Welfare, Warfare, & Police: Dispelling the Mythology

Will Porter 3/30/2014

It is discouragingly frequent that libertarians have to deal with the same old rehashed statist arguments time and time again. The proponents of government, big or small, have a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of absurd claims and baseless assertions which they hurl with confidence and certainty. Such arguments are so common, and yet so fallacious, that it begins to look as if some kind of religion is at work, a mythology of sorts. The same mantras are repeated over the generations until they attain the status of incontestable axioms, with which no argument is to be tolerated. What I hope to do in the present essay is to offer a series of rebuttals and refutations of the statist faith using both basic logical reasoning and empirical illustration through historical examples. Primarily, I will focus on three of the most prominent aspects of state-power, the Welfare-State, the Warfare-State, and the Police-State. These manifestations of government are, in varying degrees, defended all over the political spectrum, and so the comments herein will not be directed toward any particular flavor of left-right statism. Typically these issues are approached separatelyand when done so it is easier for the statist to remain in denialbut when analyzed together the picture is painted with striking clarity. Each of these three facets of power play into each other and one often creates the problems that are used to justify the existence of the other two. As this state-power accrues, we will see how society is derailed from its natural course down a different path fraught with turmoil and peril. Every measure of intervention serves to set back civilization, and as these interferences accumulate it becomes more and more evident that the world would look radically different were it not for government action and the religious faith that justifies it in the minds of men. As we approach each point, a basic lesson will emerge in regard to state-power: whenever a coercive institution extracts funds from their rightful owners and diverts them into alternative uses, this serves to impoverish society and shape it into something which nobody would have chosen, were they left to make the decision. Every multi-billion dollar government program must utilize resources, not legitimately created, but stolen. Instead of generating wealth as is the case for voluntary exchange, government activity can only rearrange wealth, and in almost every instance, destroy it. I should start first by addressing the nature of the state-mythology and the significant role that fear plays within it. Fear is, and probably always has been, the single greatest motivator for people to seek refuge under the auspices of state-power.

Fear is itself not always irrational, as some fears are perfectly legitimate. However, the fears which so commonly shut down the minds of statists are almost always held without good reason. It is unclear whether such fear is a natural and ever-present mental-factor in approaching matters of social organization, or if it is something which must be inculcated into the masses by various institutions (media, education, etc.). Nonetheless, the fear of the unknown is the major driving-force behind the perceived legitimacy of government. It does not at first seem unreasonable for people to want the toughest and baddest guy in society to be on their side. The desire for a big strong protector is probably at the very core of the government mythology. The statist, quite rationally, wishes there could be some kind of powerful institution to keep him safe, and it is natural, of course, to want that agency to be a good guy who always does the right thing, save the occasional bad apples and the rare mistakes. In crude form, the fears which afflict most statists rest in matters of crime, poverty, and the potential for foreign invasion. If nothing else, the typical state-advocate will assert that these three contingencies give common-sense justification for the existence of government. Without the Welfare-State, who would help the needy and downtrodden? Without the Warfare-State, who would protect our nation from terrorists? Without the Police-State, who will prevent crime, ensuring the citizenry are secure in person and property? On the surface, these objections seem perfectly legitimate. How could somebody possibly believe society could do without these government-provided services? How could anyone be such an extremist as to deny these essential functions to the state? Such criticisms are commonplace, and often serve as sufficient for the statist to dismiss all arguments coming from a libertarian standpoint. But are their concerns really so well-founded? How often does anyone actually check to ensure these arguments are logically or empirically sound? From my own experience, it seems incredibly seldom that these assertions are backed with evidence, but are rather quoted like passages from a holy text, taken as ultimately-given facts. If one questions or argues against these facts, they are met almost universally with outrage, indignation, ridicule, and personal attack. In the eyes of the statist, anyone who would dare to contest the necessity of governmentprovided welfare, warfare, and police must be some kind of criminal, nut job, or idiot, advocating chaos and destruction, whether wittingly or in their own childish naivety. They cry, without a centralized institution forcibly extracting funds from productive society to provide these essential functions, civilization would surely and inevitably fall apart !

It is of course always ignored that the libertarian argument against government-funded services does not equate to not wanting the services in question provided at all. So for example, my desire to not have a government police force does not mean that I dont want police of any kind. It is a fallacy to assume otherwise, as many, if not most, statists do. My purpose here is to demonstrate the sheer lunacy, wickedness, and confusion found in the statist position. The social problems that necessitate government welfare, police, and military, I will maintain, are problems directly created by government itself. Everything the government claims to fix, it actually breaks in the first place. Its as if somebody were to smash your leg with a hammer and then assure you that without them, you would never have been able to walk. The basic structure of this process lies in what is called Problem-Reaction-Solution. A problem is created by government and identified in the media, a public reaction is elicited, and a solution is then implemented to quell the outcry. At almost every turn, from socio-economic maladies like crime and poverty, to geo-political issues like threats of foreign aggression, this process is at work persuading the public to surrender ever-more freedom and tax-funds to help the state wage battle against these societal ailments. And indeed, it is highly common to hear references to war being made; the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on Poverty. These campaigns are waged not on real, tangible things, but on catch-all concepts which may be ascribed to any target the government decides is politically expedient. As will be shown, not only do these wars never reach their proclaimed goals, but they also create precisely the problems they seek to solve. The War on Drugs, instead of reducing crime and drug use, makes worse these problems, giving further justification to the Police-State. The War on Terror, while it attempts to bomb and shoot every terrorist on Earth, instead actually incites radicalism, hatred, and terrorism all around the globe. This serves to sway public opinion to favor foreign military intervention and creates the appearance of a major threat, which must be neutralized. The War on Poverty, while touted as the golden child of government programs, has not even come close to eliminating or reducing poverty, has created vast amounts of governmentdependency, squanders billions of dollars to maintain bloated bureaucracies, and discourages charitable acts in the private sector. Welfare programs exacerbate the problem of poverty and provoke public demand for government to do more of the wrong thing. The wars on vice, poverty and terrorism are nothing more than a politically-correct way to declare wars on people.

In all of these government initiatives, trillions of dollars and unfathomable resources are extracted from the private economy. This is a major source of poverty as it wastes societys wealth in completely futile efforts which always backfire. It cannot be stressed enough the cumulative effect this has in shaping the destiny of nations, effectively diverting society away from prosperity and toward increasing amounts of destruction and poverty. Let us begin our inquiry into power with the Police-State, the system of a government-funded police force. The first objection from the statist is that only government can provide the service of domestic police protection. A more sophisticated critic will allege that police protection is a public good, and that market failures will prevent it from ever arising in absence of government and taxation. It is said that free riders will discourage anyone from actually paying for the service, because if someone knows their neighbor has protection they might feel less obliged to pay for it themselves. If only a few people pay for the whole neighborhoods protection, eventually theyll get sick of this and nobody will want to pay for police. While this is a somewhat basic formulation of the public goods problem in regard to police protection, it conveys the general claim. The public goods argument is a fallacious one. First of all, police services do not exhaustively account for the good of protection. Protection from aggression can come in the form of security lights, alarms, locks, fences, guard dogs, guns, safes for valuables, even a bodyguard, as well as signs warning criminals of any of the above. Police are only a small part of how someone might go about protecting themselves. The good of protection is not one homogenous blob called police. Second, the public goods argument misconstrues the meaning of terms like efficiency and optimality. The public goods economist ascribes these terms to some arbitrarily selected amount of the good and anything at variance with this number is called sub-optimum, or inefficient. But the meaning of efficiency is found in the satisfaction of consumers demand, not the arbitrary number selected by the economist out of a socio-ethical consideration. When the public goods economist says efficient, he means in regard to how much he has determined that society needs of the good in question, as opposed to the real demand of consumers. If, in absence of government, police were provided privately and the free rider problem occurred where only a relatively low amount of police services were in demand, how could anyone say this was anything but optimum? The only way one could argue this would be to select some arbitrary number which they decided was the right amount, ignoring what people actually would have chosen.

