The Tyranny of the Watchmen

There are certain actions which we are not permitted to do as human beings.  While some people are complete pacifists, where any act of violence or force is considered wrong, most people at least follow the non-aggression principle, which states that you may not initiate force against another person.  The initiation of force, the threat of such, or fraud upon persons or property, where property is what a person owns, is considered to be a violation.  Most reasonable people can agree to this simple principle.

However, the problem is that you will have a small minority of people who have little regard for the property or person of others and instead will commit acts of theft, vandalism, murder, etc.  The human being is capable of great evil and great good after all.  When this happens, reparations are required of the perpetrator because of the harm caused.  We call this concept justice and it is different from revenge where justice is eye for an eye while revenge is head for an eye.  In other words, the reparations must fit the crime.

Most people usually allow for a government entity of some kind to be able to apply justice.  Basically, in order to enforce reparations, you need to initiate force and usually a government body is set aside for that purpose.  The vast soup of political and philosophical ideas mostly agree on having some government force, save for the various anarchist philosophies (each of which have about a dozen adherents as they are more numerous than the more “mainstream” schools of political thought).

What happens, though, when the popular institution of justice decides to overreach?  Usually, people bend over and rationalize the overreach as necessary, or worse, blame the victim of the overreach.  This happens dozens of times everyday now across the United States where government thugs are permitted to run rampant with the full support of the average citizen.  While the apathy is rapidly diminishing, as people are beginning to realize more and more how bad things have gotten, it is still significant among the dumb masses.  More people care about football than politics.  Normally, this would not bother me actually because if the Statists had no sway over us, than politics would not be that big of a deal.

The fact is, the United States government at all levels (Federal, State, and Local) have systematically violated just about every law they demand we adhere to.  When I talk about violations, I do not mean legitimate acts of reparation, but acts of violating the non-aggression principle without regard for reparations.  For example, the commonwealth of Virginia, my state of residence, has outlawed gambling.  The law itself violates the non-aggression principle as gambling does not and government should not be involved in bad decisions.  At the same time, Virginia runs a lottery system, where people can gamble by buying state-issued lottery tickets of various kinds.  Meanwhile, detectives in my state are entrapping people for harmless sports bets and sometimes getting them killed (see the tragic case of Dr. Salvatore J. Culosi).  This is a grave overreach of government action and gambling should be legalized.  Unfortunately, because of the money off of those who are just plain stupid, I doubt there will be any such action any time soon.

There have been other incidents.  The shooting death of Oscar Grant, where BART police officer Johannes Mehserle of Oakland shot and killed a young man because he was on his stomach resisting arrest.  The fact is, Oscar Grant was not fighting back, he was simply making it difficult to be arrested.  But he was lying down, unarmed, and could easily have been handcuffed and taken away.  Instead this coward shot him.  And what was the punishment for this man?  He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, served two years with time served added into the sentence and is now out of parole.  If you watch the various videos, any sane person would have called it murder and Johannes Mehserle should have been still in prison now.

But the rules are different if you are a government worker.  This is how you can tell that we are no longer a Republic but a tyranny with most of the political process as being nothing more than a sideshow.  The bureaucracy at all levels has gotten so big that it is impossible for 536 elected people and 9 appointed judges to completely and properly oversee it.  So instead of the law be applied evenly to everyone regardless of what their standing is, it is applied selectively and only severely to those who exist outside of the “Outer Party”.

If we are to regain our freedom, we must first dismantle the various agencies, rules, and regulations which are designed not to enforce the non-aggression principle, but to protect the interests of those so-called protectors of the American citizenry.  Until that happens, there will be no liberty, just power and who has it.