Sovietizing the Economy: The Final Phase

“Insanity,” according to a famous definition, is a condition revealed by the habit of doing exactly the same thing repeatedly in earnest anticipation of a different result. A closely related form of derangement is megalomania, a prominent symptom of which is an individual’s self-exalting belief that he is the divine exception that can make that different result occur.

When it’s displayed in private pursuits, megalomania is a harmless if pitiable condition. When coupled with political power, it becomes the propellant of large-scale social experiments that ruin societies and kill people by the tens of millions.

Barack Obama suffers from an acute case.

There are many things to like about Mr. Obama. As far as the public record attests, in personal terms he is genial, polite, and gracious. These traits contrast quite sharply with the casual bullying favored by the withered little cretin who presently occupies the White House.

Obama appears to be a devoted husband, and an exceptional father to his adorable daughters – traits which provide a very welcome contrast to the previous Democratic occupant of the Oval Office.

He is a remarkably disciplined individual and a decent writer. He has a good jump shot.

And if he manages to acquire a tithe of the power he seeks, Mr. Obama – or, more properly, the government over which he will preside – will probably end up killing many of us, either indirectly through the privations that result from a centrally planned economy, or through the direct application of the lethal force on which such economies depend.

Obama is a reasonably bright fellow. Somebody he respects – assuming there is any great enough to command his attention and rebuke his errors – needs to ask him this question, and compel him to answer:

If the key to prosperity is a centrally planned economy fueled by fiat currency, why isn’t Zimbabwe the wealthiest nation in history?

"Communism = Soviets + Electification," decrees the caption of this propaganda poster promoting one of Moscow's many "economic stimulus" initiatives. (Poster photos via A Soviet Poster A Day.)

The Electoral College has yet to elect Mr. Obama to anything, yet he and his Gosplan are putting the finishing touches on a grandiose plan to collectivize the entire American economy – that is, what remains of it – as an “economic stimulus.” Toward that end, Obama and his comrades have made it clear that they aren’t concerned about the number of zeros they add to the national debt.

There is a significant difference between “stimulus” as practiced by Bush the Lesser and the variety envisioned by Barack the Blessed (Peace Be Upon Him).

Bush and Greespan dispatched “tax rebate” checks to American consumers and flooded the country with “liquidity,” bidding all and sundry to go spend as their appetites dictated.

Obama and Bernanke, however, prefer to dictate the spending priorities on behalf of the population. Or as the Chicago Tribune summarized: “In recent years, federal stimulus packages sometimes amounted to giving Americans checks with a goal of stoking consumer spending. Obama’s transition team wants to mold a package that tracks the policy ideas he laid out during his presidential campaign and put people to work immediately.”

In just the past three months, the Bush Regime – with the conspicuous support of Mr. Bush’s successor – has appropriated the equivalent of half our Gross Domestic Product to bail out Wall Street. Obama apparently seeks to pick up the spare, as it were, by putting the rest of the economy under the control of the political class – for our own good, of course.

The plan is to put people to work on projects ordained by Obama and his omnicompetent vanguard of visionaries. The immediate priority would be “Green jobs, health-care technology and infrastructure,” one aide informed the Tribune. The paper ominously notes that “Obama aides have been privately consulting a range of interest groups about economic recovery.”

The New York Times uncharacteristically told something close to the truth when it observed that the Obama plan “would be in part a government-directed industrial policy, with lawmakers and administration officials picking winners and losers among private projects and raining large amounts of taxpayer money on them.”

Of course, a “private” project that receives taxpayer funds is now a government program.

During the reign of Bush the Lesser, this approach was called “privatization,” an artfully dishonest term that effectively inverts the truth. Who knows what tortured neologism will be coined to describe that process under Obama. But the substance of the matter is this: Bush presided over the most radical expansion of government control over the American economy in history, and Obama promises to regiment whatever embattled remnants of the private economy Bush may have overlooked.

Without the benefit of an inaugural ceremony, Obama is already dictating the terms of survival for those troubled industries who, in their panic over the unfolding depression, seek federal assistance. Speaking on Meet the Press today (Sunday, December 7), Obama wasn’t at all shy about specifying what he expects from the auto industry – such as the development of environmentally correct cars to radical reductions in executive pay – in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized loans.

While granting that the plight of top-echelon auto executives wouldn’t wrench so much as a tiny sob even from the chronically lachrymose, it’s worth remembering that Obama and his handlers won’t stop with that unsympathetic cohort. Just as they will use the leverage of government largesse to bring the auto industry into conformance with the will of the Gosplan, they’ll use similar means – and, most likely, even more draconian measures – to compel general submission to their Regime’s designs.

