A Rebirth of Radicalism Is Needed To Heal America

by Scott Lazarowitz

Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: Americans Proudly Voting for Evil

If you found your way here by searching for "conservative websites," or "libertarian websites," or "libertarian conservative websites," then you’ve probably noticed a different way of thinking here. A radical way.

One thing I try to do with my writing is get people to say, "Hmmm. I hadn’t thought of that." And I also want to get people to reassess their long-held views, particularly regarding the necessity of government bureaucrats having the monopoly power and artificial authority that they have.

Well, here’s some news: government bureaucrats aren’t necessary, and neither are government monopolies.

After an election season promoting the statist quo and stifling dissent, and a looming "fiscal cliff," it is time to more vociferously promote the American Revolutionaries’ radical ideas of liberty and property.

And there are many writers on LRC who do just that. For example, economist Thomas DiLorenzo told it like it is in his article, Be Patriotic: Become a Secessionist.

I can’t believe there are "anti-communist" conservatives who are denouncing secession as a "treasonous" act! These bozos are acting like communists themselves who want to keep people inside the prison State and not let the people out, not let them have their independence!

Incidentally, I have noted in the past how today’s conservatives are very collectivist and communist in their views. I just want people to step back and see the hypocrite conservatives for what they are, that’s all.

For instance, note the Republicans’ no-tax-pledge betrayal now and their true support for ObamaCare in their lovey-dovey devotion to Big Government. (Yech!)

Notice, by the way, how both conservatives and progressives seem to oppose secession in general. These attitudes supporting State-slavery of the people have only paved the way for the totalitarian rules that are keeping Americans inside the territory.

And in some ways, this secession issue is related to immigration. The conservatives support this failed socialist central planning in immigration, despite all human beings’ inherent right to travel, freedom of movement, and to migrate to wherever they wish, as long as they don’t trespass on private property. (I have addressed that here and here, and see Hans-Hermann Hoppe as well.)

But we do need a healthy, radical exposure of the true nature of the State and its minions.

So it is time for the intellectual radicals to return and be politically incorrect, time to reverse course and promote actual morality and bring back the good old days of open, honest intellectual discourse.

Or, as stated in the Principles of Hoppe’s Property and Freedom Society: "an uncompromising intellectual radicalism." Hoppe and his cohorts promote "totally unfettered individual liberty and private property." (Why do so many people have a problem with that?!)

But just as Hoppe pointed out in his 2001 book, Democracy: The God That Failed, the de-civilization of society has occurred because the government monopolies in place promote exploitation and covetousness. Further, giving central planners in Washington various legal monopolies has promoted war and aggression, and empowered the banksters and the government’s monetary central planners to rob the people in broad daylight.

So here I want to do my part by clarifying how inherently criminal the State really is, especially in the areas of civil liberties, information-stealing and criminal wars.

Actually, the American Revolutionaries did not go far enough in their "radical" thinking. If only they had rejected giving governments legal monopolies and legal authority over the rest of the population, and if only they didn’t create a central planning ruling agency in the first place! Our society would have otherwise advanced not only technologically but civilly, socially and culturally as well.

For example, government investigators, police and prosecutors have been getting away with unconstitutional and un-American invasive acts of surveillance, tracking, and searches. Many of these criminal acts are being excused by the court bureaucrats now, Supreme and otherwise. This includes the government’s access into everyone’s emails.

Private non-government people could not get away with such crimes. But because the people have unwittingly given the government a criminal monopoly of intrusion and theft, this is why the earlier Americans wrote the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution (which still isn’t enough!).

Many discussions of the Fourth Amendment, for example, have centered around the "right to privacy," although the Amendment does not specifically mention "privacy."

The Fourth Amendment does, however, mention the word "secure": "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated …"

In law and official government policies, people in various federal, state and local government agencies have the legalized authority to demand information from individuals’ private lives, finances, properties, and have the artificial authority to access, keep surveillance on and trespass into people’s "persons, houses, papers and effects," access that they have no right to have.

Especially in the absence of reasonable suspicion, these government laws and procedures are criminally invasive against the individual’s person and property.

In reality, it is these people with government monopoly positions who are engaged in actual criminality, not their victims. This is especially the case when the society abandons the concept of presumption of innocence, in which the government agent must have a reason to suspect an actual individual of some actual crime against another individual’s person or property – otherwise the government agent must leave the individual alone and may not invade, trespass or violate the individual’s person, property or communications, period. No arbitrary surveillance, no fishing expeditions, etc.

You see, especially troubling are the monopoly and artificial authority that have been given to the government, to local government police, federal "national security" employees, and so forth. This artificial authority and monopoly of law and judiciary give those employees the power of being above the law, which cancels out the idea of "equality under the law."

When the people decided that these government monopolists are "the law," such a relationship inherently makes each individual vulnerable to officially sanctioned criminality.

The Sovietizing of America is taking place right before our very eyes, because the monopoly institutions of judicial decision-making and that unequal, two-tier caste system is the foundation for it.

Have you ever really thought about the moral backwardness of having to obey the orders of some government bureaucrat or police officer, or the laws that people like Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Archie Bunker Peter King create?

