From: Robert Coyote (coyyote@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 26 2000 - 13:46:53 MST
It would be a big step for freedom if the government simply obeyed the law.
==============
What we actually need is to remove every single law that contradicts the
Bill of Rights. The DEA has been a disaster of major proportions largely
because it ignores people's right to make their own decisions about what
they ingest and in the process has fueled unconstitutional search and
seizure, detention of citizens, and so on. Everything you own can be
seized by the government and sold off before you ever get to trial if
someone claims you traffic in drugs (in some states if they even claim
you are a user). Black-clad unidentified goons can kick open your door
in the middle of the night without identifying themselves much less
presenting a warrant. There have been people killed for attempting to
defend their homes and loved ones against such interlopers. The IRS has
been known to seize entire estates over the smallest sums in dispute.
This country where the government is supposedly the protector of
individual rights has become instead a tyrant that its own citizens
fear. As well they should when such things as these take place and are
sanctioned. This country, land of the free, has more of its people in
jail per capita than any other. Something is obviously badly wrong.
Chris Russo wrote:
> >Two of my heroes are Larry Flynt and Dr. Kevorkian. Both of them
> >treat absurd laws (against obscenity, and against ownership of your
> >own life) with open defiance.
>
> As much as I agree that the laws those guys have fought against are
> absurd: Is the best solution to just ignore them?
>
Civil disobedience is one way to fight. Ignoring laws and not making
oneself a target is another.
>
> Everyone thinks some law or other is absurd, is the general solution
> for everyone to just ignore the ones they don't like?
>
It is actually essential. If you learned and obeyed the letter of every
law that binds you you would have little time for anything else and would
not be able to do very much in what time you had left.
>
> Does the existence of factions ignoring sets of laws really reduce
> the size and power of government, or just its effectiveness? Look at
> the War on Drugs - many politicians think that in order to solve
> defiance of drug laws, they need to spend more money on enforcement,
> which requires more taxpayer dollars, which increases the size of
> government, which increases the power of government, which gives some
> other government pinhead the power to attack some other group
> ignoring laws, and so on, and so on.
>
Open disobedience arguably brought the first prohibition to an end. I
recommend that we campaign as hard against the "War on Drugs" as some of
us campaigned against the Vietnam war so long ago. In the meantime
whatever freedoms have been wrongly coopted by the State can only be
exercised in secrecy or publicly in civil disobedience.
>
> If anything, I think that we need to be zealots about both enforcing
> the laws that we have and *drastically* reducing the number of laws
> that needlessly affect our lives.
>
But the many of those laws we already have deny our rights and thus
contradict the very basis of government power in this country. Their
zealous enforcement is nothing short of tyranny. You must pick and
choose and oppose as best you can what is oppressive.
- samantha
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