Mises Wire |
- Private Security Isn't Enough: Why America Needs Militias
- A Culture of Fear
- Why Are Progressives Obsessed with the Transgender Policies at the College of the Ozarks?
- Neither the Wars Nor the Leaders Were Great
- Private Security Apps May Be the Future of Neighborhood Policing
| Private Security Isn't Enough: Why America Needs Militias Posted: 01 Jun 2021 04:00 AM PDT In late May we learned that, after a five-month deployment to one of the most dangerous cities in the world, the American military would finally be going home. Well, not really. They already were home. The dangerous warzone was the American federal capital, Washington, DC. And the "danger" that the military was supposed to be countering was entirely government made. The military—the National Guard—was on a mission to "secure the capital" after a few hundred rowdies had a Jacksonian moment on Capitol Hill. People who obviously had no plan beyond their afternoon tear through the halls of Congress were somehow presented as an existential threat to the American government, and so the statists in Washington ordered the National Guard to remain deployed. Apparently, the guy who stole a piece of stationery from Nancy Pelosi's office in January was so terrifying that it took thousands of troops to make sure he didn't come back and do it again. Of course, on every other day besides January 6, 2021, Washington, DC, is not dangerous because of people like the stationery thief. It's dangerous because it's run by the government. The National Guard standing watch against some takeover by the boogaloo bois was all a show, meant to deflect from the government's failures by making it seem as though it were ordinary Americans, and not their leaders, who are the real threat to peace and security. (It also didn't hurt to have the National Guard on the steps of Congress so that the purge of patriots from the ranks by woke apparatchiks could continue apace. The last thing the military needs these days is anyone actually dedicated to preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution.) What is most troubling about this whole situation is that it was never supposed to be this way. The rationale behind a militia (of which the National Guard could be deemed a modern-day extension) is to defend people and their property, not the government which sponges off both. But over time Washington co-opted the militia spirit of the National Guard and turned it into a ward of the state. The Dick Act of 1903, for example, was but one key turning point of several in the transition from American militia to federal police force. Seen in this light, the spectacle of the National Guard occupying Washington was a complete inversion of the intended order of things. The militia is supposed to protect us from the government, not the government from us. There is an important lesson in this for those of us who, unlike Washingtonians, still love our God-given liberties. The American empire is coming apart at the seams. God willing, the damned thing will collapse with a shudder very soon. Many around the country have long since been preparing for this day, and also taking measures against the government while it still functions by exploring the possibilities of private security. Private security is surely necessary now, and will be even more necessary as the American Leviathan turns belly-up. But beware. History teaches that private security works for a while, but almost always ends up increasing oppression in the long run. As Americans rediscover the honorable militia traditions of their past, they should also take in the notes of caution which that history also contains. Perhaps the best place to start to understand how and why private security tends to become statist oppressor is to look at foreign history first. Take the samurai, for example. The samurai are probably most often thought of as swordsmen of the Tokugawa martial law order, and that is certainly true. But the samurai started out, not as state agents, but as private security forces. The Heian Period (794–1185) was a time much like the hedonist period (December 23, 1913–present) in the USA today. The central government in ancient Japan, just like the central government in the USA today, was filled with courtiers and well-connected girly men (not that I'm thinking of Hunter Biden as I write this) who were infinitely concerned with their own social schedules and could spare very little time for administration. Because of the self-absorbed nature of central government politicians, the provinces were increasingly left to fend for themselves. But countryfolk in Japan are made of sturdy stuff, just like good old boys in America. The Japanese locals didn't just roll over and whimper when things got bad. They did what any sane group would do—they stocked up on weapons and took the law into their own hands. The toughs who emerged as peacekeepers and eventually kingmakers from all this were the bushi, the samurai. While the samurai were originally government-backed warriors mustered to help defend Japan during a period of strife with China-backed forces in Korea, the tradition of bearing arms continued long after the danger had passed, and the martial men in the hinterlands were able to fend off government predation when the central administrative apparatus began to fall apart. Had it not been for the original samurai, the provinces would have been as bad as the capital when the inevitable governmental rot set in. For a time, the samurai were the saviors of Japan. As it turned out, though, the samurai were not satisfied just keeping watch over rice paddies. They, too, eventually grouped under banners and warred for control of the center. And when, after a long series of bloody and destructive wars, one group of samurai finally emerged victorious, they instituted martial law. This process then continued until the last military government, the Tokugawa, formed in the early seventeenth century. Private security became