Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

On July 4, 1776 William Henry Drayton, the first Chief Justice of the newly independent revolutionary State of South Carolina, spoke to the assembled Continental Army regiments in Charleston, South Carolina. He read the Declaration of Independence and spoke grand eloquently on the new Empire of Liberty, the United States of America. The Declaration had been signed two days earlier and dispatched from Philadelphia where the Continental Congress was in session, as it took two days to communicate by horse to all thirteen State capitols. In the previous decade America had undergone a revolution in which the Colonial regime had been expelled from the land. The Colonial Governors who had not fled outright were hiding out in ships. A British Army of occupation landed in Boston and was expelled but not defeated in battle after a siege featuring Britain’s first Pyric victory the bloody battle of Bunker Hill where the Massachusetts militia inflicted a horrifying price. George Washington had still retained control of the heights from where he threatened to bombard the British troops and fleet, but let them escape, with the rationale that in a war to protect property he did not feel justified in destroying the city of Boston. The British forces would return to New York and to Charleston. The War of Independence was on. Drayton distinguished himself before the invasion of Charleston by traveling among German settlers up State to the so called Dutch Fork area around the confluence of the Broad River and Bush River to promulgate a Treaty of Neutrality among the Germans, giving them assurance that their property would not be confiscated if they feared joining the cause of liberty but shunned the Crown. In spite of his monumental peace mission in the interior, Drayton was considered something of a loose cannon by the most powerful leaders in Charleston.

Drayton was a recent convert to the cause of Liberty. Having been an outspoken Loyalist, he suddenly changed sides as the colonial regime collapsed to become one of the most virulent rabble rousers. He was “promoted” to the Continental Congress and sent to Philadelphia with fellow wealthy planter, Henry Laurens, one of the original Liberty Boys. After the British occupied New York City, they invaded Pennsylvania. The Congress was forced to flee. On the road Drayton fell ill and died of fever, most likely Typhus. Laurens, who despised him, wrote home the cryptic comment that “Black Hat” had died of a putrid fever. It seems that Drayton stormed about dressed in what we might call a Von Helsing hat and black cape. Thus, ended the flamboyant but short carrier of a revolutionary warrior, but what exactly was his conception of the “Empire of Liberty”? Besides the speech, we can only speculate based on his classical education and standing in the community. He was most likely a Romanophile, like the rest of the Founding Fathers. There is clear evidence that he was anti-democratic, given his earlier protests against mob rule. If he had lived it is very likely that he would have evolved into a Federalist.

Ironically, Henry Lauren’s son John was best friends with Alexander Hamilton, who later became the most famous of the High Federalists, from when they were both aids de camp to General Washington. John was a true believer in the cause but died in the final days of the war in a meaningless cavalry skirmish near Georgetown, South Carolina. Henry had had his son transferred in order to get him away from any major battles after the British forces were driven from the interior of the State after the costly disasters at the Battle of Hobkirk Hill, the Battle of Cowpens, and the wipe out at the battle of Kings Mountain where the British were attempting to join forces with the Cherokee to wipe out the White settlers. The war was not merely a Revolutionary War. It was an Imperial struggle. It was a civil war. At Kings Mountain Major Ferguson’s regiments were Provincials, Tory traitors to the Patriots, and Hessian mercenaries. When the Trans Montaigne and South Carolina militia overran the position atop Kings Mountain, they began to lynch officers in revenge for atrocities against their families but were prevented by coolers heads. The prisoners were then sent on a kind of death march, considering the attrition rate, into the interior of North Carolina to meet up with the Continental Army to await future prisoner exchanges. The Empire of Liberty had defeated the most powerful empire history had ever seen, the same empire that subdued and enslaved India and near the end of its existence put the South African Boers and their African servants into death camps.

They fought for the Rights of Englishmen. That was the Liberty they conceived of. It was a national ethnic cultural conception. That was the Novis Ordo Seclorum they believed in. It had nothing to do with the Leftist Politically Correct cultural Marxism that is now destroying Western Civilization from within. They would have hung from the highest yard arm the later day spirit cooking Satanist cannibals who tried to impose their degeneracy on the globe in the election of 2016.

The Constitution of Liberty

The newly independent federation of states eventually adopted the Constitution of The United States to “secure the blessings of Liberty”, but what did they mean by this? The Rights of Englishmen were expanded to the rights of the citizens with the men of property in charge. The franchise was limited to white men with property in each of the original States, just as the first immigration law limited legal immigration to free Whites. German settlers along with Dutch, French, and Scandinavians composed a significant element of the population, not to mention the Scots and Irish. Specifically, the Constitution contained a limitation on the future import of slaves and the so called three fifths clause whereby for purposes of proportional representation and direct taxation the “all others”, which included mostly Africans and Amerindians, were to be counted as three fifths of a citizen.

During the Revolution in the several States certain artifacts of feudalism were eliminated, enslavement for debt and primogeniture. The Rights of Englishmen were enshrined in the Constitution by the explicit rule that the Common Law pre-1776 prevails in all cases not covered by new legislation. During the Revolution the inconsistency of the existence of hereditary slavery had first been noted in the original rough draft of The Declaration of Independence, but Jefferson’s condemnation of the slave trade was removed at the insistence of the South Carolina delegation. The issue re-emerged during the Constitutional convention debates. The dangers of slave revolt to the free population at large of importing unlimited numbers of African slaves were universally recognized. Several northern States had already initiated the process of the abolition of slavery. The consensus at the time of the adoption of the Constitution was obviously that hereditary chattel slavery was an unjust institution and that the unlimited importation of African slaves was a bad policy, so they placed a twenty-year expiration date on the practice, 1808. Up to that time even Virginia considered the likelihood of eventual abolition. President Madison was one of the founders of the American Colonization Society for resettling freed Blacks in Liberia, Africa as a humane way of physically removing people who were incompatible with American society.

A change in attitude toward the institution of slavery evolved in both the North and the South and came to a head during the Andrew Jackson administration. The westward expansion also resulted in the eventual elimination of property restrictions on voting. The rule of “one man one vote” supplanted the old of idea of rule by the propertied class who were the net tax payers. In the wild west almost all men were land owners, so the rule seemed obsolete. Andrew Jackson’s victory was due to the change. The average people resented the advantages the central bank gave to the rich and Jackson was able to eliminate the institution. In the South the westward expansion also resulted in the exodus of free whites from the Atlantic coast. South Carolina became a majority black state with slaves being the largest group. The Planter class ruled South Carolina with an iron grip, exempting themselves from property taxes for service in the legislature while smaller land owners simply abandoned their lands to move west. A similar process happened in other original southern States. Vice President Calhoun began to agitate against the policy of import tariffs first instituted under the Jefferson administration when the hated excise taxes were eliminated so that no American would ever have to encounter a Federal tax man. Calhoun condemned the protective tariffs which subsidized Northern industry at the expense of Southern importers and threatened Nullification. Jackson threatened to personally lead Federal troops to South Carolina and personally hang Calhoun for treason. A famous legislator commented that South Carolina was too small to survive as an independent republic yet too large to be an insane asylum so the threat subsided. While both Jackson and Calhoun were slave owning planters, a change swept over the South as the ruling elites attempted to double down on slavery.

