In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the character of Mark Antony is a clever sort. In the guise of “burying Caesar, not praising him,” he unleashes popular nostalgia for the tyrant and rage against his assassins. All this for his own purposes, of course, in the ongoing struggle for power.

Antony’s speech springs to mind every year as the Ides of March approach, especially when a wave of “smaller government” sentiment is sweeping the political world — sometimes directly sponsored by, sometimes simply co-opted by, one branch of the existing political establishment.

The Tea Party movement and the Republican Party are in the process of merging pursuant to the current “smaller government” fad.

Some in both groups oppose the merger — the Tea Party types because they know they’re being co-opted, “serious” Republican types because they fear that “smaller government” promises might actually have to be kept in some small measure — but it’s probably a done deal. The GOP requires a horse to ride back to power; the Tea Party’s energy is beginning to wane and its members are casting about for a rider to apply the spurs.

A match made in hell, and well on its way to consummation.

The Libertarian Party made a courtship play, but was rebuffed … probably because it forgot to bring flowers and chocolates and instead took its “seriousness” so seriously that it came off like the five-year-old playing dress-up in Daddy’s suit. Reward: A giggle, a kiss on the cheek, a “how cute! What a big boy you are!” … and off for the date with the nice gentleman waiting in the limo with champagne.

“Smaller government” movements invariably fail (sometimes in their attempts to seize power, sometimes when they’ve done so and can’t deliver the goods) because they refuse to become what their opponents call them: anti-government.

With few if any exceptions, “smaller government” movements quickly find themselves plagued with contradictions and reservations, either from the get-go or after hard work by their co-optors to shoehorn those contradictions and reservations into the movement’s rhetoric. Sooner or later, it turns out that they’re for “smaller government” … except where they’re for bigger government.

In the case of the current Tea Parties, Republican infiltrators have worked tirelessly to make the movement (which started out with a plausibly “smaller government” orientation on taxes, corporate bailouts and health care) into a “big government” movement on foreign/military policy and immigration, and they seem to have succeeded.

Having broken the Tea Party movement to saddle, the GOP hopes to ride it to victory this November. After that? To the knacker’s yard with it.

For a “smaller government” movement to remain a movement at all, it must maintain some kind of consistency. If it doesn’t, it becomes a mere temporary aggregate of mismatched constituencies, ripe for the picking and quickly thereafter to be peeled and eaten by those who are consistent in one thing and one thing only: The will to power.

The consistency a “smaller government” movement requires is no alien thing or newfangled innovation. Some of the greatest minds in history have held it out to us for the taking. Among my favorite formulations of it is Henry David Thoreau’s:

I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — “That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Once we’ve buried Caesar, “smaller government” movements will no doubt attempt to praise him back into existence with “limited” powers. But praising him before burying him will never get them where they want to go. If there’s a path to “smaller government,” that path necessarily leads through the forest of “no government at all.”

Last Sunday, I was invited to appear as a guest on “Anarchy Time,” an Internet Radio talk show. Three guesses as to the topic. I had a great time and look forward to future appearances, but I’d like to revisit the particular topic that a caller pointed this episode toward.

The caller claimed that it’s not necessary to eliminate the state because those who desire freedom can get what they want by doing what he’s done: Filing paperwork declaring one’s self a “sovereign,” after which one is immune to those depredations of the federal government which violate natural law. The details were kind of fuzzy, but that doesn’t really matter — the idea is of a general type which is worth discussing.

The general type I’m speaking of is the “magic word” or “secret formula” scheme, under which adherents claim that government can successfully be held to a particular interpretation of laws which restrains its powers to those which are “legitimate.”

The particular interpretation and the set of “legitimate” powers varies from theory to theory, but all of the schemes have something in common: They assume that there’s some standard to which government can be held merely by invocation of that standard.

I’m not going to go into the details of these various theories, which run the gamut from “the 14th Amendment created a new type of citizenship, and I’ve declared myself an old-style citizen” to “the 16th Amendment wasn’t ratified” to “this or that section of the tax code proves that I don’t have to pay.”

I’m not going to go into those details because there’s no reason to. The assumption on which all such schemes operate is a false assumption, and therefore all such schemes fail before the details become important.