statist nuisance. Just like in Washington, a militia had devolved into a statist monstrosity. Back in American history, take the Pinkertons as another example. The Pinkerton Detective Agency was a private security firm, too. The Pinkertons began as henchmen for railroad executives against organized labor, for which they probably deserve a great deal of praise. However, they soon discerned that the real money and influence came from Washington, so their first big assignment was to provide Secret Service detail, avant la lettre, for the newly elected Abraham Lincoln as he traveled to the capital. A generation later, the 1893 Anti-Pinkerton Act forbade the federal government from hiring private security forces, but the need for security detail of which the Pinkertons initially convinced Lincoln led to his approving legislation which created the actual Secret Service, on his very last day in office, before state-run security signally failed to secure Lincoln's private balcony in Ford's Theater. The Secret Service's original remit, incidentally, was mainly to chase counterfeiters of US currency, and as such it was part of the Department of the Treasury. Ironically, these duties continue today, long after the counterfeit currency known as Federal Reserve Notes became legal tender in the United States. And the Secret Service now lances under the banner of the Department of Homeland Security—if you have ever carried more than a few ounces of toothpaste with you on a flight, then you have automatically incurred the wrath of the people whom the government employs to protect your "freedom." Examples of private security working for government gain—call it the Pinkerton-samurai rule—could be multiplied virtually ad libitum. The Praetorian Guard, for instance, eventually dropped the pretense of protecting the Roman emperors and went all-in on the business of choosing and disposing of them. The Janissaries were the Ottoman version of the Praetorian Guard, groomed first as Christian boy slaves and later formed into a fanatically loyal bodyguard for the sultan. The Sikhs, too, sold their formidable military skills to the highest bidder, first the Hyderabad State Forces and later the British. Academi, formerly known as Blackwater, is a "private security" firm which advanced Washington imperialism in the Middle East. Whether security begins as a basement start-up or with the wave of a sovereign's hand, it almost always ends up suckling at the teat of the central state. In the summer of 2020, some Americans may have thought they were getting a glimpse of real "private security" in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ, also known as Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, CHOP) in downtown Seattle. However, as investigative journalist Andy Ngo details in his new book Unmasked, CHAZ/CHOP's security detail was enmeshed in a welter of global socialist and worldwide communist organizations. Left-wing terrorists have been plotting world socialist revolution since the beginning—the Seattle "private security" was about as "local" and "private" as the Cheka. The "anarchists" breaking windows on the West Coast were really just auditioning to be the KGB for the communist government that they hope to install. The problem is that private security will almost always choose to work for the highest bidder. And the highest bidder is almost always going to be the bidder with the monopoly on piracy, brigandage, and graft: the state (or the socialists, who are just the state in training). The linkup is the most natural thing in the world. The state steals our money and needs people to help with the stealing. The more the state steals, the more money it will have, and also the more help it will need. And also, not coincidentally, the more unpopular it will become. So, security will flock to the insecure. Likewise, whoever rebuilds a state after the old state has withered will turn almost inevitably to the men with the swords or the pistols to do the dirty work of restatifying an actual free people. Private security will nearly always find it more lucrative to work for public criminals (politicians) than for local communities. Corn farmers just can't cut the same kinds of checks that tax farmers can. There was a very good solution to this once, though. A militia. Militias were one of America's greatest strengths. Every able-bodied man was expected to have a gun and to know how to use it. He also had to know when to use it. He didn't necessarily need to wait for orders so much as a reason. If some statist punks came poking around their property, then the militia would see to it that that business ended in a hurry. If an army was dispatched, then that too could be met. The American militia was perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments in all of human history. For centuries, long before the actual on-paper founding of America, militias kept statists in line—the way it should be. But, alas, as the Tale of Heike about the late-Heian samurai wars in Japan puts it, "[N]othing lasts." One of the many devilries of Mr. Lincoln was that he made soldiering into a profession. Before the Civil War, people fought largely to defend their homes and then went back to those homes when the danger had been neutralized. An imperialist war in Mexico gave the Washington devils another idea, though. They could use a standing army to impose the federal will. Lincoln deployed that little insight with devastating results. A hateful relic of the Civil War is the standing army—the author of our enslavement, just when we thought that it was the author of emancipation. Americans have a healthy respect for military service, which I share. But the military today is the opposite of the militias of old. The military in 2021 destroys our freedom; it does nothing to protect it. Today, the American military is basically the armed wing of Sesame Street, a zombie force of woke Storm Troopers ready to firebomb any country (including ours) that doesn't