John Piper contorts the meaning of Romans 13

John Piper, who has done some great work rebutting Word-Faith doctrine, takes a position on guns and the state that I believe is inconsistent with Scripture. See: http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/should-christians-be-encouraged-to-arm-themselves In his commentary, he contorted the meaning of Romans 13. Objectively, he leads believers to amorality by using the “might makes right” interpretation of Romans 13. Pursuant to Piper’s calculus, an entity that calls itself government is ipso facto ordained by God because it has power and calls itself government. But not only that, non-believers would have a monopoly on the use of force if we followed Piper’s advice, since only non-believers would be armed.

Romans 13:1 Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.

As we can see, verse 1 tells us that there is no legitimate power outside of that which comes from God. This says nothing about everybody who wields power on earth having God ordained power. If a big man knocks down a little old lady and steals her purse, he certainly had power over her. But did he have God ordained power? There’s legitimate power and illegitimate power. Verse 1 is saying that if God hasn’t given you power, then you have no legitimate power. The true source of power is not a secular civil government, but God. Might doesn’t make right.

Far from begetting lawlessness, this is all about lawfulness, recognizing that even governments can do wrong. There’s a higher power than civil government. Verse 1 tells us we are subject to higher powers. As Christians, we have an even higher standard than manmade statutes. Just because something might be legal doesn’t mean we should indulge.

2 Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.

Many government statutes conflict with Biblical Christianity. I don’t mean the failure to proscribe all sinful behavior with statutory law. I mean that there are unjust statutes that proscribe non-criminal behavior, mostly for the purpose of enforcing some type of price fixing scheme. The government in Washington engages in evil as a matter of policy. There are many instances in the Bible where somebody defied civil authorities in order to carry out the Lord’s work. The Apostle Paul even spent time in prison. Nowhere is verse 2 implying that we must obey whatever civil government commands.

3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:

Verse 3 actually defines legitimate, God ordained power. But by verse 3, it’s too late for John Piper. Why? His position is that Romans 13 is talking about secular civil government, and that we are to obey whatever it commands. In which case, there’s no room left for making moral decisions. Piper is stuck in a paradox. No longer is Scripture the authority, yet he uses Scripture to make the case that civil government is the authority. Piper needs to make up his mind. Do we appeal to Scripture or civil government to determine right and wrong?

And if there be no room left for making moral decisions, then why does verse 3 define legitimate power in such a way that requires us to discern the difference between good and evil? As verse 3 informs us, legitimate power must be a terror to evil, not good works. In other words, if it isn’t a terror to evil while buttressing righteousness, then it has no legitimate power. To the extent civil government complies with God’s teachings, then it ought to be obeyed. Statutes proscribing murder ought not be disobeyed.

Piper’s theology implies that there’s some sphere of life God is disinterested in or indifferent towards, as if He isn’t concerned about the righteousness or wickedness of governments. Yet, if Romans 13 is properly understood, it becomes self-evident that God is very interested in how righteous or wicked is the government.

For sake of argument, let’s run with the idea that Romans 13 is talking about secular civil government, and that it must be obeyed at all times. Pursuant to that calculus, it would be a sin to overthrow the government. But if a group of people succeeded in overthrowing the government and became the new government, then it would be a sin to disobey that new group of people. In that paradigm, might makes right. Or suppose the government banned the Bible and criminalized Christianity. Do we obey? If so, pursuant to what? Romans 13?

Or when it comes to war, I can’t think of a more compelling case against war than John Piper’s interpretation of Romans 13. After all, if secular civil government is sacred, then wouldn’t it be a grave sin for government leaders in one government to try to topple government leaders in another government? Think about it. Saddam Hussein was the government leader in Iraq. That implies he was ordained by God with power. He would have been the only one who could legitimately use any kind of deadly force in Iraq, and people were duty bound to obey him. And then it would imply that government leaders in the U.S. government committed a sin by attacking the God ordained government in Iraq. Or is the only government God ordained with power the one in Washington?

