The most horrific act of violence a person can commit against another can be very easy. To take someone’s life is not especially difficult. In a world dominated by professional killers and violent fantasies, it makes sense that most people have an exaggerated sense of how difficult it is to kill someone and how invulnerable they are. Rarely do we actually consider how easy it would be to kill someone because the thought of ending another person’s life is so repulsive.
Our lives are in each other’s hands every moment of every day simply by the nature of the human experience. We are not just interdependent in many practical ways, we also live at the pleasure of nearly everyone else. The fact that murder is so rare among humans suggests that we want to be surrounded by happy, healthy people.
Despite the overwhelmingly cooperative nature of society, rare acts of violence do happen and we can be overly frightened by them. We can be convinced to be untrusting and afraid of a random person. Not everyone should be trusted and we all determine our own policies, but despite the evidence, our general tendency to distrust is higher than necessary, and we waste a great deal of energy on it. This makes us vulnerable to people who take advantage of our fears to serve the sponsors of government.
For governments to get us to accept their counterproductive monopolies in public safety and justice, they must convince us that only they can protect us from certain threats. Even for the critical matter of abortion, making it illegal often makes it more frequent and less safe. Using governments to reduce abortions makes it more difficult to develop peaceful means of doing so. This is just as true as with the problems of murder, theft, and rape. The threat of random interpersonal crime is a real one, but the answer to it is not to turn to an organization that promises to steal from us.
Turning to government for protection from thieves says, “My neighbor might steal from me, so I’ll trust a government to steal from everyone so if my neighbor steals from me, he might be locked in a cage for a while.” Turning to government for protection from murderers says, “My neighbor might kill me, so I’ll let the government steal from me so they can hire someone in a costume to come write a report about it afterwards.”
Life is risky. Risk leads to fear. Fear makes us vulnerable. Acceptance of the riskiness of life makes it possible to be brave enough to question those who would promote fear. When we try to deny the riskiness of life, either in our minds or through government policy, we only make it worse. Rather than living in fear or in resistance, simply by embracing the cooperative nature of life, we can protect ourselves from the very real threat of a society devoid of trust.
We all want to be treated fairly, and we all have a sense of what is right. When justice is used as a mere rallying cry, it can be severely distorted. When justice is founded on a concrete set of moral principles, it is a guiding light for resolving conflicts. Governments claim a monopoly on the essential services around justice (dispute resolution, incarceration, public safety) yet in these most important social functions, they always abuse that power. They provide some legitimate functions in these areas, but only as necessary to maintain the illusion of providing an actual service. Even a brief examination of government justice services reveals that governments have no moral principles.
People have long used punishment as an excuse to violate others in order to control them. When someone seeks punishment, they are not seeking justice. Punishment is merely violence with a bad excuse. The threat of punishment is governments’ primary motivator. Governments cannot threaten us with justice. The purpose of punishment is to induce suffering so the threat of suffering can be used to control us. To give enforcers credible excuses to threaten us, governments come up with laws against things that make the racket less effective like not paying taxes, doing drugs, or challenging authority.
Every time a government enforces a law without a victim, the person getting arrested is the victim. If there is no victim, there is no crime. If there is a victim, the prescription for justice is simple: make the victim whole. If the person was stolen from, the stolen property (or its equivalent, plus compensation for the trouble) must be returned to them. If they were injured, appropriate compensation must be paid. If their property was damaged, they must be compensated. When governments punish someone for a victimless crime, they also punish society by forcing it to pay for the service. If we support victimless crime laws, we are just as responsible as if we had hired someone to rob or kidnap on our behalf.
Truly dangerous criminals should be forcibly isolated from society. Providing for the isolation of those who represent a legitimate threat is a very important service. Because governments have taken a monopoly on this most important function (despite their ineffectiveness), they are generally allowed to take on similar functions made possible by that monopoly. Because they are monopolies, they have little accountability and are inherently prone to corruption. All they have to do is convince their enforcers to enforce a law and they will say they are just following orders. When government is trusted with the power to determine justice, we end up with corrupt judges working with corrupt prosecutors working with corrupt cops, while corrupt politicians give them an excuse to point guns at peaceful people every time they pass a victimless crime law.
Judging an individual’s behavior to be wrong does not give you the right to punish them. Even if you are absolutely certain, even if you saw them do it, even if you think it would serve justice, it is never right to punish another person. You have the right to harm someone if necessary in self-defense. You might reclaim stolen property. You might do something to someone that leads to suffering, but you are never justified in doing something to another person for the express purpose of causing them to suffer. The one thing you always have a right to do is turn away from someone. If someone is a known thief, do not do business with them until they have made their victims whole. This is justice founded in natural rights and it is far more robust and fair than the government racket.
