In the pagan cosmogonies, the gods exemplify a “rags to riches” story where they arise from the chaos and tame it. In the Biblical account of creation, God never has to accomplish or acheive any such dominion. He starts with power and authority and then proceeds to be generous and share it with others.
In my opinion, getting it through one’s head that states are simply big criminal monopolies is actually a source of relaxation and peace. If someone holds you at gunpoint in order to take your money, it is a traumatic experience. But at least you don’t feel guilty for submitting.
But when the government is involved, all sorts of American mythology about standing up for one’s rights, and “liberty or death” confuses one’s thinking. One has some sort of duty to stand up against tyranny.
No, you have a duty to survive it as best you can.
Patrick Henry is not inspired (and never meant “Liberty or Death” as some sort of eternal principle anyway), but Solomon was. And he said, “he who is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion“–which exposes grand stands of the Alamo kind as really exercises in mass suicide.
And it frees you from illusions of legitimacy. Does anyone think that Paul would have modified Romans 13 if someone had said that a ruler had not been “lawfully” appointed by some legal tradition? Do you think you get to avoid paying income tax because the amendment wasn’t properly passed or doesn’t really specify income?
Why bring trouble on yourself?
Most regimes in human history have come to power by coercion (actually, all of them have). A legally predictable and consistent regime would be a great blessing, but it is not a reasonable expectation in most times and places and it is never an excuse for rebellion or even non-submission.
Joseph was kidnapped and enslaved through nothing but criminal activity. When Potiphar’s wife asked him to “lie with” her, he replied,
Behold, because of me my master has no concern about anything in the house, and he has put everything that he has in my charge. He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself, because you are his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?
Get that? Joseph doesn’t even mention that adultery is a sin against God. He only spoke of how greatly his master had blessed him and how it would be a sin to be untrustworthy and ungrateful. Joseph restricted his reasoning to a reply that would work just as well if a fellow slave told him to stop laboring so hard when his master wasn’t looking. He, a kidnapped victim, regarded himself as obligated to his master.
I’ve written a fair amount about how we’ve been enslaved since the Paulson coup in September 2008. Don’t confuse what I write about our increasing and illegal (i.e. unconstitutional) slavery with some hasty course of action. In the American movie version of Joseph’s story, he would have escaped Potiphar’s house with gunfire (and probably slept with his wife too, come to think of it).
But he would never have inherited the world.
I’m in the middle of writing this response when I remember there is a character-count restriction… So I’ll just do it here:
A few observations:
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.
So if defense and protection are not motives, then we are left with vengeance, which is addressed here by God.
OK, these were random thoughts, most of them having little to do with what anyone actually said. My mind spun off in all sorts of directions.
I completely agree with pastor Wilson. Lawless people tend to fight and kill one another. Tiller chose to live by the sword and he showed that it can lead to dying by the sword. This was one zealot attacking another.
Since Tiller was one among many who will continue to commit abortions against babies, there’s really no purpose at all served by his death besides providing fodder for the pro-life movement’s enemies. We’d be better off if he were alive and practicing. To the extent that this can be used to further marginalize pro-life efforts, it could easily lead to more dead babies rather than fewer.
I just listened to an interview with Roderick Long (haven’t read the article yet), but I wasn’t super impressed. He argues that if the state does not produce law and order that this provides an incentive for entrepreneurs in the private sector to find ways to produce these things. Well, duh, they do. They invent the state. In a word, tyrants gain control.
Which is what we should expect. We all know that businessmen try to gain monopolies by government power all the time. So why wouldn’t someone who started a “law and order” business not try to gain exactly that kind of monopoly?
If it were so simple, then we would never have seen the rise of states in the first place.
I can’t help but like Long, and he had better moments than the one I’m commenting on, but Libertarian intellectuals need to stop living in an obvious fantasy. Medieval Iceland didn’t get “law and order” from an entrepreneur. That is like getting language from a business startup. Icelandic society and customs produced law and order cooperatively, without any “entrepreneur.” (And, by the way, the Althing was not a legislature. Otherwise, it would not qualify as an anarchist precedent.)
The math is easy. If you allow investors to start new businesses and employ people you will have more incomes to tax. You will make more revenue marginally taxing the middle class than heavily taxing the upper class. If you heavily tax the rich you create incentives for them to do less with their money and not invest or start businesses that employ others.
Yet politicians find taxing the rich (or all the rich who don’t show proper respect by lobbying and donating to their campaigns) tempting. This is because the simple knowledge that one has power is more attractive than financial improvement. The “rich” are a power in society. By punishing them through taxes, the politicians prove to themselves that they are more powerful. Better to lose money than to lose power.
The state isn’t even moral enough to be a parasite.
Remember this entry?
What I wonder is this: Did the precedent set by resistance growing into revolution mean that rulers would no longer tolerate resistance? Now, instead of hoping to settle and compromise, resistance might end in complete overthrow. Is this the reason why tarring and feathering, why rioting, is so much less common–to the point of disappearing from the US?
