AMonger
Veteran Expediter
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif][FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif][FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Can We Live Free in an Unfree World?[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif] by Karen Kwiatkowski[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]
[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Stefan Molyneux, a well-known anarchist, gave a great talk last year where he pointed out that, "The enforcement of the state does not come from the state. It comes horizontally, from the mass of the people who have been cultured to believe the storyline of vertical state control." He calls this "the genius of the state." He calls these enforcers slaves, enforcing their own slavery.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The genius of the state is that it gets us to voluntarily, without pay, to stand up for it, and to deter, ****, and defriend not just the people who challenge its presumed authority, but to heartily reject both ideas and factual information that challenge the state’s façade of moral certitude...[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Liberty is within reach for most people in the world today. This is what we are seeing in North Africa and the Middle East today, and within all of the statist regimes of China and India. Only in North Korea, where food and maintenance of the state are so dear, and communication technology so inaccessible, do we have perhaps a sense of near term hopelessness...
[/FONT] [FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Americans tend to assume the United States is on top of the freedom pigpile. It sounds like a good place to be, but the facts are very different. The Heritage Foundation currently ranks the US as having the ninth freest economy, but it shares its 77% rating with Bahrain and Chile, so being 9th may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Just this week, a Cato economist interviewed economist and author Dambisa Moyo, regarding her new book How the West Was Lost. They spent a lot of time discussing how the 35% corporate tax rate in the US is ten percentage points higher than socialistic Denmark (which, by the way, was determined to be more economically free than the US).[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Even if you are not a prisoner, it is difficult these days to travel within the United States, at least by air. To leave and return to the country requires a great deal of paperwork, planning, and wasted time all in the name of [to the idol of--amonger] state security. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif] There is an old piece of paper (sometimes known as the law of the land, or the Constitution) that explicitly says the government will not constrain or limit our ability to assemble, to speak, to write, to publish, to own and bear arms, to receive fair trials, to not be tortured or to be insecure in our persons and property or papers. Yet, we live in a country with free speech zones, permits to march or demonstrate, state documentation and approval to own and bear arms, etcetera, etcetera. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]90-95% of people charged with a crime never see the inside of a courtroom, much less a jury of their peers, as charges multiply based on tens of thousands of pages of laws to be broken, juries and judges lean predictably on the side of the state, not truth, and plea bargains become the popular solution, if unjust, expensive and immoral solution.[/FONT]
...[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Do we stand up parallel alternative systems, and participate only in those spheres? Do we ignore the problem and just live our lives?[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The answer, I believe, is yes. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]...To really think about this topic philosophically, one can read Harry Browne’s book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. [/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]
[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]...To live free means that you have accepted the truth about human liberty, not just that it is something people of all ages want and enjoy, but that free societies are truly better than unfree societies. To the extent that liberty is present in society, we see self-organizing, self-moderating, highly productive and correspondingly, generous, compassionate and fundamentally peaceful people... Free societies tend to value all of its members, be they young or old, male or female...[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]If you think about how the state, and not just the US state, but all modern states, have classified and divided people by age, it demonstrates the sheer hatefulness and dehumanization that statism is known for. Through the age of 18, children are dependents, and basically made to be slaves in preparation to pay taxes for a limited working life. After age 65, the state has termed human beings again as dependents, and as with the young people, not considered productive or particularly valuable.
When I think of George Washington, the first of the post-Constitutional Convention presidents, I don’t think of him chopping down a cherry tree. I think of him as the 16-year-old surveyor’s apprentice traveling with his employer making maps and surveys of land Virginia and West Virginia, over the very land that I now call home. In an era where the life expectancy for free men was around 54 years, George Washington was fighting for secession from the British empire and eventually serving as President until he was 65 years old. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Today, the U.S. life expectancy is about 78 – by the standard set by our first president, we should expect productive and valuable goods and services from Americans through age 93. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]On the other side, the state demands children and teenagers sit quietly in their seats, instead of sailing around the world, flying or driving or starting companies. Even as we marvel at what teenagers can accomplish, the state and its minions generally tut tut and frown when they act on their natural abilities to produce, to think, and to act.[/FONT]..