Justice is the application of ethics. A society’s practice of justice is a measure of its commitment to moral principles. Society’s punishment of nonviolent behavior is a measure of its abandonment of freedom. When we turn to governments for justice, we are turning to institutions based on violating rights in order to protect them. A protection racket cannot claim to have a moral foundation. Justice is far too important to be trusted to government. In many ways, we have become dependent on government, so in the transition to a free society, many peaceful systems of justice will first resemble current government models and meet current expectations. However, with the innovation made possible in the absence of coercion, those expectations will soon be exceeded with far more righteous and efficient systems of justice.
Modern governments have entered a self-destruct cycle. Policies are enacted on behalf of special interests. Governments convince enough of us that the policies are well-intended. We figure out that a particular policy is intended to take advantage of us. We get upset and resist. Rather than give in to the pressure, politicians (and their sponsors) find it more profitable to minimize the impact of the resistance while they create a new policy to distract us. This creates a seemingly endless cycle of creation and suppression of discontent. Old discontent piles up as politicians, special interests, and other criminals respond to very short-term incentives because they are removed from accountability for long-term consequences. As tension grows, governments must increase direct control over their citizens. Effective governments have carefully cultivated enforcement classes full of police who will not question orders. A government of runaway enforcement, or a police state, is a predictable result of corruption.
Police officers provide many legitimate services. They provide public safety by patrolling and occasionally intervening in real crimes in progress. They help stranded motorists. Sometimes, they even solve crimes and apprehend people who should be held accountable. However, as far as government is concerned, providing services is only a justification for the real purpose of police: enforcing the will of politicians on behalf of special interests.
The primary function of police is much easier when they are intimidating. Because war is the most destructive application of government force, when governments need to increase the intimidation effect of their police, they become militarized – adopting the fashion, tactics, advanced weaponry, excessive force, and criminally irresponsible spending of the military. As the relevance of providing legitimate services decreases, the need to control populations through intimidation increases. The mechanics of police militarization are the same as general military spending: an imagined need is fulfilled by a contractor who has bribed a politician. Police forces are somewhat accountable to their communities, so the pressure for militarization isn’t local, but rather from central authorities with large grants that people can be tricked into thinking they aren’t paying for.
We inherently fear police because of the power they wield over regular citizens. Most police departments exhibit all the critical elements of violent street gangs: they are territorial, violently enforce their monopolies, and have distinct identifying features. Police are feared in a way that normal people are not because they have arbitrary power, low accountability, and often behave violently without concern for others. When ordinary citizens commit violent crimes, they are often jailed without any legal proceedings. When police commit violent crimes, they are often given a paid vacation while their employers “investigate” and pretend to be concerned to the extent necessary to maintain their credibility.
One element of a police state is an excess of laws making noncriminal behavior illegal. Most governments have passed so many laws that if they want to go after someone who challenges their power, refuses to be exploited, or represents a political inconvenience, it’s not difficult to come up with a legal excuse to detain, charge, try, and sentence them. This also makes police especially intimidating because they have an incredible amount of discretion about who they arrest and why. This power enables horrific expressions of racism and other personal biases. Once a police state reaches the point at which most people feel incapable of precisely following the law, respect for the government plummets.
The more a government seeks control over its citizens, the more it needs to spy on them. All government surveillance is wrong, but it is especially wrong when the property rights and privacy of citizens are violated. In a free society, a balance will be struck between security needs and privacy rights, and no one’s property ever needs to be violated. When you are being recorded in public by a fellow citizen, they are collecting sound waves or light particles coming from you and there is no violation. But if that person taps your phone line, or puts a bug in your home, or in any other way physically inserts anything where it is not welcome, they are violating your property and your privacy. The reason governments need to violate your property in observing you is if you had true privacy, you would have a space in your home that they couldn’t control. The current extent of surveillance clearly shows there is another motive besides catching bad guys. Government surveillance is not about keeping us safe. It’s about keeping us under control.
The most important way to hold police accountable is by recording them. A police state will not be defeated by individual local actions, but recording police can educate others, hold individuals accountable, and eliminate the most reckless officers. Recording technology available in most smart phones allows almost anyone to record police. Those same phones can be used to upload data, and the internet provides distribution that is difficult for governments to cut off. These technologies are game-changers and should be used to hold everyone accountable, not just police. As technology continues to improve, it will become much more difficult to be violent in secret.
In some places, it’s illegal to record police, but in some places where it’s technically legal, it’s not always practical. It is important to look out for each other and sometimes even protect an officer by recording the interactions of others when we can. We should always know our rights and assert them as much as we can, but it also helps to know specific local laws and our rights “under the law” to deal with enforcers more effectively.