toe Washington's utopian-socialist policy line. Anyone who disagrees with the woke agenda is going to get a visit from the army, and probably also from several of the other armed federal agencies (even the Social Security Administration and the post office have their own armed guards). The feds' rampaging through free people's land used to happen only in places like Chad, Yemen, Lakota country, and Japan, places that the federals could raze for sport. But now it happens in Washington, too. The militia got co-opted. The minutemen got turned into time-serving Hessians for statists. Patriots became patsies for Jen Psaki and her crew. There is a way to undo this, but it will take hard work and vigilance. We must form militias again. We don't need to have any silly initiation ceremonies or wear any uniforms. Militia is a culture more than a chain of command. The whole point of a militia is to instantiate—to borrow the title of James C. Scott's 2009 study of the Zomia highlanders in Southeast Asia—the "art of not being governed." Don't talk to anyone from the government, keep your powder dry, and if things get hairy, then, well, you know what to do. The American empire is falling. The only way the federals can keep order is by turning citizen against citizen, deploying the National Guard to Washington, and surely deploying it to your city, too, if you get out of line. But as the American empire falls, let us rediscover perhaps the best American tradition of all—the patriot with the gun and the good sense to choose his family and community over the blandishments of the rapacious state.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Posted: 31 May 2021 11:30 AM PDT Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, Soviet foreign spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov warned the United States, "We have done the most terrible thing to you that we could possibly have done. We have deprived you of an enemy." For nearly half a century, the elusive threat posed by the Soviet Union formed the basis of American foreign and domestic policy. Much of the United States' political and economic development was in fact a product of the government's exploitation of a supposed Soviet menace. Gerasimov recognized that the fall of communist Russia denied the American government the ability to exploit the fear of Marxism to its own benefit. It was as if the American government had lost its reason for being. The United States has a long history of exploiting fear for the purpose of legitimizing its growth. The current generations of American citizens are direct witnesses to over eight decades of such exploitation. In the Great Depression, the government used the fear of capitalism to legitimize previously unforeseen growth in the size of the federal bureaucracy. As the Depression wore on, the state's inability to spend its way into prosperity led to public skepticism. Thus, the government quickly shifted its focus to the threat posed by Japan, Germany, and their allies. Perhaps most relevant to current Americans was the fear of communism perpetuated through the Cold War. No less than two wars were justified by this anticommunism, as were political repression and a radical expansion of bureaucracy and the military-industrial complex. As Gerasimov suggested, the fall of the Soviet Union left the US government without a justification for its existence. The state no longer enjoyed an overbearing threat with which to distract the masses while it grew in size. Unfortunately, this situation did not last long. Indeed, the past decade witnessed the development of an overwhelming American fear of terrorism. Americans have apathetically allowed the repression of their freedoms in the name of some greater cause (a cause, ironically, justified as a mission to preserve American freedoms). While support of American imperialism, otherwise termed "counterterrorism," has recently waned, the government is now reinforcing its legitimacy by once again intervening on behalf of the common man against the capitalist system. By this means the United States' bureaucracy continues to grow virtually unhampered, and individual freedom has necessarily decreased. Our government's authority is based on the notion that only the state can protect the American people from the vices of greed and opposing ideologies. The state thrives off the creation of a false dichotomy between stateless ruin and state-induced prosperity. The actual relationship is quite clear, however: the state itself is actually the people's greatest threat. The Great Depression and World War IIThe Great Depression witnessed one of the earliest large-scale increases in federal power in 20th-century American history. The state, looking to find a scapegoat for the disaster, was quick to demonize capitalism and greedy irrationalism as the culprits behind the dramatic depreciation of the general standard of living. The solution was benign government intervention, guaranteeing the laborer a living wage and promising progress and growth through central management. The fear of economic collapse, poverty, and misery led the American people to largely ignore, or even allow and accept, the growth of bureaucracy. Uninterested in having any opposition, the state either bought off differing politicians or purged those who stood in the system's way, most through the use of the newly created Internal Revenue Service. While pointing at the ills caused by free and unfettered businessmen, Hoover became the largest peacetime spender in the history of the country; Roosevelt later shamed Hoover with even greater fiscal expenditure. Despite large spending programs and rampant bureaucratic growth, neither president successfully ended the depression. Failing to stimulate the United States out of the depression, the American government desperately needed a new enemy to distract the country's attention with. The rise of Adolf Hitler in Europe and the growing threat of Japanese imperialism in the Pacific