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The first step in living free is orienting our own thinking to liberty. This means we must begin with our own perception of the world, our own knowledge of how free markets, free choice, free movement, and free speech work...[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]
I think the second thing we can do to begin to live free is also something that all people already exhibit – a certain degree of neuroticism, or as it is sometimes characterized, low emotional intelligence and less developed interpersonal skills. To live free in a free society requires us to have more emotional intelligence and better-developed interpersonal skills – i.e. to be less neurotic, less fearful, less pessimistic. These are the gifts of the trader, the talents of the deal-maker. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]A neurotic personality complains that no one wants to buy my products; the less neurotic personality finds out why and figures out something new and better to do. If we are to support ourselves, and eliminate the nanny state that we all hate, we need to develop our emotional intelligence and our interpersonal skills – and in doing this we begin to recognize not only the inherent value of all the people we meet and work with and trade with, but our own inherent value. And that leads to self-confidence, and a self-confident person is well-suited to liberty.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]...This requires some work. Some education. Some practice. And it requires some basic principles that you live by which I think, for libertarians and many others, should be the Ron Paul campaign theme. Peace, prosperity and liberty. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]I will diverge here a bit to criticize the Libertarian Party, self-proclaimed party of principle. A significant minority of libertarians, including some influential and popular politicians within the party, happen to be pro-war. They praise the state for martialing soldiers and building bombs to kill people in other states, for some state-defined rationale that is consistent only in its variability over time. Of course, supporting state wars – especially given what we now know about the ways states go to war and justify those wars throughout history – is inconsistent with freedom. The state’s language gives us a clue, because it generally puts forth that the state is always fighting FOR freedom, rather than extinguishing it (which is what a war-time state does both at home and abroad). I believe the state abuses the language this way because human beings were designed to exercise and intuitively love real liberty. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]A liberty-minded person should encourage his or her friends and neighbors, if those friends and neighbors were advocating that the state act on behalf of this or that just cause, at home or abroad, to review the Christian parable of Jesus and young wealthy man who sought to do right. We should advise our friends and neighbors, in their passion for justice, to take the whole of their property, and give it away for the cause. They don’t even have to go that far, they could perhaps send money, weapons or aid. But certainly, if they advocate in an intervention by our state, they should not wait, but instead immediately travel to the distant land or domestic city, take up arms or aid, and fight the good fight. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]A statist instead would say, well, let’s tax and take a bit from everyone, and then send a few young men who can’t otherwise get jobs, or have been infused with false patriotism and blind obedience by their families and state-funded education, to go fight for us. The individual cost will be low, and we can all feel like we are doing something. And a statist is illogical about destruction of property. He or she believes that rebuilding or fixing damaged structures and people (whether it is the foreigners we want to change or the injured or maimed and mentally fractured soldier we want to heal afterwards) is productive. They see no difference between that, and the alternative, where the same capital would have been channeled into creating and building more, new and better things. A statist doesn’t think about the insanity of their reasoning. Like babies playing peek-a-boo, statists haven’t yet learned that even when you can’t see something right in front of you, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. As Bastiat explained, there are costs we can see, and those that are unseen – and both types of costs matter and must be considered in understanding our choices and actions. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]If we have developed a certain preparedness of mind, a certain openness to liberty; if we have worked on our interpersonal skills, increased our fundamental sense of optimism about ourselves and others, gained self confidence; and if we understand logically and historically why we hate the state, we are living liberty in an unfree world. At this point, we haven’t done a thing except open our minds, discipline our thinking towards logical and analytical thinking, and attempted to love people even as we hate vertical and force-based institutions. We have not yet changed or directed our attention to changing any other person, much less attempted to change or weaken the state. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Or have we? [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]We are social creatures, and society is made up of individuals, who flavor the soup whether they are trying to or not. I would submit to you that living free can be achieved by only these three basic mental steps...