The man with the (Five-Year) Plan: Lenin, the most influential political strategist of the modern age, is seen in silhouette pointing (leftward, of course) toward a bright, new future.

To understand the scope of Obama’s dirigiste designs, it’s useful to recall his campaign gaffe (a “gaffe,” of course, is an instance in which a politician is caught candidly disclosing his intentions) in which he informed an audience in Roseburg, Oregon that “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”

Obama seeks not merely to control the means of production, but also to regiment individual consumption in order to bring the population into compliance with his vision of a better society. He won’t be content merely to restructure the auto industry, or to preside over vast, corruption-fattened liturgies of infrastructure renovation; he’s after nothing less than a complete reconstruction of our individual lives. That’s the hideous truth lurking behind his anodyne promise to be the “president of all Americans,” whether we care to have someone preside over us or not.

George W. Bush was a conspicuous failure as a dilettante businessman. Barack Obama – so far as we can tell from his uniquely opaque biography – has never operated a business, met a payroll, or set his hands to honest work in the productive sector. His brow has never been beaded with the sweat of honest private labor, nor has it been creased by the stress familiar to businessmen seeking to meet the needs of customers while navigating the hazards of government regulation and taxation.

Yet he assures us that he possesses some numinous quality – “the vision of change … comes from me,” to quote one of his more recent Olympian pronouncements -- that equips him to direct a $16 trillion economy, correct the multifarious errors of made by lesser beings in their private transactions, and reorient that economy in order to address the future that he and his enlightened associates infallibly foresee it.

Question: What is an honest description of inherently worthless fiat currency? Answer: Play-D'oh! The reverse of this (unofficial) counterfeit euro coin found in Spain bears the likeness of Homer Simpson, which somehow makes a screwy kind of sense.

Given the wonder-working powers Obama implicitly claims for himself, the most intriguing question is not whether he was born in Hawaii or in Kenya, but rather if he was immaculately conceived.

Obama must be nothing less than a necromancer if he is serious about spending trillions of dollars on Keynesian public works projects: With the dollar’s demise imminent, Obama’s plans will require the ability to transmute a worthless currency into real money with actual value. Either than, or he will simply task Ben Bernanke to run the printing presses at such a speed that their friction-heated surfaces could be used to fry bacon.

"Come and join us in collectivist misery!"

Which brings us back to the Zimbabwe scenario.

For most students of hyperinflation, Weimar Germany – with its shoppers toting huge stacks of worthless marks in bags or wheelbarrows, and the government issuing single-side mark notes because the presses couldn’t keep place with currency depreciation -- exemplified the worst case scenario.

But Zimbabwe – land of the $200,000,000 dollar note and the $2 million loaf of bread – has overtaken Weimar as the most potent negative example.

People in that nation – once the chief agricultural producer for the entire continent – are dealing with the full menu of misery offered by a centrally planned fiat money state. The basics of daily life are constantly priced beyond their income; food shortages are commonplace, as are shortages of cash when the Government imposes arbitrary limits on daily withdrawals. Some of those residing in the country that was once the breadbasket of the Dark Continent have been reduced to devouring dirty, canine offal, or bovine excrement, and Zimbabwean children by the thousands are being felled by cholera.

Hyperinflation is the fastest and most efficient way to strip-mine a society of its civility. The barbarization of Zimbabwe is merely the latest example, but it won’t be the last. The architects of our economic distress have deliberately created the conditions for global hyperinflation in the knowledge that doing so will result in hardship and death on an unimaginable scale.

“The world is not going back to normal after the magnitude of what [central bankers and the political class] have done,” wrote Tom Fitzpatrick, chief technical strategist for Citigroup, in an “internal client note” privately circulated by the bank. “When the dust settles this will either work, and the money they have pushed into the system will feed through into an inflation shock. Or it will not work because too much damage has already been done, and we will see continued financial deterioration, causing further economic deterioration.”

One face of hyperinflation: Zimbabwean children find refuge from the famine that plagues their once-productive country.

Commenting on Fitzpatrick’s analysis, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Telegraph observes that the possible outcomes he predicts include a strong possibility of “a downward spiral into depression, civil disorder, and possibly wars.” As Fitzpatrick pointed out, “There is a risk of domestic unrest, starting with strikes because people are feeling disenfranchised. What happens if there is a meltdown in a country like Pakistan, which is a nuclear power[?] People react when they have their backs to the wall.”

