Quote of the Day: Governments rely on indirect coercion

Governments rely on indirect coercion because direct coercion seems brutal, unfair, and wrong.  If the typical American saw the police bust down a stranger's door to arrest an undocumented nanny and the parents who hired her, the typical American would morally side with the strangers.  If the typical American saw regulators confiscate a stranger's expired milk, he'd side with the strangers.  If the typical American found out his neighbor narced on a stranger for failing to pay use tax on an out-of-state Internet purchase, he'd damn his neighbor, not the stranger.  Why?  Because each of these cases activates the common-sense moral intuition that people have a duty to leave nonviolent people alone.

Switching to indirect coercion is a shrewd way for government to sedate our moral intuition.  When government forces CostCo to collect Social Security taxes, the typical American doesn't see some people violating their duty to leave other people alone.  Why?  Because they picture CostCo as an inhuman "organization," not a very human "bunch of people working together."  Government's trick, in short, is to redirect its coercion toward crucial dehumanized actors like business (and foreigners, but don't get me started).  Then government can coerce business into denying individuals a vast array of peaceful options, without looking like a bully or a busy-body.

This is from George Mason University Professor and Author Bryan Caplan at the Library of Economics and Liberty Blog

Video: Murray Rothbard: The Government is not Us

As excerpted from the Murray N. Rothbard's "For A New Liberty The Libertarian Manifesto" p.60-64.

From the Liberty Pen (hat tip Bob Wenzel)

Quote of the Day: Government is not to be trusted. Ever.

Repeat after me: Government is power.  Government is not to be trusted.  Ever.  Even if you believe that some government is and will always be necessary, that ‘necessary’ piece of government should always be regarded as a prudent lion tamer regards the big carnivorous cats that are ‘necessary’ for him to make a living.  To imagine that seemingly subdued purring lions can be trusted to be dealt with in any ways that do not include the use of strong cages, leashes, ceaseless and deep suspicion, and escape hatches is the height of romantic absurdity – wishful thinking of the most extreme and inexcusable sort.  Government is by its very nature a dangerous, untrustworthy, dishonest, arrogant, slippery entity – characteristics that are by no means reduced anywhere near to insignificance by a wide franchise, regular elections, and sturdy ink-on-parchment documents called “constitutions.”

Unless you are a high-ranking government official, government - no government – is ever “Us.”  It is always “Them.”  And They are not to be trusted.  Ever.

(italics original)

This is from Café Hayek’s Professor Don Boudreaux on Edward Snowden NSA spying expose

Quote of the Day: The State is a Soulless Machine

It is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself, and fail to develop nonviolence at any time. The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence

This quote is from Mahatma Gandhi, a political leader and inspiration to India’s independence via non-violent resistance movement, from his The Non Violent State Essay

Quote of the Day: The State Owes its Existence to Civilization

Primitive (“tribal”) societies are primitive not because they don’t have states, but because they don’t have a developed tradition of private property. This necessarily results in economic autarky and extreme poverty. Autarky and poverty in turn result in both inter-tribal biological competition (constant warfare) and the fact that there is not enough wealth to support a parasitic state. It is private property and the division of labor that led both to a decline in inter-tribal warfare and enough wealth in societies for parasitic states to feed off.

The state owes its existence to civilization, not vice versa.  And the wars that interrupt the process of civilization have been made more frequent and more bloody by the encroachment of the state on market-and-civil society.

This is from Mises Institute editor Daniel James Sanchez at the Mises Blog logically refuting the misleading comparison of the levels of violence between state and pre-state societies.

Quote of the Day: The State is Not an Instrument of Justice; It's an Instrument of Power

Think about it. If you steal my chicken or I steal your cow, this is a dispute between us; what does the government care about it? The answer should be it doesn't care at all but because the state loves power and the state does not like to share power, it likes to resolve all disputes the way it wants to resolve them. This drives up the cost and diminishes justice because it forces the disputants to follow the state's rule and the state's command and the state's way, and this does not inure to politeness, civility or even the idea that a dispute could possibly be resolved amicably and justly, without the state being involved.

