Criminal enterprise

Bill suggested that I write a history of Laissez Faire City. I can do it in a single sentence. It was a criminal enterprise. Details would fill a shelf as big as a two-volume O.E.D., defining each aspect, utilizing nearly every word in the English language. With equal mental energy and all of my remaining days I could fill a library with crimes committed by millions of other people, including the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Founding Fathers, and every session of Congress since its inception as an institution of political compromise.

The dispossessed native Amerindians were rapacious brutes, perpetually at war with rival tribes and far worse in their treatment of women and children than the bloody Aztecs and Arabs. One cannot point to a single African tribe ancient or modern that has clean hands, or an instance of religion or philosophy that did not punish the weak. You think libertarians are innocent? Hah. Murray Rothbard was supported by taxation and tax loopholes his entire life. Walter Block laughed that a Ph.D. in economics was a $250,000 annual meal ticket to do little as a tenured party animal, funded by similar political crimes, including intellectual fraud.

I claim innocence in that regard. I was an innovator. I was also ignored, the strange karma of working outside the iron grip of tradition and scholarship of the Known and Familiar. Those who succeed intellectually, creatively, or economically are slaves to the art of extracting maximum benefit from existing arrangements. I'm typing these words on a laptop made in China, built by indentured servants from a series of stepwise improvements following basic research at Bell Labs, a monopoly, headed by an asshole guilty of multiple crimes.

I try to be generous about crime. Life is short. Few of us are born free and independent of life's little boxes. Whatever joy one finds is usually a happy accident, someone to love, far removed from the world, cloistered in a hovel or something less awkward depending on one's continent and era of history. Sexual love has existed for thousands of years, perhaps the only personal value that is discovered and earned, threatened by success and treachery, won and lost, transformed irrevocably by the purpose of sex -- children.

You were once a child, the product of sexual love, something that may have been a mistake in judgment, fogged by animal physiology, no different than other species. The bonds and boxes of family (or lack thereof) shape who we are as a people. That Austrian economics is deaf to this principle explains why libertarianism remains an inarticulate craving for high crimes and misdemeanors, baseline treason. Let's compare and contrast a life of duty. My recent fiction stars a USMC officer who resigned his commission because he was revulsed by killing, the sole mission of Marines, the "devil dogs" trained to fight as a team, to obey every command unquestioningly and immediately without flinching from peril. Marines are front line infantrymen, tasked to take real estate and hold it by force.

Without such men we would not be having this conversation. In ancient times, Marines were the backbone of maritime empire, stationed shipboard to enforce order and attack on shore, expeditionary forces to win supplies and defeat all opposition. Cannonade (in modern times aerial bombardment) cannot take, it can only destroy. Marines take territory and resources. "Boots" as they are called sarcastically by Marines are troops organized into an Army, clumsy in operation, fueled by a deluxe supply chain and leisurely, well planned deployment. The Marines land first, poorly equipped except by their fierce character as fighting men.

I speak of these matters to highlight our collective debt to crime. Whether it's Israel or USA, history is a trail of tears, unending war, political oppression, economic waste and fraudulent claims of wisdom and justice. Through it all, sex and family shaped what men did and why. Their women reared children to enter into battle with each other and for or against the men in power. Transition to a modestly peaceful postwar civil society in the late 20th century is comfortable, but little else has changed. Sex and family still determines our destiny.

The challenge of liberty is to make a choice, to join the Marines or avoid duty. I'm not certain which is more honorable. As a small and sensitive man, I was ill suited to fighting. I avoided fights as a child, as a young man, and later in life as a filmmaker. Had I been more aggressive and ruthless, I would have won a more successful career in Hollywood, I'm certain of it, and I could recite a string of incidents in which I was self-defeated by cowardice. I turned down an opportunity to make a slasher movie, fully funded and easily done. I abhored violence.

This does not make me an antiwar libertarian. The fact of the matter is that my survival and happiness depends on marines, literal U.S. Marine infantrymen and their civilian brothers in spirit who manufacture government and capital goods. Using the platform of luxury that we all share in the modern world, I am writing an article on the topic of crime. It was not a crime to fight the American Revolutionary War of Independence, nor any of the global conflicts that predated my life. What happened in Vietnam and more recently Iraq was tragedy, rather than a sudden perversion of American power. Nothing surpassed the perversion of American life by African slavery and the Civil War. There is endless suffering to come, a nation divided by DNA. The melting pot theory is rhetorical and theoretical.

It's not my purpose to complain. The goal of my work has been to advance a few ideas that could influence history, principally a new constitutional framework for the practice of law and profession of justice. It was a job I did not volunteer to undertake. I was forced to swear it as a solemn purpose, after spending two years in Federal prison and observing many cases among the men who were likewise deemed felons. I did time with Gordon Liddy. I bunked with murderers, bank robbers, drug dealers, and white collar criminals. Every one of them had families and children, enjoyed music, wanted freedom and prosperity. As a jailhouse lawyer, I freed three of them and won early parole for another guy -- but the challenge of discerning apolitical constitutional law as it might and ought to be was a difficult task.

It only took 25 years to make good on that mission, to redefine justice and frame an organic document constituting laissez faire law. The achievement was a great burden of duty that finally ended, thankfully. It was done at a time when Laissez Faire City was desperately in need of due process of law. Had it been ratified as a constitutional legal regime, it may have saved Laissez Faire City from implosion. No free society can survive without the rule of law.

We should be careful when using that phrase, the rule of law. It has nothing to do with the whims of a legislature or tyrant. I will quote an opinion of counsel I filed with the leadership of Laissez Faire City in January 2000, predating the Freeman's Constitution of August 2001, which elaborated this simple idea: "In a laissez faire community of any kind, physical or digital, the rule of law arises from and requires all of the following: a constitutional right to practice legal representation on behalf of others; the right of practicing lawyers to associate for the purpose of selecting judges who, on appointment to the bench, are barred from private legal practice; and the right of any person or organized group to obey and execute lawful orders that may be issued from time to time by the courts so created. The jursidiction of laissez faire constitutional law and the courts which duly interpret and uphold such principles exists globally and perpetually as a matter of right. Laissez faire constitutional law flows from a single proposition, which is that no one may legally judge his own cause of action or act to penalize another without fair public trial and impartial due process of law. Laissez faire law is discovered and demonstrated in the process of litigation and trial. It cannot be legislated, codified, or imposed by a 'lawgiver'."

Whether that makes sense to you or not is unimportant. What I wish to impart is extremely simple. My conception of laissez faire justice set forth in The Freeman's Constitution was an act of treason, no different than the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The quarto volume of my book Laissez Faire Law paid tribute to our gallant forefathers by choosing the Amazon retail price of $17.76. (you can get it half price at Lulu.com)

Treason describes most crimes, disobedience to established order.