One of the theories underlying the American system of governance is “separation of powers,” which supporters of the Constitution assert creates a system of “checks and balances” which ultimately serve to secure our liberty. If the President becomes a tyrant, Congress or the Supreme Court can put him in his place. If Congress passes unconstitutional laws, the President can veto them or the Supreme Court can overturn them. If the Supreme Court upholds bad law, Congress can pass better law or the President can appoint wiser judges when vacancies occur.

It’s a nice theory … but one that simply doesn’t describe the real world. In the real world, politicians have more in common with each other than they have in common with those whom they claim to rule. They’ll occasionally limit each others’ power, but only by way of striking a balance of power that leaves them all more, rather than less, powerful … and you a little or a lot less free.

America’s jails and prisons are overflowing with defendants who’ve broken no law which the US Constitution could conceivably be interpreted to authorize.

The obvious example of that is marijuana smokers and dealers. There’s no specific constitutional provision for outlawing marijuana, nor is there any reasonable argument for “original intent” allowing it to be outlawed (George Washington, who presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787 before he presided over the nation that convention created, grew the stuff himself). Yet hundreds of thousands are arrested each year on marijuana possession or trafficking charges.

Another obvious example is prosecution on “gun charges.” The text of the Second Amendment is not unclear, nor is there any serious question as to its original intent — what’s there to misunderstand in “shall not be infringed?” Every last “gun control” law on the books is plainly and irrefutably unconstitutional. And yet gun sales and possession are held hostage to “permit” schemes and “violators” receive long vacations in the Graybar Hotel.

The idea that invoking “the rules” against a government will force it to lie down obediently at one’s feet and accept a leash around its neck is beyond superstitious — it’s foolhardy. There are no magic words. There is no secret formula. The relationship between government and governed is inherently adversarial. Even the most determined efforts to make it otherwise have historically failed (usually sooner rather than later). Appealing vainly to those efforts rather than accepting the reality (that it’s them or you) and acting accordingly is a fool’s errand.

It’s March and the year ends with a zero, so if you’re an American, watch your mailbox. You’ll be getting an envelope from Uncle Sam some time soon.

In that envelope you’ll find a form demanding answers to ten questions, on pain of a $100 fine for refusal to answer or $500 for answering falsely.

Or maybe it’s $5,000 for refusing to answer “any of the questions” — the Census Bureau would like you to think so, anyway.

If you believe that government can do anything without a) screwing it up, or b) screwing you over, the census is proof positive that you’re mistaken. Government can’t even count..

The purpose of the census, as originally authorized in the US Constitution, is simple: To count heads for the purpose of apportioning congressional districts based on how many people live where. That’s it. That’s all.

By that standard, eight of the ten questions on the 2010 census form are irrelevant and there’s no constitutional authority for the government to ask — or legal obligation for you to answer — them.

The first two questions are: “How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2010?” and “Were there any additional people staying here on April 1, 2010 that you did not include in Question 1?” In other words, “how many people” and “are you sure about that?”

Everything after those first two questions is just nosy bureaucratic poking around to determine “how more than $400 billion dollars of federal funding each year is spent on infrastructure and services …”

In other words, it’s a sort of dating service questionnaire — it hooks vampires up with victims. Sometimes those vampires are the wards of the welfare state and the victims are the taxpayers; sometimes it’s worse than that (data from the 1940 census was used by the forces of Count FDRacula to round up Americans of Japanese ancestry and herd them into concentration camps).

They want names. They want phone numbers. They want to know whether you rent or own. They want to know your gender, your race, whether or not you’re a Latino, and where else you might happen to occasionally stay besides home.

And people in hell, I’m told, want icewater.

This is how the state works: The politicians throw out an idea that sounds fairly sensible and harmless at the time. Once they’ve got their hooks into us, though, they run wild and that benign little idea quickly grows like Topsy and turns in sinister directions. If they sense revolt brewing, they’ll back off just a little (the 2000 census featured five times as many questions on everything from household income to what kind of heating setup the house had) … but don’t worry, they’ll be back at it as soon as we let our guard down.