[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Liberty-minded people are extremely hard for the state to control. They make terrible soldiers and impolitic generals. They ask a lot of questions, and they listen carefully to the answers, attuned to falsehood and fallacies. [They question authority--amonger] I spoke earlier about ageism and the state. Liberty minded people are a bit like teenagers, and like teenagers, they tend to feel things a bit more powerfully, and to imagine things a bit more colorfully, and love truth a bit more fearlessly than their parents. It is often said that teenagers don’t really understand mortality, and they take risks that other sectors of society don’t take – emotional and physical risks. They challenge authority. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]If we are only slightly liberty-minded, we will do all these things, and we will refuse and resent vertical organization and control. The state – like an angry parent – will be upset, but we will cope with that anger, brush it off, and do it our way...
[/FONT] [FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Is there a cost involved? We could be harassed, economically punished, and condemned. We will be asked hard questions, by both the apparatus of the state, and by our society and community...[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]We wonder, "How can we live free when the state is a massive powerful enemy of freedom, and the only effective political mechanism is not rule of law, but an iron triangle between lawmakers, the bureaucracy of state, and favored industries or groups?" ...Eliminating the state when most of our neighbors believe in it and rely upon it would only lead to the rise of a subsequent state, possibly one that is even worse and less free. Making the state "libertarian" while most of our neighbors believe in and obey state power would corrupt both libertarians, and the very concept of liberty. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The honest answer is we have to start with ourselves, and we have to practice living liberty in such a way that it informs, inspires and ultimately induces and helps our neighbors to turn their own backs on the state. Etienne de la Boetie realized that all states, kings and dictators, democracies, and republics, rest on the consent of the ruled. In each moment, and in the myriad of ways that human beings reject the state, lose faith in the state, and withhold their consent, we achieve liberty and we proportionally destroy the power of the state. It happened to Rome, and to Moscow. It’s happening today in Egypt and Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain. It is happening in the United States too, not in an organized or vertical way, but by the cumulative daily acts of liberty in mind, body and economy of millions of real people. To live free, we need only to greet them, commend them, and join them.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif] by Karen Kwiatkowski[/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]
[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Stefan Molyneux, a well-known anarchist, gave a great talk last year where he pointed out that, "The enforcement of the state does not come from the state. It comes horizontally, from the mass of the people who have been cultured to believe the storyline of vertical state control." He calls this "the genius of the state." He calls these enforcers slaves, enforcing their own slavery.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The genius of the state is that it gets us to voluntarily, without pay, to stand up for it, and to deter, ****, and defriend not just the people who challenge its presumed authority, but to heartily reject both ideas and factual information that challenge the state’s façade of moral certitude...[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Liberty is within reach for most people in the world today. This is what we are seeing in North Africa and the Middle East today, and within all of the statist regimes of China and India. Only in North Korea, where food and maintenance of the state are so dear, and communication technology so inaccessible, do we have perhaps a sense of near term hopelessness...
