rants and bilewhat?



An End to Coercion:
How to Realize It and Why.

I have often been told that there is no way to escape the reality of government coercion: governments have to do a dirty job, and they must make and enforce laws which aren't always fair or just, and these laws must be enforced and policed with police and guns. I've been told that this fact of life cannot be overcome. Although most people are willing to admit that some regulations and laws are out of control - from smoking bans to the war on drugs to laws against homosexuality, most people still feel that the government has no choice but to handle things such as collecting taxes and enforcing traffic laws under penalty of imprisonment.

Just because most individuals don't find a moral problem with state coercion, the consensus that it is therefore the correct way for a human being to live in society is not necessarily the right conclusion. This essay is in answer to this widely-held notion. I intend to prove that, in fact, a just, honest and self-reliant society is possible without the constant spectre of government force hanging over it.

Our Daily Agony

Everyday, we are confronted with several specific avenues in which the state exercises its use of coercion upon us in methods contradictory to our rights as human beings and which we often feel helpless to find a solution for. The list I was able to come up with includes all of the following: the draft or selective service, military and police protection, taxes on production (income) and consumption (sales), the jurisdiction of the courts, traffic law and infrastructure, broadcasting and the media, education, health care, pensions, the welfare state, and numerous other areas. I will attempt to address these as comprehensively as possible.

Personal Coercion: The Draft

The idea that the military draft could be in any way justifiable in a free society is laughable. If a society is free and just, there should be no shortage of men willing to fight for that freedom and justice when it is threatened. If the cause is unjust or the actions of the government are sketchy, it is only right that men are unwilling to take up arms in the name of that government. The primary reason the draft is often seen as justifiable is because most of the military actions of the state today are in no way tied to the protection of our country or our national interests, and thus most individuals are unwilling to fight those battles voluntarily.

If a standing army is required due to generally hostile geopolitical conditions, it would be adequately staffed if only the government were willing to pay its members the equivalent of their civilian pay in their respective field.

Financing this, as well as for the various research and development and weapons procurement necessary for a viable military machine, would be based upon tax on real property, accepted voluntarily by property owners. After all, the rational basic purpose of any free country's military is to protect the property of its citizens from seizure by a foreign entity. Those who own property would be the ones to finance that protection, based upon their respective holdings.

The enforcement of this tax does not have to be based upon coercion, as is tax collection today. The military would merely keep track of those who are not paying for their services, and publish their records, in a way blacklisting those who are in arrears. This policy would show businessmen whether they are doing business with honest, secure individuals or dodgy cheats. There is sure to be a small percentage of free riders, but like most insurance policies today, men who wish to be secure in their property would be more likely than not to purchase such insurance - if they value their property and their freedom.

Those who don't value these things would find themselves far less able to deal with their fellow men, since those men would quickly note their poor planning and evasive practices.

Police and Judicial Activity

Like the military, law enforcement and protection could be handled much differently and far less coercively. The same type of federalized jurisdiction as we have today could be maintained, in a far more just manner, if based upon a participatory, voluntary system.

Today, most legal protection is universal, and laws universally enforced. If a home is invaded, the owner calls the police and the police handle the case, regardless of how the property owner's tax record reads. If instead of general taxes the police and judiciary were funded by a subscription-based property tax and contract tax, the laws could be enforced much more justly.

In the case of criminal offenses, individual rights would be protected by contract law, since property owners are paying not only for the protection of their property, but also for the legal system which would try those accused of violating their rights, similar to uninsured motorist insurance on an auto policy. Because the criminal code is full of unjust and superfluous laws, this system would not be as inefficient as it appears. Such things as drug offenses, "moral" offenses, or other such violations would be eradicated when every property owner was faced with the full cost of the enforcement thereof.

In the case of contract law, all contracts which the partners wish to be enforceable under civil law would require the endorsement of the governing body. Thus, contracts not receiving the approval of a qualified legal representative would be unenforceable, and any violation thereof would not be under the jurisdiction of the state.

Those who leave their taxes unpaid would not face criminal proceedings, as is currently the case. Rather, tax evasion would be in all cases treated similarly to unpaid child support - those in arrears would be denied access to the legal system. Police would recognize a plaintiff as a non-paying citizen, fellow citizens and businessmen would not trust them, and their contracts would go unendorsed and unenforceable.

Please understand that the above suggestions, radical as they may seem, do not suggest an anarchic, libertarian distopia. I am in no way advocating the Slavic ideal of "competing governments" in any way, but rather I fully support a single central government with a federal system. I do agree that the state, whether strongly central or confederal, should have a monopoly upon the issuance and enforcement of the law, but that the means and methods of that enforcement should be voluntary, and under the consent of the governed.