This begs the question: why aren’t men like John Piper calling out the government for its wars against other governments, the latest of which is taking place in Syria with the U.S. trying to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad? That’s right. We are supposed to submit to whatever the government does, even if it leads into a paradigm of paradoxes and contradictions.

4 For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.

5 Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.

6 For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.

7 Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.

Romans 13 isn’t even talking about ungodly civil government. It’s talking about ecclesiastical governance, which has been usurped by secular civil government. It’s not saying we are duty bound to pay taxes to secular civil government. It says tribute to whom tribute is due. Custom to whom custom. This is where believers are compelled to use discernment, applying a Biblical worldview, in order to determine who has legitimate authority and who doesn’t. It’s not hard for me to discern that the government in Washington is a criminal organization that ought to be resisted by all believers.

Pacifism and self-defense aren’t mutually exclusive. There is nothing about defending human lives that’s antithetical to a spirit of Christian love. We must use discernment. Just because somebody wrongs me in some way doesn’t mean I retaliate. Our mission is to be effective witnesses for Jesus Christ. We ought not relish the opportunity to take a life. The goal should be to never take a life. But we do have a responsibility to protect human life. Romans 13 makes it clear we must be a terror to evildoers and buttress righteousness. Even if you aren’t a Christian, would you prefer godless, anti-human, amoral agents with guns, or people with the love of Christ? I can think of nothing that would make us all safer than if every Christian were armed. As Christians, we have a responsibility to own and carry firearms, that we be able to defend not just ourselves, but others. John Piper is evading his responsibilities.

Why I support Donald Trump

Let’s face it. Immigrants are destroying America. Some of them come here and commit crimes. But just as bad, a lot of them come here to work and steal our jobs. The Asians especially like to come here and work. Why is it every Chinese buffet I go eat at is ran by Chinese people? Not only are our jobs going to China, but the Chinese are coming here to steal our jobs! The only candidate with a serious plan to protect our economic wellbeing from these job stealing immigrants is Donald Trump.

There’s a narrow group of people who call themselves libertarians who say that immigration restrictionism won’t create or save jobs. I beg to differ. Donald Trump wants to create a deportation force. Just think of all the jobs he would create to round up and deport immigrants!

Overall, Donald Trump is on the right track by campaigning against arbitrage in the labor market. He just doesn’t go far enough. I mean think about it. By restricting immigration to the United States, the aggregate supply of labor hasn’t really shrunk. Lower cost labor is still available, but in other countries. The only way to truly shrink the labor pool – which everybody knows is the way to lift wages (not increasing productivity) – would be to bomb everybody in every other country. Donald Trump needs to get serious about bombing China back to the stone age, or else his campaign against arbitrage will be wholly ineffective.

Curtailing the ability of companies to purchase lower cost labor here in the United States would merely encourage companies to move their business abroad. Therefore, to effectively combat arbitrage in the labor market, Donald Trump has the right idea with a border wall. We need to implement capital controls so that businesses can only hire white males here in the United States and nobody else. If that means building border walls to trap people and capital into the United States, so be it! It’s time for a Berlin Wall of North America. Keep in mind that if we trap capital in, we trap people in. Try leaving the country without your capital!

If you are in business and somebody is selling the same product or service you are, but at a cheaper price, in the old days this would be settled with baseball bats. Now price fixing is so much better. We can just use government – militaries and police forces – to harass and imprison and maybe even kill our competitors! People even cheer on the price fixing schemes! At the very least, we can use government run healthcare to diagnose free market advocates who support a smooth functioning price mechanism as mentally ill. My favorite Chinese buffet is low priced compared to other restaurants, which just isn’t fair. All the more reason we need Donald Trump.

I really like Donald Trump’s waterboarding plan. That could create a lot of jobs at the Central Intelligence Agency. I myself would be very interested in one of those positions as an Enhanced Interrogation Specialist. When I was in the Marine Corps, I was brainwashed into believing torture is contrary to the law of war. But I am overcoming that brainwashing. We all know an accusation is tantamount to guilt and, just like Donald Trump, politicians get everything right and there could never be any mistakes. How can anybody claim waterboarding is bad without trying it on somebody once or twice? Only terrorists would disagree with Donald Trump’s waterboarding plan. It’s about time they be waterboarded.