provided Roosevelt with the perfect target. Intervention in Europe was justified not merely on account of helping the British or opposing German fascism. The government instead built a culture of fear. Propaganda posters depicting German jackboots crushing small-town American churches, or Germanic invasion forces converging on New York City, were distributed throughout America's cities. Another such poster depicted the Germans and Japanese looming ominously over the United States, one with a pistol and the other with a bloody dagger, reading, "Our homes are in danger now!" The Roosevelt administration made it clear that the intentions of the Axis powers were to threaten the freedoms of Americans proper. Creating a threat was necessary if Roosevelt was to persuade the noninterventionist doves, many of whom still peppered the bureaucracy. Indeed, after the First World War only a direct threat could justify American involvement in a new European war. To this end, Roosevelt's administration managed not only to run a considerably large propaganda campaign, but also to coax the Japanese into a clear provocation. The Roosevelt administration's campaign of escalation toward war culminated with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and a number of other American territorial assets in the Pacific Ocean. A direct attack on the United States provided all the justification necessary to intervene both in the Pacific and in Europe. The result was a two-theater war, costing the United States nearly 300,000 lives (and many more wounded), and leaving Europe and Japan almost completely shattered. All the while, the American state continued to grow in size, power, and capability. Anticommunism and the Cold WarAfter the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union replaced the defeated Axis Powers as the greatest threat to the United States' freedom. Soviet Russia was no less than the heart and origin of global communism. It infected much of East Asia, including North Korea, China, and Vietnam. The Red Army posed a direct menace to free and capitalist Western Europe and, indeed, to the free world in general. The perceived Soviet threat provided the rationalization for the Cold War, which ensued between 1946 and 1991. In the period between 1946 and 1991 Americans saw quite possibly the greatest expansion of bureaucracy in the US government — ironic for a country purportedly focused on fighting communism. Fear of communism validated American involvement in two major wars: Korea and Vietnam. Justified or not, both wars held great implications regarding the growth of the state. The first of these two major wars was fought in Korea, between 1950 and 1953. The Korean War spelled the end of the anti-interventionist movement in the US government. The post–World War demobilization proved excessive for a country intending to challenge global Marxism. The North Korean invasion of southern Korea in mid-1950 caught the United States, in the midst of said demobilization, severely unprepared for a new war. The US government was determined to never be caught off guard again, and the years following the end of the Korean War witnessed the development of the American military-industrial complex and the foundation of a permanent wartime military. The Korean War confirmed a new age of militarism, where the United States was ready and willing to intervene in the name of anticommunism (or, at least, behind the veil of anticommunism). Forming powerful alliance blocs across the world, both the United States and the Soviet Union prepared for their inevitable confrontation — the "Third World War." Fear of inevitable war, and the consequent exploitation of such fear by the state, led to the creation of a soon-sprawling military-industrial complex. A growing military required armaments, encouraging the enlargement of a permanent war-materiel industry. Given the public-private nature of this particular market, it is unsurprising that it soon devolved into a system in which companies would directly lobby government for contracts, and where the company with the most friends in government usually won. The establishment of a network of favoritism led directly to a situation in which politicians readily justified different military programs just to necessitate the continued production of war supplies. As the military-industrial complex grew in size, it became so important that politicians only needed to point to the vast amount of workers it employed in order to justify its existence. This, in fact, is the form in which the military-industrial complex exists to this very day. It is a relic of the Cold War. The government consistently exploited the fear of communism to meet the needs of individual bureaucrats. Most well known is the case of McCarthyism. Senator Joseph McCarthy ingeniously used the fear of communism to discredit his political opponents and protect himself from criticism. As a method of censorship, he had hundreds of individuals, most related to the entertainment industry, blacklisted. While Senator McCarthy's purge represented an extreme case, which ended by the late-1950s, fervent state-sponsored anticommunism did not recede. The roots of the United States' second major anticommunist war, the Vietnam War, were firmly planted in the mid-1950s, with the dissolution of French Indochina into two independent Vietnams. While the North fell under communist rule, the South consolidated under the brutal leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem. The South, firmly anticommunist, was promptly buttressed by the fiscal and military support of the Eisenhower administration. The Diem regime's brutal method of governance, including enslavement and execution, triggered the beginning of the Viet Minh insurgency. The United States responded by declaring unwavering support for the South (lest the United States lose even more face, given the debacle at the Bay of Pigs and the erection of the Berlin Wall in Germany). By 1963, 16,000 