, Scottish and Irish immigrants found it so difficult to feed a family that they voted with their feet, by walking to the nearest port and booking passage to the colonies, principally to America, and later to Australia and New Zealand. The government became alarmed, shortly after the absentee landlords became alarmed, for the rents simply quit coming in. A royal commission was created to figure out what had happened to all the (formerly servile) farmers and shopkeepers.

As is so typical of governments, they immediately developed a conscience about the conditions in which those poor emigrants had to travel. (Wink, wink.)

In 1803, the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed the Passenger Vessels Act. It was the first of many laws intended to regulate the transportation of immigrants and to protect emigrants on board ships from exploitation by transportation companies (such as exorbitant rates and consequent subjection to poor sanitary conditions). The Passenger Act required improved conditions relating to hygiene, food and comfort for passengers travelling to North America. However, this law was not always followed by transportation providers and the spread of infectious diseases such as typhus continued.

This act was established under humanitarian pretences, but the more practical and desired effect was to raise the cost of passage to prevent as many as possible from leaving. Landlords who feared the emigration of their population lobbied extensively for this piece of legislation, and where one could previously travel to Canada for £3–4, the price for the same passage was in some cases raised to £10 or more. The ability to move abroad was subsequently limited to a small class of people until it was repealed in 1826.

As one South Texan recently told me, when I asked him, what would your ancestors say, who came from Europe 150 years ago to claim this ranch and build a homeland for generations. His response was startling in its intensity. He said, “My family came here to escape government oppression and to find cheap land. I’ve had enough government meddling with my property and confiscatory taxation. I’ve found cheap land in another country. If my family lived here with me now, I guarantee you, they would be helping me pack!” He now owns a ranch in Argentina. (I asked him about the socialist government there, and he said, “It could be bad, if they were efficient, but they’re so incompetent that they practically don’t exist. I can live with it.”) Reminds me of Will Rogers’ famous quip, “I should think the last thing you want is all the government you pay for!”

Someone told me recently that 4,000 Americans a week arrive in Panama to make it their new home. Obviously, many are retirees, choosing to get better value for their dwindling dollars there than they can back home. But many of the people leaving the US these days are simply fed up, and no longer convinced that they can do a thing in the world to change things here, and willing to make the effort to start over for the sake of children and grandchildren.

All of that to say, “Things are at a head.” None of us are surprised that a crisis is coming – it’s the common core belief of a huge section of Americans today. And some are preparing creative ways to secede, right where they are. They are opting out of government systems, disappearing from the traditional and moving into alternative forms of buying and selling their goods and services. These things need a lot of discussion and development and debate. Whether it’s food production and cooperative buying, or alternative health programs, or herbal medicine, or contract labor, etc., there is a healthy underground economy out there that is (a) invisible, and (b) helping prop up the sick and dying economy.

If you decide to become an expatriate and leave the country, you’re in good company. Follow your own path, knowing you’re not the first, nor the last. (Chances are, you’ll be back.)

http://southernnationalcongress.org/truths/individual_secession.shtml

The Nature of Government

A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.

Do men need such an institution—and why?

Since man’s mind is his basic tool of survival, his means of gaining knowledge to guide his actions-the basic condition he requires is the freedom to think and to act according to his rational judgment. This does not mean that a man must live alone and that a desert island is the environment best suited to his needs. Men can derive enormous benefits from dealing with one another. A social environment is most conducive to their successful survival—but only on certain conditions.

“The two great values to be gained from social existence are: knowledge and trade. Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The second great benefit is the division of labor: it enables a man to devote his effort to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in other fields. This form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to achieve a greater knowledge, skill and productive return on their effort than they could achieve if each had to produce everything he needs, on a desert island or on a self-sustaining farm.

“But these very benefits indicate, delimit and define what kind of men can be of value to one another and in what kind of society: only rational, productive, independent men in a rational, productive, free society.” (“The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness)

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment-a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man’s nature—is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all the values of human coexistence, has no possible justification and represents, not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to man’s survival. Life on a desert island is safer than and incomparably preferable to existence in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

If men are to live together in a peaceful, productive, rational society and deal with one another to mutual benefit, they must accept the basic social principle without which no moral or civilized society is possible: the principle of individual rights.

To recognize individual rights means to recognize and accept the conditions required by man’s nature for his proper survival.

Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.

The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistoric savages.

The use of physical force—even its retaliatory use—cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors’ intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice-the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.

Visualize, for example, what would happen if a man missed his wallet, concluded that he had been robbed, broke into every house in the neighborhood to search it, and shot the first man who gave him a dirty look, taking the look to be a proof of guilt.

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.

If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.

This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.

The fundamental difference between private action and governmental action—a difference thoroughly ignored and evaded today—lies in the fact that a government holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. It has to hold such a monopoly, since it is the agent of restraining and combating the use of force; and for that very same reason, its actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no touch of whim or caprice should be permitted in its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

This is the means of subordinating “might” to “right.” This is the American concept of “a government of laws and not of men.”

The nature of the laws proper to a free society and the source of its government’s authority are both to be derived from the nature and purpose of a proper government. The basic principle of both is indicated in the Declaration of Independence: “to secure these [individual] rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”

Since the protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of a government, it is the only proper subject of legislation: all laws must be based on individual rights and aimed at their protection. All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it.

