Tareq And Michaele Salahi’s attendance at a White House dinner to which they hadn’t been invited was hardly the first “security breach” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. According to the Washington Post, the Secret Service has documented at least 91 such events since 1980.

The moral of the story isn’t that you can’t trust the Salahis. It’s that you can’t trust the government. In the 220 years since “We The People” allegedly “ordained and established” the Constitution, the government created by that Constitution has continuously worked toward exempting itself from the rules, both explicit and implicit, that bind it.

At one time, the very idea of “breaching White House security” didn’t exist. It was understood to be “the public’s house,” and if you felt like dropping in for a visit or a walk around the grounds … or for that matter, a chat with the president … that was your prerogative as a citizen, right up to at the middle of the 20th century.

These days, you can get a guided tour of the house you allegedly own, where your alleged employees work — if you can get one of those alleged employees, to wit “your” congresscritter, to request permission on your behalf for you to visit.

It’s not just about the White House. It’s about your right to use “your” property. You are a member of “the public,” right?

In recent years, what passes for debate has become so ridiculous that a right unambiguously enshrined in the Constitution and acknowledged therein as belonging solely to “the people” and not subject to infringement by any level of government for any reason — the right to keep and bear arms — is seriously held by some not to apply on “public properties” such as courthouses and “national” forests. If “the people” can’t exercise their rights on their own property, where can they exercise them?

The ink was barely dry on the Constitution before government began setting itself apart from, and above, that “We The People” to whom it was supposedly subservient.

In 1792, the federal government, at the urging of then Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, imposed a tax on whiskey. While the overt arguments for the tax largely centered around paying off government debt (the feds had assumed state debts from the revolution), Hamilton didn’t make any bones about its true purpose. It was, he said, desirable “more as a measure of social discipline than as a source of revenue.” Hamilton had his central government, and now he was eager to have it display its whip hand.

In 1794, President George Washington led an army the size of that which had won the Revolution into western Pennsylvania to let the hoi polloi know who was boss. It wasn’t about whiskey or taxes. It was about authority. A few prisoners were rounded up; two were sentenced to death but pardoned; and 25 or so were fined for “assisting and abetting in setting up a seditious pole in opposition to the laws of the United States” — a liberty pole, in other words, just like those to which Americans had rallied in support of throwing off the British yoke.

It’s gone downhill ever since. These days it’s virtually impossible to enter a government building without emptying your pockets, walking through a metal detector and doffing one’s cap to the uniformed representative of authoritah.

“We The People,” my ass. In setting itself over and above the rest of us, government has also set itself apart from the rest of us. In developing its own interests and priorities distinct from — and often opposed to — those of the people whom it allegedly serves, government has relinquished any rightful claim on the people’s loyalty.

Remember this, and remember it well: Government serves itself first and foremost. We’re an afterthought at best and, more often than not, an obstacle to be overcome. Government is inherently an alien institution and its employees are at all times an occupation force. It’s about time we recognized that and started treating them accordingly.

Left, right, left, right, left, right, left … who can tell the difference these days? The party in power — whichever party that may be — makes policy on the basis of precedent, not ideology. Old programs are preserved, perhaps “reformed.” The opposition party fights tooth and nail against new programs — then keeps and expands them when it comes out of opposition and into power. Government gets larger, never smaller, and as President Barack Obama’s speech at West Point last Tuesday demonstrates, politicians are at least as likely (if not more so) to double down on their predecessors’ bad ideas as on any stray good ones which might have accidentally worked their way into the program.

The US government’s war in Afghanistan has entered its ninth year with no light at the end of the tunnel. So far its fruits come to more than 800 US and nearly 1,500 “coalition” dead, and as many as 30,000 Afghan civilians killed.

Brought on by the horrific blowback of American foreign policy hubris, the war marks not a retreat from, but an enshrinement of, that hubris. It was flawed from conception: As soon as its objectives exceeded or varied from the liquidation of al Qaeda’s command and control apparatus — as they did from the beginning — it was virtually guaranteed that neither that objective nor any other would be achieved. Nor have they.