American personnel were deployed in Vietnam. This rose to a couple hundred thousand within the next two years. While the Vietnam War proved to be an absolute disaster, its most lasting legacy was not the cultural antistate revolution that it sparked in the United States. Rather, despite the mounting opposition to the war, it managed to finally solidify the bureaucracy's ability to wage war without a congressional declaration (despite the War Powers Resolution, which was supposedly meant to reverse the extreme powers granted to the presidency by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution). This made future war efforts much easier to organize, leading to a number of military operations during the 1980s, including Grenada and Panama. In retrospect, especially for those who have no recollection of the era, it is rather difficult to understand the culture of fear imposed by the state. Through the exploitation of the public's fear of communism, the United States legitimized the military-industrial complex, instigated short anticommunist purges, launched two major wars (and many smaller ones), and supported several brutal dictatorships throughout the world. Ultimately, the Soviet Union fell without a single shot fired in anger between it and the United States. No world war materialized. Communism fell not by the sword, but by its own internal inconsistencies. Ironically, the Cold War's losers were the citizens of the "free world," who, by turning a blind eye to rampant government growth were enslaved by their own "protectors." Soviet foreign spokesman Gerasimov warned the American government of the great harm the Soviets had inflicted by collapsing. Government-sponsored slavery suddenly lost its principal justification. TerrorAfter the fall of the Soviet Union, the new centerpiece of government's fearmongering soon emerged. A series of minor bombings in the 1990s and finally the ghastly attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, confirmed the Soviet Union's replacement — global terrorism. The nation was swept with terror frenzy. Like communism before it, the elusive threat of terrorism justified two wars and numerous infringements on the individual rights of American citizens. The Bush administration launched two military invasions within two years of each other — Afghanistan and Iraq. Both wars were supposedly fought to protect Americans from the suspect threat of global terrorism. It was argued, and is argued to this day, that terrorism posed a threat to American individual freedoms. Yet, the greatest threat to American freedom proved to be, not the terrorists, but the very government that purportedly protects Americans. Indeed, in the years following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration managed to perpetrate some of the most severe infringements on individual rights since the Roosevelt administration. All the while, Al-Qaeda has yet to seriously threaten the United States. Furthermore, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan left Al-Qaeda virtually untouched. While Afghanistan supposedly harbored Al-Qaeda figurehead Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda was already widely dispersed throughout other countries. And of course Iraq had no meaningful relationship with Al-Qaeda. New Tools of RepressionUnsurprisingly, the two wars in the Middle East have taken their toll on the people's trust in the state. Support for continued interventionism abroad continues to wane, as it becomes clear that neither of the wars has much to do with global terrorism or the protection of American freedoms. However, the state has once again shifted policy to cope with the change in public opinion. The fear of terrorism has by and large been replaced by the alleged threat of capitalism and animal spirits. The threat once again becomes greed, and as usual, there is only one solution — embracing the state. Naturally, the masses have once again fallen for this appeal to fear. Without government intervention, alleges the regime, the country will fall into a spiral of poverty and misfortune. The people, otherwise free, will find themselves the downtrodden slaves of the free market. The government thrives on creating these false dichotomies: war or invasion, militant anticommunism or a global communist revolution, war or terrorism, economic interventionism or economic misery. It offers the masses two choices, utopia or hell. The one, it claims, can only be provided by the state, while the other is the product of an unprotected and anarchic society. These illogical fears have tended to win over reason, and the government continues to grow unchecked. A century of war, corruption, interventionism, and inflation have failed to dissuade the public from apathetically accepting government growth. This phenomenon can perhaps be explained by noting the collective rejection of reason and logic, spread through the system by the ranks of intellectuals and academics who willingly accept this transition to irrationalism. For whatever reason, bureaucratic expansion has been left virtually unopposed. Fortunately, the recent dismantling, by means of the Internet, of the state's monopoly on education has allowed for the formation of pockets of resistance. These represent the development of a liberal counterrevolution to the now mainstream culture of statolatry — a return of reason. Before such a movement can set in, however, the culture of fear created by government must be dispelled. Man must not allow himself to fall prey to the state's exploitation of his emotions. Man must, once again, recognize the fallibility of the state and the availability of other options. [Originally published August 30, 2010.]  |