The source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.” This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.

There is only one basic principle to which an individual must consent if he wishes to live in a free, civilized society: the principle of renouncing the use of physical force and delegating to the government his right of physical self-defense, for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement. Or, to put it another way, he must accept the separation of force and whim (any whim, including his own).

Now what happens in case of a disagreement between two men about an undertaking in which both are involved?

In a free society, men are not forced to deal with one another. They do so only by voluntary agreement and, when a time element is involved, by contract. If a contract is broken by the arbitrary decision of one man, it may cause a disastrous financial injury to the other—and the victim would have no recourse except to seize the offender’s property as compensation. But here again, the use of force cannot be left to the decision of private individuals. And this leads to one of the most important and most complex functions of the government: to the function of an arbiter who settles disputes among men according to objective laws.

Criminals are a small minority in any semicivilized society. But the protection and enforcement of contracts through courts of civil law is the most crucial need of a peaceful society; without such protection, no civilization could be developed or maintained.

Man cannot survive, as animals do, by acting on the range of the immediate moment. Man has to project his goals and achieve them across a span of time; he has to calculate his actions and plan his life long-range. The better a man’s mind and the greater his knowledge, the longer the range of his planning. The higher or more complex a civilization, the longer the range of activity it requires—and, therefore, the longer the range of contractual agreements among men, and the more urgent their need of protection for the security of such agreements.

Even a primitive barter society could not function if a man agreed to trade a bushel of potatoes for a basket of eggs and, having received the eggs, refused to deliver the potatoes. Visualize what this sort of whim-directed action would mean in an industrial society where men deliver a billion dollars’ worth of goods on credit, or contract to build multimillion-dollar structures, or sign ninety-nine-year leases.

A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner’s consent, under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury.

Some of these actions are obviously criminal. Others, such as a unilateral breach of contract, may not be criminally motivated, but may be caused by irresponsibility and irrationality. Still others may be complex issues with some claim to justice on both sides. But whatever the case may be, all such issues have to be made subject to objectively defined laws and have to be resolved by an impartial arbiter, administering the laws, i.e., by a judge (and a jury, when appropriate).

Observe the basic principle governing justice in all these cases: it is the principle that no man may obtain any values from others without the owners’ consent—and, as a corollary, that a man’s rights may not be left at the mercy of the unilateral decision, the arbitrary choice, the irrationality, the whim of another man.

Such, in essence, is the proper purpose of a government: to make social existence possible to men, by protecting the benefits and combating the evils which men can cause to one another.

The proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men’s rights: the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders—the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws.

These three categories involve many corollary and derivative issues—and their implementation in practice, in the form of specific legislation, is enormously complex. It belongs to the field of a special science: the philosophy of law. Many errors and many disagreements are possible in the field of implementation, but what is essential here is the principle to be implemented: the principle that the purpose of law and of government is the protection of individual rights.

Today, this principle is forgotten, ignored and evaded. The result is the present state of the world, with mankind’s retrogression to the lawlessness of absolutist tyranny, to the primitive savagery of rule by brute force.

In unthinking protest against this trend, some people are raising the question of whether government as such is evil by nature and whether anarchy is the ideal social system. Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: for all the reasons discussed above, a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy: it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.

A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called “competing governments.” Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists—who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business—the proponents of “competing governments” take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with every citizen free to “shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses.

Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.

One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is obviously devoid of any understanding of the terms “competition” and “government.” Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. One illustration will be sufficient: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.

The evolution of the concept of “government” has had a long, tortuous history. Some glimmer of the government’s proper function seems to have existed in every organized society, manifesting itself in such phenomena as the recognition of some implicit (if often nonexistent) difference between a government and a robber gang—the aura of respect and of moral authority granted to the government as the guardian of “law and order”-the fact that even the most evil types of government found it necessary to maintain some semblance of order and some pretense at justice, if only by routine and tradition, and to claim some sort of moral justification for their power, of a mystical or social nature. Just as the absolute monarchs of France had to invoke “The Divine Right of Kings,” so the modern dictators of Soviet Russia have to spend fortunes on propaganda to justify their rule in the eyes of their enslaved subjects.

In mankind’s history, the understanding of the government’s proper function is a very recent achievement: it is only two hundred years old and it dates from the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Not only did they identify the nature and the needs of a free society, but they devised the means to translate it into practice. A free society—like any other human product—cannot be achieved by random means, by mere wishing or by the leaders’ “good intentions.” A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free-a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.

The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government.

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.

Now consider the extent of the moral and political inversion in today’s prevalent view of government. Instead of being a protector of man’s rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guarding freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force and coercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serving as the instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of nonobjective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim—so that we are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

It has often been remarked that in spite of its material progress, mankind has not achieved any comparable degree of moral progress. That remark is usually followed by some pessimistic conclusion about human nature. It is true that the moral state of mankind is disgracefully low. But if one considers the monstrous moral inversions of the governments (made possible by the altruist-collectivist morality) under which mankind has had to live through most of its history, one begins to wonder how men have managed to preserve even a semblance of civilization, and what indestructible vestige of self-esteem has kept them walking upright on two feet.

One also begins to see more clearly the nature of the political principles that have to be accepted and advocated, as part of the battle for man’s intellectual Renaissance.

