Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

The defining principle of a free society is that an individual's life and property are his own to do with as he pleases, as long as his exercise of his rights doesn't infringe on the rights of others. Infringing on a freeman's ownership of his life and/or property have long been the most basic and obvious forms of crime.

The current public perceptions of guilt and personal accountability have been largely inverted by a mass media and legal system that seek to punish victims and create false heroes of those who cause harm to others. However, on an individual level, it's likely that at least some of us are still capable of finding the experience of having their personal property taken by force to be an offensive violation of their rights. Similarly, some among us are likely still capable of viewing the arbitrary killing of their loved ones by a gang of heavily armed and armored men in black ski-masks, as an inherently wrongful act.

In more rational times, the taking of property by force would have been properly recognized as the crime of robbery. Arbitrarily taking the life of another would have been recognized as the crime of murder. Providing a collective defense against the crimes of robbery and murder was arguably one of the original reasons for the establishment of laws - and in turn law enforcement.

However, no artificial power center is safe from those who would turn its power to their own purposes. The law that was created to protect the innocent has all too often been subverted to empower the guilty.

Wealth, in its purest form, reflects the free market value of an individual's contributions to the economy. While the free market rewards productive individuals with relatively greater wealth, it also tends to limit through competition the amount of wealth that can be concentrated over the long term, and thereby the maximum abuse an individual can inflict on the system.

The essence of capitalism is the use of wealth earned from previous economic contributions to create additional wealth producing economic activity. Wealth in the form of capital provides the means of purchasing the labor and materials required to create a product with a higher market value than its cost of production. Paying wages is arguably the most efficient means of purchasing the power to direct and control the labor of individuals who wouldn't otherwise be motivated to contribute. Capitalism returns increased wealth - and potential to purchase power - to its successful practitioners.

There are some needs of society that are commonly claimed to require greater concentrations of wealth and power than a truly free market will provide to individuals. The primary justification for artificial constructs like corporations and governments is that they benefit society through the concentration of sufficient wealth to accomplish large scale tasks like national defense, and the efficient manufacture of complex products.

The danger of these artificial concentrations of wealth is that they can also be used to purchase power to interfere with the free market far in excess of the wealth and power available to those individuals against whom that power is likely to be abused.

Those who earn their wealth by way of free market valued contributions tend to be moderated in their abuse of power by their vested interest in the economic system that provided them with their wealth, and which continues to define its value. Unfortunately, this is rarely true of those who acquire wealth - or control over someone else's wealth - without personally earning that wealth through their own market valued contributions. Gaining control over a corporation or government provides a shortcut to control over - and ability to abuse - the artificial power that has been concentrated in that corporation or government.

A corporation's long term wealth and power are continuously dependent on the market's relatively voluntary continued support. A corporation must continue to supply goods and/or services that are desired by their customers at a price that doesn't encourage those customers to seek other sources.

In a perfect world, corporations would be inherently limited in their abuse of power by the discipline of the free market. Their activities would be self-limited to commercial enterprises where the potential for profit was greatest. A corporation that expended its wealth purchasing power outside of that directly required to produce its product would find itself at a disadvantage in the marketplace against competitors who hadn't burdened their products with unnecessary costs of production.

In a "perfectly imperfect" world, market abuses by those who earn their wealth by way of free market valued contributions that did occur would tend to be localized and self-moderated. An individual or corporation might seek advantage in their particular market sector, but would be subject to market corrections if they sought to purchase power and influence that wasn't specifically directed at returning commercial advantage for their product. They wouldn't have the opportunity or temptation to use the wealth generated by their commercial enterprises to purchase the power to interfere with the non-commercial aspects of society.

But unlike a perfect world, there is a pervasive perception in our real world that some amount of government is needed to handle those needs of society that are outside of the proper scope of individuals and corporations.

While substantial persistent distortions of a free market tend to be self-defeating, government provides a "cost effective" means for individuals and corporations to purchase sufficient political power to frustrate the free market's inherent defenses. It was well understood at the time of our nation's founding that governments were the primary means of imposing and protecting persistent distortions of the free market.

Wealth and power have always been intimately linked. Wealth can be used to purchase power, and power can be used to distort the distribution of wealth. The power and control that can be purchased with wealth have always held powerful attractions - especially to those who lack the wealth to purchase meaningful power of their own.

One of the evils of authoritarianism is the use of law by the the ruling elite to validate each new infringement on the rights of their subjects. Rulers issue imperial edicts granting themselves the right and power to inflict arbitrary hardships on the masses of powerless peasants. However, while rulers can easily create laws to justify their exercise of power, they must still purchase the means of expressing that power. It takes wealth to raise armies, hire tax collectors and law enforcers, and buy the fickle loyalty of bureaucracies. One of the most effective ways to limit the size and scope of government is to limit its access to wealth.

