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The Enemy Within
by Bob Wallace
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Countries rarely fall from attacks from without. Almost all have fallen by attacks from within, specifically, the growth of the State.

I make the distinction between government and the State. Government is based on real law, i.e. true law. The State, on the other hand, is based on nothing but false law. In fact, that's my definition of the State: it's always based on false law.

True law is discoverable, just as the laws of physics and chemistry are discoverable. False law are "laws" the State just makes up. They never work; they always have the opposite effects, such as the "War on Drugs."

The free market and political liberty are true laws, because they work and allow people to flourish. Socialism is a false law, because it never works and can only be imposed by the State. Communism is such a false law it has never existed, contrary to the hallucinations of the paranoid who, among other things, got us into Vietnam.

The only purpose of government is to protect your life, your liberty and your property. That's it. I like the formulations of Richard Maybury: "Do all that you have agreed to do" and "Do not encroach on other people or their property." The first is the basis of tort law and the second of criminal law.

The belief that political and economic laws are discovered, not created, puts me in the Natural Law camp.

One of those discoverable, natural laws is that the growth of the State always damages everything it touches: people, families, neighborhoods, education. And once the State gets big enough, it always collapses.

The growth of the State and its damaging everything it touches until it collapses it what I mean by "the enemy within."

I have never much been concerned about Al Qaeda. Yes, they are the enemies of the United States, but they are weak. They have no navy, no army, no air force. They aren't the Wehrmacht (as a late friend of mine told me about his participating in the Battle of the Bulge: "You ain't never fought nobody until you fought Germans").

On the other hand, what I am concerned about - and predicted, as did many other people - is the growth of the State in response to the attacks against us. In some ways it's amazing: someone weak attacks us from without, and in response the enemy within gets stronger! The analogy I use is imagining a three-pound Yorkie biting a 250-pound Bull Mastiff one time and the Mastiff bites itself until it collapses and dies.

I believe the State part of the U.S. has gotten so big it's going to collapse. Fortunately, the country itself won't. That's the one good thing about what's coming.

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