Doug Casey: Why Do We Need Government?

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/17/2016 22:00 -0500
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-17/doug-casey-why-do-we-need-government
Submitted by Doug Casey via CaseyResearch.com,
Rousseau was perhaps the first to popularize the fiction now taught in civics classes about how government was created. It holds that men sat down together and rationally thought out the concept of government as a solution to problems that confronted them. The government of the United States was, however, the first to be formed in any way remotely like Rousseau's ideal. Even then, it had far from universal support from the three million colonials whom it claimed to represent. The U.S. government, after all, grew out of an illegal conspiracy to overthrow and replace the existing government.
There's no question that the result was, by an order of magnitude, the best blueprint for a government that had yet been conceived. Most of America's Founding Fathers believed the main purpose of government was to protect its subjects from the initiation of violence from any source; government itself prominently included. That made the U.S. government almost unique in history. And it was that concept – not natural resources, the ethnic composition of American immigrants, or luck – that turned America into the paragon it became.
The origin of government itself, however, was nothing like Rousseau's fable or the origin of the United States Constitution. The most realistic scenario for the origin of government is a roving group of bandits deciding that life would be easier if they settled down in a particular locale, and simply taxing the residents for a fixed percentage (rather like "protection money") instead of periodically sweeping through and carrying off all they could get away with. It's no accident that the ruling classes everywhere have martial backgrounds. Royalty are really nothing more than successful marauders who have buried the origins of their wealth in romance.
Romanticizing government, making it seem like Camelot, populated by brave knights and benevolent kings, painting it as noble and ennobling, helps people to accept its jurisdiction. But, like most things, government is shaped by its origins. Author Rick Maybury may have said it best in Whatever Happened to Justice?,

"A castle was not so much a plush palace as the headquarters for a concentration camp. These camps, called feudal kingdoms, were established by conquering barbarians who'd enslaved the local people. When you see one, ask to see not just the stately halls and bedrooms, but the dungeons and torture chambers.

"A castle was a hangout for silk-clad gangsters who were stealing from helpless workers. The king was the 'lord' who had control of the blackjack; he claimed a special 'divine right' to use force on the innocent.

"Fantasies about handsome princes and beautiful princesses are dangerous; they whitewash the truth. They give children the impression political power is wonderful stuff."

IS THE STATE NECESSARY?
The violent and corrupt nature of government is widely acknowledged by almost everyone. That's been true since time immemorial, as have political satire and grousing about politicians. Yet almost everyone turns a blind eye; most not only put up with it, but actively support the charade. That's because, although many may believe government to be an evil, they believe it is a necessary evil (the larger question of whether anything that is evil is necessary, or whether anything that is necessary can be evil, is worth discussing, but this isn’t the forum).
What (arguably) makes government necessary is the need for protection from other, even more dangerous, governments. I believe a case can be made that modern technology obviates this function.
One of the most perversely misleading myths about government is that it promotes order within its own bailiwick, keeps groups from constantly warring with each other, and somehow creates togetherness and harmony. In fact, that's the exact opposite of the truth. There's no cosmic imperative for different people to rise up against one another... unless they're organized into political groups. The Middle East, now the world's most fertile breeding ground for hatred, provides an excellent example.
Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together peaceably in Palestine, Lebanon, and North Africa for centuries until the situation became politicized after World War I. Until then, an individual's background and beliefs were just personal attributes, not a casus belli. Government was at its most benign, an ineffectual nuisance that concerned itself mostly with extorting taxes. People were busy with that most harmless of activities: making money.
But politics do not deal with people as individuals. It scoops them up into parties and nations. And some group inevitably winds up using the power of the state (however "innocently" or "justly" at first) to impose its values and wishes on others with predictably destructive results. What would otherwise be an interesting kaleidoscope of humanity then sorts itself out according to the lowest common denominator peculiar to the time and place.
Sometimes that means along religious lines, as with the Muslims and Hindus in India or the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland; or ethnic lines, like the Kurds and Iraqis in the Middle East or Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka; sometimes it's mostly racial, as whites and East Indians found throughout Africa in the 1970s or Asians in California in the 1870s. Sometimes it's purely a matter of politics, as Argentines, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and other Latins discovered more recently. Sometimes it amounts to no more than personal beliefs, as the McCarthy era in the 1950s and the Salem trials in the 1690s proved.
Throughout history government has served as a vehicle for the organization of hatred and oppression, benefitting no one except those who are ambitious and ruthless enough to gain control of it. That's not to say government hasn't, then and now, performed useful functions. But the useful things it does could and would be done far better by the market.