It’s not just the census. It’s everything. Take drivers’ licenses (please!). The original stated intent of those things was to ensure that drivers had proven their competence by passing standardized tests. They weren’t supposed to be “general identification” papers. But try boarding an airplane, buying a gun, or even picking up a six-pack of beer without one now. And trying getting one without documenting in triplicate everything but your driving competency.

But the mutation of the census — a simple head count, for the love of Pete — into a word that no newspaper is going to publish (it starts with “cluster”) must be, hands down, the purest illustration of how these guys work: Give’em an inch, they’ll take a mile.

I’m not going to try to talk you out of responding to the census. Everyone has his own line in the sand, and filling out this “simple 10-question form” may not cross yours. My own past practice — which I intend to stick to this year — has consisted of verifying the number of people in the household and answering all other questions with a curt “none of your business.” That keeps me in compliance with Title 13. Hey, I answered all the questions, and the answers weren’t false! To slightly modify Whitman’s admonition, “Resist much. Obey (just a) little.”

One of the first lines of argument against a stateless society is that the existence of “social safety nets” is just too important to leave to the private sector. The usual counter-arguments from anarchists, and even limited governmentarians, are:

• That private charity is more efficient than coercive redistribution (i.e. a higher percentage of a donated dollar than a tax dollar actually gets to those in need of the “safety net”);
• That people are generous (more than $300 billion dollars in charitable donations circa 2008) and would be even more generous if they weren’t taxed so heavily; and
• That a reliable “safety net” produces a culture of dependence and is therefore undesirable in any case.

One counter-argument not made often enough is this: Government involvement in “social safety net” programs pollutes those programs. It corrupts their personnel. It changes their purposes and practices. Over time, “charities” become less and less about helping people per se and more and more about integrating themselves — and their “clients,” at gunpoint if necessary — into the state’s apparatus.

While I don’t agree that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose (sing it, Janis!), there was a time when having nothing left to lose was liberating in one particular sense: Being destitute meant being at liberty to shift as best possible for yourself, to make your situation bearable, to do whatever you could think of to improve it.

These days, some “charity” functionaries are quite up front about the fact that they’re less concerned with helping people make their own way and more concerned with being the middlemen who funnel taxpayer money to “clients” whether or not those “clients” are particularly interested in that money, or in the strings attached to it.

Here in St. Louis, a group of homeless people have formed a community of sorts in an old tunnel under a collapsing street. The city government’s getting ready to close the tunnel and drive them out of it as a prelude to street repairs.

Now, just to be clear, so far I’m not complaining. Since I don’t support the existence of government, I obviously don’t support the existence of government property, but that’s not what I’m getting at. Driving (alleged) squatters off (allegedly government) property isn’t my topic. Neither is the propriety of the city’s officials looking for “solutions” to the homeless people’s “problems.” I could hold forth on either subject, but let’s stick to my real point. Here’s a local news story on the subject:

Note this line from the story: “Sometimes for the chronically homeless people the best thing that can happen to them is that they are forced into making some choices and decisions.” That’s Dan Buck, CEO of St. Patrick Center.

What “choices” does Buck want to “force” them into making?

He wants to force them to accept money or services his organization provides. I guess that sounds charitable, until you know where the money comes from: A $550,000 government grant to place “clients” in “green jobs.” Some portion of an $11.1 million HUD grant to put “clients” into housing. Grants to help veterans. Grants to help former inmates of the state’s prisons.

According to its annual report, the single largest chunk — 42% — of St. Patrick’s $11.7 million in revenues was “government funding.” I suspect that’s not counting the impact of tax benefits reaped by donors, or government money that works its way to the organization indirectly.

And that money only comes in if there are “clients” to “serve” with it. From his perspective anyone who can qualify for his organization’s programs should be enrolled in them. If you’re homeless and don’t think you need Dan Buck, well, too bad — Dan Buck needs you and he’s right up front with the oxymoronic notion of government “forcing you to choose” to meet his need on the pretext that he’s the one meeting yours.

The sad thing about this is that St. Patrick Center has a reputation as one of the finest charities in the St. Louis area … and would almost certainly have that reputation and then some if there was no government “safety net” — or involuntary financing of same — and it was really able to operate as an actual charity. Government doesn’t solve problems, it creates them. And its use of “public-private partnerships” prolongs and exacerbates them in the name of solving them while simultaneously corrupting the organizations that should be addressing them.