The proposed way out of this is to have the government intervene to provide the service. But why should anyone think that government would do any better a job in providing the optimum amount? Indeed, public police today are notorious for providing severely deficient amounts of protection to the areas which need it most. The incentive structure of government, as well as its alienation from market forces (profit and loss, competition, supply and demand) leads it to constant squandering and misallocations of services. The inability to efficiently allocate resources is precisely why all forms of socialism must always fail. Socializing any industry, including police, will necessarily lead to exactly the same failures, giving no basis whatsoever to the public goods argument. Even conceding that the market would provide too little police, the government does not escape the problem of figuring out what is optimum, as well as actually providing that amount of services. But this would all be to assume the free rider problem is a legitimate concern. Does anyone actually believe that if someones neighborhood was being devastated by street crime, they would forego buying protection simply because they didnt want their neighbors to enjoy it without paying for it? People would rather face frequent violence and danger than allow their neighbors to have something for free? This seems to take an absurd stance on human behavior, where people act based purely in monetary motivations (incidentally, this was a common error of the Classical economists). One could easily imagine a situation where a financially better-off neighbor pays for protection which benefits his whole neighborhood, even if only to selfishly protect himself. Either way, even assuming private police provision will universally discourage customers patronage, this still ignores the fact that protection can come in many forms beyond police. Finally, a fairly easy solution to the free rider problem is to simply fund police through community organizations. It certainly could be the case that people could buy this service on an individual basis, but there is no reason to think that mutual aid societies and homeowners associations couldnt collectively purchase such a thing as well. Private-funding of police would also be much easier, considering the nature of government funding always moves toward higher costs for lower-quality services. To briefly return to government resource-allocation, prices in government industries are typically much higher than they would be in their private counterparts. The cost to fund and maintain a government police force is blown wildly out of proportion compared to the actual services they provide. Instead of focusing purely on stopping violent criminals, police devote a massive amount of their resources toward things like vice crimes.

A tax-funded police force, as with any government program, will also seek as much funding as it can possibly get. To do so it must also spend a lot to prove it actually needs the funding. For the statist, everything is perpetually underfunded, ignoring the constant exponential increase in funding over the decades for every popular agency of the state (as well as the hundreds of lesspopular ones!). Just how big does government have to be before it starts solving problems? The state has grown in size 4-5 times over since it initially declared, say, the Drug War, and yet still it can accomplish no real strides in the ill-intended direction it proclaims to be heading toward. One might add that it is precisely because of overfunding that government police so often overstep their constitutional and moral boundaries. When they are allowed militarized weapons and the legal ability/funding to arrest masses of peaceful people, their effectiveness in fighting real crime severely diminishes. A private police force could not possibly survive in this way; it is only government that creates the perverse incentives to spend as much as possible. Private firms have to be competitive and efficient, cutting their costs as low as possible while still providing a service that people will voluntarily pay for. A system of private police would necessarily cost much less, therefore making its private-funding less of a daunting task. And instead of pursuing trivial injunctions and victimless crimes, its efforts would be put toward keeping people and their property safe, further reducing the costs. Moreover, and more importantly, a government-funded monopoly police force has no actual contracts with the people its supposed to protect. In the 1981 court case Warren v. District of Columbia1 The court stated that official police personnel and the government employing them owe no duty to victims of criminal acts and thus are not liable for a failure to provide adequate police protection... It is hard to imagine a private firm which, in their contract, said they didnt actually have to do the exact thing youre paying them to do. In almost every way, it seems a voluntarily-funded private police force is more attractive than a corrupt, inefficient, and abusive one provided through the state. With all of this said, we have yet to address the issue of crime itself. It is oft-charged that without public police, surely criminals would run wild in the streets, looting and pillaging everything in sight, leaving average helpless citizens alone to deal with marauders, thugs, and street gangs. To deal with this point, let us take the hardest case possible: the violent crime which today plagues almost every major city in the world.

It first should be made clear, though, that the polices primary job has never been to prevent crime, but to catch and punish criminals ex post facto. It is much less common for police officers to catch and stop crimes in the act, or to prevent them preemptively. Rather, police usually hunt down and catch people after theyve already committed an offense. In the past it was proper to call these people peace officers, because their purpose was to keep the peace and avert violence (ignoring for the moment their brutal treatment of nonwhite demographics). But shortly after the Vietnam War, when thousands of mentallydistressed troops were coming home, the government police system began to become more and more militarized and its ranks started to swell with former military members. Not only have police started using SWAT teams, APCs, M-RAPs and other military weapons, but the entire culture and purpose of the police force has changed. The polices function used to be to keep the peace and diffuse violence, today their job is to enforce laws and to escalate violence at every opportunity. To protect and serve is the age-old police adage which is supposed to illustrate the noble purpose of the profession. Now, this adage has turned into make it home. That is the purpose of the officer. It is of course expected that anyone working a potentially dangerous job will always be motivated to get home and see their families and friends again, but when this becomes the only factor in the police officers judgment, he will often disregard protection and service of the public in favor of protecting himself or his fellow officers. The police culture has turned more towards a gang or military mentality, where the unit or the brotherhood takes primary importance over all else, as if engaged in a war against the rest of the populace. One often hears police officers saying I just want to make it home, and ones heart ide ntifies with that sentiment, but so long as officers only care about making it home, to protect and serve will increasingly fall by the wayside. Instead of leaving people alone in their mundane daily motions, the police actively roam the streets searching for trouble. They look for minor infractions or misdemeanorswhich there are many thousands ofin order to meet quotas and often simply to exercise their position of authority over average citizens. There are so many laws on the books that, even when one calls around to various government agencies to ask, nobody can tell you any kind of number;2 how about too many to count. There are tens of thousands of laws, any of which you may unwittingly break and be punished for.

The average American commits 3 felonies a day, just by being alive and going about their everyday activities.3 Even when you think you have nothing to hide, you are always in danger of being harassed, fined, or even locked away, all depending on the police officers use of discretion in enforcing whichever laws his whims dictate. To return to the issue of violent crime, we must ask what causes the phenomena of rampant inner-city violence so common to large urban areas. Surely we need police and laws to deal with this, right? Again, this statist-myth is completely without merit. An astounding amount of crime is created or in some way caused by government laws. Were it not for this, the amount of murder, assault, battery, and robbery would be much less severe, eliminating much of what commonly justifies the ever-expanding Police-State in the first place. A massive contributing factor to violence can be found in the worldwide War on Drugs, and more broadly, the War on Vice. The prohibition of various drugs, along with prostitution and some forms of gambling, alone can account for a major portion of such crime. Even on a superficial level, it seems obvious that when highly-demanded goods and services are made illegal, they are forced into underground black markets, where crime and corruption flourish. Instead of being provided by reputable vendors, drugs, gambling, and prostitution are pushed into the hands of shady dealers, or even worse, cartels and street gangs. Whether one believes it is moral or decent to get involved in drugs, gambling, or prostitution, it remains a fact that many people do and will engage in these activities whether they are legal or not. I am fairly sure that it is uncontroversial to assert that street gangs are significant contributors to violent crime. In contrast to the relatively rare cases of violence between average, upright citizens, the systematic and organized violence of street gangs surely wins out in regard to their share of aggression inflicted into society. It is almost totally due to the drug trade that these gangs can grow so large and well-funded, and become such a problem. But drugs havent always been illegal, is there any historical parallel which can shed light on the Drug War phenomenon? Have we seen anything similar to the drug-dealing gangs and cartels that exist today? Has this always been such a serious problem? From around 1920-1933, the United States instituted the 18th Amendment, commonly known as the prohibition of alcohol, which sought to eradicate alcoholism in a strikingly similar way to which the War on Drugs seeks to erase the blight of substance abuse.4 The results were, as well, almost identical to the effects of the Drug War.

