Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

3

THE ASSAULT ON OUR LIBERTIES

WE’VE ALREADY SEEN SEVERAL areas in which the State is making war on us. Unfortunately, there are many others — we can’t get away from them. In this chapter, we’ll look at a few more.

One of the main ways our freedom has been taken away stems from a movement explicitly hostile to people. No, this is not a misprint — a very powerful ideology explicitly hates human beings and looks forward to wiping out much of the human race. I refer of course to the so-called environmentalist movement.

All over Europe and the US, Marxists are joining the environmental movement. And no wonder: environmentalism is also a coercive utopianism — one as impossible to achieve as socialism, and just as destructive in the attempt.

A century ago, socialism had won. Marx might be dead, and Lenin still a frustrated scribbler, but their doctrine was victorious, for it controlled something more important than governments: it held the moral high ground.

Socialism was, they said, the brotherhood of man in economic form. Thus was the way smoothed to the gulag.

Today we face an ideology every bit as pitiless and messianic as Marxism. And like socialism a hundred years ago, it holds the moral high ground. Not as the brotherhood of man, since we live in post-Christian times, but as the brotherhood of bugs. Like socialism, environmentalism combines an atheistic religion with virulent statism. But it ups the ante. Marxism at least professed a concern with human beings; environmentalism harks back to a godless, manless, and mindless Garden of Eden.

If these people were merely wacky cultists, who bought acres of wilderness and lived on it as primitives, we would not be threatened. But they seek to use the state, and even a world state, to achieve their vision.

And like Marx and Lenin, they are heirs to Jean Jacques Rousseau. His paeans to statism, egalitarianism, and totalitarian democracy have shaped the Left for 200 years, and as a nature worshipper and exalter of the primitive, he was also the father of environmentalism.

During the Reign of Terror, Rousseauians constituted what Isabel Paterson called “humanitarians with the guillotine.” We face something worse: plantitarians with the pistol.

Feminist-theologian Merlin Stone, author of When God Was a Woman, exults: “The Goddess is back!” The “voice of Gaia is heard once again” through a revived “faith in Nature.”

Gaia was an earth goddess worshipped by the ancient Greeks, and James Lovelock, a British scientist, revived the name in the mid-1970s for “the earth as a living organism,” an almost conscious self-regulating “biosphere.”

There is no Bible or “set theology” for Gaia worship, says the Rev. Stone, when making a national tour of Unitarian churches. You can “know Her simply by taking a walk in the woods or wandering on the beach.” All of Nature forms her scriptures.

“Industrial civilization is acne on the face of Gaia,” says Stone, and it’s time to get out the Stridex.

Ancient pagans saw gods in the wilderness, animals, and the state. Modern environmentalism shares that belief, and adds — courtesy of a New Age-Hindu-California influence — a hatred of man and the Western religious tradition that places him at the center of creation.

Environmentalism also has roots in deism — the practical atheism of the Enlightenment — which denied the Incarnation and made obeisance to nature.

Early environmentalist John Burroughs wrote: we use the word “Nature very much as our fathers used the word God.” It is in Nature’s lap that “the universe is held and nourished.”

The natural order is superior to mankind, wrote ecologist John Muir more than a century ago, because Nature is “unfallen and undepraved” and man always and everywhere “a blighting touch.” Therefore, said the human-hating Muir, alligators and other predators should be “blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty.”

Christianity, adds ecologist Lynn White, Jr., “bears an immense burden of guilt” for violating nature. It brought evil into the world by giving birth to capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.

Since we must think of nature as God, says William McKibben, author of the best-selling End of Nature, every “man-made phenomenon” is evil. We must keep the earth as “Nature intended.” To punish man’s desecration, ecologist Edward Abbey urged anti-human terrorism in his influential novel, The Monkey-Wrench Gang. And the fastest-growing group in the Gaia liberation movement, EarthFirst!, uses a monkey wrench for its symbol.

Founded by David Foreman, former head lobbyist for the Wilderness Society, EarthFirst! engages in “ecodefense” and “ecotage,” from spiking trees (which maims loggers) to vandalizing road-building machinery to wrecking rural airstrips. One of its goals is cutting the world’s population by 90 percent, and it has even hailed AIDS as a help.

Foreman was convicted for conspiracy to blow up the pylons that carry high-power wires (using, I’m sure, environmentally safe explosives), but his example is powerful, even among the alleged non-radicals. One of the mainstream environmentalists, David Brower — former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth — urged that land developers be shot with tranquilizer guns. He agrees with McKibben: human suffering is much less important than the “suffering of the planet.”

We must be “humbler” toward nature and use technology like “bicycle-powered pumps,” says McKibben — who lives on an expensive Adirondack farm. But he wants the rest of us “crammed into a few huge cities like so many ants” because it’s best for the planet. We shouldn’t even have children, for “independent, eternal, ever-sweet Nature” must be disturbed as little as possible.

McKibben does admit to one sin: he owns a 1981 Honda. But a man who lives a properly ascetic life is “Ponderosa Pine.”

A life-long leftist, Pine — whose real name is Keith Lampe — was an apparatchik of the black-power Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (which didn’t have many students or much non-violence) and a founder of the Yippie Party. He rioted at the 1968 Democratic Convention and has been arrested nine times for civil disobedience.

Converted by Allan Ginsberg to environmentalism, Pine split with his wife and twin sons. She had complained about his “Tibetan vocal energy science” — a continuous, hour-long, top-of-the-lungs shout each morning as an act of “communion with Mother Earth.”

With his civil disobedience campaign against logging, and environmental news service, newspaper columns, and newsletter (he refers to paper, in other contexts, as “dead tree flesh”), Pine has been extremely influential, though there is some dissent about his demand that we go barefoot to be in “more intimate touch with the earth.” David Brower goes further, denouncing the Pinian nom de terre; did he, Brower asks angrily, have “permission from the Ponderosa Pines to use their name”?

But even Brower agrees with the knotty Pine’s crusade to collectivize the US, return us to a primitive standard of living, and use the Department of Defense to do it. “I want to change the military’s whole focus to environmentalism,” says Pine.

In the meantime, however, it is possible to do something good for the earth as your last act. A recent issue of EarthFirst! Journal, notes Washington Times columnist John Elvin, had some advice for the lifelorn. “Are you terminally ill with a wasting disease?” asks the Journal. “Don’t go out with a whimper; go out with a bang! Undertake an eco-kamikaze mission.”

The possibilities for terminally ill warriors are limitless. Dams from the Columbia and the Colorado to the Connecticut are crying to be blown to smithereens, as are industrial polluters, the headquarters of oil-spilling corporations, fur warehouses, paper mills. ...

To those feeling suicidal, this may be the answer to your dreams. ... Don’t jump off a bridge, blow up a bridge. Who says you can’t take it with you?

Ron James, an English Green leader, says the proper level of economic development is that “between the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne.”

“The only way to live in harmony with Nature is by living at a subsistence level,” as the animals do.

The normal attitude for most of human history was expressed by the Pilgrims, who feared a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” Only a free society, which has tamed nature over many generations, enables us to have a different view.

“To us who live beneath a temperate sky and in the age of Henry Ford,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “the worship of Nature comes almost naturally.” But “an enemy with whom one is still at war, an unconquered, unconquerable, ceaselessly active enemy” — “one respects him, perhaps; one has a salutary fear of him; and one goes on fighting.”

Added Albert Jay Nock, “I can see nature only as an enemy: a highly respected enemy, but an enemy.”

Few of us could survive in the wilderness of, say, Yellowstone Park for any length of time (even though the environmentalists let it burn down because fire is natural). Nature is not friendly to man; it must be tempered.

Because they know that the vast majority of Americans would reject their real agenda, the environmentalists use lies, exaggerations, and pseudo-science to create public hysteria.

EXXON: The environmental movement cheered the criminal indictment of the Exxon Corporation for the Alaska oil spill, with the possibility of more than $700 million in fines. The one shortcoming, say the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, is that Exxon executives won’t be sent to prison.

Exxon cannot be allowed to get away with an “environmental crime” which despoiled the “pristine wilderness of Alaska,” says Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. But the legal doctrine underlying this indictment is inconsistent with a free society, notes Murray N. Rothbard.

Under feudalism, the master was held responsible for all acts of his servants, intended or not. During the Renaissance with growing capitalism and freedom, the doctrine changed so there was no “vicarious liability.” Employers were correctly seen as legally responsible only for those actions they directed their employees to take, not when their employees disobeyed them. But today, we are back in feudal times, plus deeper-pocket jurisprudence, as employers are held responsible for all acts of their employees, even when the employees break company rules and disobey specific orders — by getting drunk on duty, for example. From all the hysteria, and the criminal indictment, one might think Exxon had deliberately spilled the oil, rather than being the victim of an accident that has already cost its stockholders $2 billion. Who is supposedly the casualty in the Justice Department’s “criminal” act? Oiled sand?

In fact, Exxon is the biggest victim. Through employee negligence, the company has lost $5 million worth of oil, a supertanker, and compensation to fishermen, or the cost of the clean up. The total bill could be $3 billion.

Yet every night on television, we were treated to maudlin coverage of oily water and blackened seagulls, and denunciations of Exxon and oil production in “environmentally sensitive” Alaska. Though why it is more sensitive than, say, New Jersey, we are never told. In fact, environmentalists love Alaska because there are so few people there. It represents their ideal.

Despite all the hysteria, oil is — if I may use the environmentalists’ own lingo — natural, organic, and biodegradable. As in previous oil spills, it all went away, and the birds, plants, and fish replenished themselves.

The Exxon oil spill was hardly the “equivalent of Hiroshima,” as one crazed Alaska judge said. And who knows? Oil might be good for some wildlife. This year, the salmon catch is almost 50 percent bigger than any time in history.

WETLANDS: One of the great engineering achievements of the ancient world was draining the Pontine Marshes, which enabled the city of Rome to expand. But no such project could be undertaken today; that vast swamp would be protected as wetlands.

When John Pozsgai — an emigrant from communist Hungary — tried to improve some property he found this out. After buying a former junkyard and clearing away the thousands of tires that littered it, Pozsgai put clean topsoil on his lot in Morrisville, Pennsylvania. For this, the 57-year-old mechanic was sentenced to three years in prison and $200,000 in fines, because his property was classified as wetlands by the federal government.

After ordering a bureaucrat to “get the Hell off my property,” Pozsgai was arrested, handcuffed, and jailed on $10,000 bail. Quickly tried and convicted, Pozsgai’s brutal sentence will — said the prosecutor — “send a message to the private landowners, corporations, and developers of this country about President Bush’s wetlands policy.”

John Pozsgai has a different view: “I thought this was a free country,” he told the Washington Post.

RUBBISH: In Palo Alto, California, citizens are ordered to separate their trash into seven neatly packaged piles: newspapers, tin cans (flattened with labels removed), aluminum cans (flattened), glass bottles (with labels removed), plastic soda pop bottles, lawn sweepings, and regular rubbish. And to pay high taxes to have it all taken away.

In Mountain Park, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, the government has just ordered the same recycling program, increased taxes 53 percent to pay for it, and enacted fines of up to $1,000, and jail terms of up to six months, for scofftrashes.

Because of my aversion to government orders, my distrust of government justifications, and my dislike of ecomania, I have always mixed all my trash together. If recycling made sense — economically and not as a sacrament of Gaia worship — we would be paid to do it.

For the same reason, I love to use plastic fast-food containers and non-returnable bottles. The whole recycling commotion, like the broader environmental movement, has always impressed me as malarkey. But I was glad to get some scientific support for my position.

Professor William L. Rathje, an urban archaeologist at the University of Arizona and head of its Garbage Project, has been studying rubbish for almost 20 years, and what he’s discovered contradicts almost everything we’re told.