Alex R. Knight III, my fellow C4SS news analysts, passes along an encouraging datum from Rasmussen in his latest column:

The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, however, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.

“It’s abundantly clear,” writes Knight, “that faith in government itself is dying.” And as far as he goes, he’s right. If the state relied on consent and faith to rule we’d be basking in the white light radiating from the visible end of the anarchist tunnel right about now.

Unfortunately, government is an omnivorous beast: When it can’t curry (or convincingly fake) consent and faith, it’s content to dine instead on cynicism and fear. It’s also prone to re-making itself in whatever form best guarantees its continued existence and maximum power.

To put a finer point on it, even if this state is going down (and, like Alex, I think it is), we’re still a long way from, and in a dangerous place on the journey toward, the state as such going down.

Over the centuries of the modern nation-state’s existence, the political class has had a head start and the upper hand when it comes to shaping the conventional wisdom. Manufacturing an illusory “consent of the governed” may be the brightest jewel in that crown, but it’s far from the only one.

Another obvious thing that the political class has going for it is the fear that its operatives lovingly and carefully cultivate — fear of the state itself (”if I rise up, will I be struck down?”) and fear of what life without the state might entail (”the politicians tell me that I need them … what if they’re right?”). Those fears immobilize at least as many otherwise free people as “consent” does.

When the state’s power is waxing, the cynic is seemingly the natural ally of the anarchist. His choice to live self-sufficiently and to follow his own conclusions as to what constitutes a virtuous life makes him useless to the state. Those two things also make him a worthy example for anti-statists to point to in their attempts to whittle away at “consent of the governed.”

As the state’s power wanes, the cynic’s function changes. Just as he’s disinclined to throw in with the state, he’s also disinclined to throw in against it. And why should he? He’s living the stateless life already, and he did so with no one’s assistance! The cynic remains an admirable figure … but from a revolutionary standpoint, he represents inertia rather than weight in the balance of (against!) power.

Unless conversion to cynicism is unanimous, realizing the stateless society in the crater left by an imploding state is not, or at least not wholly, an automatic result of the implosion. It requires volition and motivation, not mere disinclination to undo the implosion. It requires the creation of new, non-coercive institutions to replace the old coercive ones, and it requires active resistance to attempts to reincarnate the state.

The first step in creating those new institutions is convincing people that they’re better than what they replace — or, to steal some words from the Center’s mission statement, “building public awareness of, and support for, market anarchism.” As we chronicle and celebrate the death throes of the state, it’s important that we also actively promote its alternative, the stateless society.

It seems to me that the demographic most immediately amenable to adoption of the stateless society as goal is the “freedom movement,” broadly defined. I’m also aware that most market anarchists and most readers of this column are, to one degree or another, involved in other activities of and acquainted with non-anarchist members of that movement.

So in this hopeful Year of the Anarchist, I’m asking you, our readers, to help C4SS in its mission by passing on relevant links — to C4SS, to the Molinari Institute’s library of persuasive arguments, or to your own favorite market anarchist polemics — to your friends and acquaintances on a weekly basis. It’s time for a “big push” to bring the general freedom movement behind the goal of a stateless society.

The mainstream media and the usual political suspects would rather not deal with Joe Stack all. His final flight damaged more than an Internal Revenue Service building: It shattered a pre-constructed Sturm und Drang narrative, crafted over the course of centuries. That narrative doesn’t and can’t admit to any defect in the nobility of, let alone outright wickedness on the part of, state actors. Nor can it abide the possibility of honesty in response from, or even just plain mental breakdown under stress on the part of, the victims of those actors.

The key feature of the Sturm und Drang narrative is that its protagonist is motivated “not by pursuit of noble means nor by true motives, but by revenge and greed.” In the IRS versus Joe Stack version of that narrative, he must necessarily be a “terrorist” and a “coward.” Only state-approved use of deadly force may be understood as noble; any non-state-approved motive must be fundamentally dishonest.

But words mean things.

