In the first, fundamental sense of the term, private government describes the power of each individual to control the conduct of his or her life, whether right or wrong, in sickness and in health, for better or worse, courageously, cowardly, or cooperatively with others. In America, toleration of differences and separation of church and state were a precondition for national union, and it resulted in a widely understood right of individuation legally protected by the First Amendment. The state cannot compel a citizen to attend a church or be taxed to support a religious sect. Individual decisions concerning education, career, marriage, and finance are largely unregulated, despite a mountain of legislation and administrative rules imposed to limit individual choice. Liberty stubbornly persists as a matter of personal aspiration or folly, contrary to the best efforts of family, neighbors, and politicians to induce conformity.
That, however, is not the topic I wish to discuss. Private government has another meaning pertaining to constitutional law, not in the present, but the future. In tempestuous infancy and adolescence, the U.S. Constitution was a legalized tug of war with periodic explosions. Colonial frontier pioneers did not perceive an obligation to be stewards of the planet. The Federal Convention of 1787 did not debate LGBTQ or transgender privileges, and the Civil War was not fought to give birthright citizenship to foreign anchor babies.
American constitutional thumb wrestling was a brief struggle in the sweep of human history, even if we graft it to the dead root of English common law. Some historians point to ancient Rome as a source for concepts like contract, or Bible stories as the source of all law. Athenian aristocrats experimented with democracy and trial by jury. The Code of Hammurabi is taught in U.S. law schools as the ancient basis of equity and criminal law, improved incrementally by thousands of years of judicial and legislative thought.
Wait a minute. Spaceflight was derived from rock throwing?
Obviously not. The American Experiment was a clean break with all previous governments, and it was totally rewritten twice, by Civil War and by 20th Century Supreme Court decisions. If the Founding Fathers knew what we've done to their Constitution, they'd shout from their graves to damn us. Everything in law today is a radical break from its original intent, no better than juvenile delinquency, defying Madison and Franklin and Otis. You don't know who Otis was. Nor do you know why Franklin proposed that judges should be elected by lawyers, or why Madison opposed a Bill of Rights. Without Madison, Franklin, and Otis, there would be no Constitution to reinterpret and coin gay marriage rights.
Be that as it may, I'm not interested in political footstamping or current notions of political rights. What matters is the future, and I'd like to return to the idea of private government. Let's suppose that the public tussel of democracy is arbitrary and unpredictable. The United States is a bankrupt nonprofit corporation, a global welfare fountain that no one owns.
Private government is totally different. Instead of voting, free of charge, expecting the U.S. to hand you a pile of benefits, in a private government there are joint venturers (partners) who pony up "cash calls" to retain their right to elect a board of directors. There are no taxes, no regulation of commerce, no social benefits. The sole function of a private government is national defense, funded by insurance companies, banks, and wealthy individual citizens who can afford to buy a vote to determine the scale and scope of national defense. It's less nutty than it sounds. The American Revolution was funded entirely by private backers and fought by volunteer civilians.
I wrote a short story and recorded a lecture to explicate the idea.
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Showing posts with label war powers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war powers. Show all posts
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Monday, December 10, 2018
Liberty and force
I recently recorded a video and wrote a companion short story concerning the Executive, by which I mean a professional military compatible with anarchist theory, the rule of law, and competitive free market private enterprise.
In simple terms, the Executive is a traffic cop backed by nuclear weapons. Someone should possess the awesome power to deter aggression. I propose to make it a private firm owned by money center banks, insurance companies, pension funds, lunatic billionaires and other financial heavyweights, combined in a privately held consortium with periodic cash calls to fund national security in a fully free financial Wild West.
Ooooo! -- sounds dangerous all of a sudden. Free market capitalism, no regulators. Investors would probably go for it, let Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan direct the military and pay for it. I'll bet $100 to a donut that UBS and Deutsche Bank will want a piece of the action, too. There are numerous institutions who are hungry for freedom and prepared to pony up.
