We all live under the boot of an armed gang…
Imagine you were born in a different time, where instead of governments and democracy, the world is ruled by criminal gang networks like the mafia or the mob. Imagine you live in New York, which is run by the “New York Thugs” or something like that. They would probably leave you alone as long as you were compliant. If they were wise, they would control the streets of the city and maintain some semblance of order, because chaos threatens existing power structures. So you might even feel safe walking the streets so long as you remain in the good graces of those who held the power.
Imagine this criminal gang set up a system of tribute collecting, so that everyone who they were “protecting” would be made to pay their fair share to the protectors. Of course, the thugs would use some of that money to maintain control of their city, but the remainder would go to enriching themselves and their friends, buying off enemies, trafficking drugs, guns, sex…it is still a gang after all. But none of that is your concern, right? As long as they aren’t bothering you directly, they’re keeping the streets safe and the chaos of anarchy away, what’s the big problem?
Then one day you discover, very much by accident, that the top leadership of this gang is engaged in a child sex trafficking ring, which they use to blackmail each other to get their way. Of course, you are shocked and appalled, as any decent person would be. Your view of the thugs has changed dramatically. You start noticing other wrong things. You see (another) video of a friendly gang in a nearby city dropping bombs on an apartment building, and you realize for the first time that this “ally” your regime is supporting is killing civilians, who had nothing to do with the conflict. They are using your tribute money to do this. Next, you see one of the thugs who is assigned to watch the street you walk home on confiscating thousands of dollars of cash from someone “on suspicion of illicit activity.” You feel sick to your stomach because you know the gun the thug used to enforce his dictates was paid for, in part, by your tribute.
You get home and start opening the mail on your kitchen table. The first letter is from the “New York City Gang” demanding that you pay the rest of the tribute you owe them (you miscalculated, apparently, and underpaid them). You’ll now pay the difference, plus exorbitant interest for the weeks the tribute went unpaid while their letter made its way slowly to your address via their completely unreliable postal service.
You decide you’ve finally had enough. You refuse to support a regime that abuses people at home and abroad with your hard-earned money. You ignore the tribute notice. A few weeks later, you receive a summons to appear before a tribunal, where you know you will be made to grovel and apologize to the gang before paying your tribute bill with interest. You ignore the summons because you no longer recognize the legitimacy of the gang. You won’t be their slave. More weeks go by…you miss your day to appear. All the while you are working, minding your own business, and not hurting anyone in any way.
Finally, one day there is a loud knock on your door. You open it to find five armed thugs representing the New York gang standing in front of you. They inform you that they are here to arrest you for failure to pay tribute. You protest and try to explain your reasoning, but these guys don’t care. They’re little more than their badges and guns. They cuff you, shoot your dog, throw you in the back of a car, and that’s the end of you. You’ll spend the next years of your life in a dank prison cell. All because you refused to pay your dues to support the regime.
Can you spot any similarities between this imaginary tale and the situation you currently are living in?
Many of our top government officials have been directly implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring. If you aren’t aware of this already, you must be living under a rock. Even if you know about it, I would recommend everyone take the time to listen to this podcast for the most in-depth analysis I’ve found of what really was going on with Jeffrey Epstein. Warning: it’s a hard listen.
Our government is supporting a war campaign that is slaughtering thousands of civilians in Israel/Gaza. It has also perpetrated or funded many similar wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria…the list goes on and on.
And of course, you are being fleeced every paycheck by the thugs to fund their operations. They didn’t help you earn it, but they’ll take great care to make sure that you pay every penny they think you owe them. Looters.
In light of this and many other abuses too numerous to name, what would happen to you if you decided to stop paying taxes in protest? Pretty soon, men with guns will show up at your door. You will be compelled to support them under threat of violence or imprisonment (more violence). Your choices are these: support the regime with 1/3rd of your income, or be put in a cage with all the violent psychopaths who have been deemed unfit to participate in society.
Your government is a gang of armed thugs. They are no different than any criminal gang you might encounter on the streets of New York City or L.A., except they wear suits and ties and are good on TV. Their mechanism for maintaining power over you is the same: violence.
I can already hear the objections.
“But we’re a democracy! We vote for our leaders and they represent the will of the people.”
Democracy is overrated. A majority of the population forcing their will onto the minority isn’t that cool, it turns out. The “will of the people” is a false idea, it doesn’t exist. Who are “the people?” Just the ones in the majority? Just the ones who make decisions on behalf of the majority? Do they get to use violence to force their “will of the people” onto the minority? Democracy is a sacred cow that has been worshipped for far too long. It is not effective in protecting people against violence, because (in most cases) it relies on aggressive violence to maintain its control. What aggressive violence, you might ask? Primarily taxation. It is a model of organized theft enforced by guns. If you had a democratic system where people were allowed to opt-out and leave, then perhaps you could call it moral. Otherwise, it is akin to slavery.
No, slavery is not too strong a word. What else would you call it? You’re being forced to labor for the government’s sake, with the threat of actual violence acting as the whip. You aren’t allowed to opt-out or leave, you’ll be killed or imprisoned for trying.
“But we have enumerated rights, and checks and balances on power!”
We do have constitutional rights and thank God for that. They have been the only thing holding the line against the progressive march toward totalitarianism over the past 120 years. But the truth is, those rights are held onto by a thread. All it takes is five Supreme Court justices with bleeding hearts and a disdain for dissent, and what’s left of those rights could just be “interpreted” away. Besides that, the most important right of all is not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution: property rights; protection against the seizure of property by the state or anyone else. Eminent domain (where the government seizes your land against your will) and civil forfeiture (where police seize your cash or other assets) both regularly happen to people who’ve not even been accused of a crime.
