Chapter 8 GOVERNMENT * Government defined * Descriptions of Government * Corruption in Government * The Real Function of Government * What Government Responds to * Political Intentions are Irrelevant * Failures and Contradictions of Government * Government Murders During the 20th Century * The War On Drugs * Self-Defense * Government defined A critique of the Randian view: Rand defined government as "an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area. A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control." Peikoff tries to justify this definition by claiming that in a free society the government is prohibited by a Constitution from initiating force. Barbara Branden makes perhaps the best presentation of the Randite view of government. She claims that government is "a social agency that performs the task of formulating and enforcing the laws of a country. The concept does not entail that a function of that political body will be the initiation of force. But because it is true that a factual function of government IS the initiation of some extent of force, people fail to grasp the possibility of an alternative to that factual function. They fail to separate the concrete from the abstraction. They have failed to differentiate some particular instances of government from the abstraction as such." I have several objections to these notions: If, as Rand claims, the institution has exclusive power, how can it be prevented from aggressing (since there could be no restraining power to stand against it)? The initiation of force cannot at all be prevented except by bringing to bear against it a greater force. But if government holds exclusive power, then there cannot exist any greater force, and thus government cannot be kept from using its force coercively. What does "objective control" mean in fact? As used by Rand, the concepts of "exclusive" and "objective control" preclude one another. Peikoff's commentary is merely the elementary mistake of confounding the notion of "prohibit" with the notion of "prevent." It is quite obvious that to forbid something is by no means to prevent that thing, and the idea that a document can, in itself, pose a restraint on the behavior of an organization of men possessed with weapons of destruction, is simply absurd. The only thing that can counter the power of a gun is another gun. A written constitution won't stop a policeman's bullet, no matter how vigorously you wave it, nor how vociferously you assert its provisions. As Mao Tse Tung taught, "All government power grows out of the barrel of a gun." The abstraction that Barbara Branden comments on is not an abstraction from perceivable concretes - there is not now and never has been a government that did not aggress against its subjects. It is not "some particular instances of government" that manifest this attribute, it is ALL instances of government that do so. The aggression is a universal and FUNDAMENTAL characteristic of ALL governments. It is universal both by historical observation and because every government, to be territorially exclusive, must compel every person within its domain to acquiesce in its sovereignty. It is fundamental because that acquiescence underlies all the other functions of government. Aggression must therefore be a definitive characteristic in forming the abstraction "government." It is not epistemologically proper to hypothesize a non-existent concrete (a government without aggression) and subsume it within an abstraction. To do so is not to create a valid concept but a fiction, and this is what the Randites have done with their concept of government. The word "government" has an easily discernable meaning which can be seen by anyone who looks deeply enough into the factual nature of its fundamental distinguishing characteristics. To think about, and talk sensibly about, a phenomenon which does NOT share those fundamental distinguishing characteristics, we should select a verbal label different from the one that is already applied to the phenomenon which DOES possess them. Thus it is improper to use the word "government" in the way the Randites use it. Nock made a distinction between the State and Government: "Government is an agency with strictly limited powers, devoted to protecting individual rights to life, liberty and property. The State, on the other hand, is an offshoot of government that develops when some people capture the machinery of government and pervert it, using its powers not to protect rights, but to violate them, to exploit people by confiscating their wealth, regulating their activities, and subjugating them whenever necessary to enhance its own illicit power." This distinction is spurious. "Government," as Nock describes it, is something that has never existed. The State is not an offshoot of government - something that develops from the corruption of government - the State is in fact the only one of the two institutions that has existed in history. Except for some private agencies, limited in scope and subsumed by the State, there has in fact never been what Nock calls a Government. A conceptual distinction can be made between the coercive institution I have described above as "government" and the more general notion of "the means by which order is maintained in a society" (the means may not necessarily be a government). Some people would use "state" to denote the first and "government" to denote the second, but this would be ambiguous in view of the widespread equivalence between the words "state" and "government," so I will use "state" and "government" synonymously, and use "governance" to denote the idea of a means by which order is maintained in a society. Coercive power is that which defines government and makes government different from any other social institution. All other differences between states and other institutions flow from this fundamental characteristic. Thus the proper definition of government is "the strongest gang of aggressors in a particular area at a particular time." * Descriptions of Government Gandhi: "The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence, to which it owes its very existence." Mencken: "The typical lawmaker of today is a man devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology, or cannibalism." Lane: "The nation is nothing at all but simple force. Not in a single nation are the people of one race, one history, one culture, nor the same political opinion or religious faith. They are simply human beings of all kinds, penned inside frontiers which mean nothing whatever but military force." The essential characteristic of States, quasi-States (e.g., the PLO) and proto-States (e.g., the IRA) is that they initiate force to implement their policies. Viewing the State all through history, we can see no way to differentiate the activities of its administrators from those of a professional