The price of civil liberty is small. A free society must have a judiciary to settle disputes and to control civilian police charged to investigate and deter street crime and murder. Matters like fraud are common law wrongs, often entailing class action and restraining orders to stop the looting and freeze funds. Money damages are the only remedy in common law jurisdictions. Shareholder suits are common. If our laissez faire judiciary is fair and objective, big financial institutions will be drawn irresistibly. Banks thrive in orderly, stable legal relationships. Every financial instrument, derivative, option, mortgage, share of stock, life insurance policy, and pension benefit is a contract. Why write bogus paper? Nothing but problems, wreck the firm and lose everything. Wall Street is loaded with lawyers to make sure that financial contracts are fair, valid, and enforceable. There are trillions of dollars backing those agreements.
Those trillions are thirsting for real security. A free society and its courts must be domiciled somewhere in the physical world. Court costs are pennies compared to national security. For instance, the Executive handles air traffic control, suppression of piracy and terrorism, armed defense of a geographic territory and sufficient clout to deter aggression by hostile foreign governments, of which there are many today and will be for the foreseeable future. Getting along with them financially involves project finance and all sorts of tax gymnastics that will remain worthwhile for traditional players like HSBC and sovereign wealth funds. Many states detest the idea of freedom, especially China, Russia, Britain, France, USA -- the permanent members of the Security Council and insatiable tax leeches. Not one of them is financially solvent or efficiently managed. Their idiotic plan for global progress is to "save the planet" and shuffle additional tens of millions of penniless migrants to Europe and America.
The Executive Branch handles immigration in a free society, requiring passports, a plausible purpose to enter the market, and enough money or sponsorship to find a place to work and reside. No special status for diplomats or divas. Common law means common law in all of the Executive activities at territorial borders, airports, seaports, etc.
Most the Executive's power is held in reserve to deal with the unexpected. There is an air force and a navy, a professional nucleus of army officers and troops, security men to guard the Commander-in-Chief and military sites. Not a penny more than essential facilities and trained personnel. That's the beauty of private funding by cheapskate bankers, who will try to trim every national defense line item, but provide enough dough to protect their golden goose, a free market without financial regulation. A good rule of thumb is 1% of GDP for national security expense including procurement and maintenance. That might translate in the financial sector to a 0.05% annual haircut, the highest "tax" rate on earth, but they get to vote as shareholders, choose directors, set policy, and control what the Executive does.
Civilian control of the military is a natural condition. Private enterprise is the engine of all value creation and free cash flow. Finance fuels the market and connects entrepreneurs to capital investors, lenders, and insurers. Successful enterprises pay the freight for national security. As old stodgy companies are displaced by new high tech market entrants, shares in the Executive might change hands. National security might grow or shrink, depending on the tenor of the times. It's impossible to predict how long freedom and security would exist, if young Turks refuse to fork over funds. No one can be compelled to support the Executive.
The one thing that threatens a free society most of all is NAP, the idea that military force is wrong, no matter what the mission or legal basis. The same complaint can be levied against law courts, police, private property, and a currency of paper bank notes. It doesn't matter what folks think or say about the use of force. War is hell. It destroys homes and factories, breaks things and kills people. No one really wants war, except the masses whipped into a frenzy by a charsimatic fool. I recommend using a weathervane. If the Commander-in-Chief starts making bizarre televised speeches about patriotism, that's the time to skeedaddle.
In modern America, we've been led by aristocrats, community organizers, schoolteachers, spooks, and jovial showmen who were democratically elected one man one vote. Every one of those plebeicites increased the size of government and waged wars. That's why I'm quits with voting. I'd rather give the job of control to a board of directors representing financial interests. No banker on earth would agree to war if he had to pay for it in cash, scarce capital squandered on destruction, markets monkeywrenched by fear.
Meanwhile, don't cross the Executive's red lines. No terrorism. No threats.
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Monday, October 29, 2018
Uh, immigration
With thousands marching toward the border, President Trump is prepared to deploy troops to (shoot them?) uh, do something by golly (put them on buses, to be fed, housed, educated, and doctored in humane detention centers? asylum claims filed? given transport home?)
Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Asians who came on student or tourist visas and forgot to leave. No one knows where they are. Ten or twelve million illegal aliens are loose in Los Angeles and San Francisco, swelling welfare rolls, working as casual day laborers with fake identity documents, concealing and enabling MS-13 gang members.
Since everyone else is talking about immigration, I suppose I'll have to say something, too. I'm supposed to be a sharp cookie, specialized in constitutional theory, right?