Oregon Ranchers To Bundy “Militia”: Go Home, We Don’t Want You Here

By Colin Taylor

Posted on January 3, 2016

http://www.occupydemocrats.com/oregon-ranchers-to-bundy-militia-go-home-we-dont-want-you-here/

In a deliciously ironic twist, it turns out that neither the family involved or the residents of Harney County, Oregon, are happy with the wave of Bundy-led anti-government extremists that have descended on their state. It is beginning to be very clear that these zealots are provoking a standoff just for the sake of provoking a standoff.
The original incitement for the gang of armed militiamen was the re-sentencing of Dwight Hammond, 73, and Steven Hammond, 46, to jail for setting off dangerous forest fires on federal property to hide the fact that they were illegally hunting. They both served a light sentence, but a judge resentenced them to more years in light of the severity of the blazes, which consumed 139 acres of forest. The militiamen, apparently outraged by the due process of crime and punishment, traveled to the county to protest their sentencing. However, the Hammond patriarch refuses to associate himself with the men who flocked to his state like so many jihadis to Syria. 


In a deliciously ironic twist, it turns out that neither the family involved or the residents of Harney County, Oregon, are happy with the wave of Bundy-led anti-government extremists that have descended on their state. It is beginning to be very clear that these zealots are provoking a standoff just for the sake of provoking a standoff.
The original incitement for the gang of armed militiamen was the re-sentencing of Dwight Hammond, 73, and Steven Hammond, 46, to jail for setting off dangerous forest fires on federal property to hide the fact that they were illegally hunting. They both served a light sentence, but a judge resentenced them to more years in light of the severity of the blazes, which consumed 139 acres of forest. The militiamen, apparently outraged by the due process of crime and punishment, traveled to the county to protest their sentencing. However, the Hammond patriarch refuses to associate himself with the men who flocked to his state like so many jihadis to Syria.
“Neither Ammon Bundy nor anyone within his group/organization speak for the Hammond Family,” said Hammonds’ lawyer W. Alan Schroeder. The Hammonds intend to report to jail and comply with law enforcement.
 However, the Bundy boys felt like the Hammonds still needed their help, even though they, along with the rest of Harney County, do not want it: “We went to the local communities and presented it many times and to many different people. They were not strong enough to make the stand. So many individuals across the United States and in Oregon are making this stand. We hope they will grab onto this and realize that it’s been happening.” Bundy apparently met with “10 or so residents in Burns on Friday to try to recruit them, but they declined.”
Local schools have been closed for a week in fear of possible violence. The residents are not pleased. “I want them to go home. We take care of ourselves”  said resident Bee Bee Sitz said. Kainan Jordan remarked that I don’t think all of these outsiders coming here is necessary. I think they intimidate the local people.”
With luck, this situation will be resolved without the bloodshed that these terrorists so clearly want to see. Their cause never had any legs to stand on in the first place; they are simply delusional fools who, as one militiaman said, “came here to die” – to provoke a confrontation over some enormously petty injustice that will allow them to leave this earth in a blaze of glory, knowing that there is an echo chamber of conservative media that will venerate them as martyrs standing up to the imagined tyranny of President Obama’s rule.

What's Happening in Oregon Is Nothing Less Than Armed Sedition

Its roots in our politics are deep and tangled.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a40914/oregon-bundy-militia/

AP Les Zaitz/The Oregonian

By Charles P. Pierce

Jan 3, 2016

"If three years ago any person had told me that at this day, I should see such a formidable rebellion against the laws & constitutions of our own making as now appears I should have thought him a bedlamite—a fit subject for a mad house."

—George Washington to Henry Knox, on the subject of Shays Rebellion, February 3, 1787

You have to give Captain Daniel Shays this: When he launched his armed sedition against lawful authority, he at least was invited in. Overnight on Saturday, in an obscure corner of the Oregon wilderness, and contrary to the law, and in defiance of democratic authority, both federal and local, another act of armed sedition was committed. It seems to me that this ought to be a bigger story than, say, the belated prosecution of Bill Cosby, or whatever most recently came out of the mouth of the vulgar talking yam. In a small place in Oregon, the essential compact of the United States of America has come apart.

The Bundy family of Nevada joined with hard-core militiamen Saturday to take over the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, vowing to occupy the remote federal outpost 30 miles southeast of Burns for years. The occupation came shortly after an estimated 300 marchers—militia and local citizens both—paraded through Burns to protest the prosecution of two Harney County ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond, who are to report to prison on Monday. Among the occupiers is Ammon Bundy, son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, and two of his brothers. Militia members at the refuge claimed they had as many as 100 supporters with them. The refuge, federal property managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was closed and unoccupied for the holiday weekend.

