What now seems like a lifetime ago, back in the early 1970s, I asked a colleague (who knew about such things) a somewhat complicated question.
Assuming that:
- the average individual (in those days) is forced to give a third of what he earns to government (which will do nothing productive with it, but turn it straight into trash of one kind or another), and that
- whenever three such individuals are taxed at that rate, in effect, one whole human being — including all his or her potential accomplishments, his creations, his ability to raise the standard of living for himself, for his family and friends, for everyone around him, and for society in general — has been economically obliterated, then
- how many human lives in total have been obliterated in that way since the Constitution, with its taxing powers, was ratified in 1789?
It turns out to be a very difficult question to answer. Tax rates have varied over the years, and so has the number of Americans subject to taxation. In the end, my colleage estimated that it had consumed the productive capacity of some fifty million (50,000,000) innocent human lives. That’s roughly four times the number of victims claimed by Adolf Hitler. It almost equals the number of individuals killed in all of the Second World War. It fits in somewhere between the number of Russians slaughtered by Josef Stalin and Chinese killed by Mao Zedong.
And according to political scientist R.J. Rummel, it’s properly called “democide”, since, for this purpose, everybody gets to be the Jews.
So now you finally know where your flying car went, and why there’s no cure yet for cancer. You know why there’s no luxury hotel aboard a Big Wheel space station, no vacation resort on the Moon, and no scientific base on Mars or Titan. All of those things, and many more that we expected to have (or still haven’t imagined) by now, were devoured, sometimes quite literally, by grants to investigate the territoriality of tree frogs, programs to feed individuals who can’t — or won’t — work (which is properly the job of churches), programs to keep people from smoking the wrong vegetable or (to quote the late Saint George Carlin) shooting, snorting, or rubbing it into their bellies), not to mention enforcing laws against licking the wrong toad.
Not the ones squatting in the White House.
L. Neil Smith, “Economic Genocide”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2014-06-29.
June 29, 2023
QotD: The costs of taxation
January 20, 2022
QotD: The Boot-On-Your-Neck parties
Or somebody just like her.
Neither of these phony antagonists will offer not to do any of those evil things. Instead, they’re competing on the basis of who can deprive us all of more of our rights faster. Standing on the shoulders of would-be tyrants like Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson, Bill Clinton did his damnable best to make the state stronger and more unaccountable to the people. George Bush stands on Clinton’s shoulders today.
Any “progress” made by Republicans in converting America into a dictatorship will be absorbed by the next Democratic administration before they go on to make “progress” of their own. The “no-fly” list will become the “no-ride” list, then the “no-drive” list, then the “no-walk” list, and finally the “no-breathe” list. Why anybody should think that it matters which wing of the Boot on Your Neck Party is doing it to us at any given moment is — and always has been — beyond me.
L. Neil Smith, “Time for a Boynout”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2006-02-19.
January 8, 2022
QotD: You can’t fight City Hall
My daughter’s home schooled. And generally, I ignore my city government because I have far bigger fish to fry (or I’m taking the coward’s way out, you may decide for yourself which). But because I’m willing to bet that one city government across this country is pretty much like another (they should all be given 24 hours to get out of town) and the trends they set have a regrettable tendency to spread upward and outward, I think it’s appropriate to discuss them from time to time, so that we’ll all have an idea of what we’re up against.
If it were only a matter of good old-fashioned Chicago-style graft, we could probably accept it philosophically. For example, say some city council somewhere passed a law that lawn sprinkling systems (which our hypothetical city government urged us to install because they save water) must now be inspected and a whopping fee collected for this “service”. Never mind that the Earth got along perfectly well for the last four and a half billion years without the fee-collecting lawn sprinkling system inspectors who lobbied for this law. What we have here (and as usual, employing government as a truncheon) is sheer, primitive, plug-ugly greed, which I happen to define as an inordinate and potentially violent desire for the unearned.
L. Neil Smith, “Feeding the Ducks”, Libertarian Enterprise, 1995-10-01.
December 22, 2021
Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”
L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:
Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm
Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.
Feh.
As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.
Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.
But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.
Double feh.
Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…
September 7, 2021
L. Neil Smith, 12 May 1946 – 27 August 2021
From what might be the penultimate issue of the Libertarian Enterprise, Neil’s daughter Rylla Smith says farewell to her father:
Lester Neil Smith III, novelist and political commentator, gunsmith and musician, visionary and futurist, passed away on Friday, August 27th at Poudre Valley Hospital after a lengthy battle with heart and kidney disease. He was 75 years old.
A long-time resident of Fort Collins, Colorado, Neil was born on May 12th, 1946 at Mercy Hospital in Denver, Colorado to Maj. Lester N. Smith II and Marie L. Coveleskie Smith.
Neil, known in the world of science fiction as L. Neil Smith or, affectionately, “El Neil”, is survived by his beloved wife, Cathy L.Z. Smith, his daughter, Rylla C. Smith, his brother Roger L. Smith, his nephews Nolan and Travis, and his aunt, Barbara Ohlwiler, as well as countless friends and brothers-in-arms. He was preceded in death by his mother and father.
Neil’s life was one spent perpetually looking forward — toward the future of freedom, of technology, of the continuation of the evolution of the human body, mind, and spirit, and toward the endless sea of stars. As a child, he wanted to be a marine biologist, to discover the unknown in the depths of the seas; this translated naturally in his young adulthood to a thirst for knowledge of the far greater unknown beyond the shores of this world.
Neil had an avid interest in the politics of personal liberty and always stood for what he believed to be right. He had a passion for friendly debate and never shied away from speaking his mind.
In the late 1970s, he wrote the first of his many novels, The Probability Broach, which began a long and prolific career in the burgeoning world of liberty-oriented science fiction, and was the creator of the Prometheus Award, as well as the recipient of the 2016 Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Memorial services will be held in Fort Collins, Colorado on a date yet to be determined; for more information, please follow Neil’s memorial page on EverLoved.com or contact Rylla Smith at ryllacat@gmail.com.
“And yet, what is bravery but the capacity to reject our fears, ignore and supress them, then go on to do whatever it is we are afraid to do.” — L. Neil Smith
August 16, 2021
L. Neil Smith – “Take your children out of school!”
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith offers a useful bit of advice to parents concerned about their children being indoctrinated in state-run schools:
“Abandoned Schoolhouse and Wheat Field 3443 B” by jim.choate59 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
For quite a while now, the boob-tube has been filled with coverage of various Board of Education meetings around the country attended by parents murderously angry that their kids are being forcibly indoctrinated with utter claptrap like CRT, which apparently stands for Communist Racist Toxin, a new and poisonous religion where the color of your skin is an Original Sin for which you will be made to suffer no matter what you think, do, or say. My wife Cathy, passing by the TV set half a dozen times a day, invariably shouts, “Take your children out of school!” This essay is admiringly dedicated to her.
I suppose the Public Schools got started out of some sense of specialization. “You chip the flint, Og, Ogla cooks the mammoth, and we’ll teach the kids.” Evolution would have it the other way. The young have been learning from their parents for thousands of generations and it worked out pretty well until sinister figures like Horace Mann and John Dewey, equipped with the limitless power of the State, decided to use it to steal our children from us.
Take your children out of school!
It was perhaps, the stupidest thing that a people have ever done, and I’m pretty sure that Thomas Jefferson would have recognized it as the stupid thing it was, so it had to wait until he and those like him were safely dead. It isn’t brain science. It isn’t rocket surgery. Hand your offspring over to the State, and they will be taught every self-destructive thing the State wants them to be taught — and by now it should be clear, as it surely was to Jefferson, that the State is the enemy of everything decent and productive. Public education was probably responsible for both world wars.
Take your children out of school!
And if it was such a self-evidently good idea, then why did it have to be compulsory? The rows of desks in public schools are populated by conscription — no matter how many pleasant memories we may have of our school days. Public schools are financed by extortion and theft, two of the reasons we fought a revolution in the first place.
Take your children out of school!
It might be cynically observed that public schools are cheaper than paying for baby-sitting, but, given property taxes and the damage it does to the most important people in our lives, is it really? Idiots have whimpered for the last year that having your kids at home is inconvenient.
Public Schools are convenient for the State. They give government two incomes to tax, instead of only one. Take your children out of school!