When seen in perspective, our garbage problems are no worse than they have always been. The only difference is that today we have safe methods to deal with them, if the environmentalists will let us.

The environmentalists warn of a country covered by garbage because the average American generates 8 lbs. a day. In fact, we create less than 3 lbs. each, which is a good deal less than people in Mexico City today or American 100 years ago. Gone, for example, are the 1,200 lbs. of coal ash each American home used to generate, and our modern packaged foods mean less rubbish, not more.

But most landfills will be full in ten years or less, we’re told, and that’s true. But most landfills are designed to last ten years. The problem is not that they are filling up, but that we’re not allowed to create new ones, thanks to the environmental movement. Texas, for example, handed out 250 landfill permits a year in the mid-1970s, but fewer than 50 in 1988.

The environmentalists claim that disposable diapers and fast-food containers are the worst problems. To me, this has always revealed the anti-family and pro-elite biases common to all left-wing movements. But the left, as usual, has the facts wrong as well.

In two years of digging in seven landfills all across America, in which they sorted and weighed every item in 16,000 lbs. of garbage, Rathje discovered that fast-food containers take up less than 1/10th of one percent of the space; less than 1 percent was disposable diapers. All plastics totalled less than 5 percent. The real culprit is paper — especially telephone books and newspapers. And there is little biodegradation. He found 1952 newspapers still fresh and readable.

Rather than biodegrade, most garbage mummifies. And this may be a blessing. If newspapers, for example, degraded rapidly, tons of ink would leach into the groundwater. And we should be glad that plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Being inert, it doesn’t introduce toxic chemicals into the environment.

We’re told we have a moral obligation to recycle, and most of us say we do so, but empirical studies show it isn’t so. In surveys, 78 percent of the respondents say they separate their garbage, but only 26 percent said they thought their neighbors separate theirs. To test that, for seven years the Garbage Project examined 9,000 loads of refuse in Tucson, Arizona, from a variety of neighborhoods. The results: most people do what they say their neighbors do — they don’t separate. No matter how high or low the income, or how liberal the neighborhood, or how much the respondents said they cared about the environment, only 26 percent actually separated their trash. The only reliable predictor of when people separate and when they don’t is exactly the one an economist would predict: the price paid for the trash. When the prices of old newspaper rose, people carefully separated their newspapers. When the price of newspapers fell, people threw them out with the other garbage.

We’re all told to save our newspapers for recycling, and the idea seems to make sense. Old newspapers can be made into boxes, wallboard, and insulation, but the market is flooded with newsprint thanks to government programs. In New Jersey, for example, the price of used newspapers has plummeted from $40 a ton to minus $25 a ton. Trash entrepreneurs used to buy old newspaper. Now you have to pay someone to take it away.

If it is economically efficient to recycle — and we can’t know that so long as government is involved — trash will have a market price. It is only through a free price system, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated 70 years ago, that we can know the value of goods and services.

The cavemen had garbage problems, and so will our progeny, probably for as long as human civilization exists. But government is no answer. A socialized garbage system works no better than the Bulgarian economy. Only the free market will solve the garbage problem, and that means abolishing not only socialism, but the somewhat more efficient municipal fascist systems where one politically favored contractor gets the job.

The answer is to privatize and deregulate everything, from trash pickup to landfills. That way, everyone pays an appropriate part of the costs. Some types of trash would be taken away for a fee, others would be picked up free, and still others might command a price. Recycling would be based on economic calculation, not bureaucratic fiat.

The choice is always the same: put consumers in charge through private property and a free price system, or create a fiasco through government. Under the right kind of system, even I might start separating my trash.

McDONALDS: I’ve always admired McDonald’s. It put restaurant dining within the reach of the average American, and made cross-country travel less of a culinary roulette. But these days, the gold on those arches is looking a little bit green.

For 15 years, McDonald’s put its hamburgers in styrofoam boxes, and no wonder. The containers kept the food hot, clean, and dry, and the foam even absorbed grease.

Styrofoam was a wonderful invention, as anyone who’s ever held a paper cup of hot coffee can testify. Light, strong, cheap, and insulating, styrofoam was a consumer godsend. So naturally, the environmentalists — whose declared enemy is the consumer society — despised it.

The Environmental Defense Fund persuaded McDonald’s to ban styrofoam as “bad for the environment.” By this, they do not mean the customers’ environment, since paper leaves a hamburger cold and soggy much more quickly than styrofoam.

The environmentalists say that styrofoam doesn’t biodegrade. But so what? Rocks don’t biodegrade either. Why should we mind styrofoam buried under our feet as versus rocks? Because styrofoam is manmade, and therefore evil, whereas rocks are natural, and therefore good.

Non-ecological factors may be at work, however. Edward H. Rensi, president of McDonald’s U.S.A., said the company can “switch to paper and save money.” And if the customers don’t like it? What are you, a spotted owl murderer?

But McDonald’s may not be getting off so easily. The Audubon Society criticizes the deal, saying that “a lot more paper means a lot more pollution.”

I guess the environmentalists won’t be satisfied until McDonald’s slaps the burger directly onto our outstretched hand. If it is a burger. An agreement with the animal rights movement may be next. Anyone for a McTofu?

Portland, Oregon — in a move that other cities are studying — has hired ex-New York bureaucrat Lee Barrett as a “styrofoam cop.” Since January 1990, no restaurant or other retail food seller in Portland has been able to use products made of the wonderful insulating foam. It is Barrett’s job to swoop down on businesses to make sure they are not styro-criminals. If they are, he can levy $250 fines for the dread offense — with $500 for hardened offenders.

ALAR: Just before the publication of a National Research Council study extolling fresh fruits and vegetables (why do government scientists get paid to repeat what our mothers told us?), and pooh-poohing the trivial pesticide residues on them, the environmentalists arranged an ambush.

A PR man for the Natural Resources Defense Council was featured on 60 Minutes, points out syndicated columnist Warren Brookes, and Ed Bradley denounced Alar as the “most potent carcinogen in our food supply.” This was disinformation.

Alar — used safely since 1963 — helps ripen apples, keeps them crisper, and retards spoilage. Using an EPA-mandated dosage 22,000 times the maximum intake of even an apple-crazy human, one rat out of the thousands tested developed a tumor. This was the extent of the “scientific proof” used not only to harm the manufacturer, Uniroyal, which had to pull Alar off the market, but the entire US apple industry.

A saner voice — Dr. Sanford Miller, dean of the medical school at the University of Texas at San Antonio — noted that “the risk of pesticide residues to consumers is effectively zero.” But apple sales dropped, and apple growers lost more than $250 million, with many driven into bankruptcy.

Says Dr. Miller: 99.9 percent of the pesticide carcinogens now eaten by humans are natural. And as man-made pesticides and fungicides are banned, we are endangered. “Fungi produce the most potent carcinogens in nature.”

RATS: The attack on Alar was based on rodent testing. And many other helpful products have been forced off the market, and companies and consumers harmed, through such panics. And now it turns out, as many of us have long thought, that such tests are defective.

Two recent articles in the journal Science — by Bruce Ames of the University of California, Berkeley, and Samuel Cohen of the University of Nebraska Medical College — have shown that it is the massive dose itself, no matter what the substance, that causes tumors.

The hyperdosages, explain these scientists, kill cells in the test animals, which their bodies then replace. The more this takes place over the animal’s lifetime, the greater the chance of a cell mutation leading to cancer.

As with Alar, take thousands of rats and fill them full of a chemical for their whole lives, and it can be no surprise when one develops a tumor. This shows us that no one should try to live on Alar, but it tells us nothing about an infinitesimal residue, so small as to be barely measurable, of this helpful chemical.

GREENHOUSE: On the first Earth Day in 1970, environmentalists warned that we faced a new ice age unless the government took immediate and massive action. Today, using much of the same data, they claim we are endangered by global warming. These are the same climatologists who can’t tell us whether it will rain next Friday, but who are certain that the earth’s temperature will be x degrees Celsius higher in 2014 than today. Increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will melt the polar ice caps and coastal areas will flood, we’re told. As temperatures increase, Dallas will become a desert and Baked Alaska more than a dessert.

The proposed solution to this “Greenhouse Effect” is, surprise!, more government spending and control, and lower human standards of living. President Bush’s budget has $375 million for greenhouse research.

Yet the “net rise in world surface temperature during the last century is about one degree Fahrenheit,” nearly all of it before 1940, notes syndicated columnist Alton Chase. “And the northern oceans have actually been getting cooler. The much-vaunted ‘global warming’ figures are concocted by averaging equatorial warming with north temperate cooling.”

A National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration study of ground temperature in the US from 1889 to 1989 found no warming. And a recently concluded ten-year satellite weather study by two NASA scientists at the Huntsville Space Center and the University of Alabama also found zero warming.

There is no evidence of global warming, but even if it were to take place, many scientists say the effect would be good: it would lengthen growing seasons, make the earth more liveable, and forestall any future ice age.

CLEAN AIR ACT: Bush’s Clean Air Act, signed into law in October 1990, gives the EPA dictatorial power over every American business whose products might be harmful if burned. Since almost everything is toxic if burned, this is the establishment of Green central planning.

The bill also subsidizes ethanol, methanol, and compressed natural gas, and orders manufacturers to produce expensive cars that run on them.

Ethanol, a corn-based fuel beloved of Sen. Bob Dole (R-IRS) and his ethanol-producing mentor, Dwayne Andreas of Archer-Daniels-Midland, gives off other forms of pollution, and is much more expensive than gasoline. (Note: this provision, by artificially increasing this demand for corn, will also raise food prices by about $10 billion.)

Methanol is a highly corrosive fuel that destroys the normal automotive engine, requiring super-expensive alternatives. It costs more than gasoline, is only half as efficient, and is so toxic as to make gasoline seem almost benign in comparison.

Compressed natural gas requires massive steel tanks. A container holding the energy equivalent of a normal gasoline tank is much bigger and weighs 30 times as much, lowering mileage and wiping out most trunk space. And even a minimal number of refueling stations will cost $15 billion.

The Clean Air Act also has higher CAFE standards (fleet-wide economy regulations) that will have the effect of mandating lighter and therefore more dangerous automobiles.

The bill also places new and heavy regulations on hundreds of thousands of small businesses, in the OSHA tradition. OSHA is the quintessential Establishment regulatory agency, since the Exxons of the world can easily handle its depredations, while small businesses cannot. It has been a tremendous relative benefit to big business, and a barrier to entrepreneurs and small firms.

The new Clean Air Act replicates this, in spades. Any business using one of 200 common chemicals will have to undergo a lengthy and expensive licensing process. This includes your corner dry cleaner and print shop. And if the owner violates any regulations, knowingly or unknowingly, he will be subjected to heavy civil and even criminal penalties.

If a business gets new equipment, it will need a new permit — another bar to innovation for small companies. And if a factory changes its production method, it too will need a new permit. Again, this is no problem for Dow Chemical, only for Dow’s would-be competitors.

As bad as all these provisions are, the most serious and expensive aspects of the Clean Air Act involve “acid rain” and the ozone layer.

ACID RAIN: Environmentalists are adept at PR, and the very name acid rain conjures up images of drops eating through your umbrella and dissolving your hair. In fact, it means only that litmus paper turns a different color.

The environmentalists tell us that America’s streams, rivers, and lakes are becoming dangerously acidic, and that the villain is coal burning by utility companies. However, the government’s own ten-year, $600 million National Acidic Precipitation Assessment Project — which the EPA has censored — found that acid rain is a non-problem.

