Dear Imperialist Swine

Why is this so difficult to understand? Anarchists are not against groups of people assembling together. They are against monopoly on law and order by one particular organization. Anarchists say: just like TV or Internet service can be provided by different private organizations competing for customers in a free-market environment, the same can be said about law and order. Private organization competing for customers can provide those in a free-market environment.

See this post for an explanation.

Yet, I suppose, yelling at a taxman is not the worst that people in the US have done. At least he wasn’t tarred and feathered (I won’t link to a particular clip from John Adams series).

Actually, following Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, two lawyers sued the state of Georgia over a pre-Revolutionary bond in Supreme Court. (See Chisholm vs. Georgia.) Georgia argued that it was a sovereign state that could not be sued without its permission. Supreme Court supported the plaintiffs. The court of Georgia, however, found the decision unconstitutional; furthermore, the House passed the bill that “any federal agent attempting to execute the order would be guilty of felony and shall suffer death without benefit of closure by being hanged”. See 12:10 here.

(After which the 11th Amendment was passed making it unconstitutional to sue a state without its permission.)

Messed up we-know-better-than-you thinking

A perfect example of a messed up method of thinking representative of a certain political philosophy (click to enlarge):


(source)

What’s a sign of a you-know-which political/economical philosopher? He thinks he knows better than a whole country of people what they really need.

“Who needs a new iPod? You need a new iPod? Are you kidding? No you don’t. What you really need is a big marble ball in the middle of a city and a park around it. To create which we will tax you, taking your iPod money away.”

Subjects to the Government

(Lithuania in 13th–15th centuries)

As everyone knows, everything that the nations can do, Jews can do better. (Except basketball.)

In the same way, everything that the Europeans can do, Americans can do better. (Except culture. And cooking.)

This includes negative things. Like slavery.

By Philip Chaston, from London:

Once I was born a British citizen, and enjoyed the suzerainty of a long-standing liberal democracy. I knew my liberties as they were embedded in common law and understood the rights and privileges which were my birthright. This was a common culture that was shared in many forms by my fellow pupils at school, by my family and by those who desired to make this country their home.

In 1997 I was still a citizen. Now I am a subject: not a subject of the Crown but the subject of a new beast, one that stretches from Whitehall to Brussels. Roger Scruton has defined a subject as follows:

Subjection is the relation between the state and the individual that arises when the state need not account to the individual, when the rights and duties of the individual are undefined or defined only partially and defeasibly, and where there is no rule of law that stands higher than the state that enforces it.

This is a contentious argument, but our rights are overdetermined and overdefined on paper, arbitrary in exertion, incompetent in execution. Moreover, the European Union under the Treaty of Lisbon confers the authority of a bureaucratic state based upon a law no higher than itself, which can annul and strike out all rights, as power overrides law.

In practice, bureaucratic accretions, quangos and the vomit of regulation have encouraged a culture of subjection. This may have roots prior to New Labour but it acquired its final flowering under this pestilent regime, and discarded the final brakes upon its power: demanding that we are subject to them, civil servants in name, masters in form. ID cards, databases, surveillance and dependency.

The final transition can never be dated. It is not in the interests of the Tories to row back on such change, as they will lose the power that they have looked upon so enviously for a decade. So, when I vote in 2010, I will know that we are each capable of acting responsibly as a citizen, but we are now viewed as subjects, to be feared and controlled.

Sounds familiar? Especially the part in bold.

By the way, I do hope you enjoy paying your new tax when buying things online.