L.Neil Smith's Fourth of July message to those who love freedom.

Excerpt: Once upon a time, it was the government that feared the people, rather than the other way around. Still, as a writer and thinker, I have never wanted to be anything like those ancient Roman political philosophers who, suddenly noticing they had become subjects of a gigantic world empire, whimpered ineffectually for centuries for a return to their Old Republic. They never seemed to notice that their Old Republic contained, as the saying goes, the seeds of its own destruction.

When Doug Casey speaks, I listen. And this is what he advised in the Daily Reckoning on Tuesday:


Substantially the same message, in greater detail, was offerred on MSN Money's Smart Spending blog Wednesday:


Click through and read the entire MSN post; there's lots of good advice there.

Today's featured addition to the site's archive is an article entitled "The American Revolution Revisited."

Excerpt: One of the icons of the libertarian movement is the War for Independence, commonly referred to as the American Revolution. "War is the health of the state," they admit, but somehow the American Revolution is slotted into a different category than all other wars. It was the noble war; it was the war for the libertarian principles of "natural rights" and "no government without the consent of the governed."...But war IS the health of the state, and there is danger in deifying any historical event. Every war involves the massive violation of individual rights and the rapid growth of the state. Although I admire many aspects of the War for Independence, I wish to caution against exempting it from the same criticism that should be leveled at any war.

Full article accessed by clicking here or by reading the 'extended text'.

Related articles: Libertarian Just War Theory and War is the Health of the State: its Meaning.

Reader's comment -- D.G. writes,

I'd add another to the list [within my original article]:

Rebellious American colonists had been developing and deploying nonviolent conflict tactics such as boycotts, tax resistance, noncooperation with state institutions (and their replacement with parallel non-state institutions) before the *war* part of the revolution began. These techniques were remarkably successful at gaining the demands of the colonists.

I'm not enough of an expert on revolution-era history to be able to say for sure one way or the other, but some say that the "hot" war with Britain was wholly unnecessary to gain de facto independence and local representative control. That a set of impatient, short-sighted, violent people (e.g. Sam Adams) kept up violent provocations until war became inevitable.

"The true history of the American revolution" (Fisher) was an eye-opener for me in this regard.

Anyway, in this telling, we ended up with a General at the top of a government hierarchy who then ended up with a big phallic monument in a city full of imposing government buildings named after him and his face on the dollar and -- I kid you not -- a painting called "the Apotheosis of Washington" painted on the inside of the Capitol dome that shows Washington on a throne surrounded by pagan gods ascending into heaven. (see: http://sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=17Feb07#item3 ) And we got a centralized government that worships war to an amazing extent.

What we could have had was a model of bottom-up, nonviolent people power, and its success against the world's most powerful empire, that would have inspired the world years before Gandhi used much the same set of tactics against the same foe.

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Although it is on my list of places to visit, I have not yet been to Quebec City. It was 400 years ago today that "the first permanent non-native settlement in North America" was established. Happy birthday!

Update: The news source I quoted is wrong. Thanks to H.Rearden on our forum, I now know that the first permanent non-native settlement in North America was St. Augustine, founded on Sept. 8, 1565. The first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown, was founded on May 14, 1607.

I don't like quoting the famous line from Henry VI, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." It is not because of my aversion to violence nor a general fondness for lawyers. Indeed, I like to think of Shakespeare as setting a trend for future generations of lawyer jokes...(The line is spoken in a comic relief scene by a villaneous character named Dick The Butcher.) I avoid the quote because I think it has been widely misinterpreted -- a victim of revisionist history written largely by lawyers themselves. Consider the revisionism offered by the book Thinking Like a Lawyer. Its author Kenneth J. Vandevelde claims that Shakespeare's real meaning was, "the surest way to chaos and tyranny even then was to remove the guardians of independent thinking." Accoridng to Vandevelde, those "guardians", of course, are lawyers.

NOT! To reach such a tortured interpretation, you'd have to ignore salient factors as the constant bashing of lawyers that runs through Shakespeare's plays. (For an accurate interpretation, click on the NOT! above.)