(December 1963)

“The Nature of Government,” from The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand. Copyright (c) 1961, 1964, by Ayn Rand. used by permission of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Two Attitudes Toward the State

FreedomFest, Las Vegas, Nevada, July 14, 2012
I expect the worst of the economic, the political turmoil we are all going to have to deal with will hit in 2013 or, perhaps, the last months of this year. I expect the hard times to last for at least several years.

Every morning I wake up and browse about 20 newspaper or media sites in order to stock the two daily newsfeeds I maintain. So I have no illusion about the condition of the world or about the immediate future. It is dismal.

And, yet, I’m an optimist.

I am an optimist about freedom…and not just the abstract concept but living freedom in my own time. It is not that I’m mentally deficient…and it is not because I haven’t been paying attention.

As bizarre as it may sound, my current attitude arose as a result of my turning 9/11 over and over in my mind. I gave a lot of thought to what my relationship to the state was and what it should be. Nothing has politically shocked as much as the 9/11 experience.

I call it an experience because, for me, 9/11 was far more than the terrorist acts that occurred on one day. For me, it was and is primarily America’s reaction in 9/11′s wake. The entire nation seemed to give up on freedom. America seemed almost eager to surrender every freedom on which it was built. And the police state came into being so fast.

To me, the symbol of 9/11 and the legacy it left America – or, rather, the legacy America chose to embrace – can be seen at the airports where the Bill of Rights has been obliterated. Customers line up like criminals to permit uniformed agents of the state sexually assault them and their children, they allow their possessions to be pawed through. More than allow it…many people demand it in the name of security and then turn angrily on anyone who even raises the question of civil liberties.

I have been involved in libertarianism or Objectivism since I was 15 years old but after 9/11, after seeing the ease with which a police state established itself, I wondered if I had wasted my life.

The title of my presentation this morning is “Two Attitudes Toward the State” and I want to explain two attitudes between which I’ve swung for many years and are still present within me today.

Before moving onto them, however, I should be clear that I am talking about attitudes and not my evaluation of the state, which remains unchanged. The state is a thug.

Basically, it relies upon two things to elicit cooperation from people in order to ‘convince’ them to surrender their rights and wealth.

The first is the myth of legitimacy; this is the notion that an electoral process or a hereditary line-of-succession or “fill in the blank” establishes an elite group who consist of politicians and those with political pull. These elite individuals somehow have the ‘right’ to tell other individuals what to say and what to do with their own body. They live by a double standard. Theft is wrong except if done by them in the form of taxation. Killing innocent people is wrong except if done by them in the war against terrorism.

Today the myth of legitimacy is being widely seen for what it is: a myth. Every day, fewer and fewer people believe in the legitimacy of the elites. And without that myth, their actions are being seen for what they are: a vicious double standard that excuses theft and murder. This means the state has to increasingly use the second method by which it elicits your cooperation: raw force or the threat thereof. And a sure sign that the elites have lost legitimacy and know it is the fact that they are becoming more violent toward their own citizenry by the hour.

So…I have no illusions about the condition of the world and my evaluation of the state has not changed.

I should return to attitudes. The first attitude toward the state that I want to examine was best expressed in a talk by David Friedman in which he assured the audience there was an Italian saying that translated into something like “It is raining again…PIG OF A GOVERNMENT!”

I remember wincing in my seat because I had a sudden vision of myself, standing in an open street, with my fist raised in fury at the political injustice of the drizzle hitting my face. The meaning of the saying, of course, is that many people blame everything on government. This hit too close to home. I was spending so much time railing against the State that I was running the risk of defining myself by what I oppose. I was taking the state inside myself and allowing it to filter my approach to life and determine many of my emotional reactions.

To some degree that process is inevitable. Sometimes the state seems to be everywhere. As long as you care about injustice, you’re going to react deeply at the sight of it. Frankly, that reaction is not something I intend to root out from within myself. I like it. Even if the reaction doesn’t always ‘feel’ good – sometimes it can feel almost sickening – it is something I prefer to the alternative of not caring.

Having said that, I also want a life in which I am not constantly reacting to injustice, constantly crying out against the state. I’ve seen too many good people burn out, I’ve seen them become bitter, or just lose their joy in living. And, so, after 9/11, I tried to find a balance in how I ‘consume’ the state…if you want to use an economic term. Or, in how I filter the state, if you want to use a psychological term.

An invaluable resource in that quest has been Henry David Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience.” Specifically, I turned over and over the story of his famous one-night stay in jail for refusing to pay a tax…and what happened directly after his release. And here I’ll let Thoreau speak for himself…


“It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the jail window….My neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s… When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party…” Thoreau journeyed off with a swarm of children who moved joyfully through the fields and forest. At one point, Thoreau paused and noted to himself, “in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.”

Upon his release from jail, Thoreau felt no rage toward his neighbors, no bitterness. He did not brood or rail against the injustice of his arrest. He shed everything but the insights he had gathered from the experience. And, then, he went about what he called “the business of living.” That is a wonderful phrase. The business of living.