criminal class. Thus there are no ethical differences between a hoodlum protection racket and a State, save scale, sophistication, and success in conning the victims into acceptance. * Corruption in Government When I attribute some purpose to government, I do not mean to imply that individual people who are members of government explicitly hold that purpose as their personal objective. This is quite frequently NOT the case at all! What I am attempting to do is explain the consequences of government in terms of institutionalized behavior whose implementation results in those consequences. Just as no one really INTENDS to kill himself when he begins to be an alcoholic, nevertheless his behavior has that as its consequence. The only choice a man has is what actions he will take. He has no choice about the consequences. They are rigidly determined by the law of cause-and-effect. By the Law of Identity. Being merely human, a percentage of bureaucrats can be expected to be corrupt, thus as the number of bureaucrats increases there will be more corruption. By the same token, increased legislated criminalization means that more property rights are controlled by government, thus there is greater scope for corruption. The more severe are the legal constraints on private markets, the more valuable become the rights controlled by government, thus the reward for corruption increases. Police corruption occurs in those areas where entrepreneurs would supply voluntary services to consumers, but where the government has decreed that these services are illegal: narcotics, prostitution, gambling, etc. Where gambling, for example, is outlawed, the law places into the hands of the police the power to sell the privilege of engaging in the gambling business. In short, it is as if the police were empowered to issue special licenses for these activities, and then proceeded to sell these unofficial licenses at whatever price the traffic will bear. Whether consciously or not, the government proceeds as follows: first it outlaws certain businesses, then the police sell to would-be entrepreneurs the privilege of engaging in those businesses. Given the unfortunate and unjust laws, corruption may be highly beneficial to society. Society may be better off if corruption induces police to ignore many of the victimless crimes, thus leaving police resources available to prevent violent crimes. Ignoring many laws, such as housing codes and oil import restrictions, would improve social welfare. In a number of countries, there would be virtually no trade or industry at all in the absence of the corruption that nullifies government prohibitions. How sane is the moral foundation of an institution that requires the corruption of its members to achieve desirable ends? * The Real Function of Government Have you ever wondered just what the government is REALLY doing while it is claiming to "serve and protect"? In 1971, the FBI office in Media, Pa. (a suburb of Philadelphia) was raided and a large quantity of documents seized. This raid was considered so important by the FBI that it closed about half its offices throughout the country, concentrating its resources in the remainder so as to provide for greater secrecy in its operations. An analysis of the seized documents was subsequently published in the Los Angeles Free Press, 24Dec71: 40% surveillance of political groups 30% internal procedural matters 15% "ordinary" crime 7% military AWOLs and deserters 7% draft resistors 1% organized crime Governments all behave in fundamentally the same manner, regardless of what they say their politics are. Perhaps they might be more accurately perceived as big machines that do what they are programmed to do rather than as bunches of people. A culture develops within government that is completely dominated by the advocates of government action. From constituents to lobbyists to journalists, the congressman very rarely, or never, comes in contact with anyone who advocates government inaction. Every employee at every level of every government department is affected and all those expensive people think they have to DO SOMETHING to justify their salaries, and every action is another interference with freedom, keeping people from doing what they want to do or making them do things they don't want to do. A bureaucrat dreads being accused of doing nothing, so he will continually proliferate rules. One result is that the American court system is drowning in the avalanche of legal pollution that could appropriately be called hyperleges. If we view crimes as being behaviors that conflict with the interests of the segments of society that have the power to shape government law, then we realize that the government merely tries to balance the demands of conflicting interest groups, and to discriminate among them on the basis of their relative political power in order to determine who gains and who loses. Another primary function of government is to act as a mechanism to take wealth from some and transfer it to others. Governments protect individuals' property against the depredations of others as a shepherd protects his sheep from shearing by others. But against their own government, individuals have to protect their accumulated wealth as best they can themselves. Those who claim that government, bad though it may be, is an absolute necessity for protecting people against crime, must explain the fact that for every 1000 crimes the American police are aware of, only one criminal is ever sentenced to prison. Nor does government protect people against foreign aggression - on the contrary, it coerces the people (by means of what is euphemistically called "selective service") into protecting and preserving the government's own existence. * What Government Responds to For many years I had a vague, non-specific realization that government in America is somehow fundamentally different from most all other governments. But I could not specify precisely what that difference is founded on. I believed there to be a much stronger connection between government and the public here in America than in other countries, but I could not identify the nature of that connection. Then, when the passage of Proposition 13 in California in 1978 (by a margin of 2 to 1 at the polls) touched off a nationwide run of similar legislation in other states, I saw just how it is that the government is responsive to "the people." I now believe that elected officials base (sometimes, but not always, explicitly) their behavior on WHAT THEY PERCEIVE TO BE THE WILL OF THE MAJORITY OF THE VOTERS. In this statement I use three terms very carefully and deliberately: perception, will, and majority (not the majority of the whole population, but the majority of the voters). Most political behavior is not based on the will of the majority, but is based on what the politician PERCEIVES as being the