Dear C4SS Readers and Supporters,

Yesterday, May 20th, many communities, especially Moore, OK, were devastated by an EF4 tornado estimated to be more than 2 miles wide.

As many of you may not realize, Oklahoma is the home of many of the writers and volunteers with C4SS.

With more storms on their way, the families of Oklahoma could use all the support and aid they can receive. Every little bit of aid is important. This is where $5 from everyone makes an impact that can change lives. Anarchist activist scott crow summarizes the situation well, ”Note to people doing decentralized relief. Just because the state tells you to leave or you can’t do it doesn’t mean you have to listen. Don’t be confrontational. Be creative. The need is great and the state will fail on many levels.”

Volunteers have put together exhaustive lists of how one can send aid or where they can go to volunteer:

• Interoccupy.net‘s #OPOK UPDATE: OKLAHOMA RELIEF
• Moore.recovers.org‘s The City of Moore Recovers
• Moore Oklahoma Tornado Lost and Found Animals
• Infoshop.org‘s Support Oklahoma

Members of Occupy Sandy have begun collecting resources, and volunteers on their way. The Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma has set up a donation service; text the word FOOD to 32333 to give $10 to the Regional Food Bank.

If you want to donate equipment and goods to support the recovery effort, please send them to:

Community Action
c/o Oklahoma Tornado Relief
CSBI Building, E-Wing
1155 E Main
Norman, OK 73071

Priority goods for the recovery effort:

1. Work gloves
2. Backpacks
3. Duffel bags
4. Dust masks
5. Respirators
6. Sturdy shoes
7. Huge tarps
8. Bungee cords
9. Any and all clothes of all sizes

Thank you all for your concern and support. Take care of each other and be safe. And always remember, any (good) thing the state can do, we can do better.

P.S. Any updates, additional information or corrections that need to be added to this post, please let us know in the comments below.

With the ever expanding surveillance systems being employed in the United States and around the world, the ability to use the internet anonymously is becoming increasingly important, especially for activists, or anyone who is not okay with your Search Engine provider, ISP (Internet Service Provider) and your government knowing everything about your internet use. Here, I will go into brief detail about the technical aspects of Tor, give reasons why you should use Tor and finally guide you through the installation of the Tor browser and how to contribute to the network by setting up a relay.

What is Tor?

Tor, formally an acronym for “The Onion Router“, is a distributed proxy network designed to provide anonymity on the web. Much like a VPN (Virtual Private Networks). Tor encrypts your traffic and bounces it through a number of relays before arriving at it’s destination. Preventing third parties from being able to see what you are sending through the network, and where your traffic initially came from. Tor can also be used for servers, to anonymize the physical location of websites, and those who visit them.

How does it work?

There are a number of very in depth resources that explain in a lot of detail how the network works, this is not that. This is a brief guide to introduce you to the concept of onion routing, and if you wish to learn further, there will be a number of links included.

When you attempt to contact a website using the Tor Browser, the Tor client randomly selects 3 nodes from the network. The client then encrypts a message to be sent to the final recipient (e.g a website you want to visit). The encrypted message is sent to the first node, the first node then peels off an initial layer of encryption, revealing where to send the message to the second node, this process is repeated until it reaches the third and final node, also known as the “exit relay”, where the message is unencrypted and sent to the final recipient. The effect of this is to obscure your IP address from the destination server by providing multiple barriers between you and the server. Keep in mind however, personal information that you choose to give to a website, such as in a sign up form, is treated like any other data by the website, it can be looked at by an administrator, or subpoenaed by Law Enforcement, Tor works most effectively if you keep your information private as well as anonymous.

Why should you use it?

Increasingly, governments around the world have become preoccupied with what is known as Total Information Awareness, the ability to track every piece of digital information that we create: financial transactions, instant messages, email, web history, etc. This information can be used to intimidate, harass, or even jail dissidents, journalists and those who may pose some form of nuisance to the government. Many nations have strong controls on what people can search for and view on the internet. Tor allows for the bypassing of these filters, and has been especially useful in Iran, a nation which enjoys extremely high usage of the Tor network.

In the short term, there is little we can do to stop this encroaching surveillance state. But we are able to protect ourselves and others by obscuring as much data as possible. Tor is one such solution. The more people who use Tor, among other things, to browse the web, when they feel it necessary, the less useful our data will be to the government. The more of us who run relays for the Tor network, the faster the system will function for those who need to use it.

Setup

In recent times, attention has been paid to making the use of Tor extremely easy for the less technically proficient, with minimal setup required. The Tor browser bundle can be downloaded from here:

• https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en

This will install the components needed to use the Tor network, including a modified version of Firefox specifically configured for Tor and Vidalia, a graphical front-end that will allow you to configure your Tor settings, including setting up a relay to contribute to the network.

If you do not feel the need to use the Tor browser on your system, but wish to set up a Tor relay, the package can be downloaded by following this link, choosing your operating system, then choosing the Tor Relay Bundle. This will be especially useful on desktop computers, or dedicated computers that run constantly. While a temporary relay does not harm the network, a permanent one is much more useful. When you run a relay from your system, you will be making the Tor network larger and faster. By adding a node, you make the network more distributed, providing for more robust anonymity. You are also spreading the traffic load, increasing the speed of the network.

The Tor Relay bundle can be downloaded from here:

• https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en - Choose your operating system, then “Tor Relay Bundle”.

Setting up the browser is simple, just download the file, extract it to the folder of your choice, then click the “Start Tor Browser” in the folder. Vidalia should start to run, and once it is connected to the network, the browser will open and will notify you if you are successfully running Tor.

If you wish to run a relay along with the browser, go to “set up relay” in Vidalia and check “relay traffic inside the Tor network (non exit relay)”, set how much bandwidth you wish to donate and you are good to go.

If you have installed the relay bundle, the relaying option should be set up automatically, and Vidalia will attempt to run whenever you boot your computer. You may wish to run as an exit relay, but do so at your own risk. If you run as an exit relay, your IP will be what the destination websites see when someone uses your relay, the traffic runs unencrypted from your connection to the destination, and if someone is using Tor for less than savory purposes; spamming, Wikipedia vandalism, child pornography, etc. You run the risk of having your IP banned from many websites due to actions of others, have your computer seized or even be arrested by law enforcement. If you wish to run an exit node, please follow this guide from the Tor Project to mitigate the risks involved. I must emphasize however, these are not issues if you run a relay inside the network, as all traffic you send and receive will be encrypted.

I hope this guide has been useful and convinced those not already using Tor to give it a try. If you do set up a relay, please let us know in the comments section.

There are further resources available for a more in depth look at:

• https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en
• https://www.torproject.org/dist/manual/short-user-manual_en.xhtml
• https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki

“some 4,500 garment factories employ approximately 4 million workers. In the grand scheme of things, they are better off with the factories than they would be without them; the benefits outweigh the risks. In fact, compared to other opportunities in Bangladesh, the garment industry pays reasonably well.”

If U.S. companies like Nike reduce their footprint in Bangladesh and abandon factories there out of fear of bad publicity, “hundreds of thousands of garment workers could lose their jobs and be thrust into worse alternatives.”

Well, yeah — true as far as it goes. When a mugger says “your money or your life,” I’m better off handing over the money and staying alive — but it’s the guy with the gun who artificially set the range of alternatives. The question you should be asking yourself, and people like Powell and the people in the C-suite at Nike don’t want you asking, is who decides what other alternatives are available in Bangladesh?

It isn’t some faceless, inevitable fact of nature that is forced on the sweatshops — or on Nike — by an anonymous market. Thanks to international trademark and patent law, Nike and a few other companies are the only game in town when it comes to hiring people to make shoes. They can take Nike’s price or leave it. But there’s lots of competing sweatshops, and Nike can easily take its business elsewhere. Nike’s oligopsony pricing power means they can set the price they pay a sweatshop for a pair of sneakers as low as they like. And the same “intellectual property” gives them oligopoly pricing power in the United States to sell the sneakers at a retail price thousands of percent above the actual cost of production. The margin between what they pay sweatshops for the shoes and how much they gouge Western customers isn’t set by “the market.” It’s set by Nike. They can set that margin as high or as low as they want.

And the operative phrase here is “as high.” Nike would rather maximize the margin it makes on its sneakers, even at the cost of people living in barracks working hundreds of hours a week for a few dollars a day — and sometimes dying slow, horrible deaths by the hundreds in the rubble of their factories.

So-called “intellectual property” is not legitimate property at all, but a state-enforced monopoly every bit as protectionist as the industrial tariffs of a century ago. Like the tariff, “intellectual property” creates artificial scarcity in goods that are not scarce by nature, enabling privileged corporations to extract rents from that scarcity. The global corporations of the 21st century are as dependent on “intellectual property” for their profits as the old national industrial corporations of the early 20th century were on tariffs. Tariffs ceased to be useful to big business, and “intellectual property” became useful, because corporations became global. Because “international trade” actually consists mostly of internal transfer of goods between local subsidiaries of global corporations, tariffs no longer serve the interests of giant corporations. Like the tariff, “intellectual property” is a government restriction on who may sell a given type of good in a given market, enabling the beneficiary to charge whatever consumers can pay. But unlike the tariff, which was a form of protectionism that regulated the transfer of goods across national boundaries, “intellectual property” regulates the transfer of goods across corporate boundaries.

Unlike the industrial corporations of a hundred years ago, companies like Nike don’t actually make things. They use artificial property rights like “intellectual property” to control the conditions under which other people can make things, and to set up toll gates between the people who make things and the people who consume things. The really, really big money isn’t the ability to produce, but the ability to collect tribute for allowing production to take place.

Without “intellectual property,” those factories in Bangladesh could ignore Nike’s trademark and market identical shoes to the local population at a tiny fraction of the price. And without Nike to impose uniform pricing across the industry, they’d have to compete for local workers. It wouldn’t matter if Nike decided to “reduce its footprint” and pull out of Bangladesh. The workers’ livelihoods would no longer be held hostage to what Nike did or didn’t do.

—

“Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.”

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 17, 157–61

Grocery Insurance

The essential problem with medical financing is described by the Grocery Insurance analogy— third party payment (nominally “private” insurers or the state) divorces price from cost, distributes responsibility, suppresses competition and puts upward pressure on prices: when your insurer only requires a small deductible for each trip to the supermarket, you will probably buy a lot more caviar, filet mignon and white truffle oil.

Likewise, the seller will raise prices. When someone else pays, the seller and the buyer do not have antagonistic interests; the seller wants to charge higher prices and the buyer does not care. Ultimately, costs are externalized. Insurance companies are unscrupulous in their efforts to contain costs, deny coverage and swindle customers (as a matter of necessity) – despite it all, costs are aggregated within the insurance fund and redistributed in the form of higher premiums for everyone. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and the insurance model is based on trying to eat yours.

The state, as disorganized as it is, has less incentive to ruthlessly minimize costs, but immense waste is written off as necessary humanitarian spending. The state suffers diseconomies of scale, bureaucratic inertia, lacks incentive to economize and by its nature the state is centralized and prone to corruption. Hospitals, drug companies and doctors take advantage of the inept Panopticon by price gouging, pushing drugs and executing unnecessary procedures.

Thus, the two-pronged system of unaccountability drives healthcare costs in one direction – up. Meanwhile, tax and premium-payers are gouged with nowhere to turn – to the point at which 17% of U.S. GDP and 23% of the Federal budget is spent on sick care. Nobody should blame sick people for the broken system; they operate within very narrow constraints, especially lack of access to healthy food, clean water, accurate medical information and they endure unsafe working conditions. Claiming that people are hedonistic free-riders is facile. Few will make healthy choices because of the specter of future medical costs; they do so to avoid contracting a disease. The problem is that there are few choices, period, and they’re all unhealthy.

Let Food be Thy Medicine, or Hippocrates Rolling In His Grave

American culture is not conducive to optimal health. Quintessential American foods are hot dogs, hamburgers, soda and culturally appropriated “ethnic food” with enhanced salt, fat and sugar content. The state has made it hard for individuals (especially the poor) to consume healthy food.

Centrally mandated 5-year plans called Farm Bills subsidize certain foods (corn, soy, wheat, canola, sugar, dairy), allow for genetic modification, petrochemical biocides and fertilizers and disempower local producers. The state claims to be protecting family farmers, which hardly exist anymore. These protections actually subsidize the profits of companies like Monsanto, Syngenta, ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Indeed, to manipulate prices, some farmers are paid not to produce food.

This is the economic insanity of Chomsky’s socialized-cost, privatized-profit agriculture; the Soviet Union failed for similar reasons, particularly the Hayekian knowledge problem. Blend the impossibility of calculating the appropriate parameters of a complex system with institutionalized corporate corruption and viola - the American agricultural system. As ADM’s own Dwayne Andreas trenchantly quipped: “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.” [1] Quite, Mr. Andreas, and you are the beneficiary.

The food crisis is characterized by overabundance of unhealthy foods and scarcity of healthy ones. In the inner city, “food deserts” have arisen; large radii wherein markets with fresh produce cannot be found – just liquor stores and gun shops. Radically rational solutions include large-scale urban agricultural projects like Growing Power, the Transition Movement and Cleveland’s cooperative Evergreen City Growers. The food crisis is not the focus of this inquiry, but is critical nonetheless.

The water quality is not so great either. Fluoride, chlorine, heavy metals, agricultural runoff and synthetic compounds including pharmaceuticals, DDT and bisphenol-A contaminate the water that the state is ostensibly responsible for safeguarding. More and more communities are removing the forced-medication of fluoride from the water, but this is easy relative to, say, preventing coal-sourced mercury residues from building up in the watershed. Water filtration is a vitally important mechanism that unfortunately selects against the poor or uninformed.

The long-term sustainable solution to the healthcare crisis is to get to the root of illness – diet and lifestyle. Then questions about costs and administrative technicalities would be moot. However, if society attained a high level of health, some people (perhaps those with predominantly genetic disorders) might still experience lackluster care. Unfortunately, within current constraints it is unlikely that enough people have the awareness and agency to fix their health if left to their own devices. Therefore, the medical system must be remade to stop hurting people (but not by force, property expropriation, or other forms of authoritarianism).

The Temple of The M.D.

“First, Do No Harm.” – Hippocrates

The white coats are seen as the god-kings of science (and physicians often believe it, developing arrogant god-complexes themselves). Their achieved status typically results from ascribed status; only those born into affluent families can afford to become physicians in the first place. This perpetuates a classist-notion of intellectual superiority and paternalistic “I Know Best” healthcare decision-making.

The relationship of the doctor (the Latin root being docere, or to teach) and the patient is no longer one of compassion, respect and free contract; there is a power asymmetry where the doctor cannot be questioned (and he ridicules unorthodox ideas).They even have special uniforms, titles and prestige salaries to bolster their superiority. Doctors start to believe they know everything and they are reflexively dismissive of treatments they were not taught about in school.

It was not so long ago that Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was driven out of practice (and mad) by daring to suggest that physicians wash their hands between doing autopsies and delivering babies. He was later known as the “Hungarian Savior of Women,” because new mothers’ infection rates dropped precipitously after his crackpot theory was put into practice.