When a tax collector knocked on his door and confronted him with the demand to pay up, Thoreau probably asked himself the same question I’ve been asking myself since 9/11. Namely, what is my relationship to the State? In answering, it is important to understand that Thoreau’s refusal to pay the tax was not the act of a determined political dissident; it wasn’t part of a pattern in his life through which he fought for the ideal of freedom. Thoreau refused to pay because he knew the specific tax would support the Mexican-American war, which he thought was immoral; rendering support to the war violated his sense of decency. In short, he did not want to cooperate with evil.

But unless and until the state literally knocked on his door, Thoreau was happy to go about the business of living as though the state did not exist. His insight while standing on a high hill is simple but profound: “and then the State was nowhere to be seen.” The essay “On Civil Disobedience” is sometimes titled “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” and that is a mistake. Thoreau did not believe people had a duty to confront the state except when it sought to make you an accomplice in the oppression of others. Anyone who stands up against injustice when the state is not at their door but at someone else’s deserves applause. But they should not do so at the expense of their primary duty, which is to live as deeply and honestly as possible. The primary business of life is living.

It is far more difficult today than in Thoreau’s time to find places where the state cannot be seen. But, perhaps, this makes it more important for us all to try.

These are the two attitudes toward the state that define my relationship to it. On the one hand, I still shake my fist at the sky and shout PIG OF A GOVERNMENT! On the other hand, I aggressively try to expand the areas of my life about which I can say “Here there is no state.” These are areas like my home, family, friends, my community, writing, working…these are areas where the government does not define or in most cases even affect what I do or how I feel.

In a sense, and it is a simplistic sense, what these two opposing attitudes express is a distinction that is key to the entire structure of libertarianism: the distinction between state and society which is most often expressed in economic terms. The standard expression comes from Franz Oppenheimer’s book The State in which he contrasted what he called “the political means” with “the economic means” of acquiring wealth or power. The political means is the use of force – the State; the economic means is cooperation – Society. By using force the unproductive State feeds on the productivity of Society.

Instead of making an economic distinction, however, I am making a psychological one. The attitude “PIG OF A GOVERNMENT!” is who I am in relationship to the State; that is my reaction when it knocks on my door and on the door of others. That reaction remains within me and I’ll be expressing it for as long as the State keeps knocking.

The attitude “here, there is no State” is who I am in relationship to Society as I go about the business of living. It involves a commitment. As much as possible I don’t use the services or so-called ‘benefits’ the government offers but seek private means instead. I explore alternative currencies and means of exchange like barter. I join networks of individuals who cooperate together for mutual benefits. In short, I am taking my life back from the state and privatizing it.

Oddly enough, the attitude of ignoring or obviating the State – again, as much as possible – may well be the most effective strategy for countering it. That’s not my purpose; my purpose is the business of living. But by privatizing your own life, you make the state increasingly irrelevant, which is what politicians fear most. They are desperate to be part of our lives, to teach our children, to regulate our work, to read our messages and hear our phone calls, to dictate our medical choices… And the most effective personal response when the State knocks at your door may well be to not answer even by the act of raising your fist.

Regards,

Wendy McElroy
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Where Is the Line for Revolution?

By Brandon Smith Jul 19th, 2012

The subject of revolution is a touchy one. It’s not a word that should be thrown around lightly, and when it is uttered at all, it elicits a chaotic jumble of opinions and debates from know-it-alls the world over. The “R” word has been persona non grata for quite some time in America, and until recently, was met with jeers and knee-jerk belligerence.

However, let’s face it; today, the idea is not so far fetched. We have a global banking system that is feeding like a tapeworm in the stagnant guts of our economy. We suffer an election system so fraudulent BOTH sides of the political spectrum now represent a hyper-rich minority while the rest of us are simply expected to play along and enjoy the illusion of choice. We have a judicial body that has gone out of its way to whittle down our civil liberties and to marginalize our Constitution as some kind of “outdated relic”.

We have an executive branch that issues special orders like monarchical edicts every month, each new order even more invasive and oppressive than the last. And, we have an establishment system that now believes it has the right to surveil the citizenry en masse and on the slightest whim without any consideration for 4th Amendment protections.

There are plenty of pessimists out there who would assert that Americans are totally oblivious to these developments. I have not found that to be true at all. Millions of people are awake to such issues, and millions more are, at the very least, angry at the state of things, though they may not fully understand the source of their distress.

Only a fool would deny that a fight is in the air…

Though the atmosphere of conflict is present, we are indeed experiencing a pause, a breath, a quiet moment before the breach, and this is a confusing time for many.

We human beings have a very odd tendency to view our own species as inherently and irrevocably violent, or at the very least terribly flawed. However, for all the negative press mankind gets for being “warlike”, if we look back at history it is much more customary to find people desperately trying to avoid conflict, not provoke it, especially if there is an element of tangible risk. Wars are usually not fought by the general citizenry, or the men who promote the pursuit of hostilities. They pay other people to fight for them. If they were ever expected to actually participate in the same battles they lust after, they would probably change their minds about the whole idea rather quickly.

Most often the only instances in which common people take up arms and charge towards combat based on principle have been revolutions. Some revolutions are based on lies, and some are based on inspiration, but all of them require men to conquer their own apathy and fear of confrontation. This is no easy task, and it sometimes takes years or decades of social adaptation and organization.

The elements of a revolution are synchronous. They are like the ingredients of a boiling tropical storm. Each vital aspect of the event must be in place, or there can be no energy or direction. That said, if an environment is left sweltering and volatile, and this electric stew is maintained long enough, eventually, a tempest will rise.