The quote came to mind this morning upon reading a news item entitled "For divorce lawyers, slump in economy can boost business" and a commentary on it written by Ned Holstein of the excellent Fathers and Families site. The commentary entitled "Guess Who's Not So Worried About the Economy?" opens, Skyrocketing food and gas prices…foreclosures and a credit crisis…small businesses struggling to hold onto paying customers…just some of the recession worries shared by millions of Americans. But perhaps not everyone — as reported in last week's Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly: "For divorce lawyers, slump in economy can boost business."

Ned does a fine job of analyzing the news item and leaves no need for my two cents worth. For example, Ned explains,

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We've been hearing bad news about General Motors for months. Just Tuesday we learned that GM's sales were down 18% from the previous year. Yesterday I read this:


There's a real vote of confidence: they've got enough cash for the next six months, and they can sell assets and "make other moves" to stay afloat for twelve more. The punchline, however, is this:


Sales down, stock down, six months' cash left, flirting with bankruptcy, and that's "underperform"? (And last week GM was a "buy"?) What on earth does it take to get a "sell" rating from this guy?

Liberty Magazine's Tim Slagle deserves credit for seeing this one coming in time to hit the July issue (Reflections, p.12), and for doing the math. In the last week or two, do-gooders of every political persuasion have started bleating "bring back the 55 MPH speed limit" to save gasoline. No one stops to count how much this damnfool proposal costs the drivers. To quote Slagle:


Yet bureaucrats and busybodies have no compunction about demanding that every driver give up a slice of his time in the name of some vague public good. It's not enough that they can slow down -- and I'll bet that none of them currently do -- but everyone else must be forced to live their preferred lifestyle.

Here's an idea: leave the speed limit alone. Those that want to conserve gas can slow down. Those who think their time is worth more than $1.80 an hour -- or $2.20 an hour, at $4.08 a gallon -- can opt to drive faster and pay a bit more. That's freedom of choice.

__________
* In one of life's little ironies, those virtuous souls who own high-mileage automobiles will be compensated less for slowing down.

I rarely reprint in full news stories from the mainstream media but this one is compelling and requires no commentary. This, from the ABA Journal (July 1):

A drug possession trial in Los Angeles ended abruptly after dramatic courtroom developments. When a surprise videotape of the defendant's arrest was played in court Friday by the defense, it contradicted the testimony of two arresting police officers, who are now the focus of a new investigation.

On Monday, after prosecutors had a chance to review the videotape, which was taken by a surveillance camera at a nearby building, they acknowledged it was not consistent with the officers' sworn testimony, the Los Angeles Times reports. Superior Court Judge Monica Bachner then dismissed the cocaine possession case against Guillermo Alarcon Jr., 29, who works at a grocery store.

A police internal affairs investigation has now been launched against the two officers, who reportedly said in testimony that they chased Alarcon into an alley by his Hollywood apartment building and saw him throw away an object that turned out to be cocaine. However, the videotape shows it took a team of police more than 20 minutes to find the cocaine, which a defense lawyer says wasn't Alarcon's. Additionally, at one point an officer apparently tells another to "be creative" when writing the arrest report.

Deputy Public Defender Victor Acevedo, who represented Alarcon, said the case was "completely trumped up," apparently during courtroom comments to Bachner, according to the newspaper. "They have two officers who came into court and blatantly lied and planted evidence," he told the judge yesterday.

Hat tip to swm.
For more details, see the Los Angeles Times coverage.

Many thanks to WolfmanMac for the following article (exclusive to this blog and ifeminists.net) which asks the question, "Do you really want men prosecuted for their thoughts? " (Note: the author invites your feedback, including requests to reprint, at tom911katATyahooDOTcom)

Lynch Mobs, Stones and Glass Houses

It has been observed that the primary difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits. Unfortunately, the same can be said for the difference between justice and injustice, for the amount of justice we can expect on this earth is surely finite, while injustice continues to reach new lows. One can only hope that the public would begin to note the frequency with which such injustice is given its imprimatur under the guise of “protecting women and children.”

On June 10th of this year The Sacramento Bee reported on the arrest and prosecution of one of its own. Mr. Gilbert Chan, described as a “veteran reporter,” was off duty attending a cheerleading competition. There he “was caught by University of California, Davis, police on Feb. 3 while surreptitiously videotaping [the] …competition on campus.” As a result of the arrest, “Chan pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of invasion of privacy” as well as “to a felony charge of possession of child pornography. The tape focused on the buttocks and other parts of clothed cheerleaders. The cheerleaders were under 18.”