The state is not an instrument of justice; it's an instrument of power

This is from Judge P. Andrew Napolitano interviewed by Anthony Wile at the Daily Bell (source lewrockwell.com)

Myth of the Greater Good: Philippine Government to ‘Blast’ Illegal Settlers for Flood Project

Recently I quoted Wendy McElroy’s the Myth of the Greater Good.

Yesterday’s headline news would seem like a great example

From Yahoo.com

The government is prepared to "blast" houses and other illegal structures along riverbanks and waterways if inhabitants refuse to transfer to safer areas, Public Works and Highways Secretary Rogelio Singson said yesterday.

Singson said President Benigno S. Aquino III has authorized the use of force to remove obstructions in the tributaries in Metro Manila and nearby provinces, citing the government's "political will" to implement its P352-billion flood control and mitigation program.

He said the government plans to relocate around 190,000 illegal settlers in the water channels as part of its efforts to reduce floods and minimize casualty during stormy weather.

"I just received instructions from the President that if push comes to shove, we will have to blast the houses if they don't leave within a certain period," Singson said in a Palace press briefing after presenting the flood control master plan to the President.

Political priorities that cater to the alleged “greater good” as shown in the above are reactive, presumptive, short term oriented and populist. Such also demonstrates the innate nature of the state.

The usual stereotyped responses by the government to fleeting immediate popular concerns are short term oriented, where the typical solution centers on throwing of more money at the problem, more regulations or prohibitions and or more taxes.

Never mind that the past centrally planned flood projects have been ineffective. Nobody questions if such fiascos have mainly been consequences of the knowledge problem and of the fragility of central planning operating on a highly complex environment. Everybody has been made to superficially think or believe that such blemishes have been mainly about the lack of money and or mismanagement and of the supposed necessity of government action.

So to address these, for politicians and the bureaucracy, such failures require even grander and more lavish projects. Of course these will be accompanied by the presumptions of expertise.

And anything that obstructs on their visions has to be met by force. Since environmentalism has been today’s politically correct theme, thus illegal settlers or squatters have become targets for coerced actions.

The so-called poor, whom were frequently used as convenient rationalizations for raising taxes, have been transformed into objects of political wrath.

Political priorities are dynamic. The shifting nature of government’s attention greatly depends on popular circumstances which dominate the headlines or which reflect on the public’s opinion.

A few months back, the public has been mesmerized with territorial claims dispute. And with calls for populist nationalism, the government’s response has been to increase their budget with implicit popular approval. According to globalsecurity.org, the Armed Forces modernization bill that would add 75 billion pesos ($1.8 billion) for defense spending over the following five years to acquire more weapons, personnel carriers, frigates and aircraft. Yet all such increases in military spending will hardly bolster the nation’s defense or do anything substantial to address the so-called controversial regional dispute.

Instead what these does is to pressure taxpayers into supporting non productive activities which will be used against them.

In the future, should there arise other popular immediate concerns such as natural calamities, e.g. earthquakes or tsunamis or others, expect the response to be the same—throw money at the problem, and wish or hope for their success.

Current political obsession over the environment comes in response to the monsoon rain flooding where popular opinion has been shaped by flawed ideas of environmental experts. One of whom has even blamed economic growth and urbanization as responsible for the current disasters.

Never mind if the citizens of the metropolis have shown increased wellbeing from economic development (table from NSO).

For the environmentalist religion, the argumentative framing has been to put up a strawman and beat them down.

The thrust of the environmental nirvana fallacy extrapolates that we should remain poor so as to allegedly “save the environment”. Yes, use one event (fallacy of composition) to highlight the need for socialist interventionist misanthropic (anti-people) policies by ignoring all other important factors.

High approval ratings thus becomes a license for political boondoggles premised on the supposed omniscience of “experts” whose reasoning can’t even pass the logical rigors of economics.

High approval ratings also mean that current policies have been designed based on the outcome most preferred by the median voter—Median Voter theory or populist politics.