Meanwhile, in the North a different cultural change began to evolve. The abolitionist movement doubled down on anti-slavery. However, it is a mistake to view the changes, especially in the North, purely in the context of a single issue. The North was subject to far greater European migration than the South, which stubbornly insisted on importing Africans. The European migrants were desired by the developing industrialists who needed cheap labor and by the promoters of westward expansion who needed warm bodies to fill the void of what Jefferson called The Great American Desert. The vast open spaces contained only a scattering of native primitives who were overwhelmed by European technology, firepower, man power, and ingenuity.

However, the most insidious change was the introduction of European ideologies, liberalism, socialism, and communism. The first alien ideology to act on the American psyche was liberal nationalism, via the French Revolution. Next American Universities became colonized by German Kantians and Hegelians, and other Prussian busybodies, supplanting the influence of John Locke and other early English thinkers. The new European ideologies infected the splintered Abolitionist movement as it evolved from Liberty Party, to Free Soil, to Republican. The first two incarnations recognized the legitimacy of the Southern complaint and supported free trade against the excesses of protectionism, but the Republican Party was captured by the remnant of the defunct Whigs, those business boosters who mimicked English Liberalism. The most extreme Abolitionists adopted a more egalitarian policy toward the slaves. A reading of John Brown’s manifesto reveals the extent to which the delusion had taken hold, calling for a violent revolution against the slaver owners by a coalition of poor Whites and slaves. In the face of the mass extermination of the white French planters in Haiti they maintained this insane policy of a racial coalition, to the consternation of all white Southerners. The horrors of the Civil War were a direct result of this alien liberal altruism. Much was written about how the Civil War was the first modern industrial war, with trains moving masses of troop, telegraphs, and even repeating rifles in the end, but it was also the first modern war in the ideological sphere.

The Nationalist Liberal Egalitarian Constitution

After the assassination of Lincoln, who is supposed to have intended to remove the newly freed African slaves back to Africa, the Radical Republicans, who were then controlled by radical abolitionist liberal egalitarians, instituted the punitive Reconstruction of the Southern States. They also used the opportunity presented by the fact that the unreconstructed States, which were legally designated to continue in a state of rebellion even after the war had concluded, to pass a series of Amendments to the Constitution. For the purposes of this essay, the Fourteenth Amendment is the most significant. Section 1 “All persons born in the United States … are citizens of the United States” and Section 4 “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law …shall not be questioned”.

Section 1 is the great transfer of equal citizenship to all those nonwhites who were previously under legal disability, as well as the underpinning of the concept of “anchor babies”. Section 4 asserts the unlimited power of the Federal Government to saddle us with public debt and has even been theoretically extended to so called entitlement programs such as Social Security because of the issue of Civil War pensions. In general, the Fourteenth is a transfer of power from the several States to the Federal government. While the question of citizenship is clearly a Federal power in the original Constitution, the Fourteenth obliterates all previous local distinctions. Just as the issue of Civil War pensions is stretched to include later give away programs, the power to limit who can legally immigrate is under attack by similar legal theories. Another implication given to this Amendment is that it makes the Federal Bill of Rights mandatory on the States, where before some were explicitly in reference to the Federal powers only. The same legal theorists who stretch the other clauses here extend to imply the effective destruction of the Tenth Amendment. Thus, the United States was converted from a federation of states with a limited national state to a national state of a token federation. While the Fourteenth Amendment still supports the concepts of due process of law in support of Life, Liberty, and Property, the intention of this benefit was eventually inverted to support the legal claims of fictional “legal persons”, State chartered corporations, against actual persons. The result was a great imbalance in favor of the old Whig program of a modernized kind of corporate mercantilism over the old interests of Jacksonian democracy, while Jacksonian democracy was turned on its head and redistributed to the penniless, illiterate nonwhite masses.

This untenable situation of forced racial political equality was somewhat reversed by the final ending of Reconstruction occupation government in the election of 1876. South Carolina was even able up until LBJ’s Great Society to mitigate the forced absolute democracy by imposing a minimal literacy requirement and a token $1 poll tax, sense it had not been explicitly outlawed. The “equal protection” clause in the Fourteenth was even softened by the legislative device of “separate but equal” which was allowed to stand until after WWII. The national republic was given a temporary reprieve from pure liberal egalitarianism.

The Alien Invasion of America

No, it was not men from Mars. It was alien ideology from Europe. In order to understand what happened to America, it is first necessary to understand what happened to Europe. America was not only a colony of Britain. It was and is a cultural colony of Europe, as a result of America’s early immigration policy. As we have seen, the first official immigration policy of the United States was restricted to White Europeans. The accepted meaning of White was all Europeans of the native European Caucasian ethnicities. Immigrants often arrived in groups who settled in the western territories as distinct communities and integrated slowly. Some arrived as adventurous individuals and families. Some arrived as refugees fleeing famine and war. The Irish were the first such significant mass migration. The Irish were like Americans, the victims of British oppression, in this case an economic political genocide. The Irish famine was politically engineered with the intent of starving out native Irish speakers and anyone else living outside of the British colonial-feudal structure. The available grain crops and domestic animals were forcefully exported to Britain while the Irish were left to subsist on their meager gardens. The potato famine was to a great extent a fiction promulgated by the British press. The majority of Americans were Protestant and had a tradition of antipathy toward the Roman Catholicism because of the historic conflicts of the Reformation and because of suspicion of the centralized nature of its organizational structure. They were seen as Papists. The Irish were still able to assimilate because the Catholic Church as an institution refrained from attempting to overturn the anti-establishment clause in the First Amendment.

The next major crisis in Europe was the Revolution of 1848. America had been impacted by the Napoleonic Wars and was drawn into the War of 1812, which featured British land invasions of the East and of the Gulf coast, but it only served to unite and not splinter the nation. That war even fed the nationalist expansionist fervor of westward expansion leading to the Mexican American War. The Revolutions of 1848 were an outgrowth of the ultraliberal French Revolution. The victorious allied powers had attempted to re-impose some semblance of the Old Order after Waterloo, but the pandora’s box had been opened. For the most part updated forms of liberal nationalism re-emerged in Western Europe, but there was something else, socialism and communism. The various kinds of socialism and communism were presented as revolts against the triumph of the middle class represented ostensibly by liberal nationalism. However, they were basically revolts against human nature, carrying the egalitarianism of the French Revolution to its ultimate extreme. We are most familiar with Marxism because of its later success, not at bringing about the promised Worker’s Paradise, but of the numerous colossal campaigns of mass extermination of all who disagree with that virulent violent ideology and because of the ultimate failure of the Soviet Revolution.

The German philosopher, Max Stirner, has given us an explanation of the European ideologies that existed just prior to 1848, an explanation not unsympathetic to the American Revolution. However, many people have mistaken his effort to explain the idea of individualism to educated philosophically sophisticated Europeans in his collection of essays, The Ego And Its Own, as some kind of anarchist tract. That is not the case, however. His intention was hypothetical, philosophical. Whatever his intentions, his work is still valid today as a vehicle for understanding European, and by extension, Europeanized (as opposed to the nativist ideology of the American Revolution) American political thought. This is not the place for a detailed history of the slow and creeping progress of Marxism in America, but only to explain what it is and how it evolved.

