War! War! War!

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY really began, not on 01/01/00, but on 9/11/01, when two aircraft brought down three tower blocks in the World Trade Center; since then, nothing has been the same. The United States has been spending resources - men, material, money - on war, principally in the Middle East.

I have not been in the Middle East for half a century, and even then I was not in Iran or Iraq or Israel, so I cannot tell you anything about the campaigns there. But there is another war that has been going on even longer, on which I can shed light.

Had you forgotten the War on Drugs?
It is:
(a) Unconstitutional; Congress can define only crimes against the citizens of EVERY State, such as treason, piracy, and counterfeiting the current coin; the States retain the power “of prohibiting the exportation or importation of any species of goods or commodities whatsoever” (Art. IX, Articles of Confederation.)
(b) Unlawful; consent is a defense to a crime; a surgeon, or a barber, is not guilty of mayhem. It would be a crime to sell someone cocaine if, but only if, se did not know it was addictive.
(c) Unlimited; narcotics enforcement is intruding into ordinary life, interfering with medical practice. Doctors fail, or refuse, to prescribe what they think best for the patient, for fear of attracting the attention of the enforcers.
(d) Undiplomatic; the War renders our neighbors enemies - Canadians and Mexicans do nor consider marijuana a menace, but neither do they want our addicts flooding into their countries. In Colombia and other South American countries, the struggle to grow coca faster than the U.S. Customs can destroy it is making ordinary foodstuffs too expensive for the workers.
(e) UnChristian; the Pharisees sought to dictate personal hygiene, but Jesus said: “Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.” (Matt. 15:11.)
(f) Unwinnable; As narcotics become more and more expensive, so the narcotics trade becomes more attractive to the best and boldest men, men who want to be respected and prominent. The best and brightest Americans do not join the police or the customs - at least, we hope they don't!

What do we do, now? First and foremost, get the U. S. government out of the War on Drugs; the U. S. government has its hands full with wars against other countries. Then, the States can find their own ways to cope with the problem: providing methadone, providing clean needles, perhaps setting up enclaves where it is safe to dope yourself . . . .

NATION BUILDING

THE UNITED STATES is, apparently, engaged in a struggle to organize a mob of violent Muslims into a coherent nation in Iraq. However, one imagines that the Iraqis have at least a few things in common. Presumably, they all do not want foreigners telling them what to do; and equally they do want to keep on selling oil overseas, rather than going back to herding goats. So one thing they and we could agree about would be, for us to keep other nations from invading them.

Presumably also, they arrange to live in neighborhoods with mutual trust, so that they can go to sleep without one man in each household having to sit up with a weapon. If so, then presumably the problem boils down to keeping large numbers of faction A from fighting large numbers of faction B . . . without forgetting there is also a faction C.

We now see our way forward; divide the whole nation into parts – we might call them STATES – each with its own territory. How do we avoid there being border wars?

We ensure that the borders do not provoke conflict – that is, there must be free trade across the borders. How can this be done – if the people of State A do not trust the people of State B? We arrange for the border between States A and B to be patrolled by the people of State C, the border between States B and C by the people of State A . . . . Presumably, if the people of A grow vegetables and the people of B farm animals and the people of C catch fish, the border zones will be advantageous to the people on both sides, and even to the people patrolling the borders.

Once the people of the different States are trading together, there must arise disputes between citizens of different States. But we Americans can explain to them the solution to this problem; it is the “common law,” the law discovered by a number of separate courts that follow one another’s precedents. Whether one is a Muslim or not, you must admit that if your case has been settled in same manner as every other person’s case, you have not been wronged.

The borders between the three States and the surrounding nations would be defended by the U. S. A.; presumably, only a token U. S. force would suffice to dissuade any neighboring nation from attempting to take advantage of the weakness of a divided Iraq.

How can there be a solution as simple and obvious as this? Because – I suspect – the people out there believe, correctly, that our success is due to “democracy,” and imagine, falsely, that “democracy” means that the majority dominates over the minority. Possibly Muslims would be less hostile to us if we were more Christian, if our commandments governed only relations with strangers – if we did not forbid polygamy, thus sentencing so many women to live in solitude, if we did not have such “crimes” as statutory rape, thus denying fertile women fulfilling lives, if we did not deny the right of parents to bring up their children as they think fit, if we did not pretend that “domestic violence” is something that happens behind locked doors and curtained windows.

