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L. Neil Smith's THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 266, April 11, 2004 Taxation is the Root of All Evil
Pure Poison
Exclusive to TLE Let me tell you about the kind of civilization you live in. It's something neither right wing socialists like Rush Limbaugh, nor left wing socialists like Al Franken, want you to know — which is why there have to be libertarians, who aren't any kind of socialist at all. Once upon a nightmare, vast legions of dessicated, self-loathing, tambourine-abusing, inorgasmic harridans — practicing a particularly constipated form of one of the cruelest, least-humane belief systems imaginable, devised originally by pathetically backward Neolithic sheepherders — hijacked American politics while their husbands were understandably seeking refuge elsewhere, murdering and being murdered by and for one kind of government or another, in a war fraudulently advertised as being fought to end war, or to make the world safe for democracy. What we really needed was something to make the world safe from democracy. But I digress. Naturally one of the first uses to which this newly-safe democracy was put, was to deny — to shattered veterans returning home from the horrors of trench warfare to the vastly greater horrors of a lifetime spent in wedlock to these hags — the pleasure of one of the simplest, most ancient, and beneficial remedies for this ultimate variety of hopelessness. Alcohol. For almost half a century, this common, easily-produced chemical — very popular during the Enlightenment and Revolutionary times, and man's best friend for 20,000 years or so — had been under attack by these genetic culls with their skulls full of worms, and the bible-thumping parasites who fed off their self-hatred, as the worst thing that had ever happened to humanity, a plague, a scourge responsible for each and every one of our poor long-suffering species' woes and shortcomings. Now, with the men safely out of the way, these creatures — whom H.L. Mencken described as waking in the middle of the night, trembling with the fear that somewhere, someone was happy — finally got their chance to do something about Demon Rum and all of the other demons, whiskey, tequila, schnapps, sake, Grand Marnier, and beer, as well. Since what they wanted was blatantly unconstitutional, they actually managed to amend that document to make something called the Volstead Act legal, and the U.S. Treasury Department went to work, destroying businesses large and small, wrecking people's lives, and obliterating pleasure. In the process, they also created bootleg liquor, bathtub gin, speakeasies, turf warfare, and drive-by shootings we've all come to love. One minor problem with outlawing alcohol was that, aside from its drinking properties, the stuff has other applications, in industry and the home. In those days, for example, it made for nifty little lamps that chemistry students and mad scientists could employ to boil their concoctions over. It's good for cleaning and degreasing things (as a gunsmith I always kept a bottle handy), and preparing one's arm for a shot. It makes brisk, refreshing back rubs possible when you have a fever. Obviously, something had to be done to prevent people from using alcohol in the way that nature (or at least Neolithic Man) originally intended. But what? An even better question is this: how many years, or decades, or centuries would it take you or me or any other decent individual to come up with the solution that popped into their twisted minds almost immediately? Their solution? They'd poison the alcohol folks bought to cool their sick kids' bodies, so that if they drank it, they'd go blind. They called it "denatured alcohol", and that's what should be on the Great Seal of the United States today, as a symbol and warning of what government is really all about: threatening people with injury or death if they fail to comply with the slightest whim of the mentally putrefying scumbags who run it. Today, the stuff is still poisoned, seven decades after Prohibition finally ended, to force you and me to pay religiously based discriminatory "sin" taxes on alcohol made for drinking. Remember that you heard it here first: taxation is the root of all evil. Those who think that advocating the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes may eventually lead to wider freedom, or who wonder how government can be so cruel as to deny this small comfort to those dying slowly from hideous diseases (and the therapies devised for them), need only look at denatured alcohol as a symbol of what they're fighting. Speaking of marijuana, it only seems natural — better make that "denatural" — that government would come up with a similarly slimy scheme to keep people from enjoying the vile weed. In this case, tons and tons of a poison with the lovely name "paraquat" were dumped out of airplanes (the same way Agent Orange was deployed in Vietnam) on marijuana crops in Central and South America, endangering the lives and health of farmers who had finally found a way to make a decent living. Is there any wonder that the world hates us? I can't recall whether any of this paraquat stuff made its way back to America to punish errant high school and college students, but I do remember one writer in particular (one hopes he'd be embarrassed at the suggestion today) who advocated intercepting shipments of other substances — cocaine, heroine — poisoning them thoroughly, and then reinserting them in the supply pipeline to "discourage" illegal drug use. I also don't know whether paraquat is still being used. What I do know is that policies like these are not just homicidally insane, they tell us everything we need to know about those who would control our lives "for our own good". They tell us we're being ruled by people who make Jim Jones — and the leaders of the cult who castrated themselves and then took poison to await the arrival of the Mother Ship — look rational. Now we can understand the officials who, faced with the threat of airline hijackings, would rather scramble military jet fighters and shoot the airliners down — killing hundreds of innocent people in a particularly violent and frightening way — than allow those same passengers to exercise their natural right to carry the means of self-defense. That's a kind of poison, just like denaturing alcohol or dropping paraquat. Now we can understand all those oh-so-kind, oh-so-humane advocates of victim disarmament who would rather see a woman raped in an alley, and strangled with her own pantyhose, than see her with a gun in her hand. That's a kind of poison, too. They're all crazy as bedbugs — it's as simple as that — with a craziness both murderous and evil. Our political system was designed or has evolved, one hopes inadvertently, to filter out any of the wise, principled, sane majority among us, and put the killer-crazies — individuals who would poison us to protect us — in power over us, instead. And that's what has to change if we are to survive, let alone be free.
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