August 9, 2021
L. Neil Smith – “[P]ut not thy trust in would-be princes”
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith recounts the sad record of US political parties who claim to support causes but uniformly shrink from actual support of those causes or their advocates:
A late newspaper columnist named Sam Francis (ultimately denounced by the left as a racist, of course) once said that America is ruled by an Evil party (the Democrats) and a Stupid party (the Republicans). To “stupid”, I would rush to add “cowardly”: when the GOP finally got a leader with a spine and testicles and guts (extremely rare qualities among Republicans), they were so terrified of of the man that they betrayed and abandoned him. A third political party, the Libertarians, seems determined to be even more spineless, balless, and gutless; they have specialized for years in nominating con-men and crooks for President.
They also don’t seem to know who their friends are, or how to treat them when they’ve found them. A case in point is one Norma Jean Almadovar, a former police officer and professional sex-worker who wanted to advance the Libertarian Party’s cause and recognition. The party that had always claimed it wanted to legalize prostitution was embarrassed to be confronted by the beliefs they claimed to advocate, and froze her out.
Now the once-admirable conservative youth organization Turning Point USA has faced an almost identical “crisis” and has failed almost identically. The Internet pornography-star Brandi Love (look her up), was originally scheduled to speak at their recent convention — against sex-work — but she was suddenly disinvited and chucked out into the cold, just like Norma Jean. Words like “graceless”, “churlish”, petty, “mean”,and “pusillanimous” come immediately to mind. It appears that competition has worked just as Adam Smith predicted. TPUSA is just as cowardlly and stupid as the LP.
Years ago, I took it on myself to write to Norma Jean to tell her how deeply ashamed I was of the Libertarian Party; it was just one of many reasons that I eventually left the party. Now I’m writing this little ditty in the faint hope that Brandi (whose real name is Tracey Lynn Livermore) will see it. I mean to tell her the same thing about Republicans that’s true of the Libertarians. Sorry sweetie, put not thy trust in would-be princes.
There was a movie, some years ago (it was about police corruption; I don’t remember anything else about it), where the phrase “you’ve lost the meaning” recurred several times. The Libertaran Party and the GOP lost whatever meaning they had long, long ago. Unfortunately, the Marxists, Stalinists, and Maoists we’re up against never lose their meaning. To quote another movie (Die Hard) they want to kill you and cook you and eat you. Not necessarily in that order.
December 23, 2020
Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”
L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:
Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm
Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.
Feh.
As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.
Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.
But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.
Double feh.
Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…
October 7, 2020
QotD: The gullible generation
For Americans, it meant looking for protection by a political regime so grossly and criminally corrupt that future historians will shake their heads, wondering how an entire people could be such suckers. “The Greatest Generation”, that miserable collectivist mouthpiece Tom Brokaw has called them. Looking back over what my father told me of his life, how his family suffered in the government-caused Great Depression, how he and his comrades risked unspeakable danger in the war, and how he became a prisoner in Germany — all to aggrandize the virtual godhood of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — I call them “The Gullible Generation”.
On the other hand, people loved the Roosevelt Administration so much that they passed a Constitutional amendment to make sure that no sonofabitch could ever be elected to more than two Presidential terms again.
World War II gave government complete, dictatorial control of American society, control of industry, control of communications, control of the economy, control that Roosevelt had desperately lusted after before the war, but failed to achieve. If anyone objected, or insisted on his rights under the Constitution, all the other side had to say was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
The government enjoyed that level of control. Once the war was won, and people looked forward to a period of peace, the government plunged us into the Korean War, Vietnam, and an increasing number of undeclared and stupid conflicts in order to retain its power. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” never worked quite as well as it had to shut dissenters up, but it’s clear that this scam will go on and on and on until something drastic is done to stop it.
L. Neil Smith, “The Deep State”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-04-14.
September 29, 2020
The Lamprey Party of America
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that we need a modern Thomas Nast to add to the political menagerie of elephants and donkeys:
“The Third-Term Panic”, by Thomas Nast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine on 7 November 1874.
A braying ass, in a lion’s coat, and “N.Y. Herald” collar, frightening animals in the forest: a giraffe (“N. Y. Tribune”), a unicorn (“N. Y. Times”), and an owl (“N. Y. World”); an ostrich, its head buried, represents “Temperance”. An elephant, “The Republican Vote”, stands near broken planks (Inflation, Repudiation, Home Rule, and Re-construction). Under the elephant, a pit labeled “Southern Claims. Chaos. Rum.” A fox (“Democratic Party”) has its forepaws on the plank “Reform. (Tammany. K.K.)” The title refers to U.S. Grant’s possible bid for a third presidential term. This possibility was criticized by New York Herald owner and editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Image and caption via Wikimedia Commons.
