So Much for a "Free Country"

By now we've all heard of the raids on the FLDS church in Eldorado, TX. There are so many levels of injustice in this case that it would be impossible for me to address them all in one post. One example of blatant hypocrisy stands out: the same state that tried to require 11 and 12 year-olds to get an HPV vaccine is now claiming that children are abused because they married too young. Throw in the fact that the alleged cry for help was a fraud (Tawana II, anyone?), and the broken families, and the smug self-rightenousness of the testifying psychiatrist and CPS official ("This is not about religion -- this is about keeping children safe from abuse"), and the exceedingly low probability that the state will acknowledge its mistake (Nifong, to draw a further analogy), and it's no small wonder that people like the authors of this blog have so little faith in America anymore.

Anyone, with any level of credibility, need make only one phone call, speak the magic words "child abuse," and your family is destroyed or permanently damaged.

JMM

Comments

[Joseph Breslin]

Knew things were going south when the media started refering to it as a "compound". You see if the govenrment wants your tax money, you live in a "home". If the government wants to kill you, you live in a "compound". It reminds me of something Jude Wanniski said: Sadam Hussein is our enemy, so he lives in a "palace", the President is our friend so he lives in a "White House".

Josh points out the obvious contradiction of a society which wants to test twelve year olds for stds but will arrest 13 year olds from polygamous marriages. Its utter;y friggin ridiculous. And what's it all about? Pure control? Setting an example for us underlings? Don't these "compound" invasions always end badly? Everyone must join the State's club. No one is permitted to leave or stop paying membership dues. "If you want a picture of the future, think of a boot stepping on a human face, forever."

[JMM]

Some of my friends at school were joking about what exactly a "compound" is - when does a campus become a compound? Or does it go the other way? Do you need subterranean tunnels connecting the buildings? How many outbuildings can a farmhouse have before it ceases to be a farm and becomes the much maligned "compound"?

[Joseph Breslin]

This sort of thing just makes me want to construct a booby trapped "compound" of my own. I suppose a compound is any structure or living arrangement which, if it were multiplied, would tend to leave the State with nothing to do. So people who leave society to live independently of the state (in say Waco or Ruby Ridge) live in a compound. People who exercise their constitutional rights to form a militia (in Montana) or collect...sorry..STOCKPILE weapons live in a compound.

[Joseph Breslin]

Incidentally, praxeology can be applied very profitably toward an understanding of the
State's behavior. Why for example does the American State sometimes act quickly to suppress liberty yet sometimes allow Its doings to become known and its leaders' evil works to see the light of day? Why so tyrannical here and not there? Well here's my brief k-mart quality praxeological analysis of the State's choices.

1) The State Acts-
Remembering that one must choose ordinally, placing priorities from first to last:
i)The State's first priority is to sustain its own existence, which it accomplishes by propaganda and the implied threat of force.
ii)Consequentially it must shut down or diminish the impact of any activity which it cannot control or which tends to expose it as unnecessary. These include a)Competition (the free market , sound money, postal services that could undersell it, commercial regulation agencies, public defense, education, truly independent news etc) b) Cultural Disengagement (people who live off the grid and encourage others to do so, free communities, weird religions, drug users)
iii) Pursuant to maintaining its indispensability, it must sell itself as benevolent and good and so a) It must provide a number of services and b) It must not push too far at any given time. If it is caught blatantly crossing the line of justice, the people might begin to suspect they are being lied to. The state acts quickly to appear to amend the wrong, either by finding a government scapegoat or altering its behavior (say, temporarily lowering taxes, prosecuting some minor player) until the danger of being found out has subsided.

The state is really a monopolistic business.Only it is the only true monopoly in existence. It claims to offer an important product (safety, liberty etc) and is always trying to get the highest price it can for that product. Since under ordinary conditions people have no choice but to pay (out of fear of the State and the false belief that they can't get the product any other way), the State gets away with charging the highest price it can without charging SO much that people actually start questioning the State's claim to indispensability. If they do, it temporarily lowers prices until everyone is happy again...and then gradually jacks them back up.