The End of Gun Control: 5.5 Contravening the Principles of Prosperity
No benefits from quagmires: All these wars are absurd, unachievable, unnecessary, unconstitutional, and intangible imbroglios that have nothing to do with protecting people or their property.
Sun Tzu, one of history’s earliest military strategists, offered perennial truth in his Art of War (Ch. 2.13) by stating:
“Those in proximity to the army will sell goods at high prices. When goods are expensive, the citizens' wealth will be exhausted.”
Sun Tzu also pointed out that no nation has ever benefited from protracted warfare. The aim of a warrior-sage is to avoid conflict by, when possible, adept maneuvering, adopting an unassailable defense, or striking an opponent’s strategic centers of gravity for a swift victory in the event that kinetic battle becomes inevitable.
Does current public policy sound anything like the strategic advice of Sun Tzu?
With eternal wars on drugs, terrorism, poverty, etc., public officials continually find new avenues to deplete the public treasury on unwinnable quagmires. It is important to remember that as the scope, sphere, and depth of the warfare state expand so does the weight of the burden for funding it fall upon the tax-payer.
Every average citizen, and especially those in urban areas, now lives in close proximity to an army of drug warrior, police-state bureaucrats and their wealth is being exhausted on an unwinnable protracted war on inanimate objects. One could also compound this with the other armies of bureaucrats engaged in the wars on poverty, terrorism, unapproved market prices, or ever widening beliefs about discrimination. All these wars are equally absurd, unachievable, unnecessary, unconstitutional, and intangible imbroglios that have nothing to do with protecting people or their property. In fact, like gun control, they are just excuses from expanding political power and expropriating other peoples’ property.
Just ask yourself: How does someone using drugs or being poor threaten me, my loved ones, or the things I have?
The short answer is they do not. Not in the slightest bit.
Has this strategy even worked? Since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 was passed and staggering amounts of public resources since then were thrown at drug control and prohibition, have the taxpayers gotten the results promised?
Of course not. Drugs, and more specifically drug cultivators, dealers, and users, continue to win the War on Drugs no matter how much money and authority governments wield in this war on people and their property.
These negative returns on investment duplicate of what occurred during the alcohol prohibition of the 1920’s. It was a failed disaster for everyone except the bootleggers, teetotalers, and politicians and bureaucrats of the warfare state.
The typical justification given for continuing the war on drugs is based on expected second or third order effects of drug abuse such as increased property crime due to the poor or drug addicted needing to steal in order to fuel their habits.
Then why not prevent or prosecute the property violations, based on clear standards and obvious transgressions, using the unambiguous boundaries of order? Protecting property rights (rather than being overly concerned with what people do to themselves) would achieve the supposedly desired result without the additional cost of fighting unwinnable wars.
The war on terror is equally preposterous since terrorism is a tactic that has been in existence throughout history. One cannot win a war against a tactic.
As an aside, the 9/11 terrorist attacks that kicked off the Global War on Terror occurred due to a violation of property rights and an infringement on gun rights. It is impossible to know exactly what would have happened in an alternate reality, yet it is relatively easy to speculate that no intended attack of that sort would have been successful in a private property social and legal order.
Some people may not agree that the right to keep and bear arms applies to people when they travel on commercial aircraft. Yet, who should decide which people can be armed in a vehicle, vessel, or conveyance? Should people holding public offices, like the bureaucrats of the Federal Aviation Administration (a part of the executive branch that is specifically prohibited from infringing on the right to keep and bear arms), be the ones to decide? Why not the airline, the owner of the aircraft? Why not the captain of the ship? Who has the property right?
A private property standard would remove the third-party interventions that distort the ability of consumers to enter into contracts with providers for transportation, or any other, services. Companies held to strict liability, under a private property legal order, would be rightly incentivized to take their own security seriously and not pass these responsibilities off to a feckless bureaucracy, or their subcontracted firms, following the lowest standard needed to satisfy bureaucratic minimums.
The 9/11 attacks, among many things, proved the failure of bureaucratic oversight of economic activity while simultaneously highlighting another reason why governments are constitutionally prohibited from infringing upon the right to keep and bear arms. It was FAA policy that created a security vulnerability for terrorists to exploit upon defenseless airline passengers and crews on 9/11.
The security vacuum created by government policy, leading to the 9/11 attacks and the Global War of Terror, is just one example, among many, that demonstrates how justice gets perverted by leaving these functions in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats.
Further, public officials get to aggrandize themselves, expand their prestige, extend their influence, and spend more of other peoples’ money in the name of these unwinnable wars. This incentive structure underlying the Military Industrial-Congressional Complex and what is increasingly becoming a Homeland Security Industrial-Congressional Complex.
Additionally, lucrative government contracts attract politically connected corporations to influence the perpetuation of these unwinnable, vague, and indefinite wars leading to more lobbying and undermining representation for average citizens.
For these reasons, politicians enjoy distorting the definitions of justice, security, and property to suit their own purposes, again, at the expense of the common citizen. This is why We The People must ‘execute the law’ directly, and take the power out of the hands of the political caste, to restore constitutional order.