I really appreciate the way Donald Trump wants to execute Edward Snowden. Only traitors would try to expose government wrongdoing. What would we do without the NSA protecting us? I mean we could end up with political figures openly plotting to implement torture programs becoming POTUS or something! I say we waterboard Edward Snowden before executing him. And what an awesome idea that is to wall off a torturing police state!

One thing that really pisses me off about China is the way the PBC has been devaluing the renminbi in order to cheat on trade. Everybody knows low prices are bad for the economy and devaluing the currency is the way to boost exports. It’s not like if China tightened that would create even more lopsided arbitrage opportunities and precipitate capital outflow at an accelerated pace due to loose monetary policy by the Fed. People just stop shopping completely if prices are too low. Donald Trump is so right on economics. Now he needs to call on the Fed to devalue the dollar by increasing the money supply a good four or five fold. Pour on the inflation so that we can take those jobs back from China! What’s really killing our economy is trade with China. China is killing us. Damn China for buying our dollars. We need to erect trade barriers so that American consumers can’t buy anything from other countries like China in juxtaposition with the Fed staying loose. Keeping the Fed parked in neutral in juxtaposition with implementing a protectionist package is such a great idea!

Of course, I write in jest to demonstrate the absurdity of Donald Trump’s platform. For some great rebuttals of Trump’s fallacies, I will be posting some links right here in the near future.

A prediction on police body cameras

As if there’s no problem that can’t be fixed with a government program and money, President Obama is requesting funds to equip police officers with body cameras in order to curtail police brutality. If politicians in Washington told us they needed to fund a government program to make certain the sun rises in the morning, you could take it to the bank the sun will stop rising in the morning.

One reason I am opposed to President Obama’s idea is because the Constitution doesn’t permit the federal government to exert this kind of control over local LEOs. Even if funded and initiated entirely at the local level, I would disagree with the government usurping the role of private citizens.

Historically, government has been incapable of holding itself accountable. The video of Eric Garner’s murder demonstrates the inadequacy of cameras as a means to achieve accountability. Body cameras are not the end-all solution to a morality problem and could engender a false sense of security for the citizenry. I’m all for private citizens having the right to record police, and it’s they who need to hold government accountable. I also support the right of individual police officers to record themselves in order to defend against spurious accusations. But a government camera will hold police accountable to the government, not the people.

If the government’s track record is any indication, body cameras could worsen the problem of police brutality. To believe that body cameras, imposed on officers by a flawed system, will morph bad police officers into good ones rather than good ones into bad ones requires a certain amount of naivete.

Consider the case of Eric Garner. His murder was captured on video – the evidence is about as empirical as it can get. The murderer will not be held accountable. Contrast that case with the case of former police chief Willie Lovett. See: Supporting the police who enforce Sheldon Adelson’s racket. For doing the right thing, Lovett is going to jail.[1] The trend is not for the government to administer justice but to drive up its cost (i.e. drive up the cost of a “bribe” or protection). My rule is to look for the means to further that trend in every political plan.

How will body cameras impact officer discretion? Suppose an officer wants to be courteous by not enforcing an unjust statute – say, letting somebody off with a warning – will that officer be unable to deviate from policy? I believe it will be less likely that body cameras will be used to curtail brutality than to enforce compliance with prevailing policies, which will compel the use of unnecessary force.

I see the proposal for body cameras as the new front line in the battle for our civil liberties. If the plan for police officers proceeds, this will be merely the first step of an Orwellian scheme on steroids. Here’s my prediction: The program, if implemented, will only metastasize. Why not compel everybody to wear cameras? If people have nothing to hide, then why not? If we can place body cameras on police officers, why can’t we “help” veterans by compelling VA employees to wear them? (I would be opposed to such a scheme.) Why not compel all government employees to wear body cameras to ensure they are properly executing their duties? We will then have one huge government full of employees being held accountable by the government.