Rather than reducing crime and the consumption of alcoholic beverages, the effects of the 18th amendment included: rampant organized crime and, in some areas, an almost doubling of violent crime rates, major corruption of law enforcement, increased consumption of alcohol, as well as an epidemic of deaths related to tainted, impure, or too-potent booze, distilled in basements and bathtubs.5 A similar trend occurs in the contemporary drug prohibition, where potency keeps increasing, as it is easier to illegally traffic smaller amounts of stronger, more expensive drugs. Due to this, street dealers are forced to cut the drug with other potentially harmful filler substances to bulk up its weight and appearance. The public at-large today sees the clear stupidity and insanity of such an attempted ban on alcohol, so why is it so difficult to fathom how this might be happening again, on an astronomically-larger scale, with the War on Drugs? The slew of shoot-outs, massacres, bombings, racketeering, and police corruption turned the streets of some major U.S. cities into battlegrounds during Prohibition.6 The Capones and Lucky Lucianos of yesterday are the Bloods, Crips, Vice Lords, and MS-13s of today. This is an obvious case of history repeating itself.7 Almost immediately after the 18th Amendment was repealed, the spike in crime-rates reversed, the black market gangs receded, thus returning many large American cities to relative normalcy. The particular myth surrounding the Drug War, then, is almost 100% nonsense. It is claimed strict drug-enforcement reduces substance abuse, it has and does not. In fact, the use of certain substances is at an all-time high in many countries around the globe, and continues to rise. This is in line with Americas experience with alcohol prohibition. It is also said that drug-laws reduce crime, they have and do not.8 Crime rates are staggering in cities like Detroit and Chicago, almost exclusively due to the criminal enterprises that operate in the drug-gambling-prostitution trade. This, also, is almost identical to what occurred with the ban on alcohol. The two main thrusts of the case for the Drug War are completely without basis. The only other example of substance-prohibition in Americaalcoholbrought about the exact same social-calamities, as well as similarly absurd arguments and justifications in its favor. It is also incredibly vital to point out the fact that the U.S. government, through the CIA, has in the past been caught and proven to have smuggled thousands of pounds of hard drugs, like cocaine, into their own country.9

The somewhat well-known Iran-Contra scandal took place at the dawn of the U.S. crack epidemic, and may have been a primary factor in creating it. The amount of crime and violence that spawned from the crack-mania could, to at least some extent, be directly linked to the CIAs extensive drug-running operation. The CIA seems to rejoice in running drugs because the profit accrued from it allows them a huge black-budget to fund various covert and subversive operations. Not that the CIA doesnt already get a secret black-budget in tax-dollars, but they like to have plenty of money to do things like overthrowing democratically-elected leaders and founding/funding rebel-terrorist groups, but well learn more about this below. It is highly doubtful that the CIA, or whoever it now may be, has permanently ceased their drugtrafficking operations, as Iran-Contra didnt involve only one incident.10 It really is no great mystery why they would do such a thing, the more drugs pumped into the country, the more crime and social unrest they can create. With increased social malady comes the public demand for more government power to control society and economy. The expansion of government allows more tax-money to be allocated into the coffers of police officials, state-bureaucrats, politicians, private prison contractors, and so on. This, as well, does not have to be a unified conspiracy. Such a thing can occur when various factions within the state pursue their own corrupt incentives, not necessarily in concert with one another. If the CIA were running drugs for the purpose of funding the Contras, and the various branches of police like to keep crime around for their own separate reasons (retaining/increasing their funding), they dont have to conspire on a mass scale for it to benefit them both. People follow their interests, and if various state-officials can somehow gain from what the CIA or another branch of government is doing, so be it. Aside from the fact that the Drug War cannot possibly accomplish its proclaimed goals, the very same government who bans these drugs actually ships them in by the ton to ensure they will never succeed in meeting their target. But that is not all; the prison system must be addressed here as well. America has the largest prison population on the planet and it swells with millions of inmates, a large portion of which are incarcerated for non-violent distribution or possession crimes.11 Incarceration rates skyrocketed during the Reagan Administration12, when crack-cocaine punishment was made orders of magnitude more severe than powder-cocaine, at a ratio of about 100:1.13

Some will maintain this was purposely done to harm minority demographics and the poor, but regardless of the intentions, this certainly was the effect.14 Despite locking up hundreds of thousands of people for non-violent offenses, crime rates nor drug use have been significantly affected.15 The government cannot even keep drugs out of its own prisons! Given this fact, it is quite strange to continually encounter individuals who truly believe drugs can be eradicated from the whole of society (if not the face of the planet). Proponents of statism often succumb to forms of magical thinking, this is a pristine example. A prison is one of the most controlled, lockeddown, regulated places on Earth. If the state cannot prevent drug use even here, it is more than foolish to trust in their ability to quell drug use elsewhere. The criminal justice system today is geared primarily toward the punishment and incarceration of offenders, as opposed to the recompense and restitution of real victims. Adding insult to injury, not only are victims of genuine crimes not compensated, but are also forced to pay taxdollars to house, clothe, and feed their own tormenters. The legal-judicial and prison systems of modern governments are highly corrupt and provide the total antithesis of justice. To make matters even worse, a new wave of private corrections-contractors have emerged to imprison the people the Police-State kidnaps. Similar to military-contractors, these are not truly private institutions, as they receive most of their revenue in tax-dollars and from exclusive contracts awarded by the statewhereas free market business actually has to compete. Government-contractors simply get paid to do things nobody but the government wants done, this is not genuine demand, and these firms are not really private. The profits made in such a business come largely from the government-racket of imprisoning the innocent. Drug offenses are referred to as victimless crimes, as there is no true victim. A real crime is an activity that physically harms or damages a person or their property. There is no such thing as a crime against society, or a crime against ones self. Victimless crimes are, in fact, not crimes at all.16 On top of incentivizing real crime, where person or property are actually harmed in some way, the Drug War makes criminals out of people who havent actually done any wrong and adds a completely unnecessary, massive burden on the already-inefficient judicial system (and, not to mention, costs taxpayers mind-boggling sums of money).

Do not mistake me here to be in favor of drug use, it is clear that such a thing is spiritually and physically detrimental for the user. But the non-violent choices of individuals, personally-good choices or not, cannot possibly justify the moral abomination left in the wake of the War on Drugs. Many things that are legal, including tobacco, alcohol, and junk food, are also harmful to health, and here nobody presumes the right to beat down your door and lock you in a cage to prevent you from consuming these substances. Not only does it fail to prevent crime from occurring, the Drug War creates vast amounts of crime by leaving the drug trade in the hands of gangsters and thugs. Additionally, the massincarceration of drug offenders has doubtless contributed to the solidification of the criminal underclass by sending vast amounts of otherwise peaceful people through the criminal school of prison where they house with miscreants and malefactors of all backgrounds. Trillions of dollars17 have been devoted to this effort, and the effects have been completely contrary to its alleged goals. Every dollar which is spent on the Drug War is a dollar not spent to protect people from real crimes, violations of person or property. When ever-more legislation, time, effort, and resources are devoted to it, all this can do is aggravate the problem. Innercities again turn into warzones where rival drug-gangs and police alike all fight for territorya situation almost identical to alcohol prohibition, but now ongoing for many decades, allowed to develop into serious problems. If the Drug War had never been declared in the first place, it is highly unlikely our cities would be so ravenously violent, and therefore the public at-large would not feel the urgent need for a militarized Police-State to protect them. Things havent always been this way. Crime is, of course, eternally-present in any society, but the concentrated and organized nature of the drug trade is an altogether unique phenomenon, created by artificial state-intervention. It did not emerge naturally and spontaneously, but directly as a result of counter-productive, nefarious laws. The typical justification for the Police-State is crime. But the problem of crime is made inconceivably worse by, at bare minimum, the Drug War, giving government a blank-check to continually feed the fire they claim to be trying to put out. The War on Vice isnt a complete explanation, however, of the scourge of crime which afflicts society. Crime is the daughter of desperation, and it is poverty which breeds desperation. The drug trade is simply an outlet for crime, made highly profitable and lucrative by its illegalization.

