At TechCrunch, Paul Carr argues for why the UK needs, if not exactly the draconian new digital copyright currently under consideration, at least something very much like it  (but with stronger procedural guarantees for accused file-sharers).

Never mind all the arguments from principle against the legitimacy of copyright law.  I’ve done that to death here.

But what really caught my eye was his utilitarian arguments.

Aside from the whole issue of IP’s legitimacy, arguments like these make me want to pull my hair out.

Guess what?  If there’s a head-on train collision, every penny spent on replacing or repairing the trains, paying the insurance claim on the cargo, hospitalizing or embalming and burying the human victims, and paying damages for any tort that happened along the way, will count as a net increase in GDP.

By definition, anything that anyone can charge for adds to the GDP by the amount people pay for it.  So the more stuff is enclosed with charges for admission, the higher the GDP will be.

In Theories of Value and Distribution, the Marxist Maurice Dobb used a classic example of artificial property rights:  the state granting to a class of people the right to erect toll gates across highways and pockiet the proceeds (not to fund highway maintenance, mind you–just to take the money for themselves).

Under marginalist economics, any production input with a price has “marginal productivity” equal to what it adds to the final price of the good.  So under that orthodox paradigm, the toll-gate owners would have “marginal productivity” equal to whatever cost the toll added to total production costs and prices, and economists would be stroking their beards and intoning learnedly about the “service” the toll collectors perform in not impeding traffic on the roads.  And of course, GDP would increase by the amount of the tolls.

In other words, anything anyone can do to make it more costly to produce anything, to increase the amount of money you have to pay to receive a given good or service, or in general to increase the cost of living our daily lives, will show up as an increase in the GDP. It’s what Thorstein Veblen called “capitalized disserviceability.”

If highway subsidies cause the neighborhood grocer to shut down so that you have to take the freeway to go to the chain supermarket on the exit, and as a result you’re unable to live without a car, you’ve experienced a net reduction in quality of life to the exact amount of the time you have to spend working to make payments on the car and pay the insurance premiums, plus the extra time you have to spend driving — not to mention the increased insecurity that comes from having yet another non-discretionary subsistence good in your life that depends on the whim of an employer.  But the GDP has gone up by the additional amount you had to pay for all that stuff you didn’t have to pay for before, despite having a higher quality of life.  You’ve done your part to increase the GDP, you old altruist you!

If someone could figure out a way to bottle air, sell it to you, and criminalize directly breathing from the atmosphere as “airlifting,” or if they could contrive some new mechanism for collecting a toll every time you tried to move a spoon from your bowl to your mouth, GDP would probably rise a hundredfold.

If your main concern is the size of GDP, it’s easy:  just find some way to use government to muscle in and force people to pay you for something they were getting free.

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.”

Seven years ago, a 23 year old American woman, Rachel Corrie, stood bravely on the Gaza Strip in front of an armored Israeli bulldozer, peacefully protesting with a bullhorn the razing of Palistinian settlements in the area. She was no stranger to this kind of activism; she’d done it numerous times, and the Israeli ‘dozer drivers, all military personnel, while partially burying her with dirt, would always back off.

March 10, 2003, however, turned out to be different. Rachel Corrie was run over, crushed, and killed. A month’s “investigation” by the Israeli military, not surprisingly, found no soldier at fault. Now, Rachel Corrie’s parents are attempting to sue the Jewish State at a courtroom in Haifa, Israel. Here’s what an article from CNN’s Paula Hancocks had to say about Ms. Corrie and her parents’ thoughts:

“Corrie’s parents are proud of what their daughter did, recalling how important it was to her to help Palestinian families in Gaza.

“In an interview shortly before her death, Rachel Corrie, who grew up in Olympia, Washington, said, ‘There are just countless ways in which these children are suffering. I want to support them.’

“Her mother, Cindy Corrie, told CNN, ‘She deserves the attention that she’s receiving in this case. Every human being who is assaulted and whose life is taken in this way deserves some accountability, some explanation for why this happened, particularly when it’s done by a military and particularly when it’s a military supported by me and my tax dollars.’”

I was a bit surprised by this rare flash of mainstream media candor from CNN – even if they were only aquiescing to print a quote from an interviewee: To wit that American taxes pay for a good portion of Israel’s military. Is it any wonder the Arab World is committed to violent “jihad” in the name of this gross bias of America towards Israel, not to mention being militarily occupied and assaulted themselves by U.S. troops – again paid for by Americans through taxes extracted under threat of violent force?