In order to carry such an ideal to its fullest, however, our society would have to, by necessity, accept the tenants of personal responsibility for our actions and for our property, and behave accordingly. Thus the more we have, the more we must pay to insure what we have. We cannot rely upon our community to protect our bodies or our health from ourselves, and thus drug laws and behavioral laws would be impossible. Those who choose to smoke would have to pay huge insurance premiums to justify the higher outlays their carrier would have to provide, and those who fail to support their ends will find themselves without means. That is justice.

Taxes Taxes Taxes

As I've shown, the only justifiable function of the state's outlays should be for the purpose of protecting property and enforcing contracts, and thus those who hold property and make contractual agreements must be willing to insure themselves with government and judicial protection. This means that the financing of the government would have to be based wholly upon property and contract taxing.

Income tax (tax on production) is one of the most unjust and evil actions taken by government today. By taxing a man progressively based upon the degree of his productivity, we are discouraging productivity and inviting all men to understate their earnings in shame, when in fact they should be proud of every penny of their wealth. The same goes for probate taxes, which literally beat dead men after their corpse is in the grave. Probate taxes visciously strip men of the right to choose to whom they award their wealth after their death, and are an attack upon the tendency of honest men to save and invest their wealth, rather than squander it in order to keep it out of state coffers.

Sales tax (tax on consumption) is only a slightly lesser evil than taxes on production. It is often levied upon the most basic goods, including food and clothing, and does nothing to discourage consumption or encourage savings. Most sales taxes finance pork-barrel projects or failing local welfare, transit or subsidy systems, and history has proven that "temporary sales tax" initiatives are a contradiction in terms.

The majority of government projects for which taxes are levied today are in no way the realm in which the state should be involved. Welfare, education, health care, pensions and transportation should all be severed from their state shackles. More efficient and viable industries would develop in their wake, and the cost of citizenship would be reduced considerably.

If a community or state wishes to sponsor a pet project unrelated to property protection or contract enforcement, such activities would have to be funded by voluntary fundraising methods, such as lottery, donation, or subscription. Any method of extracting wealth from the general population by legal coercion is by nature unjust and wicked.

Traffic, Infrastructure, and the Media

Traffic law would be a far more justifiable and just if a single, simple change were made: the privatization of transportation. Roads, highways and freeways which were privately owned would have traffic laws and regulations enforceable based upon contractual agreement, where the toll ticket or subscription fee one pays for the use of a transit system is a contract between the owner and user. Like parking garages and event venues, this contract establishes the regulations which the owner wishes to levy on his customers, and what the penalties for violating them could be.

Thus the enforcement of speed limits and the like would be the responsibility of the owner of the facility, and the penalties for violating such rules would be covered by the more benevolent realm of civil and contract law, rather than criminal proceedings. This would, of course, not rule out the jurisdiction of the state in felony and capital cases, such as manslaughter or use of a vehicle as a weapon on private property, just as such law currently applies on both private and public property.

In terms of electricity and telecommunications infrastructure, the emergence of cheap and competitive wireless communications has shown how much better a consumer market would be created if the means of transmission is privately owned and regulated.

Along the same lines are the broadcast media, which have been under the unjust thumb of state regulation since their inception. When the ability to utilize radio waves for audio and video broadcast were discovered, the government immediately seized the ownership of the broadcast spectrum, declaring that it "had always been there" and thus was "everyone's property", and have since managed (or mismanaged) to regulate this industry into a spineless, meaningless nothingness.

In a just broadcasting system, the creators of the methods of sending and receiving broadcast signals should have been the owners of the resource. After all, it was their invention which created the productive existence of radio waves. Contrary to the state's previous actions in cases such as mining claims or homesteading, in the case of broadcasting, the state in no way protected the innovation of broadcast media or its innovators, but declared that anything discovered in broadcast production was by nature community property, subject to government whims and regulation. The only way to bring justice back to broadcasting is to dismantle all regulatory bodies, except those voluntarily maintained by the industry itself. Content, frequency propagation, methods and policies would be the responsibility of independent broadcasters or their voluntary cooperative organizations, and the entire media industry would function more justly and efficiently as a result.

Finally, there would remain such things as insurance and services which are currently handled by the state, but which would be far more just if handled independently and privately. In such cases as fire protection, unemployment insurance, health insurance, workers compensation, pensions, and all other assurance-related services, businessmen and property owners would be served far better with private insurance services. Insurance companies would be in charge of insuring against fire and contracting fire protection for their customers based upon the level of service for which customers paid. The issuance of insurance would be governed by the same rules which insurance providers currently use, including location-based premiums, where for example, those who live in an area with few insured households would be required to pay a higher premium, just as people in Los Angeles tend to pay higher homeowners permiums due to the crime rate and density of their city. This is just, because people are free to choose where they with to live.