Comes now Obama, with a plan to “surge” 30,000 more US troops into Afghanistan (having already doubled the size of the US force there in the previous year to no effect), at a cost of $30-$45 billion, on a promise to “begin ending” the war two years from now, around its 10th birthday.

Those who are surprised shouldn’t be. For all the talk of Obama as “peace candidate” in 2008, the fact is that he waxed bellicose at every opportunity, promising to expand the war in Afghanistan and perhaps even extend it further into Pakistan. He’s done both, and just this last week approved an expansion of the US “murder by remote control” drone program in Pakistan, expecting to take it beyond the Waziristan province and into Baluchistan.

The problem with politics as it applies to foreign policy is that no politician believes he or she can afford to appear “weak” while running for office. And every politician, with the possible exception of a second-term president, is always running for office. Obama had to out-hawk John McCain — and George W. Bush — to get elected. In office, he has to out-hawk both his predecessor and every prospective GOP opponent to get re-elected.

The only time a “peace candidate” has a shot at the Oval Office is at that point where the nation is exhausted by and disenchanted with war … a situation which the system is geared toward reaching inevitably but slowly. Richard Nixon managed election in 1968 as a “peace with honor” candidate, at a point where the the US had obviously and irrevocably lost the conflict in Vietnam. Still, he dragged it out for another four years rather than be seen as “weak.”

The incentives of politics all point toward war, or at least the constant will to war.

Since politics — both domestically and internationally — is ultimately no more than a turf contest between street gangs, it’s only natural that jingoism plays well and that the advantage goes to the “strong man” candidate in the first place. Politics is about force. A bona fide “peace candidate” in such a contest is about as viable as Mother Teresa in the selection process for head of the Gambino crime family.

The existing warlike tendency of politics is fertilized and watered by the truckloads of cash poured into the political process by “defense” contractors and other parasites of the state capitalist system’s digestive tract. They spend a great deal of money attempting to get you and your wealth into one end of that tract in the expectation of dropping your bare bones out the other end. In Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ve thus far skinned you to the tune of about a trillion dollars, above and beyond the 5,000+ American lives directly taken.

Even “mainstream” politicians have had occasion to warn us of the dangers this system entails, as Dwight D. Eisenhower did in his 1960 farewell address. What they’re unwilling to admit — and what we must at some point come to grips with — is that those dangers are inherent, congenital, unavoidable and progressive. We can have politics or we can have peace. We can’t have both.

The recent hullabaloo over Tareq and Michaele Salahi’s “crashing” of a White House “state dinner” is very instructive as to the true nature of government, and how skewed most Americans’ perceptions are in relation to it. To get a really good idea of what I’m talking about, just get a good load of this rubbish from CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer:

“’I don’t think it’s a tempest in a teapot,’ Schieffer said of the brouhaha over Michaele and Tareq Salahi, who crashed security at a White House state dinner, claiming they were invited. [One invitation they chose to ignore was to a Capitol Hill event, yesterday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the matter.]

“’I think the government ought to prosecute these people. If that means sending them to jail, so be it. This is not only a security issue — people being able to get into the White House and get up close to the president, and who knows where that kind of thing goes — but this is also sort of an insult to the American people.’

“’State dinners are part of the symbols of our democracy, like the White House itself, like the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem. And when people are making fun of those things, when they’re doing what these people did, that’s an insult to awful all of us. And if these people go to jail, that will be just fine with me.’”