Bear in mind here that if the strategy Fitzpatrick describes is successful, the result will be an “inflationary shock” – which would mean the utter pauperization of everyone whose earnings, savings, and investments (such as they are) are in dollars. The only weakness in Fitzpatrick’s assessment is the false dichotomy found therein between the prospect of a continued, deepening depression on the one hand, and hyperinflation on the other. Thanks to the ministrations of the Power Elite, we’re going to have both.

By waging two eminently avoidable and utterly disastrous wars abroad, and engaging in unprecedented domestic profligacy, George W. Bush and his cronies burned our economy to the ground. Obama and his comrades are now ready to sow salt and leave it entirely barren for a generation or more.

On sale now

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Lincoln Gambit

The Idol and the Avatar: Barack Obama, the second socialist politician from Illinois elected President of the USA, borrows some mojo from the first.



"The president addressed Congress the other day. I don't know which was scarier -- the speech, or Congress cheering him on. He invoked Lincoln. Whenever a president is going to get us in serious trouble, they always use Lincoln." --

Victor Milson, space adviser to the U.S. president, reporting ominous news from home to his friend Dr. Heywood Floyd (who is in the vicinity of Jupiter); from the film 2010: The Year We Make Contact.



While it cares little for customary piety, our ruling Nomenklatura displays the intolerant fervor of Paradise-bound Jihadis in defending the sanctity of the Almighty State and its avatars. In that pantheon there is none holier than the martyred founder of the Second (or People's) American Republic -- Abraham the Almighty, whose sacred likeness sits in stoic majesty in the Imperial Capital's most celebrated pagan cathedral.


















Despite the fact that the candidate had a background barren of worthwhile accomplishments and a political vita that could be inscribed on the note inside a fortune cookie, Barack Obama's followers -- most likely in the thrall of a campaign-generated meme -- routinely compared him to Jesus.


Lincoln, by way of contrast, wasn't deified in this fashion until after his assassination. Now that he's scant weeks away from being garlanded with Caesar's crown and swaddled in the Imperial purple, the media's image-makers have joined in the chorus of deification, widely and shamelessly anointing him son and heir to Abraham the Divine.


In fact, Obama is the beneficiary of what could be called an affirmative action apotheosis: He's being sanctified before he's had an opportunity to do anything. Already, even before the Electoral College has assembled to cast its votes, Obama is being treated as the sitting president: He is conducting business with Congress and state governors, and reporters at press conferences convened by the "Office of the President-Elect" are required to stand as one in solemn, chastened reverence as His Holiness strides to the microphone, presumably hovering an appropriate distance above the ground so as not to be soiled by contact with the mundane.




(Don't bother to watch the whole thing; just take note of the first few seconds in which Obama bids the chastened throng to be seated.)


The first Lincoln, we should recall, was not greeted as a savior; instead, his election-by-plurality as a regional candidate was the result of a freak political bank-shot, and its impact immediately flung seven states from the Union.


Obama's ascent, by way of contrast, has had exactly the opposite effect. Rather than contemplating secession, state governments are looking forward with eagerness to Obama's reign, and governors are panting after the "stimulus" subsidies the Holy One has promised for public works projects.


Unlike banks accused of "hoarding" cash, and consumers who have quite wisely decided to pare down household spending, the state-level specimens of the political class aren't inclined toward thrift.


In pleading for Washington to shower them with plundered wealth, thereby preventing the need to thin the ranks of publicly supported parasites, the nation's governors have explicitly promised the incoming Obama Regime: You send it, we'll spend it.


So Obama won't confront a crisis of "disunion" from the moment he places his hand on whatever holy book he chooses next January 20 and perjures himself by promising to protect a Constitution for which he has no documentable respect. Like nearly all of those who held the office since Lincoln, Obama (at least on the basis of what record he's compiled, and his public statements) is a devotee of what Marxist historian George P. Fletcher calls "The Secret Constitution" -- an unwritten document that transposes the existing Constitution, which created a decentralized republic into a unitary state with an all-powerful central government.



It's not well remembered now, but Lincoln was perfectly willing to permit slavery to exist in perpetuity, and to allow restive states to be independent in everything but name, as long as Washington, D.C. was able to continue collecting the taxes necessary to keep its bondholders happy.


In his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln put forward the remarkable claim that the Union -- which he described, in near-theological terms, as an eternal and indivisible entity -- "is much older than the Constitution" and the states that formed it. For this reason it was impermissible to permit any of its constituent states to depart, since this would make the Union "less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity."