will of the majority. (This explains the influence of lobbyists and other pressure groups.) Of course, this does not account for ALL political behavior - a lot of it is straightforwardly venal, and much is intended simply to increase the power of government. But in almost all situations where the issue under consideration is the subject of considerable publicity, the politician will do what he THINKS the MAJORITY of the voters WANT him to do. I believe there are no limits to this. None whatsoever. As Mencken observed, they would, if they thought it politically expedient, legislate infanticide just as readily as they voted in Prohibition and the War on Drugs. This thesis leads to an answer to the question: "Why don't politicians understand principles?" If my argument is correct, then it is an immediate conclusion that politicians CANNOT have principles (except the one that I have attributed to them). Any man who insists on shaping his behavior by reference to ethical or moral principles, rather than electoral pragmatism, would probably not get elected. If his insistence on principle were to be adamant while he was in office, he would surely not get re-elected. Thus I see a selection process in action - a process which ensures that politicians will not be the sort of people who understand and act on principles. The notion that politicians refer to "accepted religious principles" has considerable merit too. If the politician cannot see, clearly and explicitly, the will of the majority, he will act by default, as it were. He will consult whatever set of "principles" he holds implicitly, usually some set of religious ethics or, lacking that, a collection of cliches and platitudes. * Political Intentions are Irrelevant The State makes promises to its citizens that it cannot even try to fulfill without employing means that frustrate their own ends. As the gap widens between promise and fulfillment, perceptively honest people in the political system tend to dissociate themselves from the process, leaving it to those who are unscrupulous enough to accept and practice fraud. As the State extends its power, increasingly callous practices are required of increasingly callous people. The worst get on top, and try to stay there. Politicians have to be wicked: the requirements of office are such that no benevolent mind could meet them. Once a man has chosen to become part of the state, it is the nature of the institution that controls the ways in which he will function, regardless of his intentions. A pernicious system is not made less so by its adherents intending that it do good. For example, police training systematically presents the idea that it is right to force others to obey orders. Thus individuals who become police are subjected to changes in themselves which, like the movement of the hands on a clock, may be difficult to see at any particular moment, but which are nonetheless inexorable. A man or woman of only moderately authoritarian tendencies at the time of first entering the police force soon begins to accelerate down the path to savagery. Perhaps the first time he witnesses fellow officers beating up a suspect, the new recruit is astonished and horrified. But he says nothing because so many officers with greater experience and authority accept the violence. The next time, the new recruit looks the other way and feels terribly upset. By the third time, he merely thinks: "Oh no, not this cruelty again." By the twentieth or the thirtieth time, the no-longer-rookie cop is accustomed to seeing such injustice, and after many years on the force, such a man or woman thinks nothing of performing such acts. But nowhere along the line could the cop see himself turning into a bully. No matter how well-meaning the individual policeman may be, the parameters of the institution in which he functions compel upon him this alternative: to accept the conditions of the institution or to withdraw from participation. Part of "accept the conditions of the institution," whether it is a police institution or a military institution, is the requirement that the participant renounce his own moral autonomy, abandon his own sense of ethical judgment and allow himself to become merely the instrument of the judgments of his superiors. Once he has done this there are no limits to the wickedness he is capable of. "When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of public duties they lead their country by a short route to chaos."... Sir Thomas More. And after he has done it for a sufficient length of time, he will become so immersed in the life that no other alternative will be conceiveable to him. "When National Socialism has ruled long enough, it will no longer be possible to conceive of a form of life different from ours."... Adolph Hitler Many men have no honor, but at least it is possible for a man to have honor. It is not possible for a government to have honor, simply because no one within it can keep his honor while continuing to condone and participate in the dishonorable behavior that is an inevitable concomitant of government. Government consists of two types of workers: those who are paid for what they do, and those who provide their participation free of charge. Both groups work for the state. Every individual who begins working within the political system in an effort to accomplish anything enlarges the system by his own presence, whether or not he is a salaried employee. This is always true even when the intent of the activist is the reduction of government. Success in the free market rewards the virtues of thrift, hard work, and far-sighted entrepreneurship. Success in politics, on the other hand, rewards the ethical vices of demagogy, mendacity, and expertise in the wielding of terror and coercion. Hence, the good people - from any rational point of view - will tend to rise to the top in the free society, while ethical scum will tend to rise to the top of a statist system. The politician's job consists in sacrificing some men to others. Thus, no matter what choice he makes, it cannot be just. Proceeding from an unjust basis, he can have no rational standards by which to judge. The idea that the Libertarian Party can effect any changes in the performance of government is based on an incorrect assumption: the assumption that there can be honest, sane and benevolent people among members of the government. Even if a man desires very strongly to accomplish some good and beneficial end, he cannot do it through means which are fundamentally evil and, by acting via these evil means, he makes himself immoral REGARDLESS OF HIS INTENTIONS. It is as impossible for an honest and just man to participate in government as for an athiest to become an archbishop. Or a priest to become an abortionist. In each case, the alternatives differ in terms of fundamental principles so opposed that there is no possibility