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Stack and Drega
by Jim Davidson
jim@vertoro.com

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

"It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the political offender to act."
—Emma Goldman

This past week, a man named Joe Stack took off in a private aeroplane and flew it into an IRS building. He set fire to the building, died on impact, probably killed one person, and injured thirteen others.

Before he left home, he posted a note to his business web site recounting the long and painful battles he had fought not only with the IRS, but with the system of government that Alexander Hamilton designed to benefit the affluent. Because Stack points out in his manifesto that he sees the cronyism and the huge bailouts for banking gangsters, and because he mocks state-based capitalism with a quote derived from the Communist Manifesto, he's been called a communist.

I never met the man. Maybe he was a communist. I never encountered him in his youth, so maybe Stefan Molyneux's detailed insight into Stack's brain is accurate. And I don't care.

The Internal Revenue Service is evil, and the men and women who work there are individually and severally evil. They believe that because they wear fancy hats and carry important badges of office that they are empowered to rape, murder, steal, and brutalise with impunity. I believe that they are men and women behaving badly, and that no badge of office gives them any authority to do what is wrong for anyone to do.

Joe Stack's response to being bullied and brow-beaten, coerced and hounded, for decades, was to lash out in anger. No, what he did was not rational. No, it was not very sensible. And, no, it didn't bring about an end to the IRS.

Indeed, it is likely to be regarded by statist authoritarians as an excuse to pile more brutality, give more authority, and buy more shotguns for the IRS. But the reaction of statists is not especially interesting to me. The reaction from anti-statists has been generally poor.

For it is criminal to preach non-violence to a man who has been the victim of repeated brutality. It is idiotic to suppose that you can attack, torture, rape, murder, and brow-beat people and never get a response.

When Laozi wrote that the person who advises a leader in following the path should teach her not to conquer the world with force, for force generates resistance, and the resistance grows until it overwhelms and comes back against the user of force, was talking about exactly this sort of thing. If you drive people mad with anger, who is to blame for their angry acts of desperation?

The person who acts is to blame, of course. And in opposing aggression by the IRS with defensive and retaliatory force, Joe Stack acted in accord with the zero aggression principle. It is not wise to anger people by bailing out the rich and leaving the poor to wallow in filth. For people are not entirely rational, and they do lash out, and they are already angry.

No, there were no innocent men and women in that building. They are all brutal thugs for the warfare and welfare state. They are all violent and vicious, eager to hold a gun against the head of the productive to seize wealth for the sake of the parasitical. They all take stolen money in every paycheck.

No, Stack is not someone to emulate. As with Carl Drega before him, and many other men driven to acts of violence and desperation, what Stack did was done poorly. He should have stolen a bigger plane, just as Drega should have used a weapon with a larger calibre bullet. He should have not given any advanced warning, but left a note with a publicist, and he certainly shouldn't have set fire to his own home (if he did).

I suspect that because of the note, the witness Megan Riley who saw the Hazmat trucks parked less than a mile away shortly before the plane crash were there because some intrepid Heimatland sicherheitsdienst (Homeland Security Department or Gestapo to you and me) person found that note and pushed the panic button. The "false flag" goombas are all over this sequence of events, of course. They also wonder why Megan and her friend didn't see a pilot in a plane slewing left and about 50 feet off the ground.

Yes, Stack is correct, the system of coercion and brutality goes on and on and on. It does not treat people right. It beats them, it hurts them, it hates them. Those in police uniform beat and murder and rape and they lie for each other, even to the point of going on the witness stand and testi-lying. That's their word for it. They testi-lie and more people die. Because the police are not your friend, they are evil, they are enforcers of unjust laws, they are the enemy of freedom, and they revel in their power, their authority, and their brutality. They share little prizes like the Denver police shirts "we get up early to beat the protesters." They amuse themselves like Nazi concentration camp guards by getting a line of prisoners set up and shooting one in the mouth to see how many can be felled with a single bullet, and call that "efficiency."

Anyone who thinks Joe Stack is a hero needs to get a better grip on reality. Anyone who thinks Stack was an aberration needs to take a long hard look at the police state. And anyone who is still filing a W-4 and having payroll and income taxes withheld is cooperating with a system of violence and brutality. Voluntary servitude has consequences.

Yes, there are crazy people in the world. So taunting them and attacking them and brutalising them isn't very bright. The IRS was called on the carpet in 1998 for these kinds of actions, and they have never changed. They won't change, because they are hateful, evil, violent, vicious scum.

When mankind are ready for it, they will not suffer under such a pretence of government.

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, and anti-war activist. His 1990 venture to offer a sweepstakes trip into space was destroyed by government action as was his free port and prospective space port in Somalia in 2001. His 2002-2007 venture in free market money and private stock exchange was destroyed by government action in 2007. He's going to Mars if he has to walk. His second book, Being Sovereign is now availble from Lulu and is expected within a few weeks to be available at Amazon. His third book Sovereign Self-Defense will be released for Kindle next week. His fourth book Being Libertarian will be available for free download as a .pdf, being a compilation of all his essays and letters in "The Libertarian Enterprise" since 1995. Contact him at indomitus.net or houstonspacesociety.org.