| Why Are Progressives Obsessed with the Transgender Policies at the College of the Ozarks? Posted: 31 May 2021 09:00 AM PDT Earlier this year I argued that the state is necessarily hostile to Christianity due to it being not only a rival pole of power in society, but because the state itself promotes its own religion in the form of progressivism. I noted at the time that legislation like the Equality Act is an attempt to force progressive dogma onto the rest of society and to further undermine and supplant the remaining vestiges of independence in society. A recent lawsuit regarding housing policy on college campuses serves as another reminder of what this process looks like in action. On his first day in office, Joe Biden signed the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation, which expanded the definition of sexual discrimination to include, as the name suggests, discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. It then directed the executive agencies to review their policies and to change them in accordance with this guidance. On February 11 the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released its updated guidance to reflect that discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation would be considered a violation of the Fair Housing Act. The College of the Ozarks is a unique conservative Christian school located in Missouri, and as one might expect of a conservative Christian school, it has long prohibited biological males and females from sharing the same dorms, bathrooms, and showers regardless of their sexual and gender identity. In response to this new HUD policy, the school, working with the public interest law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, sued the government in April, seeking to have the rule overturned because its implementation did not follow proper procedure and also seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction because the college is in the middle of organizing the housing for the incoming freshmen in the fall and the new rule has caused "immediate upheaval" for the school administration. The College of the Ozarks is very small, with only around fifteen hundred students, and its policies make clear that such a school is not for everyone. In contrast to the stereotypical "party hardy" attitude at many colleges, College of the Ozarks is a dry campus and forbids students from partaking in alcohol even off campus. The school also has a curfew, and forbids sexual relations with anyone of the same sex, sex outside of marriage, gender expression inconsistent with sex assigned at birth, and gender transitioning. Students are required to attend religious services at least five times a semester and there is a campus dress code. All full-time students are required to work on campus to fund at least part of the costs of admission. All that is to say that College of the Ozarks is a different kind of college than most and that unless a prospective student is completely clueless, they know what they are getting themselves into when they apply and choose to attend. Such a school may not be my or your cup of tea, but its continued existence demonstrates that it does provide value for those students who do attend. This case once again demonstrates the Borg-like attitude that is at the heart of the progressive movement and its inability to brook any dissent, no matter how small. All of society must heel before the progressive dogma of the day and any deviation, no matter how small and insignificant, must be crushed. No one is going to go to College of the Ozarks expecting to go to a party school like the University of West Virginia. It is not clear why someone who identifies as transgendered would ever want to go to College of the Ozarks in the first place other than to troll them and try to sue them into oblivion. The only reason the school cannot be left in peace is because progressivism is a religion of zealots who will never stop as long as they have the power to enforce their will upon others. Mises stated in Liberalism that "A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police." In a truly liberal society there is room for people and institutions of many different faiths and world views to live in relative peace and harmony. We are fortunate to live in a country that has such a diverse array of people and places. Even before the founding of the United States, America had been a refuge for people who do things differently. It is without a doubt ironic that the land founded upon nonconformity and relative peaceful coexistence is slowly and seemingly inexorably being crushed into a homogenous cube by the grinding machinery of the state and its zealot pilots under a banner of diversity and tolerance.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Neither the Wars Nor the Leaders Were Great Posted: 31 May 2021 08:45 AM PDT [Introduction to Great Wars and Great Leaders (2010).] The king of Prussia, Frederick II ("the Great"), confessed that he had seized the province of Silesia from the Empress Maria Theresa in 1740 because, as a newcomer to the throne, he had to make a name for himself. This initiated a war with Austria that developed into a worldwide war (in North America, the French and Indian War), and went on to 1763. Of course, many tens of thousands died in that series of wars. Frederick's admission is probably unique in the annals of leaders of states. In general, rulers have been much more circumspect about revealing the true reasons for their wars, as well as the methods by which they conduct them. Pretexts and evasions have proliferated. In today's democratic societies, these are endorsed — often invented — by compliant professors and other intellectuals. For generations, the unmasking of such excuses for war and war making has been the essence of historical revisionism, or simply revisionism. Revisionism and classical liberalism, today called libertarianism, have always been closely linked. The greatest classical-liberal thinker on international affairs was Richard Cobden, whose crusade for repeal of the Corn Laws triumphed in 1846, bringing free trade and prosperity to England. Cobden's two-volume Political Writings are all revisionist accounts of British foreign policy. Cobden maintained that