Let's begin with previous writing. Liberty trumps property. There have to be public roads to facilitate travel between Point A and Point B. That said, no one has a natural right to trespass on private property, except power lines, pipelines, and other sorts of community facilities like airport approaches that limit airspace and subsurface resources that extend underneath multiple properties and have to be unitized as a matter of equity.
Speaking of equity reminds me of another dozen ways that neighbors can limit what you do with private property. If you invite MS-13 to set up a base of operations on your land, there is nothing in law to stop neighbors from waging war via police or private action. The caravan of thousands marching toward private land on the border are likewise a "public nuisance" that could be ordered to scram, to cease and desist clogging up Border Patrol operations. If a court order is ignored, they could be imprisoned until they comply.
Unfortunately, court orders are appealable, so we'd end up detaining them pending review by a circuit court and conceivably the Supreme Court. If a cake shop dispute can go all the way to the Supreme Court, there's little doubt that thousands of asylum seekers could do it, too, claiming to be wrongfully detained, denied due process, racially profiled, ill-treated while in custody, and so on. It's a sort of No Win clusterfuck.
If it were up to me, I'd build a fenced highway from the border to the nearest Salvation Army soup kitchen, and let private charities deal with refugees, however many make it across the border. Border Patrol should identify and arrest evil men disfigured with MS-13 tatoos, turn them over to ICE for detention, interrogation, and prosecution. I am opposed to the death penalty and cruel punishments, but war powers could be invoked against drug dealing, with POW camps established at the border. MS-13 gang members arrested in Long Island or LA or Chicago can be sent to the POW camp. There's no Geneva Convention privilege to distribute heroin and phentanol, to intimidate and imperil U.S. citizens.
Can Congress declare war on MS-13? Sure. It's a cohesive foreign force.
Obviously, that's not going to happen. We can't rely on Congress to do anything logical or timely. Think about it. What should private actors do when confronted by evil? Turn a blind eye to women and children, help them to reach safety, far from the field of battle.
Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Asians who came on student or tourist visas and forgot to leave. No one knows where they are. Ten or twelve million illegal aliens are loose in Los Angeles and San Francisco, swelling welfare rolls, working as casual day laborers with fake identity documents, concealing and enabling MS-13 gang members.
Since everyone else is talking about immigration, I suppose I'll have to say something, too. I'm supposed to be a sharp cookie, specialized in constitutional theory, right?
Let's begin with previous writing. Liberty trumps property. There have to be public roads to facilitate travel between Point A and Point B. That said, no one has a natural right to trespass on private property, except power lines, pipelines, and other sorts of community facilities like airport approaches that limit airspace and subsurface resources that extend underneath multiple properties and have to be unitized as a matter of equity.
Speaking of equity reminds me of another dozen ways that neighbors can limit what you do with private property. If you invite MS-13 to set up a base of operations on your land, there is nothing in law to stop neighbors from waging war via police or private action. The caravan of thousands marching toward private land on the border are likewise a "public nuisance" that could be ordered to scram, to cease and desist clogging up Border Patrol operations. If a court order is ignored, they could be imprisoned until they comply.
Unfortunately, court orders are appealable, so we'd end up detaining them pending review by a circuit court and conceivably the Supreme Court. If a cake shop dispute can go all the way to the Supreme Court, there's little doubt that thousands of asylum seekers could do it, too, claiming to be wrongfully detained, denied due process, racially profiled, ill-treated while in custody, and so on. It's a sort of No Win clusterfuck.
If it were up to me, I'd build a fenced highway from the border to the nearest Salvation Army soup kitchen, and let private charities deal with refugees, however many make it across the border. Border Patrol should identify and arrest evil men disfigured with MS-13 tatoos, turn them over to ICE for detention, interrogation, and prosecution. I am opposed to the death penalty and cruel punishments, but war powers could be invoked against drug dealing, with POW camps established at the border. MS-13 gang members arrested in Long Island or LA or Chicago can be sent to the POW camp. There's no Geneva Convention privilege to distribute heroin and phentanol, to intimidate and imperil U.S. citizens.
Can Congress declare war on MS-13? Sure. It's a cohesive foreign force.
Obviously, that's not going to happen. We can't rely on Congress to do anything logical or timely. Think about it. What should private actors do when confronted by evil? Turn a blind eye to women and children, help them to reach safety, far from the field of battle.
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