of overlap. Throughout the history of government, there has been one thing only that has tied government behavior to the facts of reality: the necessities of military action. When you are making guns and bombs, you HAVE to know what reality is. Without this compelling link to reality, all government behavior would be totally insane. Even with it, most government behavior is irrational at best - madness otherwise. * Failures and Contradictions of Government There are many who claim that without government there would exist much more suffering and distress. In response to this manifestation of the "WouldChuck" fallacy I can only say that I am honest enough to admit that I do not know how much suffering and distress there would be without government. All I can do is point out some of the more blatant examples of how much suffering and distress there are WITH government, and observe that under the plausible pretext of protecting person and property, governments have spread wholesale misery, destruction, and death all over the earth where peace and security might otherwise have prevailed. They have shed more blood, committed more crimes, tortures, and murders in struggles with each other and with their subjects than society would or could have suffered in the absence of all governments whatever. Here I want to present just a few examples of how government fails in practice. If you read the newspapers and newsmagazines regularly, you will quickly see that these examples are merely tiny drops in the huge bucket of government's incompetence and viciousness. In every session of all the legislatures of America, programs to solve the nation's debt, create jobs, and remedy social problems are launched with great fanfare and wonderful speeches. But then, when no one is looking, the politicians go back to their offices and the promises are forgotten. Although the scenarios that triggered the programs are frequently discredited, the bureaucracy permanently retains all the power it accumulated through the legislation that created the programs. With such great fanfare and wonderful speeches, the Humphrey-Hawkins "full employment" bill was enacted in 1978 (when the unemployment rate was 6.1%). It set a national goal of reducing unemployment to 4% by 1983. In 1983 the unemployment rate was 9.6%. Because those in favor of a government subsidy have much at stake, their lobbying efforts will be intensive and well financed. To the individual taxpayer, however, the impact will be at most a few dollars a year. Accordingly, opposition is usually muted and dispersed. In concert with the lobbyist is the politician. Being human, he seeks a measure of personal importance, prestige and influence. Thus his interests are not served by minimizing the role of the state, but by maximizing the role of the institution of which he is a part. He will have a natural inclination to insist that increased regulation is the appropriate remedy for any social problem. And so, year by year and decade by decade, the bureaucracy grows larger and larger, welfare handouts multiply in number and the tax burden builds higher and higher. Totalitarians eventually gain the advantage, and it is merely a matter of time before freedom is extinguished. Even when the people become aware that the government is hideously bloated, they have little incentive to curtail it. On the one hand, people don't have the foggiest understanding of "spontaneous order," i.e., that problems can be solved by unplanned processes that are not the result of any controlling authority's specific intentions or conscious designs. (The economic process by means of which everyone is provided with shoes is an example of such a "spontaneous order" phenomenon.) On the other hand, people don't understand that many of the social problems they face are the result of past government actions, and that the only real solution for them is an indirect one, to wit: to repeal earlier programs and let individuals take care of things themselves. The imposition of restraints on Japanese automobile exports to the USA during the 1980s shifted the composition of those exports away from small cars and towards large cars, as the Japanese attempted to increase their revenues without increasing the number of units they sold. Yet large cars are relatively fuel inefficient. Thus the protective efforts of the US government had the unforeseen consequences of increasing the average amount fuel used and pollution produced by imported cars. The Savings and Loan industry is going down the tubes, US Banks are failing in record numbers, the FDIC is running out of money, loans are hard to come by even for the most creditworthy borrowers, and the economy merely creeps along despite remarkably low interest rates. Welcome to the latest banking crisis - in this era of central banking which was supposed to prevent such things. During more naive days, nearly everyone imagined that private banks were inherently unstable and that financial crises could be averted only through the good graces of wise regulators. Recent events make it quite clear that government intervention itself is a key source of instability. The Federal Reserve governors base their hunches about inflationary pressures - and the actions required to stifle them - on selected economic indicators, but the indicators they monitor reflect the fact that inflation is a sequential process: it shows up first in wholesale prices, then in retail prices, then in wages. So by the time wages begin rising, it is too late for the Fed's actions to affect the primary cause of the phenomenon they are trying to deal with. The Minimum Wage: The first thing that happens when a law is passed that no one shall be paid less than $3 for an hour's work is that no one who cannot produce the equivalent of $3 an hour for his employer can be employed at all. You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive the employee of the right to earn the amount that his abilities would permit him to earn, while the employer is deprived even of the moderate services that the employee is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage the government substitutes unemployment. The December, 1991, issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN contains an excellent example of the precept that government is grossly inefficient at best, and counterproductive at worst. An essay on "Homelessness in America" touts government as the only effective means of coping with the problem, and presents as an ideal remedy "a joint effort started in 1989 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and HUD. Under the Homeless Families Program, nine cities, including Atlanta, Baltimore and Denver, will receive a projected $600,000 grant each over five years to implement services for homeless families. The program also makes available 1,200 Section 8 certificates, public