Destitute inner-city youths, especially, are incentivized toward a life of misdeeds which manifests in drug-dealing street gangs and mafia cartels. We may begin to illustrate the roots of poverty simply by pointing to the countless billions of dollars extracted from productive private society and poured into the Police-State apparatus, including the tax-funds devoted to feeding and clothing the millions of non-violent drug-offense inmates.18 Every single dollar stolen from productive hands in taxes is a dollar which will not go toward the savings and investment, capital accumulation, and business expansion vital for alleviating poverty in society. We cannot precisely pin down the damage done by all of this, since we cannot see all of the businesses that didnt start up or expand because of it, but it is certain that when vast sums of wealth are stolen and poured into destructive government-programs, this hurts society as a whole. Every dollar wasted in the militarization of police,19 undertaken to combat the government-created phenomenon of drug-crime, is a dollar that will not go to feed a hungry child, or to allow a business to expand to employ an unskilled worker. (I have deliberately left out the subject of law-provision, as it is itself a topic which deserves its own essay, but it should suffice here to say that law is also corrupted by government influence and would, in almost every conceivable way, be better left to the voluntary private sector.) From the preceding discussion, weve commenced to show how society takes shape largely as determined by state-intervention. When government tries to eradicate crime, it ends up creating it instead. They assert a problem, incite a public reaction, and act to solve it using ham-fisted laws which go completely contrary to their purpose. A common theme of this essay will be to provoke you to ask what is more important, the intentions of a law/program, or its actual effects. The best of intentions cannot transform a bad law into a good one, and the same good intentions cannot reverse a laws destructive effects. Because economic destitution is a primary motivator for crime, it may be said that it is really poverty that is at the root of the crime epidemic. This brings us to our second statist mythology: the Welfare-State. The states welfare system is made up of many agencies and programs, each slightly varying in form and function, but none escaping the blunders of welfarism. The common claim is that without government welfare programs, the lower classes would suffer and starve. From the implementation of FDRs New Deal, to Lyndon Johnsons Great Society, the governments War on Poverty has been waged for the greater part of the 20th century, and is still going strong at the dawn of the 21st. Are these programs really working, or do we have yet another case of a corrupt, incompetent, and utterly bungling government creating precisely the problems it claims to solve?

In 2005, almost 500 billion dollars was devoted toward 50 or so different welfare programs in the U.S., amounting to about $13,000 for every poor man, woman, and child. Since the days of the Great Society, about 9 trillion dollars in total has been thrown toward government welfare, and yet poverty numbers remain in the millions, despairingly close to rates before LBJ stepped in with his helping hand.20 Part of the reason why welfare funds can never fully reach their destination is that all along the way, thousands of bureaucrats must be employed to manage and disburse the money and resources. It costs millions of dollars just to keep the lights on in every bureaucrats office, not to mention the near-lavish benefits received by various government workers and officials. And while the significant inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the Welfare State is indeed a contributor to poverty, this is hardly the tip of the iceberg. For it is not only unnecessary welfare-bureaucrats alone who must be employed and their offices kept running, but every government employee and office. Millions of people live parasitically off of private society, diverting many billions of dollars out of the hands of productive people and business owners who might employ the poor, into the wasteful hands of bureaucrats and politicians. Even ignoring the waste which might come from the specific activities of the Welfare-State, it is implicitly wasteful in that it inserts an additional middle-man into the equation. For a loose analogy, imagine if the government were to mandate that employers had to pay their employees through a 3rd party bureaucracy. Instead of just paying their workers, the employer must send the money through a system of government officials, all of whom must themselves be paid a salary and their offices kept running. It is easy to see how wasteful such a law would be and this same issue plagues all government programs. It might not be so bad if state-welfare actually met its goals, but they instead have the opposite effect. Welfare programs keep people dependent and incentivize unproductivity. On a simple costbenefit analysis, it should be obvious why many people prefer to stay on welfare. If the options are dont work, get paid, and work, get paid a little more the former seems to be the attractive choice. This is not to say that everybody on the dole is abusing the system, but the very nature of the Welfare-Statefree moneywill always attract unproductive people who wish for a free-ride. Unlike the above example of free riding in regard to police, free riders of the welfare system are literally living off of stolen funds. Voluntary unemployment is a real thing, and it further contributes to the burden on society that the state fosters and allows to continue.

Along with the Welfare-States immense waste, we can add the Police-States waste as well, as discussed above, resulting in inconceivable sums of economic turmoil. Just imagine what society might look like if all of these resources were put to productive use. Again, this cannot be stressed enough. Even in the hands of average citizens, all of the money otherwise devoted toward taxation could be saved in banks, allowing interest rates to (naturally) fall, and for cheaper loans to be made for startup businesses. The indirect effects of government waste are incalculable and poverty would certainly be much less of a problem were it not for th e states reckless abandon in their use of stolen tax-dollars. Furthermore, to add to the basic blunders of welfare, some of the specific guidelines enforced have also been majorly destructive. For example, in many cases the conditions for welfarehousing were that no males were allowed to live in the home. This had particular impact on the black family,21 and its effects can now be seen with the widespread single-motherhood so common to inner-city populations and the black demographic in particular. The black family survived slavery, yet it could not endure the crushing effects of the U.S. Welfare-State.22 This only piles on top of the endless list of travesties which have plagued the inner-city underclasses, predominately black and Latino, and only adds gasoline to the fire in regard to the rampant urban crime considered at length above. In conjunction with outright welfare programs, other labor laws such as minimum wage legislation23 also contribute to the economic oppression of the lower classes.24 Exactly the same as the Police and Welfare-State, minimum wage laws hurt the same people they are alleged to help! When the price of anything, including labor, is made artificially more expensive, its demand will fall. When an unskilled worker can only contribute 5$/hr of productivity to a company, forcing an employer to pay him 7$/hr will do the worker no favor. Instead of lifting the unskilled up, as if on a floor, or platform to be raised, minimum wage laws set up economic hurdles for workers.25 The government can force employers to pay higher wages, but they cant stop them from simply hiring less people, and this is precisely what happens. If the state set a minimum price for, say, bananas, higher than the prevailing market price, it would be no surprise at all when fewer bananas were purchased. Why is this simple economic logic so difficult to grasp when assessing the minimum wage? Highly-skilled union laborers are typically in favor of minimum wage legislation26 precisely because it has the effect of blocking out the unskilled competition, who willingly works for lower wages due to their current-lack of expertise or proficiency in some given trade.

Labor unions, backed by government power, have been constant enemies of progress and the alleviation of poverty. Their consistent push for artificially-higher wages, less innovation and technological advancement, tariffs, as well as featherbedding practices have added to the skewed structure of production and pricing-mechanism which result from state-intervention. When unions use government to enforce ostensibly pro-labor legislation, the result is always to the detriment of both the workers at-large, as well as the same people in their capacity as consumers.27 A union can divert resources to benefit a single firm or industry, but these are resources necessarily forced out of other areas of the economy. This will take its form in higher prices for goods, bloated and inefficient industriesutilizing resources that are more economically-appropriate for other lines of productionas well as an overall reduction in the material welfare of society and technological/entrepreneurial innovation. Unions often take credit for the creation of the middle class, as well as the reduction of child labor and poor working conditions, but this is a false attribution.28 Wealth in society cannot be created by passing laws, but only through market processes and increased production. When a capitalist invests profits back into his businessfor example by purchasing new machineshe increases worker-productivity, which is a direct determinant for wages. When an hour of labor becomes more productive, due to new technology or capital equipment, labor-services become more valuable. When capital accumulation takes place, wages rise, and the material ware-withal of society to produce more stuff is amplified. This has historically led to the enrichment of the common man and the emergence of an affluent middle class. As the income of the average worker was boosted, families no longer had to send children off to work; a household could now be supported by only one or two people. Working conditions are also made more acceptable as entrepreneurs re-invest back into their own firms. By the time unions and government stepped in with legislation, both child labor and dangerous working conditions were well on their way to being eliminated by the market.29 Capitalists do not have to do any of this out of their own kindness or generosity, but only out a purely selfish motivation for more profit. Adam Smith talked of the invisible hand 30 which guides society toward general prosperity through market mechanisms and profit incentives, rather than out of the beneficent disposition of entrepreneurs. Whether we assume extreme greed as human nature or not, this has no relevance in the way social progress occurs based on the workings of the market economy.