Karl Marx (Marxists have a history of using assumed names. Marx was an assumed name, as was Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. They did this to hid their true identities from Europeans who were what is now called, anti-Semitic, a term invented by Marxist Bolsheviks.) was a self-hating Jew. Originally, communism first appeared in Europe as the most extreme fanatical Protestant cults. In any cities consumed by these fanatics disaster always followed because the idea of existential equality is at odds with reality. Stirner and Marx were contemporaries. Needless to say, Marx hated Stirner’s guts, so doing the same is traditional among modern Marxists and neo-Marxists. Marx hated money. I mean he hated the concept of hard money, gold and silver, but he loved paper money and advocated for central banks, via the nationalizing of banks. The ideology of Marxism was pseudo-Hegelian (Hegel basically promoted a more sophisticated version of Platonic idealism) dialectic materialism, a steaming shit pile of pseudo-intellectual bunk, which is designed to justify previously forgone conclusions. Stirner, being in tune with the more rational Western tradition, was Aristotelian. Stirner explains that Christianity as a theological system was essentially Platonic. He only peripherally identifies Judaism as a more basic practical belief system without going into detail, only to show that it is different form Christian theology.

Marxist Dialectic Materialism is a type of deterministic materialist reductionism wrapped in pseudo-Hegelian jargon. Communism, as explained by Stirner, is a Platonic Ideal, a floating abstraction at odds with human nature, but justified by a suicidal altruist version of the morality of the New Testament. Marxist communism came into being during the Victorian era and Marx, after being driven out of France and Germany, settled in Victorian England with his other self-hating Jewish colleague, Engels. Marx advocated genocide of all pre-industrial peoples as incompatible with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and in addition to the elimination of all capitalists and property owners. Just as the Victorian British practiced genocide of the Irish, Marx advocated the further genocide of the Highland Scot and the Basque in his published propaganda. Just as the Victorians supported strict sexual morality, Marx called homosexuality a middle-class disease to be exterminated by the Revolution. The Soviets, to the bitter end, professed to be good family men and women. How did this Nineteenth Century Victorian utopian egalitarian communist political ideology devolve into modern liberal egalitarian neo-Marxism, or cultural Marxism, promoting every degenerate form of cultural relativism including transsexual insanity?

Here is where the complex story of Alien Invasion begins. Marxists being crazy, violent revolutionaries, were regularly expelled from Europe, and some came to the United States. For some reason many Jews who rejected religion became rabid Marxists. But there is a peculiar thing about being Jewish. It is a transnational ethnic group like a modern tribe, similar to but not the same as Gypsies. But while Gypsies are universally acknowledged to be low life grifters and drifters, the wandering Jew is renowned for higher education and business genius. That is because the Jews never adopted the anti-commercial ideals of the New Testament but remained the same over the centuries. Charging interest and making a profit was never against their religion. Evidently, living among Christians rubbed off on many Jews in the Nineteenth Century, but instead of converting they gravitated to a new secular political religion, Marxism. As previously mentioned, the Jews identify as an ethnic group or tribe. That is due to the fact that traditional Judaism is hereditary through the mother, an indisputable pedigree. As a cohesive, interrelated ethnic group, they tend to be clannish and hang together, with or without religious faith.

This might not be of major concern but for the fiendish nature of Bolshevik Marxism. Comrade Lenin was a propaganda wizard. He not only believed in the big lie but in practically every conceivable kind of lie. They even invented new names for lying, misinformation, disinformation, agitprop (agitation propaganda), but his crowning achievement was the discovery of “the useful idiot”. Lenin identified the Useful Idiot as the typical delusional suicidally altruistic Western democratic socialist or liberal sympathizer for the Bolshevik cause. Propaganda specifically designed to subvert, demoralize, or degrade the archetypical, in good Platonic tradition, Useful Idiot was put into mass production by the ideological social engineers of Scientific Socialism, the term the progressive communists like to use to describe their system. The KGB, the final iteration of killer secret police settled for under Stalin, Lenin’s successor, promulgated widely known instructions to all foreign operatives, which in essence formed the original basis of what all modern Useful Idiots think of as Political Correctness, itself another Soviet term for lying to oneself.

One might wonder what it is about the social psychology about being Jewish that lent itself to Bolshevism. Bolsheviks are essentially the Chosen People of the Communist Utopia, the chosen people, a people set apart and above the rest of humanity the philosopher kings of communism. They called it the Politburo. Much has been written about this subject of the Chosen People, but as a student of history, I like to rest my opinions on historical sources, Tacitus in this case. In his writings Tacitus explains the pre-Christian ruling class Roman view of both the Jews and early Christians, who were still a Jewish sect. He describes how the Jews struggled against first the Alexandrian Macedonian Greeks and then the Romans, who were not the first empires to confront this alien monotheist culture. To make a long story short, from the Roman perspective Jews and early Christians (this was before the Nicaean Creed) were the very definition of religious bigotry and overbearing moral superiority, something totally unacceptable in a subject people to a proud imperial power.

A more recent, modern, and relatively neutral view of the subject is, from all people, a reformed German Social Democrat, Alexander Rustow, in his great work, Freedom And Domination, where he explains the nature of the conflict between the Nazis and the Jews. They were incompatible, the Master Race and the Chosen People. As the perennial underdogs, the Chosen People gravitated toward Marxism. The thing they both had in common was social alienation. The Jews were alienated by perpetual subjugation and permanent defeat, which resulted in periodic upheavals (the bloody anti Roman revolts) where they thought they had found a savior. Marxists had their new savior. The Germans were alienated by the humiliating defeat in the First World War and they found their savior. The two opposing forces were incompatible, as both were motivated by implacable conceit, humiliation, and a desire for revenge, the essence of social alienation.

You might wonder how this conflict relates to America. The Soviet operatives had to find their Useful Idiots. In America they found an unlimited supply of gullible altruist egalitarian liberals and various socialist splinter groups. The Marxist Jews were not particularly unique in that respect. However, they were part of a basically un-integrated ethnic support group, the non-communist secular suicidal altruist liberal Jews susceptible, manipulatable by the Bolshevik, and just corruptible enough to be especially useful. Plus, they, the Jewish Useful Idiots, had control of the new mass entertainment industry, many financial institutions, and the news media. Leftist Jews thus became the ubiquitous leaders of PC Progressivism. It was a decades long process by which Americanized Jews were either coopted or marginalize, in the case where they were too conservative. Now a non-PC Jew is a rarity, a gem latched onto by desperate conservatives as tightly as a rare conservative Negro.

As an aside I have to admit that I have no idea how the original Jewish immigrants made it past the first United States immigration laws requiring only white Christians be allowed. I suppose that they were simply ignored and permitted to slip in. For example, the historic Confederate Jewish community in Charleston came in via the Brazilian slave trade from Brazil. They spoke Portuguese, as did their slaves. To this day the peculiar accent of Charlestonian Blacks is known as Geechee, short for Portuguese.