Where Cindy Corrie is naive is only where most Americans – along with most of the world – are equal babes in the woods: Government is by its very nature disprone to “accountability.” As an institution, the very foundation of which is the use of violence to accomplish goals, it ought to be readily apparent that no particular moral standard can be ascribed to or expected of it. Sadly, Rachel Corrie’s death was not an aberration or anomaly. It was and is the norm when dealing with governments. Human life means little or nothing when it comes to the perpetuation of the elitists’ power cycle. Control, domination, and mastery become all-important. Ethics and scruples are mere laughable impediments and distractions. As Benito Mussolini was fond of shouting: “Everything in the State! Nothing outside the State! Nothing against the State!”

I, like any anarchist, prefer to turn that psychotic sentiment inside out and advocate the converse. I would’ve liked to see Rachel Corrie live. Both proverbially and literally, that means abolishing all political governments outright, in favor of voluntary non-violent free markets. If that makes me crazy in anyone’s view, so be it – though that view is a tragedy. As was the death of Rachel Corrie. As is the existence of government.

In the Matrix reality put before us by the corporatist alliance of big government and big business, and its corporate media mouthpieces, there are several recurring themes.  The economy we have now is the result of “free choice,” and all its specific features are the result of the free choices of individuals.  Those who complain of aspects of the existing economy want to use government to restrict freedom of choice.  Big business and big government are mortal enemies, and the main motive force behind government policy is a desire to restrict the freedom of big business and punish the rich.

Thomas Sowell manages so effectively to work all these talking points into a recent slimy little turd of a column, you’d think he was playing Neocon Talking Points Bingo.

Sowell laments the “resentment” toward excessive profits and wealth, and insinuates that it’s all part of some master plan–an “agenda”–by the “czars,” “our betters in Washington,” and politicians who seek “dangerous power.”  The goal is simply to take away “our freedom to live our lives as we see fit.”  Free to live as we please, we choose to create a corporate economy like the one we have now, and the only way to change the current corporate setup is by restricting our freedom.

In Sowell’s morality play, the struggle between big government and big business is a struggle between power and freedom.

Sowell has it exactly backwards.   The struggle between big government and big business is about as authentic as the struggle between a “good cop” and “bad cop” in a police interrogation room.

Sowell also objects to the terms “‘obscene’ wealth” and “‘unconscionable’ profits,” asking just what’s wrong with wealth and profits.  For Sowell, all wealth is by defnition good–it’s poverty that’s bad.

But he makes the unwarranted assumption that all wealth is obtained in a positive sum gain.  What if our economy, as it’s actually set up, is a negative sum game in which most large concentrations of wealth are obtained at the expense of someone’s poverty?

It’s stupid to say, without qualification, that all wealth is good–just as it’s foolish to say that all property is good.  Sowell should know better than most people that there have been unjust forms of property.  And likewise, there is unjust wealth.

The fact is, big business and the rich are on the same side as those power-seeking politicians.  The dominant corporations and large fortunes of our time result from the use of the state to restrict our freedom of exchange.  Their wealth comes from the ability to restrict–with the help of the state–the terms on which we can buy and sell, and compel us to buy and sell only on terms favorable to them (if you don’t believe it, just compare the $10 you pay for a CD of Linux or Open Office to the hundreds of dollars charged for Windows or MS office).  Their profits–most definitely unconscionable–come from state-enforced privilege, state-enforced artificial scarcity, and state subsidies.

Government redistributes income, all right:  but it redistributes it to the rich, not from them.  And our economic freedom is restricted–but to the benefit of big business and the rich, rather than to their detriment.

We have a corporate ruling class that has enriched itself at our expense, by using government to restrict our economic freedom and force us to do business with them on their terms.  And people like Sowell are their shills. We don’t need any of them.

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.

In the Wall Street Journal editorial “How Milton Friedman Saved Chile,” Bret Stephens credits Milton Friedman’s collaboration with Augusto Pinochet for saving the lives of thousands of Chileans who otherwise would have perished in the recent earthquake. He argues that the economic policies of Friedman and the Chicago Boys are why Chile had sufficient wealth for quality building construction.

“The poorer the country, the likelier people are to scrimp on rebar, or use poor quality concrete, or lie about compliance.”

That statement is true, but the problem with Stephens’ argument is that he does not look at the other side of history.  Most obviously, Pinochet’s policies did not help those who were killed or tortured by his regime. It also has not been seen what kind of wealth could have been created without a parasite like Pinochet ruling the country.