Virtually all of the few acidic lakes have been that way since before the Industrial Revolution, thanks to water running through topsoil heavy with decaying vegetation. This is also why the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt found the giant Rio Negro river system in South America acidic and fishless 200 years ago.

Ironically, the fish in some Adirondack lakes — where there has been the most publicity — are affected by reforestation. Cutting down trees in the early part of the century led to less acidic soil, and a more neutral pH in the water, and artificially stocked fish thrived. Replanting over the last few decades has meant more acid.

OZONE: The other major focus of the Clean Air Act is the alleged deterioration of the ozone layer. We’re told that we need a robust layer of ozone to prevent too much ultra-violet B radiation. But this is another non-problem. Since 1974, when we began measuring the UVB radiation level, it has declined 10 percent. Less is getting through, despite alleged anti-ozone chemicals.

Ozone is created by the action of sunshine on oxygen, so it should be no surprise that over the South Pole in the winter, when there is little sunshine, the ozone layer might thin, or even develop a temporary hole. This has happened, it is the only place it has happened, and it was first recorded in the mid-1950s, long before the alleged chemical villains were in significant use.

Ozone is harmed, we’re told, by chlorofluorocarbons, the wonder chemicals used in air conditioners, refrigerators, and spray cans, and which are essential to the computer industry as well. Stable and non-toxic, CFCs cannot catch fire, and they are tremendously energy efficient. Yet the Clean Air Act will heavily tax, and eventually ban, all CFCs and related chemicals.

The planned substitutes are not only poisonous and energy inefficient, they can catch fire and even explode. The exploding refrigerator: it seems a perfect symbol of what the Clean Air Act, and the entire environmental movement, will inflict on us for the sake of the mythical Mother Nature.

But ozone is good, we’re told, only in the upper atmosphere. To cut down on its incidence at street level in Los Angeles, the entire country will be fastened with additional anti-automotive and anti-industrial controls, with more bad economic effects.

A GREEN GNP?: The environmentalists feel they have a PR problem. Since their explicit agenda is to make us consume less, that is, to be poorer, they worry that this may not be popular. So they have a solution: the Green GNP.

GNP — gross national product — is already a deficient statistic. For example, as government spending grows, so does the GNP, even though government growth subtracts from real wealth. Nevertheless, as the statistical avatar of American business activity, the GNP has tremendous political significance.

To hide the fact that their legislation and regulation makes us poorer, the environmentalists want “environmental quality” incorporated into GNP. The Environmental Protection Agency and similar bureaucracies in Western Europe are funding research to make this possible.

The federal government already owns more than 40 percent of the United States. Say, under environmentalist pressure, another billion acres is taken out of production to save an endangered weed. Green accounting will claim that our environmental quality has been improved by x billion dollars, and add this to the GNP. Already, the GNP figures disguise how poor we’re getting along, thanks to government intervention in the economy. A Green GNP will take us even further from reality.

SPOTTED OWLS: When I visited a logging area in far northern California, I found no environmentalists. As the Sierra Club’s own studies demonstrate, environmentalists are upper-class types who live in places like Manhattan and Malibu, not in the woods. Those who do have no illusions about the Earth Goddess Gaia.

Loggers know that mankind’s very existence depends on bending nature to our will, and that if we ever stop doing so, the jungle will reclaim our cities.

The livelihood of 30,000 working families in the Northwest will be destroyed by the Bush administration — approved anti-logging regulations on millions of acres, so 1,500 spotted owls can continue to live in the style to which they have become accustomed. If you think that wiping out 20 human families per owl seems excessive, it just shows how unenlightened you are.

(Note: if the spotted owl really is “endangered,” and environmentalists want to save it, they should buy some land and set up an owl sanctuary. But using their own money somehow never occurs to them.)

The environmentalists privately admit, however, that the owl is not their major concern. It is outlawing all “old-growth” logging, a controversy which cuts to the heart of the environmentalist movement (unfortunately not with an ax).

Old-growth trees are precious because they were not planted by man, the Great Satan of the enviro-druidic religion. Pollution questions, although they make use of them, are irrelevant to these people. Old trees produce much less oxygen than new trees, so according to the “rain-forest criterion,” we should harvest all old trees and plant new ones. I don’t notice any environmentalists recommending that, however. In fact, California had a Forests Forever ballot initiative defeated in November 1990, to ban all old-growth logging. These are the same people, remember, who wanted to let Yellowstone’s trees burn down because the fire was started by natural lightning.

To drive through far northern California is to be reminded of the aptness of Ronald Reagan’s “if you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all” remark. The monotony is broken only by the occasional town, an oasis of civilization in a green desert. Yet the environmentalists would turn these into ghost cities. As one affluent environmentalist told me, “those people have no business living there.” Now if I can only find an Audubon Society meeting so I can wear my new logger t-shirt: “I Love Spotted Owls. Fried.”

OIL: With the US government prepared to go to war over oil, one would think that the environmental stranglehold on domestic energy production might be questioned. In fact, it has been made tighter, with millions more acres, offshore and within the US, forever barred — or so the environmentalists hope — from energy production for humans.

The Arctic National Wildlife Reserve is full of oil, perhaps eight to nine billion barrels worth — even more than Prudhoe Bay, points out columnist Stan Evans. So full of oil is this government wildlife reserve that oil seeps out of the ground and into the water, for some reason causing no media hysteria at the “desecration” involved. Yet this mammoth resource has been locked up by the feds through environmentalist pressure.

Production off the California, North and South Carolina, and Florida coasts is also banned, although there is probably 30 billion barrels there.

Through a coalition of rich people in places like Santa Barbara who don’t want their free views disturbed by a distant drilling platform, and environmentalists who feel drilling contaminates Mother Earth, and might injure a seagull, the American people have been made poorer.

All federal lands should be privatized, but so long as they are government owned, they should at least be opened to productive human use, including oil production, coal and other forms of mining, and tree harvesting.

SMOKING: In 1604, James I of England ordered his subjects to stop using tobacco, “the horrible Stydgian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” Other anti-smoking politicians have tried whippings in Russia, nose-slittings in India, and beheadings in Turkey. One anti-smoking sultan roamed the streets of Istanbul in disguise and beheaded any tobacco seller he found. Even our present-day fanatics wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think.

Massachusetts outlawed the sale of tobacco in the 1630s, and in the 1640s, Connecticut banned public smoking and ordered private smokers to get a license.

These measures failed, just as Turkish capital punishment had. It was more than 150 years, points out our Gordon Dillow, before the anti-smoking movement revived.

All during the nineteenth century, what were called anti-smoking “agitations” increased. Eugenicist Orson Fowler even condemned it as an aphrodisiac, and warned that those who “would be pure in your love-instinct” should “cast this sensualizing fire from you.”

In 1984, the New York Times said that “the decadence of Spain began when the Spaniards adopted cigarettes.” With Americans using them, “the ruin of the Republic is close at hand.”

Tobacco was accused of causing color blindness, weak eyesight, baldness, stunted growth, insanity, sterility, drunkenness, impotence, sexual promiscuity, mustaches on women, and constipation.

In 1893, New York Schools Commissioner Charles Hubbell said that:

many and many a bright lad has had his will power weakened, his moral principle sapped, his nervous system wrecked, and his whole life spoiled before he is seventeen years old by the detestable cigarette. The “cigarette fiend” in time becomes a liar and a thief. He will commit petty thefts to get money to feed his insatiable appetite for nicotine. He lies to his parents, his teachers, and his best friends. He neglects his studies and, narcotized by nicotine, sits at his desk half stupefied, his desire for work, his ambition, dulled if not dead.

By 1909, with the help of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the National Anti-Cigarette League succeeded in outlawing smoking in North Dakota, Iowa, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Washington, South Dakota, and Minnesota. New York City outlawed smoking by women, and 29-year-old Katie Mulcahey was jailed for lighting up in front of a policeman and telling him: “No man shall dictate to me.”

When drinking was outlawed, evangelist Billy Sunday said: “Prohibition is won; now for tobacco.” The Presbyterian, Northern Baptist, and Methodist churches called for tobacco prohibition, but amidst growing public dismay about the effects of alcohol prohibition, they failed to win many more converts.

A popular song seemed to sum it all up:

Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
It satisfies no normal need. I like it.
It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
It takes the hair right off your bean.
It’s the worst darn stuff I’ve ever seen.
I like it.

Gradually the states repealed their anti-tobacco laws. Kansas’s was the last to go in 1927.

But tobacco prohibition fever is upon us once again. California always seems to lead the way in these matters, and today, not only do they have hectoring state anti-drinking signs in their restaurants, they are subjected to an expensive and intrusive state advertising campaign against smoking.

The anti-smoketeers were bolstered in the last decade by the Ruritanian admiral with the 1,000-mile stare, Dr. C. Everett Koop. As surgeon general, he preached about the dangers of “second-hand” smoke. But where was the evidence?

An American Cancer Society study of 180,000 American women has not detected any increased risk to non-smoking wives of heavy smokers. And a Yale Medical School study showed that tobacco smoke in the air very slightly improved the breathing ability of asthmatics!

But none of this matters. Our health Nazis are obsessed by the idea that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying a smoke or a drink. Therefore their $28.6 million government ad campaign.

I find the notion of state behavioral advertising chilling. (Although I wouldn’t mind trying anti-bribe ads in the legislature.)

No one was supposed to be persuaded by the slogans that used to festoon Moscow: “Glory to the Communist Party,” “Toil for the Motherland,” etc. They were there to demoralize the opposition. So it is in California.

With newspaper, TV, and radio ads, the state department of health services says it will “change the image” of smoking from “sexy, glamorous, youthful” to “dumb, dirty, dangerous.” While I don’t know anyone who thinks smoking is the former, the latter sounds like a great description of the California government.

The tobacco industry works through persuasion. The State of California (not to speak of the US government) gets its money, and its way, at the point of a gun. Give me Virginia Slims over the tax man any day.

SIEG HEALTH: We’ve always known the Nazis were economic left-wingers (Nazi standing for National Socialist German Workers Party), but now — thanks to Robert N. Proctor’s Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Harvard University Press, 1988) — we know they were health nuts, exercise freaks, ecologists, organic food zealots, animal righters, and alcohol and tobacco haters.

Like today’s environmentalists, who place every bug and weed above humans, the Nazis were ardent conservationists. They passed a host of laws to protect “nature and nature’s animals,” especially “endangered” plants and animals.

The Nazis outlawed medical research on animals, with Hermann Göring threatening anyone who broke the law with being “deported to a concentration camp.” He jailed a fisherman for six months because he cut off a bait frog’s head while it was still alive, and the German humor magazine Simplicissimus ran a cartoon with a platoon of frogs giving Göring the Nazi salute.

As believers in “organic medicine,” the Nazis urged the German people to eat raw fruits and vegetables, since the preservation, sterilization, and pasteurization of food meant “alienation from nature.”

They even hated Wonder Bread. “In 1935, Reich’s Health Führer Gerhard Wagner launched an attack on the recent shift from natural whole-grain bread to highly refined white bread,” says Proctor. Denouncing white bread as a “chemical product,” Wagner linked the “bread question” to a “broader need to return to a diet of less meat and fats, more fruits and vegetables, and more whole-grain bread.”

In 1935, Wagner formed the Reich Whole-Grain Bread Committee to pressure bakers not to produce white bread, and Goebbels produced a propaganda poster tying Aryanism to whole-grain bread. In 1935, only 1 percent of German bakeries were health-food stores. By 1943, 23 percent were.

The Nazis were also anti-pesticide, with Hitler’s personal physician, Theodore Morell, declaring the DDT especially was “both useless and dangerous.” He prevented its distribution.

