Crime Is Crime

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

You can fool most of the people most of the time, but you can’t fool reality any of the time.

The reigning chaos reflects perfectly what passes for thought in millions of minds. Minds that have been taught that reality is whatever one believes it to be. That reason is a superstition and is inferior to random feelings and emotions. That observation, hypotheses, experimentation, discovery, and science itself are akin to voodoo rituals. That consumption precedes production and is morally superior to it. That anyone’s work, income and wealth are subject to anyone else’s proclaimed need. That actions have no consequences.

Rioters and looters are faithfully adhering to the distilled essence of what our rulers and intellectuals have been telling them for decades: If you need it, or just want it, it’s yours to have or destroy. They are simply eliminating the government middleman. The only surprise is that it didn’t happen long ago.

The Age of Chaos has arrived. Violence is accomplishing what violence always accomplishes—destruction, ruin, and death. The only theoretical justification for government is that it employs force to protect its citizens from violence—invasion, violence against persons or property, and the indirect violence implicit in procuring and keeping value through fraud or extortion.

Modern governments don’t protect their citizens from violence, they subject them to it and are its chief instigator. The latest outrage is coronavirus totalitarianism. It is nauseatingly hypocritical for politicians to ritually and halfheartedly denounce looting and destruction after they’ve spent the last three months destroying millions of businesses and jobs.

There are other killers lurking out there: crime and mass unrest. The statistics for the former and the probability of the latter will only increase with the duration of lockdowns. Police are already reporting an uptick in crime. The death toll from a week of widespread urban rioting could easily surpass that of the entire coronavirus outbreak. There’s no mystery why President Trump has called up a million military reservists, and no assurance they will be able to prevent sporadic riots from deteriorating into total chaos and pandemonium. No mystery, either, why sales of firearms and ammo have jumped. By the way, rioters and looters don’t always social distance, so they may spread the coronavirus.

SLL, “Surrendered Without A Shot,” April 6, 2020

Let’s reach a conclusion that lockdown proponents will reflexively deny: the lockdowns have made the rioting worse. It’s not implausible to suggest that people stuck in their houses for three months might have joined in simply because they were going stir crazy…or were desperate and angry because they lost their jobs and can’t pay their bills.

Government now does everything except the one thing it’s supposed to do—protect the citizenry from violence. Some of the government officials who tossed people into jail for letting their kids play in parks or opening a barbershop are now assuring rioters and looters they feel their pain and are doing little to stop them. It’s the perfect inversion: persecute the innocent, succor the criminals.

Politics is an exercise in criminal demagoguery, the promise of something for nothing in exchange for votes and power. That something has to be stolen from someone by the government. Governments don’t protect against the criminal element because they are the criminal element. Theft, extortion, and fraud can’t produce wealth. They only redistribute and ultimately reduce or eliminate it by destroying the rights of those who produce it.

Rioters have screamed, “Eat the Rich!” and have looted high end stores as an appetizer. To the extent that they’ve announced a program, this appears to be it: install a government that will eat the rich, and by implication anyone who produces wealth. Left open is the question: after they eat the rich and productive, where does their next meal come from?

The present government is already devouring producers and its debt is extortion, theft, and fraud all rolled into one. The full faith and credit of the United States is the full faith and credit of its present and future producers, whose production is and will continue to be extorted and stolen under threats of fines and imprisonment. Creditors are holding debt the value of which the government will do everything to fraudulently undermine via debt monetization, inflation, and currency depreciation.

You can fool most of the people most of the time, but you can’t fool reality any of the time. Reality never grants something for nothing, not even on credit. To get something out, you have to put something in.

The utterly incompetent and incoherent response by government officials to the nationwide rioting, in both word and deed, was inevitable. They can neither speak nor act with intellectual, philosophical, or moral clarity given the dominant political creed—that reality can be subverted, something can be had for nothing, and the rights of some are justifiably destroyed for the benefit of others. That creed obliterates the concept of individual rights and the principles that logically flow from that concept. Yet, only the intellectual vantage point afforded by that concept and its concomitant principles offers clarity.

A policeman in Minneapolis knelt on an already-subdued and handcuffed suspect’s neck for approximately eight minutes and the suspect died shortly thereafter. Three other police did nothing to either stop the policeman or aid the suspect. Based on the video evidence, which will probably not be the complete evidentiary record, the kneeling policeman should be charged with murder and the three other police should be charged as accomplices. All four should have the legal protections afforded all criminal defendants and receive a fair trial before either a judge or a jury. Verdicts would then be reached and any defendant who was found guilty, punished.