But then what do I know? Pursuant to the VA, everything I wrote above would no doubt be charted as the manifestation of extreme delusional thinking. Perhaps I can overcome this “delusional” thinking by getting with the program and calling for cameras on all government employees (jestingly). And then the government will be able to ensure VA employees comply with prescribing dangerous psychiatric drugs to veterans for having impermissible beliefs (e.g. believing the profit and loss test on the free market is the best way to ensure accountability to consumers).

[1] – Lovett’s “crime” (he had no victims) was functioning as a de facto tax collector independent of the regime, while Garner’s assailants were functioning as de jure tax collectors on behalf of the regime. From these two cases, one might conclude that violating policy to protect liberty without inflicting injury upon anybody is a greater “crime” than is needlessly taking a life if done in service to the state.

Supporting the police who enforce Sheldon Adelson’s racket

Recently, Senator Harry Reid criticized the Koch brothers for being motivated by the pursuit of wealth while defending his nexus with the billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Senator Reid’s apologia of Sheldon Adelson is that Adelson is not motivated by the pursuit of wealth. Adelson doesn’t seek money. Money seeks Adelson. See: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/harry-reid-don-t-pick-on-sheldon-adelson

Let’s start with this axiom: there’s a distinction between what’s illegal and what’s criminal. In other words, just because something is illegal pursuant to statutory law doesn’t make it a criminal act. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it lawful or moral. In many instances, enforcing a statute is itself a criminal act. When the government does whatever it wants, that’s called lawlessness.

Gambling is not a criminal activity. If it were, then Sheldon Adelson has a lot of explaining to do. If something is a criminal activity, it shouldn’t be legal under any circumstances. The government ought not selectively grant permission to people to rape one another through a licensing scheme.

I’m not saying gambling is a good thing to engage in, but it shouldn’t be illegal. Gambling is legal in Nevada and on Indian reservations. Apparently, the former police chief of Savannah-Chatham, Georgia, agrees with me that it would be immoral to enforce anti-gambling statutes. For that, he is now being prosecuted. See: https://www.augustachronicle.com/story/news/2014/06/05/feds-indict-ex-savannah-police-chief/14409477007/

Former Savannah-Chatham Metro police chief Willie Lovett is being prosecuted for having taken payoffs from an “illegal” (i.e. non-government-accredited) gambling enterprise to not enforce anti-gambling statutes. He received money in exchange for protecting the enterprise from the LEO that he ran. Repealing anti-gambling statutes would remove the demand for the protection services sold by the former police chief.

Let’s establish another axiom: as Murray Rothbard saliently articulated, bribery isn’t inherently wrong. When an employer pays an employee to work, that employer is bribing the employee. If somebody pays a neighbor to mow their yard, that person is bribing the neighbor to mow their yard. If somebody pays somebody to murder somebody, that’s totally immoral and criminal and needs to be stopped. The consequential issue is not that a person paid somebody to do something. The consequential issue is what the person paid to have done.

In the case of Willie Lovett, his “transgression” was in not enforcing anti-gambling statutes. From a moral point of view, it would be wrong to jail people who voluntarily engage in a victimless activity. Unless somebody was forced to gamble against their will, it makes no sense to call gambling a crime. From an economic point of view, shutting down the gambling enterprise would not be in the interest of the local government. Instead, it would make more economic sense for the local government to leave the enterprise intact and collect taxes – kind of like what the former police chief was doing. Objectively, the former police chief is being prosecuted for behaving like a tax collector rather than a kidnapper.

Prosecuting Willie Lovett for doing the right thing by not enforcing unjust statutes against gambling makes sense only from the point of view of Nevada casinos. Objectively, Nevada casinos benefit by having the federal government wage a war on gambling in other jurisdictions. The real racketeering is the prosecution of Lovett, suppressing competition for casinos in other parts of the country.

Pursuant to Sheldon Adelson, statutes against online gambling have nothing to do with his own economic interests. Instead, online gambling exploits vulnerable people. To prevent that exploitation, people should travel to Las Vegas and visit one of his casinos. See: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-adv-adelson-online-gambling-20140521-story.html#page=1

But then Adelson does say that he’s in favor of gambling. It’s just that online gambling he’s against. Then perhaps Adelson can use his political pull to help repeal anti-gambling statutes in Savannah-Chatham and then cover the legal defense of the former police chief. Or does he only support the police who enforce his racket?