So, here we have a man who attended a competition that was, to all appearances, open to the public. There, cheerleaders cavorted about while clad in the costumes for which they are famous, in full and public view of all and sundry. Mr. Chan videotaped them, as presumably so did others in attendance. The elements of Mr. Chan’s “crime” appear to be two-fold – he was taping them “surreptitiously,” and focusing on their naughty parts as he did so.

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Friend and decades-long libertarian Kent Hastings was assaulted last night while walking in a neighborhod in Southern California (his state of residence is Nevada). Kant's story -- related with typical anarchistic aplomb -- is reprinted in full and taken below from the commentary section of Wally Conger's blog Out Of Step. (FYI, Kent is a longterm associate of the now-deceased Samuel E. Konkin III, co-author with Brad Linaweaver of the alternate history novel Anarquia and the film editor/associate producer on J. Neil Schulman's movie Lady Magdalene's.)

Kent's story follows.....

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Today, the featured addition to the archives is an article that asks, "Why do good men do nothing in the face of evil, especially when evil aggressively invades their lives?" It can be accessed by clicking on articles in the tool bar and, then, on non-political strategy in the drop down menu. Or...click here.

Excerpt: The question of why people passively obey government has haunted the history of political discourse. In 1552, Étienne de la Boétie addressed what he called the most important problem confronting freedom: people consent to their own enslavement. His analysis of 'why' resulted in the world's first book on non-violent resistance, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Modern historians ask the same question. During the mass arrests of Stalinist Russia, people reportedly slept in their clothing...not in order to flee more easily but in order to be fully dressed when seized. In Hitler's Europe, Jews reported on their own to deportation centers and to their deaths. Why?

Tim Starr circulated to me the following tribute to Vince Miller. A memorial will be planned in the coming weeks and, when particulars are solid, I will post the details. Until then, I will let Starr have the final words about Vince in this blog.

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This is an amusing twist to the foofaraw about the Associated Press demanding that bloggers pay for quotes of as few as five words from AP articles. It seems that AP, in one of their articles, quoted twenty-two words from a TechCrunch blog. Without permission, and without payment. Michael Arrington, the author of those words, is sending a DMCA takedown demand to the AP, and also billing them $12.50 (the AP's own scale for 22 words).

A headline from the UK Daily Mail (06/30): Grandfather with 'For Sale' sign in car window given £100 fine for running street business. Victor Abrahams put a 'for sale' sign on his Ford Escort and, then, went about his daily life. Unhappily, he works and, so, parks his car in the town of Barnett where it is illegal to do business in a parking place, however legally parked a car may otherwise be. Abrahams has appealed the fine and will undoubtedly attempt to reason his way out of paying. As he stated to the press, "Why is the for-sale sign in my car window any different from a delivery van with the name and phone number of the company on the side? Or why is it different from a driving instructor's car that has the name and details of the driving school on the side? Surely if I'm offering goods for sale, so are they."

Alas, the man is appealing to government agents against whom reason is impotent. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, “It is as useless to argue with those who have abandoned the use of reason as it is to administer medicine to the dead.” The government wants money and no argument, however valid, will stand between its grubbing fingers and a wallet.

There is a lesson here. In the most literal sense of the words, Abrahams (and the rest of us) should never do business in the streets; more generally stated, never do business in a more public manner than is absolutely necessary. Being public about your economic transactions is akin to staggering into a bar with $100 bills bulging out of your pockets; the government thugs, no less than the barroom ones, will mark you as an easy target. Government everywhere and on all levels are looking for ways to roll you like a hapless drunk, which means it is time for us all to sober up and be more careful.

What constitutes 'being sober' in this context? -- Being private. (For more info on preserving your privacy, click on links in the tool bar and scroll down to the category "Civil Liberties." Eventually, there'll be a drop down menu for the categories...but the section is a project in process)

Ask yourself: how can I make my transactions -- even just one transaction -- more private? Some of the options are... Use cash as much as possible. Refuse to fill in blanks on forms, pleading a fear of identity theft. Use social networks to advertise rather than newspapers. Go through an anonymizer when doing online business. Use anonymous debit cards rather than a credit card. Never answer financial questions over the phone. For that matter, never answer financial questions. Barter when possible. Don't give the appearance of wealth or brag. Don't be that drunk in the bar.