Where does tyranny come from? Levinas and Simone Weil argue that it grows out of the decay of neighborliness and hospitality…
Read the rest at Peter J. Leithart » Blog Archive » Tyranny and law.
Seems to jive with some of my recent thoughts.
Notice I’m trying to avoid questions about how much is overreaching, whether one is in favor of minarchism or not, etc.
What I am noticing is a tendency of people opposed to some level of state intrusiveness (some level of action that they count as intrusive) and present the antidote with the claim that individual human beings are not obligated to one another beyond the obligation to not attack or steal or defraud.
So, in a libertarian society, if Jeff sees Tom mugged by Bill, is he not obligated to help? What if he knows in advance that his friend Bill plans to mug Tom, is he free from any legal responsibility for the assault and theft?
My hunch is that, in actual history, this sort of ethic has very little in common with societies that have been able to keep the government restrained from intrusion. And I have very little confidence that this sort of widespread ethic would be conducive to anything like a free, peaceful, and prosperous society.
It seems much more likely that only a society which widely understands that people are responsible for one another would be able to minimize or eliminate the state and be free, peaceful, and prosperous.
A policeman friend of mine told me that most of his time is spent intervening between neighbors who call the police rather than deal with one another. I’m not sure if there is a faster way to grow a police state.
By some weird coincidence of impulse and information, I ended up getting from the library The President Makers: The Culture of Politics and Leadership in An Age of Enlightenment 1896-1919 by Matthew Josephson. I just read the first few pages of “The Golden Years of McKinley and Hanna” and feel like I have just taken the Red Pill.
Is trying to decipher the problems in American history always like pulling up a weed and finding the root is so long that it never pulls free?
I finished this book, finally, and am not sure I can do it justice. As you may have noticed when I mentioned it before, it is the kind of book that has a lot of personal connection to me that might not apply to anyone else. Still, here is my attempt.
An Enemy of the State was written by one of my favorite political columnists, and it is the most fun I have had in awhile.
Not a teen anarchist who never grew up.
One of the big surprises to me was how long it took for Rothbard to embrace anarchism. I had assumed that he had reacted to the marxism of his family and become an anarcho-capitalist as a teenager.
But, for one thing, I was wrong about one aspect of Rothbard’s upbringing: his father was very much a pro-American supporter of the free market. They remained close while his father was alive. And Murray himself was an active participant in the “old right” movement to promote free markets and to oppose foreign interventionism. Even in grad school he had not yet become the radical libertarian he is now known as (for better or worse).
It used to be worse.
With the Democrat hegemony currently in place, many who grew up during the Reagan victories are tempted to think things are as bad as they could be. This was a good time, therefore, to read Rothbard’s biography. He had a much more hostile environment to deal with from the New Deal to World War II to the Cold War and the Great Society, the pro-peace, pro-freedom principles of the Old Right was increasingly isolated, ignored, and mocked by virtually everyone.
It was especially hard for Rothbard to see old allies who had opposed American involvement in WWII suddenly get on board the National Review band wagon in favor of nuclear war with Russia. He saw virtually all the remnants of the anti-war conservatives completely subverted to support the rising welfare-warfare state.
The fact that Rothbard continued to be optimistic and keep looking for strategic avenues to communicate his vision is nothing less than inspiring.
Reaching out to the New Left not a Productive Strategy
I first heard of Rothbard because I was part of a group that received “The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.” It was the result of severing ties with the group who had formed the Libertarian Party and represented an alliance with paleo-conservatives, who after the end of the Cold War were interested in reverting to a pro-peace and pro-freedom foreign policy.
Before this time, from the late sixties through the seventies, Rothbard had tried to reach out to the New Left and to college students. The results were not productive. College radicals could spout off libertarian slogans, but they couldn’t become a mass movement. Rather than trying to reach Middle America, Libertarians wanted to define themselves as “low-tax liberals.” Furthermore, with the anti-state attitude came many more anti-establishment attitudes that no healthy society (stateless or not) could ever sustain.
To some extent, Rothbard brought this on himself. He had an ideological streak that, while not as unhealthy as the Rand Cult, got him involved in some messes. The whole account of Karl Hess “converting” to anarchism in Rothbard’s living room set my teeth on edge.
The History of Economic Thought
This climactic chapter alone deserves a series of posts. I expected it to be boring but by the end it was my favorite part of the book. Rothbard had wanted to write a history of economic thought for years, and finally got two volumes of it done before he died. He shows that Adam Smith was by no means a pioneer, let alone the founder, of the discipline of free market economics. In fact, he was a step back. He also showed there has been a long-standing struggle between those who thought that they could control the world through values-free mathematics and those who wanted freedom. Especially eye-opening to me was Rothbard’s discussion of how Jonathan Swift was opposing such people in his own day. I have read all of Gulliver’s Travels and caught some obvious barbs toward some relying on mathematical ingenuity, but had no idea who he was responding to.
Here is an entertaining audio from his wife Joey.
This book is worth reading on several levels. Since I am a Christian, and not a secularist, I can’t follow Rothbard in all his thought. But he is still quite helpful, and just as important, quite fun to read and read about.