“THE WORLD IS A SAFER PLACE” remarked The New York Observer, when Paris Hilton was jailed in Los Angeles, California. However, the only people who actually felt safer were the police and bailiffs and judges of Los Angeles, who were reassured that there was no prospect of domestic tranquility – a.k.a. constitutional government – emerging in their metropolis.

This may seem to be just the obvious failure of our republican form of government: elected county and district attorneys eagerly look for crimes-without-victims which they can prosecute in order to cow, or sheep, the citizens. But this persistent phenomenon is due to an institutional anomaly; the prosecutions are brought by county, or district, grand juries and attorneys, but those convicted of felonies are confined in State prisons – at State expense. If the counties were required to pay the State to keep the convicts, then the voters might find it worth their while to elect prosecutors who would discriminate dutifully.

A government of law allows no special privileges – or only ones in favor of minorities, such as bankruptcy and patents and copyright. Why is it against the law to drive without a license – on a public highway? Simply so that the State can sell licenses; were it not illegal to drive without a license, no-one would pay for a license. The State is running a plain and simple protection racket. If there were a test to measure driving ability, it might well rank the drivers in order, from 1 to, say, 10,000,000. Can you say that those from 1 to 5,000,000 are the first class, and those from 5,000,001 to 10,000,000 are the second? No, because the difference between those numbered 5,000,000 and 5,000,001 is negligible, and if you made the order a second time, people would have moved up and down across the division; to say “all men are equal” is to say “there are no classes” (not “there is no order”!) Certainly Hertz and Avis and National Car Rental are free to issue licenses to drive their own cars; if they make mistakes, they lose either customers or rentals. But the state is not at liberty to make mistakes; it exists to do justice, “No State shall . . . grant any Title of Nobility . . .:” Art. I, Sec. 10.

In California, the purpose of the criminal prosecution is to “correct” the citizen; I find it hard to believe that a person created in the image of God is improved in any way by being fenced in and given food and water. What might well “correct” hir, or hem, would be to explain exactly what is the difference between right and wrong; but, of course, if the penal code actually defined that distinction, hardly anyone would ever be convicted (how often do you see anyone fail to yield “in compliance with” a YIELD sign?) and the police and bailiffs and judges would be reduced to earning an honest living – one which their equals agreed to give them.

Let me tell you a great big, GREAT BIG, secret – one very closely guarded by the police and bailiffs and judges! In any court, the plaintiff bears the burden of proof. In a criminal case, any presumptions are in favor of the defendant: you are presumed to be a reasonable actor, if you squeezed the trigger you are presumed to have meant to fire. (If you were actually drunk or drugged, you would have to find evidence to show the fact.) The secret is that in California, and indeed several of the States, “in every crime or public offense” the penal code explicitly requires “evil design,” what the lawyers call mens rea. If you fail to yield “in compliance with” a YIELD sign, you have committed a crime malum in se, “in itself unlawful;” you are presumed to have meant to wrong the other driver. who had the right of way. You would have to prove that your brakes failed, or some other fact, in order to have an excuse. But failing to stop “in obedience to” a STOP sign is malum prohibitum, wrong only in the jurisdiction of this legislature, only since the act was signed by the governor; it is necessary for the prosecution to prove that you meant to wrong someone else, you do not have to prove that your intention was innocent.

Obviously, these United States would not have the world’s safest highways if the citizens were inclined to violate the rights of their equals; the crimes the prosecutors try are almost always statutory crimes, crimes against the state. Paris Hilton has only to argue, “You have not proved that I meant to wrong any other citizen; your case is defective.” In California and several other States, it only needs the citizens to fight the cases, to demand that the prosecution prove “evil design,” for us to restore LIBERTY – which means that you act as you think right, anyone who thinks otherwise has to sue for damages. If your actions result in harm to one of your equals, se can sue for damages – in the civil court: the State does not get its sticky fingers on the money.