The Nazis funded massive research into the environmental dangers of background radiation, lead, asbestos, and mercury. They campaigned against artificial colorings and preservatives, and demanded more use of organic “pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fertilizers, and foods.” Government medical journals blamed cancer on red meat and chemical preservatives.

Drinking was actively discouraged, and there were stiff penalties for anyone caught driving drunk, with the police — for the first time — empowered to give mandatory blood alcohol tests.

Hitler, a vegetarian and health-food enthusiast, was also a teetotaler. Himmler shared Hitler’s hatred for alcohol, and had his SS promote the production of fruit juices and mineral water as substitutes.

Hitler especially hated smoking, however, and he would allow no one to smoke in his presence. When the state of Saxony established the Institute for the Struggle Against Tobacco at the University of Jena in 1942, he donated 100,000 RM of his own money to it. He also banned smoking on city trains and buses.

The Nazis believed in natural childbirth, mid-wifery, and breastfeeding, and women who breastfed their children instead of using “artificial formula” received a subsidy from the state. By the middle 1930s, the Nazis had outlawed physician-assisted births in favor of midwives.

The Nazis also promoted herbal medicine, and the S.S. farms at Dachau were billed as the “largest research institute for natural herbs and medicines in Europe.”

No wonder our eco-leftists have that glint in their eye. From now on, I’m going to check if they are wearing armbands.

One of the fastest growing and most radical parts of the environmental movement is the animal rightists. They too worship nature, but make a cult out of animals whom they equate with human beings, and in fact place above us.

BABY SEALS: About ten years ago, we were subjected to a barrage of photos and news stories about big-eyed seal pups hunted for their fur. Greenpeace stirred a worldwide propaganda campaign, and the European Community and others banned the import of the pelts.

This not only wiped out the livelihood of the natives who hunted the seals, but it harmed the fishing industry. With no hunting to keep the seal population under control, the animals are devouring increasingly scarce fish and damaging nets.

Some bureaucrats are proposing a government seal hunt (no private hunters, of course), but the environmentalists have prevented it. Meanwhile, stocks of cod and other fish continue to drop. Do the environmentalists care? We “shouldn’t eat anything with a face,” one told me.

FLIPPED OUT: One environmentalists’ Victim of the Month was the dolphin. Some of the animals were caught inadvertently by tuna fishermen, but Flipper reruns on TV must have convinced millions of Americans that dolphins are intelligent, so the environmentalists were able to persuade them to spear the tuna industry.

Santa Barbara, California, has now declared a Dolphin Awareness Day; school children all across America engaged in letter-writing campaigns (those who still could, despite the government schools); and San Francisco kids were denounced if they brought tuna sandwiches to school.

The Audubon Society, the Humane Society, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and a host of similar organizations wanted an end, in effect, to the organized American tuna industry, and they may get it.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Reagan in 1981, imposed convoluted regulations on the industry in the name of saving dolphins. But that’s not good enough, said then-Congresswoman Barbara Boxer (D-CA): dolphins “have creative centers larger than humans.” Or at least larger than members of Congress. So new federal restrictions are needed.

Even before the politicians could act, however, Greenpeace and other environmental groups pressured the four major tuna companies to stop using fish caught by nets because an occasional dolphin might be caught. The livelihood of American tuna fishermen, with the life savings of whole families invested in expensive boats and equipment, was, of course, irrelevant. The companies will now only buy tuna from the western Pacific, where there are no dolphins, and no American fishermen.

The environmentalists admit, be it noted, that they also cherish the life of the tuna, and want it also protected from fishermen, but they will have to wait. Charlie hasn’t had his own TV show yet.

EXTINCTION: From the snail darter to the furbish lousewort, every existing animal and plant species must be kept in existence by the government — claim the environmentalists — even if human rights are violated. But why?

Most of the species that have existed since the “creation,” from trilobites to dinosaurs, are now extinct through normal processes. Why not allow this to continue?

If, for scientific or entertainment purposes, some people want to preserve this species or that on their own land and at their own expense, great. Zoos and universities do this already. But the rest of us should not be taxed and regulated, and have our property rights wiped out, to save every weed and bug. The only environmental impact that counts is that on humans.

FUR: In Aspen, Colorado, voters defeated a proposed ban on fur sales, but in most places it is the furaphobes who make themselves felt, especially since they are willing to use almost any tactic.

They spray-paint women in fur coats, slash coats with razors and burn down fur stores. Last year, they put incendiary bombs in the fur-selling areas of department stores all over the San Francisco Bay area. Police suspect the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which has been charged with using identical devices elsewhere. But such is the environmentalist influence in the media that there was little publicity.

ALF, which the California attorney general calls a terrorist organization, says it seeks “to inflict economic damage on animal torturers,” from fur sellers to medical researchers.

MEDICAL RESEARCH: A physician researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, Dr. John Orem, “conducted ground breaking — and painless — research on cats,” notes Katie McCabe in the Washingtonian, “until his lab was trashed by the Animal Liberation Front.” Children may die as a result, but ALF says: so what? Anything is justified to stop the use of animals.

Congress listens respectfully to animal-rights lobbyists, and has passed legislation making medical research more expensive. One amendment from then-Sen. John Melcher (D-MT) requires researchers to protect the “psychological well-being” of monkeys (whom Congressmen must feel close to) at an estimated cost of $1 billion.

This plays, however, directly into the hands of people-killers. Who knows how many cures will go undiscovered because of these restrictions? Thousands of babies have been saved because we know about the Rh factor, which was discovered through the use of rhesus monkeys. But animal rights advocates say it is better that babies die than that monkeys be used to save them.

Even former Rep. Bob Dornan (R-CA) pushed animal-rights legislation that would add billions to medical research costs. Not that he goes all the way with these people. Although named “Legislator of the Year” by the radical PETA, Dornan still “wears leather shoes.” Until PETA outlaws them, that is, for the animal rightists see cow leather as no different than human skin.

Fred Barnes reported in the New Republic — itself pro-animal rights — that the Bush administration buckled under animal rights pressure (Barbara is rumored to be a supporter) and “strongly opposed” legislation empowering the FBI to investigate terrorist attacks on medical research facilities.

In a cover story on the subject, New Republic senior editor Robert Wright says he was converted by the “stubborn logic” of the animal-rights movement, although he — like Dornan — doesn’t go all the way. He still believes in “the use of primates in AIDS research.”

ANTS AND SWANS: The animal rights lobby wants them to outlaw any use of animals in medical research, food, or clothing. There is “no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights,” says Ingrid Newkirk, director of PETA. “The smallest form of life, even an ant or a clam, is equal to a human being.”

The “murder of animals,” says Alex Pacheco, chairman of PETA, is equivalent to the “murder of men.” Eating oysters on the halfshell makes you Charles Manson.

Recently there was an uproar in southern Connecticut. The state’s wildlife division had proposed, in the face of an out-of-control swan population, to “shake eggs.” The swans — large, heavy, aggressive birds with no natural predators in the area — were attacking children. The swans couldn’t, of course, be hunted, so rangers were deputized to rattle fertilized eggs to prevent hatching.

Thousands of residents protested this violation of the swans’ rights, many proponents of human abortion among them. If children were injured by the swans, so be it. (Note: This is in the Green tradition. Rousseau abandoned his five children as “an inconvenience” and animal-rights activists are typically pro-abortion.)

Let’s get serious, says a PETA spokeswoman: “Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughter houses.”

From FDR to the present, the Democrats have been bad on environmentalism. It played an important part in the New Deal and the Great Society (Lyndon Johnson called himself “the Conservation President”), and any day I expect to see the Democrats designate trees as what Joe Sobran calls an Officially Accredited Minority, with a certain number of seats (plastic, of course) in their national convention.

But environmentalism got its political start under the original liberal Republican: Teddy Roosevelt. As no one who knows Washington will be surprised to learn, there were special interests at work.

When the federal government established the national parks system, and locked up millions of acres, it made other land — held especially by the timber and railroad interests associated with J.P. Morgan, Roosevelt’s mentor — much more valuable. Some of these interests were the funders of the original conservation lobbying organization.

Richard Nixon continued this tradition when he established — by executive order — the Environmental Protection Agency. Not surprisingly, the EPA’s budget has been dominated by sewage-treatment and other construction contracts for well-connected big businessmen. But small and medium businesses, and the American consumer, have suffered from its endless regulations.

And the head of the EPA was to be elevated by President Bush — the “Environment President” — to sit with the cabinet. President Bush also proposed a New Deal-style $2 billion program to plant a billion saplings, none of them members of Congress.

Are we short of trees? No, but the president is “genuinely fond of trees,” says a White House aide. And although no one thinks it will “cure the Greenhouse effect,” it’s “symbolic of his commitment to the environment.” American foresters, farmers, landowners, and homeowners don’t know the proper number of trees, but Washington, DC, does.

Some problems, like alleged global warming, are so enormous, say the environmentalists, that only world government can solve them. And the one-world-types who infest the national Democrats and the resurgent Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party are glad to comply.

Right now, the State Department and the EPA are negotiating a plan, based on the new Clean Air Act, to issue pollution permits worldwide. Third World countries would get “excess” permits, which they could then sell to Western companies, bringing about another transfer of wealth from the West to the Third World, which will undoubtedly be used to pay back the big bank loans of Third World governments.

Establishmentarian Elliot L. Richardson, writing in the New York Times, says that “nothing will be done” environmentally “without an institutional mechanism to develop, institute, and enforce regulations across national boundaries.”

To build “a global Environmental Protection Agency,” perhaps run like “the United Nations General Assembly,” that could levy taxes and impose controls to make sure there is “equitable burden sharing,” the US government must lead the way in the “interest of the entire world community.”

Ever since Woodrow Wilson, liberals have been infected with the idea of world government. With the melding of the European Community and the coming establishment of its tax authority and central bank, the Trilateralist ideal has come closer.

Patriotic Americans must reject this globaloney, and not only on grounds of national sovereignty. We know how difficult it is to deal with city hall, let alone the state or federal government. A world bureaucracy would be a taxing, meddling nightmare. Well-connected international lawyers like Elliot Richardson would do well, but the average American would get it in the neck.

Once we reject utopianism, and realize that — for example — eight million people can’t live in Los Angeles and have air like rural Colorado’s — we can set about solving real environmental problems through the only possible mechanism: private property and the price system.

When the price system functions freely, it brings supply and demand into rough equality, ensuring that resources are put to their most-valued uses. To the extent that government meddles with prices, it ensures waste, hampers entrepreneurship, and makes people poorer.

If coffee — for whatever reason — becomes scarcer, its price goes up, which tells consumers to drink less. If more coffee comes on the market, its price goes down, telling consumers they can drink more. Prices thus constitute a system of resource conservation.

But environmentalists pretend — like Soviet central planners — to know economic values without prices. They claim we are “running out” of everything, and thus we need government controls on consumption. But if we really were running out of, say, oil, its price would skyrocket, telling consumers to use less and entrepreneurs to seek substitutes. And when the oil supply was threatened by the Iraqi War, that’s exactly what happened.

Neither do the voluntary eco-restrictions work as intended. The environmentalists are forever telling us to be poorer and use less water, less gasoline, less toilet paper, etc. But if they reduce their consumption, it lowers the price for the rest of us, and we can use more. (P.S.: Don’t pass this on to the environmentalists; it’s the one favor they do the rest of us.)

When anything is commonly owned — like air and water — we see all the bad effects of socialism. People abuse the resource because they do not have to bear the price.

To solve this problem, anyone who is personally harmed, or his business damaged, by air pollution ought to be able to sue to stop it, and receive damages. But the federal government intervened in this common-law process in the nineteenth century to favor special interests, making it impossible, to take a real example, for a farmer to sue a railroad whose spark emissions burned down his orchard.