The 19th century political caricaturist and editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902) is famous for identifying Republicans as elephants and Democrats as donkeys. He also created the Tammany tiger, and Santa Claus as we know him today.
Mr. Nast was a handsome and clever fellow, a Bavarian immigrant, to whom we all owe a great deal, but I have long thought that more animals need to be added to America’s political menagerie, none of them as wholesome and savory as elephants and donkeys. Lampreys are eel-like fish, sort of vertebrate leeches or underwater vampires, that attach themselves to larger fish with their circular, tooth-lined mouths, hitching a free ride, punching a hole through the legitimate fish’s flesh, and feeding on its blood. They look and feel (I am informed) slimy and disgusting. The freedom movement needs a cartoonist (I can think of one or two) capable of rendering a cartoon lamprey in all of its horrifying malevolence.
What party would be represented by a lamprey? Well, it has gone by several names, and it’s filled with familiar and despicable figures. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, described as “to the left of all Republicans, except Susan Collins, and … Democrat Senator Joe Manchin” is a lamprey, riding along on the Republican party, parasitically sucking its lifeblood, never contributing anything to advance its progress. She voted with Obama a stunning 72.3% of the time. I could say Murkowski is a “never-Trumper”, but she was a lamprey long before the Donald ever came along. My wife Cathy, first made aware of Murkowski’s malevolent role in American politics, exclaimed, “Alaskans! What the hell is wrong with you?”
Another well-known lamprey is Willard “Mitt” Romney, who viciously opposes all of Trump’s undertakings, foreign and domestic, and whose father George was a leader of the cabal in 1964 who betrayed fellow-Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and helped Democrats and the media stab him in the back, electing that murderous gangster Lyndon Baines Johnson. George Romney would have called Barry a “deplorable” if the term had been current back then, for the same reasons the political elites despise President Trump today. They believe only they are fit to determine how to live your life. The delusion seems to be hereditary.
September 22, 2020
An idea for the blighted 21st century — Radio Free Earth and an updated “Liberator” pistol
In the most recent edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith considers a couple of ways to help oppressed peoples all around the world:
An example of the original Liberator pistol from WW2.
Screen capture from a Forgotten Weapons video.
The first is an idea that I originally read about in the 1950s in a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s a satisfying irony about using it against the Chinese communists,since Clarke himself was an ardent collectivist (among other nasty things) and wrote about it as a way that communists might bring Western Civilization to its knees. Building on Clarke’s original concept, imagine a tiny radio receiver, tuned only to a single frequency, with no moving parts, small enough to fit almost entirely into the human ear, and with the right coloration to be virtually invisible.
Now imagine a geostationary satellite standing 22,300 miles in space over China. The basic idea is like Radio Free Europe, but with significant differences. Instead of dull propaganda (I listened to some of those RFE and Voice of America broadcasts), there would be readings by celebrities like James Earl Jones and Dennis Haysbert from the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and other Founding Fathers. Nineteenth century thinkers like Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker would be featured, as well, along with H.L Mencken, Ludwig von Mises, Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayeck, and Milton Friedman from the twentieth century.
Very importantly, these lessons in liberty would be interspersed by good, old-fashioned action-adventure radio drama, featuring the works of individualist scribblers like Robert A. Heinlein, H. Beam Piper, Poul Anderson, and little old me, Underdog. Jammed in there just to keep the comrades listening avidly, there would be what I like to think of as “weaponized pornography”, high-quality dramatic readings of Pauline Reage’s Story of O, among others. If it works in Chinese, it will work in Arabic or Farsi, as well.
The geostationary satellite would beam all these offerings down twenty-four hours a day to the millions of little radios that we have air-dropped or otherwise smuggled to the citizenry. Sailors on their brand-new ships would probably listen in, as well. The Chicoms would try their damnedest to outlaw them and maybe even shoot the satellite down, but 22,300 miles is a long way away, and battle-lasers can defeat missiles laboring at the peak of their climb. Such satellites are relatively cheap and replaceable, especially if they can prevent World War III, and we’d keep sending the Chinese those little radios.