While the term “police state” may apply to varying degrees, and some government apologists will always declare the amount of control to be insignificant, any organized violent control is just as wrong as a “total police state.” Subjecting people to systematic violence traumatizes them and helps keep them submissive. Do not give in! There are many important ways to fight the police state to improve our communities, but until we defeat statism, it will always be there, and even the slightest degree of a police state is too much.
Dispute resolution is too important to be entrusted to governments. When we accept arbitrary authority from a violent monopoly protection racket, the authority is soon used to make us submit. Then that authority is for sale to the highest bidder and courts are used to get us to go along with all kinds of disastrous policies.
Government courts seek to stay in power and maintain their influence. They depend on other parts of government for their budgets and have no incentive to go against the general agenda. Once this relationship is established, it is easy for politicians to pass laws that go completely against any rational sense of justice and have the courts behind them. Courts become part of the machine, convicting us of victimless crimes to keep police busy, keeping the politicians and their sponsors happy, and providing a flow of bodies to the prisons.
Courts justify their existence to the politicians by doing their bidding, but they need the help of police to do it. Police officers are routinely called to testify against defendants, and courts try to make people think they are protected from false testimony, but police are routinely allowed to lie. When police are accused of misconduct, they are often punished with a slap on the wrist, if at all. This is partly because police protect their own, like members of any gang, but also because most prosecutors and courts will only seek accountability when the misconduct is so bad that it threatens the credibility of the racket.
Government courts often refer to themselves as part of a “justice system,” but more importantly, they are punishment systems. It’s absurd to think any part of an institution based on theft and violence could provide justice, but many people still seem to believe this. Justice requires respect for self-ownership, and courts are more concerned with upholding the law than providing justice. Because courts have a monopoly, they have to provide some approximation of justice, (holding violent criminals in isolation, occasionally ordering restitution for damages) but taken as a whole, courts provide a justification for government agents to punish people for behavior the government doesn’t like. The greatest tragedy of government courts is that when someone is wronged, if the perpetrator is caught and punished, the victim is punished again as a taxpayer, rather than compensated.
Courts are a critical part of the protection racket because they give governments cover for using force against peaceful individuals. When courts appear to go against the rest of the government program, they still serve an important purpose. They want us to think the court is there to keep the government in check. A very brief look at almost any country’s history will show that is not the case. The court can also serve to tap on the brakes of runaway statism while maintaining the credibility of the racket.
In a free society, courts would depend on the recipients of their services to fund them, rather than governments. They would be accountable to the people, rather than politicians. They might be bundled with other legitimate protection services. We could pay someone to protect our rights, rather than having a monopoly forced on us based on violating our rights. Increased freedom always results in greater efficiency, but this will be especially dramatic in the area of dispute resolution. No longer will a monopoly service provider abuse its customers with inconveniences that would be intolerable in any other industry. No longer will people with no responsibility for their decisions make important rulings. No longer will people be unaccountable for the great injustice of all the productivity stolen and wasted by false imprisonment. Dispute resolution services, unsurprisingly, will be much better when organized without a violent premise.
Locking someone in a cage is never justice. It is only punishment or justified isolation of someone who is a danger to others. Locking someone in a cage for hurting a person does not make the victim whole. Locking someone in a cage for doing something you just don’t like makes you the criminal. Sometimes individual acts of incarceration are justified, but modern prison systems contain mostly people whose incarceration itself is a crime. Even for its stated objectives, a punitive prison system is a dangerous and ineffective tool.
All real crimes stem from a failure to thrive within voluntary, cooperative relationships. Many governments try to portray their prisons as rehabilitation centers, and while some people come out of prison much stronger and healthier because of the educational experience, that is clearly not their purpose. Some governments have the audacity to call their prisons “correctional,” as if they have the power to correct someone’s behavior. In many cases, governments will sentence violent criminals on the presumption that they are too dangerous to be in civil society at the time of sentencing, but after a few years in a madhouse surrounded by similar offenders, they will be safe to release.
If someone who hurt someone goes to jail, or even gets the death penalty, how does the victim benefit? They might feel safer without their attacker on the loose, but now they are being victimized as a taxpayer to pay for the cost of housing, food, and health care for another inmate whose productive capacity is reduced to nearly zero. Real justice would be reparations for damages and compensation for victims.
Revenge never serves justice, however tempting it may be. The more we question the assumptions of modern prison systems, the more aware we are of their disastrous effects. This is inspiring a reexamination of our sense of justice and making it clear how governments take advantage of our innate desire for revenge. Dealing with violent, irrational, and criminally insane people is an important function in any society and it will be very exciting to see how cooperative efforts will address these issues, and how much more productive and happy society will be without so much effort invested in keeping people behind bars.