The real question is; where is the tipping point? What causes a population to tolerate or ignore certain crimes by governments, but not others? Where is the line in the sand that if crossed, turns an apprehensively meek citizen into an “enemy of the state” ready to lay down his life against the very system he was born into? The answer is an intuitive and psychological one, rather than mathematical.

Colonial Americans suffered through numerous and mounting indignities over the course of many years before taking up arms. They attempted nearly every method imaginable to counter or reason with British oppression without turning to violent means. They exhausted every avenue, legal, political, and social. They held rousing protests. They decentralized economically and countered British trade controls. They constructed brilliant legal arguments appealing to the monarchy to embrace logic. They attempted diplomatic redress after redress. It was abundantly clear that they did not want a war. When average Americans consider the revolution that gave birth to our free republic, they tend to forget the long struggle that was necessary to rally support for a declaration of liberties. No society, no matter how right in their position, and no matter how heinous the tyranny, jumps directly behind the muzzle of a gun to solve the problem. Revolution takes time…

As difficult as it is to rationally gauge the exact moment or circumstance that triggers revolt, the intensity or build up to conflict can certainly be felt. That pressure is tactile in America today, and is becoming difficult to ignore. The reasons are obvious. In the past 10 years alone elements of our government have cemented into place the “legal” framework to:


1) Detain U.S. citizens indefinitely without trial under the guise of enemy combatant status.

2) Assassinate U.S. citizens without trial and without due process under the law, including the very clear requirements of the treason clause.

3) Confiscate resources, including your private property, in the name of national security and preparedness.

4) Take control of or eliminate all communications networks including phone, radio, television, cell, internet, etc. in the name of national security.

5) Unleash a swarm of unmanned Predator Drones over our homes and towns to make mass surveillance of the public easier. All without probable cause or the protections of the 4th Amendment.

6) Capture, collate, and monitor the communications of millions of citizens without probable cause or a warrant under the FISA domestic spy bill.

7) Declare martial law without congressional oversight and embed active serving military amongst the populace in a law enforcement capacity. This includes the institution of Northcom, which is a standing military presence in the U.S. whose primary mission is to quell domestic dissent.

Most of the laws and executive orders that qualify this behavior from our government have been tested, at least in a limited capacity. These abuses of power have already galvanized a groundswell of activists across the country, and I believe that if implemented in a broader manner, will instigate revolution. Where is the line? I believe the line will be drawn with these trespasses:


1) Any action that involves the standardization of indefinite detainment or rendition against American citizens will result in rebellion. The second due process is thrown out the window and the right to a trial by jury is revoked, there is not much left for a population to do but fight back. This includes pre-emptive assassination as well. The more often enemy combatant status is applied to get around Constitutional protections, the more exponential public anger and fury will be. Black bagging people will lead to war.

2) Economic mismanagement or deliberate derailment by banks has been accomplished with the aid and collusion of government. This has been made abundantly clear by numerous instances of exposed fraud, including the Libor Scandal, in which the private Federal Reserve and agencies within our own system have openly admitted to hiding the precarious nature of our financial situation. Any further implosion of the overall economy will be blamed on this fraud by a considerable portion of the public. When people’s wallets and bellies become empty, it’s amazing how quickly they will get off their couches to solve a crisis. If they can’t find justice within the system, history has shown that they will look for justice outside of it.

3) The institution of checkpoints, invasive technology like naked body scanners, and exaggerated law enforcement presence on a wide scale, will invariably lead to revolt. Dealing with TSA thugs in an airport is one thing; people fly voluntarily, and when they do it often involves a particular level of fear and anxiety, which can be used as rationalization for extreme security measures. Dealing with blue-shirts on the streets near your home, at the bus stop, or on the highway, on the other hand, is not going to go over too well. These tactics have already been experimented with on a small scale. I don’t care how sheepish the American people appear to be in this era; start invading their personal space on a regular basis and many will eventually respond with fists instead of shrugged shoulders.

4) Predator drone fleets hovering over every square mile of the U.S. is not only completely unacceptable, it is going to escalate dissent into the realm of revolution. Any society that harbors even the slightest morsel of individualism is going to think “expedient regime change” when flying surveillance cameras are buzzing over their shoulders 24 hours a day. Set aside the fact that many of these drones will be launched weapons capable. No government has the right to categorize the whole of a citizenry as potential criminals. “When innocent until proven guilty” becomes “guilty until proven innocent”, revolutions become inevitable.

5) Martial Law is an impractical solution to any national crisis. The Founding Fathers understood this well, which is why they specifically opposed the use of standing armies, especially in peace time. Under the Constitution, the private citizenry was supposed to be the disaster reaction force, not government paid centurions. There were multiple reasons behind this position. First, military troops are not trained for and do not have the capacity to police a domestic population (especially their own) in a practical manner. They are trained to do one thing; dominate an enemy. Second, the citizens within a particular state or county would have a much better understanding of that region’s needs and complexities. A military composed of mostly unfamiliar outsiders would not know or care about how a local system operates, and would instead try to impose its own one-size-fits-all methodology. Finally, as apathetic as many people seem, they still do not like to feel bullied or subjugated. Being surrounded by armed troops at every turn with the executive granted legal authority to detain or kill without verifiable cause would make any man a little perturbed. I do not believe many in the U.S. will quietly accept a martial law scenario, regardless of the excuse given by government (terrorism, economic disaster, foreign war, etc.). A move towards military administration of domestic affairs will lead to revolution.