The Borders Are Closing In

Slavery consists of being “subject to the incessant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man.”

~ John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government

When an officer tells you to come inside and sit down, you come inside and sit down…. When an officer tells you to do something, you do it …. There is no “why” here.

~ U.S. Border Guard to a befuddled Canadian citizen arbitrarily detained while trying to visit a shopping mall in Niagara Falls, New York.

Returning to his home in Toronto following a brief visit to the States last December, author Peter Watts had the misfortune of being “randomly selected” for a search by members of the Regime’s Border Guards Directorate stationed at the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, Michigan.

The science fiction novelist’s bad luck was exacerbated by a momentary miscommunication: He saw a “flicker of motion” outside his car that he assumed was a wave, rather than a demand to pull over. His passenger understood what was happening, and urged Watts to pull over — which he did.

“When I go like this, I’m not waving hello,” sneered the border guard, assuming the snarky tone of unmerited superiority that armed functionaries use when addressing Mundanes.

“I guess we’re not in Canada, because sometimes that means ‘hello,’” Watts replied, thereby committing a potentially fatal offense called “contempt of cop.”

He compounded that supposed sin by getting out of the car and asking what the guards were doing as they pawed through the luggage in his trunk and the bags in his back seat.

As a citizen of the freest country (by default) in North America, Watts made the critical error of assuming that he had the right to ask why his privacy was being invaded, and that his question would be answered. His question was answered with repeated demands that he get back in his car.

After Watts hesitated, one of the guards seized his arm. This provoked a predictable “flinch response” from Watts, who pulled his arm away.

For reasons that make perfect sense to those attuned with Kafka’s sense of reality, American law enforcement officers often construe the act of pulling away from their unwanted physical contact as a form of “assault” — and thus as a pretext for the summary administration of “street justice.”

First two, and then eventually three, of the stalwart guardians of our sacred northern frontier took turns pummeling the slender, mild-mannered 52-year-old man. Watts was punched, kicked, pepper-sprayed, handcuffed, then thrown wet and partially disrobed into an unheated cell. He was then interrogated, held overnight, and charged with “assaulting a federal officer” after being denied access to legal counsel (and pestered repeatedly to repudiate his Miranda rights).

After Watts’ computer, flash drives, and loose-leaf notebook were confiscated, he was unceremoniously dumped — in shirtsleeves, without so much as a windbreaker — on the Canadian side of the border.

Ironically, in his novel Maelstrom, Watts — a Hugo nominee who specializes in dystopian fiction — appears to have anticipated his experience. Describing the abuse suffered by a character at the hands of customs officials, Watts observes: “Technically, of course, it was not an assault. Both aggressors wore uniforms and badges conferring the legal right to beat whomever they chose.”

A jury of dutiful collectivist drones found Watts guilty of the supposed crime of “non-compliance with a border guard”; his “crime,” reduced to its essence, was to ask, “why?”

Although Watts could have been forced to spend years as part the world’s largest prison population, the presiding judge was content to pilfer $1,628 from the victim of the assault at the border — after treating him to a patronizing lecture about the need to be “nice” to the feral armed adolescents who constitute the State’s punitive caste.

Watts’ experience leaves a decidedly totalitarian aftertaste. Crossing the border of a totalitarian state u2014 in either direction u2014 is an experience fraught with visceral anxiety. Finding himself in the unwanted company of humorless, heavily armed goons of questionable competence and dubious intelligence, the traveler is vividly aware that he can be arrested, imprisoned, beaten, or even shot at whim.

The best thing to do in such circumstances, travelers are told, is to assume a posture of utter servility, meekly and quietly enduring whatever indignity inflicted on them until they are safely through the checkpoint. In coming years, it most likely won’t be necessary to visit the border in order to have a sample of what Watts endured; experiences similar to his will become increasingly commonplace for citizens and other residing legally within the United States.

