When individuals establish for themselves a government of their own choosing, they generally establish a structure for that government, and explicitly spell out the mission of that government, its purposes, and most importantly, the limitations they impose upon that government. Every bit of detail which outlines the functions of the various branches and bureaucracies of a government is in and of itself a kind of parameter which limits the scope of government to a particular area. Governments which step outside of the boundaries of these missions are generally held to be in violation of the charters and constitutions which give them their authority. In short, a government which violates its mission by stepping beyond the boundaries of its enumerated authorities and roles has abdicated its claim to legitimacy. It is no longer a government of informed consent; it is instead a government which exists in spite of consent and whose continued existence depends on misinformed consent.

In an earlier section, I delineated between the state and the nation by distinguishing the former as the various bureaucracies, organizations, and entities established ostensibly to help the state fulfill its mission while classifying the latter as the people, the land they occupy or hold claim to, and the ideals which those people sincerely believe represent their unique identity as a country. In nearly every state, there is a fundamental bifurcation between the ideals of the people and the actions of the state. Our laws flow from those commonly held ideals which we share with each other, at least insofar as those laws represent what we believe about ourselves and our country. The inevitable result of the state is that those laws are perverted against the very ideals which gave rise to the state and its foundation in various charters and constitutions.

The state accomplishes its abuses in a two-fold manner: it either ignores the laws which its agents find to be archaic and in conflict with some overriding state interest, or it codifies the power to override individual liberty into the very law which flows from a constitution whose very purpose was to prevent abuses of individual liberty by limiting government to a defined role. Ends justify means in either case according to those individual agents, elected or otherwise, who perpetuate the erosion of freedom in order to promote expansions of state authority at the expense of individual liberty and self-determination. These men and women share a commitment to pragmatism above all else, and, as noted in another section, this commitment to an ends justifying means philosophy naturally results in their classification as Leftists. Some will call them utilitarians, but for my own purposes, I refer to them as Leftists. The end result of this pragmatism over principle is that any claim of the state can be justified in hypothetical contexts if not in real world precedents.

For instance, we have never encountered a situation where an individual with knowledge of a deployed dirty bomb was apprehended before the detonation of said bomb, and where intelligence agents had the opportunity through interrogation to prevent the detonation of the bomb in question by using any and all means imaginable. Yet because such a hypothetical is possible, even though it isn’t at all likely, intelligence agencies and defense hawks argue that they need to be legally permitted to torture not only the suspect, but also his children and his spouse in order to compel him to give up what he knows. The torture rises to the point of sexual mutilation of the children, to the point where an infant’s testicles can be crushed in order to compel his father and mother to divulge information, though they are merely suspects and have not even be charged, tried, or convicted of any crime.

This sort of reasoning, based at is it is entirely on hypothetical eventualities or possibilities, can be used to justify any behavior by a state. The logical extension of such logic is thus: we know that a terrorist group resides within a particularly populous area, and that they possess materials which can be used to construct a nuclear bomb. Due to the intelligence we’ve already gleaned, we can be fairly certain that they are already in the process of constructing said bomb. They are actually near deploying the bomb to its target, and their departure from the populous area is impending.

We have the means to strike to preempt their attack, but the strike will involve killing tens of thousands of people in order to eliminate the threat posed by two dozen individuals. However, if the two dozen people in question are successful, their bomb will kill hundreds of thousands. This is the moral and ethical calculus posed by pragmatism, utilitarianism, or Leftism.

The whole of our perspective is comprised of two options, either/or. Both lead to the destruction of human life, but one leads to the destruction of less human life. Then again, given our intelligence agency’s history of lying, assassination, conducting human experiments outside the purview of law, and various other improprieties and illegalities, how do we know that in this particular instance they are telling the truth to us? We know only because they are us. They are an agency of our government. That’s the whole of their credibility, and their shared nationality with us is supposed to expunge or negate their long-documented and oft-lamented record of wrongdoing.

We believe that they exist for our defense, and that their actions, no matter how reprehensible when taken in separately by themselves, are somehow rendered acceptable within a context that remains forever classified or hidden for purposes of national security. This despite the fact that declassified examples have routinely exposed the agencies in question as having no basis from which to assert that their actions were in fact related to national security. Usually, the intelligence community and the security establishment as a whole use national security and the penumbral secrecy thereof to hide evidence of their own incompetence and malfeasance so that they are never held to an account for their failures. By the time declassification occurs, those responsible have long since died, and the public’s outrage has faded. Many individuals who read of the acts in question at the time of their declassification were not even alive at the time the illegalities occurred.