And let’s be honest now, do we really believe in morality and having a civilized society? If we do, then laws, procedures, and regulations which in any way violate the individual’s rights to life and liberty and the individual’s "right to be secure" in one’s person, property or effects need to be labeled as criminally intrusive laws, regulations and procedures. In my opinion, those who make these laws and policies, or enforce and prosecute them, are engaged in true criminality, intentionally or not.

So, that this monopoly exists, in addition to the disarmament laws, actually increases the individual’s vulnerability, and so such an official policy is inherently violating of the rights to life and liberty of the individual.

Currently, besides the government criminals, private criminals are getting away with assaults, robberies, and murders because their victims have been disarmed by the local "authorities," and because the local government police monopoly doesn’t even prevent these crimes.

And more often now it is the government-monopolized police who are brutalizing innocent people.

For further reading related to these ideas, see Albert Jay Nock: The Criminality of the State; Hans-Hermann Hoppe: State or Private Law Society and Why Bad Men Rule; Harvey Silverglate: Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent; Murray Rothbard: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (Ch. 12: Police, Law, and the Courts); Robert Murphy: Policing for Profit; and Robert Higgs: If Men Were Angels.

Some good news is that states have begun to actively nullify some of the federal intrusions that are criminal in nature. That includes some aspects of the failed drug war, the NDAA’s provision of indefinite detentions of Americans, and ObamaCare.

There have also been recent examples of jury nullification.

But it isn’t just the states and their governments who should enact nullification through legislation, because many state and local laws, ordinances and regulations are just as criminal as the federal ones.

To further restore their liberty, communities, neighborhoods, families and individuals will need to nullify those legislative acts of criminality that empower a bureaucrat or cop to violate one’s right to be secure in one’s person, property and effects.

So we also need judge and police nullification.

When police and judges choose to not enforce victimless crime laws or invasive regulations, or choose to not prosecute and sentence people accused of victimless "crimes" or invasive regulations, then those police and judges who set innocent people free will be heroes, in my view. Would they be "breaking the law"? No. They would be upholding the true, moral rule of law.

But one thing I really wanted to cover here is America’s war mentality, which is related to the aforementioned civil liberties matters.

Unfortunately, in 2012 it is considered "radical" to question government bureaucrats on so-called national security.

I really thought that, after Vietnam and 58,000 Americans killed for no good reason, the American people wouldn’t stand for any more of such government criminality.

But no. Then came President George H.W. Bush, who had to invade Iraq in 1991. And then the Iraqi sanctions, 9/11 and the "War on Terror." To the elder Bush, in my view, the end of the Cold War meant a dismantling of the American foreign expansions (and a curbing of the voracious tax-feeding by the military-industrial-complex). The neocons and progressives couldn’t stand for that.

But in practical terms, all these statists have done is provoke foreigners and make Americans less safe.

It’s amazing the millions and millions of people over many generations who have been bamboozled and duped into supporting the wars that the U.S. government has gotten America into, and for no good reason.

Unfortunately, the masses tend to give the corrupt bureaucrats the benefit of the doubt with these wars.

So America is now a more primitive, politically correct and repressive society, thanks to the dumbing-down of generations of people by the government educrats. Grown adults now act like texting-obsessed, subservient TV sitcom characters who bow to the wishes of the most imbecilic, corrupt criminal types in Washington.

The dumbing-down is why we have U.S. senators who think that questioning the legitimacy of the "War on Terror" is "treasonous," or that someone who criticizes the war-buffoons in Washington is an "enemy combatant," or a "terrorist." It’s sickening, and truly un-American, in my opinion.

The government schools have maliciously expunged the critical thinking skills necessary to challenge the assertions of government buffoons, which is necessary in maintaining a civilized society.

Why do so many people now have no idea that all human beings have an inherent right to due process and presumption of innocence? (Hmmm. Could that be because of the government-controlled dumbing-down of education in America? I don’t know, maybe.)

You see, if a government bureaucrat or military officer wants to accuse an individual of something, the accuser is morally, ethically and legally obligated to provide evidence against the accused.

Otherwise, we might as well let the Rulers and their minions just sweep up totally innocent people with no evidence against them and detain them indefinitely. (Oh, wait a minute, the Bush Administration already did that.) Or let the Rulers just murder people at will. (Hmmm. Obama is already doing that, too. Oh, well.)

Sadly, there are generations of people who are brainwashed into believing that "war is different," and therefore suspending civil liberties should be permitted. Well no, war is not "different," nor "exceptional."

As I wrote here, war is an artificial concept used by collectivists and statists to rationalize the commission of criminal acts of aggression against others and get away with it.

So the people such as the two Bush Presidents who started wars of aggression – they are the aggressors, and thus the criminals, when it comes Iraq twice and Afghanistan.

There is no just rationalization for a war of aggression, period.

And Obama’s drones murdering innocent people day after day, it never seems to end, all this stuff, as America descends into Leviathan’s totalitarian enslavement.

What those who really value freedom and peace need is not just more radicalism in America, but more rebelliousness, more nullification of government crimes and especially a mass withdrawal of support of the current system of government monopoly that gives some people artificial authority over others.

Of course, the real solutions – as radical as they may be – to society’s current national ordeal of "fiscal cliff" and "terrorism" are decentralization and secession, and dissolving the United Soviet State of Amerika entirely.

December 14, 2012

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

Copyright © 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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