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08/10/2004 Archived Entry: "Liz Michael says it better than I"

LIZ MICHAEL SAYS IT BETTER THAN I. "The Revolution Has Started: Haman’s Gallows and the Mordecai Element." Thanks, RagnarDanneskjold, for ferreting out that link. Don't know why I didn't blog that column when it first appeared.

Only one thing I really disagree with. Should the day of Bill of Rights Enforcement ever come, I don't think we should go on a revenge spree -- even if we can rightly tell ourselves it's a justice spree.

I think we ought to make it very, very, very damn unappealing for the agents of tyranny to inflict their depredations NOW, while they're inflicting their will upon us -- or trying to. I think every IRS agent would do well to realize that awakened people can be as deadly as awakened rattlesnakes. Every cop who conducts a seatbelt checkpoint or an insurance checkpoint should be be given lots of incentive to stop doing it. That's the aim. To get them to STOP. To make tyranny suddenly much less appealing, much less fruitful to the workaday agents of megagov.

Critter's idea, for instance, is a start. Then what if victims of checkpoints managed to get digital photos, names, and badge numbers of all the participating officers? And perhaps their SSNs and home addresses? And what if those officers learned that every American unjustly stopped was one more individual American personally pissed off at the individuals committing the injustice?

This is not a threat. But we'd all be healthier and more free if it were a fact of life.

Forget making them pay some theoretical price after (and if) liberty is restored. It's too late then and all we do is halt our own forward progress by wallowing in the past. Should freedom lovers ever actually rise into the ascendency, our best course would be to forgive all but the most egregious engineers of tyranny and move on.

The best revenge is living well, right? And even better if at the same time we get to watch talentless, moneyless former govgoons flail around trying to figure out what value they have to offer free people in a free world.

Posted by Claire @ 06:43 PM CST
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