To End War, Prepare For Peace

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:52:43 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - some things that have to change before we'll have peace in the world. Number one, of course, is taxation, the great enabler of state violence. [tle]

The first is to establish widespread recognition that, in addition to being immoral because it happens to be theft, taxation is the fuel of war. If you remember nothing else from this essay, try to remember that.

Taxation is the fuel of war.

No matter how any political administration promises to use the money that it extorts from us, sooner or later, either directly or indirectly, it will be diverted and used to "break things and kill people". What it will break is civilization itself, and a great many of the people that it kills won't just be foreigners, a majority of them completely innocent of any wrongdoing, but our own sons and daughters.

Likewise, the particular form of slavery that we politely call "conscription" should be considered by everyone to be a provocation and an act of war. Whenever we hear that, oh, say Canada, has begun registering its kids for a potential draft (and this should definitely include those programs intended to coerce individuals into any kind of domestic service), they should be harshly confronted and persuaded to desist.

Exactly as they should do when we draft our children.

At the same time, we must arm the people and disarm the state. We now know from the experience of the past thirty years that "an armed society is a polite society". Violent crime is much more effectively suppressed by those who would otherwise be its victims, than by hordes of government lackeys whose first thought is for their pensions. We also know--thanks to people like the Vietnamese and the Afghans--that a civil population in possession of small arms is more than a match for any huge government equipped with high-tech, high-capital weaponry.

Add comment Edit post Add post