Is it easier to build a police state from the inside out, or from the outside in? We may never know, since the architects of the Homeland Security State are doing both simultaneously.

Whenever a society descends into totalitarianism, the ruling clique will eventually close the borders — not just to prevent contamination by politically troublesome foreign influences, but also to prevent the egress of refugees and (most importantly) the flight of capital to more congenial economic environments.

In our case, the invasive and arbitrary powers exercised in the name of border security are becoming embedded in routine law enforcement within the interior. Although the geography of the contiguous 48 states remains unchanged, there is a very real sense in which the borders are closing in on us.

The Border Patrol — the kind folks who treated Mr. Watts to a dose of uniquely Amerikan hospitality — already carries out warrantless, suspicionless checkpoints as far as 100 miles inside the national boundary. The Department of Homeland Security insists that the Fourth Amendment proscription of “unreasonable searches and seizures” doesn’t apply to “border enforcement” searches. This would mean that the two-thirds of the U.S. population living within 100 miles of an international border are residents of a “Constitution-Free Zone.”

Tragically, the expansion of the immigration control “Constitution-Free Zone” is being propelled by some of the most outspoken critics of “big government.”

Last week, many (by no means all) adherents of the Tea Party movement briefly suspended their campaign against invasive government to promote and applaud the enactment of a measure turning Arizona into an authentic police state — that is, one in which police can demand identity papers from practically anyone and arrest those who don’t comply.

Under SB 1070, signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer on April 24, any “lawful contact” between a law enforcement officer and a citizen can end with the latter being arrested and detained if he cannot satisfy a “reasonable suspicion” that he is in the country without official permission.

An incident that occurred two days before that law was signed by Brewer demonstrates that a valid driver’s license may not be sufficient to allay that suspicion, and that it’s entirely possible for a native-born U.S. citizen who fully cooperates with the police to end up being handcuffed, arrested, detained and humiliated.

On April 22, an Arizona resident who identifies himself as Abdon (he hasn’t chosen to disclose his surname) pulled his truck into a weigh station. As his vehicle was being inspected, Abdon was asked by an official to display proof of legal residency. He promptly handed over a valid Arizona commercial driving license; he also supplied his Social Security number and additional personal details.

For some reason this was considered insufficient, and Abdon ended up being cuffed and hauled away to an ICE detention facility while his wife — who was dragged out of work — was dispatched to their home to retrieve Abdon’s birth certificate and other documents.

The unfortunate truck driver’s birth certificate listed his birthplace as Fresno, California. This means that he — unlike one, or possibly both, major party candidates in the last presidential election — has an unassailable claim to being a “native-born United States citizen.” He had complied with every demand made of him at the weigh station, and did nothing to suggest that he harbored criminal intent of any kind.

The only source of the “reasonable suspicion” that led to Abdon’s arrest was his visible ethnicity. This is the standard under which American citizens (particularly, but not exclusively, of Latino ancestry) can now be harassed, arrested, and detained in the State of Arizona.

The more frequently this kind of thing happens, the likelier it becomes that innocent people will be seriously hurt — as if being accosted, questioned, and detained by armed strangers for reasons beyond one’s control weren’t sufficient injury.

SB 1070 has been the equivalent of a public works project for the “tolerance” industry, which is busy planning boycotts and other expressions of punitive sanctimony against Arizona. This had the predictable, albeit unfortunate, effect of leading at least some honorable people of goodwill to assume the best about the measure without examining its impact on individual liberty.

Every invasion of individual rights happens with the eager support of people acting in the sincere and thoroughly mistaken confidence that what they permit the state to do to others will never be done to them.

The seminal error is to insist on exceptions to the principle that government — assuming, of course, that one should be permitted to exist — must be strictly limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of every individual.

When that error is coupled with a fertile topic of public concern — such as terrorism, drug addiction, child abuse, or illegal immigration — politics becomes pregnant with large-scale abuses of individual rights.