He looked forward to a time when the slogan "no foreign politics" would become the watchword of all who aspired to be representatives of a free people. Cobden went so far as to trace the calamitous English wars against revolutionary France — which went on for a generation and ended only at Waterloo — to the hostility of the British upper classes to the antiaristocratic policies of the French.  Castigating the aristocracy for its alleged war lust was standard for liberal writers of earlier generations. But Cobden's views began to change when he observed the intense popular enthusiasm for the Crimean War against Russia and on behalf of the Ottoman Turks. His outspoken opposition to that war, seconded by his friend and coleader of the Manchester School, John Bright, cost both of them their seats in the Commons at the next election. Bright outlived his colleague by 20 years, witnessing the growing passion for empire in his country. In 1884, the acclaimed Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, ordered the Royal Navy to bombard Alexandria to recover the debts owed by the Egyptians to British investors. Bright scornfully dismissed it as "a jobbers' war," war on behalf of a privileged class of capitalists, and resigned from the Gladstone cabinet. But he never forgot what had started him on the road to anti-imperialism. When Bright passed with his young grandson in front of the statue in London, labeled "Crimea," the boy asked the meaning of the memorial. Bright replied, simply, "a crime." Herbert Spencer, the most widely read philosopher of his time, was squarely in the classical-liberal tradition. His hostility to statism is exemplified by his assertion that, "Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression and by aggression." While noting the state's inborn tendency toward "militancy" — as opposed to the peaceful intercourse of civil society — Spencer denounced the various apologias for his country's wars in his lifetime, in China, South Africa, and elsewhere. In the United States, anarchist author Lysander Spooner was a renowned abolitionist, even conspiring with John Brown to promote a servile insurrection in the South. Yet he vociferously opposed the Civil War, arguing that it violated the right of the southern states to secede from a Union that no longer represented them. E.L. Godkin, influential editor of The Nation magazine, opposed US imperialism to the end of his life, condemning the war against Spain. Like Godkin, William Graham Sumner was a forthright proponent of free trade and the gold standard and a foe of socialism. He held the first professorship in sociology (at Yale) and authored a great many books. But his most enduring work is his essay "The Conquest of the United States by Spain," reprinted many times and today available online. In this ironically titled work, Sumner portrayed the savage US war against the Philippines, which cost some 200,000 Filipino lives, as an American version of the imperialism and lust for colonies that had brought Spain the sorry state of his own time. Unsurprisingly, the most thoroughgoing of the liberal revisionists was the arch-radical Gustave de Molinari, originator of what has come to be known as anarchocapitalism. In his work on the Great Revolution of 1789, Molinari eviscerated the founding myth of the French Republic. France had been proceeding gradually and organically towards liberal reform in the later 18th century; the revolution put an end to that process, substituting an unprecedented expansion of state power and a generation of war. The self-proclaimed liberal parties of the 19th century were, in fact, machines for the exploitation of society by the now victorious predatory middle classes, who profited from tariffs, government contracts, state subsidies for railroads and other industries, state-sponsored banking, and the legion of jobs available in the ever-expanding bureaucracy. In his last work, published a year before his death in 1912, Molinari never relented. The American Civil War had not been simply a humanitarian crusade to free the slaves. The war "ruined the conquered provinces," but the Northern plutocrats pulling the strings achieved their aim: the imposition of a vicious protectionism that led ultimately "to the regime of trusts and produced the billionaires." Libertarian revisionism continued into the 20th century. The First World War furnished rich pickings, among them Albert Jay Nock's The Myth of a Guilty Nation and H.L. Mencken's continuing, and of course witty, exposés of the lies of America's wars and war makers. In the next generation, Frank Chodorov, the last of the Old Right greats, wrote that "Isolationism is not a political policy, it is a natural attitude of a people." Left to their own devices, the people "do not feel any call to impose their own customs and values on strangers." Declining to dodge the scare word, Chodorov urged a "return to that isolationism which for over a hundred years prospered the nation and gained for us the respect and admiration of the world." Chodorov — founder of ISI, which he named the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, later tamed down to "the Intercollegiate Studies Institute" — broke with the "New Right," the neocons of the that era, over his opposition to the Korean War. Murray Rothbard was the heir to this whole legacy, totally familiar with it and bringing it up to date. Aside from his many other, really amazing contributions, Murray and his colleague Leonard Liggio introduced historical revisionism to the burgeoning American libertarian movement (including me). This is a work now carried on with great gusto by Lew Rockwell, of the Mises Institute, and his associated accomplished scholars, particularly the indefatigable Tom Woods. The essays and reviews I have published and now collected and mostly expanded in this volume are in the tradition of libertarian revisionism, animated by the spirit of Murray Rothbard. They expose the consecrated lies and crimes of some of our most iniquitous, and beloved, recent rulers. My hope is, in a small way, to lay bare historically the nature of the state. Tangentially, I've also taken into account the strange phenomenon, now nearly forgotten, of the deep affection of multitudes of honored Western intellectuals in the 1930s and '40s for the great experiment in socialism taking place in Soviet Russia under Josef Stalin. Their propaganda had an impact on a number of Western leaders and on Western policy towards the Soviet Union. To my mind, this is worthy of a certain revisionism even today.  |