All that being said, doctors can also be lifesavers, saints, geniuses and visionaries. But the present medical system does not attract these types, nor is it conducive to bringing out these qualities in practitioners. The problem does not lie with the individual, but with the institution. Most police officers are not repressive thugs themselves, but the institution of policing serves to quell dissent, wage war on poor people and protect the stolen property of the elite. As Omali Yeshitela said, a militarized police force “only becomes necessary at that juncture of society where there are those that have and those that have not.”

A Destructive Trade Union: The American Medical Association

Conservatives have long held private labor unions in contempt. They claim that consumers are hurt by higher prices, unions use terrorist tactics, and Rand’s “persecuted minority” of big businessmen and corporate shareholders are slighted by the haughty demands of uppity workers.

Leaving aside the fact that labor unions established the eight-hour day, weekends and eliminated child labor, labor unions are vital to economic models of liberal capitalism; organized labor is the engine behind rising wages. The claims that labor unions are unjust are hard to take seriously, given the importance of the Labor Movement in the early 20th century in securing basic conditions of decency in the workplace. [2] In any case, worker’s cooperatives render both unions and bosses obsolete and are indeed more efficient than capitalist enterprises founded on the slave-master relationship. [3]

But there is at least one pseudo-union that is unquestionably destructive: The American Medical Association. The AMA uses its considerable political leverage to limit the number of doctors that can be trained annually, making doctors artificially scarce and fetching higher salaries on the market. First declared in 1924 by Morris Fishbein, the AMA continues to wage a covert war against competing modalities like chiropractic, naturopathy and midwifery. The same crusade is fought by the American Dental Association, American Cancer Society, National Cancer Institute and American Academy of Pediatrics. [4]

One must pay for an MD, D.O., N.D. degree and a government license to practice even basic medicine. Medical schools and physicians are artificially scarce and state-mandated pharmacies only recognize their legitimacy to write prescriptions. Patients must pay for the amortized cost of medical school to get a simple prescription for antibiotics. In China, physicians called barefoot doctors receive a moderate amount of medical training and travel the country treating common medical conditions like infection and fractures. [5] In tandem with the aging baby boomers requiring more medical care, there is a desperate shortage of medical providers. Like the guild they are, the AMA is lobbying to prevent nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants from practicing without the paternalistic oversight of a white coat. [6]

Only doctors may take serious medical risks and make serious medical mistakes. Just how major are the blunders that doctors may make is a vexed question, and it is hard to see how it could ever be completely otherwise. At what point does reasonable risk become negligence? When does the necessarily chancy business of fending off the angel of death become a license to commit horrendous cock-ups?

At present, the British rule is that ‘doctors’ who have been certified by the government (that is, by the government sponsored medical oligarchy – this point can’t be made too often for it is the essence of the matter) may take much more severe medical risks than may those who are only ‘doctors’ in the opinion of their patients.

If a (government certified) doctor carries out a medical operation of some sort and it goes wrong (as operations inevitably will from time to time), well, these things happen. You can’t be a doctor and not commit the medical equivalent of mistiming the occasional cover drive, fumbling your lines or committing the occasional typographical error. On the other hand, if you aren’t a ‘doctor’ and you take medical risks, then even if all goes well, you are in legal trouble. [7]

In effect, a licensure monopoly protects negligence that has been deemed reasonable by the state and bars certain types of people from practicing medicine despite demand from patients.

The Coup D’état – Flexner Report

Pharmaceutical drugs have not always been the primary treatment option in the West. Prior to 1910, the dominant forms of medicine were nutritional, herbal, osteopathic, and surgical. Pill popping and “A Pill For Every Ill” are relatively novel phenomena.

The shift toward petro-chemical derived pharmaceutical treatment began in 1910, with John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie’s educational coup d’état, the Flexner Report. The report was a piece of research reformatted into a formal proposal, accompanied by massive donations to certain colleges (bribes), which established the code of the medical institutions we have today. The primary stipulation was that these schools would emphasize pharmaceutical drugs over traditional methods of treatment.

The report also recommended the merger of medical schools with universities, which drove up the cost of medical education, limiting access to all but upper class white males. Also, the pact mandated that new medical schools could not be established without state approval. The robber barons restructured the medical education system because they wanted to remodel their public image, but also to fabricate a profit-generating industry in the decades to come. [8] Rockefeller was also a eugenicist, hoping to craft an Übermensch using the new field of genetics, which he largely financed at Columbia and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

It is doubtful that even the robber barons could fathom how out-of-hand the drug situation has become. The same lack of foresight probably applies to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly—in his gasoline evangelism, John D. probably didn’t expect geopolitics to revolve around petroleum as it does today. Unknown but influential policy changes can have lasting, chaotic effects. This is especially true when simple legislation that, by the stroke of a pen, has the power to unleash the potent propaganda known as direct-to-consumer advertising.

Thirty years ago Merck’s aggressive chief executive Henry Gadsden told Fortune magazine of his distress that the company’s potential markets had been limited to sick people. Suggesting he’d rather Merck to be ‘more like chewing gum maker Wrigley’s,’ Gadsden lamented it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people. Because then, Merck would be able to ‘sell to everyone.’ Three decades on, the late Henry Gadsden’s dream has come true. [9]

Direct-to-consumer advertising began in 1981, and really took off in 1995. Big pharma convinces you that you’re sick, that you’ve “got bad genes,” and only petrochemical-based pharmaceutical drugs will make you whole. To support this myth, companies like Pfizer, Ely Lilly, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Sandoz are often caught colluding with academia to misrepresent drug efficacy to doctors. The disease industry has also been lobbying politicians to ensure that profits are maximized on every front, regardless of the human consequences.

These days, big pharma pushes drugs for chronic depression and ADD. These are Band-Aid treatments—the first purportedly lifting mood and deadening emotion in order to numb patients to the ills of their environment, and the second dosing children with addictive amphetamines so they become over-stimulated robots that eventually develop psychoses and adrenal exhaustion. All this in an attempt to “normalize” behavior. Emotional response is elicited by environmental stimuli. In other words, there is a reason why children don’t sit still in the Prussian military-modeled public school system, and justification for feeling chronically depressed in the modern world.

Pharmaceutical drug interactions cannot be predicted with any confidence. “The average person over 65 now uses seven different medications per day, four prescribed and three over-the- counter,” said Andrew Duxbury, MD, associate professor of geriatrics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and director of the senior care clinic at UAB’s Kirklin Clinic. “There’s never been a controlled study on a human being involving more than three drugs circulating in the body at the same time. So no one knows, scientifically, exactly what’s going on in your body when you take seven, 10, or a dozen at a time.” [10]

Doctors know a lot about pharmacology, but not much about nutrition or preventative medicine. Dietary and lifestyle factors are the leading cause of premature death. [11] Doctors receive an abysmal amount of dietetic education. A 2006 study of all the medical schools in the United States found that less than 41% of the 106 respondents provided the minimum 25 hours or more recommended by the National Academy of Sciences in 1985. [12] This recommendation was made while advertisements for “healthy” margarine were on air – with trans fats now known to increase cancer and heart disease incidence.

Needless to say, perhaps in 1985 we underestimated the importance of nutrition and in light of modern evidence, the recommendation should be more than a paltry 25-hour minimum. Twenty-five hours of schooling equals two hours a day, five days a week for two and a half weeks total. That’s nothing, given how important diet and lifestyle factors are in pathogenesis. In the same study, 88% of instructors expressed the need for additional nutritional education.

Bad Science

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” – Marcia Angell, M.D.

How do drugs that prove dangerous get such a stalwart reputation in the medical community to begin with? Misrepresentation of data by Big Pharma, the FDA, and international regulatory agencies was a major factor. The FDA was once funded entirely by the federal government (a time when corporate co-optation was actually frowned upon).

In 1992, George H.W. Bush changed the rules, and the FDA now derives over 40% of revenue from fees charged to pharmaceutical companies. Britain’s version of the FDA derives 70% of revenues from drug companies, thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s earlier reforms in the 80s. The FDA having a monopoly on regulation is bad enough, and the aforementioned mercantilist conservatives simply required bold-faced bribery. The solution is to de-monopolize regulation and enable entities like the Environmental Working Group or Underwriters Laboratories to certify safety and quality.

Today, there is a revolving door of public policy, lobbying, academia and corporate influence. There are myriad methods employed to misrepresent the research. Not all of it is published—only about 40% of research finds its way to a journal. Of those that do, there is a “publication bias,” where studies that find positive results (that the drugs work) are more often published than those that show the drugs don’t work or are toxic.

Another technique is “Salami slicing”—Big Pharma will cite the same data multiple times in numerous studies. There is no profit motive for independently funded research that seeks to take dangerous drugs off the market. Further, independent research is not published in the major journals like The Lancet or NEJM. Finally, standard cooking of the books, or fun with numbers: anyone along the chain of command can, with a keystroke, corrupt the data. Industry-supported research must be taken with colossal, hypertension-inducing grains of salt. [13]

For example, a meta-analysis of 166 studies on Monsanto’s artificial sweetener aspartame correlated funding source with findings. Seventy-four were funded by industry and 92 were independently funded. One hundred percent of industry-funded studies found the food additive safe, whereas 92% of the independently funded research identified a problem. [14]

Such hazards include neurological excitotoxicity, seizures, mood disorders, headaches, increased appetite and cancer. [15] [16] Of the six “independently” funded studies that found no dangers, five of them were conducted by the FDA. Again, that leaves one out of 92 independently funded study finding the substance safe. To this day, aspartame is the most complained-about substance to the FDA, which insists the sweetener is safe.

Intellectual “Property” – The Patent Monopoly

Property rights are limited to that which is finite, or of limited reproducibility. Ideas are not physically scarce. Likewise, oxygen is not scarce so it is impractical to consider it property. Land is scarce—they ain’t making any more of it. There is a good reason to utilize property rights to organize non-violently. But what happens when supposed property does not physically exist? This is the case with intellectual property. It is an illegitimate, artificial form of property that only exists because of state violence. The byproducts of patent “rights” are monopoly rents to the owner and artificial scarcity for everyone else. This topic is treated in detail elsewhere. [17] [18]

Some believe patents are a necessary evil to entice people to develop new ideas and technologies. First, it’s unclear whether most intellectuals are primarily motivated by windfall profits. Profit is never the inspiration for great minds. As Jonas Salk, the developer of the Polio vaccine, stated, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” He had a higher intention for his discovery; he did not want anyone to suffer needlessly so that scientific pockets may be padded with cash.

But even assuming some socially valuable research would not occur without the potential for windfall profit, there is a naturally occurring market mechanism that rewards originality: price gouging. There is a period of time between which the invention is brought to market and when competitors are able to reverse-engineer and manufacture their own version. This window allows the originator to charge a high price (if they value their marginal personal gain over availability for poor people). Most importantly, though, eliminating patents would allow for more creativity. As it stands, developers can’t build upon the ideas of others without paying royalties. This slows technological progress.

In the case of pharmaceutical drugs this dynamic is particularly pernicious. A recent study found pharma spent 24.4% of their sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of US domestic sales of $235.4 billion. [19] The artificially high prices protected by patents deprive the poor of necessary goods, as is the case with malaria and AIDs medication throughout the developing world. Generic drugs, sold at cost of production, could ameliorate this tragedy. Today, people are dying to boost profits. By all measures, the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable of all. [20]

“The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion) [in 2002]. Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.” – Marcia Angell, M.D.

For more from former editor-in-chief of the NEJM, Marcia Angell, see The Truth About the Drug Companies,  Your Dangerous Drugstore, and Drug Companies and Doctors.

The Drug Merchants

“Medicine makes you die slowly.” – Plutarch

Researching the pharmaceutical industry crushes one’s faith in humanity. It is like reading about King Leopold’s Congo, or medical research within Nazi concentration camps. The sheer force of elite sociopathy is staggering. The laundry list of crime is too long to be retold here, but suffice to say, the entire industry has been accused of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. [21]

Xenobiotic drugs are chemical compounds not found in nature, and for which humans lack efficient detoxification pathways. They are also the only treatment that pharmaceutical companies can patent. Herbal or dietary treatments have not been embraced by the illness industry as they cannot be patented. This is precisely why the dietary methods of Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Galen, Avicenna and today’s burgeoning legion of doctors of natural medicine are attacked and disparaged by the vampiric hegemony. Regardless, the public is waking up, and many doctors defect to alternative medicine and demand within that sector is growing rapidly. [22]

The Food and Drug Agency is the Gestapo arm of the medical-industrial complex, furthering the machine’s blitzkrieg on true health and longevity. For decades, the FDA routinely carried out raids on food co-ops, medical doctors using alternative therapies, farms, even churches in an effort to suppress authentic therapies. They send in vans full of SWAT teams with M16 rifles, handcuffs and bulletproof vests. Documents, computers, money, herbs and devices are confiscated, and excessive damage is done to the facilities. The FDA justifies the raids based on charges that are later dropped, and they routinely levy exorbitant fines against their target after the fact. [23]

“The thing that bugs me is that the people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks its doing are as different as day and night.”

- Dr. Herbert Ley, former commissioner of the FDA (1968-9)

The FDA restricts timely and affordable access to necessary drugs, lies about safety and efficacy to protect profits, suppresses alternative therapies and discredits physicians who successfully utilize them. [24]

In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed former Monsanto lawyer Michael Taylor as Deputy Commissioner of Food at the FDA. Throughout his career, Taylor vacillated between representing Monsanto and working for the FDA — a revolving door par excellance. In 1994, Taylor mandated that FDA not require the labeling of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), [25] which is toxic to humans and cows. [26] It is banned in more civilized countries like Canada, Australia and Japan (and the entire European Union).

Until July 1988, U.S. customs officials confiscated any dextran sulfate that AIDS sufferers brought back from Japan. The drug showed some efficacy in inhibiting the HIV virus’ ability to attack white blood cells. Shouldn’t sick people be free to inform and treat themselves? The same logic applies to the failed, draconian War on Drugs; a sovereign individual is fully within their right to administer any substance to themselves, no matter the personal consequences. Only when they aggress against another has a person transgressed.

There are many unorthodox therapies for cancer, like Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s antineoplastons, [27] the Gerson protocol, Essiac tea, ellagic acid, laetrile, high-dose ascorbic acid, electromagnetic therapy, and dozens of dietary therapies. [28] These are all highly controversial, mostly not because they’re risky, but because if any one of them worked, it threatens patent-monopolized pharmaceutical company profits. In any case, the efficacy and toxicology of these therapies is irrelevant; individuals must be free to choose their medicine. As it stands, the FDA sues, fines, imprisons, and revokes the license of any physician that uses forbidden methods.

Optimistically, the tides are changing, and the Health Freedom Movement is picking up steam, demanding reform and elimination of the FDA in favor of market agencies like the Environmental Working Group. We have, as a reoccurring theme in America’s authoritarian federal structure, the case of a centralized, co-opted, protectionist agency deluding and sickening the populace in favor of short-term profit. [29]

Not only do they price-gouge consumers on toxic snake oil, the sickness machine systematically suppresses research into effective therapy, and even revokes the licenses of physicians using non-toxic and/or nutrition-based treatment protocols. The day is soon approaching that the populace will surpass an awareness-threshold and demand retribution from the unholy trinity that is the FDA-Academic-Pharmaceutical alliance.