Examples of such an insurer-based system currently exist throughout the business and financial world, and work very efficiently, especially in areas subject to the least amount of state restriction or regulation. Auto insurance carriers would be able to liscense drivers, and thus be responsible if their insure a poor or reckless driver. Just as liability insurers are responsible when they insure a bad doctor or lawyer, they should better scrutinize the professionals they insure, and be responsible for their liscensing and the determinations of their qualifications. Transferring the entire liscencing and regulatory infrastructure to the insurance industry would be the best check on insurance companies, and the best method to ensure honesty between traders and partners.

Education

A common issue of contention exists in the field of education. Most people see education as a right, to varying degrees. This is a common fallacy. It was started by the sons of the Founding Fathers, who believed that a free state could not be maintained unless the populace was educated in the functioning thereof. This is a flawed argument at best, and a total contradiction at least.

The right to become educated is irrefutable, and is tied to the right to life. Men, to survive, must learn the proper values by which to live, and our success as a species shows we are actually good at it. But the right to educate ourselves in no way implies the right to be educated by others. From birth, all children are eager to learn, and the best of parents provide a benevolent environment in which to foster this eagerness. The most important lessons of being human are learned in the first few years of life, and thus the role of parents in steering the education of their children is vital. Unfortunately, most people suddenly deny this role after infancy.

It is generally assumed that parents are no longer responsible for the education of their children after the age of kindergarten. The reason I make that statement is because most people assume they have a right to send their children off to state-funded schools after they reach a certain age, and that the state should be responsible for education for anywhere from six to twenty years of that person's life.

This is tragic, because it erodes the sense of responsibility parents should feel for their children and their development as human beings. If parents feel they have done their job by age four, do they really love their children? Why would one bear children when one does not plan to provide for that child's development and growth in every way to adulthood?

The best way to replace this sense of responsibility in parents is to privatize the entire education industry. For much of the industrial revolution, the average child received their education from a combination of parental nurturing and on-the-job training. Parents would bring up their children to understand the value of productive work, and once old enough, that child would begin their career, usually with a family firm, farm, or local factory. The social mobility of the child was based exclusively upon their ability and ambition, as well as the extent to which their parents nurtured and exploited that ability.

Today we could easily return to a more just system, if state education was abolished and in its place were scholarship- or sponsorship-based educational systems. Parents with the resources to send their children to private schools would be free to do so, and those who could not could choose several other avenues which would quickly become available. One would be similar to today's corporate trade schools or military academies, where students are educated under contract to employ themselves with their sponsoring institution upon graduation. Many employers would readily offer education memberships as a benefit, similar to today's pension and health plans. Such a benefit would be a powerful recruitment tool for employers who wanted responsible, trustworthy workers, and they would know immediately upon the worker's utilization of such a benefit that that worker had a strong sense of parental responsibility.

Scholarship and sponsorship-based schools would be the most efficient ever in existence, because they would provide immediately marketable knowledge and skills, and most students would have immediate placement upon graduation. Companies offering education benefits for parents could choose between subscribing to independent education providers or forming their own schools, similar to current health care organizations for employers. The result would be a far more rational, responsible and intelligent populace, and a return to the virtues of productivity and self-reliance.

Realize It...

Utopian? Hardly. What I've described is suggested by the simplicity and innate rational beauty of a document known as the Constitution of the United States. Although it had many loopholes and contradictions which have been appropriated for the collectivist and intrinsicist lobby over the more than 200 years of its existence, it remains one of the most cogent frames for a free state and free society. It advocates justice, life, productivity and self-reliance.

To make it happen, one has only to stop giving moral sanction to the infrastructure which denies us justice every day, in our taxes, criminal code and regulatory maze. I'm not advocating the old libertarian line of "don't pay your taxes" or the anarchist line of revolution. I advocate order and justice. That is not possible without the rule of law. But even the rule of law is unjust and will not instill a sense of liberty and order unless it is based upon the voluntary participation of those under its jurisdiction. A legal system is only as strong as the justice it provides, and a system based upon coercion from within is never just.

Would that mankind understood this and stopped assuming that "order" must always mean "force", and saw society as something in which they voluntarily participated, rather than grudgingly accepted as just another penalty for the sin of being alive. I do not believe my life is a sin, and I have always maintained that the ability to enjoy it rests in my own hands, and none other. Would that every man could wake up and be vested with the self-confidence and resolute character necessary to make a just world realizable for himself and for us all.