Back in May 2003, while driving home from work, I took the Bermuda-Mohawk exit off the eastbound I-696 service drive. I had been taking this exact route home for years. Just two or three weeks earlier, unfortunately, as a reduction-in-traffic measure, the City had erected a sign on Mohawk changing it to a one-way southbound street weekdays between the hours of 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m.

By force of habit, I took it northbound anyway. Sure enough, one of Royal Oak’s finest was waiting for me. I pleaded with him to let me off with a warning; needless to say, my pleas fell on deaf ears.

So I burned a vacation day a few weeks later to have my day in court. Surely the judge would look at my impeccable driving record and my twelve years of continuous residence in the neighborhood. Surely he would recognize I had had a momentary mental lapse. Surely he would throw the ticket out. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Out of the goodness of his heart, he knocked the charges down to impeding traffic. I got to pay a “modest” $150 fine to keep the points off my driving record. This is the City’s idea of clemency! Good thing the cops and judges are civil servants who work for me. I shudder to think what happens to me if our positions are reversed.

http://www.urbaneapts.com/urbanereflections-blog/?p=907

The State–every State–is corrupt. That’s the reality. Why should the municipality of Royal Oak be exempt from reality? The only legitimate ordinance is caveat emptor. The wonder is not that a municipality enforces an ordinance selectively; when political entities wield political power, economic entities will invest resources in political pull. Hence selective enforcement. Hence disrespect for the moral law. Hence centralized chaos parading as societal order. No, the wonder is that otherwise intelligent human beings still cling to the State as the sine qua non to an orderly society. As if political pull takes deleterious selfishness out of the equation! What a racket!

I just don't understand Constitutionalists and minarchists. They say the government should get out of education, commerce, labor relations, medicine, banking, etc., but then they draw the laissez-faire line at local policing, national defense and the court system!

Why? What's so special about security arrangements and dispute resolution services? Why can't the market provide those services--as it does all the others--more efficiently, morally and effectively? No, we don't need a flipping government, not any more than we need any protection racket--limited or otherwise!

I'm striking at the root here. Never mind the republican (small "r") myth of keeping limited government limited. That utopian fantasy merely blights the branches.

You’ve really done it this time, Dr. Rand Paul. Our thought crime stands exposed! Your impolitic utterances have confirmed what our fascio-socialist elites (motto: “Forced to be Free! Hooray, Dumb-Ah-Crah-Cee!”) have long suspected; namely, that we Neanderthal devotees of do-nothing government uphold the right to do whatever we damn well please with our own property. So what if that means keeping historically oppressed minorities—e.g., left-handed Eskimos, Wicca practitioners, University of Spoiled Children football fans—off our property and out of our commercial transactions for no good reason? (“Good reason” here defined by those same chattering classes who, as Karen De Coster has so incisively noted, would not object to a black restaurateur’s refusal to serve a Klansman.) We just don’t care. Our idolatrous devotion to property rights trumps all considerations of Sporting Fair Play.

Not that the chatterers will grant us the freedom to act on our reactionary musings. That just wouldn’t be fair! No, they stand at the fore: ready, willing and able to sic their Sporting Fair Play cops on recalcitrant rednecks like us. Or do they? It so happens one fanatical sect has eluded their critical gaze, famously practicing invidious racial and religious (yes, both—oh, the humanity!) discrimination since its arrival on these shores (fleeing religious persecution, of all things!) a quarter of a millennium ago. It persists in its regressive ways today. This notwithstanding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and with nary a peep of protest from the bien-pensants! Indeed, many of these same bien-pensants have been known to spend their hard-earned fiat dollars on leisurely excursions to this cult’s far-flung compounds, which pockmark the farmlands and villages of this fair (the word is used advisedly!) land like so many conspiratorial craters on a faked Apollo Moon Landing film set. Freethinking Hollywood itself has portrayed it in a favorable light.

Such is the thrall in which these cultists hold us! Even the cultural vanguard has been blinded to their evil ways!

Who are these sinister bigots, you ask? Why, it’s as plain as the hook-and-eye closures on the corsetry on their womenfolk’s backs: the Amish. The Amish, you ask, incredulously? Yes, the Amish! Oh sure, they come off as folksy and decent and quaint with their simplified lifestyles and gentle and dignified ways. But they’re separatists! They contribute to their community and their community alone — building homes, raising barns, and tilling the soil for each other, educating their segregated Amish young in segregated Amish schools. You don’t see them contributing to the Hmong or Catholic or Tourette’s syndrome communities, do you? By no means! They fancy themselves superior to those communities! They disassociate from them! They discriminate against them!

