One shocking revelation adulthood requires is understanding free people do not need legislation.
It's shocking because it runs counter to most of the education folks especially in the United States receive: compulsory public schooling.
There, every attempt to glorify Great Men and battles to steer the ship of state makes up official history. How are these mystical things called Rights obtained? Well, prior to some judicial wag or great politician or set of passed laws, they didn't exist.
Just one more law.
Just one more sacrificial self-appointed leader.
Nearly completely ignored is the organic order, the every day anarchic relationships most everyone has and has had. I write of course of the commercial sphere.
It's poo poo'd, denigrated, thought of as demonstrably silly when placed in comparison to serious people in blue suits making speeches.
Adults are struck hard when pressed to point out dramatically real improvements governments, legislators, law makers have made in their lives.
A public education zealot will immediately mention Civil Rights as an example of government doing good. But think about the South during Jim Crow. In most cases, segregation was enforced by municipal and state laws, stretching all the way to miscegenation. Governments warred with one another because they were easily captured by majorities. That eventually they 'righted' the slight doesn't really begin to reveal the failure of governments per se. Brave business owners routinely bucked the state, city, and were penalized heavily for doing so.
To rectify Jim Crow, governments were super-empowered, running rough over basic property rights in an effort to expand their own power while playing role of moralist. Problems stemming from such an over-reach set precedence, meaning since government is allowed to regulate who might be able to purchase a burger at your restaurant, government can set further regulations and requirements extending into all aspects of life.
It isn't exactly clear government's attempt at social engineering has made life demonstrably better for the people, at least in official history books, it claims to have bettered, say African Americans.
What is clear is your dealing with governments.
Take less theoretical examples, more practical. DMV. Post office. City council. Municipal police. Courts. Schools and school boards.
Does any ounce of honesty allow you not to admit they're huge failures?
Their costs have skyrocketed. Their services retard. Rather than protectorates or servants, they've become your greatest threat both to person and wealth.
Now think about the device from which you're reading this essay. Think about how it has yearly come down in price but only soared in service and value.
The same thought experiment can be done with every sphere of influence in your non-governmental life -- clothing, food, entertainment, art, medicine, science, transportation.
Once the contrast is made it is very difficult not to keep noticing.
The patterns repeat endlessly.
All you love, making your life better is from voluntary relationships in freer markets.
All you hate, find cumbersome and threatening, making life at times impossible stems from government.
Why?
Is this just a coincidence for our time, a failure of this epoch? Surely the author cannot be toying with the idea such failures are endemic to government, a catastrophic aspect of it.
That's exactly the point.
Freedom works. Prohibition empowers the political class.
That a murdering closet homosexual man can enter a notorious gay nightclub in central Florida and come close to extinguishing 100 souls does not implicate freedom. There isn't too much freedom. Freedom didn't kill those poor folks.
Characteristically, and maybe paradoxically, the further we get away from an event, the better able we're going to understand its full import.
I'll grant that it's early.
However, here are some basic facts a sober person should find unnerving:
1. None of the proposed laws, short of outright confiscation, such as gun show loopholes, watch lists, would've stopped the Orlando asshole.
2. The Orlando asshole was in fact government bona fide, having been cleared to work for a government contractor, and was indeed licensed by the state.
3. The Orlando asshole was investigated TWICE by the federal government's law enforcement elites, and was promptly let go. Twice.
4. After initially engaging the Orlando asshole, Orlando police high tailed it out of the club, waiting THREE HOURS to finally end the standoff. I am not a massacre expert, but leaving enough time to watch half of season of Mad Men, enough time to watch a full major league baseball game, waiting enough time to take your chick to a move AND have dinner ... well, that alone speaks volumes about who police are really protecting. Even a survivor ran around to the front and screamed at police to DO SOMETHING. Hint: police aren't chartered to protect you.
5. It does appear Orlando police were so ill trained, so frightened out of their socks, that when the Orlando asshole appeared, police began wildly shooting in his direction, and reports have speculated Orlando police might be responsible for some deaths. They're at least responsible for allowing folks to bleed to death (see 3), but that they probably killed innocent people should make you furious.
So what is the answer! What is my utopian solution!
I don't have one.
Remember, I didn't declare whole swaths of neighborhoods gun free zones. I didn't give municipal employees a monopoly on policing, protecting Orlando city dwellers.
The burden isn't on me.
No utopia is necessary to suggest a private security force, responsible and immediately accountable, who would be devastated by such a loss of life that no one would do business with them again, might've been better suited to protect gay club dancers.
But what will come of yet another government failure, so explicit, so incompetent, so vile?
The force fired?
Orlando police disarmed?
The chief who waited three hours while people bled to death jailed?
Nope.
That's what might've happened if there was a private arrangement between the club and a security agency.
There would be hell to pay, as there would if your phone blew up in your face, if your car went bonkers, if a restaurant meal made you sick.
Every effort to right the wrong would be made. Businesses would realign, redouble their efforts to improve service, to make sure you're as protected as humanly possible.
What is the incentive for Orlando police?
Nothing.
Their raises are locked in. They're not financially responsible to anyone if they fail. No other agency can bid to offer better protection.
A few folks will hand ring, if that.
A few others will write long stories about a top-to-bottom failure of governments, once again, to protect people.
In fact, funding for both the FBI and the Orlando police will increase (mark my words). Government is the only institution, be it public schooling or security, where a failure is given MORE confiscatory tax dollars.
That's the difference.
The private market works for your every happiness, and if it does not, if it fails, there is another business waiting to fill the void.
Governments are monopolies in the worst, least natural sense.
And I mean it.
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CONTACT: checalaloskelsos@gmail.com
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