[/FONT] [FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Americans tend to assume the United States is on top of the freedom pigpile. It sounds like a good place to be, but the facts are very different. The Heritage Foundation currently ranks the US as having the ninth freest economy, but it shares its 77% rating with Bahrain and Chile, so being 9th may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Just this week, a Cato economist interviewed economist and author Dambisa Moyo, regarding her new book How the West Was Lost. They spent a lot of time discussing how the 35% corporate tax rate in the US is ten percentage points higher than socialistic Denmark (which, by the way, was determined to be more economically free than the US).[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Even if you are not a prisoner, it is difficult these days to travel within the United States, at least by air. To leave and return to the country requires a great deal of paperwork, planning, and wasted time all in the name of [to the idol of--amonger] state security. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif] There is an old piece of paper (sometimes known as the law of the land, or the Constitution) that explicitly says the government will not constrain or limit our ability to assemble, to speak, to write, to publish, to own and bear arms, to receive fair trials, to not be tortured or to be insecure in our persons and property or papers. Yet, we live in a country with free speech zones, permits to march or demonstrate, state documentation and approval to own and bear arms, etcetera, etcetera. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]90-95% of people charged with a crime never see the inside of a courtroom, much less a jury of their peers, as charges multiply based on tens of thousands of pages of laws to be broken, juries and judges lean predictably on the side of the state, not truth, and plea bargains become the popular solution, if unjust, expensive and immoral solution.[/FONT]
...[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Do we stand up parallel alternative systems, and participate only in those spheres? Do we ignore the problem and just live our lives?[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The answer, I believe, is yes. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]...To really think about this topic philosophically, one can read Harry Browne’s book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. [/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]
[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]...To live free means that you have accepted the truth about human liberty, not just that it is something people of all ages want and enjoy, but that free societies are truly better than unfree societies. To the extent that liberty is present in society, we see self-organizing, self-moderating, highly productive and correspondingly, generous, compassionate and fundamentally peaceful people... Free societies tend to value all of its members, be they young or old, male or female...[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]If you think about how the state, and not just the US state, but all modern states, have classified and divided people by age, it demonstrates the sheer hatefulness and dehumanization that statism is known for. Through the age of 18, children are dependents, and basically made to be slaves in preparation to pay taxes for a limited working life. After age 65, the state has termed human beings again as dependents, and as with the young people, not considered productive or particularly valuable.
When I think of George Washington, the first of the post-Constitutional Convention presidents, I don’t think of him chopping down a cherry tree. I think of him as the 16-year-old surveyor’s apprentice traveling with his employer making maps and surveys of land Virginia and West Virginia, over the very land that I now call home. In an era where the life expectancy for free men was around 54 years, George Washington was fighting for secession from the British empire and eventually serving as President until he was 65 years old. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Today, the U.S. life expectancy is about 78 – by the standard set by our first president, we should expect productive and valuable goods and services from Americans through age 93. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]On the other side, the state demands children and teenagers sit quietly in their seats, instead of sailing around the world, flying or driving or starting companies. Even as we marvel at what teenagers can accomplish, the state and its minions generally tut tut and frown when they act on their natural abilities to produce, to think, and to act.[/FONT]..
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The first step in living free is orienting our own thinking to liberty. This means we must begin with our own perception of the world, our own knowledge of how free markets, free choice, free movement, and free speech work...[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]
I think the second thing we can do to begin to live free is also something that all people already exhibit – a certain degree of neuroticism, or as it is sometimes characterized, low emotional intelligence and less developed interpersonal skills. To live free in a free society requires us to have more emotional intelligence and better-developed interpersonal skills – i.e. to be less neurotic, less fearful, less pessimistic. These are the gifts of the trader, the talents of the deal-maker. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]A neurotic personality complains that no one wants to buy my products; the less neurotic personality finds out why and figures out something new and better to do. If we are to support ourselves, and eliminate the nanny state that we all hate, we need to develop our emotional intelligence and our interpersonal skills – and in doing this we begin to recognize not only the inherent value of all the people we meet and work with and trade with, but our own inherent value. And that leads to self-confidence, and a self-confident person is well-suited to liberty.[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]...This requires some work. Some education. Some practice. And it requires some basic principles that you live by which I think, for libertarians and many others, should be the Ron Paul campaign theme. Peace, prosperity and liberty. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]I will diverge here a bit to criticize the Libertarian Party, self-proclaimed party of principle. A significant minority of libertarians, including some influential and popular politicians within the party, happen to be pro-war. They praise the state for martialing soldiers and building bombs to kill people in other states, for some state-defined rationale that is consistent only in its variability over time. Of course, supporting state wars – especially given what we now know about the ways states go to war and justify those wars throughout history – is inconsistent with freedom. The state’s language gives us a clue, because it generally puts forth that the state is always fighting FOR freedom, rather than extinguishing it (which is what a war-time state does both at home and abroad). I believe the state abuses the language this way because human beings were designed to exercise and intuitively love real liberty. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]A liberty-minded person should encourage his or her friends and neighbors, if those friends and neighbors were advocating that the state act on behalf of this or that just cause, at home or abroad, to review the Christian parable of Jesus and young wealthy man who sought to do right. We should advise our friends and neighbors, in their passion for justice, to take the whole of their property, and give it away for the cause. They don’t even have to go that far, they could perhaps send money, weapons or aid. But certainly, if they advocate in an intervention by our state, they should not wait, but instead immediately travel to the distant land or domestic city, take up arms or aid, and fight the good fight. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]A statist instead would say, well, let’s tax and take a bit from everyone, and then send a few young men who can’t otherwise get jobs, or have been infused with false patriotism and blind obedience by their families and state-funded education, to go fight for us. The individual cost will be low, and we can all feel like we are doing something. And a statist is illogical about destruction of property. He or she believes that rebuilding or fixing damaged structures and people (whether it is the foreigners we want to change or the injured or maimed and mentally fractured soldier we want to heal afterwards) is productive. They see no difference between that, and the alternative, where the same capital would have been channeled into creating and building more, new and better things. A statist doesn’t think about the insanity of their reasoning. Like babies playing peek-a-boo, statists haven’t yet learned that even when you can’t see something right in front of you, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. As Bastiat explained, there are costs we can see, and those that are unseen – and both types of costs matter and must be considered in understanding our choices and actions. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]If we have developed a certain preparedness of mind, a certain openness to liberty; if we have worked on our interpersonal skills, increased our fundamental sense of optimism about ourselves and others, gained self confidence; and if we understand logically and historically why we hate the state, we are living liberty in an unfree world. At this point, we haven’t done a thing except open our minds, discipline our thinking towards logical and analytical thinking, and attempted to love people even as we hate vertical and force-based institutions. We have not yet changed or directed our attention to changing any other person, much less attempted to change or weaken the state. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Or have we? [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]We are social creatures, and society is made up of individuals, who flavor the soup whether they are trying to or not. I would submit to you that living free can be achieved by only these three basic mental steps...
[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Liberty-minded people are extremely hard for the state to control. They make terrible soldiers and impolitic generals. They ask a lot of questions, and they listen carefully to the answers, attuned to falsehood and fallacies. [They question authority--amonger] I spoke earlier about ageism and the state. Liberty minded people are a bit like teenagers, and like teenagers, they tend to feel things a bit more powerfully, and to imagine things a bit more colorfully, and love truth a bit more fearlessly than their parents. It is often said that teenagers don’t really understand mortality, and they take risks that other sectors of society don’t take – emotional and physical risks. They challenge authority. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]If we are only slightly liberty-minded, we will do all these things, and we will refuse and resent vertical organization and control. The state – like an angry parent – will be upset, but we will cope with that anger, brush it off, and do it our way...
[/FONT] [FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Is there a cost involved? We could be harassed, economically punished, and condemned. We will be asked hard questions, by both the apparatus of the state, and by our society and community...[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]We wonder, "How can we live free when the state is a massive powerful enemy of freedom, and the only effective political mechanism is not rule of law, but an iron triangle between lawmakers, the bureaucracy of state, and favored industries or groups?" ...Eliminating the state when most of our neighbors believe in it and rely upon it would only lead to the rise of a subsequent state, possibly one that is even worse and less free. Making the state "libertarian" while most of our neighbors believe in and obey state power would corrupt both libertarians, and the very concept of liberty. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The honest answer is we have to start with ourselves, and we have to practice living liberty in such a way that it informs, inspires and ultimately induces and helps our neighbors to turn their own backs on the state. Etienne de la Boetie realized that all states, kings and dictators, democracies, and republics, rest on the consent of the ruled. In each moment, and in the myriad of ways that human beings reject the state, lose faith in the state, and withhold their consent, we achieve liberty and we proportionally destroy the power of the state. It happened to Rome, and to Moscow. It’s happening today in Egypt and Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain. It is happening in the United States too, not in an organized or vertical way, but by the cumulative daily acts of liberty in mind, body and economy of millions of real people. To live free, we need only to greet them, commend them, and join them.[/FONT]