For the purposes of maintaining the holy unity of the divine Union, Lincoln was willing to abide practically any compromise. Not only could he support the permanent institutionalization of chattel slavery, Lincoln was prepared to countenance outright insurrection -- as long as it fell short of formal political separation and, most importantly, the refusal of citizens to pay, and state officials to collect, federal taxes.


"The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the [federal] Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere," Lincoln promised. "Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality shall be so great and universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers [the federal talent pool being devoid of any other variety -- WNG] among the people for that object."



Of course, the same politician who offered that remarkable promise later reprovisioned Ft. Sumter, a tax-collection post situated in the territorial waters of a state that had withdrawn from the Union, as a deliberate provocation intended to precipitate the war.



ProfessorThomas DiLorenzo of Loyola College, author of a the definitive short biography The Real Lincoln (as well as the indispensable new book Hamilton's Curse) points out that at the time of the attack on Ft. Sumter several major northern newspapers described the event as the consummation of Lincoln's provocative designs. "Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate a civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor," commented the April 13, 1861 Providence Daily Post. That observation came a day after the Jersey City American Statesman described the resupply vessel as "a mere decoy to draw the first fire from the people of the South."


After the war began, Lincoln punished his media critics in predictable fashion by dispatching the military to close down thousands of northern newspapers, at least until their editorial boards were brought to heel. Call this a pre-Marconi version of the "Fairness Doctrine." "After Fort Sumter," observes DiLorenzo, "Lincoln wrote to his naval commander Gustavus Fox thanking him for his assistance in drawing the first shot."



Charles Adams, who has written several authoritative studies of that variety of institutionalized theft called taxation, points out that Lincoln's reaction to secession wasn't to exclaim "What will happen to those unfortunate human beings held in bondage?" but rather, "What will become of my tariff?" Through the tariff, the agricultural South was forced to subsidize the industrial North's embryonic corporatist system.


Just a few generations prior to Ft. Sumter, firebrands among the colonial Patriot movement were not assuaged by London's promise to govern with a lighter hand, and even to suspend the collection of certain taxes for a brief period. London still claimed the legitimate authority to extract taxes, and to use duress as necessary to accomplish that objective. Accordingly, the colonial Patriots weren't willing to settle for anything less than political independence. The drive for Southern independence was informed by the same calculations, and propelled by the same ideals, however imperfectly realized.


Lincoln, who had been willing to make slavery permanent, or to re-settle black Americans in Africa, cynically co-optated the emanicpation issue as a war tactic. This didn't change the core objective of his war, however, which was to create a monolithic federal state operating on corporatist principles -- that is, socialism for the wealthy and politically connected, such as the railroad trust that conveyed Lincoln to the White House.















In their fascinating recent book Red Republicans and Lincoln's Marxists: Marxism in the Civil War, Walter D. Kennedy and Al Benson, Jr. examine the role of the "48ers" -- veterans of the 18 interconnected revolutions that convulsed Europe in 1848-1849 -- in creating the Republican Party, bringing Lincoln to power, and conducting the war against the South.


Lincoln himself hailed the proto-Marxist revolution of 1848 in terms that seem, for him, profoundly odd. "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better," insisted Lincoln in a January 12, 1848 speech. "Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit."


Those seeking to "revolutionize" Europe weren't secessionists content to withdraw from existing political entities and leave others in peace. Their objective, as described by Kennedy and Benson, was to overthrow the existing political order under which they lived, and then consolidate power over larger territories. The objective was to reconstruct society, not merely to withdraw from oppressive, unjust political arrangements.


Germany provided both the best example of this centralizing revolutionary effort and a large supply of failed revolutionaries who migrated to the United States and later joined the struggle to suppress Southern independence. German revolutionaries, in describing their vision, declared that all of Germany -- which at the time was a fractious collection of principalities -- henceforth would be "a united indivisible republic."


Certainly, the revolutionary program appealed to idealistic impulses by promising to free people from arbitrary rule and feudalist institutions. "People were to be freed from local decentralized control," write Kennedy and Benson, only to be "placed instead under centralized authoritarian control" in the name of "Democracy."

(Click on map to enlarge.)

When the revolt of 1848-49 was crushed, the "48er" diaspora brought many of the most ambitious and radical of the revolutionaries to the United States, where they were taken into the bosom of America's home-grown collectivist movement.


Many of them were instrumental in creating the Republican Party and mobilizing fellow expatriates to vote for Fremont and Lincoln. Some of them -- such as Joseph Wedemeyer, Charles A. Dana, Franz Sigel, August Willich, and Carl Schurz, to name just a few -- rose to commanding heights in the Union Army during the war. Dana, a personal friend of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, was assistant secretary of war under Lincoln.


