Another worthwhile article on The Daily Bell, by libertarian author Wendy McElroy. She observes that Murray Rothbard divided statist interference with individual liberty into three categories, autistic or direct coercion (i.e., putting a drug dealer in jail), binary coercion (i.e., forcing a person to engage in a transaction with the state he would not otherwise engage in) & triangular coercion (i.e., forcing a transaction between two private parties, e.g., hiring quotas for women & minorities). The first is directed against losers who have no sympathy in the public eye. Who cares about drug dealers, after all? Policy makers who serve the state would prefer to avoid direct coercion against members of the general public & minimize the sense that coercion is actually occurring, especially in those triangular cases where they can argue a public benefit. (Obamacare would fall into this category -- or it did until it was actually launched.) Today, as more & more members of the public become educated about what is really going on -- about the scam the Federal Reserve is running, e.g. -- & beginning to recognize the coercion at that level (how real inflation is wiping out their savings, a literal theft, how a very few are getting absurdly rich by gaming the system instead of real, productive work), the system is losing credibility. Hence the gradual turn to direct coercion against more & more ordinary people, including those who least expect it (e.g., at routine traffic stops). A societys transformation into a tyranny does not happen all at once, after all. It happens gradually, in stages. It also happens gradually that agents of the state will increasingly be used to create fear in the general public, so that they will not resist encroaching tyranny & instead do what their masters up on high tell them to do. The obvious agents to create & enforce this fear with tasers, batons, & pepper spray are the police.
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 15:25:11 +0000
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