Let us bring the saga closer to the current year. The Soviet Union collapsed, disappeared totally, and the Russian people rejected Marxist socialism and communism, but that had no impact on the American Useful Idiots, except to alternately blame President Regan, while pretending that he had nothing to do with it. Such is the nature of being a PC Useful Idiot. The original proximate cause of the sickness might be gone, but the symptoms persist forever. Ironically, the original Soviet policy was far too successful to the extent that Russia is now under constant attack by the PC Progressive precisely because it is no longer Marxist. History is not a force, as the Marxist determinists want you to believe. It is a freak show, a killer clown from outer space world. The big question is, how do we survive this PC freakshow?

Then Came Trump

Trump surprisingly defeated the degenerate PC cabal piloted by a cadre of Satanic cannibals and their disgusting leader Hillary. This is great because it gives us a chance to think about what might be next. I mean besides the soft genocide of population replacement and economic collapse to a Third World level.

Several ideas have been floated. First, and most conventional and moderate, while being portrayed in Clown World as fiendishly authoritarian to the point of being Nazi like, is Make America Great Again. Trump has revealed what he actually intended by the slogan, and the process seems to be moving forward. However, there is a fatal flaw. Given the existing level of low IQ Third World migration, even if immigration is stopped and all illegals are deported, if permanent Third World residents replicate at the current rate and the current rate of White reproductive replacement continues or declines, which seems likely given the dis-genic ravages of affirmative action and other forms of the social promotion of degeneracy pushing welfare state, the MAGA process will collapse in some future election.

There are systemic obstacles to the return to any previous status quo, as I already explained, the Fourteenth Amendment. Given the fact that the repeal of Constitutional Amendments is out of the question for the foreseeable future some other adaptation is necessary. The title of this essay provides the first clue as to how I suggest we proceed. But, first I must define who I mean by “we”. We are America, the Americans, the real, actual original Americans, the patriots of the cause of liberty. I am in no way concerned here about the musings of fantasy totalitarians of any sort, LARPing for some imagined future. In my version of America’s future all totalitarians should be physically removed. To a totalitarian, I am sure this seems totalitarian, the irony of it all. The first phase of physical removal is removal from power. The next phase is disqualification or removal from the political process. For those totalitarians who are unable to accept that, they will be removed from United States jurisdiction. Those who react with force will be eliminated by force. That is the way politics works. As to those who are merely incompatible with modern virtuous civic life and modern technological society, the unalterably stupid, the lazy, and the degenerate, they will be socially demoted to a level barely above that of resident aliens, but disenfranchised, not on the basis of race per se, but on the basis of performance. Legally, I propose a constitutional meritocracy. If the proponents of race realism are correct, a true meritocracy will result in the domination of the country by people of European extraction provided immigration is controlled. Then we can proceed to constitutional reform.

Since our purpose here is to re-establish the Empire of Liberty version of a constitutional republic, everything must be done by means of the legitimate rule of law. That requires an initial electoral and legislative majority. Maybe MAGA is, as the PC fanatics fear, the entry point. What happens next is open to question. I foresee that the only way to restoration to a just society based on Life, Liberty, and Property mentioned in the Fourteenth, must include martial law at some point. There are several reasons for my conclusion. First, the violent reaction of the Left to removal from power is always to be expected. Violence, the initiation of force if you will, is integral to the nature of the Left. Violence is the essential tool of Leftist domination and so called social engineering. Nothing they want can be imposed without it. If this expected violent reaction happens soon, and the more successful MAGA is the more we should expect it, Trump can only survive by imposing martial law on the irredeemably corrupted Left dominate judiciary, bureaucracy, and corporate structure. A legal structure for martial law has already been enacted into Federal law. It already exists. It was always the Left’s end game. All that is required is the Trump must have the will to use it, but for the opposite purpose for which Democrats originally voted for it. If Trump can first smash the power of the Left, only then do we have a chance to move forward to abolish the current leftist welfare state and replace it with a modern, Western, Nativist American, meritocracy.

Those are the projects and purposes for which we must strive. Only once the power of meritocracy is established can we begin to proceed to a permanent structural change in the system. A change that will bring about a new Constitution of Liberty, perhaps not too dissimilar to the original, and a new Empire of Liberty suited to deal with the existential threats of the current era.

To Reverse The Neo Liberal Way Of Doom

The American Revolution has been correctly criticized as a basically conservative revolution. There is much truth in that but much falsehood as well. The American Revolution was innovative and liberal, in the original meaning of promoting individual liberty. The American Revolution is conservative when compared to French Revolutionary liberal nationalism, where instead of Life, Liberty, and Property, the slogan was Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the old brotherhood of man theme of the extreme Protestants who usually then spun off into communist insanity. The French intellectuals of the time imagined that they had overcome the problems of Christian fundamentalist extremism by rejecting religion. Their attack on the Church was inspired by explicit atheism not Protestantism. As Max Stirner correctly pointed out, they merely replaced the floating abstraction of the Holy Spirit with a mechanistic floating abstraction of the Great Clock Maker, but in political reality, the Clock Maker was the nation state. The resulting Great Terror of the head chopping machine, the guillotine, was only a prelude of greater horror to come. I do not mean the Napoleonic Wars. I mean the restored peace. The societal unrest unleashed by the French Revolution resulted in intellectual ferment. The logical extension of liberal egalitarianism was the horror that is socialism and communism.

The American Revolution happened in a totally unique set of objective conditions that will never happen again, the American frontier. The frontier is gone. The political system has been transformed by the colonization of alien ideas into a unique dystopian admixture of Americanism with post Napoleonic political ideas and post Bolshevik Useful Idiot mental illness, beset by Dark Ages Islamic savages and Third World peasants. They call it Globalism, triple brackets optional. The Globalist neoliberal corporatist would be oligarchy has hit upon a wonderful plan to disrupt pan-European society with an invasion of Islamic fanatics. Actually, Islamic fanatic is a redundancy.

Islam is a political ideology, a Dark Ages warrior cult if you will, dressed up as a religion. Islam is totally theocratic. Theocracy is completely antithetical to the American way of life. Imagine, if you will, that the religion of the Aztec survived and tried to claim official protection as a religion under the First Amendment. That would involve legalizing human sacrifice and cannibalism and is out of the question. The first Amendment simply forbids the official creation of a mandatory religious establishment. It in no way legalizes every imaginable religion but allows for the free competition of any religion compatible with civil society. Only the gullibility of your basic Useful Idiot can go full moral relativist and promote its own destruction. Islam should be outlawed as the subversive and treasonous death cult that it is. Just as Scientology is a blatant fraud created by a science fiction writer as a way of making money, so Islam is a Dark Ages Death Cult. Both should be outlawed, and certainly never granted any legal status.

A vital part of post-MAGA will be wiping America clean of organized perversion and human trafficking (which Trump has already begun doing), Dark Ages Death Cults, Satanic Spirit Cooking cannibalism, and callous frauds like Scientology. In order to make this happen America must reject moral and cultural relativism.