Gen. Wedemeyer was a friend and close associate of Marx in the London Communist League before migrating to the United States, where he distinguished himself as a publisher of Communist tracts (including the first American edition of the Communist Manifesto) and helped organize the Republican Party, and commanded a Union army.


Gen. Willich, whom Marx incongruously described as "A Communist with a heart," served on the Central Committee of the Communist League. His fellow 48ers referred to the Union General as "The reddest of the Red." A passionate admirer of the deranged terrorist John Brown, Willich gave a speech in 1859 urging his audience to "whet their sabers with the blood" of southern slaveholders.

Red Bluebellies: Marx's BFF Joseph Wedemeyer (left); German revolutionary-turned-imprisoner of American Indians Carl Schurz (below, right).


Franz Sigel's commanded experience at the time he was given a Union army consisted of leading socialist troops in a failed uprising in Baden, Germany. Carl Schurz, another veteran of the German socialist uprising, did little to distinguish himself as a Union general, but had lasting influence as a Senator from Missouri and Secretary of the Interior.


It was Schurz who created the American Gulag Archipelago called the Indian Reservation system (and it was his wife who pioneered the kindergarten system, better described as the ante-chamber to the Regime's collectivist mind-laundry).


Revolutionary collectivists of this variety clustered around Lincoln and his party because they understood the need to forge a unitary state out of the decentralized American republic -- and they were very aware of the fact that this could only be accomplished through total war. This view was well expressed in a hopeful note Engels wrote to Weydemeyer in which the war against the South was described as "the preliminaries of the proletarian revolution, the measures that prepare the battleground and clear the way for us."


Lincoln's war didn't preserve or restore the Union; it destroyed it and supplanted it with a new polity based on radically different premises. Just as Marxists of his era gravitated naturally toward Lincoln and vibrated like tuning forks when he spoke the language of raw power and ruthless centralization, Marxist academicians of our era understand the true nature of what Lincoln accomplished.


Among that number can be found Columbia School of Law professor George P. Fletcher, whose above-mentioned book The Secret Constitution acknowledges what Lincoln's critics have long maintained, in the teeth of criticism and contumely: The so-called Civil War was an effort to bring about "the consolidation of the United States in the mid-nineteenth-century European sense of the term" -- or, if you will, the post-1848 sense of the expression.


"One year into the war," continues Fletcher, "after a string of Union defeats, Lincoln learned that the old Union could not possibly survive. `A new one had to be embraced.' And the new Union would have to be based on a new constitutional order."


That new order, Fletcher elaborated, would be based on the premise that "the federal government, victorious in warfare, must continue its aggressive intervention in the lives of its citizens." Familiar institutions would remain, but their roles would be redefined and their powers completely revised within "a new framework of government, a structure based on values fundamentally different from those that went before."



For decades, the Soviet Regime and its agents celebrated Lincoln as a precursor to Lenin, and for very good reason: Both Lincoln and Lenin displayed nearly limitless tactical flexibility in pursuit of the power they exercised ruthlessly in the effort to create a vast, centralized Union (or Soyuz).


Shortly before his death, General Lee -- in a characteristically graceful reply to a kind note he'd received from Lord Acton -- explained that "the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people [were] the safeguard to the continuance of a free government." By suppressing the option of secession, which is the ultimate peaceful check on the ambitions of a central government, the North had destroyed that safeguard.


In words that have the undeniable heft of fulfilled prophecy, Lee predicted that "the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it."


Cast a look about you, ladies and gentlemen, and you'll behold the "ruin" of which Lee wrote. Those ruling us have pledged something in excess of $8 trillion -- more than half of this year's gross domestic product -- to provide a financial cushion for the politically connected criminals who preside over our financial system. In that fact we can see the real nature of the "Union" created by Lincoln: It is a forced marriage between the ignorant or deceived host and eager, esurient parasites.


The logic of Lincoln's triumph, wrote biographer Charles C.L. Minor, is that "the right to govern is paramount over the right to live, that man is made for government, rather than government for man, and that for men to claim the right of self-government is to deserve and incur the death penalty." This is why the Power Elite exalts Lincoln's name above all others and celebrates him as the Holy State made Flesh.


For those who reside within the bunkers and gated communities of the Power Elite, the rest of us are useful only as something to be consumed: We are producers whose earnings can be taxed, whose properties can be seized, whose children can be conscripted.

The deified Lincoln.