Ceteris paribus (all other things equal), both naturally-raised wages and a generally intensified capacity for production lead to financially better-off consumers whose dollars command evermore resources in the economy. As goods become increasingly abundant, many of them decrease in cost, allowing the consumers money to buy them more. So long as people use sound money, this process enriches the lower and middle classes. In a genuine capitalist society, even many of the poor enjoy luxuries that kings of pre-industrial antiquity couldnt have dreamed of. If the general claim is that labor laws help the workers with the least skill and experience, this is blatantly false. Wage legislation helps only the firmly-entrenched labor unions as it outlaws competition from the unskilled, whose only competitive edge is to work for less pay than their skilled counterparts. If the labor unionists contention is rather that such legislation prevents all of the workers from exploitation, there is no need for theoretical insights, as empirical experience clearly proves otherwise. If the claim is, without a legal minimum, employers would pay only third-world wages, why is it the case that they have always paid over double the legal minimum wage, on average, even with those laws in place?31 There is nobody forcing them to pay more than 7-8$/hr today, yet they do almost universally. This has much to do with the fact that employers are not the only side of the labor-contract; they have to make their job positions attractive, and through the competitive process labors price can be bid even higher than it would be due to increasedproductivity alone. Finally, if government-backed unions are alleged to be the beacon of equality and workers rights, why do the anomalies of government labor unions exist? If we are supposed to seek refuge from the evils of the private sector within the state, why would government employees need protection from government exploitation? Government is supposed to be fair and equal, a nobler system that escapes the salacious spell of the profit-motive. If government cant even prevent its own workers from feeling exploited, it is hard to grasp how anyone can think the state is the effective remedy to all inequality in other areas of society. The institution of the government-backed union, with its corollary wage and labor laws, adds a giant impediment to the economy, creating unemployment, a skewed price system, and incentivizes the un-productivity of labor. There is absolutely a place for labor unions in society, as the individual worker is in a worse bargaining position than is his employer, and he may not have access to all of the relevant knowledge regarding the prevailing wages for a given industry.

But when coupled with state-power, unions become tools for cartelizing the labor force of various industries. From there, they can only help themselves at the expense of all others. The Labor Union-State is often said to be in direct opposition to the Corporate-State, but in reality each of them both have similar motivations to harm the consumer at-large. Like the union, the large corporation has perverse incentives to lobby for government privilege as well. The Corporate-State is bolstered by an enormous apparatus of regulations, tariffs, exclusive contracts, tax subsidies/impositions, guaranteed credit, grants, price-fixing, as well as bail-outs and nationalizations. We may add the cartels established by intellectual property laws like patent, trademark, and copyright, as well as the cartels resulting from licensing, permits, and certificationsall of these serve to help the wealthy corporate class, at the utter expense of everyone else. The dizzying array of collusion between business and state found in the modern American economy has transformed a once fairly-free market into a quasi-fascist corporate-state. Fascism has many characteristics, including nationalism and other cultural values, but politicoeconomically, fascism is essentially the joint-rule of society by government and corporations. Each of the government-measures just listed above gives an artificial benefit to some politically well-connected firm (primarily on Wall Street) or, conversely, puts restrictions on and hampers smaller competitors who have not curried political-favor. The cumulative effect is to centralize wealth into the ruling class of corporate-statists, always extracting money from the lower and middle classes and entrenching it into the network of monolith state-backed firms. Many of these corporations actually have government officials as shareholders, or have them sitting on their boards of directors. This is known as the infamous revolving door between business and state, most prominent within the FDA and the military-industrial-complex.32 Corporate welfare33 is yet another cog in the machine of the state. Strong outrage toward corporatism has been voiced by the likes of the Occupy Wall Street movement, yet the hue and cry is almost exclusively directed toward the private sector, when in reality government is the primary reason any of this is ever allowed to happen. Corporations are often blamed for buying state-power, but if there were no power for sale in the first place, none of this could possibly occur. Nobody else but the politician is in a position to grant special privilege to corporations and banks. It must therefore be reasoned that government is the primary culprit here, not business.

If corporations are allowedindeed, encouragedto pander to the state to change the rules of the game, why would anybody expect them not to exploit this? The Occupy crowd call for more regulationswhich are actually harmfulbut even assuming the best of scenarios where they could accomplish what they claim to, does anybody actually believe the government and the corporations who it sells its power to are ever going to heed any sort of laws or regulations? Tens of thousands of regulations were on the books before the 2007-2008 housing crash in the United States, they did not prevent the same old scenario from playing out, as it has consistently throughout American history. Corporate and bank collusion always create the familiar cycle of booms and busts, but this will be addressed below. If the easiest way to succeed in the establishment-corporate world is to lobby to the state, and if all of the big competitors are doing the same thing, it creates a runaway-train phenomenon where the only way to get a leg-up is to use political aggression to help yourself or harm your adversaries. But the corruption in regard to corporations is completely dwarfed by the outright wickedness of the state-banking system. The American central banking cartel, the Federal Reserve, is possibly the most destructive institution on the face of the planet.34 The legislation that would create the Fed was devised by a group of bankers, in secret, on Jekyll Island,35 Georgia. So secret was this meeting that the conspirators traveled in a special passenger car and used fake names to avoid attention. Apparently these men thought that what they were doing was in some way criminal or corrupt, and if so, they were right. On top of fractional-reserve banking,36 which allows for artificial expansionary credit booms, the Fed is also the federal states money-printer.37 When the U.S. government decides it wants to debase the dollar, it calls up the Federal Reserve to do the deed. The Fed is often said to be private, but this is absurd. Truly private banks are not created by acts of Congress, nor are they bestowed with special rights and privileges which nobody in the private sector could ever hope to attain. The nominally private nature of the Fed was originally intended to keep the central bank independent of government, a plan which has completely backfired. The Fed is highly politically-active, and rarely engages in behavior at variance with the interests of the American federal government.

On top of allowing the government to finance imperial wars of aggression, the money-printing engaged by the Fed spurs on the process of inflation.38 Inflation is socially-destructive because it dilutes the purchasing-power of a currency. When more units of money chase a relatively stable sum of material goods and services in the economy, prices rise. Staple goods, like milk and gasoline, skyrocket in price over the decades as the process of inflation is continued. And because almost nobody in the general populace understands a thing about economics, the ravages of inflation cause an outcry for more welfare, higher wages, more regulation, etc. Instead of blaming the Fed for high prices and an inflated money supply, the common citizen aims his anger toward the small gas station and grocery store owner. As weve seen, all of this public demand for government counter-measures can only compound the problems that already exist, leading to even more public commands for additional government intervention. The great economist Ludwig von Mises almost a century ago pointed out the exponential growth of government-created problems. Their attempted solutions complicate matters even further, and until this process is put to a halt, there is no end to the disasters which may be brought forth. The Feds destruction doesnt end with fractional-reserve banking and fiat money-printing, though. Americas central bank often intervenes to artificially set interest rates. When interest is pushed below the natural market rate, this spurs on mal-investment, primarily in the higher stages of production, like capital goods and the mining raw materials. Interest rates play a vital role in coordinating investments across time in any modern industrial economy. The normal market function of the interest rate is to signal to entrepreneurs and investors that consumers are generally saving their money, instead of spending it. When people save, they refrain from consuming resources and this frees them up for longer-term investment projects. The relatively greater amount of money saved also allows for banks to make cheaper loans, because their pool of loanable-funds is more abundant. Putting this all together, the interest rate allows an investor to gauge consumption in society and determine whether or not a longterm project would be fruitful. When rates are low, this means credit is cheaper, and thus makes such long term projects more attractive. However, when the Fed arbitrarily sets the interest rate, usually very low, the signal is sent out to investors to begin their time-consuming projects. Yet, at the same time, the populace is not actually saving their money, nor are they using up fewer resources.