The federal government also nationalized the coasts and waterways specifically to smooth the way for industrial special interests.

If, as is the case with many waterways in England and other countries, people had property rights in the streams and rivers running through their land, they could prevent pollution just as they prevent trash-dumping in their front yard. And if fishermen and homeowners held property rights in the coasts and adjacent waters, they could prevent pollution and properly allocate fishing rights.

The recent hysteria over African elephant tusks was another problem of property rights. If people were allowed to raise elephants and sell their tusks — as even the Zimbabwean government pointed out — there would be no more and no fewer elephant tusks than there should be. The same principle applies to all other resources. If left in common ownership, there will be misuse. If put in private hands, we will have the right amount: supply will meet demand.

An example of market conservation was the Cayman Turtle Farm in the British West Indies. The green sea turtle was considered endangered, thanks to over-harvesting due to common ownership. The Farm was able to hatch eggs and bring the hatchlings to maturity at a far higher rate than in nature. Its stock grew to 80,000 green turtles.

But the environmentalists hated the Cayman Turtle Farm, since in their view it is morally wrong to profit from wildlife. The Farm was driven out of business and the green turtle is again on the endangered species list.

Greens — like all liberals — justify government intervention because of what economists call “public goods” and “externalities.”

A “public good” is supposed to be something we all want, but can’t get, unless government provides it. Environmentalists claim everyone wants national parks, but the market won’t provide them, so the government must. But how can we know, independent of the market, that everyone does want these expensive parks? Or how many parks of what sort?

We could take a survey, but that doesn’t tell us the intensity of economic demand. More important, it is not enough to know that people want, for example, diamonds. That means something economically only if they are willing to give up other things to obtain them.

Amazingly, liberal economists have never developed a way to identify these so-called public goods, so-objective scientists that they are-they use intuition. Paul Samuelson’s favorite example was the lighthouse, until Ronald Coase demonstrated that private entrepreneurs had provided lighthouses for centuries.

If we realize that only the market can give us economic information, the alleged problem of public goods disappears. Absent government prohibitions and subsidies, or competition from “free” parks, the market will ensure that we have exactly the number and type of parks that the American people want, and are willing to pay for. Moreover, if we sell all the national parks, we can pay off the federal debt.

An “externality” is a side-effect. Your neighbors’ attractive new landscaping is a positive externality; their barking dog is a negative one. One is a blessing, the other an irritant, but you voluntarily purchase neither.

Environmentalists say, for example, that trash is a negative externality of consumerism. So they advocate more regulation and bureaucracy to solve it. Yet the free market solves this much more justly and efficiently through property rights. Privatize everything and the externalities are “internalized,” that is, those who ought to bear the costs do. But to environmentalists, human prosperity is itself a negative externality.

Chicken or chicory, elephant or endive, the natural order is valuable only in so far as it serves human needs and purposes. Our very existence is based on our dominion over nature; it was created for that end, and it is to that end that it must be used — through a private-property, free-market order.

The environmental movement is openly anti-human and virulently statist. Is it any coincidence that the Nazis exalted animals, nature, and vegetarianism above humans, civilization, and civilized eating, or that our environmentalists have an air of green goose step about them?

The environmentalists must be opposed — if they will excuse the expression — root and branch. But it will not be easy.

Unfortunately, the environmentalists have company in assaulting our freedom. Under the guise of protecting freedom, the State has tried to seize control of our children and to destroy family authority.

Christopher Ratte, professor in the department of classics at the University of Michigan, was recently turned into a jailbird and had his son taken away from him, all in the name of protecting the child from the father. He had taken his seven-year-old son to a baseball game in Detroit and ordered him lemonade. What was served up was a “Mike’s Hard Lemonade,” which his son prepared to drink. Suddenly security arrived.

“You know this is an alcoholic beverage?” the security guard asked.

“You have got to be kidding,” responded the professor. And before the professor could examine the bottle, the guard snatched it away, and the boy was taken to the hospital where no traces of alcohol were found in him. The boy was then promptly put in foster care. It was two days before the mother, a professor of architecture, was allowed to take him home, and a full week before the father was allowed to come back into the home again.

The case provides a remarkable look at the workings of bureaucracy. The Detroit Free Press interviewed all the people involved. It turns out that no one was happy about what happened, but the gears of the bureaucracy ground away, ruining peoples’ lives for no good reason.

The cop on duty thought it was a mistake, but his supervisor was insisting that he act. When Child Protective Services came to take the child away into their cruel foster care, the police objected. But CPS was just doing its duty. It had no choice but to take the child since the police had requested a court order — also triggered by events — to remove the child. Observers who know the system say that the only surprising aspect to this case is that child was returned so quickly. Had the couple been poor, uneducated, and unconnected, the case might still be tied up in the courts.

The lesson many people draw from this is that social workers are being given too much authority, that governments need to be reformed so that they do not take extreme measures too hastily, that cops need to use good sense before busting up families, etc. The problem is that all of these reforms ultimately depend on the state to use its discretionary power judiciously.

The real issue concerns the locus of control. Does it belong to the family or the state? When there is a dispute, to whom does the presumption of innocence belong? It is not enough to say: here is a bad family environment, so of course the state should control the outcome. When it comes to the power of the state over the family, there is no such thing as a judicious use. The state has every reason to invent reasons to destroy families — and all other independent centers of authority — and the families themselves have no choice but to crawl and beg.

State campaigns for the welfare of children have always been a major justification for the expansion of leviathan. This is the primary basis for the war on drugs, which has robbed us of so many civil liberties. It is the basis for the nationalization of education that is taking place, administration by administration, in the name of preventing any child from being left behind. If the Interent is ever regulated in the US the way it is in China and parts of Europe, it will be in the name of protecting the children. Indeed, it is possible to erect a totalitarian state in the name of helping the children.

So it was in Texas, when the state swept in to remove 437 children from their mothers. The police were responding to a call claiming abuse, but there was no other basis for this incredible action than the desire to crush a religion completely. The state decided the dissident church shouldn’t exist, and so it claimed all power in the interest of the children. The state could count on sympathy from mainstream American culture, which rightly disapproves of polygamy and underage marriages. And that is precisely why the group separated themselves completely from the rest of the culture.

Should people be free to set up cults, to live undisturbed to practice their religion, to deviate from mainstream ethical codes? Certainly if we believe in freedom, people should be able to do this. In fact, the group was already under a great deal of pressure to reform from the outside and inside, with former members of the group reporting despotic control by the leader and many men who had been excommunicated putting pressure on those inside to leave. We don’t know whether the entire matter — if indeed abuse was taking place — might have been handled in this way, because the state intervened to impose the cruelest possible solution: namely, taking children from their mothers’ arms and putting them in the hands of government social workers.

In the name of protecting children, the state already runs a huge program with government officials posing as teenagers seeking sex and arresting those who fall for the scam. By itself, this is very strange, with government becoming a source for the very problem that government is trying to correct. Meanwhile, a February–March 2008 report from the American Psychologist reports that the fears about Interent predation are wildly exaggerated and do not reflect the facts. This is hardly a surprise, since the state has incentive to exaggerate the pathologies of society as a means of getting a clawhold over every independent sector.

The goal of the state is to find some practice that is universally reviled and pose as the one and only way of expunging it from society. The best example today is child pornography, a grim and ghastly industry that every decent person would like to see eradicated from the earth. But in the name of doing so, the state invades everyone’s privacy, controls speech, interferes with families, and otherwise uses the issue as a wedge to undermine every freedom.

Thus do we see what is wrong with statements such as the following:

We have an obligation to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse, and we can do this by increasing communication between state and federal agencies to help combat this repulsive industry. While privacy rights should always be respected in the pursuit of child pornographers, more needs to be done to track down and prosecute the twisted individuals who exploit innocent children.

Do we really want to unleash the state to solve this problem? Not if we understand the dynamics of statism. The power will not be used to solve the problem, but rather to intimidate the population in ways to which people will find it difficult to object. The trouble is that the above words were not written by the typically naïve do-gooder, social worker, or Justice Department bureaucrat. They were penned by spokesmen for the Libertarian Party.

Thus can we see the power of propaganda, and its uses. Not even self-identified libertarians can see that state authority over the family is a basis for the loss of liberty in our time, and that the state always poses the greater threat to society than whatever problem it purports to solve. There is a further problem: a concession that the state can indeed solve social problems that cannot be corrected without the state, is to give up the entire argument over the future of liberty itself.

The environmentalist movement portrays humanity as the enemy of the earth and sides against humanity; and its influence of the State, as we’ve seen, is vast. There’s another important area in which the State makes war on large sections of humanity. The State bears primary responsibility for racism.

What is racism and how can we tell if it exists? I’m not talking about someone who dislikes African-Americans or whites or Latinos. We might call that racism on the level of individual ethics, but there are no inevitable and widespread social consequences of a bad attitude. Defining racism, a notion highly charged with political implications, also raises the specter of the Thought Police: did you or did you not think politically incorrect thoughts?

Let’s deepen and broaden the discussion in light of what Ludwig von Mises says about racism in contrast to the liberal view of the social order. In Omnipotent Government, he shows that the modern doctrine of racism originated with the Frenchman Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau as a way to justify aristocratic privilege. In the hands of the Nazis, the doctrine was extended to the alleged superiority of Aryans over everyone else. They claimed that the races were inherently incompatible, and advocated state policies to bring about their desired outcome.

Mises first regards racism as a particular species of a general social theory that posits the existence of intractable conflicts in society, and that therefore it is impossible for society to work properly absent some fundamental structural change brought about by the state. In the old Marxist variety, this conflict was between capital and labor. That view doesn’t have many adherents anymore since real-world events have disproved the Marxian vision for more than a century. The poor didn’t get poorer under capitalism; they became richer than ever before in human history.

In a similar way, the racialists must also confront the reality of the market economy. As Mises said, in a market economy, there is no legal discrimination against anyone. Freedom prevails, and “whoever dislikes the Jews may in such a world avoid patronizing Jewish shopkeepers, doctors, and lawyers.” The problem is that this does not produce the results racists want. Indeed, the market always tends to bring people together in peace, neither compelling nor forbidding exchanges.

“Many decades of intensive anti-Semitic propaganda did not succeed in preventing German ‘Aryans’ from buying in shops owned by Jews, from consulting Jewish doctors and lawyers, and from reading books by Jewish authors.” What the racists wanted required more. “Whoever wanted to get rid of his Jewish competitors could not rely on an alleged hatred of Jews; he was under the necessity of asking for legal discrimination against them.”

The end result, then, is a policy of interventionism. This interventionism is required if a racist result is to be brought about, and the allegedly intractable conflict finally resolved. If this logic is carried to its end point, the result is mass suffering and death. The Jews were the problem in Germany, so they had to be eradicated. The Kulaks in Russia similarly had to be destroyed. Same with anyone with Western or bourgeois attachments in Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The Hegelian synthesis in each of these cases is achieved through mass slaughter. The supposedly persistent conflict between groups is washed away in rivers of blood.

Even as Marxists abandoned their old view of capital-labor relations, they promoted the conflict view of society — one entirely at odds with the old liberal idea — in other forms. This is because the Marxian view itself has deeper roots in Hegel’s view that history must tend toward a synthesis of two opposing forces, culminating in some transforming moment. Socialism is one way to render the Hegelian view in material terms. But there are other ways. So long as you have the perception of a war-to-the-knife conflict, history cries out for a resolution.

Thus does the Marxian view easily mutate to take on a different cast depending on the political moment. The sexist view of the world, for example, holds that men and women have opposing interests, and that a gain by one sex always comes at the expense of the other. A forced rearrangement of social institutions, they believed, was required to fix the problem.