Anyone enraged by the police’s behavior, or by the way police treat people or specific groups of people, or any other conduct by the government or its agents has the right to peaceably protest and take other political action, either as an individual or as a member of a group. The key word is peaceably. Nobody has the right to initiate violence against anyone else or their property. The government’s duty is to protect its citizens from such violence and destruction. When it erupts en masse, as in a riot, the government must stop it, with force if necessary, up to and including deadly force. The motivations or justifications of those engaging in the violence and destruction are irrelevant.

Every year governments steal trillions of dollars from their productive citizens. Some of it remains with governments or their agents, some of it is bestowed as unearned largess to the politically favored. Foreign and military policy has degenerated into nonstop war whose only purpose is to feed the military-industrial-intelligence complex and enrich it’s contractors. People can be tossed in jail if they refuse to accept as legal tender a fiat-debt currency backed by nothing, one which the government’s central bank continuously debases, in part to reduce the real value of the government’s debt.

Industry after industry has been turned into government-sponsored predatory cartels, with the military-intelligence-industrial complex and the financial-banking complex at the head of the pack and the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex coming on strong. Regulation is an instrument of government extortion and a means for the cartels to exclude potential competition by making entry into cartelized industries prohibitively expensive. No industry is so inconsequential that it can escape regulation; the government has its arbitrary and grasping fingers in every pie.

Under a contradictory-on-its-face rationale of “equality,” governments have created unequal-by-law quotas, preferences, and set-asides for favored groups. Taking the next giant step towards the eradication of whatever remains of individual rights, governments have locked “unessential” people in their homes and prevented them from opening their businesses or working at their jobs. Virtually every government activity and job has been deemed “essential.” There are no individual rights when inequality is written into the law.

Adding insult to injury, attending schools, gathering in groups, or even breathing clean air have also been prohibited in response to a dramatically and intentionally overblown medical danger. When government destroys rather than protects individual rights, its law enforcement arm inevitably does the same. Enforcement becomes a matter of caprice, whim, and the personal predilections and prejudices of its agents. The multitude of laws give law enforcement virtually unlimited power to harass, arrest, brutalize, incarcerate, and kill. The coronavirus measures only increase that power.

There are so many laws and regulations that no person can possibly be aware of or comply with them all, yet government exempts law enforcement from even the most basic strictures against criminality. Under asset forfeiture laws, it can steal property arbitrarily deemed to be involved in the commission of a crime and it is then up to the owner to prove that it was not. Incidents like the one in Minneapolis are commonplace, but the chances the police who commit crimes will be imprisoned, or even lose their jobs, is minimal. The glaring inequity of a system in which innocent citizens are routinely treated as criminals but government exempts itself from justice has not been lost on the citizenry. It has not been lost on police forces, who have been militarized not to protect themselves and the government from criminals, but from an increasingly subjugated and enraged citizenry.

To believe that a government that has destroyed individual rights while enshrining its own criminality can speak or act with any kind of moral authority towards criminal rioters and looters is absurd. The apex of absurdity—so far—is the Minneapolis police force’s abandonment of its own precinct station to rioters. Criminals will attack soft targets, and those who agree with them in principle are soft targets. If a government won’t protect its own property from criminals, it’s certainly not going to protect law abiding citizens’ lives or property.

The rioting makes a mockery of arguments that the government should control or eliminate citizens’ right and access to firearms, which would make them soft targets. A government that refuses to protect individuals and their rights hasn’t a leg to stand on when it tries to restrict individuals from defending themselves. Such restrictions are clearly seen for what they are: another government destruction of individual rights.

How long can governments that outlaw businesses, jobs, and education—in short, production—and engage in and legitimize theft, fraud, extortion, vandalism, violence, and murder—in short, destruction—survive? Reality cannot be fooled. Production is survival—for both producers and the governments they support—destruction its antithesis. The bell tolls.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence, 1776

Our government effects only terror and misery. To effect our Safety and Happiness, it’s past time to withdraw “the Consent of the Governed” and “to alter or to abolish” it. That is our right, enshrined in our Declaration.

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