Somewhere along the line, a cluster of errors is revealed and many entrepreneurs realize their projects are simply unsustainable, and this can send the economy into a downturn, not to mention causes immense waste of time and resources. This process is known as a business cycle,39 and every major cycle in U.S. history has been brought on by the various actions of a central bank. Economic depressions are the result of government intervention, expansionary credit, money printing, and tampering with interest rates, thus harming the whole of society and further oppressing the already downtrodden lower and middle classes. As already alluded to, the Federal Reserve System also gives government the impetus to wage offensive wars against vastly out-gunned foreign nations.40 This brings us to our third, and final, government myth: the myth of the Warfare-State. It is oft-alleged that without a massive military-industrial-complex, hundreds of overseas bases, and colossal defense budgets, the United States would be at the mercy of for eign invaders and terrorists. This claim might seem valid if one has no historical context of the aggressive posturing of the United States government and armed forces. It is said that people across the world hate our freedoms and culture, and so seek to destroy us. We are said to be in constant danger from extremist zealots who would gladly die for the cause of harming America in any way possible. The modern-day bogeyman is found in various Middle Eastern nations like Syria, Iraq, and Iran. As the Cold War specter of Communism has proven to be incapable of offering a real threat since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in the 1990s, new dangers must be presented to the American populace in order to spur on the perpetual fear which is so often the health of the state. When people refer to the peril faced by America all around the globe, they almost never take into consideration the fact that the United States may have created these threats. This phenomenon is known as blowback,41 and it occurs when a belligerent nation provokes unexpected retaliations from their victim. The dangers presented to America by foreign aggressors are almost exclusively the result of blowback. The countless military occupations and interventions of the U.S. government over the last century have fomented a radical hatred of America and Americans.

For example, has anyone considered the possibility that some Iranians might hate the U.S. because once upon a time in the 1950s a CIA-backed coup overthrew the democraticallyelected Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and propped up the brutal42 military dictatorship of the Shah?43 Mosaddegh sought to nationalize Irans oil industry, and the U.S.backed coup reversed this process to allow Western corporations continued participation in the Iranian oil trade. Not that the nationalization of an industry is usually a good thing, but the point is that rebellion against U.S. interests is not tolerated, regardless of what country it is, and there is no hesitation in disrupting, bombing, or somehow subverting a non-compliant country. This coup-de-tat eventually led to the fermenting of radical-Islamic factions in Iran, which culminated in the bloody Iranian Revolution of 1979.44 Further down the line, Iran and Iraq go to war, and the United States backs Saddam Hussein 45 with money, supplies, and bio-chemical weapons (including nerve gas, Anthrax, and the Bubonic Plague),46 which may or may not have been used in the mass killing of Iraqi-Kurds by Hussein during this war. In addition, U.S. economic sanctions in the post-Gulf War period contributed to the death of over 500,000 Iraqi children, about which U.S. diplomat Madeline Albright said on television it was worth it.47 On top of this, strategic bombing of Iraqi sewage systems in the most recent Iraq war have contributed to new Cholera epidemics48, as well as the general filth and unsanitary conditions which result in even more death and suffering of an already-oppressed people. An entire series of books could be devoted to the list of moral outrages supported or directly undertaken by the United States military apparatus, as well as other Western nations, but these few anecdotes should begin to prove the point. Hatred for the United States, especially from the Middle East, is perfectly reasonable and justified! In case after case, Western military powers have continually bombed, invaded, and oppressed the populations of various Middle Eastern nations.49 In the post-9/11 period, this hasnt changed, and in fact has drastically escalated. With new undeclared wars and interventions ranging from Iraq and Afghanistan, to Yemen, Libya, and Syria (to give a small sample), it seems the United States empire is nowhere near finished in its military aggression abroad.

The 9/11 attacks themselves (not to address here the mountains of inconsistencies within the official 9/11 story)50 were a perfect example of blowback. Not only did the United States provoke such an attack, but our government covered up and lied about it at almost every conceivable turn. The majority of the population knows essentially nothing about what really occurred on September 11th, or the real reasons why any terrorists would ever want to attack us in the first place. For every government we overthrow, for every country we bomb, for every man, woman, and child murdered at the hands of U.S. soldiers, hordes of new terrorists are created and incited to radical hatred of the West. They dont need religion or ideology to inform their malice, all they have to do is live in their own country for a day, a month, a year, a decade under U.S. occupation. Im not sure what more they could ever need. Can anyone imagine how the U.S. citizenry would react if, say, China decided we were being oppressed and needed to be liberated (and they would be right!), and so sent thousands of troops, tanks, and drones to occupy our country? How many American insurgents would take to the streets to fight them off? How many terrorists would want to take revenge against the invading foreigners who would be slaughtering our people, beating down our doors in the middle of the night, torturing and imprisoning us, all in the name of our own liberation, precisely as we do in the Mid-East today? Government proponents typically have no problem imposing terror and chaos across the world, yet never once think of how we would like it if the very same thing were done to us, here at home. This is the vilest and most blatant form of hypocrisy and it characterizes the myth of American exceptional-ism.51 The utter annihilation left in the wake of the U.S. armed forces isnt the sum of the problem here, though. As with the Welfare and Police-State, the billions of dollars dumped into militaryspending contribute to domestic poverty and crime, wasting the resources that could make society rich. Again, if these billions were left in the hands of the productive private sector, untold sums of wealth could be created, untold jobs could be generated, untold prosperity and flourishing of our nation (and the rest of the world) could take place. The private military-contractors who are now running wild abroad also add to this heap of corruption. Ever-more billions are lost to crooked contractors, who deliberately destroy piles of equipment in order to embellish their costs.52

Many firms (like Dick Cheneys Halliburton-KBR or Erik Princes Blackwater) are paid on a costplus53 basis, meaning that their pay is determined by how much they spend on personnel and equipment. Examples documented in various films54 and news reports include the burning of mounds of brand-new, in-the-box computers and blowing up trucks that simply have flat tires in order to get new ones; the more that is spent, the more they are paidin tax-dollars. The notion that such contractors are at all private is also a ludicrous one. A company that gets the majority of their funding from exclusive, no-bid government contracts is not a market firm, but a branch of government that gets to socialize their costs/risks, and privatize their profit. But hey, the banks and prison-contractors get to do it as well, so one may suppose that this is a fair deal. I wish to push my argument even further here and claim that were it not for U.S. global military hegemony and oppression, this country wouldnt even need a government-military at all.55 Contrary to American doctrine, the founding revolutionaries of this nation were not demi-gods, yet they were not geo-politically ignorant either. The warnings aired about a standing-military, as well as entangling foreign alliances (NATO), were serious and valid, and the primary reason there is so much complexity and tension around the world today is directly due to the fact that the U.S. and Western powers constantly have ignored this advice. At any point in the last 100 years at least, the U.S. has been involved in some sort of conflict, intervention, or war with another country.56 The same hatred that is fostered in the Middle East is created anywhere else the U.S. flag is forcibly thrust abroad. The strongest case for the necessity of a government-run military is certainly that of World War 2. Since this topic is full of myths, ever-so-commonly touted as truth, we should address this with due consideration. The Axis powers were arguably one of the biggest threats to liberty that the world has ever seen. And yet, even here it can still be effectively argued that all of this was avoidable, if only the U.S. wouldnt have intervened and made the problems worse at every given opportunity. First of all, when America entered World War 1, we allowed for a much more brutal domination of Germany. Were we to have refrained from entering the war in 1914, Europe may have fought a long, drawn-out, bitter war. Such wars, as are historically common to Europe, tended to tire the population of conflict and strife, and periods of peace usually followed.

