The More Laws and Regulations, The Greater the Police State

August 1, 2011

There is an article on LewRockwell.com by Eric Peters, regarding how our modern day “law enforcement” officials are increasingly arrogant, belligerent and really out to start a fight, and not just with actual criminals (which might take actual courage). These Nazi police are attacking, abusing, assaulting, tasing, shooting and murdering innocent civilians who have committed no crime, and some of whom had not even formally been charged (or accused) with anything. No, nowadays, the police are acting like criminals against the general, non-violent, non-criminal citizenry.

Peters notes of one incident, and provides a video of it, of a Nazi officer criminally assaulting a woman while her kids sat in the car. On that YouTube video page, a commenter noted that the woman should have done what she was told, and that “you deserve to get tazed you dumb b***h!” That comment received 28 thumbs up. This tells me that there are a lot of citizen Nazis and Brownshirts out there who do not understand the idea that common civilians have rights. (You know, the right to not be assaulted for no good reason by a Nazi police officer?)

These things give me more concern when there is going to be an economic collapse and societal chaos, and God forbid the imbecile in the White House might impose martial law.

Peters notes how any questioning of a cop’s “authority” or not following orders will get you in trouble, and it didn’t used to be that way.

Simply objecting , verbally – or passively declining to immediately follow whatever orders are shouted at you – has become “resisting” in the minds of many cops…

The root problem is that we have so many petty laws in the first place. Cops should not be put in the position of having to enforce ridiculous – and tyrannical – edicts that naturally get people’s backs up, because people quite rightly object to being handled like criminals or talked down to like an idiot child over something that is – in a sane society – absolutely none of the cop’s business in the first place.

It used to be that, for the most part, only criminals – actually dangerous people, sociopaths – had to fear being handled roughly by cops. Now society is so interwoven with laws that it is almost impossible to step outside of your door without violating one and thus, find yourself the target of law enforcement.

An interesting aspect of this is the psychology involved. Criminals – dangerous people, sociopaths – understand what they are and know what they’ve done and so rarely evince genuine outrage when caught, roughly or otherwise. But the rest of us – the John Qs. and Janes just trying to live our lives – we take affront when a cop suddenly appears and begins quoting “the law” and spewing threats at us. This combination of shock and outrage contributes to the escalation of the situation…

But that was before society began policing every aspect of our lives, giving cops a reason to hassle us where none existed before – and providing the pretext for the escalation we see all around us. There is, quite literally, no way out. Or at least no good way out…

Well, yes, there actually is a way out, and that is to de-monopolize community policing and security. A lot of people scoff at that suggestion, because it has been assumed that the local government must have a compulsory monopoly in those fields, because they are just too important. No, they aren’t so important that only the government may be involved in your community’s security. There is no reason why competing agencies can’t do those things, and also such agencies would be more accountable. Monopolies are not accountable. And it doesn’t even have to be paid-for firms on the market — voluntary groups should also be involved in the policing of their own neighborhoods.

But it would also help to erase just about every positive law that is on the books, laws that have nothing to do with protecting our liberty or property and are only there to make money for the local or state government. And that is a very bad and dangerous reason why laws should be on the books or be enforced. The drug war also needs to be ended. Here and here are good articles on the absurdity of the drug war.

Eric Peters has been doing a wonderful job covering the abusive police state and its “Clover” defenders, as have Wendy McElroy (more here and here), Radley Balko and especially William Grigg.

But getting back to that brutish, tyrannical, bullying attitude that many cops seem to have nowadays, I think that the “War on Terror,” started by George W. Bush, may have contributed to the escalation of these Nazi police attitudes. The Bush wars and domestic police state told us that it is a bad thing for foreigners to attack and murder our fellow Americans (which is true — that is a bad thing), but that it is justified for our government to attack entire countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan who were not the cause of 9/11 and were of no threat to us, and for our government to destroy whole towns and whole countries and murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians overseas.

Bush’s domestic police state told us that individuals do NOT have any inalienable right to presumption of innocence and due process, and many of these police officers got that message. I have addressed the danger of how barbaric our military has become, how our military and domestic police forces are dangerously being fused together, and how there already have been examples of our own government leaders turning the guns on American civilians here.

Sort of related but not really, Justin Raimondo links at the end of this piece to a post by Helen Geller, who might be covering up something to do with the Norway nutso, in which she supposedly received an email way back in 2007 that Helen posted on her blog, Atlas Schmucks, but now has deleted one particular part of it. It’s hard to take some of these people seriously, after all their paranoid, anti-Muslim rants and seizures. It’s as though they want all Muslims deported from the U.S. Can we have all Islamophobic wackos deported? That would be nice.

Speaking of George W. Bush, Laurence Vance has this post at the LRC Blog, regarding Sean Hannity’s amnesia of the Bush years:

…In the mind of Hannity, the eight years of the Bush administration never happened. That is the only way I know how to explain it. Here is a quote from Hannity about Obama: “The guy who is responsible for all this massive debt.” Really Sean? Bush doubled the national debt and gave us the first trillion dollar deficit but it is all Obama’s fault? Now, I despise Obama and his policies as much as I despise Hannity, but why give Bush a free pass? Hannity also said something like: “We need a conservative Senate, we need a conservative in the White House.” Really Sean? Bush and the Republicans had absolute control of the government for over four years and what did we get for it? The TSA, the Medicare Prescription Drug plan, the Patriot Act, the expansion of the police state, and two wars. Let’s hope and pray that we don’t get any more conservatives in the Senate and the White House.

For more on the Bush legacy, see Doug Casey.