Rulers depend on their ability to convince others to do their bidding as the source of most of their apparent power. No individual, regardless of imagined birthright or hereditary claim to privilege, has ever been able to exercise actual power beyond the limits of his own mind and muscles. The power concentrated in a ruler results almost entirely from the creation of an artificial hierarchy of supporters expecting personal gain in return for contributing to the concentration of power available to their ruler. The expected gain may be in the form of immediate rewards of wealth and/or privilege, expectations of future wealth and/or privilege, or just the creation of an environment favorable to their other interests.

A ruler retains his power only as long as he manages to satisfy - or more commonly delay - his support hierarchy's expectations of gain. The ruler will lose power as his promises of eventual gain lose credibility in the minds of his supporters. The greater the resistance of his subjects, the greater the expectations of eventual rewards the ruler must create in order to purchase the continued complicity of his support hierarchy, and keep himself "in power".

Resistance to the ruling elite's claims of special status typically requires the creation of a privileged class of enforcers. The labels change across cultures, but not the basic nature of these arbitrarily defined privileged classes, or the role they perform in the support hierarchy of the ruling elite. These "king's men" have in different times and places called themselves knights, samurai, Praetorian Guard, Red Guard, SS, KGB, Clansmen, Night Riders, Sheriffs, Marshals, and countless other variations on the same theme. The "king's men" are granted special privileges to violate the fundamental rights of citizens in the name of the ruling elite.

We are "each the heroes of our own movies", so it's hardly surprisingly that those king's men who managed to write the popular history of their times, have tended to put a positive spin on their activities. In their version of history, they often portray themselves as guided by idealistic codes of honor, and scrupulously careful in observing the proper displays of respect toward fellow members of their class. Within their view of the world, they are the brave defenders of the proper order of life, their violence glorified as noble deeds, great adventures, and heroic sacrifices.

The ruling elite's claims of honor and glory tend to ignore the "localized adverse effects" inflicted on the citizenry in the name of their imagined higher causes. Those elites who have lost control over popular history tend to be portrayed much less positively after their legends have been edited by their victims. The perspective of time also allows a more rational analysis of the true costs of these elites on humanity's halting progress toward enlightened civilization.

The functional details of the often ritualized behaviors of the king's men were less important than that those details were perceived to be expressions of power and prestige. Their most important function was to demonstrate the king's power, and thereby demonstrate that the king had power. Abusing the lives and property of the peasants wasn't a side effect of the ruling elite's pursuit of higher objectives, but rather the primary purpose, which the ruling elite sought to camouflage behind imagined higher objectives.

Respect for property rights has proven to be a critical factor in the functioning of an advanced industrial civilization. Crime represents a non-productive cost overhead for a productive economy. As this overhead grows, the resulting decline in productivity is compounded because defending against crime diverts resources, while the criminal act compromises the value of whatever productivity is accomplished.

Isolated incidents of crime degrade the quality of life of the individual victims. Persistent patterns of crime undermine the means of maintaining a prosperous society. The consistent poverty created by exploitive socioeconomic systems based on the officially sanctioned taking of property from productive individuals, compared to the unrivaled prosperity created by America's unique experiment in liberty, provides grim testimony to the profound value of respect for the individual rights of freemen citizens.

Since government is incapable of creating real wealth, it can only acquire the wealth to fund expansion beyond its most basic functions by seizing it from productive citizens through taxes, fees, debasing the currency, or outright seizure. If committed by individuals, the means commonly employed by ruling elites in obtaining the wealth needed to purchase the continued complicity of their support hierarchy would be properly recognized as crimes.

Those who commit crimes in the name of ruling elites commonly justify their offenses by claiming official sanction turns their wrongful acts into valid functions of government. However, the actual net effect on the victim is essentially the same regardless of whether a crime is committed in the name of a ruling elite, or is simply a manifestation of the perpetrator's sociopathology.

Our nation was founded out of a recognition that there is no meaningful difference between robbery and murder committed by freelance individuals or by the king's men. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights were framed specifically to limit the power of our government to intrude on the freedoms of its citizens - and thereby limit the usefulness of our government to those who would make themselves our ruling elite.

The political structure of our original republic was intended to protect the rights of individual freemen from populist demagogues seeking to gain power by promising to abuse their office for the benefit of their supporters. These protections have been largely compromised by such superficially attractive populist corruptions as universal suffrage and the popular election of senators, progressively turning our once robust free republic into a doomed democracy.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, (which is then) always followed by a dictatorship."

Alexander Tyler, 1787

It was expected that those who had most effectively used their personal freedoms to create their own prosperity, and would be the ones taxed to pay for any attempts to expand the scope of government, would provide an electorate that was resistant to the curse of populist democracy. This was the thinking behind America's original limitation of voting rights to productive contributing citizens - land owners in our then largely agrarian economy.