Claims of national security are a key part of the state’s reliance upon myth: one can absolve oneself of accountability for any number of transgression by ensuring they remain hidden in perpetuity, or at least as long as one is alive. In this way the guilty parties ride off into the future to enjoy their lives after entire careers filled with theft, murder, and torture, each example of which was committed supposedly in service of the country and the security of its people. If this is the case, why not have it all out in the open? Surely we can judge for ourselves whether or not a state-sponsored assassination was in fact in our interest.

This is the key distinction between the state and the individual: an individual who commits the sort of acts committed by an intelligence operative is said to be sociopathic and even criminal, while the intelligence or defense operative can continue through the decades of his career racking up impressive statistics even by the standards of our most prolific sadists and serial killers.

For our purposes, let’s reflect a moment on the Holocaust, a tragic genocide in which the lives of six million Jews were systematically extinguished for no other reason than their race. They were judged as complicit in the real or imagined crimes of their forefathers and peers, regardless of their actual involvement in the banking establishment which allegedly brought about Germany’s decline during and after World War I. If the Jews in fact possessed such influence and vast power, as the National Socialists and other backwards bigots alleged, one wonders why such a powerful race was unable to prevent the genocide of six million of its own people. They financed armies, moved nations against their own interests and for the interests of the Jews, and possessed the world’s banking system at their disposal, if one believes the sort of rhetoric propagated by inbred bigots and morons. Yet when a failed artist and World War I veteran set in motion events which would kill six million of their kind, they were unable to prevent the genocide from occurring.

The wealthy Jews of Europe had long existed in ghettoes and slums, from which they were unable to escape. They could not move freely throughout much of Europe. In Italy, the Jews had been crammed into one ghetto in Rome. After Italy’s independence, the Italians did take down the walls which prevented the Jews from walking through the city after sundown, but the vast majority of the Jews lacked the means or the wherewithal to go anywhere else. When the Nazis came for Jews of Italy, they backed their trucks right up to the entrance of the ghetto and began to apprehend them. This took place 300 yards from the Vatican, by the way. These powerful Jews were unable to do anything substantive to resist their persecutors, despite holding sway over the entire world by virtue of their race, if one believes the myth and narrative constructed by the National Socialist state.

Six million people were done in lawfully by a state because of a mythic narrative, with both the myths and the laws constructed by the state who extinguished six million supposedly omnipotent Jews as if it were an afterthought. This was accomplished through the bureaucracies of the German state, through propaganda which flowed from its official ministries and through laws which poured forth from its legislature. The parts of the Holocaust which were not explicitly authorized by the law took place through vaguely constructed laws which gave the government ambiguous powers to subvert the explicit letter of the law in the name of some security interest, some pragmatic concern. Ambiguity in the law is the ally of genocidal maniacs, especially when it empowers a state to override the letter of the law in emergency situations and circumstances.

Now let’s consider another law you may not have heard of, in a place you rarely think of, if you think of it all. In the Bolivian mountains, there is a city named Potosí which lies beneath the Cerro de Potosí, a mountain which sits upon one of the richest silver deposits ever discovered in the history of mankind. Back in the time when Potosí was at its peak, Bolivia was part of the Viceroyalty of Peru under Spanish rule, and the administrator of Potosí, a man named Francisco de Toledo, Count of Oropesa, adapted the Incan system of mita for his own purposes. The Incas had evolved a system of conscription for public service to construct their empire, and owing to their wealth, a family could tend their crops for sixty-five days a year and then spend the rest of the year laboring under the mita system.

Francisco de Toledo’s idea was to use mita for the mining of the silver at Potosí, and the practice eventually evolved into Indian laborers being forced to toil in the mines for months at a time, at a wage which did not equal out to the costs of their subsistence. While the free labor rate was 30 pesos a month, the monthly expenses for food alone came to 28½ pesos. The free laborer also had to pay taxes, and his total expenses for the month were as high as 60 pesos. That’s the free labor rate. If you were conscripted under mita, you were paid around 25 pesos a month at most.