A “coward,” for example, is “a person who lacks courage; a timid or pusillanimous person; a poltroon.” As Bill Maher pointed out when the same label was pasted on the 9/11 attackers, “staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”

Applying the “terrorist” label to Stack represents a double bind for the state. Stack targeted his actual enemy, the IRS, not “non-combatants.” If his attack was “terrorism,” then so is every last US military attack on targets occupied by people not wearing military uniforms. If such attacks aren’t “terrorism,” then neither was Stack’s.

Sturm und Drang isn’t and can’t be an honest response to Joe Stack. Whatever one’s estimate of the validity and magnitude of his grievances might be — and as for myself, I can’t help but sympathize with anyone victimized by the IRS, collection/enforcement arm of the largest organized protection racket in human history — his action was the very picture of honesty: One does not offer one’s life as payment for the opportunity to express that which one does not truly believe.

The IRS and its supporters are closing ranks behind the Sturm und Drang response, of course. The widow of the IRS employee killed in Stack’s attack — herself a government tax collector as well — filed suit against Stack’s own widow yesterday, “saying she should have warned others about her husband.” The suit asserts a duty to “avoid a foreseeable risk of injury to others.”

I wonder: How many hours did Valerie Hunter spend on the phone, calling taxpayers at random or from knowledge of pending investigations, to warn them that she or her husband might be coming to inflict injury on them? How many “settlements” did she and her husband extort from victims whose only crime was trying to make a living? How much money and property were she and her husband responsible for the theft of? How many such suits would be filed against her or her employer if the pernicious doctrine of “sovereign immunity” didn’t forbid her victims to seek justice?

In the matter of the state versus Joe Stack, it’s the state (and its employees) to whom the Sturm und Drang narrative properly applies.

Earlier this week, US Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) became the latest in an increasingly large pack of incumbent congresspersons announcing their retirements. There’s a markedly increased tendency among Democrat and Republican alike this year to suddenly notice that they’d love to “spend more time with their families” and “pursue other opportunities” rather than remain in Washington for another two or six years.

They’re rats, swimming away from a sinking ship. And who can blame them?

The American state is foundering — its deck awash with trillion-dollar deficits, its hold flooded with $12.x trillion in unpaid past debt, sinking below the waves of tens of trillions of unfunded but promised future payments, surrounded by other, similar ships at which it has spent decades randomly firing its cannons (or threatening to).

The post-baby-boom generation has understood for decades now that it will never see its promised “Social Security” benefits.

The idea that the “national debt” will ever be paid off has, over the last year, become a subject of open public mockery. The US government’s largest creditor state, China, is signaling its loss of interest in continuing to act as financier to America’s politicians.

Finally, on a year-to-year basis, the politicians find themselves caught between the Scylla of their own unwillingness to live within the extremely ample means at their disposal and the Charybdis of their terror of the consequences of announcing that they intend to attempt to forcibly extract greater means from a pissed off (and tapped out) public.

Ladies and gentlemen, America is in a state of incipient revolution.

But don’t get too excited just yet. Like many pregnancies, many revolutions miscarry before they’re even noticed, let alone carried to term and delivered. The impending implosion of the US government — which, let me qualify here, may still be a few years out, not day after tomorrow — is an opportunity to seize freedom, not a guarantee that it will fall into our laps.

Sunken states are almost always quickly raised, pumped out, re-floated and re-flagged. And in many, perhaps most cases, it’s even the same rats who swim back out to re-crew them. Often they get some of the previous operators’ “debt water” pumped back into their holds before they set sail, as the new crew’s creditors are generally the same people with whom the previous crew ran up the debt that sank the ship last time around.

And in all cases, of course, the ship’s crew pretends to simultaneously be acting on behalf of, and to have a divine right of command over … you!

They’re going to run the ship, but you’re going to finance the voyage whether you want to or not.

They’re going to run up the debt, but you’re going to pay it off if you don’t want to be tossed in the brig.

If you let them get away with it, the cycle will just keep repeating itself and you or your children or your grandchildren will still be slaving away in the galley the next time this Ship of the Damned slips beneath the waves.

We can’t make a real revolution on an unseaworthy vessel. No matter how many times we let ourselves be conned into floating this kind of ship, a slave ship, the ending will remain the same and the next chapter will read just like the previous one.