If we are ever to overturn the slow genocide of affirmation action and other attacks on Whiteness, Americans must again take pride in their own identity and magnificent heritage. The only way to reverse the curse of suicidal altruist liberal doom is to embrace what it really meant and still means to be an American. American conservatism is the cause of Liberty.

American identity is European. The American Empire of Liberty is the only way to a future free of the Globalist corporate welfare state feudalism of the Third World transformation of the nation. The American system, the Constitution of the United States, has provided the only blueprint we need to achieve this, and this can only, without doubt and without exception, be done by the American people, we the people. We are the people, the patriots, the true Americans.

For A New American System

The American system was originally conceived as a modernization on the model of the original European secular system of government, the Roman Republic. Part of the project was never actually completed. It was interrupted by the amazing success of the transformation that they did achieve, the onrush of the frontier, industrialization, and what they called Manifest Destiny. Then the system fractured as the South grew apart culturally. When they recreated an updated version of the half finished experiment they forgot their original idea and diverted in the direction of the French Revolution, liberalism. That system was again transformed by the growth of Twentieth Century totalitarianism. Totalitarianism failed in the West but persists in China and some Third World countries. A new global threat has emerged, the Leftist corporate elite. We all know who they are. It’s no mystery or conspiracy theory. They flout themselves and their degeneracy in the media. They have penetrated every corner of life with their computer networks. They control the corrupt Deep State with their pay outs, thinly disguised bribery and extortion. That is the Swamp that Trump proposed to drain. Even if Trump is successful in “draining” the worst of it, we are still left with most of the rest of the status quo, the great machine of societal indoctrination and subversion, media and education system.

The Federalist Papers give us some hints at their hopes for somehow replicating the balance found in Roman society. The English Common Law is far different from Roman Law, but the Federalists had an idea for the creation new Orders in society that might replicate ancient stability. One such innovation was the military academies to create a cadre of professional military officers to lead the State militias in time of war. One was the establishment of the legal profession as the controlling element of society. Under a society based on the rule of law the lawyers rule. It’s almost a one to one correspondence with the totalitarian idea of the Party dictatorship, except the Party is lawyers who function as free agents not some army of ideological enforcers. Originally, there were property qualifications for voting in elections and literacy requirements.

The strict establishment of qualifications that preclude stupid people from voting and people who will vote against the clear interests of civil society is the only way a representative republic can avoid what the Federalists called “the corruption of democracy”. The corruption of democracy was seen as the use of a majority to confiscate property. There was an ancient history of just that kind of thing happening in city-states. Socialism was nothing new, just a new justification. The more the franchise can be limited to only those individuals who have a real and personal interest in the survival of the republic, the more stable the republic. While equality under the law is only basic fairness, equality of power is suicidal for the most productive, and equality of results is insanity. A criminal should never have power over the just. Criminals should not vote. A stupid person, incapable of understanding the Constitution, should never presume to tell others who know their own mind what to think. Stupid illiterate people should not vote. A poor person, a lazy person, and a hapless person should never have power over a productive person. Those who are not net tax payers should not vote. As person who is willing to defend his country, friends and neighbors from foreign attack has earned the right to vote. In ancient times such things were common sense. The rule of law and equality under the law do not mean the rule of the stupidest, the least competent, the unproductive, the criminals, and the insane. Rule of law cannot exist under such conditions. Citizenship must be divided into classes and levels of qualification based on merit, with the lowest and least qualified still subject to the rule of law and protection of the law. Nothing in the Constitution in its present form precludes a rational and just system, only intentional misapplication left liberalism does that.

The no party state was the Federalist ideal. Everyone with a minimal knowledge of American history is familiar with President Washington’s waring against the fracturing of political discourse into antagonistic factions. Factions form into competing waring groups and are totally inconsistent with public peace. We should revisit this idea. Sometimes when a military coup takes over a failing Third World democracy the military rulers outlaw all political parties. This is a horrifying thing to liberal politicians of all stripes who see perpetual political strife as a way of life. The desire to avoid constant strife was part of the appeal Twentieth Century dictatorships.

There is value in the public debate of ideas. That is not the issue. The issue is the use of political organization to subvert and capture the state. The American Revolutionaries were very familiar with that whole process. They had been there and done that. The Federalists were interested in stabilizing society to avoid the instability introduced by the war, as well as the instabilities of a group of competing states. In some states disgruntled factions were in violent opposition to the State government. The situation of the Articles of Confederation was too unstable and open to attack, as evidenced by the fact that the British did return with a vengeance in 1812.

Today we have our own instabilities and threats, both foreign and domestic. Political discourse should not be limited, except for treasonous sedition. However, criminal conspiracies to subvert and capture the state should be eliminated. The Democratic Party has manifestly degenerated into a criminal conspiracy to subvert and capture the state. There is no question about that. And the Republican Party is next to useless if not as corrupt. If public “unrest”, meaning rioting and pillaging for a political purpose, can only be stopped by arresting the instigators for treasonous sedition, then that is what must happen. Modern political parties are completely corrupt clubs of organized gangs of interest groups bent on corporate capture of everything that is not nailed down and most of what is. The States must disestablish all political parties as privileged political entities even to the extent of eliminating party labels on ballots. The ones who object to this the most are the Democrats because they know that their constituents are in general too stupid, lazy, and uninterested to do anything more than vote a party ticket. It should be illegal to even bring a pre-printed or electronic party ticket to the polling place. The Democratic and Republican parties, and most of their incumbents, should be shut down by the US Treasury Secret Service agents and all their assets confiscated for bribery, corruption, and money laundering, including their fake charity foundations, all of them. The same for their cronies in the media, anti-trust them into oblivion. The Constitution insures to the States a republican form of government. It is time to show them what that means.

Practical Considerations

Since it is clear that we live in a hostile world where the greatest danger is nuclear attack, it is also clear that America needs an active system of national defense. Whether or not one agrees with my view of American imperial power and the resulting sphere of influence that goes with it, effective military organization is paramount. The possibility of the political subversion of the military, as well as civil government, is the ultimate danger to the system. As I have previously indicated, political parties are subversive to good government by their very nature as organizations bent on capturing the power of the state for the benefit of a faction, whatever faction is represented by the party. The solution to both the problem of political capture of civil government and the resulting subversion of the military is simple, the elimination of the ability to form factions which compete in the capture of the state. In order to achieve that result civil and military culture must be unified to prevent the formation of political factions.

It is a simple solution but not an obvious one. The best way to approach the problem is by means of historical example. Since America was founded as an updated version of the Roman republic adapted to American society at the time of the Revolution lets begin with a discussion of the nature of factions in ancient republican Rome.

The Roman political system was based on the two classes of society which existed at the time of its founding. The republic was founded as the result of the expulsion of a foreign Etruscan dynasty which ruled through the agency of a ruling class, the Patricians. They were similar but not the same as a feudal class of great land owners. The difference was they did not keep the native Latin Romans as slaves or serfs. They owned chattel slaves and employed Latin bondsmen. Rome was the largest city in Italy, perhaps over one hundred thousand and was primarily based on commerce. It existed in a sea of hostile less civilized tribes and competing city states. When the original Brutus assassinated the last Tarquin king the ruling class, the Patricians, were forced by the necessities of survival in the warlike social conditions of Italy at the time, to find an accommodation with the lesser common class of plebeians, literally the people.