This system and this wage continued for two hundred years, all the way up into the 1800s. The truth was that the mitayo would never get out from under the debts he accumulated under mita, which paid him less than half of what he needed to survive. For him to make up the difference, his wife and children would also have to work in the mines as well. Of course, he would have to feed and shelter them as well.

The fact that forced mine labor was illegal under Spanish law was of no consequence. The fact that Spanish law required mitayos to be paid for their travel to the mine (they were conscripted from all over the Viceroyalty of Peru and had to travel to get to Potosí by foot and through the use of llamas as pack animals) was ignored as well. Eventually the Spanish government repealed the aspects of the law which prohibited forced labor when it became apparent that free labor was more profitable.

This is the state: when the law conflicts with practical purposes of the state and its favored groups, the law is ignored and overlooked. Far from binding the state and men equally, the law holds no efficacy whatsoever to ensure the outcomes for which it was constructed. Then and now, the law is of no concern to the state when the binding power of the law conflicts with the state’s overarching interest, even if that interest is of dubious validity. The Spaniards though they would accomplish cheaper labor costs and better returns through the use of coercive labor practices, but the reality was that on Sunday, the k’apcha workers (workers who worked on Sunday to make up the difference between their wages as free laborers and as mitayos and their actual needs) turned in more silver to the Banco de Rescates than the Spanish did between the years 1773-1777. As noted by John H. Rowe in his article The Incas Under Spanish Colonial Institutions, this fact raises “some interesting reflections on the efficiency of Spanish mining operations (20).”

By some estimates, eight million indigenous people and African slaves died at Potosí due to the harsh labor practices of the Spanish, practices which were arguably inefficient due to the aforementioned k’apcha worker production between 1773-1777. At one point, the Spanish had compelled individual to remain in the mines for periods of four months at a time. Forced labor in the mines was illegal under Spanish law when it began, as was the failure of Spanish officials to compensate mitayos for their travel to Potosí.

This wasn’t capitalism. It wasn’t a free market. The Spanish and didn’t gain their wealth and position, a position which survives to this day in our current world economy, by employing capitalist practices. They gained their wealth by behaving like thugs and ruthlessly crushing any opposition to their practices, even when those practices were illegal by Spanish law. As a state, the Spaniards disregarded their own laws when those laws conflicted with what individual Spaniards or groups among the Spanish elite wanted or saw as conducive to their own interest. The law loses legitimacy when it isn’t enforced equally or fairly, and what is more, a society which has no law has no real structure or consistency and is economically inefficient. People have no motivation to play within the boundaries of the law when the law is merely the instrument with which they are bludgeoned into submitting to policies against their own interest.

All of the colonial powers engaged in this sort of behavior. They had laws which prohibited many of the abuses they engaged in, but it was a state policy to ignore the very laws which limited state abuses if those laws got in the way of what the colonial powers believed to be a profitable course. The natural result of such injustice is strife and revolution, both of which hold bloodshed as a consequence. As further noted by Howe, “…Inca nationalists fought colonial abuses by legal means, petitioned the King for something like equal rights for Indians, and, when peaceful measures proved ineffective, attempted to establish an independent Inca state by armed revolt (158, Ibid emphasis added).

Today, we confiscate the assets of drug dealers and criminals when those assets are accrued through criminal enterprises. Imagine the same logic applied to the various colonial powers who routinely violated the very laws they passed in order to achieve an end. It’s not a comforting thought, but it’s an increasingly likely one in certain instances. The 371 treaties signed by the U.S. government with Indian nations who were recognized as sovereign by the United States at the time of the signings are now coming back to haunt present day landowners, who find that their deed to the land upon which their houses sit is based upon an uncertain and likely illegal provenance. In short, because the United States entered into binding legal agreements Indian nations which established certain territorial and ownership prerogatives, only to disregard those agreements almost immediately after the ink had dried on the documents, modern landowners are finding their ownership of land challenged in court by newly assertive Indian tribes. This is the consequence of a statist disregard for and indifference to the law.

Such statist illegalities hold real consequences for people decades and centuries after the abuse occurs. All that is required is for a court with a rightful sense that contracts cannot be broken with impunity to decide to enforce those contracts decades and centuries after a state broke its legal obligations under the contract with impunity. The bill comes due.