Supporters of the Arizona immigration law define the controversy as an issue of “sovereignty” — preservation of Arizona’s reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment and the national independence of the United States. Political sovereignty, valuable as it is, must be regarded as a “good of second intent” — something that, while of great worth, is derivative of, or subordinate to, a much greater good. The paramount political good, according to America’s founding premise, is individual liberty protected by law.

In dealing with immigration, as with all other matters of public concern, government’s only legitimate role is to protect individual rights against criminal aggression — such as crimes of violence, fraud, or trespassing on private property.

Current policy, however, is to abet and reward aggression in the form of participatory plunder by illegal immigrants by way of welfare subsidies, which obviously have to be abolished (and not just for immigrants, but for everyone — beginning with the corporate welfare whores on Wall Street and in the military-industrial-homeland security complex).

Enactment of Arizona’s “your papers, please” legislation — which, Judge Andrew Napolitano predicts, won’t survive constitutional scrutiny — comes at a time when the problem of illegal immigration is in remission, both in that border state and nation-wide. It’s entirely likely that with immigration beginning to taper off, the border enforcement apparatus being built today will increasingly be directed inward.

As the government consummates its transformation into an undisguised corporatist kleptocracy, many Americans seeking to preserve some portion of what they have earned and saved will be driven to expatriate themselves.

The Regime already treats Americans living abroad as tax slaves, irrespective of their current place of residence. Economist Doug Casey warns that currency export controls are all but inevitable — indeed, in a small but significant way, they are already a tangible reality.

Many of Obama’s conservative critics simultaneously condemn him for building an invasive collectivist state and for his inadequate zeal in closing down the border. If their perception of Obama’s intentions is sound, those critics had better hope and pray that he doesn’t reverse course and become a border control zealot.

California’s broken justice system

A few days ago, I was watching a true crime story on Investigation Discovery about two serial killers named Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris. The duo was responsible for such horrific crimes that I was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point that I couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night. It is hard to describe the feelings I experienced while watching the re-enactments. I wanted so badly to be able to change the past and save the victims by talking aloud to the television, trying to tell the victims not to get into the van.

Both Bittaker and Norris had long rap sheets. They met in prison, only to be released to go on their killing spree in 1979. It seems to me that there was enough evidence to sentence both Bittaker and Norris to death. Bittaker was sentenced to death almost 30 years ago. Unfortunately, the prosecutors exchanged a much lesser sentence for Norris’ testimonty against Bittaker. Norris is eligible for parole beginning 2010. To my shocked disbelief, Bittaker is still awaiting execution at San Quentin 30 years later!

So here is my proposal to Governor Schwarzenegger and the State of California: stop collecting death row inmates. Execute them. That Bittaker could die of natural causes defies both common sense and justice.

From watching some of these true crime stories, a frequent common denominator is drugs – both recreational and psychiatric. This would make sense, since drugs dull emotions, thus dulling the conscience. There are some things that people should get angry over, e.g., if a loved one is harmed by somebody like a Bittaker or a Norris. There are some things that people should feel sorrow over, e.g., if a loved one dies. There are some things that people should feel guilt and remorse for, e.g., bad behavior. Without emotions, one can’t empathize. Emotions play an important role in governing the conscience. Dulling emotions dulls the conscience, and thus engenders irrational behavior. Both recreational drugs and psychiatric drugs subdue emotions, i.e., subdue the conscience. That some people can’t control their emotions is undeniably true. But psychiatric drugs and people with homicidal tendencies don’t mix. It is a calculus for disaster.

Something else is usually involved in these cases, which is also a part of the broken justice system: so-called psychiatric diagnoses and “treatment” for bad and evil behavior. Doctors morph evil behavior into diseases. I’m sorry, but evil behavior is not a disease. The “remedy” is then to drug the criminal with psychiatric drugs, i.e., dulling the conscience. Norris, a serial rapist prior to his release from prison, would have been better “treated” with castration way back in 1975, rather than treated as a “patient” with a “disease.”

I propose that the criminal justice system be reformed by separating itself from psychiatry. The state of California could save money by firing psychiatrists who prescribe crime-inducing drugs, and then hiring surgeons to castrate people like Norris instead.