That’s Idea #1. Idea #2 involves a World War II project most gun enthusiasts know about called the “FP-45 Liberator Pistol”. A million of the crude, stamped, single-shot firearms, unrifled and chambered for the .45 automatic pistol cartridge, were manufactured by the Guide Lamp Division of General Motors at a total cost of $2.10 apiece (that’s $31.55 today). The whole package contained a few spare cartridges, a wooden ejection rod, and a comic book illustration showing how to use it: sneak up on a Nazi soldier, blow his brains out, and steal his rifle.
You were supposed to throw the pistol away, but me, I would have kept it. You never know when you might need it. The Liberators are so scarce today that the bidding starts at $600, meaning that there are hundreds of thousands of the ugly little roscoes still tucked away in barns and attics in eastern Europe. Wikipedia, no bastion of liberty, claims that they were all rounded up and destroyed by Allied troops (which probably cost more than the guns did). If true, it means that I was right when I wrote in my first novel, The Probability Broach, that WWII was basically a conflict between competing brands of fascism.
August 28, 2020
QotD: Communism and socialism
If you have something — some money, a car, a house, a plot of land, a factory, a body of literary accomplishments, even things like television sets and devices to play music — you can bet that somebody, somewhere is trying to figure out how to appropriate, expropriate, steal, or simply take it away from you. And most of those schemers will be college professors and politicians.
Under a set of natural laws that can be seen as ethical addenda to the laws of thermodynamics, it is always less effort to destroy than to build, which is what makes war an attractive threat for barbarians and looters to wield, and it is always less effort to steal things than to create or earn them, which is why we have always had thieves of various stripes among us, including college professors and politicians.
Within a democracy, socialism is a cynical con-game that, like all con-games everywhere, can’t operate without larceny in the heart of the “victim” or mark. Convince young voters that they can have a free higher education (regardless of how it’s going to get paid for or who’s going to pay for it), and, having been taught nothing useful by the socialist primary and secondary education systems they were compelled by force to attend, they will ignorantly vote you into office. Convince them that you deserve the power to order private businesses to pay them fifteen dollars an hour (whether their labor is actually worth it and it damages the business or not), and they will stupidly make you king.
That, in a nut-shell, and spread out over the entire culture, is what happened to Venezuela and why they’ve had to eat their pets. It’s what’s happened for three generations in North Korea, and why, it’s rumored, that cannibalism is being practiced there. The history of a hundred other countries that have tried socialism and suffered hideously for it informs us that these kinds of developments are inevitable.
L. Neil Smith, “Bernie Sanders Wants You Dead”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-05-12.
August 24, 2020
How to rectify a serious error the Founding Fathers made in the US Constitution
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that despite his respect for the founding fathers, they made a couple of serious mistakes in drafting the Constitution and it needs fixing quickly:
Founders’ Mistake Number Two: lies in the enumeration of the powers of Congress, to wit:
“They [congress] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”
With those fifty-four words, the Founding Fathers gave birth to a permanent criminal class, as surely as the city councils of Seattle, Minneapolis. Philadelphia, New York, and Portland. Even “treason, felony, and breach of the peace” are for all practical purposes excepted, now, or three quarters of these miscreants would be languishing in prison. That heinous, stupid clause must be repealed or rewritten at once.
For many years, I have advocated reopening Alcatraz strictly for government criminals, although lately it occurs to me that Antarctica might be even better. Cash-poor Russia and the other two-for-a-nickel satrapies that lay claim to slivers of that frozen continent would give them up for thirty-seven cents and a good bus token. And I kind of like the ring of “McMurdo Sound Federal Penitentiary”.
But, as usual, I have, once again, digressed.
Another cure — with similar delightfully frostbitten consequences — might be to incorporate United States Code, Sections 241 and 242 directly into the Bill of Rights, probably as Amendment Zero. They establish the crimes of depriving folks of their rights “under color of law”, conspiring to deprive them of their rights under color of law, and prescribe extremely specific penalties.
To my knowledge, those laws are never properly applied, and that is a travesty and a tragedy. Make them an Amendment, and they might prove more effective. I would consider every American deprived of his or her rights to represent a separate punishable offense. How about three billion years in the freeze-dried slammer, Nancy, for your decades of malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, upfeasance, and downfeasance as a member in evil standing of the Viet Congress?