The system was based on equality of basic civil rights for all free men, the right to a public trial, and on civic duties. Participation in civic life was not treated as a civil right as much as a duty. Patricians above a certain net worth were required to participate in the Senate, the alternative was social demotion and replacement by the next qualified individual. All citizens above a certain worth were required to participate in the Roman army, which meant supplying their own arms and equipment. They were the only ones qualified to vote in elections, which were basically held to chose the chief magistrates, who also commanded the legions and were the chief executives, the two Consuls, as well as subordinate magistrates and head tax collectors. There was an intermediate group or order between the Patrician Senator and the Plebian classes, the Equestrian Order, composed of those citizens who could afford to equip themselves as cavalry. There was also the office of Censor whose duty it was to compile the list of citizens and to designate their status or rank. The lowest rank of citizen was the poorest masses who had basic civil rights but could not vote. The lowest rank was dependent on rich patrons to keep them from being condemned to debt slavery. The patron saw to the defense of lesser citizens in court and it was illegal for the defending attorney to accept payment, which was considered bribery. The Censor had great power because he could condemn any citizen to the lowest rank for bad behavior. That is republican Roman political society in a nut shell.

We are all familiar with the case of Henry David Thoreau who was jailed for failure to pay his pole tax. That tax in an example of how early American states attempted to imitate the Roman system of civic virtue and duty. Now back to the Roman example.

Rome evolved a balance of power between the Patricians, who had the exclusive right to sever as magistrates, who commanded the army, and the Plebeians who served as the bulk of the armed forces. They created to Plebian magistrate called a Tribune. There were three main sectors in the City of Rome, thus they were called Tribes, which has nothing to do with the English meaning of the word, except that each Tribe had its own traditional self-governing civic organization called collegia. Roman society resembled a blend of patronage from the wealthiest and organization of the middle class in an almost Mafioso way because civil and criminal law was seen as last resort. To prevent discord in the army in the field they also devised the additional office of Military Tribune. The political function of the Tribunes was to act as a court of appeal to Plebeians who felt they were treated unjustly in the Patrician controlled courts and military courts martial.

With the building of aqueducts, the population of Rome multiplied far beyond its previous natural limit based on the availability of drinkable river water, so the ability of the magistrates to keep law and order became more and more subject to mob rule. The other corrupting factor was the continual territorial expansion due to military success. The Senate engrossed to itself all the new land by leasing the land to Senators. That resulted in civil conflict with Plebian leaders who demanded that they share the land with the soldiers who had done the most to gain it. Finally, success also resulted in massive unemployment due to the vast increase in slaves captured in war. All of which finally resulted in the civil wars that ended for a while with the establishment of the rule by the Principal citizen or Emperor, by Augustus.

It is obvious that the objective conditions in the United States are vastly different. However, the issue here is the capture of the state by a faction, in the case of Rome by Julius Caesar’s popular faction versus the Senatorial faction.

In the United States we have two main factions, based on a weird imitation of British parliamentary parties. They are the Democratic and the Republican Parties. Those two parties have evolved to represent different constituencies over the years as society has changed, but essentially the Democrats represent government employees and welfare clients while the Republicans represent the working and the middle class in the private sector. That is very different from the social class struggles of Rome.

The sordid details of how the Democratic Party evolved from representing the working class to representing the net tax receiver class augmented by the various ethnic, racial, and sexual cohorts is beyond the scope of this work. Suffice it to say that the Party has been captured by the extreme Left, the forces of Political Correctness, who pretend to serve the down trodden but actually serve a faction of Left leaning corporate cronies. The Republican Party has evolved from representing a coalition of working and corporate interests but has been captured by a class of wealthy donners, much like the Democrats, but with a slightly greater stake in the vast military industrial complex. Both Parties promote the policy of population replacement by mass migration, the Democrats to increase its voter base and the Republicans to increase the supply of cheap labor. The advent of Trump has caused the Democrats to react by going harder Left and the Republican neocon elite to seek ways to undercut him.

This is obviously a completely untenable situation. Even if Trump succeeds in all his plans, we are still left with the corporate and intellectual infrastructure that created and sustains the system. The policy of population replacement will eventually overturn everything that Trump worked for. So, what can we learn from the Romans?

The notion of simply using persuasion alone to change the course of events seems absurdly impractical, unless something amazing and unexpected happens very soon. The forces of cultural inertia seem to be set to self-destruct. Just as the Roman class system turn to civil war, the American Two Party system will end in disaster.

Force majeure is required at some point very soon to prevent the collapse of the American republic and the establishment of globalist tyranny. The first step is obviously martial law justified by the Leftist subversion of the court system. The Left is bent on using “affirmative action” to foredoom all outcomes toward the death of the current system.

Simply utilizing the existing military and police to suppress outright treason in the case of “sanctuary” states and cities and in the case of massive civil unrest by parasite classes directed by Democratic Party auxiliaries will only serve to quell the immediate insurrection, when it happens. The President must be, as they say in the corporate world, proactive. He should mobilize his supporters in a way that gives them an equal stake in the outcome to his own regime, friends and family. He must “call forth the militia”. The militia should consist initially of veterans, who will serve as the training cadre, and of all healthy young men willing to serve. They must have an active role in putting down the lunatic Left revolt against reason, morality, and a just society based on property rights in such a way that commits them to the point that there is no turning back. They must, in the eyes of the Left, be seen as partners in the regime’s crime, so to speak, in the active suppression of Leftist rebellion. A doctrine based on Constitutionalism should be developed and instruction given to the militia. Then they can serve as the future basis of the new political class, supplanting to corrupt Two Party System. They will serve as the future Oder envisioned so long ago by the Federalists, whose purpose will be to preserve and protect civic virtue, and the Constitutional system of government by means of military training and civic education. They will serve as the bulk of the entitled enfranchised voting class.

After the abolition of affirmative action and the establishment of an effective meritocracy based on property ownership and military service, the external limits of the empire are the next policy to consider. First, just as the dysgenic welfare state must be abolished so too the insanity of foreign aid must be eliminated. Suicidal altruism is an absurd basis for anything, much less an empire. Client nations benefiting from our nuclear umbrella must help pay part of the cost. The empire must be limited in scope. The idea of ruling the entire world is simply impossible. Russia and China are nuclear super powers. The Third World contains far too many low IQ people to ever manage the entire population. Even a small population of such people is neither desirable nor useful. In keeping with the idea of the United States as an Anglo-ethnic state the external empire should be limited to the geographical areas inhabited already with English speaking European people, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, some portion of South Africa, and Britain. Western Europe could remain part of America’s sphere of influence, but it only makes sense to respect the ancient existing nationalities of the continent.