Instead, the forced unconditional surrender, resulting in the Versailles treaty,57 put Germany under crushing war reparations, harming the German citizenry who had no choice in entering the war in the first place. The resulting socio-economic climate in Germany58 created the perfect conditions for a totalitarian fascist like Hitler to rise to power. This could have possibly been prevented, but was not. You see, military contractors are not a new thing; they were around back then too! Where there is war, there is profit. Where there is war, government can implement temporary programs, agencies, and regulations that never go away. In short, there is always incentive to wage war so long as a corporate-state exists, making it highly profitable to do so. The steps that could have avoided future wars were not taken, and seldom ever are. This would help to explain why Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to ignore his foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor gleaned from decoded Japanese communications.59 This gave America a legitimate reason to enter the war (see the rarely-mentioned McCollum memo60 which outlines a strategy to provoke Japan into an overt act of war, devised by the U.S. one year before the Pearl Harbor attack) and thus allow the U.S. government to use all of the age-old dirty tricks of the Warfare-State. Here also various steps could have been taken to alleviate some of the damage. Instead of allowing a surprise attack to occur, instantly launching the U.S. into the conflict, careful measures could have been taken to meticulously plan a strategy for dealing with the Axis with as little military power as possible. The situation was not as dire as it is typically made to seem, the U.S. armed forces were not the worlds only hope and much of the perils we faced could have been averted. It also seems quite ridiculous to claim that America was safer with its military forces spread all over Europe and Asia, rather than concentrated at home. Sometimes the best defense is a good offense, but in this case it simply cost American lives as well as direly-needed resources, as we were, at the time, in the throes of the Great Depression. I must address an often-touted myth regarding World War 2 and the Great Depression; that our economy was greatly helped by the war and that it was actually our sole salvation in escaping the economic downturn. This is possibly the most vapid, outlandish claim one could ever conjure up.61 If war can actually get an economy out of trouble, why in the world are we just sitting here during our Great Recession?

I have a plan to heal the economies of the world and blast us into financial prosperity never seen by the likes of the human race. My plan: have every nation pour all of their resources in assembling vast fleets of ships, full of arms and weapons and resourcesof course unmanned, no need to take lives in this process. We shall sail our fleets into the middle of the ocean and annihilate them from above, using bombs. Thats it. Thats the plan. All that is ever accomplishing during war is the diversion of societys resources into destruction, how anyone could think this brings prosperity is beyond this authors scope of comprehension. Taking tremendous amounts of material goods and obliterating them, this is supposed to be good for the economy, and, by proxy, the rest of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. Going on this reasoning, we should be able to enrich the people of Earth by blowing up all of their wealth with artillery shells. And as far as employment goes, employing people to do things that nobody voluntary chooses is neither a genuine way to alleviate poverty nor a way to elude economic standstill. But I digress, returning to the prior point; the American government could have tried to avoid or minimize the destruction of Europe and the mass extermination of millions of human beings during the two World Wars, including Americans, yet the corporate-states thirst for power, of course, did not allow this to take place. The common catchphrase is that wed all be speaking German now was it not for our entering WW2. It is nothing but sheer nonsense. Does anybody truly believe that Germany could have invaded and conquered the United States? Japan thought about it, but concluded there would be a gun waiting behind every blade of grass,62 and that because of this, invasion was impossible. They likely werent here referring to the military, but the armed-populace of America. No political leader is going to commit to the invasion of a country of 300 million people, where if even 1/3rd are armed, they are doomed. To again lend credence to the American revolutionaries, their stress on an armed-citizenry and private militias were serious and well thought-out ideas. Guns are not just for hunting and sport, but to provide deterrence from crime and invasion. The ironic, yet tragic, example of an effective armed-populace is found in Afghanistan. How many times now has a major world superpower tried to conquer them? The Soviet Union more than once, Britain, the U.S. now, and they simply cannot decisively win.

Even with a vastly overpowering arsenal of bombs and technology, the fat, inefficient, government military cannot keep up with the rag-tag bands of native guerrillas fighting for their country. The same was true in Vietnam. I of course dont mean that the U.S. didnt/hasnt slaughtered thousands of Afghanis (or Vietnamese for that matter), but only that no military defeat could be conclusively attained (of course assuming for the moment that military victory was the goal, not purely the enrichment of war-industrialists). With an armed-public, and especially with decentralized militias, it becomes highly unattractive for any conquering tyrant to attempt to invade a country. Differing from a centralized statemilitary force, a decentralized network of militias wont all surrender at one time , as one militia leader cant surrender for another in some remote location. An invader would likely have to go and take over every single town, a daunting task militarily. (And, moreover, without an existing-structure of bureaucracy and a state-mechanism for taxation, the prospect of invasion becomes yet more discouraging. Instead of taking over a ready-to-go tax farm, the would-be conqueror arrives at a forest which he must first clear in order to build any tax-structure at all.) If it werent for American intervention, provocation, exploitation, and outright war with other nations, it is unlikely we would have to worry about foreign terrorism or attack. At one time in American history, we were relatively non-interventionist, both domestically and abroad. During this time we became known as the global bastion of human liberty, free trade, and opportunity. When your country creates wealth and prosperity for the whole world to enjoy, it is not the case that everybody wants to kill and invade you. Only when your country makes strides toward Empire and constantly bangs their war drums does the rest of the world begin to hate you. Only when your country bombs and murders the children and elderly of foreign countries do such foreigners learn to despise you. Empire is not, of course, unique to the United States alone; this country has just been the modern exemplification. From the Romans, to the Spanish, to the Dutch, to the Chinese and the British, over the centuries governments everywhere have collectively dominated the planet and murdered hundreds of millions of their own citizens, in an act called democide.63 This doesnt include war, only governments killing their own people. Combining with democide the lives lost to armed conflict, and the ravages of poverty manufactured by political regimes, this equates to an amount of crime, of suffering and death, which the human mind fails to sufficiently grapple with.

With the advent of the nuclear bomb, not only are various nations and regions in dire jeopardy, but the entirety of the human race. Even if we trust our current leaders here and now, it is the most extreme form of irresponsibility to leave even the possibility of nuclear warfare squarely in their hands. Reflection on the past offers a plethora of evidence which should, but rarely does, encourage individuals to view this institution with extreme skepticism, if not outright disgust and hatred. Instead of fearing the absence of government, the greatest terror which confronts man today is, indeed, its presence. The sprawling black record of the state reaches back into the eons. There has simply never been a government which has kept itself limited. Those who proclaim to write the laws are never bound by them, and never can be. One thing which the U.S. A., the U.S.S.R., Maos China, and Nazi Germany all have in common is the fact that each of them was a Constitutional Republic. It is hopelessly nave to think that a piece of paper could ever restrain t he most corrupt, villainous gang that has ever plagued society. The history of government is the Earthly manifestation of evil wrought through the bayonet, the gendarme, the concentration camp, and the hangman. The greatest crimes of bygone days have been carried out by societys rulers, its kings, its political classes and the hordes of police, soldiers, and bureaucrats who serve them. Every population eventually learns to accept, even enjoy, their servitude to some extent. Cults of State emerge, and mythologies are devised by the ruled to justify their own enslavement. Rather than face the fact that one is helpless at the hands of a tyrant, it is much more convenient to pretend that we control government, or even worse, that we are government, and that this institution helps the people in ways which ordinary human beings cannot. We must understand that we are not government, and they are not us. The Divine Right of Kings has never departed from the basis of all government, yet only transforms over the generations until it is barely recognizable. Social institutions and technology change, but the superstitions never go away. The myths are still there, the supernatural power still remains. The people are made to grant glory and praise to the rulers, yet among their ranks are, at best, incompetent and bungling dilettantes, and at worst the vilest, lowest breed of jackals, wolves, snakes, and dogs. The state faith is the most dangerous ideology known to mankind. It compels the virtuous to act at variance with their conscience. It turns morality on its head and infects the body politic with ignorance and corruption.