Personally, I don’t feel at all insulted by the Salahis’ presence at that dinner – as a matter of fact, I could care less about it. And I don’t see how their walking in under the auspices of being invited smears any kind of mud on those ridiculously hallowed (and entirely hollow) rituals like the Pledge or the Anthem. I also don’t think the Salahis walked into that tax-financed obscenity (elites dining and drinking off of the blood and sweat of working Americans) in order to make fun of anything or anyone. I think they just wanted to see what they could get away with – just like politicians and bureaucrats do all the time. For that matter, the White House itself is financed by taxation. Anyone forced to pay taxes at gunpoint should be able to waltz right in, unlike a private residence paid for by the production of useful goods and services or by wise investing. But Schieffer, in classic authoritarian arrogance, wants to see this couple kidnapped, railroaded in a star chamber, and then placed in cages for years of their lives – and to have the whole process paid for by money taken from society at large under threat of violent retribution. And yet government agents can smash down doors and shoot people in their own homes virtually at will, because they fail to pay said taxes, or own weapons that make government people nervous (unless they’re the only ones in possession of them), or happen to have a supply of the wrong kind of vegetation.

It should be easy to see that the mindset of people like Schieffer – and there are unfortunately many of them – is scatalogical, indulgent in idolatry of false and frangible concepts, and extremely dangerous. It is endemic of the very institution and concept of government itself. And because of this, it must be eradicated as quickly and uncompromisingly as possible.

In my previous column, I argued that the best way to combat the state was not to work within the system to change the laws, but to make the state irrelevant by our own stigmergic efforts outside of it:  by reminding people that they don’t need permission to be free, by developing new means of circumventing the state and living outside its authority, and by undermining the legitimacy of the state in popular consciousness.

I want to deal specifically, in this column, with the development of new ways of circumventing the state’s surveillance and enforcement mechanisms and making it irrelevant to the way we choose to live our lives.

States claim all sorts of powers that they are utterly unable to enforce.  It doesn’t matter what tax laws are on the books if most commerce is in encrypted currency of some kind and invisible to the
state.  Without the ability to enforce their claimed powers, the claimed powers themselves are about as relevant as the edicts of the Emperor Norton.

A good example is the effect of torrent sites, proxy servers and encryption on copyright law.  Virtually every musical work or movie will be available for free download as soon as the proprietary version appears on the market, and anyone who cares enough to learn the proper technique can download it for free at no risk whatever.  The more the state cracks down on the unwary, the more of the mainstream population is driven to using web anonymizers and darknet, and accepting their use as a normal matter of course.

The concept of stigmergy, which I referred to earlier, is again relevant here:  the emergence of order through the efforts of autonomous individuals and small groups, each coordinating their efforts with the larger whole as they perceive it, without any central coordinating authority.

It’s the form of organization that governs the open-source software movement, particularly the Linux design community described in Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”  Discrete innovations are developed, severally, by the self-selected individuals most interested in the problem and best suited to tackle it, and then made available to everyone through network culture.  As Michel Bauwens put it, in corporate hierarchies probably 80% of the people working on a specific problem couldn’t care less about it, whereas in a peer network 100% of the people working on any given problem are doing so because they’re passionately committed to it.  And the best solutions are then adopted severally, by individuals and small groups, through a similar stigmergic process.  Stigmergic organization brings individual talent to bear on problems, and universalizes adoption of the best solutions as quickly as possible, without the transaction costs of conventional collective action.

John Robb, at Global Guerrillas blog, applies Raymond’s model to “open-source insurgency” and Fourth Generation Warfare.  With networked resistance, separate cells independently use their own judgment in making maximum  effective use of the tools and information that are out there in the public domain.  Al Qaeda Iraq doesn’t undertake all sorts of centralized organizational effort to make sure nobody moves without a “Simon says” from the CEO.  One little group figures out a more cheap and effective way of building IEDs, posts it to the network, and within a week all the little disconnected cells have adopted it for themselves and figured out the best way of applying it.

And according to Cory Doctorow, that’s exactly the way the file-sharing movement works.  The geniuses at the record companies, in coming up with their DRM, thought it only had to be good enough to thwart the average person. The losses to the handful of geeks who could figure out how to crack it would be negligible, so long as the average person couldn’t get around it.  But in fact the geeks, by figuring out a hack, provide the demonstration effect for everyone else.

Such independent efforts using the network form are pretty damned effective in distributing tools and info to where they’re most effective.  And they do it without the need to get everybody on the same page before anybody puts one foot in front of the other.   That’s the whole point of network culture:  it removes all the incredible transaction costs and bureaucratic inefficiencies that used to be required for getting anything done.