What makes governments critically unique is the way they use guns. Everything governments demand we do or not do is backed up with, “Or else police with guns will come and lock you in a cage.” If we all had guns, and governments didn’t have any, this racket wouldn’t work. Governments have an interest in keeping us dependent on their protection rackets, but a police officer will never provide better protection than effective self-defense. Because gun control is enforced by violence and often leads to greater overall violence where enforced, it is clearly not about reducing violence. It’s about controlling the population.
The use of force to defend oneself is an inherent right based in self-ownership. If someone is making a threat to you or your property, you are justified in using defensive force. The decision to use force against someone else is a very serious one. If you are threatened or under attack, use of force may be the only way to save your own life. Even in situations where your life is clearly threatened, your self-defense would be most valid with the minimal use of force necessary to neutralize the threat. What if you are mistaken in your assessment? What if the threat is from temporary confusion and not ill-intent? The responsibility taken on when applying deadly force is immense, and it should be used only as a last resort. To deny someone’s right of self-defense is to subject them to the tyranny of anyone who abuses them. To deny the universal right of self-defense is to deny the universal right of self-ownership.
Gun ownership by nonviolent people carries an inherent threat to violent people, which violent people are willing to use violence to remove. Governments don’t like their people being armed because they might revolt. The idea of taking up small arms against an organized military may seem absurd, but in violent revolts, sometimes it is enough to cut off just the head of the monster. Governments have used gun control whenever they want to make people more dependent, but especially when they need to tighten control over society. Some of the most vicious government atrocities ever committed were preceded by strict gun control.
One of the great ironies of gun control is how counterproductive it is to its stated goals of reducing violence and “keeping guns off the streets.” Gun control is nearly impossible to carry out effectively. Without absolute control over citizens to begin with, no government has completely succeeded in wiping out gun ownership. In many places with strict gun control, guns are actually more readily available than in a regulated market because they can be bought easily on the “black market,” where sellers are not capable of taking responsibility for who they sell to.
Criminals prey on communities with strict gun control, because to them, gun control is a convenient policy of victim disarmament. An armed, or even unarmed but violent criminal, can attack anyone on the street in an area with strict gun control with reasonable confidence that their victims won’t be armed. This is one way governments create more crime. More crime makes people more eager for government protection. It also creates dependency, because when citizens are disarmed, cooperative solutions to address crime are much less effective. Taking away the right of self-defense has disastrous consequences!
Gun control is part of a common attitude not limited to the specific technology of guns. Governments want to control the use of force. In many places, they ban common non-lethal self-defense weapons like pepper spray or tasers. If governments really wanted us to be safe, (and some local police officers genuinely do) they would encourage the use of such devices as well as guns by people capable of using deadly force responsibly. Non-lethal technologies will become at least as effective as guns and eventually replace guns for self-defense purposes. No one who simply wants to defend themselves would also want the liability of deadly force if unnecessary.
The reason gun control is so dangerous is because it promotes violence. There are a number of ways it does this, but more importantly, it is fundamentally violent because it requires enforcers to violate the rights of peaceful people. Calling victim disarmament laws “gun control” is a weak cover for what politicians are really advocating: only government agents can have guns. Self-defense is a universal human right.
Sexual assault is assault. It is as much a violation of an individual’s rights as any other crime. It is a violation of that most valuable property, one’s own body, and constitutes a misappropriation through theft, that often leads to serious injuries. The psychological ramifications, as with any trauma, can be as devastating as any physical assault. In a society where individual rights are respected and violators are not tolerated, we will better address the problem of sexual assault, until it is entirely eradicated, as it will and should be.
Sexual assault is usually a male-on-female crime because of the obvious physical advantages men have on average over women. In a society where the individual right of self-defense is respected, being armed, even with something non-lethal, can be a force-equalizer in a physical confrontation. Technology has already rendered the use of our physical strength less relevant to productivity, and will eventually make it nearly irrelevant. A free society relies less on application of force to settle disputes, and so the culture of assault will also be greatly diminished.
In a society that truly does not tolerate assaults, anyone who is caught in the act would face immediate repercussions from the community. Someone guilty of rape might face total ostracism. By turning to governments for justice, we get a system of dangerous delays that only offers the ineffective punishment of incarceration. However, some governments have used the now undeniably available technology to create public lists of sex offenders or require some other form of public acknowledgement. While these measures may represent steps forward in eliminating sexual assault, they are a pale shadow of what we could achieve in a more cooperative society.
The causes of sexual assault are many and complex. While some will say it is rooted in our biology, many of the contributing factors, like poverty and desperation, are aggravated by government. Where government is used as a tool to repress sexual activity or impose standards of sexual behavior, this can also be a contributing factor. The greatest contributor to “rape culture” is statism. A society that justifies government agents violating people will foster more people who believe their own justifications for violating others. Some governments make their resources fully available to the problem of sexual assault, while others deliberately make reporting and accountability more difficult. In either case, the problem will never be solved by an institution that assaults peaceful people.