For the combined million that will die this year from preventable heart disease and cancer, and the 100,000 per year that die from adverse drug reactions, the resolution could not come swiftly enough. [30]

A recent book, Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma, details some industry transgressions.

Case Study: Dr. John Richardson and laetrile (amygdalin)

Dr. John Richardson had a clinic in Albany, California. In 1972, he was raided by the FDA for prescribing an unapproved cancer drug called laetrile.

Armed officials burst into his office and, in the presence of patients (as well as news photographers whom the FDA had tipped off to cover the arrest), they handcuffed him and his two nurses and hauled them off to jail like dangerous criminals. The office was ransacked and Dr. Richardson’s personal files and correspondence were seized. Patients in need of medical treatment were sent home. One child with advanced cancer of the leg died shortly afterward. It is possible that the death could have been prevented had it not been for the interruption of treatment and the child’s psychological trauma resulting from the raid. [31]

Whether the drug is effective or not, some patients demand it. Why should the state treat a doctor like a criminal for providing a service that people demand? Does the state really have the people’s best interests at heart? Dr. Richardson is not a special case; it is the FDA’s standard operating procedure.

There are many other courageous men who have walked the highest wire. Dr. Ernst Krebs, the co-discoverer of laetrile, was sent to prison for providing Pangamic Acid (vitamin B15) as an adjunctive therapy in the treatment of cancer. Dr. James Privitera, M.D., from Covina, California, served time in prison for an alleged “conspiracy to sell laetrile.” Dr. Bruce Halstead, M.D., from Loma Linda, California, another laetrile advocate, lost his medical license for using the “unproven” herbal called ADS (Aqua Del Sol) as an enhancement to the immune system. Dr. Douglas Brodie from Reno, Nevada, another Laetrile specialist, served time in prison, allegedly for “income-tax evasion.”

Dr. Richardson himself summed up the Orwellian state’s artificial pandemic in this way:

The average person, secure in his home and livelihood, never having felt the crushing attack of literally hundreds of tax-supported lawyers, unthreatened by a prison sentence for merely doing what he knows is right, such a person simply cannot understand the logic of a wounded bear.

When Nazi war criminals were accused of genocide, they defended themselves on the basis that they were just following orders and obeying the laws of the Nazi state. The civilized world cried out: “Guilty!” Man is expected to respond to a higher law than that of any state. When the laws of one’s government require a man to condemn innocent people to death, he must reject those laws and stand with his conscience. If he does not, then he is no different from the Nazis who were hanged for war crimes. [...]

How much suffering and death are the American people willing to take before they stand up to the bureaucracy? How many physicians must be put into prison before all physicians cry “enough!” to the increasing government control over their profession? How many Watergates do we need before we realize that mortal men are corrupted by power, and that the solutions to one’s problems lie not in increasing the power of government but in decreasing it?

The spirit of resistance is in the air. It is a refreshing breeze, but it gives me great hope. I have resolved to stand alone if need to. But, as I write these final words, I can’t help but wonder, is there any one else out there? [32]

Two time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling stated: “Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud and that the major cancer research organizations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them.” Entities like the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations presently fund cancer research, the same foundations that once supported the eugenics movement (and today do business with companies like Monsanto). [33]

Statist Confusion About Rights

People must be free to choose their medicine, and have access (but not a state-enforced right) to medical care. Voluntary association and non-violent trade between free people is the most effective and moral means to provide affordable healthcare in the absence of state coercion.

It is problematic when state action is proffered as “rights protecting,” because the state initially restricted the type of medical care people get and impoverished workers at the outset. [34] [35] The state protects the rights of its subjects in the same way that the farmer protects the lives of his flock: spuriously, and only until the slaughter.

Well-meaning statists declare certain services rights. Everyone acknowledges certain rights, particularly negative rights, like not to be killed or enslaved. There should be no right to scarce goods or services when that right is rooted in taxation (theft). If a free society wishes to recognize such a right, it can only morally be accomplished voluntarily, borne out of human decency and goodwill rather than monopoly and mandate.

Systematic theft is only justified under the yoke of capitalism; where the ownership class has employed coercion (or capitalized on pre-existing state violence) to amass their fortunes, making it moral to steal a bit of that back and redistribute it (whether this is truly what happens in most welfare states is unclear; the taxation system may actually be regressive and dole out more corporate welfare than actual care for the poor). [36]

“My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare,” said Otto von Bismarck. Certainly the welfare-warfare state is preferable to the pre-Bismarck, historical blood- and-iron school of statecraft; however, it is a placation, the opium das volkes. Social welfare is an functionalist tool to keep the music playing and the slave ship of capitalism sailing along. Everyone in the boat wants to stay afloat, but why they’re on the boat in the first place is less investigated, debated or understood.

Fortunately, however, behavioral economics suggests humans are altruistic and share their excess voluntarily. There are evolutionary explanations for such behavior. If a doctor won’t provide care to the poor, everyone else in the society might harbor feelings of altruism or a sense of justice and pool small amounts of their excess to go to charity. They might also band together for mutual aid, under cooperative insurance agreements.

The argument that the state is necessary to enforce beneficence is circular. If nobody cared about charity, they would not use it as a justification for state-control. People value charity and justice prior to the state, which expropriates their property and gives only a sliver of it to the needy.

Furthermore, personal responsibility for a broken society is relinquished onto the state (“Don’t blame me, I pay my taxes!”). That would-be tax money might also have made it to charity (often more efficient than state welfare programs due to overhead). Americans already donate more than residents of 152 other countries – imagine how much more would be available if a third of their earnings were not robbed of them. [37] Meanwhile, the U.S. state spends only 1.5% of the Federal budget on foreign “aid” (including weapons and infrastructure projects that ultimately benefit U.S. corporations). The radical appraisal is that state-capitalism creates or exacerbates the conditions that necessitate charity in the first place.

Like most social problems, the healthcare crisis is exacerbated by two factors: ignorance and poverty.

The “unwashed masses” are misled by Edward Bernays’ and Joseph Goebbels’ media to consume hedonistically (food and drugs) to the point of sickness and then seek a silver bullet (another thing they can buy) to heal them. Abstinence, discipline, and moderation (as solemnly puritanical as those words are) do not come into the picture. Asceticism is bad for profits! Health exists in a state of balance (homeostasis). Upsetting that balance leads to illness. Today, the purported cure for poisoning is a slightly different type of poison (drugs).

Widespread ignorance is not a coincidence. In the early 20th century, the working class had high levels of literacy, attended lectures and published their own journals. The educational system today is riddled with state violence, leading to jingoistic propaganda and forced-filtration rather than authentic enlightenment because most people are too poor to furnish their own schools.

So, in order to get state funding (their own money to begin with – tax plunder), communities relinquish their right to educate their children as they see fit. Hence students make a pledge of allegiance to the flag, under God, and celebrate Columbus Day. The school system is designed to manufacture obedient, efficient workers – not free thinkers. [38] [39] This manufactured ignorance contributes to poor health, especially by engendering a conditioned deference to authority figures like physicians and FDA officials.

Poverty is found at the core of the more pernicious social problems. Most crimes are committed for want of money. People cannot live full and liberating lives because they must work to suspend a deepening of their destitution (often futile).

Poverty is also the reason people can’t afford proper medical care on an out-of-pocket basis; we are forced band together and collectivize in order to survive (either in the genuine solidarity of mutual aid societies or in the vice-grip of dehumanizing state health-management). If workers were paid the full value of their labor, perhaps such survival mechanisms would be unnecessary.

State Monopoly Medicine

A single-payer system will not solve the underlying problems of toxic food, drugs and lifestyle. State-socialism appears to work well in places like Scandinavia, but their health is better than ours to begin with (and more civilized in general). [40] Even people living under states with “socialized” healthcare may be better off using the libertarian-socialist mutual-aid model.

These nations also lack the culture of capitalist cronyism that America has in spades. The same America where the Obamacare bill was drafted by Liz Fowler, a lobbyist for the medical industry. [41] Fowler worked at Well Point Insurance prior to drafting the bill, then a congressional lawyer, and has since passed through the revolving door into the welcoming arms of pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. [42]

No, Obama is no radical socialist messiah; this is a kickback to industry, typical of “Progressive” state-corporatism. If only he were a socialist, in the sense Benjamin Tucker used the term.

Washington health policy analyst Ramsey Baghdadi predicts a $30B ten-year net gain for the pharmaceutical industry. “Pharma came out of this better than anyone else – I don’t see how they could have done much better,” he said. Industry won hefty concessions with Obamacare, as evidenced by bullish price action in healthcare and insurance equities the day the Supreme Court upheld the bill.

Industry concessions include: brand-name patents to be enforced for 12 years with gradually rising federal drug subsidies. Lobbyists prevented the importation of foreign-manufactured medicine, restricted marketing of generics by competitors and barred Medicare from being able to negotiate drug prices. Pharmaceutical interests spent an estimated $188M lobbying in 2009, with an army of 1,105 lobbyists, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In what may come as a shock to lesser-of-two evils dupes, the Democrats long ago gave up any pretense of opposing corporate power and accepted 56% of total bribes – more than the Republicans. [43] [44]

The methods of for-profit health management organizations are also problematic. For example, take the infamous 1971 tape-recorded conversation between the always-abominable Richard Nixon and aid John D. Ehrlichman (of Watergate notoriety) that led to the HMO Act of 1973:

Ehrlichman: “Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. And the reason that he can … the reason he can do it … I had Edgar Kaiser come in … talk to me about this and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make.”

President Nixon: “Fine.”

Ehrlichman: “… and the incentives run the right way.”

President Nixon: “Not bad.”

As described by Thomas Princen in The Logic of Sufficiency:

In the 1990s, health maintenance organizations (HMOs) took over much of the health care in the United States. [...] Joseph R. Wilder, an emeritus professor of survey at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, was a doctor for some fifty years, twenty as surgical chief of staff. With efficient, high-quantity surgery, he’s found errors can happen: ‘it is common practice in many institutions for a surgeon to start an operation and then leave at some point, letting an assistant finish it.

The doctor may rush off to a second operating room, where another assistant has prepared another patient for surgery. All the busy surgeon sees is an operative site — a section of abdomen, for example, where a hernia is to be repaired. [...] Suppose the assistant, misreading a chart or working from an inaccurate record, had draped the wrong side of the abdomen,’ says Wilder. ‘All the surgeon’s skill will be for nothing if he does not make a check of his own before he begins to cut.’

An unlikely scenario? Not at all, according to an authoritative study by the Institute of Medicine, between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. It used to be that surgeons would start, carry out, and complete each operation, even place the dressing and see that the patient was moved properly from the operating table. Under HMOs, that would be terribly inefficient. [...] Hospitals run like factories make doctors and nurses like Frederick Winslow Taylor’s line workers. [45]

How can medicine, a discipline rooted in compassion and not material gain, be wrested from the insurance industry and the state?

Non-Violent Solutions

The core of the solution is to increase health awareness, as more people jump ship from the biomedical “cut-and-poison” Titanic. [46] Consumers are educating themselves about healthy food, supplements and lifestyles, and using “alternative” therapies. The NIH found four in 10 adults reported using Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in the last 12 months, 17.7% of such treatments being herbal medicine. [47]

Those with higher education levels are most likely to employ CAM, [48] which may partially reflect the fact that public health coverage used by poor individuals tends not to cover CAM. [49] There is hope for health awareness, but also in financing and provision itself.

Mutual aid organizations, in the tradition of anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, flourished prior to the establishment of the welfare state.

The friendly societies were self-governing mutual benefit associations founded by manual workers to provide against hard times. They strongly distinguished their guiding philosophy from the philanthropy that lay at the heart of charitable work. The mutual benefit association was not run by one set of people with the intention of helping another separate group, it was an association of individuals pledged to help each other when the occasion arose. [50]

By 1892, approximately 6.8 of 7 million British industrial workers were estimated to be members of mutual insurance programs. [51] The system was co-opted by the British Medical Association with the passage of the National Insurance Act of 1911 and then finally outgunned by the National Health Service in 1948.

Lodge practice was a system commonly used in the United States, where a fraternal society would subscribe to the service of several physicians for a low flat rate. [52] In his incisive analysis The Healthcare Crisis: A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity, [53] Kevin Carson described an early free market anti-capitalist healthcare system:

The United States lagged behind both the British and Australians in lodge practice. In the latter countries more than half of wage earners before World War I may have had access to physicians’ services through lodge practice. [54] It was, nevertheless, quite prevalent in America. The New York City health commissioner, in 1915, observed that in many communities lodge practice was ‘the chosen or established method of dealing with sickness among the relatively poor.’ [55] [...]

The cost of coverage through lodge practice averaged around $2 a year—roughly a day’s wage— and some lodges offered coverage for family members at the same rate. And this was the typical charge for a single house call by a fee-for-service physician at the time. What’s more, the competition from lodge practice probably resulted in lower fees for the services of physicians in private practice. [56] This was, perhaps, one reason for the medical profession’s strong resentment.

The medical industry responded by launching a war on lodge practice and limiting the supply of physicians. “Between 1910 and 1930, the number of physicians per 100,000 people shrank from 164 to 125, largely because of increasingly stringent state licensing requirements, and because of a reduction in the number of medical schools (by more than half between 1904 and 1922).” [57] This was due largely to the Flexner Report coup.

Furthermore, “the federal government encouraged the crowding out of lodge-based insurance by employer-provided insurance, making the provision of group insurance to employees tax deductible without giving similar tax treatment to lodge-based group insurance premiums.” [58]

Medical insurance has since been tied with employment. Employer-based insurance hegemony binds workers to their job—also called “lowering turnover,” where workers are afraid to speak up for fear of being out on the street without medical coverage. Modern attempts have been made to establish compassionate and affordable healthcare plans but have been thwarted by state barriers to entry. Carson details the examples of John Muney, [59] the Ithaca Health Alliance, PhilaHelthia and Seattle’s Qliance clinic. These non-HMO providers claim a 25% savings on paperwork alone. [60]

Jesse Walker describes the situation soberly:

[State-healthcare] would still accept the institutional premises of the present medical system. Consider the typical American health care transaction. On one side of the exchange you’ll have one of an artificially limited number of providers, many of them concentrated in those enormous, faceless institutions called hospitals.

On the other side, making the purchase is not a patient but one of those enormous, faceless institutions called insurers. The insurers, some of which are actual arms of the government and some of which merely owe their customers to the government’s tax incentives and shape their coverage to fit the government’s mandates, are expected to pay all or a share of even routine medical expenses.

The result is higher costs, less competition, less transparency, and, in general, a system where the consumer gets about as much autonomy and respect as the stethoscope. Radical reform would restore power to the patient. Instead, the issue on the table is whether the behemoths we answer to will be purely public or public-private partnerships. [61]

Healing begins with an end to the FDA, AMA, intellectual property, state junk-food subsidies and the government research and credential monopolies. Individuals must be empowered to take control of their health. Local food, alternative medicine, socio-economic solidarity measures (worker, credit and consumer cooperatives) will build the immune system of the poor and sick, abolishing their dependence upon the privileged, parasitic elite once and for all. Workers of the world must unite, not by naively expecting solutions from the state that creates and exacerbates injustice, but by mutualizing social services in a libertarian socialist paradigm.