Over time the wisdom of our founders has been eliminated from public education, demonized in the popular media, and corrupted in our courts. Voter rolls have been packed with welfare parasites and the government employees who exploit them, and further corrupted by the enfranchisement of millions of unassimilated immigrants who have been granted voting rights without first demonstrating that they understand and support the principles of individual rights and freedoms on which our nation was founded.

Fulfilling Alexander Tyler's prediction from two centuries ago, as America has been transformed from a constitutional republic to a populist democracy, the short sighted greed of America's dumbed-down and diluted electorate has eagerly succumbed to the allure of other people's money. Each election has become yet another sad spectacle of competitive corruption - with each party attempting to out bid the other with promises of increased government services to be funded by stealing even more wealth from a shrinking minority of oppressed productive citizens.

The populist deceit is that voters bear no responsibility for the actions of those they elect to represent them. The only basis on which this could be true is if one first accepts the degenerate concept that the agents of government are fundamentally different than the citizens, and are not subject to the same laws they impose on the citizenry.

According to our constitution, it's the citizens who own the nation, and whom the government serves. Our government represents the collective will of the people, but only to the limited extent there can be a collective will in a nation of sovereign freemen citizens. Our government was intentionally denied the power to intrude in the lives of individual citizens, or to claim to be acting on their behalf or in their interests, outside of those few powers specifically enumerated in the constitution.

Any expansion of government power must be formally enabled by a constitutional amendment. For example, the disaster of alcohol prohibition required two amendments - one to empower the government to prohibit alcohol, and a second to reverse the previous misguided granting of additional power.

A careful reading of the constitution won't find any amendments empowering the government to engage in most of what the mass media would have us believe are the main political issues today. The claimed merits of these populist issues isn't a factor in whether government can legally engage in such activities. Nowhere among the enumerated powers granted to government in the constitution is there any authorization to engage in coercive social engineering like affirmative action, welfare subsidies, corporate bail-outs, public education, drug prohibition, or subordinating our constitutional protections to the edicts of the despots in the UN.

Contrary to the lies of the populists, electing someone willing to violate his oath of office in return for political support doesn't validate the resulting crimes against society. The intention of our founding fathers was to provide the fundamental rights of freemen citizens with stronger protections than the tenuous respect of easily manipulated voters. Our socioeconomic system can only be changed through an amendment process that is intentionally difficult in order to protect against the superficial short sighted greed of the emotion driven masses.

The vast expansions of government power during the last century have only been possible because of the criminal complicity of all those who have sought personal advantage by allowing government to arbitrarily violate the checks and balances put in place specifically to frustrate just such efforts to turn our free republic into yet another failed populist democracy.

It was once a respected legal principle that an agent of the government acting outside of constitutional limits, was no different than any other common criminal committing the same acts. If someone contracts with a third party to commit a murder, is he any less guilty of the crime than if he did the killing himself? If he hires a gang of thugs to steal someone's property, is he any less of a thief than his hired gang? The fact that he arranged to have a surrogate violate the rights of the victim doesn't diminish his guilt for the crime.

If a citizen uses his vote to hire a surrogate criminal in the expectation of unearned gains, or to use the coercive violence of government to impose his peculiar delusional fantasies on the rest of society, is he any less guilty than if he attempted to commit these same crimes directly? Voting a surrogate criminal into office is no different than contracting with surrogate criminals in the local mafia to commit crimes for hire.

One of the primary weapons in the ongoing assault on freedom is the fraudulent elevation of criminal acts into legitimate expressions of political preference. We're instructed to consider robbery and murder committed by elected surrogate criminals to be morally equivalent to the reciprocal respect for life and property practiced by freeman citizen. We're endlessly told that we have no other option than to allow our society to be destroyed by the barbarians without any meaningful defense being mounted by those still capable of appreciating the profound value of what is being destroyed.

The subversion of our once free republic will continue as long as freemen continue to be willing to tolerate overt violations of the clearly worded limitations of government power in our constitution. We must all decide which we value more - our own rights and freedoms, or the false claims that those who would be our enemies have a valid right to hire surrogate criminals to steal our lives and property.

It was once understood that a freeman had not only a right but an obligation to defend his freedom with every means available. A society of freemen has the same right and obligation to defend itself against those who would usurp the wealth and freedom of its citizens.

Those who seek to infringe on the rights of freemen, either directly or through surrogates, forfeit by their actions any right to reciprocal respect from their intended victims. The civilized have no ethical obligation to tolerate those who would turn the tools of civilization against them. Those who would use their freedom to destroy the freedom of others, have no right to be free.