No re-flagging will ever turn a Ship of State into a Ship of Liberty. It’s time to follow the example of the rats just this far — jump ship! — and no farther. Once ashore, instead of joining the rats in the raising/re-floating/re-flagging project, we need to start building our own smaller, more agile, more seaworthy vessels: Boats of our own, without captains and without rats.

Heading in to the annual television advertising showcase known as Super Bowl Sunday (and there’s football, too!), the commercial that was generating the most public controversy was Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow’s “pro-life” ad for right-wing group Focus on the Family.

I haven’t heard a word about that ad since the day it ran. The ad that’s been talked about most in the freedom movement discussions where I hang out is Audi’s “Green Police” commercial:

Surprisingly, most of the libertarian reaction I’ve seen to this action-packed peek into a near-future environmental dystopia has been negative. That may be because the ad’s content (aside from the “buy our car” part) was played straight enough to come off as ambiguous. Is Audi cheering on, or warning us of, the advent of the “green police state?”

One criticism I’ve heard of the commercial is that it’s crassly exploitative because it flogs a product which meets the standards of — which even advertises itself as an “escape” from! — a plausibly portrayed nascent police state carrying out a “war on pollution.”

I don’t find that criticism persuasive. I don’t remember analogous criticisms from the same corners of ads for products meant to help people ride out the “war on drugs” (urinalysis … er, modification … tools) or the “war on guns” (bury-ready gun safes, fast-trigger switches, etc.).

Personally, I find the ad a refreshing — and hopefully eye-opening — social satire. I don’t really care what Audi’s intent (beyond selling cars) in producing and airing it might have been. Regardless of any putative intent, I strongly suspect that its effect must have been eye-opening and thought-provoking for many viewers.

The ad is a pitch-perfect take on one of government’s congenital defects: Its propensity to ruin good ideas (in this case recycling, energy efficiency, etc.; pretty much the entire “green” portion of the idea spectrum) by turning them into political causes, then into tedious mandates, which in turn become trite excuses for throwing around the weight of bureaucratic and “law enforcement” authority.

It’s also a hilarious send-up of virtually every banal, cliched stereotype that “law enforcement” personnel seem to work so hard to live up to in this day and age. As one who deems the modern “law enforcement” regime eminently worthy of mockery and scorn, I applaud.

And, of course, the ad reprises one of the seventies’ coolest tunes, by one of the seventies’ coolest bands.

No, this ad won’t usher in the revolution, nor would any other ad have done so. That’s okay. It’s enough — more than one has any right to expect, really — that it put some essential truths in front of millions of pairs of eyes.

“Giving money and power to government,” writes P.J. O’Rourke, “is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” It’s always a bad idea to increase politicians’ supply of either commodity, even in trade for some alleged increase in freedom. The state never lifts its boot from one part of the body politic without bringing that boot down more heavily on some other limb or organ.

That lesson seems lost on the current generation of libertarian political reformists. From Social Security alternatives to “school choice” proposals to schemes for legalizing marijuana, current reformist approaches have one thing in common: Each such proposal would extend the state’s reach into people’s lives, or increase the state’s revenues, or both, in return for a superficial quid pro quo.

The latest such proposal — and likely the most successful one in the short term — is manifest in a California referendum effort and a New York campaign for governor. The referendum and the candidate both propose “legalization” of marijuana, with the key marketing points being a) that said “legalization” would give the state regulatory control over cannabis, and b) that taxing the now-legal substance would close state budget gaps.

These kinds of proposals are, in essence, attempts to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

When the state begins to visibly entertain a proposal which would in any way curtail its power, when the pro-state media begins to seriously discuss such a proposal, it’s 100% certain that that proposal is already over the hump of public acceptance. It’s a sure thing that’s being accommodated because there’s no choice but to accommodate it.

On the issue of marijuana, government is on the ropes.

The revenues they depend on for continuous expansion of the “law enforcement” bureaucracy are drying up.

The money they’re accustomed to shoveling at privileged associates for construction of the prisons and “justice centers” which now blight nearly every county in America isn’t coming in any more.

Turning off the marijuana arrest machine would be a no-brainer even if a solid majority of the American public wasn’t demanding it.