The internal strife of a nation is not predicated on the transitory moods of its people but the attitude of its government. Revolutions are not waged by happy men in an honorable land. True revolutions are a product of generations of discontent stemming from dishonest and vicious bureaucracy. An establishment government facing a wave of discord from the masses has, in most cases, done something to deserve it. I, like many, do not relish the idea of a new American revolt, but if I am to be honest in the face of the facts, I have to acknowledge that the potential for one within my lifetime is significant. I also can’t say that it is not necessary. Unless tomorrow brings a miraculous shift in current totalitarian trends, revolution may be all we have left…

Regards,

Brandon Smith
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Libido Dominandi: The Lust of Government

“Oligarchists (to the end they may keep all others out of the government) pretending themselves to be saints, do also pretend, that they in whom lust reigns, are not fit for reign or for government. But libido dominandi, the lust of government, is the greatest lust, which also reigns most in those that have least right, as in oligarchists: for many a king and many a people have and had unquestionable right, but an oligarchist never; whence from their own argument, the lust of government reigning most in oligarchists, it undeniably follows that oligarchists of all men are least fit for government.”

~ James Harrington, The Oceana and Other Works (1737)

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

~ Thomas Jefferson

Perhaps the two longest and most intractable trends in this country are the growth of the state and the receding of liberty at least since the days of the Lincoln administration. For over a century and a half, the accumulation and centralization of power have been driven by at least five factors: ignorance, greed, fear, envy, and fantasy.

Ignorance

Sadly, most Americans are ignorant of their own heritage. They confuse freedom with democracy when the Founders knew these were mutually exclusive. "Democracy was the right of the majority to choose its own tyrants," according to Madison. How many references are there to "democracy" in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? None. The Founders handed us a foreign policy of free trade and neutrality. Avoid "entangling alliances," advised Washington. Do not go abroad "in search of monsters to destroy," warned John Quincy Adams. "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy," predicted Madison, well in advance of the Patriot Act. Where have their words of wisdom gone? Right down the memory hole.

Most people lack a basic understanding of how a market economy functions. They equate a lack of planning on the part of government with chaos, or that some things simply will not get done. For example, if the government does not take care of the poor, most assume they will starve. They fall for the "fatal conceit" that planners possess enough knowledge to actually do their job. They do not stop to think that three hundred million people (or 7 billion for that matter) acting voluntarily to cooperate, compete, and improve their lives possess far greater knowledge than the "Gang of 535" inside the Beltway ever could. Knowledge is decentralized. They overlook the immeasurable contribution of the price system which enables economic calculation — the ability for individuals to weigh trade-offs and make choices in a world of scarcity. They forget that centrally planned economies have been a disaster throughout history, including the early settlements in this country.

Greed

Most fail to differentiate between the public and private sectors. The former is coercive in nature, the latter peaceful and voluntary. They focus instead on the supposed greed of the businessman. The real greed is the businessman who crosses the line and uses the gun of the state to gain special privileges at the expense of everyone else. This is mercantilism (the very system Americans originally fought a War of Independence to overturn), synonymous with "political capitalism" and "crony capitalism." It is not laissez faire capitalism. Yet the free market gets the blame whenever the government's meddling in the economy backfires. The response is always more intervention, which ultimately means even less economic freedom and more problems down the road. Meanwhile, the state official is assumed to be selfless and above temptation.

Fear

Any centralizer of power worth his salt knows people are most willing to surrender their liberties during periods of crisis. As John Adams observed, "Fear is the foundation of most governments." Thomas Jefferson famously warned, "A nation that limits freedom in the name of security will have neither." H.L. Mencken was even more emphatic: "The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear — fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety." Fear comes in many forms — fear of foreign attack (e.g., the Cold War and War on Terror), fear that the economy will crumble without adult supervision, fear that roads, schools and parks would not exist without government provision, fear that the exhaust from our cars will melt the polar ice caps and flood our coastal cities, and even fear that one of the two political parties poses a greater threat to our livelihoods than the other.

Envy

Some apologists for Big Government are motivated by the resentment of achievement itself. According to the Foundation for Economic Education's Sheldon Richman, envy can take a large share of the blame for our current welfare apparatus: "It is bad enough that the administrators of the welfare state are moved by a hatred of ability. The greater tragedy is that they poison the minds of the constituency they so desperately need. Instead of the poor learning to admire the productive and aspire to be like them, they are taught by the system that their poverty is caused by others' affluence. They learn to resent achievement and to prefer seeing the achievers dragged down. That is all the welfare state can bring about." According to Richman, what the poor really need more than a handout is the "invisible hand" of markets: "The welfare statist will cry out that we have responsibility to those less fortunate. We do, but in a sense other than the egalitarian imagines. We have a responsibility to create and maintain a free society so that all may go as far as their abilities and determination will take them."