housing assistance funds, worth about $35 million over five years.... To date, the initiative has helped more than 100 homeless families move from emergency shelters to permanent housing." What you see here is the government providing 100 dwellings, but when you look slightly deeper you observe that in so doing, the government expropriated enough wealth to have provided 160 houses. How so? Well, consider that during the two-year period "to date," this project spent over 16 megabucks to provide those 100 homes. (That comes to $160K per dwelling.) But this occurred at a time during which the average cost of a new house in America was less than $100K. The 16 Megabucks, if spent by private builders, would have provided 160 dwellings. The more the government spends on housing, the fewer houses there will be in relation to the number that could have existed without government intervention. Robert Heinlein once remarked: "Ten-dollar hamburgers? Brother, we are headed for the hundred-dollar hamburger; for the barter-only hamburger. But this is only an inconvenience rather than a disaster as long as there is plenty of hamburger." So far there is still plenty of housing and hamburger in America (at least in comparison with countries where housing and food production are strictly socialized and completely controlled by government). But as government intervention in the economy becomes more and more pervasive, the economy will become less and less able to provide these (and other) necessities of life. And the fewer houses produced, the more people will clamor for the government to "do something about the problem of homelessness!" And every time it does something, there will be still fewer houses produced, simply because government is not the solution - government is the problem. (For a more thorough account of the effects of government on the housing market read THE FEDERAL BULLDOZER by Martin Anderson.) As the problems created by partial controls multiply, there is a logical extension of partial controls to universal controls and it is here that the full and horrible price of abandoning free market principles is made explicit. Productive capacity and the incentive to work decline continually; and therefore the government is eventually led to seize control over all production and distribution. That same issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN contains an article on America's Wetlands. In its attempt to preserve these ecological areas, the federal government has implemented several programs, including the 1972 Clean Water Act and the 1985 Swampbuster program. In spite of these schemes, some 300K acres of wetlands are lost every year, and the Department of the Interior estimates that less than half of America's original wetlands still exist. The government's latest effort, the l991 Wetlands Guidelines, was used to evaluate 22 of Washington State's recognized wetlands. To the surprise of the scientists, only four of the 22 wetlands would still be so classified under the new rules. Many experts say the document is filled with inconsistencies and loopholes that could lead to the loss of designation for half of the nation's remaining wetlands. There are also several other bills pending in Congress that would alter the definition and relative value of wetlands. Each agency involved in wetlands management - the Army Corps of Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Sevice, the Soil Conservation Service and the Environmental Protection Agency - use different guidelines to define a wetland. Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan, when asked to define 'wetlands' responded: "I take the position that there are certain kinds of vegetation that are common in wetlands, pussy willows or whatever the name is. That's one way you can tell, and then if it's wet." Here we see a situation worse even than the housing debacle described above. At least in the area of houses, there are SOME dwellings constructed as a result of the government's policies, even though the government's behavior in this area is grossly inefficient. But in its dealing with wetlands, the government is actually counterproductive. The more it passes laws and creates agencies, the more the wetlands vanish. The argument that the functions of government law are the assignment of property rights and the protection of those rights is spurious. Government governs by means of mediating wealth transfers, imposing behavior controls, and protecting (and expanding) its institutions. The police cannot prevent crimes, rarely solve crimes - or even find out about them - and certainly do very little to rehabilitate criminals. The only thing they are good for is to go up against armed lunatics, so other folks might not have to; and they won't always do that. Worse yet, once they have the training they naturally want to use it, and they see one of the safest ways of doing so in the enforcement of victimless crime laws. As of 1990, the San Francisco police will no longer investigate burglaries where the value of goods stolen is under $10K. Nor will they investigate bad- check cases if the amount is under $2K. In 1988 they investigated only 26% of all violent crimes reported - but they spent 73 million dollars waging the drug war. According to the Statistical Abstract of the USA, the per capita loss to crime each year is $5760. But this pales in comparison to the $20470 that you could put into your pocket each year if government were abolished. You can calculate this amount by summing up the total revenues of all federal, state, and local governments, then dividing that sum by the number of non-government working people. The figures above are for the year 1990. * GOVERNMENT MURDERS DURING THE 20th CENTURY: In Millions (thru 1985) War 35.7 (battle deaths: WW1 9 WW2 15) Non-war 150.5 Total 186.2 = 5% of earth's population during that period. This averages out to be one murder every 15 seconds. Communist governments: 126.2 Fascist governments: 23.4 Democratic governments: .9 This distinction among government types, although certainly useful for deciding where you should choose to live, is seen to be somewhat spurious when you consider that the Italian massacre of the Libyans must be attributed to Fascism - but the French massacre of the Algerians must be attributed to Democracy. I really doubt that it made any difference to the dead Arabs who considered themselves neither Libyan nor Algerian, fascist nor democratic. Communists don't scare me; communist governments scare me, but the frightful thing is the government, not the communist. The Hutterite sect of Christianity, whose beliefs consist of pure and absolute communism, has existed for over 400 years, and during that time there has never been a murder by one of its members. Keep in mind that this little expose' of government murders includes only those people who