So maniacal is the insular Amish’s sense of superiority that they lump the rest of humanity—black and white, Jew and Gentile, Strike-the-Root and Freeper reader—into an amorphous blob of protoplasm they cavalierly dismiss as the “English.” But that’s not all. Dogmatic pacifists, the Amish steadfastly refuse to contribute their fair (there’s that word again!) share, whether in blood or treasure, to the permanent regime’s permanent project to Americanize the globe via permanent humanitarian bombing. (The Amish clearly aren’t for us—they must be against us!) Finally—and this item is intended for mature audiences only—they’re raw milk traffickers!

Enough is enough. As libertarians, we’re all in favor of the First Amendment and freedom of religion and all that crap, but a church this hate-filled has no business enjoying BATF approval. Letting the Amish run free in our midst—where they freely choose not to run free in our midst—is a sure recipe for Balkanization. It won’t stop with various clans making sport of each other’s garb! No, competing camps are bound to spring up, all of them armed to the teeth, and before you know it, we’ll all be at each other’s throats—maiming, raping and killing each other!

Do you hear us, federales? We want Showtime! With Posse Comitatus as dead as our ballyhooed Bill of Rights, nothing stands in your way! Please now unleash the full force of your righteous fury: your dynamic entries, psy-ops, flash-bang grenades, CS gas, armored personnel carriers and automatic weapons! Diversity is our strength! Only you can make it happen! If the Department of Imperial Mischief ... er, uh ... Defense can shrug off the Vietnam Syndrome, isn't it high time you guys shrug off Ruby Ridge and Waco? Now get out there and bash some Amish heads!

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/61334.html

With all due respect to Joakim Kampe's well-reasoned dissent, I believe a principled anarcho-capitalist may provide qualified support for the secession of Catalonia from Spain. It is better, ceteris paribus, that 51 percent of those living within a geographic territory be happy with their political arrangements than only 49 percent. Of course, those Catalonians not wishing to break ties with Spain should be permitted to maintain them. They should likewise be permitted to forge new ties--with each other or any other coercively or (preferably!) non-coercively organized association.

What the anarcho-capitalist may not support is the invasion of Catalonia by the Government of Spain--even if intended to "protect" the anti-secessionists from their firebrand counterparts. Any such action by the Government of Spain would violate the rights not only of pro-secession Catalonians, but of Spaniards, on whose extorted wealth and conscripted lives the invasion relies.

Government is not reason, it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it
is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
~George Washington

"That's even more true of capitalism," quoth the Interloper.

Define your terms. Examine your premises.

Capitalism, properly understood, means property rights. Property means the freedom to acquire and deliver goods and services in whatever non-coercive ways you see fit. The freedom to acquire and deliver goods and services spawns commerce, which spontaneously arises in any society, whether on the open or black markets.

People engage in trade because they expect to benefit from it. Nobody is holding a gun to their heads. Trade has nothing to do with theft, murder, mayhem, extortion or fraud. To the extent whatever you call capitalism is tied to theft, murder, mayhem, extortion or fraud, it is tied either to statism or criminality. But I repeat myself. Statism is (legalized) criminality.

Yes, the freelance criminals are always with us. They beset every society. According to statist mythology, society "hires" the State to protect itself from its freelance criminals. But when was the last time you hired a cop, politician, bureaucrat, soldier or general? In reality, the State imposes itself on society. It justifies its protection racket by pointing to the freelance-criminal element, with which it is not uncommonly in bed, balling like a mink.

In the immortal words of Tom Robbins, "Society had a crime problem, so it hired cops. Next thing society knew, it had a cop problem."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/seiler10.1.html

Consider this declension: nullification, interposition, secession, independence, decentralization, more decentralization, more and more decentralization, natural order anarchy . . .

Are the feds better, smarter and more ethical than the rest of us? Do they enjoy the Divine Right of Kings? Do they embody the General Will? If we need government because we can't trust people, are the people employed by government not people? Wouldn't big banks and rich corporations send masked gunmen into dark alleys across the land to rob us blind without the feds to protect us from them? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! What use does Wachovia, Chrysler or Goldman, Sachs have for masked gunmen when they've got the IRS and Federal Reserve Bank doing their dirty work for them?

Does extortion cease to be extortion because the gunman sports a badge? Who will protect us from our badge-sporting gunmen protectors?

This Fourth of July, may our once brave little republic start to shrug off the welfare-warfare leviathan now besetting it and return to its libertarian ideals. Better yet, may it adopt more radical ideals. If "Thou Shalt Not Steal" is good enough for us, it's good enough for our protectors. That's where Thomas Jefferson and the boys went wrong. They meant well. But you can't give your protectors authority to interpret the document intended to limit their authority. If you do, you wind up with what we have now.

The scum also rises. Centralized chaos does not order make.