Now, keep in mind that this view of society is not necessarily held by one group or another. We think of anti-male women’s activists who believe that women can only advance through political action, but the view can also be held by men. The misogynist male might also believe that women are the key problem with the world, and so social structures need to be forcibly rearranged to favor men.

The conflict view is a part of the environmentalist agenda too. The notion that humans cannot advance without killing nature is widely held today. People look at China’s advancing economy and their first thought is not human flourishing, but environmental catastrophe. Think too of those who accept as an article of faith that changes in weather patterns are due to us humans living it up too much.

We see this further today in the area of religion. Some people are dead set on the idea that a free society is incompatible with a multiplicity of religious faiths. This view is particularly popular among Christian fundamentalists, who claim that Islam will never be satisfied until it wipes out Christianity, and that every new mosque is a mortal threat to Christendom. They can’t imagine that people can co-exist in peace, tolerance, and trade, leaving religion to personal conscience.

So too with race. Decades after Gobineau, in the 1930s, it became the intellectual fashion to believe that state eugenics was necessary to cull the population of its inferior elements, so that the superior elements could thrive. Behind this was an elaborate argument about human evolution and the need for planned reproduction. This view was widely held on the left and the right, in highbrow and lowbrow circles. Why was state planning necessary? Because, it was believed, there was a genetic competition that pitted all racial groups against all, and only one group could win.

Thus did the racialist view resemble Marxism, changing the posited conflict from capital and labor to the races. What the racialists failed to understand, or understood but hated, was the capacity for voluntary institutions to harmonize racial interests. The United States showed this to be true. After the ghastly civil war came the blessed abolition of slavery, and then the end of laws requiring racial segregation. We saw how the free market can bring about cooperative trading relationships among all people. (Of course, the laws hindering freedom of association and contract in the name of anti-racism retarded social cooperation.)

What freedom has illustrated is that differences among people do not need to lead to intractable conflicts. More and more social cooperation is possible and fruitful, to the extent that people are granted the freedom to associate, trade, make contracts, and work together toward their mutual advantage.

Sadly, however, among many people in this country, there is still the impression that state-mandated institutional change, even revolution, is required to end intractable conflicts. They believe that the very essence of the social structure captures this racial conflict. Some blacks hold this view, some whites hold this view, some Latinos hold this view — the ideology of racism does not elude any group.

It should be no surprise, then, that Mises’s ideas have drawn fire from white racialists who insist that by talking about markets and freedom, we are evading the real issue, which is who will dominate. And there is the view that prosperity is not really about the question of freedom, but about the purity of the genetic stocks. Such views are not limited to whites; black activists too speak as if the only issue that really matters is gaining legal preferences for their group. In either case, the agenda is all about who has power over whom, rather than ending the ability of any group to have power over any other group.

The state is not a neutral observer. It will pass environmental legislation. It will regulate relations between races and sexes. It will put down this religion in order to raise that one up. In each case, the intervention only exacerbates conflicts, which in turn creates the impression that there really is an intractable conflict at work. For example, if the state taxes one group to give to another group, it fuels conflict and gives the impression that legislation is the route to liberation.

But who is the real winner in this game? The state and the state alone. By purporting to be the great social referee, it accumulates more power unto itself and leaves everyone else with less freedom to work out their own problems. And here is the real problem with racism or any -ism that fails to understand the capacity of the free society to work out its own problems through exchange and mutual benefit.

Thus can we see that racism is not a unique problem in society but part of a larger misconception about the basis of social cooperation.

Do you ever travel by air? Then of course you have met the TSA. If you have boarded an airplane recently, you know something about how the state lives in a strange, alternative universe in which good sense, normal courtesies, and sound judgment play no role. No aspect of life is perfect, but the sectors the state manages are wacky and topsy-turvy.

Thus we are expected to believe that every living person who boards an airplane is a potential terrorist, and every person is just as much a risk as every other person. We are expected to believe that because the state forces us to carry deodorant in a little baggy, that we are safer from hijackings than we would otherwise be. We are supposed to gain comfort when we see a TSA employee testing a tube of toothpaste to make sure that it won’t explode on board.

It is all so ridiculous, and oddly alarming. If there is one thing we can know for sure, it is that a regular terrorist is not going to subject himself to these petty investigations. The source of trouble will be completely unexpected. The bureaucrats only do what they are told to do, and those making the rules have no financial incentive to decouple authentic from bogus threats.

As Judge Napolitano has noted, the TSA’s measures are stupid and do not succeed in keeping us safe. “But how does confiscating water bottles, snow globes, and ‘toy transformer robots’ while waving deadly weapons and diseases through the gates, protect our security?”

Intrusive searches are by no means confined to airplane passengers, Napolitano points out. The New York Police Department, along with many other police departments across the country, now conducts random bag searches in the subway, without suspicion or warrant, in order to prevent terrorist attacks. These random searches clearly violate the Fourth Amendment, which is meant to protect all persons from warrantless searches and seizures. If you are unlucky enough to be selected “randomly,” the officers will stop you as you hurry to catch your morning train. As the doors slide closed on the platform below and your train departs, you stand helplessly as the bored cops search your bag.

A federal appeals judge ruled that these searches were constitutional.

In August 2006, Judge Chester Straub of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the NYPD acted within the law because the subway bag searches fell within the “special needs exception” to the Fourth Amendment due to imminent terrorist threats.

Napolitano mordantly comments, “There is no ‘special needs’ exception in the Fourth Amendment. The court simply made it up.”

These searches are of course only a small part of the so-called “War on Terror.” The Patriot Act and other laws and Executive Orders allow the government to pry into the correspondence, telephone calls, and financial records anyone it chooses to classify as a possible sympathizer with terrorism. You might think that this applies to only a few extremists and has nothing to do with ordinary Americans. If you think this, you are in for a surprise.

If you’re a member of an activist organization or have ever blogged about how betrayed you feel by your government, or how you really wish they would end this futile war and bring your kid home from Iraq, your name might be on the terrorist watch list along with thousands of other innocent people. Your phone might be tapped, your computer might be monitored, and thousands of surveillance cameras may be focused on you as you trip over that crack in the sidewalk. Today more than ever, Big Brother may be watching.

If he is watching, then, Napolitano reminds us, the Patriot Act allows him to enlist involuntarily the services of members of the public to assist in spying. Further, a citizen thus drafted into service is forbidden, under criminal penalties, to disclose that he has received a National Security Letter.

The Patriot Act places a gag order on any person served with:

a self-written search warrant … for information, barring them from disclosing that the FBI has either sought or obtained information from them. If a town librarian tells a neighbor … that the government has taken her Internet browsing records, the innocent librarian can end up in a federal prison for five years because of her truthful speech.

Isn’t this an outrageous interference with our right of free speech?

Assaults on liberty, today as in the past, are supported on the grounds that security must be protected. But the defenders of these measures fail to show that they in any way do improve our security. In what way, e.g., did the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II aid the American war effort? Napolitano remarks that it took more than 30 years for the American government to apologize for this outrageous policy. One wonders whether 30 years from now the government will issue a new apology for the many acts of tyranny of the Bush administration.

Robert Higgs remarks about the Patriot Act,

Our rulers declare that by nothing more substantial than the emperor’s say-so, any person may be arrested and held incommunicado, without trial, and then punished, even put to death. Say good-bye to the writ of habeas corpus, the very bedrock of limited government. ... Do I [Higgs] fear that the USA PATRIOT Act will be abused? No. I know that it has been already and will continue to be as its elastic language allows unscrupulous prosecutors to scratch a variety of itches unrelated to terrorism.

The extent to which the War on Terror violates our freedom is truly frightening. Bush claimed to be completely above the law and to have the power to imprison or kill anyone he wished, including American citizens, with no legal safeguards whatever.

That outstanding civil libertarian attorney Glenn Greenwald has characterized the situation we face in this way:

[P]rior to the December 2005 disclosure that President Bush had violated the law, no one ever suggested that the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] framework impeded necessary eavesdropping. If anything, the FISA court had long been criticized … for being too permissive, for allowing the government whatever eavesdropping powers it requested. Indeed, its reputation for granting every eavesdropping request made by the government is so widespread that it has long been ridiculed as the “Rubber Stamp Court.” … The FISA court approved every single request [out of 13,102 submitted between 1978 and 2001] and only modified the requested warrant on a grand total of two occasions.

Why then did the Administration bypass the court? Greenwald responds:

As Congress devised the law, the FISA court plays two critical, independent functions — not just warrant approval but also, more critically, judicial oversight. FISA’s truly meaningful check on abuse in the eavesdropping process is that the president is prevented from engaging in improper eavesdropping because he knows that every instance of eavesdropping he orders will be known to a federal judge — a high level judicial officer who is not subject to the president’s authority … it is precisely that safeguard which President Bush simply abolished by fiat. In effect, President Bush changed the law all by himself, replacing the federal judges with his own employees at the NSA [National Security Agency] and abolishing the approval and warrant process entirely.

Bush ignored the court, in sum, because he thinks that he possesses plenary powers in all matters that concern security. But how can he think this? Doesn’t the Constitution grant the president only strictly limited powers? No one can reasonably question this; but, as Greenwald notes, some legal theorists have done just that. Notoriously, John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who served as deputy assistant attorney general, wrote an extraordinary memorandum on September 25, 2001:

Yoo contended that the president’s powers were not confined only to battlefields or wars; he emphatically argued that the president has the power to make any decisions with regard to all matters relating to defense and that neither the Congress, nor the courts, nor any longstanding laws can restrict or limit those decisions in any way.

As Greenwald makes clear, Bush has applied his claim to be above the law far beyond the issue of wiretaps. Bush has acted on the belief that he may seize anyone, even an American citizen living within the United States, and hold him as he deems fit in a military prison, there to be subject to harsh treatment that really amounts to torture. Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen, was seized by the American Army in Afghanistan in 2001.

In secret, President Bush signed a decree accusing Hamdi of being an “enemy combatant” and ordered his administration to keep Hamdi in a military prison. Hamdi was not charged with any crime and was not allowed access to a lawyer. He was simply locked away and allowed no contact with anyone, and the administration asserted the right to detain Hamdi under these circumstances indefinitely.

When the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s claim, Hamdi was deported to Saudi Arabia.

Even worse, José Padilla, also an American citizen, was arrested on American soil and cast into a military prison.

On June 9, 2002, President Bush signed yet another secret order, this one decreeing Padilla to be an enemy combatant, and as a result, he was transferred to a military prison in South Carolina and subjected to the same “black hole” treatment that Hamdi received — placed in solitary confinement, not formally charged with any crime, denied access to a lawyer.

Once more, the administration claimed that it was free to do anything it wanted to an American citizen in the name of defense. When it appeared that the Supreme Court was about to rule on the constitutionality of this claim to dictatorial power, the administration transferred Padilla to the civilian authorities; he was then tried in court and convicted. The treatment he received in military prison had meanwhile made him mentally ill.

Even if Congress passes a law that forbids the use of torture, Yoo and his associates contend that the president is not bound by its terms: once more, he possesses plenary powers in matters of defense. The president has brazenly issued “signing statements” when he approves new legislation that declare that he will interpret laws in accord with his own dictatorial conception of his powers, i.e., he will disregard the law when it suits him.

As Ron Paul noted in a speech to Congress on November 29, 2001:

The target of our [congressional] efforts has sadly been the liberties all Americans enjoy. With all the new powers we have given the administration, none has truly improved the chances of catching the terrorists who were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. All Americans will soon feel the consequences of this new legislation. ... Laws recently passed by Congress apply to all Americans, not just terrorists.