Peeling away the sentiment and mythology that encrust the relevant history, the comparison between Obama and Lincoln is an apt one, and not just because they're both tall, skinny men from Illinois (albeit by way of Kentucky in Lincoln's case, and Kenya -- most likely -- in Obama's).


Obama, a well-compensated legal agitator and foundation-connected "community organizer," straddles the narrow divide between collectivists of the corporate variety and those of the cultural Marxist persuasion.


Obama's vote for the plutocrat bailout demonstrated his fealty to the Wall Street interests that funded his campaign. His cabinet selections indicate a continued commitment to bipartisan bellicosity in foreign affairs, and to continued subsidy of corporate kleptocrats until the government's bankruptcy is consummated, the dollar collapses, and our country goes the way of Zimbabwe.


Here's a very sobering thought: The indecent eagerness of the opinion-molding elite to sanctify Obama as the New Lincoln may indicate that those who know the tempo of our unfolding collapse are aware that precious little time is left before the final catastrophe.


And I'm just cynical enough to wonder -- and either bold or stupid enough to do so aloud, for public consumption -- if the Power Elite might decide that Obama should join Lincoln in "martydom." Some people are already dropping some pretty potent hints of that variety.


That's why I earnestly pray that Barack Obama will enjoy a long, healthy life following a single, forgettable term in the White House.



It's getting scary, isn't it? Buy the book for someone who can handle the truth.











Dum spiro, pugno!

Unwarranted Violence

Henry Blake: Pierce….

Hawkeye Pierce: What is it? What?

Blake: I wouldn't try to leave camp.

Hawkeye: Wha -- I'm under arrest?

Blake: I didn't say that. You're restricted.

Hawkeye: That means I’m under arrest.

Blake: Not at all, you're only restricted up to the point where, er – where, er -- you're under arrest.

Hawkeye: Henry, what's happened to you? Did you sneak off behind our backs and enlist? You're regular Army now!

Blake: Sit down Pierce, that's an order!

Hawkeye: You're forcing me to stand.

Blake: Please.

Hawkeye: That's an order I can take.

A key exchange between Lt. Col. Henry Blake and B.F. “Hawkeye” Pierce, from the M*A*S*H episode “For the Good of the Outfit.”

Government, as we must never forget, is force. And as Simone Weil so memorably observed, force is that mysterious influence “that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.”

Every government function, no matter how mundane or apparently harmless, carries with it the implied (and often overt) use of lethal force against those who do not submit. Stefan Molyneux perceptively describes this as the principle of the “Gun in the room”: Whenever anybody refers to the supposed virtue of a given government undertaking, Molyneux sagely observes, the central question is not whether the end is desirable, but rather “whether I am allowed to disagree with you without getting shot.”

Not every government functionary carries a gun and a license to kill other human beings. But every government functionary collaborates closely with those who are thus equipped to compel the rest of us to submit. The people in question are readily identifiable by the blue, brown, or black clothing they wear, which is usually accessorized with a conspicuous piece of chintzy costume jewelry called a “badge.”

At some point or another, it becomes obvious to everyone save those hopelessly in the thrall of official propaganda that the central purpose of law enforcement bodies is not to protect private property*, but rather to extract revenue for the State.

Granted, police agencies are advertised as a way of defending private property from the depredations of private criminals, and many individual police officers have carried out that function with courage and compassion. But that is not the central institutional purpose of such entities; it is an ancillary function that provides some limited benefits to society. Besides, as Albert Jay Nock observed, government isn’t interested in punishing or preventing crime, but rather in establishing and preserving a criminal monopoly.

The order of priorities that government law enforcement today can be appreciated in this contrast:

Under existing judicial precedents, a police officer cannot be held criminally or civilly liable for failing to come to the aid of an individual citizen whose person and property are under criminal attack. However, police agencies across the country routinely discipline police officers who fail to fill their quota of traffic citations.

This may at first glance seem to be a spurious comparison. But consider it in light of the principle of opportunity cost as applied to the time budget of the typical patrol officer: Should he organize his time in such a way that he can be available to help a victim of violent crime, or in the best way to take advantage of “hot spots” for traffic violators, thereby making his quota and enhancing his prospects for lucrative overtime?

A given officer can be in only one place at a given time, after all, and each hour spent trolling for inattentive drivers represents an hour taken away from the task of “serving and protecting” the local population.

Here in Payette, Idaho (population circa 7,000), the local police force has not one or two but no fewer than three undercover, unmarked cars (recognizable from some angles by the antenna cluster at the back) that apparently circulate through the town in search of traffic violations. One of them can be seen every morning making circuits through a local “hot spot”: It’s a section of a business route branching off I-95 where the speed limit suddenly dips from 35 MPH to 25 MPH for several blocks.

