Eric Holder Says Gun Owners Should “Cower” in Shame Like Smokers

Firearms, Nanny Statism, Police Statism
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The Attorney General’s exact words:

What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes. You know, when I was growing up, people smoked all the time. Both my parents did. But over time, we changed the way that people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don’t want to admit it.

Cower in Fear
You’ve been a bad, bad… citizen.

Cower — interesting choice of words that. Cower is a word more associated with fear than shame in my mind. One cowers in fear. One blushes or hides out of shame.1

It’s a natural inclination in those with a love of power to want to see those beneath them cower. Our proper posture when faced with the disapproval of our betters is on bended knee, shoulders trembling, head bowed in anxious deference.

It’s also interesting that Holder suggests smokers “cower” outside of buildings, doing their nasty deed in private, on their own initiative. Silly me, I thought it was because government regulations and corporate policies require them to smoke only in designated areas outside. I doubt most such smokers feel any shame in the act, though they may huddle in winter.

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  1. I suppose one can cower in shame as well, though surely not without some fear mixed in. ↩

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Kinsella on Anarchast Discussing IP, Anarcho-libertarianism, and Legislation vs. Private Law

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, IP Law, Legal System, Libertarian Theory, Podcasts, Police Statism
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I was a guest on Jeff Berwick’s Anarchast (ep. 51, 36 min), released today. We discussed anarchy and how such a society might be reached; the basis and origin of law and property rights and its relationship to libertarian principles, and implications for legislation versus law and the legitimacy of intellectual property; also, utilitarianism, legal positivism, scientism, and logical positivism. Description from the Anarchist site below; MP3 download. For more background on IP, see the C4SIF Resources page; on legislation vs. private law, see The (State’s) Corruption of (Private) Law.

 

Anarchast Ep. 51 with Stephan Kinsella

Jeff Berwick in Acapulco, Mexico, talks with Stephan Kinsella in Houston, Texas

Topics include: …

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A Response to 2nd Amendment Repealers and Other Gun-Control Nuts

Firearms, Nanny Statism, Police Statism
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[Originally published as a comment in response to someone who announced publicly on Google+ that he sincerely believed that, as radical as it may sound, part of the Bill of Rights should be repealed. The post below isn’t a complete case against ignorant, opportunistic statists with an irrational fear of guns, but it highlights a number of inconvenient facts and devastating arguments for their position.]

Obama the Mass-Murderer-in-Chief makes light of shooting people.
Obama the Mass-Murderer-in-Chief
makes light of shooting people.

The idea of repealing the 2nd Amendment is not that radical really. It’s just further down the road this country is already on — toward a full-on police-surveillance state. What’s truly radical these days is any defense of liberty and property.

You know that gun control has a racist history in America, right? And that it disproportionately harms women, minorities (particularly blacks), and the poor? Gun control doesn’t work. It just disarms potential crime victims.

Gun control laws were used to make blacks less dangerous, more vulnerable targets of (racially motivated) police abuse and private crime. Even now they are used to incarcerate blacks who haven’t committed any real crimes. Lacking evidence for anything else, the state puts them away on weapons charges (and/or drug charges, but the Drug War’s another unjust racist policy we don’t need to get into).

Women use guns to defend themselves from would-be rapists, domestic abusers, and the like. Guns are an equalizer, giving them a way to protect themselves from bigger, stronger men. You would deny them this? Police protection is a joke; they usually don’t arrive in time.

As I mentioned above, gun control doesn’t work, especially in America. There are already so many guns in private hands here that any new restrictions or bans will have no appreciable effect. Any politically feasible new laws will not involve confiscating these existing guns and will not ban private secondhand sales. Criminals are not wont to respect “gun free zones” and other gun laws in any case. They’ll just purchase their guns on the black market or steal them (as Adam Lanza did).

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Top State Evils: A Scorecard of Libertarian Progress

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, IP Law, Police Statism, War
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The most evil and harmful state laws, institutions, and policies are, I believe:

  • war;
  • the Fed/central banking/fiat money;
  • government schools;
  • taxation;
  • the drug war;
  • intellectual property (patent and copyright).1
You could also mention the regulatory state and the entitlement state, but the above makes a pretty good listing of the top things we libertarians would get rid of if we could.

How are we doing on these issues? I spoke with some radical libertarian friends—it’s fun musing as to which one you would abolish first, if you could—and here is the basic take:

  • war: not great, but they are getting harder for modern debt-laden welfare-states to afford;
  • the Fed/central banking/fiat money: not great, but bitcoin could pose a threat;
  • government schools: not great, but at least, in the US, homeschooling and private schools are legal;
  • taxation: not great, and getting worse, but there seems to be a limit to the level of taxes the state can get away with imposing on the economy;
  • the drug war: still horrible, but significant inroads have been made in the last election, with marijuana being legalized on a state-law basis by Washington and Colorado; and
  • intellectual property: getting more and more out of hand, but being seen as more and more ridiculous and unjust. Copyright is getting easier to evade with various technologies like encryption and bit torrent; and patents are being seen more and more as ridiculous and protectionist.

Overall, the biggest cause for hope is probably the recent progress made in the insane, evil war on drugs.

 

  1. See Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws? ↩

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Has Romney Been Reading Bastiat?

Anti-Statism, Corporatism, Democracy, Nanny Statism, Police Statism, Taxation, The Left, The Right
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“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” ~ Frederic Bastiat

No. Not even.

When Romney said “there are 47 percent who are with him [POTUS], who are dependent on government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe that government has the responsibility to care for them” he was roughly half right. Very. Roughly. What he left out is that the “other” 47 percent, those that are with him [Romney] are after the same thing. Admittedly, the number of people who are unrepentant tax feeders, to use Will Grigg’s apt description, is likely (hopefully?) lower than 94 percent. The naive, hopeful dreamer in me would peg it at probably closer to 65–75 percent.  Whatever the exact number is, the simple fact of the matter is that politics — particularly in the U.S., but abroad as well — is dominated by sociopaths with megalomaniacal tendencies who are often attended to and served by sycophants with dependency issues.

The other 25-35 percent and I just wish they’d all leave us the hell alone.

(Cross-Posted at LRCBlog.)

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