American nuclear policy should be foreign nuclear disarmament. Pakistan and Israel should be disarmed. Disarmament of those nations is necessary in order to prevent an eventual war of mutual extermination between Islam and the Jewish state. After Pakistan is disarmed India should follow. No Third World nations should ever be permitted to possess nuclear weapons for obvious reasons. Britain and France should be disarmed to prevent the formation of a potentially hostile European state. Such disarmament is not easy to envision, but it is a logical step in the prevention of possible future hostilities. Of course, Russia and China are simply too powerful to disarm. However, they both have the same interest in disarming the other minor nuclear powers as we have.

Traditionally, the United States claimed the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence. It was known as the Monroe Doctrine after President Monroe. The successful conclusion of the War of 1812 settled the idea in American politics. American hegemony over the entire Western Hemisphere was never complete, but it should be. The Anglosphere, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were added to the American sphere of influence after the Second World War, and America retained hegemony over most of its gains from the Spanish American War. The mineral resources of southern Africa could easily be added to the American sphere due to the instability and weakness of the post-colonial ersatz nations. South Africa in particular, because of its surviving English speaking European population, provides an attractive base of operations in the region and should be included. It is also in the national interest to prevent the genocide of the White South Africans by the communist inspired Bantu ethnic group as a demonstration to the rest of the European world of the national will to protect our own. Finally, Latin America is plagued by an even greater excess of democracy than the United States, due in part to misguided American policy since the Second World War. The new Monroe Doctrine should aim to install effective meritocracy in the region, while keeping it nuclear free.

Critique Of Pure Economics

In the introduction of his collection of essays on history and political economy, Democracy, The God That Failed, Hoppe brilliantly explains why apriori reasoning form virtually self-evident facts, considered common sense by reasonable men, is far superior to liberal egalitarian positivism. His explanation of Natural Order versus state created order is great as a critique of Statism. His abstract division between private law and private property and public law and public property is real, and actually exists in any society with a mixed economy and some version of the institution of private property. His explanation of the origin of the state is very limited, and to the extent that he explains the origin of the state as separate and distinct form private property and the market, mistaken.

Historically, the state, even during the time of the post Roman feudalism in the West, as an institution never ceased to exist, except during short periods of intense conflict with invading Germanic tribes. Uniformly, some type of state was quickly established upon the conquest and destruction of Roman authority. In some of the most extreme cases in the period of the Dark Age, for example in Britain, the invading Angles and Saxons established states, petty kingdoms based on their native tribal tradition. Local rulers, for a variety of reasons, quickly adopted Roman Christianity, most likely due to practicality to pacify the peasants. Also, they were deeply impressed with Roman civilization and sought to obtain similar power and prestige by acquiring and imitating what little they understood of the old order. Keep in mind that in almost every case initially they came as mercenary elements of the Roman army. However, as the constant civil wars and the economic collapse, which was accelerated by Diocletian Law, destroyed the ability of the Roman administration to pay the troops in the border forts, the former mercenary leaders, who were often kings in their own right under tribal custom, invited in succeeding waves of relatives.

In point of fact, feudalism never existed as a purely anarchic propertarian system. It was from the beginning a military occupation based on tribal law. The new land owners were subordinate to their war lords, who promoted themselves to kings, with all the customary tribal authority that implied. While it is true that they were largely illiterate or semiliterate (They used a Runic alphabet for simple record keeping and magical purposes.), they had a strict legal system based on ancient custom with the authority of religion, as with all primitive people. The kingship was the highest authority among all the Germanic tribes. While Dark ages feudalism left at best only sketchy records, thus the name Dark Age, the fact that it was not based on record keeping and written law, like Roman society, is easily mistaken by modern people, who lack historic perspective, as anarchy.

Actually, Rome was the first modern state, not the first state. Obviously, a modern state is based more or less on written laws. Rome pioneered, if not invented the practice. All modern political systems are distant reflections of the Roman system, via the American constitutional system. At the time of the expansion of the Roman Republic until it became the Empire, particularly in the West, the Gaulic tribes were organized into a system of tribal feudalism, and the institution of kingship does not seem to be as important. Some communities seem to have been influenced by Greek and Punic colonization of the coast and were evolving into commercial city-states. Then Rome wiped out Carthage, the primary Punic power in the West, and conquered Magna Grecia in the East. From the very first Gemanic invasions, suppressed by Marius until Tacitus wrote his Histories, Romans recognized that these were an entirely different ethnos from the Gauls. The first invasions were nations on the march commanded by kings and under the spell of witches who practiced human sacrifice in order to predict where the gods wanted to march next. Obviously, they were very different from the Roman system.

These nations on the march were either expelled from or deserted their home lands, according to sketchy reports. They were in a temporary nomadic condition, which confused many ancient and modern observers. They intended to take land from its owners and make it their own and settle down. The invading Germans at the time of the fall of the Empire were virtually identical to these first invaders culturally. The main difference was that many in the East, the Goths and the Vandals from Sweden originally, along the way had been converted to Christianity by the Greek missionary, Arius, translating the New Testament into Gothic Runes. That was not the case of the Saxons and the Franks in the West, but they were also initially allowed to settle as Federates, a legal status involving an obligation of military service.

This process of initial settlement introduced these Germans to the wonders of the Roman state, and they wanted those wonders for themselves. The term “Dark ages” is more apt in Britain and much of the far western Empire, but in Italy it never really happened that way. In Italy the authority of the Church survived the fall of Empire. The first Gothic King of Italy made a settlement with the Senate, taking half the land. You see, Italy was already what we would recognize as a feudal state. The Senators who where not complete cowards fleeing to a monastery became the Italian half of the aristocracy of the Middle Ages in Italy. The process of adoption of Roman ways was slower and more problematic the further west we look. Thus, in Britain there was a true Dark Age, but never a pure propertarian feudal hierarchy divorced from regal state authority.

I realize that Hoppe has a widespread fan base who might by now be wondering exactly what my point is? True, Hoppe specifically denies being an historian, and honestly admits to basing his historical argument on an explicit set of assumptions. Besides the historical invalidity and sketchiness of his historical argument you are wondering, what exactly do I object to? In a word, I smell determinism. I am not accusing Hoppe of being a determinist. He is explicitly Aristotlean. He is not Hagelian nor any other modern version of Plato’s floating abstractons. So, why do I smell determinism? What kind? How could it be? Well, maybe you are right. Maybe I smell utopianism. It is hard for me to tell the difference, since utopianists are always determinists. So, you got me. It was two words, but what kind of utopian determinism do I detect?

Anarchocapitalism is usually explained in terms of economic determinism. I have to give Hoppe credit. He only implied determinism, which he buttressed with his ahistorical justification. In addition to his false assumption that Germanic tribal feudalism was internally anarchic, which it was not, exactly what conception of property are we discussing? Hoppe’s argument implies a seamless transition from feudal property in real estate, real property as it is known, to the American ideal of real property held “in fee simple” without a predetermined transfer after death to the eldest son, primogeniture, and not only that, primogeniture without the possibility of alienation by way of debt, which we know as a mortgage, literally a “death grip” in old Norman. Under quasi feudal Roman law the tenant was bound to the land by being forbidden to change employment. Under Germanic tribal law land ownership was strictly limited to the eldest son, primogeniture, and without a valid hair, “entail” kicked in, transferring ownership to the nearest qualified male relative. It is self-evident that volumes of written law promulgated in the King’s courts and by the State legislatures of the original thirteen states were directly responsible for this change from absolute illiterate tribal feudalism to modern real estate.