(This is also something you have to give to Captain Daniel Shays. He put a little more of his ass on the line. His act of armed sedition aimed a little higher than the occupation of the vacant headquarters of a bird sanctuary.)

Before moving on to the larger issues, it's important to note that the local authorities, and the local citizenry, want no part of this noisy claque of armed meatheads.  It is popular among these people who apparently have brains wired like short-wave radios broadcasting from upper Michigan to say that the real constitutional authority in this country resides in its local sheriffs. Well, the local sheriff in this case would like it very much if this particular invasive species would abandon his jurisdiction and go back to freeloading on federal lands in Nevada.

Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward told people to stay away from the building as authorities work to defuse the situation, The Oregonian reported."A collective effort from multiple agencies is currently working on a solution. For the time being please stay away from that area. More information will be provided as it becomes available. Please maintain a peaceful and united front and allow us to work through this situation," Ward said in a statement.

Hell, even the convicted arsonists on whose behalf this action allegedly was undertaken have distanced themselves from these clowns.

The Hammonds said they have not welcomed the Bundy's help. "Neither Ammon Bundy nor anyone within his group/organization speak for the Hammond Family," the Hammonds' lawyer W. Alan Schroeder wrote to Sheriff David Ward.

This is an act of armed sedition against lawful authority. That is all that it is, and that is quite enough. This is not "an expression of anti-government sentiment." Flipping off the governor as he drives by is "an expression of anti-government sentiment." What Alex Jones does every day is "an expression of anti-government sentiment," and god bless them all for it. That's what the Founders had in mind. This is not an "occupation" following "a peaceful protest." That would be all those folks who got bludgeoned and pepper-sprayed out of Zuccotti Park a couple of years back. (And when exactly did ABC News decide it wasn't a news organization anymore?) These are men with guns who have declared themselves outside the law. These are men with guns who have taken something that belongs to all of us. These are traitors and thieves who got away with this dangerous nonsense once, and have been encouraged to get away with it again, and they draw their inspiration not solely from the wilder fringes of our politics, either. Ammon Bundy and his brothers should have been thrown in jail after they gathered themselves in rebellion the first time.

This is another step down the road that leads to the broken shell of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. There are respectable people in our respectable politics who have been shamefully silent on the subject, and there are respectable people in our respectable media who seem terrified of calling this what it is. You want an example of the deadening effect of "political correctness" in our politics? Watch what the people running for president have to say about this episode. Look at how it is being framed already—or ignored entirely—by the elite political media. There is a constituency for armed rebellion in this country that is larger than any of our respectable political and social institutions want to admit. It is fueled by reckless, ambitious people who engage in reckless, ambitious rhetoric.

It did not begin in Burns. It did not begin on the Bundy Ranch, either. In its most modern form, and in the form most relevant to recent events,  it began, as so many noxious elements of our politics did, with the Reagan Administration. It began with a man named Ron Arnold, and a Secretary of the Interior named James Watt, and in something called the Wise Use movement with which the Republican party (and the conservative movement that became its fundamental life force) allied itself for its political advantage in the western part of the country.

Much of this popularity can be explained by the lingering economic recession of the early 1980s, which provided a receptive grassroots audience for the Wise Use claim that it is easier to force nature to adapt to current corporate policies than to encourage the growth of more environmentally sound ways of doing business. Wise Use pamphlets argue that extinction is a natural process; some species weren't meant to survive. The movement's signature public relations tactic is to frame complex environmental and economic issues in simple, scapegoating terms that benefit its corporate backers. In the movement's Pacific Northwest birthplace, Wise Users harp on a supposed battle for survival between spotted owls and the families of the men and women who make their livings harvesting and milling the old growth timber that is the owl's habitat. In preparation for President Clinton's forest summit in Portland, Oregon, Wise Use public relations experts ran seminars to teach loggers how to speak in sound bites. Messages such as "jobs versus owls" have been adapted to a variety of environmental issues and have helped spark an anti-green backlash that has defeated river protection efforts and threatens to open millions of acres of wilderness to resource extraction.

That was the respectable—if undeniably destructive—part of the movement. Its philosophy, however, was embraced by the growing militia movement in the same part of the country. Its philosophy ran in poisoned tributaries to all points of the political compass until it gathered itself into a great reservoir of toxic fantasy, and that is where the essential compact of the United States of America was encouraged to break down.

There is no actual tyranny in this country against which to take up arms. There is bureaucratic inertia. There is pigheaded bureaucracy. There even is political chicanery. But there is no actual tyranny in the Endangered Species Act, or in the Bureau of Land Management, or in the Environmental Protection Agency, or in the Affordable Care Act, or in IRS dumbassery, or even in whatever it is that the president plans to say about guns in the next week or so. Anyone who argues that actual tyranny exists is a dangerous charlatan who should be mocked from the public square. Anyone who argues that there is out of political ambition, or for their own personal profit, should be shunned by decent people until they regain whatever moral compass they once had.