were directly murdered by governments. It does not take into account the tens of millions who died in the deliberately-caused famines in the Soviet Union (8 million during the 1920's) and China (30 million during the 1950's). Nor does it count those poor unfortunates repatriated by the Allied nations in Operation Keelhaul. Nor does it encompass all the damage and suffering caused by enslavement, property seizure and income theft that are perpetrated on a regular basis by ALL governments. As Ayn Rand was fond of saying: the enormous population growth of the capitalist societies during the 19th century should of itself induce any life- loving person to embrace capitalism. Well, the perpetration of 186 million murders should of itself induce any life-loving person to reject government. During a recent one-year period (1986), these were the murder rates for police in various American cities: (the government does not call these "murders," but they are killings by the police, in the line of duty, of innocent civilians who are not suspected of any crime. No prosecutions ensue from these incidents.) Dallas .924 per 100K of the population (9) Los Angeles .743 (22) Denver .700 (4) Houston .462 (8) NYC .185 (14) The numbers in () are the actual number of people murdered that year. Dallas and LA have the two highest rates of all cities in the country. I do not know how the other listed cities rank, and these are the only data I have. The census bureau classifies the USA urban population as being 167M, or 74% of the total. Urban is considered to be communities of 50K or more. I assume that most of the murders occur in urban areas and so I use the 167M as a population base for these two extrapolations: 1. Using the lowest murder rate available (.185) there would be just over 300 murders per year nationwide. 2. Using the average of all the murder rates (.603) there would be just over 1000 murders per year nationwide. It is probably safe to assume that at least one poor citizen is being murdered by the police every day somewhere in the country. Contrast this with the rate at which police are being murdered: just over 100 per year. These statistics ARE kept by the FBI - and widely publicized. In fact there is a national day of mourning observed for murdered police - it is in May each year. You might ask "Who are these poor people?" (Keep in mind that police do not accidently kill people; when a policeman takes out his gun and shoots it, he is TRYING to kill somebody. When a civilian performs the same action, it IS considered by the government to be an act of murder.) They range from a 5- year-old boy in Stanton CA to a 70-year-old woman in Dallas. They include an entire family of 11 people (including 5 children) who were DELIBERATELY burned to death in Philadelphia by the city police department, who held off the fire department until the fire had done its grisly work. This happened in May of 1985. After a two-year investigation, the city government announced that "no laws had been broken" by anyone involved. And mayor Goode boasted (yes, it was actually a boast!) that "the city government is more powerful now than it was then." During the decade of the 60s the Philadelphia city police murdered its citizens at the average rate of one per week (2.5 per 100K on an annual basis). This caused such a scandal that it provoked an investigation by the Federal Justice Department and the city cleaned up its act a little bit even though there were no indictments. And if deliberately (and legally) burning children to death does not convince you of the viciousness of government, what would? If you are a decent and benevolent person, you ought to believe in something different from what has killed so many people, and espouse an ethics that human beings could actually live by, and work for it to become real. In June of 1984, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that prosecutors need not honor plea-bargain agreements. The court maintained that as long as a plea-bargain agreement is "voluntarily accepted by a suspect with full awareness of the consequences," prosecutors are not bound to abide by it. It seems that the more open and forthright the government is, the less obliged it is to be honest! Ask yourself what products and services are currently least satisfactory and have shown the least improvement over time. Postal service, elementary and secondary schooling (one of the government's greatest failures is the public school system), police protection, sewage disposal, and railroad passenger transport would surely be high on the list. Ask yourself which products are most satisfactory and have improved the most. Household appliances, TV and radio sets, computers, supermarkets and shopping centers would surely come high on that list. The shoddy products are all produced by government or government-regulated industries. The outstanding products are all produced by private enterprise with little or no government involvement. Yet the public has been persuaded that private enterprise produces shoddy products, that we need ever more government employees to keep business from foisting off unsafe products at outrageous prices on us poor ignorant and vulnerable customers. What the government refers to as "Fair Trade" consists largely of the government devising new ways to protect consumers against the scourge of low prices and high quality. The rise of statism has seen a general economic thrust away from far- sightedness and the building of capital and toward destructive looting of the stock of capital for short-term profit. The increasing scope of law-making, and its associated transfers of property rights from private individuals to government, undermines the private property arrangements that support a free market system. This process creates considerable uncertainty about the future value of those private rights that have not yet been seized by government. When resource owners are relatively uncertain about their continued ownership of those resources, they tend to use them up relatively rapidly and have less incentive to enhance future production capabilities. Thus resources will be overused and underproduced. Even for statist-minded businessmen, the inevitable erosion of confidence in the future that results from the government's continual policy reversals, irresolution in the face of electoral whims, and stifling bureaucracy, makes long-term business planning impossible. Regulation of economic activity is often justified and upheld by the courts on the fictitious grounds that a laissez-faire economy inevitably leads to "excesses" and "abuses," necessitating regulation which amounts to prior restraint upon private freedom of action; yet similar attempts at prior restraint of government action is routinely struck down, even as judges cite the resulting excesses and abuses as a small price to pay for