The best way to weaken any unjust authority is by showing others, severally, how to resist it:  discovering the best means of nullifying its power over you so you can make it irrelevant to your life, and then propagating the knowledge of that technique far and wide.

Painstakingly getting everyone on the same page, before permitting anyone to take the first step, is the path to irrelevance.  The central benefit of network culture is that it has eliminated the enormous transaction costs of coordinating efforts through giant, bureaucratic organizations.

In April of 2000, Royal Dutch/Shell paid $2 million for the safe return of one of its oil tankers, the Russian-flagged Volgonef.

By January of 2009, the ransom on seized tankers had apparently gone up to $3 million, the amount paid by Vela International Marine, a state-owned Saudi company for the return of the Mv Sirius Star.

As I write this, the media is not yet running information on the ransom demanded for the Maran Centaurus, taken off the coast of Somalia yesterday. Given that it’s carrying a $20 million cargo, odds are that the ransom demand this time will be in line with previous ones.

Oh, wait … that first one, the Volgonef, wasn’t called a “ransom.” It was called a “fine.” And the thugs who boarded and seized the ship weren’t referred to as “pirates,” they were recognized as a “navy.”

If only the differences ended with the labels … but sadly, they don’t.

Most pirates buy — or at least steal without pretense to the contrary — their own equipment, adding to and improving that equipment from their take. Even when a navy takes down an especially juicy victim, chances are that the operation won’t cover its own costs. Navies operate at a loss and take that loss out of the hides of the taxpayers back home, telling them that it’s for their own good. Pirates don’t pretend to be their victims’ benefactors. Navies base their entire claim to “legitimacy” on that pretense.

And, for the most part, pirates are content to take the money and run. Navies, on the other hand, spend a great deal of time pointing their guns at other people and demanding that those people concede to whatever demands the government that sent them might happen to make.

With two exceptions, “navies” come up short in any moral comparison with “pirates” — and frankly I’m not too sure those exceptions hold water (pun intended).

The first exception is that navies can — provided it doesn’t interfere with more important “duties” — be relied upon to answer the calls of vessels in distress at sea, rendering aid and saving lives. Then again, so can most civilian vessels … and there would be more, and probably better-equipped, civilian vessels at sea if governments didn’t tax them from top to bottom at every opportunity.

The second exception is that navies certainly are useful if war breaks out and a coast needs to be defended or the war needs to be taken to the enemy as far as possible from home. The problem with that is that a sizable navy may make war more likely, for less justifiable reasons.

Consider, for example, the US Navy and its 11 “Carrier Strike Groups,” each disposing of more firepower than all naval forces in World War II combined, and more firepower than any other navy on Earth today. At a cost of $171.7 billion for FY 2010 [PDF] — or, to put it a different way, $572 from every man, woman and child in the US for the year — the US Navy’s 280 ships, 3,700 aircraft and 300k+ personnel are on duty 24/7/365, steaming around the world just looking for trouble.

If you go looking for trouble, odds are you’ll eventually find it. If you can’t find it, it’s always easy to provoke, create, or just plain manufacture it (see “Incident, Gulf of Tonkin,” or “Maine, USS”). The US Navy has long since relegated any “legitimate defensive role” it might have once claimed to the whiskey locker. Its purpose isn’t to defend you or me, it’s to throw Washington, DC’s weight around. And not just against foreign nations, but against random dissidents as well. For example, in 1989, in an open act of piracy, US Navy vessels assaulted Greenpeace activists on the high seas, using water cannon and ramming to forcibly remove them from international waters for no better reason than that US politicians felt like detonating a nuclear weapon there.

$572 would buy you about 100 “value meals” at your local fast food restaurant, at least 50 bottles of decent bourbon, or a decent laptop computer. Do you really feel “well-served” by being forced to spend that much every year on an organization whose primary mission has long since become seeking out fights that cost you even more?