Yet politics has always been a zero sum or even a negative sum activity.

So the Philippine government has turned the heat against the illegal settlers or squatters whom incidentally are mostly creatures of the state through the decriminalization of squatting or the Lina Law. The immoral statute has encouraged rampant squatting which has mostly been used by local politicians for election purposes.

Never mind too that despite the immorality of the actions of the illegal settlers who were mostly incentivized by law and became instruments of politicians, these people still have natural rights enshrined by Article 3 of the Philippine 1987 constitution (hat tip my beloved daughter) which holds that

No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor shall any person be denied the equal protection of the laws.

“The government is prepared to "blast" houses and other illegal structures” signifies that the privileges of the natural rights of life, liberty, or property only belong to the political class and to those designated by them. All the rest are standing vassals of the state and whose lives are seen merely as statistics.

This also shows that the nature of the state is institutional violence, such that violence and the threat of violence can be used indiscriminately, especially targeted against their own citizens, depending on the caprices of those that wield them.

As the great Professor Ludwig von Mises explained,

State and government are the social apparatus of violent coercion and repression. Such an apparatus, the police power, is indispensable in order to prevent antisocial individuals and bands from destroying social cooperation. Violent prevention and suppression of antisocial activities benefit the whole of society and each of its members. But violence and oppression are none the less evils and corrupt those in charge of their application. It is necessary to restrict the power of those in office lest they become absolute despots. Society cannot exist without an apparatus of violent coercion. But neither can it exist if the office holders are irresponsible tyrants free to inflict harm on those they dislike.

In reality, both illegal settlers and the threat of violence against them, to justify the administration’s new pet flood project, signify ethically as two wrongs which do not make right.

Yet for the current crop of politicians, high approval ratings translates to political superciliousness and the license to conduct political repression which elevates the risks of a tyrannical rule.

History shows us of the myth of the rational voter where people junk rationality in terms of politics to support “systematically biased ideas concerning economics” or widespread social ideas grounded on economic ignorance.

Populist politics have been premised on what people want to hear rather than what they need to hear.

Nazi chief Adolf Hitler’s popular rise to power should be a magnificent example. Chart from Spiegel Online

At the end of the day, the “greater good” is in essence the bamboozling of the gullible public using feel good political themes, for them to support the self-interests and the priorities of the political class coursed through institutionalized violence.

To Fix the Culture of Secrecy, Reduce Government’s Role in Society

Internet sites as Wikileaks and Anonymous has gone on exposing much of government “secrets” through "leaks", thereby putting immense pressure on governments to become more “transparent”.

For some politicians and experts in the US, the way to deal with a “culture of leaks” translates to the management classification of information.

This from the CNN,

At the end of July, the Senate intelligence committee marked up legislation drafted in response to recent high-profile leaks of classified information. The committee's chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, claims that the bill will address the "culture of leaks" in Washington. But the leaks are a symptom of the intelligence community's culture of secrecy -- and the bill would make that problem worse in a host of ways.

Any insider will tell you that the government classifies far too much information. Top military and national security officials estimate that between 50% and 90% of classified documents could safely be released. That adds up to a massive amount of unnecessary secrecy when one considers there were 92 million decisions to classify information in 2011 alone.

The WikiLeaks disclosures featured some vivid examples, such as a cable from an American diplomat who classified his description of a typical wedding in the province of Dagestan.

Put simply, officials who routinely see innocuous documents stamped "Secret" lose respect for the system, and that puts all secrets, the real ones as well as the purely nominal ones, at risk.

Excessive classification also means that even low-level or nonsensitive government positions often require clearances. One in every 50 American adults now has access to classified information, not a winning formula for keeping secrets.

The Senate bill, however, does nothing serious to address the problem of overclassification. Indeed, it perpetuates the fiction that all classified information poses a dire threat.

