Violence from Prohibition Laws: Atimonan Killing

I have been repeatedly pointing out here that prohibition statutes engender unnecessary violence. Worst, violence have always been arbitrary instituted by political authorities in the name of supposed moral uprightness. 

Today’s headlines shows of a good example, from the Inquirer.net

The gun battle in Atimonan town, Quezon province, that left 13 people dead on Sunday was the culmination of a three-month police operation approved by the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) headed by Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa Jr.

But Ochoa denied there was any mission order from the commission authorizing the police-military operation in Atimonan.

The operation, code-named “Coplan Armado,” had only one target: Victor “Vic” Siman, operator of the numbers racket “jueteng” disguised as government-sanctioned Small Town Lottery (STL) in Laguna and Batangas provinces in southern Luzon…

A Philippine Daily Inquirer source in the Philippine National Police described the 12 others killed  in the alleged shootout between security forces and Siman’s group as “collateral damage.”

Such violence has been exercised against alleged crimes based on “vices” or what American individualist and anarchist Lysander Spooner calls as “Vices are not crimes”

It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others.

Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property — no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.

Jueteng is about gambling and personal vice. The ban on this has created a shadow industry, like all others, prostitution, drugs and etc... Ironically, on the other hand, the Philippine government promotes the "casino" industry.

Yet the war on jueteng has been an endless crusade by the Philippine government that has hardly attained proximity to its stated political ‘moral’ goals.

As pointed out in the past, the downfall of the ousted administration in EDSA II, has been tied to this. The difference is that because the involved had been the top political brass, then “no killing” had been dispensed with.

But of course, application of laws has been different with people with lower levels of political power.  I call this political inequality.

Unfortunately, the public has been benumbed or inured to “collateral damage”, which echoes on the my edited version of Stalin’s axiom “one death is a tragedy, one million dozen is a statistic”, or that “collateral damage” has been perceived as “reasonable” for as long as government does it, or has been carried out with good intentions, and or for as long as this happens to the others (and not to them)

The tragedy here is that the public doesn’t realize which has been more immoral: violence as a means to a (questionable) end or personal vices.

Yet the above example exhibits the institutional violence inherent in all governments, as the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises once pointed out (bold mine)

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

To draw attention to this fact does not imply any reflection upon government activities. In stark reality, peaceful social cooperation is impossible if no provision is made for violent prevention and suppression of antisocial action on the part of refractory individuals and groups of individuals. One must take exception to the often-repeated phrase that government is an evil, although a necessary and indispensable evil. What is required for the attainment of an end is a means, the cost to be expended for its successful realization. It is an arbitrary value judgment to describe it as an evil in the moral connotation of the term. However, in face of the modern tendencies toward a deification of government and state, it is good to remind ourselves that the old Romans were more realistic in symbolizing the state by a bundle of rods with an ax in the middle than are our contemporaries in ascribing to the state all the attributes of God.

In upholding an unjust populist edict, the recourse to violence means that government creates more victims via repression than attaining its political goal. It also means the government has hardly been about the fiction of social justice but about the preservation, expansion and the showcase of political power.