I’m sorry to say that the situation is even worse. President Obama claims the authority to kill American citizens without trial, if he deems them sufficiently dangerous, and he has done just that. Anwar-al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric, was killed in a drone attack. As William Norman Grigg explains,

The links connecting Anwar al-Awlaki to anti-American terrorism were entirely suppositious, forged through unsubstantiated official assertion. He was, at most, a clerical propagandist who never exercised command authority. For that matter, no evidence has been presented that he ever had an operational role in a military force of any kind. 

Awlaki — an American-born cleric who was once courted by the Pentagon — was accused of expressing support for armed attacks against US military personnel and government interests. It is not terrorism to employ lethal violence against an invading and occupying army, nor is it a crime to express support for armed self-defense — including armed interposition against the aggressive designs of the U.S. government.  

The administration asserted — without providing evidence — that Awlaki had an “operational” role in planning terrrorist attacks against U.S. citizens. If evidence supporting that charge existed, the administration had the unconditional constitutional duty to indict Awlaki and put him on trial. 

The vertically integrated murder apparatus that killed Awlaki and fellow U.S. citizen Samir Khan is entirely autonomous — and increasingly automated. Awlaki was added to a “kill list” and his execution “sanctioned” by a secret legal memorandum, on the basis of things he had said in public. Within a few years, the machinery of mass murder will be refined to the point where people — including U.S. citizens — may find themselves targeted for execution on the basis of behavior “patterns” that suggest unexpressed but impermissible thoughts.

Ron Paul reacted with appropriate indignation: “That’s not a good way to deal with our problems,” he said of the drone strike in Yemen that killed Awlaki.

“He was born here,” said Paul. “He is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged with any crime. Nobody knows if he killed anyone.”

And Paul said the precedent of striking against Americans, even those suspected of being terrorist masterminds, is not a good one.

“If the American people accept this blindly and casually — have a precedent of an American president assassinating people who he thinks are bad. I think that’s sad,” he said.

The government, beyond a doubt, is engaged in war against American citizens. Once more, we shouldn’t think that the government’s assault affect only a few outliers. Government efforts to watch everybody aren’t confined to measures ostensibly directed at terror suspects. Judge Napolitano calls attention to another intrusion — cameras installed to catch speeders. Relying on these cameras denies due process to the accused:

The tickets are practically indisputable, since the images of the vehicle are not close enough to capture the driver of the vehicle. If the license plate recorded is registered to you, you’re guilty. Period. These cameras are so profitable that in Britain they are referred to as “yellow vultures” and are the most lucrative cameras in the country.

Napolitano notes that using these cameras increases accidents, since drivers speed up at intersections in an effort to avoid detection; nevertheless, the cameras are increasingly part of the local scene in various sections of America.

The aim of the government seems to be to subject everybody to total surveillance. If what you do is always under the eye of a government agent, then the government is in position at once to stifle any resistance to its plans for us. The government’s aim here was prefigured by the Panopticon project of the British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. Murray Rothbard describes Bentham’s plan in this way:

In visiting his brother Samuel in Russia, in the 1780s, Bentham found that his brother had designed such a panopticon, as a workshop, and Bentham immediately got the idea of the Panopticon as the ideal physical site for a prison, a school, a factory — indeed, for all of social life. “Panopticon,” in Greek, means “all-seeing,” and the name was highly suitable for the object in view. Another Benthamite synonym for the panopticon was “the Inspection House.” The idea was to maximize the supervision of prisoners/school children/paupers/employees by the all-seeing inspector, who would be seated at a tower in the centre of a circular spider-web able to spy on all the cells in the periphery. By mirrors and other devices, each of the spied-upon could never know where the inspector was looking at any given time. Thus the panopticon would accomplish the goal of a 100 per cent inspected and supervised society without the means; since everyone could be under inspection at any time without knowing it.

Bentham’s apologists have reduced his scheme to merely one of prison “reform,” but Bentham tried to make it clear that all social institutions were to be encompassed by the panopticon; that it was to serve as a model for “houses of industry, workhouses, poorhouses, manufactories, mad-houses, lazarettos, hospitals, and schools.” An atheist hardly given to scriptural citation, Bentham nevertheless waxed rhapsodic about the social ideal of the panopticon, quoting from the Psalms: “Thou art about my path, and about my bed; and spiest out all my ways ...”

Bentham’s goal was to approach, or simulate, the “ideal perfection” of complete and continuous inspection of everyone. Because of the inspector’s “invisible eye,” each inmate would conceive himself in a state of total and continuing inspection, thus achieving the “apparent omnipresence of the inspector.”

Of course, Bentham didn’t originate the idea of the government keeping tabs on its citizens. That idea has a long historical precedent. Since the Middle Ages, the State has used the census as an instrument of control.

“There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus,” says St. Luke on why Mary and Joseph found themselves in Bethlehem, “that all the world should be taxed.” Joseph had to go to his own city because the tyrannical Roman government was conducting a census. But the information may have been used for more than just taxation. The Roman government’s local ruler later decided he wanted to find the Christ child and kill Him.

Did the government make use of census data to find out where the members of the House of David were? We can’t know for sure, although a later Roman despot did. But we can know that Joseph made a huge error in obeying the census takers in the first place. They were up to no good. In fact, another group of religious Jews in Judea decided that they would not comply with the Roman government’s demand to count and tax them. The group was known as the “Zealots” (yes, that’s where the word came from). They saw complying with the census as equivalent to submitting to slavery. Many ended up paying for their principled stand with their lives.

And yet, their resistance arguably made would-be tyrants more cautious. For ten centuries after Constantine, when feudal Europe was broken up into thousands of tiny principalities and jurisdictions, no central government was in a position to collect data on its citizens. This is one of the many great merits of radically decentralized political systems: There is no central power that controls the population through data gathering and population enumeration.

The only exception in Europe in those years was William the Conqueror who, after 1066, attempted to establish in England a centralized and authoritarian society on the Roman model. That meant, in the first instance, a census. The census was compiled in The Domesday Book, Domesday meaning the day of reckoning or last judgment, so named by an Anglo-Saxon monk because it represented the end of the world for English freedom.

A predecessor to today’s tax rolls, it functioned as a hit list for the conquering state to divide property up as it wished. “There was no single hide nor yard of land,” read a contemporary account, “nor indeed one ax nor one cow nor one pig was there left out, and not put down on the record.” Eventually the attempt to keep track of the population for purposes of taxes led to the Magna Carta, the foundational statement of limits on the state’s power.

The Domesday Book established the precedent for many other attempts at compiling information. But according to Martin Van Creveld (author of The Rise and Decline of the State, 1999), the information-gathering techniques of these times were so primitive, and the governments so decentralized, that the data were largely useless. On the Continent, for example, no government was in the position of demanding a comprehensive census. That began to change in the sixteenth century, when the nation-state began to gain a foothold against the countervailing power of the church, free cities, and local lords. In France, the first modern philosopher of the state, Jean Bodin, urged that a census be taken to better control the people.

Also in France, writes Voltaire, Louis XIV tried but failed to develop a comprehensive accounting of “the number of inhabitants in each district — nobles, citizens, farm workers, artisans and workmen — together with livestock of all kinds, land of various degrees of fertility, the whole of the regular and secular clergy, their revenues, those of the towns and those of the communities.” It turned out that this was just a utopian fantasy. Even if the Sun King could have devised the form, it would have been impossible to force people to surrender all that information.

The first censuses of the eighteenth century were taken in Iceland and Sweden using depopulation as an excuse. But America after the revolution of 1776 faced no such problem, and the generation that complained of British tax agents knew better than to invest government with the power to collect information on citizens. In the Articles of Confederation, drafted in the days of full revolutionary liberty, each state had one vote, no matter how many representatives it sent to Congress. There was no demand for a census because the central government, such as it was, had no power to do much at all.

It was with the US Constitution in 1787 that the real troubles began. The document permitted more powers to the federal government than any free person should tolerate (as Patrick Henry argued), and the inclusion of a census was evidence of the problem. The framers added the demand for a census in the interests of fully representing the people in the legislature, they said. They would have two legislative houses, one representing the states and the other the people in the states. For the latter, they would need a head count. Hence, the government would count heads every ten years.

Why else was a head count needed? Article I, Section 2, included an ominous mention of taxes, recalling not only Caesar Augustus but the whole tyrannical history of using the census to control people:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.

The 1790 census seemed innocent enough, but by 1810, matters already were out of control: For the first time, the government started demanding information on occupations. Fortunately for the American people, the records were burned by the British in 1813, leaving hardly a trace for the state to use to expand its power. And yet, the state would not be held back, and the census became ever more intrusive.

The lesson of the history of the US census is this: Any power ceded to a government will be abused, given time. Today, the long-form of the census asks for details of your life that you would never tell a neighbor or a private business. A total of 52 questions, some outrageously intrusive, appear on it.

Every census is worse than the last. The 1990 census asked for the year of your birth, but the 2000 census wants to know the day and the month, not to mention the race and relation of every person in the house, along with the number of toilets and much more. And what is this information used for? Mostly for social and economic central planning — an activity the government shouldn’t be engaged in at all.

This isn’t a biased rendering of the objectives of the census. The Census Bureau itself says, “Information collected in Census 2000 will provide local area data needed for communities to receive federal program funds and for private sector and community planning.” You only have to ask yourself what any eighteenth- or nineteenth-century liberal would have thought of the idea of “private-sector” and community planning undertaken by the central state.

Indeed, very few Americans trust their government enough to allow it to engage in planning. Consider the incompetent Census Bureau itself. The letters it sent out in advance of the forms put an extra digit in front of the addresses, as the head of the bureau admitted in a Feb. 26 press release, while trying to blame it on someone else. And these are the people we are supposed to trust to gather information on us to plan our lives? No thanks.

The letter from the government says, “Census counts are used to distribute government funds to communities and states for highways, schools, health facilities and many other programs you and your neighbors need.” In short, the purpose is no different from that of William the Conqueror’s: to redistribute property and exercise power. Clearly, we’ve come a long way from the head-counting function of the census. Moreover, there are quite a few of us out here who don’t believe that we “need” these programs.

What’s worse, the point of the original census was not to apportion a fixed number of House members among the states. It was rationally to expand the number of people serving in the House as the population grew. But after the Civil War, the number of House members stopped growing, so there’s not much point to the census at all now — or at least no purpose consistent with liberty.

Moreover, if a head count were all that was needed, the job could be done by using data from private companies or the US Postal Service. But the census wants more than that. Why? Forget all the official rationales. The real reason the government wants the information is to control the population. The promises that the data won’t be used at your expense is worth the same as all government promises: zippo.

What is a freeman supposed to do when he receives the form in the mail? First, remember that information is the foundational infrastructure of the would-be total state. Without it, the state is at a loss. And then consider whether the costs associated with noncompliance are outweighed by the subjective benefit one receives from joining with all free people in resisting the government’s data-collection efforts. Finally, consider the limited purposes for which the Framers sought to use the census, and ask yourself whether the central government of today really can be trusted with knowing what is better kept to yourself.

For many years, voluntary compliance has been falling. In anticipation of this problem, the Census Bureau has been relying on wholly owned sectors of society to propagandize for its campaign. The Sesame Street character named Count von Count is touring public schools to tell the kids to tell their parents to fill out the census, even as more than one million census kits have been sent to public schools around the country. Think of it as the state using children to manipulate their parents into becoming volunteers in the civic-planning project.

It is a bullish sign for liberty that the government only achieved 65 percent mail-in compliance in 1990. And given the decline in respect for government that characterizes the Clinton era, you can bet it will be even lower today. If you do choose to fill out the census, some commentators have recommended you adhere strictly to the Constitution and admit only how many people live in your household. That such a tactic is considered subversive indicates just how far we’ve come from eighteenth-century standards of intrusion.