“The man in the street does not notice the devil even when the devil is holding him by the throat.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

—

1 Carney, D. 1995. Dwayne’s World. Mother Jones Magazine.

 2 Carson, Kevin. 2010. Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model. Center For A Stateless Society.

3 Folbre, Nancy. 2009. The Case for Worker Co-ops. New York Times.

4 Mercola, Joseph. 2011. Chiropractors and Naturopaths – Are They Dangerous? Mercola.com

5 Valentine, Vikki. 2005. Health for the Masses: China’s ‘Barefoot Doctors.’ NPR.

6 Schierhorn, Carolyn. 2010. As NPs push for expanded practice rights, physicians push back. The DO.

7 Micklethwait, Brian. 1991. How and How Not to Demonopolize Medicine. Libertarian Alliance.

8 Brown, E. Richard. 1981. Rockefeller Medicine Men. University of California Press.

9 Moynihan, Ray and Cassels, Alan. 2005. Selling Sickness. Nation Books.

10 Shaw, Gina. 2003. How Many Drugs Are You Taking? WebMD.

11 McGinnis JM, Foege WH. 1993. Actual Causes of Death in the United States. Journal of the American Medical Association. vol. 270, no. 18, pp. 2207-2212.

12 Adams, Kelly et al. 2006. Status of nutrition education in medical schools. American Society for Clinical Nutrition.

13 Kirsch, Irving. 2010. The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Basic Books.

14 Walton, Ralph. Survey of aspartame studies: correlation of outcome and funding sources. <www.dorway.com/peerrev.html>

15 Mercola, Joseph. Aspartame Studies. Mercola.com <http://aspartame.mercola.com/sites/aspartame/studies.aspx>

16 Blaylock, Russell. 1994. Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills. Health Press.

17 Kinsella, Stephen. 2008. Against Intellectual Property. Ludwig von Mises Institute.

18 Long, Roderick. The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights. Markets Not Capitalism.

19 Gagnon, Marc-André and Lexchin, Joel. 2008. The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States. PLoS Medicine.

20 Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. 2002. Pharmaceuticals Rank as Most Profitable Industry, Again.

21 Adams, Mike. 2004. Pharmaceutical industry accused of crimes against humanity before the ICC in the Hague. NaturalNews.com

22 Barnes PM, et al. 2007. Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use Among Adults: United States. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics.

23 Batalion, N. 2011 Timeline of FDA Suppression of Natural Healing Sources. Healing Talks.

24 Null, Gary. 2012. FDA: Cult of Tyranny. Documentary.

25 Taylor, Michael C. 1994. Voluntary Labeling of Milk and Milk Products From Cows That Have Not Been Treated With Recombinant Bovine Somatotropin. FDA.

26 Robin, Marie-Monique. 2012. The World According to Monsanto. The New Press.

27 Adams, Mike. 2011. Burzynski documentary reveals true agenda of FDA and cancer industry to destroy cancer cures that really work. NaturalNews.

28 Griffin, G. Edward. 2001. World Without Cancer. American Media.

29 Feuer, E. 1998. Innocent Casualties: The FDA’s War Against Humanity.

32 Griffin, pg. 322-327.

33 Mercola, Joseph. 2011. American Cancer Society More Interested in Wealth than Health. Mercola.com

34 Long, Roderick T. 1993. How Government Solved the Healthcare Crisis. Markets Not Capitalism.

35 Johnson, Charles W. 2007. Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty As We Know It. Markets Not Capitalism.

36 Sinn, Mike. 2012. Welfare Statistics: Government Spends More On Corporate Welfare than Social Welfare Programs. Think By Numbers.org.

37 The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Americans Are Most Generous, Global Poll Finds. 2011.

38 Gatto, John Taylor. 1992. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. New Society Publishers.

39 Rothbard, Murray. 1999. Education: Free and Compulsory. Ludwig von Mises Institute.

40 Olsen et al. 2011. Healthy aspects of the Nordic diet are related to lower total mortality. J. Nutr.

41 Lieberman, Trudy. 2012. Healthcare expert for sale: The Guardian follows the saga of Liz Fowler, healthcare lobbyist extraordinaire. Columbia Journalism Review.

42 Lennard, Natasha. 2012. Obamacare architect heads to Big Pharma. Salon.com

43 Fram, Alan. 2010. Big Pharma Wins Big With Health Care Reform Bill. Huffington Post.

44 Ridgeway, James. 2010. Big Pharma a Big Winner in Health Care Reform. Mother Jones.

45 Princen, Thomas. 2005. The Logic of Sufficiency. MIT Press. Pg. 92-93.

46 Null et. al. 2005. Death By Medicine. J. Ortho. Med.

47 Barnes P. and Bloom B. 2007. Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use Among Adults and Children: United States. NIH.

48 Ni et al. 2002. Utilization of complementary and alternative medicine by United States adults. Med. Care.

49 Bodeker G. and Kronenberg F. 2002 A Public Health Agenda for Traditional, Complementary, and Alternative Medicine. Am J Public Health.

50 Green, David. 1993. Reinventing Civil Society. Institute of Economic Affairs, Health and Welfare Unit. Pg. 30.

51 Evans, Tim. 1994. Socialism Without The State. Libertarian Alliance.

52 Beito, David. 1994. Lodge Doctors and the Poor. The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty

53 Carson, Kevin. 2010. The Healthcare Crisis: A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity. Center for a Stateless Society.

54 Beito, David. 2000. From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967. University of North Carolina Press. Pg. 19.

55 Ibid., pg. 110.

56 Ibid., pg. 111.

57 Carson pg. 7

58 Ibid.

59 Parsons, Claudia. 2009. N.Y. Doctor Offers Flat Rate Care for Uninsured. Reuters.

60 Carson pg. 8-10.

61 Jesse Walker. 2009. Obama is No Radical. Reason Magazine.

Violence has become our foreign policy – it is the status quo. Our nation-state acts as an agent of terror to occupied territories and lesser states under its influence. The system will stop at no cost. As Bush-era “shock and awe” grew unpopular, the system was able to change the face of its aggression with the Obama era drone wars.

Perhaps what is most disturbing is the support the public lauds on politicians who support aggressive foreign policy. This represents the decaying moral fabric of the nation – the economy, scandals and social issues dominate public thought. Hawks such as Lindsey Graham (waging an all out assault on the habeas corpus), vulgar libertarians such as Rand Paul (whose filibuster, cheered as patriotic by the very people who supported the invasion of Iraq, did not call for the end of drone attacks overseas, only to protect us Americans) and let’s not forget the most effective evil, the noble peace prize-winning Commander-in-Chief (whose NDAA effectively silences dissent, much more ominous than the Patriot Act – who he himself signed again) are all popular politicians. What has become of the anti-war movement?

Our foreign policy is morally unjust. As our troops are separated from their loved ones, flown overseas, killed and maimed, so too are innocent people in our occupied territories. Towns and villages are bombed, occasions such as weddings, birthdays and funerals are bombed, first responders are bombed, men, women and children are murdered, families are torn apart, hundreds of thousands are displaced, people are indefinitely detained and tortured in detainment. Our tax dollars fund this inconceivable aggression, but what is the scandal – the targeting of political groups? What about state sanctioned murder?

We are laying waste to helpless people, who have often been repressed by dictators and authoritarian regimes we placed in power. Where is our national conscience? We were hurt when people cheered September 11^th, but then acted just as barbaric at the news of Bin Laden’s death. How do we not get it?

Change must come from within. The system will obviously still act, regardless of falling public support for the war. But, we are an obedient society. The more we obey the harsher the state becomes, and the more it is able stop dissent. With laws such as the NDAA, the state has defined what is just, but it is the state that is unjust.

The state says in order to uphold the American way we must be strong, and our economy must grow at any cost – this rhetoric is championed by conservatives and liberals alike. We can stand for this no more. We need freed markets, we need to decentralize our institutions, we need to develop alternatives to power, we need to change our moral consciousness. Humanity needs peace.

Our crisis is institutional, but also moral and intellectual. If the government will not stop the war, we must stop the government. Will we?

Com os níveis de uso de drogas nos Estados Unidos essencialmente os mesmos que — e os níveis de violência relacionada com drogas iguais ou mais baixos (*) que — os daqueles em países, como a Holanda, com leis liberais relativas a drogas, o apoio público à Guerra às Drogas parece estar esmorecendo. Isso foi mais recentemente evidenciado na vitória de importantes iniciativas de descriminação de drogas no Colorado e em Washington. Alguns comentadores equivocados chegam a ponto de dizer que a Guerra às Drogas é “um fracasso.” Aqui, para botar as coisas nos eixos, estão quinze aspectos sob os quais ela é retumbante sucesso: (* Email privado – Obrigado, Murilo. Realmente deveria ser “mais altos”.)

1. Ela contornou as restrições da Quarta Emenda a “busca e apreensão,” e disposições similares em constituições estaduais, abrindo brechas de “boa fé,” “suspeita razoável” e “expectativa razoável de privacidade” suficientes para transformar em papel higiênico tais restrições, para todos os efeitos práticos.

2. Em assim fazendo, criou precedentes que podem ser aplicados a amplo espectro de outras missões, como a Guerra ao Terror.

3.Tornou farmácias e bancos em braços do estado que constantemente informam acerca de seus clientes.

4. Via programas como o DARE, transformou crianças em informantes que vigiam seus pais para as autoridades.

5. Como resultado do modo pelo qual o DARE interage com outras coisas tais como as políticas de Tolerância Zero e inspeções sem mandado por cães farejadores de drogas, a Guerra às Drogas tem condicionado crianças a acreditar que “o policial é amigo delas,” a ver alcaguetagem como comportamento admirável, e a instintivamente procurar uma figura de autoridade para dar-lhe informação no segundo mesmo em que vejam qualquer coisa ainda que minimamente excêntrica ou anômala.

6. Via confisco civil, capacitou o estado a criar extorsão lucrativa em propriedade furtada de cidadãos nunca acusados, menos ainda condenados, por qualquer crime. Melhor de tudo, mesmo possuir grande quantidade de dinheiro, embora não tecnicamente crime, pode ser tratado como evidência de intento de cometer crime — o que poupa ao estado o trabalho de converter em forma líquida toda a propriedade tangível larapiada.

7. Possibilitou a forças policiais locais terem treinamento militar, criarem equipes paramilitares SWAT para funcionarem exatamente como a instituição militar dos Estados Unidos em país inimigo ocupado, obterem milhões de dólares em excedente de armamentos militares, e vestirem uniformes pretos realmente atraentes, exatamente como os da SS.

8. Entre as guerras ao comércio urbano de drogas e aos laboratórios rurais de metadona, tem mantido sob constante assédio e vigilância dois dos grupos demográficos de nosso país — os pretos dos centros decadentes das cidades e os brancos rurais pobres — menos socialmente condicionados para aceitar ordens da autoridade, tanto no local de trabalho quanto no sistema político, e componentes vitais de qualquer movimento em potencial por liberdade e justiça social.

9. Além disso, ela leva aqueles que com efeito caem nas garras do sistema de justiça criminal a um ciclo de anos de duração de controle direto por meio de encarceramento e liberdade condicional.

10. Mediante destituir do direito ao voto criminosos condenados por crimes graves, restringe a participação, nos processos “democráticos” do estado, a apenas cidadãos predispostos a respeitar a autoridade do estado.

11. Junto com programas como Lei e Ordem e COPS, condiciona os cidadãos da classe média a aceitar o autoritarismo e a falta de legalidade da polícia como necessários para protegê-los da terrível ameaça representada por pessoas que ingerem voluntariamente substâncias que entram em seus próprios corpos.

12. Por meio da retórica “se você nada tem a esconder, nada tem a temer,” condiciona o público a assumir que o estado de vigilância é bem-intencionado e só quem faz coisas erradas objeta a vigilância onipresente.

13. Em conjunto com infindáveis aventuras militares no exterior e com a retórica do “os soldados defendem nossas formas de liberdade,” condiciona o público a venerar figuras com autoridade que vistam uniforme, e o predispõe a aceitar de bom grado futuras expansões da autoridade militar e policial sem um pio de protesto.

14. Cria oportunidades enormemente lucrativas para os grandes bancos — um dos mais importantes reais eleitorados do governo estadunidense — lavarem dinheiro oriundo do tráfico de drogas.

15. Graças a importantes centros de produção de drogas tais como o Triângulo Dourado do Sudeste Asiático, a indústria de ópio no Afeganistão, e a indústria da cocaína na América do Sul, capacita a CIA — a maior quadrilha de narcotráfico do mundo — a obter enorme receita de financiamento de operações clandestinas e esquadrões da morte ao redor do mundo. Essa rede clandestina de órgãos de inteligência, narcotraficantes e esquadrões da morte, aliás, é outro importante eleitorado do governo estadunidense.

A Guerra às Drogas seria com efeito um fracasso se sua real função fosse reduzir o consumo de drogas ou a violência relacionada com drogas. Contudo, o sucesso ou o fracasso das políticas do estado é julgado, em realidade, pela medida em que essas políticas promovam os interesses servidos pelo estado. A Guerra às Drogas só será um fracasso se o estado existir para servir você.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 10 de março de 2013.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

Não há nada tão engraçado como a visão dos funcionários autoritários de uma ordem fenecente tentando reprimir uma revolução que não entendem — e fracassando miseravelmente.

A tentativa do Departamento de Estado de censurar arquivos imprimíveis de armas de fogo em 3-D doDEFCAD é a mais recente — e uma das mais divertidamente hilariantes — tentativa dos Senhores da Escassez de tentarem entender a revolução da Abundância que ameaça o poder deles. Menos de um dia depois de o DEFCAD ser forçado a removê-los, os arquivos apareceram em A Baía dos Piratas e Mega. Este último caso é especialmente engraçado; Kim Dotcom está provavelmente morrendo de rir a respeito.

Qualquer pessoa que já tenha ouvido falar do Efeito Streisand poderá ter contado a você que isso aconteceria. Tentar suprimir informação na Internet só faz chamar mais a atenção para a informação original — que permanece facilmente disponível — e outrossim deixar constrangido o pretenso supressor na medida em que a tentativa de supressão torna-se, em si, uma narrativa. Já perdi a conta do número de pessoas, ontem, que disse nunca ter ouvido de Cody Wilson ou de armas de fogo imprimíveis em 3-D antes da história da ação do Departamento de Estado tornar-se conhecida, mas pretendia ir à Baía dos Piratas – TPB e verificar. Graças aos não pretendidos esforços promocionais do governo dos Estados Unidos, provavelmente cem ou mil vezes mais pessoas sabem onde obter os arquivos imprimíveis de armas de fogo de Cody Wilson, em comparação com antes.