The bill strips intelligence community employees of their pensions if the Director of National Intelligence decides they leaked classified information, even if the information reveals only that Dagestani weddings last three days. It revokes the clearances of officials who disclose the existence of classified covert operations -- even if the operations, like the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, are in the past and could not possibly be jeopardized by disclosure.

Worse, the Senate bill extends the shroud of secrecy to encompass even unclassified information. Intelligence officials already must submit any publications that discuss their work to their agencies for pre-publication review and approval; under the bill, they must submit "anticipated oral remarks" as well. On its face, the provision could require pre-publication review for dinner party conversations.

This is an example of how politics addresses symptoms rather than the disease.

In reality, the political institution called the government operates on the principle of mandated organized violence.

And much of these acts of violence and repression have been deliberately concealed from the public for reasons which works to the interests or benefits of the political authorities.

It is only when violence has been seen as popular or politically expedient, when these are made public, or when they are uncovered or exposed by media.

In short, the political nature of governments has been one of advancing the culture of secrecy or of scapegoatism. Transparency, thus, is nothing but a political jingoistic charade.

SM Oliva, formerly of the Mises Institute, has this highly relevant quote

“Transparency” is a buzzword associated with all sorts of good-government movements. But it’s something of a libertarian Trojan horse. No government can ever be transparent, for that would rob of it of its very substance. All monopoly government is predicated on the ability to actively mislead and misdirect the majority — the public — away from the truth, whether it’s political truth, economic truth, or personal truth. Even government attempts at transparency are themselves usually little more than misdirection by another name. One can be transparent in such a way as to satisfy most inquisitors while revealing nothing that compromises the basic pillars of the state.

Bottom line: Managing information classifications will hardly solve on the issue of the “culture of secrecy” the latter of which signifies on the essence of government. To attain government “transparency” extrapolates to the vast reduction or retrenchment of government’s role in society.

And another thing; the pressure by Wikileaks and by other social media outfits on governments reveals of the process of the slomo ungluing of centralized political structure. Centralized institutions have been feeling the heat from, and or have been fervently fighting against, the forces of decentralization.

10 Signs of a Sociopath; The Worst Get on Top

The recent unfortunate slapping incident during a TV debate by a Greek politician looks like signs of a sociopath.

Naturalnews.com talks about the risks of associating with people with sociopath traits.(bold original)

Sociopaths are masters at influence and deception. Very little of what they say actually checks out in terms of facts or reality, but they're extremely skillful at making the things they say sound believable, even if they're just making them up out of thin air. Here, I'm going to present quotes and videos of some legendary sociopaths who convinced everyday people to participate in mass suicides. And then I'm going to demonstrate how and why similar sociopaths are operating right now... today.

Why cover this subject? I've seen a lot of people get hoodwinked, scammed or even harmed by sociopaths, and it bewilders me that people are so easily sucked into their destructive influence. I want to share with NaturalNews readers the warning signs of sociopaths so that you can spot them, avoid them, and save yourself the trouble of being unduly influenced by them.

Much of this information is derived from the fascinating book,The Sociopath Next Door(http://www.amazon.com/Sociopath-Next-Door-Martha-Stout/dp/0767915828), which says that 4% of the population are sociopaths. The book is a fascinating read.

Aside from being hoodwinked from their glib persuasions, sociopaths or psychopaths don’t take the responsibility for their actions, and thus, resort to blaming others for their mistakes, as explained by author Michael Cross (video on this link, thanks to an anonymous commenter)

Yet here are the ten signs to look for, again from Naturalnews.com

10 Signs for Spotting a Sociopath

#1) Sociopaths are charming.Sociopaths have high charisma and tend to attract a following just because people want to be around them. They have a "glow" about them that attracts people who typically seek guidance or direction. They often appear to be sexy or have a strong sexual attraction. Not all sexy people are sociopaths, obviously, but watch out for over-the-top sexual appetites and weird fetishes.

#2) Sociopaths are more spontaneous and intense than other people. They tend to do bizarre, sometimes erratic things that most regular people wouldn't do. They are unbound by normal social contracts. Their behavior often seems irrational or extremely risky.