The Non-Aggression Principle
Every government in the world today has one thing in common: they use aggressive violence to accomplish their ends.
This is a norm that’s been built up over centuries, or even millennia. I believe there is a higher path that we ought to pursue. I’d like to take the reader along a journey of discovery as we attempt to imagine a world in which aggressive violence is not the norm, and is not acceptable for anyone to use, governments, corporations, and individuals alike.
I believe that a truly free society must have its foundation built on the “non-aggression principle.” The non-aggression principle simply states that one cannot use violence against another person for any reason, or under any set of circumstances, except direct self-defense (including defense of one’s own property and, under a very limited set of contexts, defense of the innocent who cannot defend themselves). I define the term “aggressive violence” as violence used in any context outside of self-defense. Next time you find yourself in support of some government action, consider whether the non-aggression principle is being violated. Is there any form of aggressive violence or coercion being used to accomplish these ends? If so, it violates the non-aggression principle and is immoral. Let’s make a quick list of things most governments do that violate the non-aggression principle:
Taxes
Tariffs
Foreign Wars
The war on drugs
Trade Embargos and Sanctions
Any regulation of voluntary contracts or transactions between individuals
Domestic Surveillance
Wealth Redistribution
Money Printing, quantitative easing, central banking in general (inflation is a tax)
There are many more that could be added to the list, but it isn’t necessary. You get the point. If it is enforced with a gun and it isn’t direct self-defense, it violates the non-aggression principle.
Let’s try another thought experiment. Think of your favorite government program, law, or regulation. Perhaps you’re a big fan of the welfare state: social security, medicare, etc. Maybe you think the national defense budget is very important. Maybe you think wealth redistribution is a great idea, or that it is imperative the cops keep drugs off the streets. Imagine this favored state policy, and imagine yourself enforcing that policy with a gun. I mean you, with an actual gun in your hand or on your hip, in someone else’s house forcing them under threat of violence to comply with your wishes that they participate in this favored policy or program of yours. Would you do it? If the answer is no, or if it makes you uncomfortable to think about, then perhaps you should reconsider your support for state power. All you are doing is outsourcing that job to men with guns who aren’t so squeamish about using violence to enforce their will. Just because you don’t have to see it doesn’t mean you aren’t complicit.
I would like to emphasize here, for those who haven’t considered these things before: every state action is backed by the threat of violence. If you don’t believe me, try refusing to comply with one of their mandates. If you continue in your refusal, sooner or later men with guns will come to get you. That is their only enforcement mechanism. You will comply, or they will use violence.
Conclusion
I expect that many people reading this will feel that the non-aggression principle sounds nice in a perfect world, but is, in reality, a pipe dream without a chance of success. Most will argue that we need a state and that the state has no choice but to use violence to enforce its will. They will argue that you must force people to contribute, to pitch in, to do the right thing; otherwise, who will build the roads? The schools? Who’ll care for the poor? They will argue that without armed representatives of the state out on the streets, chaos will reign. In other words, you must force people to do the right thing; they cannot be left to make their own decisions.
I would first like to point out that I am not advocating we immediately shut down all state-sponsored programs tomorrow and move directly to a state of anarchy. No, I believe that bringing the non-aggression principle into practice in wider society in the United States and throughout the world will be a decades-long project. It may even take multiple generations, but I do believe it is possible and that, as thinking, feeling, and moral creatures, we each have a responsibility to work to bring about that eventuality. I believe morality demands it. Should we not be striving for the ideal? A state founded on the use of violence sounds far from ideal to me.
I cannot address all of the other concerns above in this article. In truth, it would take many volumes to work out the detailed solutions to each of those objections. The best and most complete work on this theory (in my opinion) was done by Murray Rothbard. You can pick up his book “Man, Economy, and State” from Amazon. It’s a big book though, so for those of you who need an shorter summary, I will try my best to provide that here. Over the next few articles in this series, I intend to do my best to address the most important and most common objections to the non-aggression principle, like:
How would we defend ourselves from other aggressive nations?
How would we provide infrastructure?
Who would regulate the economy?
Who will care for the poor and underprivileged?
How would the “non-aggression principle” be enforced?
I’ll also attempt to elucidate the enormous potential upside we could all enjoy from living in a free society based on the non-aggression principle and strong property rights. All this to come in the next few releases. I hope you stick around to see them.
Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.
I watched a documentary the other week about the maras in Guatemala. Those gangs also require protection from people who live in their territory, but unlike our tax system, they charge pretty much as much as they think they can get away with (while our tax system allows people to prosper if they make good choices). In addition, while you may go to prison for not paying taxes in the US, that's a somewhat lenient form of punishment compared to being shot for not paying protection to a gang.
Another nice thing about living in a democracy rather than in the gang is that people who want to change the political system do so by pouring energy into political campaigns, while people who want to change which gang oversees their territory have to put energy into killing gang members (and causing a lot of collateral damage in the process). I am not the biggest fan of political ads, but they are sure better than seeing friends killed in the crossfire of gang violence.
But, I'm looking forward to reading the rest of your posts! I'm sure that they will be thoughtful and interesting.
I won’t lie my gut reaction is definitely along the lines of “This is a pipe dream”. However I definitely understand that moral drive to the principle and it certainly seems more “free” than a system backed by violence.
My initial questions would be:
* It does sound kind of like “communism hasn’t been done right yet”
* If there is no acceptable use of violence then how do you handle criminal dissonance and foreign aggression?
* If there is no regulation of voluntary contracts then is there no consequences for breaking contract?
* Any infrastructure or organization that is not enforced could be abused by people who don’t contribute to it but reap the benefits anyway. How else do you have consequences for this without violence?