Nada obstante, os bocós que se congratularam há poucos dias a propósito de tirar do ar aqueles arquivos de armas de fogo imprimíveis não são exatamente o tipo de pessoa que você suporia ter ouvido falar do Efeito Streisand — obviamente. São como o parceiro do comediante que recita as frases que dão ao comediante a oportunidade de fazer piadas nessa peça, atuando só para nosso divertimento. São como a Matrona da Sociedade que entra no salão de jantar num curta dos Três Patetas e demanda: “Qual é o significado disto?!!” Para eles, a Internet é apenas uma grande Série de Tubos, e tudo o que eles têm a fazer é fechar uma válvula em algum lugar para controlar o fluxo de informação. Acontece apenas que a Internet não funciona assim. Na memorável frase de John Gilmore, ela trata a censura como estrago e a contorna.

Lembram-se do gracejo de Joe Biden acerca de “furto” de “propriedade intelectual” não ser diferente de “assalto-relâmpago na Macy’s”? A abordagem do governo dos Estados Unidos em relação ao DEFCAD ilustra a mesma fundamental concepção equivocada. Trata informação digital infinitamente replicável como se fosse bem finito e excluível existindo numa localização física, sobre a qual alguém pode exercer controle ou posse física do mesmo modo que se fosse apenas um sapato ou uma cadeira.

A lógica jurídica deles — legislação de controle da exportação — exibe o mesmo fracasso conceptual. Eles não conseguem entender que os “bens” que o DEFCAD estava “exportando” chegavam a seus portos de destino em todo o mundo no mesmo segundo durante o qual era feito o upload dos arquivos para o website.

Um arquivo digital pode ser replicado infinitamente com custo marginal próximo de zero; o mesmo padrão de informação pode existir num número ilimitado de lugares simultaneamente. Vê só? Acabo de fazer isso com a função copiar-colar de meu browser. Tente fazer o mesmo com a joalheria do Macy’s. Não é possível “furtar” uma canção ou um filme digital — o ato de replicação não afeta as cópias já na posse de outras pessoas, mas apenas aumenta o número de cópias no mundo. Eis porque copiar não caracteriza furto. Analogamente, você não consegue privar o mundo de acesso à informação mediante remover a cópia em um website.

Olhar para essas pessoas que ficam tentando usar ferramentas conceptuais da era da escassez para combater a abundância é como olhar Napoleão tentar derrotar Heinz Guderian ou Erwin Rommel com canhões em cima de duas rodas e infantaria em massa em formações de linha e coluna. Eles não detém as ferramentas conceptuais para entender, menos ainda para combater, a nova sociedade cujo nascimento estão tentando impedir.

Eis porque as tentativas do governo para impor escassez artificial falham toda vez, independentemente de quantas vezes ele lhes mude o nome — ACTA, CISPA, etc. — e tente de novo. Não há como consertar a estupidez.

Assim, para vocês, Senhores da Escassez — representados desta vez por seus lacaios nos Departamentos de Estado e de “Defesa” dos Estados Unidos, tenho uma mensagem: Vocês não têm nenhuma autoridade que devamos respeitar.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 12 de maio de 2013.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

人人生而平等

《宣言》的草案原稿更明确地强调了平等的重要性。广为人知的最终文本是这样写的：

　　“我们认为这些真理是不言而喻的：人人生而平等，造物者赋予他们若干不可剥夺的权利，其中包括生命权、自由权和追求幸福的权利。”

但杰弗逊最初写的是：

“我们认为这些真理是神圣而无可否认的：人人生而平等、生而独立；生而平等衍生出人与生俱来、不可剥夺的权利，其中包括生命权、自由权和追求幸福的权利。”

据我所知，措辞上的修改更多是出于行文格式，而非语意上的原因。最终文本的确更加流畅。但原草案的哲学意义更精确。最终文本把平等和自由并列为两个基本原则，却没有指明它们之间的关系，相反，原草案明确地指出，自由的价值是居于次位，由平等衍生出来的。

然而，我们这些76原则的继承者们，却不怎么提及，也不怎么热衷于平等。相反，我们把自由挂在嘴边；我们称自己为自由主义者而不是平等主义者。我们写的书不叫《平等宪章》、《为了新的平等》或《我如何在不平等的世界中找到平等》。相比之下，那些在当代政治话语中经常援引平等的人，往往是我们理解的76原则的敌人。如果他们也信仰平等，那么平等怎么可能也是我们的理念呢？

当然，答案是我们必须具体地说：什么的平等？哪些方面的平等？我们的平等主义对手崇尚社会经济地位的平等（socioeconomic equality）【译注：后文略作经济平等】。有时解释为机会平等，有时解释为结果平等（如今，两者的界限越来越模糊，结果不平等被当成机会不平等的初步证据）。我们拥护的是什么样的平等？

自由意志主义的平等通常被理解为法律上的平等－－法律面前人人平等。自由意志主义者确实援引法律面前人人平等的理念，反对经济平等主义的各种项目（如劳工法和反歧视法赋予员工随时终止雇佣关系的权力，却不允许雇主这么做）。

但法律上的平等局限太大，不能树立自由意志主义的理念。正如经济平等主义者发现法律上的平等是不够的，因为（阿纳托尔·法朗士的名言），“法律既禁止富人，也禁止穷人在桥底下睡觉”。举个例子，如果非正义的征兵从男性扩展到两性，自由意志主义者不会为此欢呼；这样做在法律上更平等，但却一点也没有增进自由。正如穆瑞·罗斯巴德写道：

“平等待遇的正当性首先取决于待遇本身是否正义。举个例子，如果琼斯和他的追随者建议奴役一群人。我们能“正义地”主张必须平等地奴役每一个人吗？假设一人有幸逃脱。我们要谴责他逃避施加给同伴们的司法平等吗？【注1】”

同样的道理，平等的自由权不足以准确表达自由意志主义的理念。每个人都平等的拥有一点点自由，那并不是自由意志主义者的世界。我们可以像斯宾塞一样主张平等自由法则，但法则不仅要规定平等的自由权，还要规定最大的自由权，真正起作用的不是平等。平等自由法则顶多把平等看成对最大自由权的约束，而不是其基础。

我用“顶多”一词是因为也可以合乎逻辑的说，平等的自由权是最大自由权的结果，而完全不是对其的约束。再引一次罗斯巴德：

“如果有人想呼吁每个人买一辆汽车，他这样阐述这一目标：“每个人都应该买一辆车”。而不说：“在购买汽车上所有的人应该平等”。斯宾塞的平等自由法则是多余的。如果每个人都能自由地做他想做的一切，由这一前提可以得出，没有任何一个人的自由被破坏或被侵犯了。“平等自由法则”中的“平等”概念没有正当的地位，它被逻辑量词“每一个”取代了。“平等自由法则”可以改名为“完全自由法则”。【注2】”

但是，如果对于我们理解的自由社会来说，法律上的平等以及平等的自由权都是不够的，那么怎么才能从生而平等推导出我们的自由权利？

为了回答这个问题，我们必须回到杰弗逊的思想源泉－洛克，他告诉我们什么是自由意志主义的“平等”：即一种状态。

“在这种状态中，一切权力和管辖权都是相互的，没有一个人享有比别人多的权力。极为明显，既然同根同源的人们与生俱来地享有一切同等有利的自然条件，能够运用相同的身心能力，就应该人人平等，不应该有从属或臣服关系。【注3】”

简而言之，洛克和杰弗逊所指的平等是权力的平等：禁止任何一个人“从属或臣服于”另一个人。既然A干涉B的自由构成B对A的从属或臣服关系，那么自由权就直接来自“权力和管辖权”的平等。洛克解释说：

“人既然都是平等和独立的，任何人就不得侵害他人的生命、健康、自由或财产。而且，我们既赋有同样的能力，在同一自然社会内共享一切，就不能设想我们之间有任何从属关系，能授于我们毁灭别人的权力，就好像我们生来是别人的牺牲品，如低等动物生来是供我们利用一样。【注4】”

这是明显的前康德式陈述，不能把人视为别人达到目的的手段。（同样请注意，洛克和杰斐逊怎样援引独立作为权力平等的必然结果和释义。）

现在，我们理解了为什么经济平等和法律上的平等都达不到洛克式激进平等的标准。这两种平等形式都没有质疑那些执法者的权力；它们必须依靠执法者来确保被管理的人之间的平等。因此，尽管经济平等的支持者口号喊的很响，但他们与法律上平等的支持者一样，都没有挑战现有的权力结构。两种平等形式都要求当权者有所作为；但如此一来，他们就承认、甚至要求执法者拥有与其他人不平等的权力。

自由意志主义的平等版本不会这样自我设限。正如洛克认为，权力的平等必然导致拒绝执法者，进而拒绝法律制度本身拥有任何超出公民个人的权力：

“在这种状态下，自然法的执行权便交给了每一个人，每个人都有权惩罚违反自然法的人，以制止违反自然法为度。因为，在那种完全平等的状态中，自然而然地，没有人享有高于别人的地位或对别人的管辖权，所以任何人在执行自然法的时候所能做的事情，必须人人都有权去做。【注5】”

洛克式平等不仅包括在议员、法官和警察面前的人人平等，而且最重要的是普通人与议员、法官和警察的平等。

根据这一标准，支持无政府资本主义的罗斯巴德才是古往今来最一致、最彻底的平等主义理论家之一。《反叛自然的平等主义》的作者罗斯巴德要是听到这样说他，很可能从坟墓里跳出来；但是，正如我们将看到的，安·兰德曾说资本主义毋庸置疑是致力于平等的：从许多方面看，不管是对平等的捍卫者还是反对者来说，怎样正确理解平等都是一个不为人知的理念。

洛克之后，自由意志主义者们划分为两个阵营。一些人像罗斯巴德一样，把洛克式平等奉为任何法律制度都应该遵循的绝对标准。其余的人则跟随洛克本人，把纯粹的洛克式平等对法律制度的约束视为不可行，于是支持放弃一部分洛克式平等，刚好能让法律切实可行地保护剩余的洛克式平等。

我本人站在第一个阵营里；在我看来，洛克对洛克式平等与法律秩序的运作不相容的论证，不是犯了以偏概全的合成谬误（the fallacy of composition），就是犯了抽象误置为具体的谬误（the fallacy of misplaced concreteness）。【注6】（例如，洛克错误地从每个人都应该向第三方法官递交纠纷的主张，推断出应该存在一个每人都能提交纠纷的第三方法官，这就像从每一个人都至少有一个喜欢的电视节目，变成了至少有一个大家都喜欢的电视节目。）

但是，即使第二个阵营是正确的，必须放弃一些平等才能保护剩余的洛克式平等；下述主张仍然成立：政府的一切特权必须严格限于运作法律系统，任何越权都构成对人类平等的不正当侵犯。无论如何，两个阵营都寻求对洛克式平等的最小背离。因此，自由意志主义历来把批判火力对准普通人和执法者（以及他们的亲信和政府特权的受益者）之间的权力不平等。正如安东尼·弗卢写道：

“统治精英们认为理所当然的裁决，结果既有可能是被统治的人之间的平等，也有可能不是。至于发号施令者和服从命令者之间，当然一丝平等也没有。【注7】”

温迪·麦克尔罗伊考证了女权主义运动内部三种不同平等主义理念的相互影响：“主流”理念－法律上的平等，和两个更“激进”的理念：１、“经济平等”－麦克尔罗伊认为是社会主义或马克思主义理念；２、我所说的“权力平等”－麦克尔罗伊称之为个人主义或自由意志主义的理念：

“在女权运动中，平等的含义各不相同。在女权运动史上的多数时期，美国主流女权主义者认为，平等意味着现行法律下的平等待遇和现有制度下的平等代表权。重点不是改变现状而是融入其中。更激进的女权主义者抗议说，现行的法律和制度才是不公正的根源，因此不能进行改革。这一点可从她们的平等观反映出来。对个人主义者来说，平等是一个保护个人权利的政治术语，即保护每一个人对自己身体的道德管辖权。对于女权社会主义者，平等是一个社会经济地位术语。马克思主义划分阶级的参照物是看其与生产方式的关系，而自由意志主义的分析标准则是看阶级与政治手段的关系。社会划分为两大阶级：用政治手段－暴力获取财富或权力的阶级，以及使用经济手段的阶级，经济手段必须基于自愿互动。前者是统治阶级，他们以占有后者的劳动和财富为生。【注8】”

从自由意志主义的角度看，足以令人尴尬的是，经济平等主义者是统治阶级的辩护士。

很少有人认识到，自由意志主义者对经济平等主义提案的抵制，其本身才是基于平等主义的理念。然而，这是千真万确的。据我所知，阿马蒂亚·森是唯一认识到这一点的经济平等主义者；然而，森的特例反证了这一规律。因为他也没理解要点：他把自由意志主义的平等解释为平等的自由权，前面我们已经提过这样的解释是不够的。森是这样理解这个问题的：

“自由意志主义的思想家们不仅反平等主义，而且正是因为他们把自由看得高于一切，才被定性为反平等主义者。他们这样看待平等和自由之间的关系是完全错误的。自由意志主义者一定认为人应该拥有自由这一点很重要。如此一来，则诸如“谁应该拥有自由？”，“应该拥有多少自由？”，“怎样分配自由？”，“平等到什么程度？”等问题会接踵而至。因此，为了补充自由至上的主张，平等的问题立刻显现。接下来必须凸显如何在相关人等之间分配权利，才能补足自由意志主义者的主张。事实上，自由意志主义者的自由诉求通常包括“平等的自由权”的重要特征，比如，坚持每个人都平等地享有不受他人侵犯的权利等。自由是可以应用平等的领域之一，平等是分配自由的可行模式之一。【注9】”

森的分析是混乱的，原因有两个。首先，如前所述，平等的自由权不是自由价值的补充，而只是根据完全自由的理念得来的。（森之所以没有认识到这一点，很可能由于他把自由看成一个积极的术语，干这个或干那个的自由，这种情况要求尊重别人的自由，因此也就限制一个人自己的自由，从而不可能让所有的人都自由。但是，如果把自由理解成消极的术语，即免于强制干预的自由，那么完全可以让所有的人都自由。）第二，森以为在自由意志主义者眼中，自由的价值是碰巧得来的，平等主义的考虑就应该紧随其后。他没有认识到，在洛克的意义上，自由本身根植于平等。

在我看来，反对经济平等主义立法的理由正是平等主义的；此类立法必然强制异议者服从政府决策人，强迫他们屈服于税收和管制，从而预设了前者和后者之间的权力不平等。正如米塞斯写道：

“重要的是要记住，政府的干预总是意味着暴力行动或暴力威胁。政府开支不管花到何处，都是由征税得来。交税是因为纳税人害怕抵抗征税者。他们知道，不服从和抵抗是毫无希望的。只要此状况不变，政府就能够征到它想花的钱。政府的最终手段是使用武力，警察，宪兵，军队，监禁和死刑。政府的基本特征是用殴打，杀害，和监禁来推行法令。那些要求更多政府干预的人，最终要求的是更多的强迫和更少的自由。【注10】”

