What does individual liberty look like? National CCW?
Today I received a phone call. It was from a call center on behalf of the National Rifle Association. As they gave me their spill about national concealed carry, this quote entered my mind:
They talked about freedom, as they begged me for money so they could petition and lobby congress to enact legislation that would allow the government issued permission slip to be accepted in all the states. They petition for the "rights" to protect ourselves in the way they prescribe. The word "freedom" kept coming through the script the caller was reading. It sounded like nails on a chalkboard to me. The NRA does not want freedom. If they ever even got close to freedom, they would all be unemployed.
Millions of people think that "freedom" is what the state says it is, that It is what the bill of rights says it is. The very concept of freedom, as is generally understood, is fundamentally flawed.
If you have to ask, you are not free. If you have to jump through hoops, you are not free. You don't have the liberty to protect yourself and your interests from the biggest threats to you that exist. Your very existence is at the pleasure of the state, step too far outside your invisible fencing, and you are toast.
Yet, every single day, the invisible fence that segregates YOU from everything and everyone else is crossed, violated and may as well not exist. Try to defend it the same way the state defends theirs and you are looking at incarceration or death. Sure, you are valued as individual, the same way an individual brick is valued as an individual - only by what it can contribute to the entire building.
I have no wish to exert my will upon others and I sincerely hope that we can throw off the notion that we need to serve abstractions. It makes no sense to destroy the individual in favor of some collective "greater good" that is actually just some psychopaths' personal interest.
Isn't the "greater good" actually what is best for each individual? No sacrifice needed, no permission slip required?
I truly believe that men someday will enjoy liberty that we never even realized we were missing.
These many years ago, when the USA was being envisioned, there was much contention, and some of the founders presciently expressed the very concerns you voice here.
I firmly believe the state is obsolete, and retards our continued progress. It is yet another way those that should tend to the people's concerns are corrupted, and there appear not to be any forms of government that are exempt.
Whether the representatives of citizens are elected by them, appointed by governors, picked at random, or appointed for life, no mechanism for choosing them seems to inoculate them from the compromises that eventually lead to completely screwing their constituents.
I see, however, that technology, like networked live camera feeds, the blockchain, encryption, and decentralized currency, is not only destabilizing the forces of corruption, but making the state as much a relic of the past as wooden wash tubs, and corn brooms.
The necessity of a government, in which appointed representatives communicate the will of the people to an executive branch, which carries them out (ha!), has simply been obviated by the internet.
We do not need to be represented in order to convey our wishes. It is also quite obvious that, given our executive is basing the US military in almost every country in the world, we are either particularly acquisitive, or our wishes aren't being conveyed very accurately.
Further, our rights aren't being carefully followed. Consider that the 'state' can only possess those rights delegated to it by the people. Can the state have the requisite authority to torture? To conduct drone strikes without due process (or even a charge)? To indiscriminately murder vast swaths of people (wage war)?
The state cannot have the authority to do these things because it cannot have received the delegation of authority from the people to do them, because the people do not have the right to do them.
Power to do them is not the right to do them. The state simply projects such power as it is able, regardless if it is lawfully authorized to have that power. Further, much of the power of the state is turned on the citizens it ostensibly is acting on the behalf of, ironically.
This is one of the reasons that IRS codes are such a fustercluck. It is only by the most convoluted reasoning that the prospect of being taxed on your wages, presumed guilty of tax evasion until you prove you are innocent, and summarily subject not only to asset stripping provisions, but incarceration, should you try to keep your own money you made, might be supposed to be based on the rights and wants of the people.
Not credible.
The creaky edifice of conundrums and contradictions upon which extant legal theory rests is unstable, and only possible if the people are constantly seduced by media into looking the other way, at Kardashian assets, for example, or anything that might distract them from the facts.
Since the chokehold on media is being broken - right here, and right now - that seductive destruction is failing at a higher rate than permits sustainability of extant forms of corruption.
Clearly, there are profiteers in the present system, and, neither dull nor weak, they are considering this fact. They are fighting a delaying action, keeping us from spreading the truth by censoring Fakebook, Gargle, and Twatter. But, of more concern, they are likely to have a plan b they are preparing to implement, and I am sure we won't like it.
No matter what they do, however, they are as obsolete as the state. The internet routes around censorship, and it will route around taxation, jack-booted thugs, and injustice too, because the users of the internet want it too.
Technology is bringing dreams to life, dreams of liberty and freedom from want our forefathers could but shake from their sleepy, waking eyes, wryly, when they arose to their labors.
It is time to wake up, dreamers!
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