Its creed bestows power and sway that no man should ever have access to; it bestows the right to expropriate, to coerce, to imprison the lowly class of the ruled to favor the high-priests of the Sacra Ordo ex Statum. No man fails to abuse it. Government mythology has become so common that it has altogether replaced rational thought with low slogans and cheap platitudes. It is high time that somebody thought clearly about these issues and rebutted the empty arguments of government proponents everywhere. No progress can be made until the minds of men have been changed. The only way to victory is to actively fight the prevailing wisdom of the age. The existing structure of power will always act to maintain itself; only with a strong voice of intellectual opposition can it be defeated and finally destroyed. The state is truly too dangerous to be tolerated. Together we must smash its mythos into 1000 fragments and scatter them to the winds of history.

Note: Many of the references provided are simply to help illustrate the various points made in the essay and to direct the reader toward additional relevant information. It is always encouraged that the reader does their own research. Do not take these citations as themselves authoritative.
1

Warren v. District of Columbia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia#Decision

2

Number of laws on the books: http://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-question-how-many-federal-laws-are-there/

3

Three Felonies a day: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842

4

The 18 Amendment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

5

th

Effects of alcohol prohibition: http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa157.pdf

6

Crime & prohibition: http://www.albany.edu/~wm731882/organized_crime1_final.html

7

More on organized crime & prohibition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States#Organized_crime

8

Failures of the Drug War: A) http://www.drugwardistortions.org/distortion13.htm B) http://www.drugpolicy.org/drug-war-statistics C) http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1828&context=fss_papers

Iran-Contra scandal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US More on U.S. drug-running: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/nsaebb2.htm

10

Bill Clinton & drug trafficking: http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MENA/mena.php

11

Adult prison population (1980-2009): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/U.S._adult_correctional_population_timeline.gif

12

Incarceration during Reagan Administration up from 50,000 to 400,000 (1980-1997): http://www.drugpolicy.org/new-solutions-drug-policy/brief-history-drug-war More on prison populations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#Prison_population
13

Crack-to-Powder cocaine punishment ratio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act#Background

14

Race & the Drug War: http://www.drugpolicy.org/race-and-drug-war

15

Incarceration rates graph (1925-2008): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png

16

Vices Are Not Crimes Lysander Spooner: http://mises.org/daily/3867

17

2.5 Trillion spent on drug war since 1971: http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/07/wood.failed.war.on.drugs/ Drug War clock: http://www.drugsense.org/cms/wodclock
18

Money spent on incarceration: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/03/14/states-spend-times-incarcerating-educating-studies-say464156987/

19

Militarized police: A) http://agovernmentofwolves.com/2013/05/09/on-target-pressure-points-militarized-police/ B) https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/militarization-police

20

Failures of the Welfare-State: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/more-welfare-more-poverty

21

Effects of the Welfare-State on the black family: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1672

22

More on welfare and the black family: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/slavery-did-not-destroy-black-families.-welfare-did/

23

Mises on the minimum wage: http://mises.org/daily/5865/MinimumWage-Rates

24

Failures of minimum wage legislation: A) http://mises.org/daily/6638/Welfare-Minimum-Wages-and-Unemployment B) http://mises.org/daily/6097/ C) https://mises.org/daily/2130 D) http://tomwoods.com/blog/the-minimum-wage-in-one-paragraph/

25

Walter Block on the minimum wage & the hurdles it sets up for unskilled labor: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/walter-e-block/want-to-stab-the-poor-and-help-labor-unions/
26

Economics in One Lesson - Henry Hazlitt - Pg. 121 Chap. 19 Do Unions Really Raise Wages?: http://mises.org/books/economics_in_one_lesson_hazlitt.pdf

27

Labor unions harmful effects: https://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=564

28

Labor unions taking undue credit: https://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=511

29

Child labor & working conditions: http://mises.org/daily/3446

30

Adam Smiths Invisible hand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

31

Employers pay twice the minimum wage on average: http://ycharts.com/indicators/average_hourly_earnings

32

The revolving door between business and state: A) http://people.howstuffworks.com/what-is-the-revolving-door.htm B) http://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/

33

Corporate welfare: A) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez8I8VGLNUw B) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_welfare

34

The Federal Reserve & the case against it: A) http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System B) https://mises.org/daily/2870 C) https://mises.org/books/fed.pdf
35

The Feds conspiratorial origins as told by G. Edward Griffin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Edward_Griffin#The_Creature_from_Jekyll_Island

36

Fractional reserve banking & economic instability: https://mises.org/daily/6100/Fractional-Reserves-and-Economic-Instability

37

The Fed & fiat currency: A) http://mises.org/daily/4130 B) http://mises.org/daily/4684/The-Curse-of-Fiat-Money C) http://mises.org/books/whathasgovernmentdone.pdf

38

The Fed & inflation: A) http://mises.org/rothbard/agd/chapter5.asp B) http://mises.org/rothbard/agd/chapter4.asp C) http://mises.org/daily/6320/How-the-Fed-Rules-and-Inflates

39

The (Austrian) business cycle (theory): A) http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Austrian_Business_Cycle_Theory B) https://mises.org/daily/672

40

War & the Fed: A) http://mises.org/daily/3828/How-the-Fed-Helped-Pay-for-World-War-I B) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulDSBu2OTXg

41

Blowback: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_(intelligence)
42

Iranian Shahs secret police force SAVAK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAVAK

43

CIA & Iran Coup: A) http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/19/politics/cia-iran-1953-coup/ B) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat#The_coup_and_CIA_records

44

Iran Revolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

45

U.S. backing of Saddam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_war

46

Rumsfeld and U.S. government help Iraq get chemical weapons: A) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_war B) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-153210/Rumsfeld-helped-Iraq-chemical-weapons.html C) http://rense.com/general29/wesold.htm
47

Half million Iraqi children die, Albright says worth it: http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/we-think-the-price-is-worth-it/
48

Cholera in Iraq: A) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Iraq_cholera_outbreak B) http://www.emro.who.int/images/stories/iraq/documents/cholera_in_IRaq_2012.pdf

49

U.S. foreign policy in Middle East: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_policy_in_the_Middle_East

50

Government lies regarding 9/11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuC_4mGTs98 Also see Operation Northwoods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods U.S. planned to stage a false-flag plane hijacking (sound familiar?) in order to establish a pretext to war, in this case with Cuba. Only one of the multiple false-flag terror events staged by the U.S. government, but unlike Operation Northwoods, many of them are actually carried out.
51

American Exceptional-ism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

52

Military contractor waste: A) http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/contractor-waste-iraq-KBR B) http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/07/15/pentagon-wastes-billions-on-contractors-and-lack-ofoversight-while-searching-for-cuts C) http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/fraudulent-defense-contractors-paid-1-trillion

53

Cost-plus contracts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-plus_contract

54

Documentary film demonstrating the wastefulness of military contractors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_for_Sale:_The_War_Profiteers

55

The private production of defense: A) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_defense_agency B) http://mises.org/document/1893/The-Private-Production-of-Defense C) https://mises.org/daily/2538

56

List of U.S. military interventions: http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

57

Versailles war reparations lead to WW2: A) http://lemoyne.edu/Portals/11/pdf_content/library/101paper.pdf B) http://mises.org/daily/2347#3 C) http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=256

58

Weimar Republic hyper-inflation: http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Inflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic

59

Foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor attack: A) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32763.htm B) http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?ID=103

60

Provoking Japan during WW2 & the McCollum Memo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollum_memo

61

World War 2 did not end the Great Depression: http://mises.org/daily/5069

62

It remains unclear among historians whether this is a genuine quote, but the moral of the story remains the unchanged. Armed nations are much safer from crime and invasion than un-armed or dis-armed populations are.
63

Democide stats and numbers: A) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide#Research_on_democide B) https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE5.HTM