社会主义的无政府版本也好不到哪里去，只要有人使用武力或以武力威胁实施再分配政策，无论强制者是公职人员还是公民个人，也不管他们代表大多数人还是少数人，都造成强制者与被胁迫者之间的权力不平等。霍布斯丛林也一样无法体现权力的平等。在霍布斯丛林里，任何人都可以自由地把自己的意志强加给其他人，但只要有一个人成功地让另一个服从自己，就形成了权力的不平等。

霍布斯丛林也可以代表权力面前的机会平等，但就此而论，自由意志主义者的主张是结果平等（顺便提一句，这就是为什么自由权是不可剥夺的）。只有防卫性的武力是正当的，因为防卫是恢复权力而不是侵犯权力。同样的道理，在一个理想化的民主社会里，每个公民有平等的机会担任公职掌握政治权力，这也仅代表获取权力的机会平等而不是结果平等，于是同样违反了洛克式平等。在自由意志主义者看来，如果真的“每一个人长大后都可以成为总统”，那么无异于欢呼“每一个人都有可能成为下一个攻击你的人”。

从道德的角度看，权力的不平等远比单纯的经济不平等更令人愤怒，因此，每当经济平等的要求与自由意志主义的平等相冲突时（两者一般都会冲突），必须优先考虑后者。

所以我断定，我认为这种说法不只是断言，而是可以论证的。但我现在不作论证，因为今天时间有限，而且在一定意义上说，没有必要论证。行动胜于言语，经济平等主义者本人的行动表明，他们认为权力的不平等比经济不平等更邪恶。我认识的大多数经济平等主义者一定会认为，比起获知同事薪水比自己高，被同事抢劫或殴打才更令自己愤怒。因此，在现实中，他们清醒地认识到哪种不平等才是更大的恶。事实上，在日常生活中，大多数经济平等主义者一丝不苟地遵循自由意志主义的原则，并期望别人也能同样对待自己。

下述反驳理由也不能成立－“经济不平等本身就是权力不平等的一种形式，所以出于同样的原因应该被禁止”。罗斯巴德指出，这样合并概念是自相矛盾的：

　　“A拒绝与B交换，我们能说什么…如果B挥着枪命令A交换？毫无疑问，“B使用了暴力”。暴力要么是侵略性，因此是非正义的；要么是防守性的，因此是正当的。如果我们接受“经济权力”的观点，我们必须选择后一种立场，如果我们拒绝接受，则必须采取前一个立场。走“中间道路”的国家主义者（Statist）不能合乎逻辑的说，有“多种形式”的不正当强制。他必须两者选其一，并相应地摆正自己的立场。他要么宣称只有一种形式的非法强制－公然使用武力，或者承认只有另一种形式的非法强制－拒绝交换。【注11】”

进一步阐述罗斯巴德的观点：以下两个立场是不一致的：１、禁止所有洛克式不平等，哪怕只禁止大多数洛克式不平等。２、把经济不平等和先行使用暴力都当成洛克式不平等。因为要想有效地禁止经济不平等，必须系统、大规模的先行使用武力。因此，如果经济平等主义者想逻辑一致，只能用他们自己的理念取代洛克式平等，而不能称其扩展了洛克式平等。（本观点同样适用于那些认为消极权利虽然好，但我们也需要积极权利的国家主义者 – 好像每增加一点积极权利并不意味着取消一部分消极权利一样。）

鉴于国家机器和它的臣民之间巨大的权力不平等，考虑到两者之间巨大的经济不平等，那么多自以为把全人类的平等看的至高无上的人，他们怎么会毫不犹豫地成为国家的辩护士？自由意志主义者往往百思不得其解，这些人看上去对市场因素造成的选择能力受限和议价能力差异如此敏感，令人吃惊的是，他们如何能在另一个约束选择、议价能力差异化的因素面前如此无动于衷，这一约束以国家武装力量为代表，由合法授权的暴力强制执行。

公元前五世纪，中国哲学家墨子曾经说过，“今小为非，则知而非之；大为非攻国，则不知非，从而誉之，谓之义：此可谓知义与不义之辩乎?” （如果有人认为一个人对另一个人的攻击行动是非正义的；却不认为国家做同样的事情违背正义，这样的人一定不知道辨别是非。）【注12】。那么，在一定程度上，经济平等主义者肯定混淆了是非。但是，混淆了哪些是非，为什么会混淆呢？

玩世不恭者可能回答说，经济平等主义者并没有混淆；他们致力于平等只是为了伪装自己的权力欲。他们避免批评国家，因为他们自己想驾驭国家机器，或至少想讨好那些当权者。这样的分析令我震惊，但这个中肯的评价只适用于一部分人。我所认识的大多数经济平等主义者是真诚的，他们的国家主义主张是善意的。

我并没有说他们是完全无辜的，毕竟，一个无辜的国家主义者将不得不说：“我承认你的观点，谁能否认呢？系统合法地威胁并使用暴力手段强迫个人服从国家，这是大恶。但不幸的是，为了防止更大的恶，这样的恶是必要的。”采纳这一观点的国家主义者不能为他的国家统制主张欢呼，与此相反，他将不得不表现得像阿伽门农那样悲惨壮烈，阿伽门农要牺牲自己的女儿以保存舰队。

一个无辜的国家主义者几乎不能允许自己不先调查其他可行方案，就作出这一严酷的结论。对于学术界的国家主义者，那将包括仔细研究并试图反驳（并迫切希望自己无法反驳）丰富的自由意志主义文献。这些文献论证了，大部分国家主义者列举的其他罪恶可以用非国家的手段制止。按照这样的标准，几乎没有哪个国家主义者是无辜的。为了寻求取代权力的不平等，在确定存在替代方案之前，他们将必须承认国家主义包含这样的不平等，这将迫使国家主义者接受一个自己本想避免的、令人厌恶的选择。因此，至少在大多数情况下，我认为国家主义者堪称品德低劣，而不是单纯的认知错误。就像我们可以说，种族主义和性别歧视不是单纯的认知错误而是道德品质低劣一样。

但是，国家主义的道德低劣与种族主义和性别歧视一样，不是直截了当、投怀送抱式的，而是倾向于通过自我欺骗、下意识渗透和阿伦特式的“平庸之恶”进入灵魂；它是精神性失明的一种形式，能够并且确实感染了那些在很大程度上甚至是真诚和善良的人。（我的意思不是说自由意志主义者的品德普遍超过国家主义者。正义只是许多品德之一，自由意志主义只是正义的一个应用方面，所以唯一可以自我祝贺的道德优势是，我们在一项品德的一个方面得分比信奉国家主义的同事高）。

这种精神性失明的具体形式是什么？一方面，为了掩盖国家暴力对平等的冒犯，必须让国家主义意识形态中的国家暴力隐形。因此，国家主义者倾向于把政府法令当成念咒语，由法令直接得到结果，中间不需要采取不便的手段，因为在现实世界中，政府采用的主要手段是威胁和实施暴力，把国家法令及其暴力实施伪装在咒语的外衣下，就能无视从法令通往结果的肮脏路径，从而掩盖国家主义的不道德和效率低下。

然而在另一方面，政府法令的有效性，正是依靠人们都意识到支持这些法令的力量。因此，国家主义只有隐性地表现出一种对天主教圣餐变体教义的怪诞模仿，才能维持其貌似的合理性：就像面包和葡萄酒一定要在实质上转化为基督的身体和血液，才能发挥必要的精神作用，同时又必须保留面包和葡萄酒的外部非本质属性，以发挥必要的实际作用一样。于是，为了证明国家暴力的正当性，一定要把它的本质变形为和平的咒语，为了有效性又必须保留暴力的外部非本质属性。（国家暴力神圣化也可以解释其他情景，例如，支持枪支管制的人如何能既把自己看成反暴力的，同时又威胁对和平的民众实施大规模、有系统的暴力。）【译注：天主教相当着重以弥撒为中心仪式，由教皇辖下神职人员主持的圣餐，物质上看来是酒和饼，实质成为基督的血肉，教徒从仪式中得到救赎。新教不接受此观念】

但是，忽略或掩盖经济平等立法所必须的暴力，就是默许由暴力体现出的不正当从属和臣服。也就是把那些从属和臣服的人视为统治者达到目的的手段，因此合法地承认两个群体之间权力和管辖权的不平等。自由意志主义者强烈反对这种傲慢的立场，他们才是在事实上推动平等主义的人。那些感觉不到厌恶的人，别指望你的平等主义者资格不被质疑，你们也许在理论上尊崇平等，但却无法在实践中识别平等。

我游行的时候，观看你们所敬拜的，遇见一座坛，上面写着不为人知的理念。你们所不认识而敬拜的，我现在告诉你们【译注：语出《圣经》，粗体字的原文是“未知的上帝”】。长久以来，我们让误入歧途的对手垄断了平等的旗帜。我们比他们更有权拥有那面旗帜。夺回的时机已经到来。

注释：
【1】穆瑞·罗斯巴德，《权力与市场：政府与经济》（堪萨斯城：希德安德鲁斯和麦克米尔出版社，1977年），第139页。

【2】罗斯巴德，《权力与市场》，第215-216页。

【3】洛克，《政府论》下篇 第4页。

【4】洛克，《政府论》下篇 第6页

【5】洛克，《政府论》下篇 第7页

【6】罗德里克·龙，《法律的本质第二部分：法律的三项职能》第4构想（1994年夏季），www.freenation.org；对照罗德里克.龙，《自由意志主义利弊的逻辑论证》第445页，《兰德研究》第2期（1981春），第81、82页。

【7】安东尼·弗卢，《普罗克汝斯忒斯政治学：强制平等的悖论》（普罗米修斯图书，1981年布法罗）第12页。【译注：普罗克汝斯忒斯是希腊神话中一强盗，他强迫旅客躺在床上，将矮者拉长，或将高者截短以与床长相当；忒修斯以其人之道还治其人之身。】

【8】温迪·麦克尔罗伊，《自由、女权主义与国家》第二版，第3、23页。简介：19世纪美国个人女权主义的根基。（纽约：霍姆斯和迈耶出版社，1991年），第3-26页。

【9】阿马蒂亚·森，《不平等之再考察》（剑桥：哈佛大学出版社，1992），第21-23页。

【10】米塞斯，《人的行为》第27章。

【11】穆瑞·罗斯巴德，《权力与市场》，229-230页。

【12】伯顿·沃森编译，《墨子的基本著作》（纽约：哥伦比亚大学出版社，1963），第50-51页。

作者：罗德里克·龙

译者：程晔

【罗德里克.龙（Roderick T. Long ）教授是米塞斯研究院高级研究员，奥本大学哲学教授。他是《理性与价值：亚里士多德与兰特的较量》的作者，目前从事维特根斯坦的反心理主义与奥地利学派行动学方法之间的连接工作。（见《维特根斯坦、奥地利经济学和行动的逻辑》）】

All men are created equal.

When Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, set out to enunciate the philosophical principles underlying the American Revolution—the principles of ’76, as later generations would call them—that’s the one he put down first, as the foundation and justification of all the rest. Equality—not, as one might expect, liberty.

The original draft of the Declaration highlights the importance of equality still more clearly. The final and better-known version states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

But what Jefferson originally wrote was this:

We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable: that all men are created equal and independent; that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

As far as I can tell, the wording was changed for stylistic reasons rather than substantive ones. The final draft does flow more smoothly. But the original draft is more philosophically precise. By contrast with the final draft, where equality and liberty are presented simply as two fundamental principles, with their relation to one another left unclear, in the original draft the value of liberty is explicitly said to be secondary to, and derivative from, the value of equality.

Yet we who regard ourselves as the inheritors of the principles of ’76 do not speak as often, or as warmly, about equality. We talk, instead, about liberty; we call ourselves libertarians, not egalitarians. We don’t give our books titles like The Constitution of Equality, or For a New Equality, or How I Found Equality in an Unequal World. By contrast, those who do most often invoke the language of equality in contemporary political discourse tend be the enemies of the principles of ’76, as we understand those principles. How could equality be our ideal, if it is also theirs?

The answer, of course, is that we need to specify: equality of what? equality in what respect? Our egalitarian opponents favor socioeconomic equality—sometimes interpreted as equality of socioeconomic opportunity, sometimes interpreted as equality of socioeconomic outcome. (The difference between the two becomes increasingly blurred these days as inequality of outcome is taken as prima facie evidence of inequality of opportunity.) What sort of equality do we stand for?

It is sometimes suggested that the libertarian version of equality is legal equality—equality before the law. And it is certainly true that the ideal of legal equality has been invoked by libertarians against various programs of a socioeconomically egalitarian stripe (such as labor laws and anti-discrimination laws that grant to employees, whilst denying to employers, the right to terminate the employer-employee relationship at will).

But legal equality as such is too limited to constitute the libertarian ideal. Just as socioeconomic egalitarians find legal equality inadequate because (in Anatole France’s memorable phrase) it forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, so libertarians likewise would not be greatly cheered if the injustice of military conscription, for example, were extended from one sex to both; this would be an advance in legal equality, but hardly an advance in liberty. As Murray Rothbard writes:

[T]he justice of equality of treatment depends first of all on the justice of the treatment itself. Suppose, for example, that Jones, with his retinue, proposes to enslave a group of people. Are we to maintain that “justice” requires that each be enslaved equally? And suppose that someone has the good fortune to escape. Are we to condemn him for evading the equality of justice meted out to his fellows? [1]

By the same token, equality of liberty falls short of capturing the libertarian ideal. A world in which everyone had the same tiny amount of freedom would not be a libertarian one. We may speak, as Herbert Spencer did, of a law of equal freedom, but that law specifies not just liberty’s equalization but its maximization; it’s not the equality part that’s doing the real work. The law of equal freedom treats equality as, at most, a constraint on, rather than as the foundation of, maximum liberty.

I say “at most” because equal liberty is arguably a logical consequence of maximum liberty rather than any kind of constraint on it. To quote Rothbard once more:

If someone wants to urge every man to buy a car, he formulates his goal in that way—”Every man should buy a car”—rather than in such terms as: “All men should have equality in car buying.” … Spencer’s Law of Equal Freedom is redundant. For if every man has freedom to do all that he wills, it follows from this very premise that no man’s freedom has been infringed or invaded…. The concept of “equality” has no rightful place in the “Law of Equal Freedom,” being replaceable by the logical quantifier “every.” The “Law of Equal Freedom” could well be renamed “The Law of Total Freedom.” [2]

But if neither legal equality nor equality of liberty is sufficient for a free society as we understand it, in what sense can it be from our equal creation that we derive our right to liberty?

For the answer to this question we must turn from Jefferson to Jefferson’s source, John Locke, who tells us exactly what “equality” in the libertarian sense is: namely, a condition

wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection…. [3]

In short, the equality that Locke and Jefferson speak of is equality in authority: the prohibition of any “subordination or subjection” of one person to another. Since any interference by A with B’s liberty constitutes a subordination or subjection of B to A, the right to liberty follows straightforwardly from the equality of “power and jurisdiction.” As Locke explains:

[B]eing all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…. And, being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours. [4]

This is a notable pre-Kantian statement of the principle that human beings are not to be treated as mere means to the ends of others. (Observe, too, how Locke and Jefferson both invokeindependence as a corollary of, or a gloss on, equality in authority.)