But what kind of responsibility does Friedman bear for what actually happened? Stephens says that Friedman once “wryly noted that he had given communist dictatorships the same advice he gave Pinochet, without raising leftist hackles.”

That might sound good at first – Friedman is just trying to work within the system he has been given to alleviate suffering. But when a man becomes an icon and example, he should be held to a higher standard than this. Top-down economic liberalization in Eastern Europe could have made life better for millions of people – but it probably would have gone by the Chinese example, in which an especially tyrannical regime survives by reorganizing oppression in a way that is profitable for Western capitalists.

Stephens himself alludes to a situation of regime failure with the statement that,

“Pinochet had been mostly indifferent to the Chicago Boys’ advice until the continuing economic crisis forced him to look for some policy alternatives.”

The comfortable parasite attempts to maintain its host.

Thus the inherent problem of working with government: those who seek power will exploit whatever they can to get it. People who worked outside of government channels – the underground printers, the smugglers, and the everyday folks who turned away from government promises – played a huge part in the actual collapse of especially tyrannical regimes in Eastern Europe. The governments were not able to recuperate from crisis and things spun out of their control. If more Eastern Europeans had been exposed to libertarian thought (ideas about maximizing individual liberty, not maximizing the profits of those who can buy freedom) who knows what Eastern Europe would look like today?

Naomi Klein, a major critic of Friedman whom Stephens specifically names for ridicule, responded to the editorial with an article entitled “Chile’s Socialist Rebar.”

The rebar is socialist because,

“Chile’s modern seismic building code, drafted to resist earthquakes, was adopted in 1972. That year is enormously significant because it was one year before Pinochet seized power in a bloody U.S-backed coup.”

It is not certain whether Klein understands that Stephens is arguing building codes mean little if there is not enough wealth to actually meet the standards. However, she does note that economic conditions for most Chileans were better before Pinochet, so the argument could be made from her article that Stephens is factually incorrect.

Unfortunately Klein, like Stephens, believes that state power is beneficial. When “Chileans believed in their state” good things happened. What should be believed about the state is that it is an instrument for the politically ambitious to work with the social and economic powers of their choosing to force their decisions into the lives of other people. With the state, our lives and standards are supposed to be based on the preferences of those who rule us, not by our own values.

Like many commentators, Klein conflates the term “free market” with state privileges for capitalists. It appears that her economic solution is for everyone to become a Keynesian.

An actual free market is the alternative to the state commands that Stephens and Klein look to. If the word “market” makes you feel like you’re going to be sold, then pick a different term and work with its libertarian connotations.

A true free market. It is free exchange among individuals without a layer of coercion creating power differentials. It is the practice of liberty and solidarity that levels power and best secures each individual being equally respected authority over her own life, and no authority over another’s life. It is the yard sale, the peaceable pot trade, the radical union, the gift economy, the alternative currency, the internet trading network, the tunnels under borders, the paper stolen from government presses. It is any way that people organize to consensually meet their needs and satisfy their desires apart from authority or in opposition to authority. It is anarchy, and it is the best hope for the future.

The Freeman editor Sheldon Richman, speaking at George Mason University, raised the question of just what mainstream libertarians mean when they call a country “capitalist.”  What qualifies a country as “capitalist”?

A lot of countries with relatively low indices of economic freedom (including those ranked as “mostly unfree”) are conventionally regarded as “capitalist,” and referred to as such in neoliberal agitprop comparing them favorably to non-capitalist countries like Cuba.  And the talking heads at CNBC and scribblers in the business press commonly refer to “our capitalist system,” even though it’s doesn’t even remotely approximate a free market.

So in common usage, among establishment libertarians and what passes for mainstream “free market” wonks, any country that hasn’t adopted Marxian socialism as its official ideology is “capitalist.”

Based on these observations, Richman concludes that “capitalism” in practice “designates a system in which the means of production are de jure privately owned.”

Interestingly, Murray Rothbard relates an anecdote in which Ludwig von Mises made that distinction, or something very like it, explicit.  He asked Mises:  Given that there’s such a range of possible degrees of statism, from total statism to a totally free market, and given that no country approaches either absolute, what do you regard as the defining characteristic that divides essentially capitalist from essentially non-capitalist societies?  Mises’ response:  the existence of a stock market.  A society with a market for capital goods is essentially capitalist.