| Private Security Apps May Be the Future of Neighborhood Policing Posted: 31 May 2021 04:00 AM PDT As cities defund their police departments and the quantity of public safety services demanded further outstrips the quantity supplied, market entrants are looking for ways to provide new services. About two weeks ago, an SUV bearing the logo of the Citizen app and the text "Making Your World a Safe Place" was spotted in Los Angeles. Leaked emails obtained by Vice, as well as interviews with former Citizen employees, revealed that Citizen was testing a pilot program to provide private security services via their app. However, they have since stated they do not have plans to launch this service. Currently, the Citizen app provides users safety alerts based on 911 calls and user-reported incidents in their area and is available in twenty cities. It also offers a $20 per month service called Protect that provides the user's real-time location to a Citizen employee, allows the user to activate a video stream sent to that employee by using a code word, and enables Citizen to alert emergency services to the user's precise location. Looking to expand their offerings, Citizen explored partnering with private security companies to provide additional services to users. One of these companies is Securitas; another is Los Angeles Professional Security (LAPS), which describes itself as a "Subscription Law Enforcement Service." According to their website, LAPS provides personal rapid response, patrol, alarm response, video monitoring, vacation watch, and Apple Watch fall detection for "elderly or differently abled loved ones living alone." They also offer "mask enforcement" for the private businesses LA County has required to be unpaid enforcers of mask mandates. LAPS has two subscription tiers: for $200 per month, one receives patrol as well as alarm and smart signal monitoring. It's $999 per month for "evacuation & on-site personal security." Why a Private Security App Is UsefulCitizen's planned app was described as Uber for private security. The ability to obtain security services on demand can put such services in the reach of those who would otherwise be left unprotected. According to the leaked emails from Citizen, the Los Angeles Police Department called their planned service a real game changer. Similar to how ridesharing and car-sharing services have enabled some to avoid the costs of car ownership, as well as allow others to just get a ride when needed, an on-demand security app may enable individuals to obtain supplemental protection when a full subscription service may be beyond their needs or budget. A good example of this (and one that Citizen tested in their pilot program) is having a security escort provided quickly upon request. While this is a service that many security providers, such as those on college campuses, routinely perform, it is likely to be a low priority for big city police departments, if they provide it at all. Although Citizen does not currently plan to pursue offering security services through its app, this kind of service is not novel. The London-based company My Local Bobby has for several years provided a service that allows subscribers to have a direct line to a "Bobby" assigned to them and access his real-time location through their app, with patrol and escort services bundled in. Whether future services will also be subscription based or à la carte (as most ridesharing services are) remains to be seen. What this technology enables is the reduction of the transaction costs associated with the provision of security. I believe economists err when they categorize policing as a public good, since it is clearly rivalrous beyond a certain congestion point and is in many ways excludable. For example, I can hire Barney Fife to protect my house and instruct him to ignore any burglars breaking in next door (and advertise to potential criminals that Barney will leave them alone), thereby preventing free riding by neighbors. The real issue is economizing on the use of Barney's labor: everyone in the neighborhood could hire their own Barney, but it would probably be more economical to enter some kind of sharing agreement. Barney could patrol around my block (or a larger area) without sacrificing much in terms of the effectiveness of his patrol for me individually. Figuring out innovative ways to share Barney's services enables more effective economizing, just as the sharing economy facilitates more use of goods that would otherwise sit idle. An app that allows people to hire security in a spot market when they need it has the potential to reduce the costs of security on certain margins in the same way ridesharing has decreased the costs of transportation on certain margins. For undisclosed reasons, Citizen abandoned their plans. Their service may have turned out to be unprofitable had they pursued it. This is perhaps one of the best arguments in favor of markets in security: service providers must actually provide what consumers are willing to pay for, and they are allowed to fail if they don't. Market discipline is far more effective in holding police accountable than any proposed accountability measures for government monopoly police. The less people must rely on government police for their safety, the better off they will be.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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