We can now see how socioeconomic equality and legal equality both fall short of the radicalism of Lockean equality. For neither of those forms of equality calls into question the authority of those who administer the legal system; such administrators are merely required to ensure equality, of the relevant sort, among those administered. Thus socioeconomic equality, despite the bold claims of its adherents, does no more to challenge the existing power structure than does legal equality. Both forms of equality call upon that power structure to do certain things; but in so doing, they both assume, and indeed require, an inequality in authority between those who administer the legal framework and everybody else.

The libertarian version of equality is not circumscribed in this way. As Locke sees, equality in authority entails denying to the legal system’s administrators—and thus to the legal system itself—any powers beyond those possessed by private citizens:

[T]he execution of the law of nature is in that state put into every man’s hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree as may hinder its violation…. For in that state of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another, what any may do in prosecution of that law, every one must needs have a right to do. [5]

Lockean equality involves not merely equality before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially, equality with legislators, judges, and police.

By this standard Murray Rothbard, in his advocacy of anarcho-capitalism, turns out to have been one of the most consistent and thoroughgoing egalitarian theorists of all time. As the author ofEgalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, Rothbard might very well turn over in his grave to hear himself so described; but, as we shall see, what Ayn Rand used to say of capitalism applies a fortiorito equality: equality, properly understood, is in many ways an unknown ideal—unknown both to its defenders and to its detractors.

Since Locke’s day, libertarians have been divided into two camps. Some, like Rothbard, have embraced Lockean equality as an absolute standard to which any legal system should be held. Others, following Locke himself, have regarded pure Lockean equality as an unworkable constraint on a legal system, and so have favored surrendering just enough Lockean equality to make practicable the legal protection of the Lockean equality that remains.

My own sympathies lie with the first group; in my view, Locke’s arguments for the incompatibility of Lockean equality with a functioning legal order all commit either the fallacy of composition or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. [6] (For example, from the claim everybody should submit his disputes to a third-party judge, Locke fallaciously infers there should be a third-party judge to whom everyone submits his disputes, which is like moving from everyone likes at least one TV show to there’s at least one TV show that everyone likes.)

But even if the second group were right, and it were necessary to give up some Lockean equality in order to protect the rest, it would at least still be true that any powers unique to government that gobeyond what is strictly necessary for a working legal system constitute an unjustified affront to human equality. Both groups seek, at any rate, to minimize departures from Lockean equality. Hence libertarians have traditionally directed their ire against the inequalities in authority that exist between, on the one hand, the average person, and, on the other hand, the legal system’s administrators (as well as their cronies, the private beneficiaries of government privilege). As Antony Flew writes:

[W]hat the various ruling élites determine to be fitting … may or may not turn out to be equality between all those who are so dependent. But as between those who give and those who receive the commands … there can of course be no equality at all. [7]

Wendy McElroy has traced the interplay within the feminist movement of three distinct egalitarian ideals: a “mainstream” ideal—equality before the law—and two more “radical” ideals—socioeconomic equality, which McElroy identifies as a socialist or Marxist ideal, and what I have been calling equality in authority, which McElroy identifies as an individualist or libertarian ideal:

[T]he meaning of equality differs within the feminist movement. Throughout most of its history, American mainstream feminism considered equality to mean equal treatment under existing laws and equal representation within existing institutions. The focus was not to change the status quo in a basic sense, but rather to be included within it. The more radical feminists protested that existing laws and institutions were the source of injustice and, thus, could not be reformed…. [T]heir concepts of equality reflected this. To the individualist, equality was a political term referring to the protection of individual rights; that is, protection of the moral jurisdiction every human being has over his or her own body. To socialist-feminists, it was a socio-economic term…. While Marxist class analysis uses the relationship to the mode of production as its point of reference, libertarian class analysis uses the relationship to the political means as its standard. Society is divided into two classes: those who use the political means, which is force, to acquire wealth or power and those who use the economic means, which requires voluntary interaction. The former is the ruling class which lives off the labor and wealth of the latter. [8]

From a libertarian standpoint, socioeconomic egalitarians turn out, embarrassingly enough, to be apologists for the ruling class.

That libertarian resistance to socioeconomically egalitarian proposals is itself based on an egalitarian ideal is seldom recognized. It is nonetheless true. The only socioeconomic egalitarian I know of who recognises this is Amartya Sen; yet Sen is the exception that proves the rule. For he too misses the point: he glosses libertarian equality as equality of liberty, an interpretation we’ve already seen to be inadequate. Here is how Sen sees the issue:

Not only are libertarian thinkers … seen as anti-egalitarian, but they are diagnosed as anti-egalitarian precisely because of their overriding concern with liberty…. [T]his way of seeing the relationship between equality and liberty is altogether faulty. Libertarians must think it important that people should have liberty. Given this, questions would immediately arise regarding: who, how much, how distributed, how equal? Thus the issue of equality immediately arises as a supplement to the assertion of the importance of liberty. The libertarian proposal has to be completed by going on to characterize the distribution of rights among the people involved. In fact, the libertarian demands for liberty typically include important features of ‘equal liberty’, e.g. the insistence on equal immunity from interference by others…. Liberty is among the possible fields of application of equality, and equality is among the possible patterns of distribution of liberty. [9]

Sen’s analysis is confused here, for two reasons. First, as we’ve already seen, equality of liberty is not a supplement to the value of liberty, but simply follows from the ideal of total liberty. (Sen’s failure to recognize this may be due to his thinking of liberty in positive terms, as freedom to do this or that, in which case the need to respect others’ liberty would be a limitation on one’s own liberty, thus rendering total liberty for all impossible. But if liberty is understood in negative terms, as freedomfrom coercive interference, then total liberty for all is entirely possible.) Second, Sen treats liberty as something that libertarians just happen to value, and to which egalitarian considerations are subsequently applied—not recognizing that liberty itself is grounded in a concern for equality in the Lockean sense.

The case against socioeconomically egalitarian legislation is, as I said, an egalitarian one; for such legislation invariably involves the coercive subordination or subjection of dissenting individuals to the taxes and regulations imposed by government decision makers, and thus presupposes an inequality in authority between the former and the latter. As Ludwig von Mises writes:

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom. [10]

Nor would an anarchistic version of socialism fare any better; as long as some people are imposing redistributive policies by force or threat of force on unconsenting others, we have inequality in authority between the coercers and the coerced, regardless of whether those doing the coercing are public citizens or private individuals, and regardless of whether they represent a majority or a minority. Nor would a Hobbesian jungle, where anyone is free to impose her will on anyone else, embody equality in authority; for as soon as one person does succeed in subordinating another, an inequality in authority emerges.

The Hobbesian jungle might represent equal opportunity for authority, but in this context the libertarian favors equality of outcome. (That, incidentally, is why the right to liberty is inalienable.) Only defensive uses of force are justified, since these restore equality in authority rather than violating it. By the same token, an idealized democracy in which every citizen had an equal chance to get into a position of political power would also represent only equal opportunity for authority, not equality of outcome, and so would likewise offend against Lockean equality. To a libertarian, the saying “anyone can grow up to become president,” if it were true, would have the same cheery ring as “anyone might be the next person to assault you.”

Inequality in authority is far more offensive, from a moral point of view, than mere socioeconomic inequality; hence, whenever the demands of socioeconomic equality conflict with the demands of libertarian equality, which they generally do, preference must be given to the latter.

So I assert. I think this claim can be argued for, not just asserted. But I shall not argue for it at present—both because my time today is limited, and because in a certain sense I do not need to argue for it. For socioeconomic egalitarians themselves show, by their actions if not their words, that they regard inequality in authority as a greater evil than socioeconomic inequality. Most socioeconomic egalitarians of my acquaintance would certainly be more outraged at being robbed or assaulted by a colleague than at learning that the colleague was receiving a higher salary. Hence in practice they clearly recognize which of these inequalities is the greater evil. Indeed, most socioeconomic egalitarians govern their everyday personal interactions by a scrupulous adherence to libertarian principles, and they expect the same treatment in return.

Nor will it do to reply that socioeconomic inequality is itself a form of inequality in authority, and so should be forbidden for the same reason. For, as Rothbard points out, this combination of ideas is inconsistent:

A refuses to make an exchange with B. What are we to say … if B brandishes a gun and orders A to make the exchange? … B is committing violence; there is no question about that…. [T]his violence is either invasive and therefore unjust, or defensive and therefore just. If we adopt the “economic-power” argument, we must choose the latter position; if we reject it, we must adopt the former…. The “middle-of-the-road” statist cannot logically say that there are “many forms” of unjustified coercion. He must choose one or the other and take his stand accordingly. Either he must say that there is only one form of illegal coercion—overt physical violence—or he must say that there is only one form of illegal coercion—refusal to exchange. [11]

To expand on Rothbard’s point: a prohibition on all, or even on most, cases of Lockean inequality is not consistent with recognizing both socioeconomic inequality and initiatory force as forms of Lockean inequality, because an effective ban on socioeconomic inequality requires the endorsement of systematic initiatory force on a massive scale. Hence socioeconomic egalitarians, if they wish to be consistent, can offer their ideal only as a replacement of Lockean equality, not as an extension of it. (The same point applies to those statists who say that negative rights are all very well, but we need positive rights too—as though every positive right added didn’t mean one more negative right removed.)

Given the vast inequality in authority between the state apparatus and its subjects — given, for that matter, the vast socioeconomic inequality between them — how is it that so many who think of themselves as dedicated above all to human equality so readily become apologists for the state? Libertarians are often baffled at how those who appear so sensitive to constraints on choice, and to differences in bargaining power, when these derive from market factors, become so amazingly oblivious to the constraint on choice, and differential bargaining power, represented by the armed might of the state, empowered to enforce its demands by legalized violence.

The fifth-century B.C. Chinese philosopher Mo-tzu once remarked that if someone can recognize an act of unjust aggression when it is perpetrated by one individual against another, but not when the same act is perpetrated by an organized group of individuals, such a person must be confused about right and wrong. [12] Socioeconomic egalitarians, then, must likewise be under some sort of confusion. But what, and why?

A cynic might respond that socioeconomic egalitarians are not confused at all; their supposed devotion to equality is simply a disguise for powerlust, and they exempt the state from their criticisms because they plan to wield its reins, or at least to get in good with those who do. This strikes me as a fair analysis of some, but only some, socioeconomic egalitarians. Most of the socioeconomic egalitarians I know personally are sincere in their egalitarianism and well-meaning in their statism.

I don’t mean by this that they are entirely innocent; after all, an innocent statist would have to be one who says: “I recognize—as who could not?—that the coercive subordination of individuals to the state by the means of systematic legalized violence and the threat thereof is a great evil. But this evil is, unfortunately, necessary in order to prevent evils still greater.” A statist who took this point of view could not be cheerful about her statism, but on the contrary would have to conduct herself with the tragic solemnity of Agamemenon sacrificing his daughter to save the fleet.

The innocent statist, too, could hardly permit herself to reach this grim conclusion without first investigating possible alternatives—which, for a statist in the academy, would have to involve carefully researching and trying to refute (and desperately hoping to be unable to refute) the wealth of libertarian literature arguing that most of the other evils she cites can be prevented through nonstatist means. By these criteria, few statists qualify as innocent. To seek for alternatives to inequality in authority would be to acknowledge that statism involves such inequality beforeascertaining that alternatives are available, and this would force upon the statist an unpleasant choice she prefers to avoid. Hence I regard statism as being, at least in most cases, a moral vice, rather than a mere cognitive mistake, in much the same way that racism and sexism are moral vices, not mere cognitive mistakes.

But, again like racism and sexism, statism is the kind of moral vice that tends to enter the soul through self-deception, semi-conscious osmosis, and a kind of Arendtian banality, rather than through a forthright embrace; it is a form of spiritual blindness that can, and does, infect even those who are largely sincere and well-meaning. (Nor do I mean to suggest that libertarians are generally more virtuous than statists. Justice is only one virtue among many, and libertarianism is only one application of justice; so the only self-congratulatory moral we can draw is that we score higher on one aspect of one virtue than our statist colleagues do.)

What form does this spiritual blindness take? On the one hand, statist ideology must render the violence of the state invisible, in order to disguise the affront to equality it represents. Hence statists tend to treat governmental edicts as though they were incantations, passing directly from decree to result, without the inconvenience of means; since in the real world the chief means employed by government is violence, threatened and actual, cloaking state decrees and their violent implementation in the garb of incantation disguises both the immorality and the inefficiency of statism by ignoring the messy path from decree to result.

Yet on the other hand, the effectiveness of governmental edicts depends precisely on people being all too aware of the force backing up those edicts. Hence statism can maintain its plausibility only by implicitly projecting a kind of grotesque parody of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: just as bread and wine must be transformed in their essence into the body and blood of Christ in order to play their necessary spiritual role, whilst at the same time they must retain the external accidents of bread and wine in order to play their necessary practical role, so the violence of the state, to be justified, must be transubstantiated in its essence into peaceful incantation, yet at the same time, to be effective, it must retain the external accidents of violence. (This sacralization of state violence explains how proponents of gun control, for example, can regard themselves as opponents of violence whilst at the same time threatening massive and systematic violence against peaceful citizens.)

But to ignore or mask the violence upon which socioeconomic legislation necessarily rests is to acquiesce in the unconscionable subordination and subjection that such violence embodies. It is to treat those subordinated and subjected as mere means to the ends of those doing the subordinating, and thus to assume a legitimate inequality in power and jurisdiction between the two groups. The libertarian revulsion against such arrogant presumption is ipso facto an egalitarian impulse. Those who feel no such revulsion should not expect their egalitarian credentials to pass unquestioned; they may revere equality in theory, but they fail to recognize it in practice.

For as we passed by, and beheld their devotions, we found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN IDEAL. What therefore they ignorantly worship, that declare we unto them. For too long, we have allowed our misguided opponents to monopolize the banner of equality. We have more right to that banner than they do. The time has come to seize it back.

Notes:
[1] Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977), p. 139.
[2] Rothbard, Power and Market, pp. 215-216.
[3] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government II. 4.
[4] Locke, Second Treatise II. 6.
[5] Locke, Second Treatise II. 7.
[6] Roderick T. Long, “The Nature of Law, Part II: The Three Functions of Law,” Formulations #4 (Summer 1994), www.freenation.org; cf. Roderick T. Long, “The Benefits and Hazards of Dialectical Libertarianism,” p. 445n., in Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 2, no. 2 (Spring 2001), pp. 395-448.
[7] Antony Flew, The Politics of Procrustes: Contradictions of Enforced Equality (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1981), p. 12.
[8] ”Introduction: The Roots of Individualist Feminism in 19th-Century America,” pp. 3, 23, in Wendy McElroy, ed., Freedom, Feminism, and the State, 2nd ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991), pp. 3-26.
[9] Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 21-23.
[10] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action XXVII. 2.
[11] Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market, pp. 229-230.
[12] Burton Watson, ed. & trans., Mo Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 50-51.

Translations for this article:

• Chinese, 平等：不为人知的理念

O artigo a seguir foi escrito por Anthony Gregory e publicado por O Estandarte Libertário, 18 de abril de 2013.