freedom. * The War On Drugs In view of the furor over "crime" in America, it is rather enlightening to peruse some of the actual measurements of this "crime." These data come from the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1992 edition, pages 180 thru 195. They clearly show the results of the Republican (Reagan/Bush) regime's emphasis on fighting drug use. Total number of criminal offenses known to the police: 1980 13.4million 1990 14.4million a rise of 7% Drug arrest rates (per 100K population) 1980 256 1985 346 1989 527 a rise of 106% Tried in U.S. District Courts: Marijuana 1980 2thousand 1990 5thousand a rise of 150% Other drugs 1980 3thousand 1990 13thousand a rise of 333% Sentenced to prison in U.S. District Courts: 1980 Total 14thousand Drugs 4thousand 1990 Total 28thousand Drugs 14thousand a rise of 100% a rise of 250% Observe that half the sentences nowadays are for drug crimes and that the number of drug sentences today equals the total number of sentences for ALL crimes in 1980. For every 1000 non-drug arrests made by the police, three criminals get sentenced to prison. For every 1000 drug arrests, 16 are sent to prison. An examination of the breakdown of the "Total number of criminal offenses" reveals that many categories of violent crime changed little during the 1980s. In fact, the increase in the total population of America has resulted in a per capita DECLINE in several of these rates: Total of offenses known: -2.2% Murder: -7.8% Total property crime: -4.9% Burglary: -26.6% An analysis of these numbers reveals clearly that there is indeed a "crime wave" sweeping America. But it is not murderers and burglars who are responsible - it is people puffing the wrong kind of cigarettes who are overloading the nation's prisons. The FedGov's response - putting more police onto the streets and pouring more money into the coffers of local law- enforcement agencies - is counterproductive: it can only exacerbate the situation because it will lead to a more vigorous and thorough enforcement of the Drug Laws. Some measures of the insanity of the Drug War: The morphine required for a $100 fix in a dirty alley could be purchased from the local drugstore for just $1, if not for the anti-drug laws. In 1973, John Hospers calculated that two-thirds of the violent crime in New York City would quite simply and quietly disappear overnight if all the drug laws were repealed, since that is the proportion of the crime that is caused by addicts who need the money for a fix. Half the prisoners in the Texas state prison system are there for violation of drug laws, NOT for violent crimes! How peculiar that the government does not blame the obesity of fat persons on the people who sell them food, but it does blame the drug habits of addicts on the people who sell them drugs. If two men had walked down Fifth Avenue in March 1933, and one of them had a pint of whiskey in his pocket and the other had a hundred dollars in gold coins, the one with the whiskey would have been considered a criminal and the one with the gold an honest citizen. If these two men, like Rip Van Winkle, slept for a year and then walked back up Fifth Avenue, the man with the whiskey would have been considered an honest citizen and the one with the gold coins a criminal. On the positive side, it is clear that government itself would benefit from a change in policy: reclassifying marijuana possession from a felony to a misdemeanor reduced the felony caseload of the Los Angeles police by 25%. You might think that sooner or later the government would realize the insane idiocy of its policy on drugs. But keep this in mind: although Prohibition lasted only 12 years, the Drug War has continued for over two generations with no sign of abating. Remember also that the Nazis did not abandon their persecution of the Jews, even when the manpower involved was critically needed to defend the gates of Berlin itself. Thus there is no reason to surmise the government will cease its insanity short of out-and-out social collapse. Nor do I see hope in attempts to elicit public discussion of the issue. Discussion is futile when directed not toward general principles but merely toward the specific phenomena which are consequences of those principles. This precept becomes eminently clear during debates about legalizing drugs. They invariably degenerate from very brief and superficial mention of the underlying principles into lengthy disputes over the specific means that would be used for distributing the drugs if they were to be legalized. There are other, less widely-known, aspects of the government's drug policy that have severely detrimental effects on American society: The FDA doesn't want anybody to be killed by medicines (that would look bad for the FDA's record) but they don't care how many people die of diseases resulting from the government's prevention of the development and sale of medicines. Put yourself in the position of an FDA official charged with approving or disapproving a new drug. You can make two very different mistakes: 1. Approve a drug that turns out to be dangerous. 2. Refuse approval of a drug that would have been beneficial. If you make the first mistake you will become infamous. If you make the second mistake, nobody will ever know it. Thus, with the best will in the world, you will inevitably delay or reject any and every new drug. You will compel the drug companies to Shrug. An examination of the therapeutic significance of drugs that are forbidden in the US but are available elsewhere in the world, such as in France, reveals this in action. The psychiatric profession is also deeply affected: To therapists, the addict needs help to solve a problem, the problem being that he uses a drug of which they disapprove. But to the addicts, the only problem is how to get the drugs they want. They don't see themselves as "sick," and they don't want "treatment." Authorities who are intervening to control their behavior react as tyrants always do - whether they be central planners trying to make their citizens conform to some national plan, or foreign policy planners trying to control people in other countries - by getting angry with the people who don't appreciate the intervention of "experts" into their lives. The victimizers, in short, blame the victims. And this IS a problem. The principle role of medical, and especially psychiatric, professionals in the administration and enforcment of chemical statism is to act as double agents - helping politicians to impose their will on the people by defining self-medication as a disease, and helping the people to bear their privations by supplying them with drugs. This is a major national tragedy whose very existence has so far remained unrecognized, and whose consequences may be devastating. Consider that the tranquilizer Valium is the most widely-prescribed drug in the USA. Its sale