18A038 Why Government Cannot Work by Jim Davies, 9/18/2018   

Humans need governments to the same degree that fish need bicycles.

That's amplified in the first couple of segments of the Freedom Academy, but is pretty simple: the nature of human beings is that we each have the natural right to make all decisions affecting ourselves, while the nature of government is to take all or some of those decisions away from us. There's a total mis-match.

There's no better way than that to show the necessity of bringing about a zero government society, but some other ways do exist. Today's ZGBlog suggests one, that may appeal to those seriously addicted to the myth that government is benevolent and necessary and approaches perfection in the American case.

It's to expose what government here actually does, what it's really like, and to do so in several stages, with one "indictment" nested inside another in the manner of the Russian Matryoshka dolls, the inner ones of which are seen only after opening the outer ones.

Doll #1: The Federal Government exceeds the particular powers it appears to have been granted, and ignores the restrictions it sets. That's the most visible, outer shell.

Examples of this are legion; take any function of government and consider whether or not it conforms to the Constitution, and the odds are high that it does not. Here are a few. Article 1 Section 8 lists 17 specific powers Congress is said to have; they include the power to establish post roads and post offices. But it does not say, to monopolize those services! Yet, they do exactly that. The USPS dinosaur is one result; overpriced highways are another. Another power: to "coin money" - also a non-monopoly power, incidentally. Yet the Feds, via its Federal Reserve lapdog, print it on paper. Nobody has ever managed to coin paper. One result is the loss of 99% of the value of a dollar in a single century.

As to the restrictions on power, there is not a single one of the "Bill of Rights" that is honored today. Example: Amendment 4. For a legally valid government search of someone, there must be a reason (ie, no dragnet) and a warrant, and a "probable cause" (suspicion of wrongdoing) and a witness' oath supporting it, and a list of particular items to be uncovered. All five elements are required. Yet ten million times a year, Federal agents conduct searches at the US border without a single one.

Doll #2: Not only does the FedGov disregard the detailed powers is was apparently granted, it even significantly ignores the structure it is supposed to have - the well known three branches, with separated powers. It casually and grotesquely breaks its own rules and ignores its own charter.

The founders established a Congress to make laws, an Executive to carry them out, and a Judiciary to deal, presumably, with any who broke those laws. The first problem is that we do have to "presume" that, because Article 3 does not give the Judiciary any particular powers at all, in sharp contrast to Articles 1 and 2, which define in some detail what the other two branches of the FedGov are empowered and forbidden to do. So that third branch has either no powers at all, or else it has a blank check to do anything, according to how one reads Article 3; and since nearly all those convening in Philadelphia to get the job done were lawyers, I lean towards the view that they indended it to be a blank check. Marbury shows how that intention morphed into a do-anything permit for the Supreme Court

So whereas the charter says all laws must be written by the Congress whose members are at least subject to election, the reality is that many key ones are made by the Judicial Branch - whose members are not. A good example is the Income Tax, which is enforced by courts but never legislated by Congress; another which attracts a lot of passionate interest is Roe v Wade. Notice, that was not something Representatives debated and decided, but a ruling handed down by nine old people in black robes.

Laws get made not just by judges but also by the Executive Branch, for example in the welter of Presidential "Executive Orders" of which many apply not just to the presidential staff but to the public at large. So the clear requirement of Article 1 is being violated all over the map. This second indictment therefore applies to all three branches: in major ways, none of them operate in conformity to the only charter that entitles them to exist. Accordingly, they ought not to exist.

Doll #3: the powers apparently granted by the Constitution are contradictory at core.

Their purpose is clearly stated in its Preamble, and includes for example "to insure domestic Tranquility" but then sets up a government. Always and necessarily, a government favors one set of voters (or persons of influence) over another set; the precise opposite of "tranquility" and the source of discord, its very opposite. Another stated purpose is to "establish justice", but by having government run a justice system requires it to be a monopoly; even Ayn Rand was fooled into supposing a single, "final arbiter" is needed. No such monopoly is required; competing companies in a zero-government justice industry will, absent government, no doubt cooperate to a degree but will have no need for uniformity because they will not be based on laws to be obeyed (with punishment for disobedience) but on restoration of lost or damaged rights, which is what justice is properly all about.

Doll #4: the representatives from the several states who granted the powers above had no right whatever to delegate them; for nobody can give or delegate anything he does not in the first place possess. Accordingly, the whole Constitutional Convention was a charade.

It's rather obvious, when one thinks about it; most people don't. The delegates acted on behalf of the people of the respective states; powers were delegated to them by those people and in turn they delegated powers to the government they set up. The chain of delegation therefore began with the ordinary resident back home. Since nobody can give or delegate anything he does not in the first place possess it follows that the new government could not be given any powers the individual residents did not possess. Since nobody has any power to compel his neighbor to do such and so with his own property or person, or to refrain from doing something, it follows that government cannot do so either; and so all the apparent delegations of power (to make laws, for example) are bogus from top to toe. Exactly the same is true, for the same reasons, of the State governments the delegates supposedly represented; the entire proceedings were one vast pretense.

Doll #5: the environment all these actors were playing in, the "United States", was and is a land area over which the State (and later the Federal) governments claimed dominion. If that claim should not be valid, the entire process was totally void. And in fact, the claim is not valid.

It came about in Paris. In the Treaty signed there, the British Government ceded dominion over its former colonies to the States that took their places; hence, the validity of the American claim depends entirely on that of the British claim. But the British claim originated in no more than a stroke of the pen of various Kings at various times; Their Majesties never exerted a stroke of labor to mix with the soil they were claiming. They merely issued edicts, and backed them with force of arms. Might does not make right.

Ownership of wilderness land is acquired, according to the Lockean proposal (and nothing better has yet been designed) by combining ones's labor with the material claimed. Accordingly, the British monarchs' claim to parts of North America is void. A possible further question is whether the sparsely populated land was truly wilderness, or whether it was owned by Indians, ie Native Americans. Tricky question, for very few of them staked any claim or worked it; they were mostly transient, as all people had been before the discovery of fixed agriculture. I'll not attempt to answer that here; I mention it just to show a further possible reason why King George III never owned America and therefore could not give it away.

So there's the nest - more a nest of vipers, than of dolls. Governments have no valid dominion over any land or the people living on it; they can have no valid powers greater than what is possessed by the people who may set them up; the US charter is blatantly contradictory; the government it apparently established pays no heed to the only charter than supposedly entitles it to exist, and it carelessly ignores the particular powers and restrictions by which it is supposed to abide. And this is the finest government on the planet.