This kind of ticketing-by-quota – the existence of which is indisputable, the anguished denials from police officials to the contrary notwithstanding -- isn’t “law enforcement”; it’s revenue enhancement. And it’s increasingly common as the economic implosion accelerates and governments at the municipal and county levels are starved for tax revenue.

“When I first started in this job 30 years ago, police work was never about revenue enhancement,” observes Michael Reaves, a police chief in Utica, Michigan. “But if you’re a chief now, you have to look at whether your department produces revenues. That’s just the reality nowadays.”

The Detroit News article containing Reaves’ lament was entitled “Traffic fines help fill city coffers: Officials increasingly target drivers to bolster budgets.” The piece, the first in a two-part expose, reported that “Court and police records from 2002-2007 [show that] many Metro Detroit police departments have drastically increased the number of moving violations issued in what some people say is an effort to offset budget shortfalls caused by the sluggish economy.”

One former Detroit-area police officer summarizes: “A portion of the tickets our officers write helps pay their salaries, but the rest is profit for the city. `Profit’ may not be the right word to use in government, but that’s pretty much what it is.”

No, “profit” – an term describing material gain honorably earned through mutually beneficial commerce – is not the correct word. “Plunder” is.

Detroit and its environs are in the throes of a severe and deepening depression, and suffering a predictable increase in property crimes and violent assaults. And yet, as the perspicuous Karen DeCoster (herself a Detroit native) points out, “the cops do nothing to prevent the scores of home robberies, car thefts, and assorted property crimes because they are too busy sitting in 'hot spots' that are good for catching the more dangerous types, like speeders and drivers who don't come to a complete stop at a stop sign in an empty intersection.”

That’s opportunity cost at work. And this underscores, once again, the true priorities that define police “work”: Revenue collection for the government uber alles, protection for the governed … sometimes.

The embodiment of the Detroit-area police plunderbund is Officer David Kanapsky, the champion pen-slinger for the Warren Police Department. During 2007, the Warren PD issued 54,100 traffic tickets – an increase of 20 percent over the previous year’s total of 44,809.

Kanapsky, a physically unimpressive wad of aging cholesterol who couldn’t chase down a robber or wrestle an assailant to the ground without risking an immediate coronary infarct, wrote ten percent of Warren’s citations during 2007.

Most of them were issued at Kanapsky’s favorite fishing hole, an intersection with a stop sign at which some drivers would make a “rolling stop.”

But then again, it doesn’t really matter whether drivers come to a full stop, since Kanapsky – by virtue of the costume he wears to what he calls “work” -- enjoys the benefit of the doubt when tickets are contested in court.

And since Kanapsky is paid (note carefully: not “earns,” but “is paid”) overtime simply for appearing in court, he actually has a perverse incentive for issuing citations he knows will be challenged. Last year he was given $21,562 in overtime simply for dragging his tax-engorged corpus into court to wheeze out his allegations before a judge.

Each of those contested tickets was a case of Kanapsky’s word against that of his victim – the word of a self-interested tax-feeder against that of a productive citizen. Naturally, the judge invariably takes the side of his comrade in the tax-feeding class. So Kanapsky is let free to grow another subsidized chin and prey on other innocent people; meanwhile, those who dared object to Kanapsky’s predations are out the price of a ticket and the valuable time spent in the useless, infuriating, self-abasing attempt to contest it in court.

Any citizen is free to pursue that disagreement further, at his own time and expense, in the same system that depends on the support of armed predators like Kanapsky. However, if that citizen simply shrugs his shoulders and says, in effect, “You’ve proven nothing, and I have no intention of surrendering my legitimately earned money on the word of a self-interested thug,” he’ll eventually learn that he can’t persist in his disagreement without getting shot.

It’s important to recognize that many police officers are nauseated by the use to which they are put by the governments that hired them.

"The people we count on to support us and help us when we're on the road are the ones who end up paying the bills, and they're ticked off about it,” observes Trenton, Michigan Police Sgt. Richard Lyons. "We might was well just go door-to-door and tell people, 'Slide us $100 now, since your 16-year-old is going to end up paying us anyway when he starts driving.' You can't blame people for getting upset. No politician wants to be the one to raise taxes, but if the community needs more money they should go ahead and raise taxes. At least that's more honorable than chasing down cars for doing five miles over the speed limit."