is a multi-billion dollar business. Suppose something happened that resulted in the cessation of its distribution (and also that of other similar drugs). What would be the effect on all those stressed people whose mental stability depends on such drugs? Kurt Saxon maintains that this might well be the most devastating result of a collapse of our economy. All those neurotics might go crazy and destroy everything in their environment. It is laws which create much of social context - the Prohibition laws created the "Alcohol War" context. Today's Drug laws create today's "Heroin War" context. Unjust laws are creating a deeply divided and corrupt society, where the appearance of orthodoxy is everything, and intelligence, humanity and common sense count for almost nothing. If a man long afficted by a toxic chemical suffers sudden convulsions and then dies from them, one might validly say that the convulsions were the immediate cause of the death, so long as one remembers the ultimate cause. The same is true of a country addicted to a toxic ideology. Throughout history, rulers have picked on various scapegoats to divert attention from the results of their policies, including Jews, Christians, eccentrics and now drug users. If drugs were really so terrible why were they completely legal between 1776 and 1914 - without serious social problems? It is not the drug that is the problem, but the ideology of government. Edmund Burke observed that "it is ordered in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Nor can men of infantile minds and childish habits be free. Their state-induced passions forge their fetters. * Self-Defense Compare the appalling behavior of government with the plausible alternative of self-defense: The number of times private handguns are successfully used for self-defense each year: 645K. Women use guns about 416 times per day to defend themselves against rapists. 99% of the times when a private citizen uses a gun to prevent a rape, robbery or burglary, no one is shot. The percentage of people, shot by police, who are innocent of a crime: 11%. The percentage of people, shot by private citizens, who are innocent of a crime: 2%. In Florida, an increasing number of people are carrying handguns - and the homicide rate is falling. A gun kept at home is 216 times more likely to be used for defense against a criminal than to cause the death of an innocent member of the household. Each year, more criminals are lawfully shot by private citizens than are shot by police. Fewer than 2% of gun owners ever kill someone unlawfully. A society where peaceful citizens are armed is far more likely to be one where Good Samaritans will flourish. But take away people's guns, and the public - disastrously for the victims - will tend to leave the matter to the police. In a recent survey, no less that 81% of the Samaritans polled were owners of guns. If we wish to encourage a society where citizens come to the aid of neighbors in distress, we must not strip them of the actual power to do something about crime. Surely it is the height of absurdity to disarm the peaceful public and then, as is quite common, to denounce them for apathy. Even worse are the insidious consequences of the denial, by law, of individual self-responsibility and self-authority. In a society where the individual is forbidden to act freely on his own authority within his own personal sphere of influence, a sense of apathy is the inevitable result. Both a local apathy, regarding his interpersonal relationships, and a more generalized apathy, regarding his community. People who are prevented from solving their own problems will not solve the problems of their cities, either. There are always the types who insist on running the show but who wouldn't lift a finger to carry the garbage. Freedom means, in part, that we'll all have to learn to take out our own garbage, since in a free society no one will have the means to compel others to do it for him. Freedom makes demands on people. That's why government is so highly considered - it makes "the other fellow" do the work. One reason government in America is being pressured to create a socialized medical system is that such a system lets the government take care of another worry. An anarchist looks after him or herself. Too many people in this world can't and won't. They will look for a savior, a dictator or a committee to do the work, and will cheerfully make any sacrifice in order to be saved and cared for. But the government answer has not worked; it will not work; it can not work. Unfortunately, the workable solutions are not permitted by government. Under government there are winners and there are losers. Unlike the free market, for every beneficiary of government action there is a victim. The values of the winners are imposed upon the losers, and the losers are powerless to reject them. But in a free market, majorities and minorities can both win, because a free market is not a zero-sum institution. In a market it is possible for numerous large and powerful economic interests to coexist and prosper in the same economic territory. If you believe that government should do this or that, enacting laws against drugs, pornography, homosexuality, etc., keep in mind that government acts through coercion or threat of coercion. If you want the government to tax other people for your pet project, you are in effect holding a sword over those people and forcing them to pay for the imposition of your ideas. You don't wield the sword, but the government agent wields it on your behalf. Remember too, that it is a double-edged sword: if the government can initiate aggression against others in order to achieve your goals, it can also initiate aggression against you to promote someone else's goals. Any scheme to loot "the other fellow" can work only if there are enough productive people around for each to be somebody else's "other fellow." Governments cause pain, misery and suffering by passing laws, and then point to that same pain, misery and suffering (which were caused by the laws) as the reason the laws are necessary - and even why the laws should be more strongly enforced! Nowhere is this spurious chain of "cause and effect" more devastatingly manifest than in the War on Drugs. The real cause of immigration and drug-war horror stories is the enforcement of anti-immigration and anti- drug laws, not the people forced into dangerous and degrading circumstances by those laws. (When was the last time you read about armed thugs doing battle over the distribution of Aspirin or Valium?) Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure. You can see the disastrous symptoms of this disease in the faces of the people. In their eyes you can see the flame of hope slowly dying, drowned by the harsh reality of survival in modern America as the nation sinks into the swamp of fascist tyranny.