In 1941, Gustav Richter, an aide to Adolf Eichmann, was sent to Romania to gather information about the Jewish population in a census, with the ultimate goal of plotting a mass deportation to the Belzec concentration camp. But Romania cut off all political relations with the Nazis and, as a result, the Jewish population was spared the fate of Jews in Poland and Austria. Just as the Zealots of the first century knew, when a government seeks information on people, it is up to no good.

When the government keeps tabs on us, it of course does so not just to amass information. Those of us who defy its wishes are in grave danger of imprisonment. Americans, perhaps like all people, have a remarkable capacity for tuning out unpleasantries that do not directly affect them. I’m thinking here of wars on foreign lands, but also the astonishing fact that the United States has become the world’s most jail-loving country, with well over 1 in 100 adults living as slaves in a prison. Building and managing prisons, and locking people up, have become major facets of government power in our time, and it is long past time for those who love liberty to start to care.

Before we get to the reasons why, look at the facts as reported by the New York Times. The US leads the world in prisoner production. There are 2.3 million people behind bars. China, with four times as many people, has 1.6 million in prison. In terms of population, the US has 751 people in prison for every 100,000, while the closest competitor in this regard is Russia with 627. I’m struck by this figure: 531 in Cuba. The median global rate is 125.

What’s amazing is that most of this imprisoning trend is recent, dating really from the 1980s, and most of the change is due to drug laws. From 1925 to 1975, the rate of imprisonment was stable at 110, lower than the international average, which is what you might expect in a country that purports to value freedom. But then it suddenly shot up in the 1980s. There were 30,000 people in jail for drugs in 1980, while today there are half a million.

Other factors include the criminalization of nearly everything these days, even passing bad checks or the pettiest of thefts. And judges are under all sorts of minimum sentencing requirements. Now, before we move to causes and answers, please consider what jail means. The people inside are slaves of the state. They are captured and held and regarded by their captors as nothing other than biological beings that take up space. The delivery of all services to them is contingent on the whims of their masters, who have no stake in the outcome at all.

Now, you might say that this is necessary for some people, but be aware that it is the ultimate assault on human dignity. They are “paying the price” for their actions, but no one is in a position to benefit from the price paid. They aren’t working off debts or compensating victims or struggling to overcome anything. They are just “doing time,” costing taxpayers almost $25,000 a year per person. That’s all these people are to society: a cost, and they are treated as such.

And the communities in which they exist in these prisons consist of other un-valued people, and they become socialized into this mentality that is utterly contrary to every notion of civilization. Then there are the relentless threat and reality of violence, the unspeakable noise, the pervasiveness of every moral perversity. In short, prisons are Hell. It can be no wonder that they rehabilitate no one. As George Bernard Shaw said, “imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.”

What’s more, everything we know about government applies to this ultimate government program. It is expensive (states alone spend $44 billion on prisons every year), inefficient, brutal, and irrational. The modern prison system is also a relatively new phenomenon in history, one that is used to enforce political priorities (the drug war) rather than punish real crimes. It is also manipulated by political passions rather than a genuine concern for justice. The results of the drug war are not to reduce consumption but rather the opposite. Illegal drugs are now a $100 billion dollar industry in the US, while the drug war itself costs taxpayers $19 billion, even as the costs of running the justice system are skyrocketing (up 418 percent percent in 25 years).

People say that crime is down, so this must be working. Well, that depends on what you mean by crime. Drug use and distribution are associated with violence solely because they are illegal. They are crimes because the state says they are crimes, but they do not fit within the usual definition we find in the history of political philosophy, which centers on the violation of person or property. What’s more, the “crime” of drug use and distribution hasn’t really been kept down; it has only gone further underground. It’s a major irony and commentary on the workability of prisons that drug markets are very active there.

Now to causes. Some social scientists give the predictable explanation that all this is due to the lack of a “social safety net” in the US. In the first place, the US has had such a net for a hundred years, and yet these people seem not to have noticed, even though no such net is big enough for some people. Moreover, it is more likely the very presence of such a net — which creates a moral hazard so that people do not learn to be responsible for their own well-being — that contributes to criminal behavior (all else being equal).

There are those on all sides who attribute the increase to racial factors, given that the imprisoned population is disproportionately black and Hispanic, and noting the disparity in crime rates in such places as Minnesota with low levels of minority populations. But this factor too could be illusory, especially as regards drug use, since it is far more likely that a state system will catch and punish people with less influence and social standing than those whom the state regards as significant.

A more telling point comes to us from political analysts, who observe the politicization of judicial appointments in the United States. Judges run on their “tough on crime” records, or are appointed for them, and so have every incentive to lock people up more than justice truly demands.

One factor that hasn’t been mentioned so far in the discussion is the lobbying power of the prison industry itself. The old rule is that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. And so it is with prisons and the prison-industrial complex. I’ve yet to find any viable figures on how large this industry is, but consider that it includes construction firms, managers of private prisons, wardens, food service providers, counselors, security services, and a hundred other kinds of companies to build and manage these miniature societies. What kind of political influence do they have? Speculation here, but it must be substantial.

As for public concern, remember that every law on the books, every regulation, every line in the government codebook, is ultimately enforced by prison. The jail cell is the symbol and ultimate end of statism itself. It would be nice if we thought of the interests of the prisoners in society and those that will become so. But even if you are not likely to be among them, consider the loss of privacy, the loss of liberty, the loss of independence, the loss of all that used to be considered truly American, in the course of the building of prison nation.

But won’t crime go up if we abandon our prison system? Let Robert Ingersoll answer:

The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumb-screws and racks, with hangmen and headsmen — and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities and crimes have accomplished little for the preservation of property or life. It is safe to say that governments have committed far more crimes than they have prevented. As long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.

Even if you manage to avoid being sent to jail, you are likely to at some time or other encounter the police. If so, you have a good chance of encountering violence and total disregard for your rights. As Gary Chartier notes, military veterans, trained in violence in Iraq and elsewhere, often find jobs in domestic police forces. Their training all-too-often makes them treat Americans as enemy combatants. “Military organizations and high-pressure combat-linked environments can encourage the dehumanization of perceived enemies. And people can bring their histories with them into civilian life.”

Of course, if people have guns and other weapons, the power of the government over them is not complete. The conclusion is obvious: the government must take away our guns. So far, it has been unable to do so, but Obama’s cynical manipulation of the Sandy Hook shootings makes his intentions obvious.

Joyce Lee Malcolm’s outstanding book Guns and Violence: The English Experience shows us what the gun controllers have in mind, through a detailed account of what they have done in Britain. By studying the British experience with gun control, we can see what is in store for us.

Her detailed study of British legislation on the topic shows the real aim of the disarmers. They wish to abolish the right to armed self-defense entirely. The point is not only to block armed resistance to the state, as I had previously thought; in addition, everyone is to be made totally dependent on the state for protection.

Some of Malcolm’s examples are shocking. In England:

[m]erely threatening to defend oneself can also prove illegal, as an elderly lady discovered. She succeeded in frightening off a gang of thugs by firing a blank from a toy gun, only to be arrested for the crime of putting someone in fear with an imitation firearm.

Not even if one’s life is in danger can one legally use a weapon. In another case, two men assaulted Eric Butler in a subway, smashing his head and choking him. “In desperation he unsheathed a sword blade in his walking stick and slashed at one of them. ... The assailants were charged with unlawful wounding but Butler was also tried, and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon.”

You can imagine the legal position if someone goes so far as to use a real gun to defend himself. As British law now stands, you cannot even use a gun in your own home to defend yourself against burglars. In a 1999 incident, Tony Martin surprised a professional burglar and his accomplice while they robbed his home. He fired, killing one of them.

Did the government commend Martin for his bravery in confronting the burglars? Quite the contrary, they tried and convicted him for murder. “Thus an English farmer, living alone, has been sentenced to life in prison for killing one professional burglar and ten years for wounding another when the two broke into his home at night.” Fortunately, our story has a “happy” ending: the court of appeals reduced his sentence to five years, on grounds of “diminished capacity.”

Supporters of gun control, I suspet, will not be moved by these cases. “However unfair it seems to punish someone for defending himself,” they will claim, “we have no choice. We must reduce violence in society. The state cannot protect everyone, and curtailment of the right to self-defense will cause innocent people to suffer.” But so what? Doesn’t a slogan from a once prominent regime tells us that the common good goes before individual good? If we insist on the outdated ideas of personal rights and responsibilities, we will end up as a Wild West society like the United States, where guns are plentiful and violent crime flourishes. The “horror stories” just recounted took place in England, where as everyone knows, the curbs on private ownership of weapons have caused violent crime to occur far less often than in America. Down with the right to self-defense!”

Malcolm’s outstanding book thoroughly demolishes the case for gun control just sketched. She proceeds by a learned study of violent crime in England, from the Middle Ages to the present. In her survey, a constant theme emerges. As guns became more prevalent, violent crime decreased. This trend culminated in the nineteenth century, when death by murder was rare but guns were widespread. The seizure of guns during the twentieth century has been accompanied by a marked increase in violent crime. At present some types of violent crime are more common in England than in America. As usual, the statists have their facts exactly backward.

Often people think of English medieval life as relatively calm and peaceful, but in Malcolm’s view this is a myth. “Medieval England was boisterous and violent, more so than court records reveal. ... This high rate of homicide and violent crime existed when few firearms were in circulation.”

Malcolm’s interest in the Middle Ages is not confined to her primary theme of the relation between guns and violence. She introduces another theme that will concern her throughout the book: the status of the right to self-defense. During this period, custom and law established the right of individuals to resist violence directed against them. In some instances, a person who killed his assailant stood immune from criminal penalty. I will mention just a few highlights from Malcolm’s detailed narrative. The Tudor and Stuart periods, “this era in which firearms first came into common use in everyday life as well as for the citizen militia ... in which the Englishman’s right to have ‘arms for his defence’ was proclaimed, also witnessed a sharp decline in violent homicide.”

Developments in the eighteenth century should by now come as no surprise. “[A]t the very time that the individual right to be armed was becoming well established and guns were replacing earlier weapons, the homicide rate continued its precipitous decline.”

Readers will not earn a reward for correctly guessing Malcolm’s conclusions about the nineteenth century. Once again, the number of guns increased while violent crime declined. “The nineteenth century ended with firearms plentifully available while rates of armed crime had been declining and were to reach a record low.”

So far, we have a vast example of an inductive argument. Increases in the prevalence of guns have always accompanied decreases in violent crime. Does this not strongly suggest that guns in private hands deter crime? The twentieth century, especially its latter half, gives us a chance to test our induction, since ownership of guns during that period came under strict control.

And of course violent crime did increase.

Scholars of criminology have traced a long decline in interpersonal violence since the late Middle Ages until an abrupt and puzzling reversal occurred in the middle of the twentieth century ... a statistical comparison of crime in England and Wales with crime in America, based on 1995 figures, discovered that for three categories of violent crimes — assaults, burglary, and robbery — the English are now at far greater risk than Americans.

The gun controllers of course will counter what we have said by repeating over and over, “guns are dangerous.” Rothbard shows what’s wrong with their claim:

It should be clear that no physical object is in itself aggressive; any object, whether it be a gun, a knife, or a stick, can be used for aggression, for defense, or for numerous other purposes unconnected with crime. It makes no more sense to outlaw or restrict the purchase and ownership of guns than it does to outlaw the possession of knives, clubs, hatpins, or stones. And how are all of these objects to be outlawed, and if outlawed, how is the prohibition to be enforced? Instead of pursuing innocent people carrying or possessing various objects, then, the law should be concerned with combatting and apprehending real criminals.