Fantasy

Finally, we have the dreamer, the idealist. He naïvely imagines a world of harmony and abundance which, of course, someone must plan and run. The only inconvenience? At the end of the day his Utopia requires brute force. That such fantasy provided the basic foundation of the great atrocities of the 20^th century — Stalin's collectivist famines in the Ukraine, Hitler's gas chambers, and Pol Pot's killing fields in Cambodia — always escapes the dreamer. Perhaps this is why Hollywood celebrities routinely fawn all over tyrants like Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, or why Western journalists were enamored of the mass murderer Joe Stalin during the 1920s and 1930s. To the Utopian, it is always the particular implementers at fault, never the system or the theory itself.

As Milton Friedman pointed out three decades ago, it is the knaves and the naïve who primarily drive the inexorable upswing of centralized power and planning. "You almost always, when you have bad programs, have an unholy coalition of the do-gooders on the one hand and the special interests on the other."

When will these trends of expanding government and contracting freedom end? Likely when they exhaust themselves. Trends tend to move through several phases: disbelief, gradualism, acceleration, blow off (accompanied by signs of hubris and rationalization), decline (with denial and desperate acts to keep the game going), and collapse (i.e., a return to sanity). Perhaps the Iraq War was the blow off stage of the foreign policy engine that drove the bull market in state power. And perhaps our recent credit bubble was the blow off phase of the monetary engine. If so, a major change in trend is mercifully upon us.

Kevin Duffy

November 15, 2007

Secession Principals

PRIMACY OF THE RIGHT TO SECEDE
The primary political right of the individual and of political communities must be to secede from any larger political entity, whether they were born into it, were forced to join it, or voluntarily joined it. If one denies or relinquishes that right, one is little more than a slave--and no agreement to become a slave can be legally or morally binding.
Secession of individuals and communities does not have to mean war and violence. It should be a natural evolutionary feature of all political entities. Communities can form networks or confederations, since secession is accepted by both in principle. However, communities will not form "federations" which by definition do not allow secession. We will suggest practical and nonviolent means by which such separation can occur and the kinds of networks and confederations that could be created to replace oppressive nation states.

COMMUNITY-BASED SECESSION:
In the name of nationalism, religion, ideology, tradition or "the common good," the governments of the world suppress individual liberty and individuals' control of their own communities. Special interest- corporate- state- bureaucratic- military elites worldwide tax, regulate, bully, beat, prosecute, jail and execute citizens into submission. They discriminate against, rob, ethnically cleanse and genocide members of oppressed racial/ethnic/religious/regional groups. Without government control, these elites would have little real power over individuals and communities.
The concept of individual liberty is simple: individuals should be free to do whatever they please as long as they don't harm others by using force or fraud. This is the basic ethical tenet or "golden rule" of all religions, one corrupted by layers of theology and ritual and centuries of kowtowing to political authority. Individual consent–not some nationalist, racial, religious, tribal or, ideological construct or “social contract”–is the only legitimate basis of any social, economic and political organization. However, supporting the idea and value of individual liberty is not enough to obtain liberty. We must support institutional structures that make it impossible for public or private entities to crush individual liberty.
Throughout history most individuals have chosen to live in community with others, be it on communally held or privately held lands, as either owners or renters. Large, multi-national nation states were created by military conquest of smaller independent communities, tribes and nations. Individuals today have little control over their local communities, most of which have become mere administrative units of large, distant, oppressive nation states. Government and special interest confiscation of communal and private land has further muddied the territorial basis of many communities.
In the last 50 years the largest and most powerful nation states have been building big super-national organizations like the United Nations, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization to ensure that special interest-corporate-state-bureaucratic-military elites further concentrate their control. What some call "corporate globalization" is really government globalization in service of (mostly "First World") corporate and political elites.
Many think in terms of "state's rights" secession, especially in the United States, with such states opposed to secession by smaller political units. However, Secession.Net promotes "community-based secession," assuming that smaller entities like communities, towns, small cities, neighborhoods within larger cities will and must become the basic political unit, after the individual.
The map at left suggesting hundreds or even thousands of independent, networked or loosely confederated communities as an alternate to the United States of America, Canada and Mexico. However, communities can be both geographical and non-geographical. Geographical communities can include contiguous "bedroom" or vacation communities, industrial or commercial "parks", counties including a number of farms and tiny communities, shopping malls, environmental preserves or be mixed use communities. Non-geographical communities are communities of interest, be they industrial, professional, trade or service-related, charitable, cultural, ethnic, racial, political, etc. and may include members all over a continent or the planet. It is possible that members of geographical communities not only can hold overlapping memberships in non-geographical ones, but conduct most of their affairs with those communities.
Communities must be free to join or secede from any larger regional, continental or even worldwide networks and confederations they join to deal with a variety of issues. While communities may choose to confederate along traditional linguistic, ethnic or racial national lines, these confederations must recognize the rights of sub-communities among them to maintain their autonomy. And communities themselves must recognize the right of members and geographical sections of the community to secede and become autonomous or attach to other communities. Only the right to secession guarantees true autonomy. (Future articles will detail how these processes have and can work.)
Many worry that corporations would run roughshod over such communities. But without central government- limited liabilities, privileges, welfare and stifling of competition, most existing huge multinational corporations would disappear or break up into much smaller entities that would have little real power to control communities. Those who look to central governments for such protection are enslaving themselves to a phantom.