It does us no good to ignore what is going on in this obscure little corner of the Pacific Northwest. It does us no good to refuse to hold to account the politics that led to this, and the politicians who sought to profit from it. It does us no good to deny that there is a substantial constituency for armed sedition in this country, and to deny the necessity of delegitimizing that constituency in our politics, and the first step in that process is to face it and to call it what it is.

US Police More Concerned About "Anti-Government" Domestic Extremists Than Al-Qaeda, Study Finds

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/01/2015 23:30 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-01/us-police-more-concerned-about-anti-government-domestic-extremists-al-qaeda-study-fi
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

U.S. law enforcement agencies rank the threat of violence from anti-government  extremists higher than the threat from radicalized Muslims, according to a report released Thursday by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security (TCTHS).

The report, “Law Enforcement Assessment of the Violent Extremism Threat,” was based on survey research by Charles Kurzman, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David Schanzer, director of TCTHS and associate professor of the practice at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

The survey — conducted by the center with the Police Executive Research Forum — found that 74 percent of 382 law enforcement agencies rated anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction. By comparison, 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations as a Top 3 terrorist threat.

– From Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy

Since September 11, 2001, the frightened and emotionally pliable American public has gullibly relinquished its civil liberties and free heritage in order to allow the U.S. government to wage unaccountable and unconstitutional war again Al-Qaeda and radical Islamic terrorism across the world.
Many of us have warned for years, that preemptively giving up freedoms to protect freedom could only make sense to a propagandized, ignorant public completely clueless of human history. We warned that any totalitarian apparatus implemented to fight an outside enemy, would ultimately be turned around and used upon the public domestically. We already know this is happening with the NSA’s bulk spying and data collection, and we are starting to see a proliferation of the meme that “domestic extremists are more dangerous than Al-Qaeda,” spreading from the mouths of a corrupt and paranoid political class. I’ve covered this topic on several occasions, for example:
The “War on Terror” Turns Inward – DHS Report Warns of Right Wing Terror Threat
Eric Holder Announces Task Force to Focus on “Domestic Terrorists”
Rep. Steve Cohen Calls Tea Party Republicans “Domestic Enemies” on MSNBC
New Hampshire City Requests a Tank to Deal with “Domestic Terrorist” Groups Like Occupy Wall Street and Libertarians
It’s Official: The FBI Classifies Peaceful American Protestors as “Terrorists”
If all that’s not enough to convince you we’ve got a problem, I bring to you conclusions from the recently released study, “Law Enforcement Assessment of the Violent Extremism Threat.” This study was based on a survey conducted by Charles Kurzman and David Schanzer, who recently penned an op-ed in the New York Times. Here are some excerpts from their article:

In a survey we conducted with the Police Executive Research Forum last year of 382 law enforcement agencies, 74 percent reported anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction; 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations. And only 3 percent identified the threat from Muslim extremists as severe, compared with 7 percent for anti-government and other forms of extremism.

The self-proclaimed Islamic State’s efforts to radicalize American Muslims, which began just after the survey ended, may have increased threat perceptions somewhat, but not by much, as we found in follow-up interviews over the past year with counterterrorism specialists at 19 law enforcement agencies. These officers, selected from urban and rural areas around the country, said that radicalization from the Middle East was a concern, but not as dangerous as radicalization among right-wing extremists.

Law enforcement agencies around the country are training their officers to recognize signs of anti-government extremism and to exercise caution during routine traffic stops, criminal investigations and other interactions with potential extremists. “The threat is real,” says the handout from one training program sponsored by the Department of Justice. Since 2000, the handout notes, 25 law enforcement officers have been killed by right-wing extremists, who share a “fear that government will confiscate firearms” and a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”

Meanwhile, terrorism of all forms has accounted for a tiny proportion of violence in America. There have been more than 215,000 murders in the United States since 9/11. For every person killed by Muslim extremists, there have been 4,300 homicides from other threats.

Perhaps if the police didn’t harbor such negative thoughts about the general public, there wouldn’t be as many citizens killed by police. The recent tally is up to 463 killed so far in 2015, or an average of 2.5 Americans killed by police every day.
Finally, I came across the following excerpt from a recently published National Journal article:

Senate Democrats are calling for Congress to shift its focus from solely jihadist-fueled terrorism and hold hearings on the threats from domestic groups in upcoming weeks. And the Department of Justice has already opened up a domestic-terrorism investigation into the Charleston church shooting.

The real enemy of the corrupt corporate state is none other than, “we the people.”