It is true that a regime of voluntary contractual obligations functions as the basis of the modern spontaneous order we call free enterprise capitalism. That is not the same as claiming that its origin was spontaneous in the sense that it was not a product of official state action. True, much of that action might be seen as acquiescence to a better, more just and efficient, way of doing business, as opposed to price controls and monopoly grants of authority, but it did not come about without political struggle in the arena of the state. There are innumerable contractual activities that are legal now but were legally forbidden and many that are legally forbidden that were once free from impingement by state authority.

Spontaneous order above and beyond the pure society of political status based on land ownership that is feudalism, was a direct outgrowth of the power of the state, in the person of the king, over the feudal estates. The first imposition of authority for a more peaceful society was known as the King’s Peace. That is the origin of criminal law under feudalism. The King’s Peace meant that the agents of the King, who claimed the state’s monopoly on retaliatory force, could use force to pursue and punish criminals. The evolution of civil law also was imposed by the state from the top down. The King also kept peace by preventing violent disputes and vendettas with the force of imposed civil judgements. Even the power to enforce contracts or judgements went beyond “self help” as the officials who enforced criminal law also seized condemned property to satisfy a judgement. While the state was nominally the owner of all property, that power was divided among different estates who used force to maintain their claims, all of which was more or less legally justified by a continual progress toward the Roman ideal of written law.

Under the feudal system, which Hoppe attributes the origin of natural order, the original order regarding real property was totally hierarchical and in no way subject to voluntary contractual exchange. The very ability of common people to own, buy, and sell land was an artifact of state power, created by fiat by Kings and legislatures, as was the original title to the land, ownership by conquest. Before land was ever owned by a tribal familial patriarch it was held in common by a closed group of related people, a tribe who became the peasants once conquered. My point is not that natural order does not exist, but that it is not what Hoppe and other anarchocapitalists seem to think it is. In colonial America the closest possible thing to pure Lockean creation of land title did in fact happen, but in all cases, without exception, actual title to land was codified by state law. There has never been a case of anyone in America continuing to own land he carved out of the wilderness without a valid state sanctioned title, even the rare case of so called adverse possession was and artifact of state law to deal with abandoned land in the wake of westward expansion. Natural order beyond primitive (which means low IQ and pre-literate) tribalism is the slow process of the substitution of contract law for direct control of the outcome of transactions by the state, from the first tribal overlord to modern times. It is not, never was, and never can be, the spontaneous creation of rules ad hoc by interested parties seeking to exchange or share scarce resources except in very limited temporary local circumstances. In the absence of the state the only thing similar to law is custom. However, since the state has its origin, or the origin of its legitimacy in ancient times, in religion, we find that in all ancient societies religion was the foundation of the state. The great innovation of Rome was the separation of secular and religious authority.

The root cause of this philosophical confusion, which leads to economic determinism by way of the floating abstraction of “market forces” is a failure to face up to what it takes to be secure in one’s property. Hoppe does not by any means fall into an implicit kind of pacifism. The failing of most libertarians is a kind of tunnel vision, which, in spite of the fact that they recognize individual personal self-defense as legitimate, they tend to critique the state as an illegitimate form of collective self-defense. This leads them to castigate most other forms of collective self-defense or group self-defense as illegitimate, such as familial, ethnic, racial, tribal, or partisan based group self-defense. Enter magical Market Forces. Somehow, a corporate or cooperative group when defined as a market based “defense agency” is a perfectly legitimate from of collective or group self-defense. Not only that, it is so legitimate that it can do no wrong, or at least operate morally and effectively, constrained as it is by the nonaggression principle, and market forces. The nonaggression principle is a claim to ultimate moral authority of superiority above all other moral authority, just as religion and the state claim such ultimate authority. It is a claim, only a claim, and nothing but a claim of authority. Absent willing and devoted individual actors on a mass scale it is nothing but a floating abstraction, like all the claims of Max Stirner’s post Roman European state, including liberal nationalism, wheels in one’s head.

The root cause of this confusion is the refusal or the inability to comprehend the radical difference between the authoritarian coercion based method of organization and the libertarian contract based method of organization. Military force is the origin of and the essential element of the state, while a voluntary meeting of the minds is the essential element and origin of free exchange based on the nonaggression principle. They are diametric opposites which evolved more or less simultaneously. The organization of force, defensive and offensive, (Remember the old adage, the best defense is a good offence.) might contain elements of voluntary association. Indeed, a totally slavery based military structure where no one from top to bottom is a willing participant is inconceivable outside of some imaginary dystopian robot world. So, we can amend that to claim that it must contain elements of voluntary association. However, all contracts are the result of the meeting of minds, which means free will or voluntary action. Thus, a volunteer army could have a contract of enlistment, but a free civilian contract is not valid if entered into under duress.

This is universal law, spontaneous order if you will. Even ancient Kings recognized that duress voids a contract. In English Common law that was always the case. Harold Godwinson had justice on his side when he maintained that the agreement he signed while hostage to William in Normandy was signed under duress, but we all understand that interstate law is a joke. It has no authority. William killed Harold and became the king of England by right of conquest. There you have it in a nut shell, the rule of the nonaggression principle backed by “market forces” versus actual force. Nothing is allowed to happen in the market unless political force is constrained. Political force is necessary to interdict and defeat both criminal force and official political force. The outcome of political contests does not depend on market forces. Market forces in and of themselves are weak and ineffectual in the face of political force. Market forces are only strong in the absence. For example, when socialists take over a state and set about eliminating property rights and freedom of exchange and replace them with a command and control system of production and distribution the absence of market forces reveals the innate incompetence and futility of egalitarian socialism and central planning in total economic collapse. These same market forces were totally ineffectual in preventing the destruction of the market.

To Hoppe’s credit, his argument is more of a claim of the moral superiority and the efficiency of profit management versus bureaucratic management and is obviously a credit to Ludwick von Mises’s work on the subject aptly entitled Bureaucracy, one of his best books for its simplicity and accessibility to the average person. Hoppe does not advocate his proposed system on the basis of passivism and hanging out waiting for “market forces” to prevail. I have never claimed that, but reserve that distinction to more obtuse anarchist proponents mostly clearly to his left on the political spectrum. My critique of Hoppe is against his ahistoric and resultant inappropriate use of the arguments concerning free market economics.

In conclusion, apriori, self-evidently, and clearly in accordance with common sense, libertarian market forces cannot exist in the absence of authoritarian force primarily focused on the defense of private property, of voluntary association, and of the nonaggression principle. That is an objective reality, and source of perpetual conflict. The authoritarian power of the state and its historic transformation from primarily military to civil authority evolved in history side by side or in tandem with the spontaneous order of the free market based on the gradual evolution of efficient and more just concepts of private property, and the realization of the greater efficiency of voluntary exchange over coercion under the authority of the state. The essence of authoritarianism is military organization, a system based on a command and control structure. The amelioration of that authority from military to civil purposes is the history of the co-evolution of both the state and the market.