But before it does, human misery reaches catastrophic proportions. We look upon the suffering of the Jews with understandable compassion and we are revolted by the German state’s overreach and abuse. We deny that states can legitimately claim for themselves the power to wipe out entire races of people. But where does the denial begin? Does it apply retroactively to the eight million people who died at Potosí when the Spanish government disregarded its own laws on forced labor and compensation to arrive at a result which its officers and elites perceived as convenient? Can the Spanish state today be sued by the Bolivian government as a representative of those individuals who endured what was arguably a holocaust for the economic convenience and advancement of colonial powers? Probably not. However, when a state violates its own law, the consequences are far reaching.

One could fairly and accurately make the argument that the economic thuggery and lawlessness of the colonial powers is the foundation upon which their current day position and prosperity rest. I am an unabashed capitalist, and I take issue with anyone who suggests that what transpired under colonialism was capitalist. Admittedly, I’m marginal in my views because I also take issue with the idea that there is a true free market anywhere on the planet today. Show me the market without tariffs and barriers to free trade. It doesn’t exist. However, with all of this said, I cannot dispute that economic thuggery and outright lawlessness was the foundation for the prosperity which gives western countries their unique advantage today.

The tariffs and coercive methods which deprived the developing world of a chance then are still in existence today. We allow the developing world to excel at the production of raw goods, but we do not allow them to process those goods. We insist that tea and coffee produced in Africa and South America be processed and finished into a final product in Germany. We erect trade barriers to finished goods from African and South American countries in order to keep them in their place. There are those who argue that these countries aren’t good at manufacturing and processing such products, because they lack the technologies and skills necessary to excel in those areas. We take it as a given that this is the way things are naturally. Without the artificial barriers and economic legacies of colonialism which compel developing countries to specialize in one crop above all others, and deter them from diversifying because those very tariffs prevent them from having an export market and therefore a demand which would enable them to sell their finished products, how can we know that they are just naturally lacking in aptitude?

What’s more, where is the evidence that such arrangements work for us or for them? The idea of a free market, as Bastiat so eloquently pointed out in his work on the subject, is to eliminate scarcity. What does it matter to you or me if we have less in the way of employment if exports make it easier for us to work less and have more? In point of fact, why wouldn’t we want such convenience? Why wouldn’t we want the maximum possible level of that convenience? If you could have the same amount of purchasing power you currently possess working half of the time, would you take the tradeoff?

The acolytes of free trade are not those polished types on CNBC and Fox Business who use empty sloganeering to uphold protectionist policies in banking and decry government interference in fraud riddled financial sectors. In all truth, those types and the interests who own their media outlets are the enemies of free trade. They are the ones at whose behest governments disregard the laws on the books in order to achieve an end, even if it means breaking the law. After their malfeasance is revealed, they exculpate themselves with claims of privilege, or they declare their actions classified and therefore exempt from scrutiny, and they go on their merry little way, breaking the law anew. By the CIA’s own admission, its agents break the law over 100,000 times annually.

These types will tell you that there should be no laws against fraud, as Allan Greenspan allegedly said to then CFTC chairwoman Brooksley Born during their first meeting, for the market should sort out fraud. How can the market punish fraud when bailouts incentivize fraud by providing a publicly funded backstop? You cannot have it both ways. The idea is to have laws, but to protect against their enforcement at all costs. The end result is lawlessness and abuse, and states which careen along, never out of control, but sowing chaos in the lives of middle and working class people the world over with their concerted lawbreaking and malfeasance, and their unequal application of the law as they exempt this person or group while punishing that person or group.

A state above the law is incompatible with individual freedom, and any free people who accept such a state as their own virtually guarantee their enslavement. There is but one appropriate response when the law is of no effect, and that is the overthrow of the lawless state by people who have exhausted legal means and now find themselves forced to choose between slavery and self-determination by a force of their own choosing. Whether it is by the ballot or the bullet, such revolution is never as illegitimate as a state which claims to rest upon the law while simultaneously disregarding that law with wanton impudence. A nation of people whose allegiance is to the ideals for which the state exists to promote, defend, and expand has every right to rebel against a state which departs from those ideals. It is the state which loses its right to continued existence when it departs from the law, and the people hold the rightful power to act. If they fail to do so, everything upon which their lives exist falls. They can have no guarantee of property, for the state may grant them claim to land which it has already granted to another person or group. They can hold no guarantee of individual rights, for their rights are dependent upon the state’s whim at a given time. Order itself ceases to exist in such a nation when a state lays claim to a position above and beyond the law.