As I have pointed out in the past–a point Richman refers to in his address–it is rather odd that “capitalism” was adopted  as the conventional term for a society based on private property and free exchange. There’s no obvious reason, in seeking a name for an economy in which all factors of production are ostensibly equal and enter into free contract as equals, that capital should be singled in particular out for special emphasis.  The choice of “capitalism” suggests some special ideological agenda, as if the system were run of, by and for capital as distinguished from other factors of production.

The unstated assumption embodied in calling a country “economically unfree” and yet capitalist, is this:  an economically unfree country only ceases to be capitalist when the lack of economic freedom interferes with the ability of rich people to become richer from returns on land and capital.  So long as the lack of economic freedom primarily limits the freedom of the poor to escape poverty, but the rich are able to enrich themselves on the pattern of UFC in Guatemala or Jack Abramoff’s clients in the Marianas Islands, it’s got the Good Housekeeping capitalist seal of approval.

Mises answer to Rothbard above–aside from confusing a “market for capital goods” with a market for equity in firms–implies that, no matter how economically unfree, a country in which most business enterprise is absentee-owned by the owners of concentrated wealth, and most labor is hired for wages by such absentee owners, passes muster as “capitalist.”  Presumably a country in which wealth was so widely distributed, and self-employment and cooperative ownership were such primary forms of social organization that stock trading was marginal in importance, would fall on the “socialist” side of Mises line–even if there were no regulatory constraints whatsoever on market exchange and the free movement of prices.

This is a very telling set of priorities:  ”capitalism,” as opposed to “socialism,” is not defined by the degree of economic freedom as such; it’s defined by a particular institutional structure which is disproportionately to the benefit of a particular class of market actors.

As evidence that some forms of unfreedom matter more than others, consider the proclivity of some right-wingers for saying “Pinochet’s political authoritarianism was lamentable, but at least he made Chile more free economically.”  Never mind “minor” issues like whether reversing a land reform and returning land from the people who worked it to a landed oligarchy was a step toward “economic freedom.”  Just consider Pinochet’s authortarian suppression of the labor movement:  had it been the owners of capital, and not the sellers of labor-power, who had been tortured and disappeared, or found in ditches with their faces hacked off, I doubt they would have said the same thing.  It’s an odd distinction to treat repression of the owners of one factor of production as economic, but of the owners of another factor as only “political.”

This assumption underlies most mainstream “free market” commentary in the business press and business news channels:  even when they explictly refer to “our free market system” in so many words, they really mean a system in which most business enterprise is nominally “private.”  No matter how statist a system of regulations is in effect, so long as they’re exercised primarily through “private” actors, and most money passes through the hands of such “private” actors rather than the U.S. Treasury, it’s a “free market” system.  Hence, the kind of “free market” agenda you see at places like Heritage and the Adam Smith Institute for “privatizing” government functions by contracting them out to “private businesses,” even when those businesses are guaranteed a profit at taxpayer expense.

And by the way, those who object to all this as a form of semantic gamesmanship should remember that Mises and Rand were responsible, from the 1920s on, for the deliberate rehabilitation of “capitalism” as a term of pro-market apologetics.  Before Mises’ time, “capitalism” was used by mainstream political economists to describe the actual system of political economy they lived under–i.e., historic capitalism.

“Capitalism,” simply put, is the most honest term for the unfree market we live under.  It’s a system of, by and for the owners of capital; so long as it retains that primary characteristic, it’s “capitalist,” no matter how unfree the market.

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.”

When neocons talk about the rate of “recidivism” among people released from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, you should probably keep in mind that “recidivism” may not be quite what you think.   Specifically, one condition of release is not to disclose things like the interrogation methods used there.   And so the actions included in those official “recidivism” statistics include the “terrorist activity” of seeking legal action against one’s torturers, or turning to anti-torture activism in a way that embarrasses the U. S. government.  So a lot of the hardened terrorists who were allegedly released from Gitmo have turned to careers of “terrorism” consisting mainly of the major breech of etiquette, always unseemly in a guest, of airing their former hosts’ dirty laundry.  Because you know, what happens in Gitmo, stays in Gitmo.

Just to make sure you have the rules down:  Is waterboarding terrorism?  Nah.  Is torture terrorism?  Not so much.   Is talking about it terrorism?  Damn straight!