Há algo com abril. De Columbine à Virginia Tech, de Oklahoma City a Boston, meado a fim de abril ocasiona alguns dos mais execráveis massacres em solo estadunidense. Pelo menos aqueles que, dizem-nos, deveríamos focar. Os assassinos são chamados de terroristas. A menos que vistam uniformes, como fizeram em 19 de abril de 1993, logo ao largo de Waco, Texas. Daquela vez, como somos instados a acreditar, os terroristas foram os que morreram. Em todos esses massacres, independentemente dos aspectos específicos, o governo se apresenta como aquele que mantém o caos à distância.

O estado afirma erguer-se contra o terrorismo, mas matar pessoas é sua marca registrada. As chacinas tomam várias formas, quase todas as quais alimentam a saúde do estado. O estado leva a efeito muita matança abertamente. O estado oficialmente posa de contrário a outras matanças, embora todavia as estimule por meio de sua própria violência. Até a matança não levada a efeito diretamente pelo estado serve como pretexto para o aumento do estado.

Em Boston, nesta segunda-feira, alguém deixou bombas que assassinaram três pessoas, inclusive um menino de oito anos de didade, e feriram outras 176. O Presidente Obama chamou o crime de “ato de terrorismo.” A definição de “terrorismo” dada pelo establishment sempre foi falha, visto que sempre absolveu categoricamente o governo, mas pelo menos sempre especificou envolver civis escolhidos como alvo para o atingimento de objetivos políticos. Nada obstante, nos dias atuais, mesmo antes de o motivo ser conhecido, como no caso de Boston, ou quando os alvos não são civis, como no caso dos soldados estadunidenses no exterior, o governo dos Estados Unidos chama quaisquer atos dramáticos de violência que desaprove de “terrorismo.”

Este fevereiro, chamou o ex-policial Chris Dorner de terrorista. Então a polícia o cercou numa cabana para queimá-lo vivo, pedindo à mídia para cobrir os olhos como em Waco. Todo mundo que sabia como o governo funciona não tinha motivo para esperar que ao homem fosse concedido o devido processo legal. Iriam caçá-lo, capturá-lo e matá-lo de qualquer maneira. A mídia dispensou a formalidade de chamá-lo de “possível” assassino. O Departamento de Polícia de Los Angeles – LAPD julgou-o e condenou-o e executou-o no mesmo dia e ningém exibiu a menor reação. Enquanto isso, os liberais vêm com aquela conversa de que a tirania estadunidense é irresponsável e os conservadores continuam sua adoração à imposição do cumprimento da lei.

Hoje, resistência violenta ao estado é chamada de terrorismo. Muitos dos “terroristas” arrebanhados e presos em Guantánamo Bay foram no máximo culpados de defender seu país contra um exército invasor. Algumas dessas pessoas continuam a definhar naquele calabouço, vendo sua desesperada greve de fome em protesto contra as condições em deterioração não obter resposta, exceto da parte de uma admoinistração disposta a privá-los de sua água.

De 28 de fevereiro a 19 de abril de 1993, os Davidianos do Rebento resistiram. Na manhã de 28 de fevereiro, cerca de cem agentes do Bureau de Álcool, Tabaco, Armas de Fogo e Explosivos – ATF, escondidos em trailers de gado, desceram sobre a propriedade deles. Os agentes haviam planejado e treinado por oito meses, havendo praticado sua agressão histriônica contra modelos de edifícios. Não havia motivo para tudo isso a não ser publicidade. Os agentes poderiam facilmente ter prendido Koresh, com quem tinham feito amizade. Os agentes haviam conduzido uma investigação para efeito de violações concernentes a armas e nada encontraram. Koresh havia cooperado com eles. O 60 Minutos havia recentemente focalizado um escândalo de assédio sexual da ATF, e o órgão havia sido acusado de discriminação durante reunião de subcomissão da Câmara. O bureau desejava melhorar sua imagem pública. Autoridades foram à imprensa para assegurarem-se de que repórteres pudessem testemunhar seus feitos heroicos na última manhã de fevereiro de 1993.

Diferentemente da vasta maioria das centenas de incursões militarizadas diárias internas aos Estados Unidos, a incursão de surpresa do ATF chamada “Operação Hora do Espetáculo” encontrou resistência. Quando a munição dos agentes acabou, os davidianos cessaram fogo. Houve baixas de ambos os lados, embora um agente anônimo tenha dito ao Notícias Matinais de Dallas que suspeitava de alguns agentes terem tombado por causa de fogo amigo. Uma vez a incursão tendo-se tornado claro desastre, o ATF forçou a imprensa a afastar-se.

Então veio o impasse/ponto morto. O FBI assumiu e transformou-o numa operação militar plena em solo estadunidense. A guerra psicológica desceu dura sobre os seguidores de Koresh. O FBI clangorou música alta e obnóxia, e sons de matança de animais, enquanto lançava luzes cegantes pela noite. Agentes sem motivo algum guiaram um veículo para profanarem um túmulo davidiano. O governo cortou do grupo acesso a família, mídia, e advogados. Destruiu seu suprimento de água.

A mídia demonizou os davidianos pintando-os como um culto armado que cometia abusos contra suas crianças. Os jornalistas tenderam a noticiar as afirmações do governo como se fossem fato. Eles, porém, igualmente se tornaram cada vez mais críticos em relação ao ATF e ao FBI. Depois de semanas de parecerem trapalhonas na mídia majoritária, particularmente após relato de fatos comprometedores no New York Times em 28 de março revelar o mau planejamento e a inconsequência da incursão inicial, as autoridades do governo foram-se tornando cada vez mais hostis à mídia. Em 11 de abril, o chefe da inteligência do ATF David Troy parou completamente de ter suas reuniões coletivas regulares com a imprensa.

A Procuradora Geral Janet Reno, que assumira o cargo no meio do impasse, finalmente resolveu pôr fim a ele. Às cerca de 6 da manhã de 19 de abril, o FBI começou a bombear gás CS inflamável e venenoso, proibido em guerra internacional, no lar davidiano. As autoridades sabiam que mulheres e crianças estariam escondidas na secção da residência exposta a esse gás. O governo continuou a utilizar gás por quase seis horas.

O professor de química George F. Uhlig avaliou, em audiências do Congresso, haver probabilidade de sessenta por cento de só o gás já ter matado algumas crianças. “Liberar quantidade excessiva de CS definitivamente não consultava os melhores interesses das crianças,” disse Uhlig. “Máscaras contra gás não se encaixam muito bem em crianças, quando se encaixam.” Ele depôs dizendo que a aplicação de gás pode ter transformado a área circunjacente “em área similar a uma das câmaras de gás usadas pelos nazistas em Auschwitz.”

O FBI trouxe um tanque Abrams, o mais pesado veículo blindado do Exército, para substituir seus veículos de combate Bradley. Agentes dirigiram o tanque, que posteriormente a Procuradora Geral Janet Reno obscenamente comparou a “um bom carro alugado,” para dentro do prédio. O franco-atirador do FBI Lon Horiuchi, que havia atingido e matado Vicki Weaver em agosto de 1992 em Ruby Ridge com ela segurando o filho nos braços, estava no local. Agentes do FBI lançaram embalagens de gás lacrimogênio incendiário. O porta-voz do Departamento de Justiça Myron Marlin declarou mais tarde: “Não sabemos de evidência a apoiar que qualquer dispositivo incendiário fosse usado no complexo em 19 de abril de 1993.” O FBI finalmente admitiu, seis anos depois, ter de fato usado tais projéteis em Waco.

O lar davidiano fez-se em chamas no início da tarde. Mais de setenta pessoas morreram, todas elas alvos civis, muitas delas estadunidenses, outras oriundas de outros países, mais de vinte delas crianças e perto da metade pessoas de cor, embora de algum modo os davidianos tivessem amiúde tido sua reputação manchada, juntamente com o assim chamado movimento da milícia, sendo chamados de supremacistas da raça branca. Ao o fogo intensificar-se, o FBI não deixou que o corpo de bombeiros acorresse. O agente especial Jeffrey Jamar alegou que temia pela segurança dos bombeiros — presumivelmente, os davidianos poderiam atirar exatamente nas pessoas que tentariam apagar o fogo que os estava levando à morte. Quando tudo terminou, o AFT hasteou sua bandeira no topo das ruínas conquistadas.

O julgamento dos sobreviventes foi um embuste. Jurados confusos buscavam condenar os sobreviventes por ofensas relacionadas com armas, mas não por assassínios. O juiz perfilou-se com a promotoria e questionou as intenções dos jurados. Ao chegar 1999, pesquisas indicavam que forte maioria dos estadunidenses culpava o FBI por iniciar o incêndio. O advogado especial John Danforth, Republicano, divulgou relatório, no ano seguinte, isentando de qualquer culpa a administração Clinton por aquela atrocidade.

Depois de Sandy Hook, os liberais regurgitaram todos os exauridos argumentos a respeito de controle de armas, mas um dos mais interessantes é que uma população armada não funciona para conter uma tirania porque o governo tem o equipamento militar para vencer qualquer confronto. E de fato é verdade: a maioria dos que resistem ao governo são esmagados como insetos. Alguns resistem violentamente, como os índios Lakota em Wounded Knee em dezembro de 1890, e são chacinados. Outros são atingidos por ousarem resistir até mediante jogar pedras em tropas armadas, como os quatro estudantes assassinados e os nove feridos na Kent State em maio de 1970. Outros são atingidos depois de alguns anos de relativa calma, como os radicais do MOVE de Filadélfia em maio de 1985. Os liberais estão corretos em que o governo tem os meios e a vontade de esmagar estadunidenses que ousem resistir. Esse fato nunca parece convencer os liberais de que o estado é, para começo de conversa, extremamente poderoso e ameaçador, e talvez a última coisa que deveríamos querer é dar a ele mais poderes de fazer cumprir a lei, tais como a monopolização de armas de fogo, por meio de uma guerra às armas de fogo.

Perto de uma vez por dia a polícia mata um estadunidense, mas é amiúde um criminoso e ninguém se importa, ou pelo menos uma pessoa marginalizada como o sem teto Kelly Thomas, espancado em julho de 2011 por cinco policiais no Sul da Califórnia, morrendo de complicações cinco dias depois. Ou são veteranos como Jose Guerena, em quem a polícia de Tuscon cravou 71 balas no meio da noite em maio de 2011 – inocente de qualquer crime, apenas em sua própria casa na hora errada. O estado economiza a maior parte de sua matança para o exterior, onde matar é sua própria política. E agora, graças à guerra ao terror, Obama chama os Estados Unidos de seu campo de batalha, e o mundo de sua jurisdição. Ele tornou doutrina oficial que o presidente pode determinar unilateralmente a morte de quem quer que seja.

Há vinte anos, Waco mostrou aos estadunidenses a verdade acerca do fazer cumprir a lei, do governo dos Estados Unidos, e do próprio estado. Revelou qual é a realidade para estrangeiros do além-mar. No entanto, a maioria dos estadunidenses parece totalmente indiferente ao assassínio em massa que o governo dos Estados Unidos tem perpertrado e desencadeado no Oriente Médio. No dia em que três pessoas foram assassinadas em Boston, setenta e cinco pessoas morreram no Iraque. A violência no Iraque, há nove anos, era chamada de terrorismo, a menos que cometida por soldados dos Estados Unidos. Hoje, a violência no Iraque dificilmente chega ao noticiário. O estado decide de que vidas vale a pena cuidar, e quando.

Alguns críticos da violência do estado desgostam da própria palavra “terrorismo,” considerando-a sem sentido, mas discordo. O estado perverte a maioria das palavras que usa, mas essas palavras ainda assim podem reter valor. Terrorismo refere-se a violência infligida intencionalmente a inocentes para instilar medo e promover objetivos políticos. Autoridades estadunidenses praticam terrorismo o tempo todo. Nos vinte anos desde Waco, o terrorismo do estado entrou em escalada, das sanções contra civis no Iraque para os ataques de aviões não-pilotados capazes de tiros praticamente simultâneos contra prontos-socorros, e daí até as constantes incursões policiais dentro do país. Até as mais básicas medidas da polícia, como o apalpo sistemático dos residentes de New York conhecido como “parar e revistar” visam a “instilar medo,” como jactou-se o comissário de polícia Raymond Kelly de ser a intenção, de acordo com o depoimento do ex-capitão do Departamento de Polícia de New York – NYPD Eric Adams. De alto a baixo, no país e fora, o estado estadunidense pós-Waco parece decidido a instilar medo em todos nós.

Em todo abril, desde 2003, escrevi um artigo acerca de Waco. Acho que os estadunidenses nunca deveriam esquecer o que aconteceu. LewRockwell.com publicou a maioria desses artigos. Cada um deles tem algo de diferente e discute eventos contemporâneos. Também escrevi minha tese de graduação acerca de Waco e o relacionamento entre a mídia e o estado policial. Eis aqui meus arquivos para os interessados:

• 20 Years Ago Today: Operation Showtime (Independent Institute, February 2013)
• We’re All Branch Davidians Now (LRC, April 2012)
• From Waco to Libya: Eighteen Years of Humanitarian Mass Murder (LRC, April 2011).
• Waco and the New Brown Scare (LRC, April 2010).
• The Waco Butchers Are Back (LRC, April 2009).
• Why Waco Still Matters (LRC, April 2008).
• Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, Virginia Tech (LRC, April 2007).
• Waco and the Bipartisan Police State (LRC, April 2006).
• Waco, Oklahoma City, and the Post-9/11 Left-Right Dynamic (LRC, April 2005).
• Eleven Years Since Waco and Very Little Has Changed (LRC, April 2004).
• An Anniversary We Must Never Forget (Independent Institute, April 2003).
• “God Help Us, We Want the Press”: The 1993 Waco Disaster and Media/Government Relations”  (UC Berkeley Undergraduate thesis, 2003).

Poderei fazer um intervalo na revisitação de Waco no próximo abril, não por ter esquecido as vítimas – nunca o farei – mas simplesmente porque acho que já escrevi bastante acerca dessa atrocidade específica por algum tempo, dado que o estado tem causado devastação em tantas direções, tornando Davidianos do Rebento tantos estrangeiros e estadunidenses apanhados no lado errado do infindável sítio do mundo perpetrado pelo governo dos Estados Unidos. Muitos davidianos morreram e outros sofreram injustiça no julgamento, mas tragicamente essas vítimas não são raras. Há também os muitos milhares chacinados no exterior nos últimos 20 anos. Há os milhares atingidos pela polícia desde então. Há Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, o adolescente de dezessei anos de Denver a quem Obama fez virar poeira por meio de um avião não tripulado – drone, cuja morte foi justificada com base em ele ter tido mau pai. Antes da rápida ascensão do estado de vigilância e a guerra ao terror posterior ao 11/9, Waco era a melhor oportunidade para reverter as coisas. Em vez disso, os estadunidenses, em sua maioria, viraram as costas e agora nosso país está-se tornando um grande parque de diversões para o estado policial.

Podemos chamar essa situação de a vingança de David Koresh.

Artigo original afixado por Anthony Gregory em 19 de abril de 2013.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.