LIBERTARIAN/DECENTRALIST POLITICAL PROCESSES
Communities may create whatever economic, social or cultural systems they choose. However, we believe that in order to prevent communities from re-creation of warring nation states or abusing individual rights and liberties, they must follow five principles of political process, which are both libertarian and decentralist:
A Bill of Rights: Any community may fall victim to prejudice, intolerance, exploitation, suspicion or hysteria towards one or more of its members. Therefore it is necessary to have a written guarantee of (a) freedom of association and of movement in and out of the community; (b) equal political rights to participate in community decision-making or to access community-related information; and (c) procedural rights--right to trial and due process, right to counsel, right of appeal, no cruel and unusual means of interrogation or punishment.
"Polycentric" Law: Over the last few centuries legislatively decreed law ("fiat" law), made by and for elites, has restricted individual liberty worldwide. It has supplanted more naturally and freely evolved "common law," private commercial law or law governing voluntary associations. Because such laws come from many centers of activity and interest they can be called "polycentric" law. Individuals and communities must be free to choose the legal system by which they will abide. They may choose different systems to deal with personal, business, or other matters. They may choose how much of their lives will be ruled by contractual obligations and how much, if any, by democratic decision-making. They can do so, in large part, simply by deciding what legal system and what community or communities to join.
Consensus-Oriented or Super-Majority Democracy: . "Democracy" means "rule of the people"--a phrase which has been interpreted in ways both authoritarian and libertarian. Even those who attempt to form communities only by contract usually will encounter unexpected situations which require some sort of democratic decision-making. Majority rule decision-making usually turns into a cloak for defacto minority rule by special interests and elites which ever increase their control over society. Contracts and consensus democracy are both examples of consensus-oriented decision-making where decisions, including those to restrict liberty, are not made until all affected parties agree. Super-majority decision-making means at least two-thirds, three-quarters or even nine-tenths of all those eligible to vote must agree to the decision. These processes contribute to community harmony because members propose and adopt only rules and policies that enjoy overwhelming support by all members.
Direct Democracy: Representative democracy, even in groups of a few dozen people, usually results in rule by cliques or elites, usually for their own benefit. Direct democracy means only the votes of individual members can approve or reject laws/rules/regulations and taxes/fees/contributions (depending on what each community chooses to call these functions). The growth of the Internet makes it easy for people to vote from home, office, library, etc. Direct democracy also discourages elites from suggesting special interest laws or taxes since only a small number of people will be motivated to vote for them, and at least a super-majority of all eligible voters must approve them. Voters may still elect, appoint or hire adminstrators and managers, but their policy-making ability is strictly limited.
Sunset Provisions: People too often are panicked into creating rules and regulations to deal with one time or emergency situations. Therefore it is necessary to include a provision allowing a minority of members (15 to 25%) to vote to rescind rules after a few months have passed. And all rules and fees should have "sunset" provisions so that they are phased out after a few years unless explicitly re-instated by voters. There also should be explicit "fair exit provisions" ensuring individuals disagreeing with a near-consensus rule or policy are given sufficient time to settle affairs and leave a community.
Variations on the principles above also should be followed in the regional, continental and other networks and confederations communities choose to form or join. While some sort of representation (probably proportional) probably would be used in these bodies, important decisions still would be referred back to community members. Most important we must all remember that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

NONVIOLENT SECESSION AND INSTITUTIONS
The world's large nation states are maintained through threatened and actual military violence against even perceived secessionists. Democratic welfare states bribe their citizens with unsustainable social welfare programs while they build up powerful and increasingly nuclear-armed militaries. Dictatorships dispense with social welfare bribes, sacrificing their people as they focus on military buildups. Only abolition of large multi-national nation states and their militaries will prevent destructive regional wars and eventual and inevitable, accidental or intentional, nuclear war.
Nonviolence is the belief that no racial, ethnic, religious, ideological, social, or economic belief or goal excuses the use of individual or state violence to force the compliance of others. Nonviolent philosophy and practices extend to interpersonal, group and community conflict resolution, nonviolent legal sanctions and nonviolent policing and defense.
The purpose of non-violent action is to withdraw consent from government or other authorities, rather than wrest power from them--defacto secession. Non-violence heightens the moral superiority of the actionists in the eyes of the general public--especially if the authorities respond to their sincere and open nonviolent protest with violence. Even members of the ruling classes can be swayed to sympathy by such non-violent actions. Police and soldiers wooed with sound political arguments and non-violent demonstrations are more likely to come over to the side of the activists than ones afraid of being harmed by protesters.
Political violence destroys public sympathy and unites the people with the elites and the police against the protesters--that's why governments infiltrate demonstrations with violent "agent provocateurs." Violent action usually is practiced predominantly by angry young males, often with military training, who often become as ruthless towards other dissidents as they do towards the oppressor. When violent revolutionaries take power, their regimes often are as ruthless as their revolutions.
Similarly, we must work to remove violence as a means of resolving conflicts in, or regulating, our private and public affairs. The acceptance of personal violence, public violence, government violence and war between nations are intimately connected. Nonviolent conflict resolution within and between communities, nonviolent enforcement of contracts and rules and regulations, and even nonviolent policing, peacekeeping and defense have all proved workable in many places, at many times. A commitment to nonviolent conflict resolution helps create tolerance among people, despite their ethnic, racial, religious, ideological and other differences. We must extend them to all place and all times, if humanity is to survive and prosper.