That, or something like it, seems to be becoming a fairly popular meme.  Liz Cheney, whose recent public speaking career seems to be a calculated ploy to make her dad seem less repulsive by comparison, says Justice Department lawyers who “represented detainees at Guantanamo, filed amicus briefs in detainee-related cases, or were involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees” before they joined the administration are Al Qaeda sympathizers, pure and simple.  (Actually, sometimes I suspect Deadeye Dick was some kind of Manchurian Candidate groomed for office by Al Qaeda–he was certainly the answer to Bin Laden’s prayers.)

But wait!  Before she can organize a necktie party, Liz may have to get in line behind Obama’s own justice department.  According to Solicitor General Elena Kagan, arguing before the Supreme Court, a lawyer would commit a crime—material support for terrorism—by filing a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a terrorist group.  So would anyone helping a terrorist group petition international bodies.  (Presumably the “terrorist group”—what would have been called an “alleged terrorist group” before the Bill of Rights went down the memory hole—is so designated pursuant to the President’s power to declare any group “terrorist” by executive order, subjecting them to summary forfeiture of assets without due process of law.)

And what if the amicus brief or petition is in aid of a group trying to challenge its “terrorist” designation?  Defenders of torture and irregular legal process against “terrorists” have already practically institutionalized the conceptual legerdemain by which the accusation of terrorism is sufficient evidence of guilt.  But now we seem to be approaching a further stage in the degradation of all legal norms:  not only is terrorism is so serious a crime that the bare accusation constitutes guilt; it’s so serious a crime that the denial of guilt is itself a crime!

With one major exception, the tendency for the past several decades has been for police statism to ratchet upward under both parties.  The exception was the Church commission hearings and subsequent legislative restraints on executive power, passed in the atmosphere of public outrage and horror following the revelation of Richard Nixon’s abuses of power.  Nixon’s abuses pale in comparison to those committed by Bush during his eight years in office.  Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to get another Church Commission.  That would be way too partisan and divisive.

It will be interesting, to say the least, to witness how the U.S. Supreme Court rules in McDonald vs. Chicago – a lawsuit aimed at terminating that city’s 28 year long ban on ownership of handguns. Since the ban took effect in 1982, Chicago’s crime rates have skyrocketed. Time and again, government laws that restrict the inherent human right of self-defense have had that onerous, if predictable, consequence.

Yet unlike this lawsuit’s recent brethren, Heller vs. District of Columbia, this most recent appeal to a panel of nine black-robed charlatans will allegedly decide whether the Second Amendment supercedes State and local government laws, or only applies to federal ones.

Here’s what I’m asking, just in part: Where in the Constitution is the U.S. Supreme Court even authorized to “interpret” that same document? And if numerous rulings by that same body have held the the amendment in question guarantees an individual right to both keep and bear arms, doesn’t and shouldn’t that make all further discussion moot? If it is generally and historically accepted that self-defense is a right of all individual human beings before the sheer lunacy of government-creation even begins, doesn’t it qualify, rather, as mere common sense (partial apologies to Thomas Paine) rather than something that must be legislated and then endlessly challenged, interpreted, and intersticed with myriads of exceptions and special qualifications?

In short, shouldn’t the slogan be: What part of the principle of self-defense do you not understand?

This all goes to show the wholesale illogicality of governments themselves – in particular the American version. For if government is ostensibly designed to secure and protect rights, it does a damned lousy job – since the moment it comes into existence it begins by its very nature to violate them, by demanding compulsory taxes from those it arrogantly assumes “protection” over, and then establishing sets of rules all of the “protected” are supposeed to follow under threat of violence – lethal violence, if necessary, in order to compel full compliance. This, it should be obvious, has nothing to do with “protection,” and everything to do with domination, exploitation, and persecution. It exposes government as nothing more than an ultimate – and highly vicious – con game.

It gets better: At the federal level, and in all 50 “states,” numerous court rulings – in glaringly unambiguous language – have stated that governments have no legal or constitutional duty to protect individual “citizens.” This means, in plain terms, that governments small and large across America have long since tossed its founding (if absurd from the very get-go) principle out the window: Again, that governments are instituted to secure and protect rights. Don’t think, in light of this, those in government don’t realize what a preposterous perversion of logic this is.

No, this court ruling, when it’s handed down, won’t be about common sense. It won’t be about each human’s inherent right to protect themselves from physical harm and aggression – for if it were, there would be no ruling to begin with, no court, no lawyers, no codified “law,” no elections, no politicians, no bureaucrats, no government.

It is time for Americans to see government for what it truly is, rather than the manner – in classic Orwellian fashion – in which it has sold the last several blind generations the polar opposite.