July 7, 2020
L. Neil Smith on the Progressive agenda
His latest article in the Libertarian Enterprise:
For the full length of the last century, Western culture has been commanded by the blind, deaf, but never speechless entities who see things stubbornly as they prefer to see them, and “dream the impossible dream”, rather than see them as they really are. This mental habit has led to various messes that we find ourselves in today. To any extent that it might help us to get out of those messes, it might help to understand how we got into them.
Don’t look to the wrong assistance. Psychology, for example, is nothing at all like a science and those who practice it are nothing at all like scientists. Mostly they’re hyper-opinionated liberals. No two shrinks ever agree on a diagnosis, and official definitions of various mental illnesses are a grammatical and logical laugh riot. The great truth of life is that understanding character is an art, best left to master novelists and story-tellers.
Although they’ll seldom admit it, even to themselves, so-called Progressives know by now that they are wrong, that they have always been wrong. You might say that their wrongness has stood the test of time. So what is it that they really want? Their high-flown theories and values having failed them embarrassingly — a good example of that is the minimum wage, which destroys employment for entry-level and minority youth — rather than seeking new theories and values that might serve them and everybody better, they have turned to a kind of bitter nihilism. They hate and fear the society that has stubbornly refused to bend to their wills, and so it must die. Every single policy recommendation that they make — like the $15 minimum wage, for example, or defunding the police — is directed to that purpose.
Another good example would be “gun control”, which its opponents correctly label “victim disarmament”. As unconstitutional political pressures on private gun ownership increased, and self-defense culture was forced to organize itself (contrary to liberal belief, gun companies and the National Rifle Association were followers in this, not leaders) existing gun laws were gradually weakened. It became easier to obtain and carry a weapon — and necessary, in the view of those of us “delorables” who were constantly being threatened by left-wing political figures. During the Obama-Biden regime, at least 100 million guns were sold. And as they were, violent criminality began to decrease in double digits.
Today, except for many liberal-dominated hell-holes like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and a dozen others, Americans are headed to 19th century crime levels. Did Progressives ever notice or admit that crime had diminished? They did not. The process conflicted with their erroneous belief system, so they still call today for various measures punishing firearms manufacturers and retailers, and disarming individuals who have solved the problem that the politicians and the police have only made much worse for decades.
And so it goes, in all such matters as economics, education, the environment, nutrition, and everything else. Psychologists (who, like a broken clock, are right just this once) call the phenomenon projection: if Progressives can’t run their own lives (and very largely, judging from the kids they raise, they can’t), naturally that makes them and the rest of the bizarre menagerie that was typical of the Obama-Biden Administration qualified to run everybody else’s lives. And because Progressive policies are (at least one hopes) unconsciously suicidal, the rest of us are in for a rough ride.
June 1, 2020
QotD: The right to keep and bear arms
The bureaucrat in question is New York Police Department Commissioner James O’Neill, an individual who clearly believes that his thirty-five years spent plodding unspectacularly up the NYPD chain of command equips him better to tell you what your rights are, and what they are not, than the Founding Fathers of this country and the Framers of its unique social contract.
Well I’ve got news for you, Jimmy, there is no “allow”.
“Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon — rifle, shotgun, handgun, machine-gun, anything — any time, any place, without asking anyone’s permission.”* That’s the essential freight of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, the highest law of the land, which you and yours have been illegally suppressing since passage of the 1911 Sullivan Act, named for Tammany Hall’s Timothy Sullivan, perhaps the most corrupt, bigoted politician ever to occupy office in New York.
Since the ability to own and carry weapons unmolested by the State is a fundamental right, there can be no thought of any unit of that state “allowing” it or not “allowing” it. Any government employee who attempts to interfere with that right deserves a long stay in prison among those whose rights he’s violated. Note that I am not saying that peace and civil order are a bad thing, just that it has to be achieved within Constitutional parameters. The Founders put them there for a reason; they had seen the rule of law abused too often by arrogant and brutish British authorities.
* “The Atlanta Declaration”, L. Neil Smith, 1987
L Neil Smith, “There Is No ‘Allow’, Jimmy”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-02-18.
