Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Now let me get this straight:

(1) Shady characters who openly identify themselves as the enemies of individual liberty and of Western Civilization have long wanted to deprive the American people of their unalienable, Constitutional right to own and carry weapons—so they could do things to us that they couldn’t do if we were armed.

The late, unlamented Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, that 1960s’ doyen of gun control—if not a card-carrying communist himself, then the legal mouthpiece for communists—used to tell reporters “off the record” that he didn’t give a damn about safety or reducing crime, all he wanted was to see the Productive Class disarmed. Metzenbaum regarded “gun control” as an instrument of class-warfare, a purely Marxist concept. The reporters, at the time, who failed to tell the public about Metzenbaum’s secret objective were our enemies, as well, and remain so to this day. Concerned Americans since then have been engaged in continuous warfare against new restrictions on our Second Amendment rights, as a web-work of crippling Jim Crow-like laws and regulations grows up around us.

(2) Now exactly the same political vermin are demanding that violent criminals be released from jail by the tens of thousands—using Public Health as the excuse of the moment—so that they are free to rape and rob and murder decent human beings again and again, sometimes only hours after they are let go.

(3) And finally, just in case you still naively believe that these specimens have any concern at all for peace and civil order, now they want to disband and abolish the police.

Do you discern a pattern here? Clearly the left wants the American Productive Class rendered helpless against the violent predations of their pet mobs and minions. Should anybody utter a discouraging word against them, the same mobs and minions try stifle dissent by defaming and “deplatforming” those who disagree with them online, or at public speaking events, and on radio and TV. Craven, pusillanimous universities and corporations make themselves complicit by firing those among them who dare to voice “forbidden” thoughts.

In 1977—an astonishing 43 years ago—I started writing the first of my 30-odd novels, inspired by the thinking of philosopher/lecturer Robert LeFevre. Set in 1987 (which was the future then) its working title was The Constitution Conspiracy It was to be about an alternative version of America that had never made any of the mistakes, liberty-wise, that our United States had during 211 years of its existence. The book concerns itself with many topics, peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity. It has its heroes and its villains, plenty of violence and romance, and just the tiniest bit of sex. In the end, I called it The Probability Broach and it soon became the defining novel of the libertarian movement.

What’s important now is that The Probability Broach, which, amazingly, is still in print, offers a rational alternative to police-work as we know it. To get this part right, I actually became an auxiliary police officer for a while and spent many enlightening hours patrolling the city with my brother officers. Among the conclusions I reached was that at least ninety-nine percent of what we were doing could be accomplished by private contractors. However this may not mean what it seems to mean at first.

In the wake of the infamous murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, corrupt, race-baiting politicians, Marxist political activists, and the mobs they command are presently calling for police departments to be “defunded” or eliminated altogether. What they say they want, instead, is every bit as crazy and stupid as anything proposed in the 1960s. What these “geniuses” don’t seem to understand is that, in the absence of a police force, the Productive Class will swiftly act to “provide new guards for their future security” that the left will like even less. Even now, record numbers of weapons are being acquired every month, so that the estimate of “firearms of modern design in good working order” owned by the American people has to be over a billion.

Deprived of the protection their bloated taxes paid for, the same Productive Class will hire private security services by the thousands to guard their neighborhoods, schools, and businesses, devising new contractual relationships and new methods that will vastly improve on anything the political system ever provided. The cherry on top is that most of the personnel of these companies will be the officers that municipalities fired. Meet the new cops—same as the old cops.

However the simple truth is that the current war on the police has nothing to do with civil rights or humanitarianism. If George Floyd hadn’t been murdered, anything else would have served as an excuse. The collectivist left hate Productive Class Americans and they want us to be hurt, impoverished, or killed

Most of America’s current problems arise from a dismal psychological failure of the enemies of freedom to conceive of individuality, of individual action, or of individual responsibility. In the current instance, if one policeman murders a civilian, then, in their stunted estimation, all policemen murder civilians. More importantly, if that policeman happens to be white, then all white people must be forced, somehow, to share in the guilt and be punished for it.

The long-term cure, then, is to eradicate every form of collectivism from our culture, beginning with the public school system itself. We must teach our children from their earliest years to appreciate the virtues and benefits of individualism and individual achievement (not to overlook individual integrity). The short-term cure currently being proposed by the left is nothing but a dangerous joke and will only make them unhappier in the end.

 

* Hat-tip to TAO