Of course, no politician wants to raise taxes overtly, and with property values and retail earnings sharply declining, property and sales taxes are being choked off. This is why police nation-wide are increasingly being deployed as armed revenue farmers – and why the already lengthy lines outside your local traffic court get longer every week.

Roadside police holdups aren’t the only creative means of illicit revenue extraction being employed by local governments; “code enforcement” citations are likewise proliferating, often in the name of maintaining property values amid the housing collapse. Given the dimensions of the housing bust, this is a bit like swimming against the tidal pull of Charybdis. But the intent here, once again, is not to aid homeowners, but rather to contrive new opportunities for revenue collection.

This brings us to the case of Ian Bernard (also known as “Ian Freeman”) of Keene, New Hampshire. Last summer, Freeman received a citation – delivered, as it turns out, by a retired police officer who is “working” part-time as an ordinance officer, while drawing a tax-provided pension – for allowing the occupants of a rental property he owns to store a couch in its front yard.

Mr. Freeman, recall, owns the rental property. No respectable person complained about the couch; the source of the complaint was another city official. Quite properly perceiving this to be a matter of property rights, Freeman refused to pay the citation. In early November Bernard wound up in District Court before a judge antagonistic to Mr. Bernard’s beliefs, which are well-known in Keene.

In the mistaken belief that he would make a point of some kind, the judge arranged for a little demonstration during Freeman’s hearing: Knowing that Freeman and other local freedom activists reject the stilted formality of court hearings, the judge summoned several Bailiffs to the courtroom and instructed them to be ready to arrest Freeman or any of his associates who failed to display the expected deference by standing when the judge sashayed into the room, and sitting promptly when instructed to.

Like Hawkeye Pierce, Freeman and his friends live by the axiom that someone who “orders” them to sit down is forcing them to stand, and vice-versa. This is an entirely commendable thing.

So it was that the judge ordered that Freeman be arrested for contempt for standing a barely perceptible fraction of a second longer than the judge thought proper. A special closed trial was then held, at which Freeman received a sentence of 93 days in jail – three days refusing to pay the original fine, and a total of 90 days for contempt.

Once again: This individual, who did nothing to harm anybody, will spend more than three months in jail for asserting control over his own legally acquired property, and refusing to offer slavish obedience to some fellow with a Liberace complex.

It could have been worse.

Oh, my, yes: In a time when armed tax harvesters consider it their right and duty to subject people to electroshock torture at the first sign of resistance, it can always get much worse.

Just two days ago (Wednesday, November 19), Houston resident Marvin Driver, the father of Green Bay Packers receiver Donald Driver, was reportedly beaten bloody and unconscious by a pair of Houston’s Finest who had arrested him because of outstanding traffic tickets.

Marvin Driver, 56, was “unresponsive” when taken to jail. Shuttled to a local hospital, he underwent treated for a cerebral hemorrhage resulting from blunt force trauma. Left speechless by the assault, Driver scribbled some details about the assault. He was arrested outside his mother’s home; his brother Winston, who witnessed the arrest, says that one of the officers threatened him, ordering him to get back in the house. As the police drove away, Winston called 911.

The next thing the family knew, Marvin was in the hospital. He claims to have been dragged behind a gas station and beaten by the police, who also tried to shove something down his throat. At one point, Marvin recalled, one of the assailants tauntingly told him he was “going to see Jesus.”

Mr. Driver’s injuries – which included abdominal bruises from being kneed to the stomach – were consistent with his story.

While it was clear that Driver came to serious harm while in police custody, the department’s initial reaction was that it couldn’t account for or comment about Driver’s condition until after a lengthy inquiry. However, the force quickly reassigned three officers -- Bacilio Guzman, Gilberto Cruz and M. Marin – believed to have been involved in the assault.

Officers Cruz and Guzman both became sworn police officers within the last 18 months. Mr. Driver has said that the beating he endured was less painful to him than the fact that he had known one of the assailants in the neighborhood before he grew up to be a police officer. They had been on friendly terms until one of them was given the assignment to collect revenue for the government, and the power to turn his erstwhile friends into corpses.

Gratuitous Green Bay Packers Video Extra

Since the essay above, which ended on an exceptionally grim note, made passing reference to Da Packers, I thought it might be appropriate to end the week with the following video clip.Be charitable; this was my first attempt at doing a video montage. (My ten-year-old son William Wallace had to walk me through the program.) Stay with it through the last frame and you'll see my daughter Sophia trying on her brother Isaiah's football gear. And be sure to catch the end credits, too.

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*The concept of property, of course, begins with one's physical being.

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Dum spiro, pugno!