So why offer the politicians “sweeteners” like regulation and tax revenues? They’re going to seek those sweeteners, and they’re probably going to get those sweeteners — but let them be the ones to make the arguments for those sweeteners. It’s not the freedom movement’s job to think up ways of compromising our actual or impending victories.

Most freedom activists, be we anarchists or “smaller government” libertarians, understand that Rome wasn’t built in a day and likely won’t be un-built in a day. We’re well aware that eliminating the state, or even cutting it down to some reasonably small size, is probably a long-term project. Sure, some sort of quick-acting, state-killing cataclysm is possible, but it’s not something we’re in a position to bring about or to plan for.

However, we shouldn’t let this understanding lead us into initiating compromises which partially or wholly cancel out our gains. The supporters of state power have plenty of compromises to offer and plenty of marketing mojo to impose those compromises on us. We may occasionally be forced to settle for less than we’d like or to take a loss in exchange for a gain, but less and loss are not what we should be aiming for or proposing.

This may be the only place you ever hear what I’m about to say, so let me say it up front: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) may be the most honest member of the United States Congress. Per CNSNews.com:

When CNSNews.com asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance — a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill — Pelosi dismissed the question by saying: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Pelosi’s office provided the usual “interstate commerce clause” cover later, but the moment provided a peek into the mind of a typical American politician.

The claim that then-President George W. Bush referred to the US Constitution as “a goddamned piece of paper” has been credibly called into question, but there’s a generous dollop of verisimilitude in that claim. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t, but it’s hard to believe that he didn’t at least think it.

Believe it or not, politicians — even the ones who claim to — simply don’t understand the Constitution as limiting, or even placing any conditions on the exercise of, their power. In the normal course of business, they consider it merely a formal affirmation of their omnipotence. On the rare occasion that they actually find themselves challenged by it, it becomes a “word search” puzzle which, correctly solved, opens their way to wherever they care to go.

The conservative niche marketing device commonly known as “constitutionalism” — a device which massages the libertarian impulse in a way that makes it an ideal fetish for “smaller government” types to wave at anarchists — boils down to the notion that government could be made to “work” if only we herded it back into the corral of constitutional limitations.

While that’s a very debatable notion, it’s one we don’t really have to reach, because the question it raises is answered in the negative at the word “if.” Government can’t be herded back into the Constitutionally OK Corral. It trampled down that corral’s fences long ago; the corral no longer exists. Any time you see some random piece of government standing in the area that the fences used to surround, what you’re seeing is a mere temporary coincidence of the running battle between that piece of government and some other. Government is an animal run wild. That it happens to occasionally run across the area its old pen used to cover is to be expected.

Even the House of Representatives’ leading “constitutionalist” politician goes the “goddamned piece of paper” route when the Constitution gets between him and his deepest desires. Yes, I’m talking about Ron Paul (R-TX).

When Paul decided that he wanted to “protect” marriage by providing for the outlawing of it, he authored a bill (the “Marriage Protection Act”) which if passed and enforced would have exempted the states from the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection clause” as that clause bears on the earlier “full faith and credit clause.”

As a “constitutionalist,” Paul no doubt knows (in his brain) that the Constitution can only be changed by amendment, requiring passage by 2/3rds of both houses of Congress and ratification by 3/4ths of the state legislatures. But he really, really, really wanted what he wanted, so instead of listening to his brain, he listened to his heart: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Maybe he agonized over it; I’d like to think he did. Lesser legislative lions just pour their “beliefs” into legislation, and the Constitution be damned. For example, earlier today US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) justified an attempt to repeal the Sixth Amendment (2/3rds of both houses of Congress … cough … ratification by 3/4ths of the state legislatures … mumble) by announcing that “we believe we’re at war.”

Beliefs are fun things, but they don’t trump facts. The Constitution empowers Congress to declare war. If it hasn’t done so, then the United States is not, in any legal sense, at war. That hasn’t happened since the long-concluded wars declared in 1941. The current conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia were “authorized” by Congress in pieces of legislation which included specific language to clarify that they were NOT declarations of war.

Constitutions can’t protect you from government. It’s a wild, savage animal, and the only way to protect yourself from it is to take it around back of the barn and put it out of your misery.