#3) Sociopaths are incapable of feeling shame, guilt or remorse.Their brains simply lack the circuitry to process such emotions. This allows them to betray people, threaten people or harm people without giving it a second thought. They pursue any action that serves their own self interest even if it seriously harms others.

#4) Sociopaths invent outrageous lies about their experiences.They wildly exaggerate things to the point of absurdity, but when they describe it to you in a storytelling format, for some reason it sounds believable at the time.

#5) Sociopaths seek to dominate others and "win" at all costs.They hate to lose any argument or fight and will viciously defend their web of lies, even to the point of logical absurdity.

#6) Sociopaths tend to be highly intelligent, but they use their brainpower to deceive others rather than empower them. Their high IQs often makes them dangerous. This is why many of the best-known serial killers who successfully evaded law enforcement were sociopaths.

#7) Sociopaths are incapable of love and are entirely self-serving. They may feign love or compassion in order to get what they want, but they don't actually FEEL love in the way that you or I do.

#8) Sociopaths speak poetically. They are master wordsmiths, able to deliver a running "stream of consciousness" monologue that is both intriguing and hypnotic. They are expert storytellers and even poets. As a great example of this in action, watch this interview of Charles Manson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIfGj_55FHI

#9) Sociopaths never apologize.They are never wrong. They never feel guilt. They can never apologize. Even if shown proof that they were wrong, they will refuse to apologize and instead go on the attack.

#10) Sociopaths are delusional and literally believe that what they say becomes truth merely because they say it!Charles Manson, the sociopathic murderer, is famous for saying, "I've never killed anyone! I don't need to kill anyone! I THINK it! I have it HERE! (Pointing to his temple.) I don't need to live in this physical realm..."
Watch Charles Manson saying this at the 3:05 mark of this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIfGj_55FHI

Read the explanations of the above qualities here.

Well, as previously pointed out, there are parallel traits between politicians and psycho-sociopaths.

[UPDATED to ADD: As an aside, although sociopaths may rise in the corporate world, their actions are limited by profits and losses. This is unlike politics, where mistakes would, ironically, have politicians call for more of the same set of actions which brought them to such conditions. Besides, since government is a mandated monopoly, there are no market prices for their activities, example police are paid for in salaries but we cannot establish the real worth of their services, hence there is no way to make politicians or the bureaucracy accountable in the same way as the markets operate. Thus politicians usually come away clean from their blemishes.]

That’s because the nature of politics seamlessly fits into the adaption of these qualities such that people with these characteristics tend to rise to the occasion to assume the role of leadership.

The great Friedrich von Hayek said that in politics, the only worst people get on the top.

Explains Mises Institute’s Doug French, (bold emphasis mine)

F.A. Hayek famously argued in The Road to Serfdom, that in politics, the worst get on top, and outlined three reasons this is so. First, Hayek makes the point that people of higher intelligence have different tastes and views. So, as Hayek writes, “we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive instincts prevail,” to have uniformity of opinion.

Second, those on top must “gain the support of the docile and gullible,” who are ready to accept whatever values and ideology is drummed into them. Totalitarians depend upon those who are guided by their passions and emotions rather than by critical thinking.

Finally, leaders don’t promote a positive agenda, but a negative one of hating an enemy and envy of the wealthy. To appeal to the masses, leaders preach an “us” against “them” program.

Quote of the Day: Anatomy of a Power Grab

The pathology of a government power grab is not hard to discern. The state creates the conditions for crisis. Crisis strikes. Politicians seize extraordinary powers. Crisis passes. Left behind is a popular perception that complete annihilation was averted due to government genius. Politicians are permitted to expand their power.

That’s an excellent excerpt from columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady at the Wall Street Journal who tersely narrates of the anatomy of political power grab by governments.

In using Argentina as example, Ms. O’Grady exposes the Kirchner administration use of the above stratagem to extend political control of their monetary policies through the central bank.

Yet this is not limited to Argentina but applies to the politics of interventionism everywhere.