The End of Gun Control: 6.5 Rightly Configured Power, Persuasion, and Force
Matters of war and security, peace and justice, cannot be left in the hands of the political caste. It is a shared responsibility for every citizen to defend the integrity of law in a Free State.
Left unimpeded, political actors will invariably seek to expand their jurisdictions in search of more resources to control, regulate, redistribute, and consume. The Ruler’s Dilemma, the need to buy support in order to stay in power, dictates a need for ever increasing access to, and control over, other people’s assets. Since the political caste relies upon the use of force to take possession of those properties, there is little appreciation for the resources themselves, the tremendously complex work required to cultivate them, or the people who invested in their development. Therefore, the political caste will always squander resources and destroy wealth thereby impoverishing the rest of the population.
Every political jurisdiction and political actor, regardless of what ‘level’ of government they occupy, seeks increase. This is true for every private individual as well, with the key distinction being that private actors hold no authority to use force in order to get what they want. Voluntary transactions require people to offer value to others in order to influence a trade. The political caste engages in influence operations also, even if it appears to be a mere nudge, yet such activities are aimed at propagandizing the population into accepting interventions upon property rights that are ultimate backed by force. All political enactments, at some point, become offers that private persons cannot refuse.
Desires are natural and an inevitable fact of sentient existence. Everyone wants to satisfy their desires and to move from their current state to one of greater satisfaction. Fulfilling desires signifies an elevation of the human condition. What separates legitimate fulfillment from the illicit is the means employed. Using one’s own property, whether by cultivating natural resources directly or exchanging with another, is legitimate, so long as it does not invade the peaceful enjoyment of another’s property, such as in littering or pollution. Using other people’s property without permission to gratify oneself is a violation of the (common) law and undermines the equal justice principle. Yet this is what the political caste does as a matter of, their, course.
For the political caste, fed through expropriation, taxes are their harvest, the use of force is their tractor, and average people are mere livestock. Yet there is no ‘husbandry’ or skillful resource management to their operations. The objective is to access more and expend the resources as soon as possible. This tendency is exacerbated by democracy because access to the offices that supply the political caste’s access to expropriated resources is limited by the terms of office. Therefore, public officials (including their crony patrons and other supporters) are incentivized to consume as much as possible while they are able, regardless of the overall wealth destruction it causes.
Bureaucrats are equally wanton in resource consumption. Just look at the government budget process. A public agency that does not expend its allocation in a given fiscal year has a hard time justifying the same or increased budget the following year. The incentive is to tax and expend more with every turn of the cycle, and every increase in political spending is a decrement of resources available to the productive, wealth-creating, economy.
The craving for resources cannot be stopped and the political caste cannot abnegate their nature. They dwell, metaphorically, in the Buddhist realm of Hungry Ghosts, afflicted with an unquenchable lust to use the ‘guns of government’ to control other people’s property. Further, this consumptive action compels the expansion of state power, including the absorption or elimination of other states, with the ultimate end being the formation of a worldwide political monopoly, also known as global government or a world state.
Ambitious politicians, bureaucrats, and theorists have long touted the concept of governing the world, especially since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. It’s relatively simple to understand why: Scapegoating the failures of political interventionism in order to justify more control of other people’s privately held resources.
Central planning does not work, yet that does not stop the political caste from indulging in these fatal conceits. Invariably, every time a political program fails to deliver on the promises made at its inauguration, the propaganda machine goes into action, blaming others and calling for more authorities and resources to correct the alleged problems. The US Constitution is a prime example. Once freed from the imperial yoke of England, the newly ‘free and independent states’ indulged in debasing the currency and allowing debtors to shirk paying back loans extended to them, while also restraining interstate trade with protectionist policies. In the wake of the ensuing legal and economic chaos, the member states delegated to the general government trade and coinage authorities as well as court jurisdiction for cases that cross member state boundaries.
Yet this arrangement caused more problems than it solved. The general government now debases the currency, adulterates the loan market, and inhibits free trade, domestically and internationally, at every turn. In addition to aggressive foreign wars and militarily occupying other people’s countries, the general government of the United States imposes monetary imperialism through various globalist institutions. So, rather than alleviating the problems created by smaller states, up-leveling theses authorities to a larger political body only enlarged the span and extended the impact of the same errors.
Because the political caste is the same wherever they reside and with whatever authorities they access, this same pattern replicates between states, among intergovernmental bodies, and amid globalist institutions. The call is always for more authorities and more resources using the ‘guns of government’ to take as much as they can get away with.
It is useful while reflecting on this dynamic to recall the principles of law and justice. Lysander Spooner’s 1882 pamphlet on natural law begins with clear indicators of what constitutes justice within human conduct. There are two conditions to distinguish between what is lawful versus what is criminal: 1. That individuals “shall do toward every other, all that justice requires” such as paying debts, returning what was borrowed, or making restitution for damages done to another, and 2) to “abstain from doing to another, anything which justice forbids” which includes violations like theft, robbery, rape, murder, or any other crime against property or person of another.
Spooner, in a more verbose fashion, preceded Richard Maybury’s concise, seventeen word, formulation of fundamental laws upon which every major religion and philosophy can agree: Do all you have agreed to do, do not encroach upon other people or their property. This provides a basis for contract and criminal tort law with property as the common denominator of legal analysis.
Spooner’s further contribution is in highlighting how the “science of justice” is really the science of peace and consists simply of understanding, what he calls “mine and thine”, to distinguish spheres of action that allow individuals to pursue their ends without causing friction with others. So long as people abide by the two conditions, there is peace between them and, when the conditions are violated, they “must necessarily remain at war” until restoring justice.
Here, again, the distinctions are clear and understandable for everyone involved and property boundaries provide distinguishable lines to facilitate mutual understanding. Further, Spooner echoes Sun Tzu in the need to contemplate the nature of war: Because it is the ground of survival or extinction, one cannot but consider it. In a free society, matters of war and security, peace and justice, cannot be left in the hands of the political caste. It is a shared responsibility for every citizen to defend the integrity of law in a free state.
Armed with the clear analytical framework of this “science of justice”, we can surmise that while the purpose of governance is to arrange for the protection of private property, yet also understanding the consumptive nature of political actors, then conclude that governments are impulsively inclined to undermine justice and initiate conditions of war.
The real purpose of the Second Amendment, then, is to check the insatiable desires of the political caste for control of other people’s property and, further, to halt the expansionist lust for ever growing jurisdictional monopoly power, and thereby arrest the institutional aggression that disturbs social harmony.