RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hardcore libertarians differentiate between pro-Trump patriots and Black Lives Matter detritus.

BLM rioters trashed, looted, and leveled their countrymen’s private property, their businesses.

Democratic stormtroopers harassed their fellow Americans—meek men and women in eateries, in shopping malls, in the inner sanctum of their homes—often forcing innocents to kneel or recite repulsive, self-incriminating racial catechisms.

These Mao-like cultural revolutionaries descended like locusts on places where their fellow Americans shop and socialize, sadistically threatening, and often visiting, physical harm upon their countrymen, unless they knelt before them like slaves.

In contrast, the ragtag men and women of the MAGA movement stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State.

Yet, in reply to the fact that “entire cities were burned to the ground” by the Left’s militarized BLM troops, some of the staunchest of conservatives, staffers at Breitbart, purportedly concluded in error that “storming the Capitol building” is much worse than “than burning down strip malls.”

Wrong.

Hardcore libertarians, very plainly, think the opposite. Like us or not, the radical, libertarian propertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway—will strongly disagree with the contention of the Trump-blaming Breitbarters.

A certain kind of libertarian, the good kind, distinguishes clearly between those who, like BLM, would trash, loot and level private property—the livelihoods and businesses of private citizens—and between those who would storm the plush seats of state power and corruption.

For the state is an entity that, by definition, forsakes the legitimate defense of the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens. The state’s standard operating procedure is to fleece us without flinching, all the better to fatten its members and, reflexively, to increase their sphere of influence.

Libertarians who live by the axiom of nonaggression will always prefer the man who proceeds against the state, governed as it is by force, to the man who destroys private property, rooted as that institution is in peaceful, just, voluntary transactions.

There, I’ve said it!

It’s no secret that rock-ribbed libertarians—as opposed to the lite, establishment libertarian—view the state, certainly in its current iteration, as a criminal enterprise. For it operates with force and without the consent of the governed.

If tempted, foolishly, to argue this theoretical point, think only of the meaning of the 2020 election, whereby 81,283,098 million people, or 51.3 percent of those who voted, not of the people, get to impose their will on 74,222,958, or 46.8 percent of the voters, as well as on the millions who didn’t vote.

Moreover—and since we are no longer a republic in which central authorities have only limited and delimited powers—all the people in the commonwealth are compelled to do as the “permanent state” and the newly minted state dictate.

No! Government governs without the consent of the governed, for the most part, and with the backing of oft-brutal police powers.

Which is why, incidentally, Tucker Carlson’s question to a guest on his eponymous Fox News show the other day was so misguided.

The young lady’s two small businesses had been bankrupted by her state’s brutal lockdown regimen, which targeted her tiny enterprises, but not the big-box retailers around them. Why was she still paying her taxes, Tucker inquired?

Really?

Taxes are not voluntary. The state is not based on the principle of voluntary association. Tucker ought to try to withhold his taxes. Fail to fork over the shakedown funds extracted by the syndicate that is the state—and you’ll find yourself in a cell.

Incontestably, your money, as a private individual working in the private economy, comes from the avails of your labor and is 100 percent yours in natural law. As such, you should be able to withdraw it from an agency that doesn’t serve you—and even harms you—to give to one that does. But you can’t.

For that peaceful act of financial secession, the state will deprive you of your liberty.

Expose the Welfare-Warfare Surveillance State in all its depredations and you’ll find yourself entombed forever, like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden (who, at least, lives free in Russia).

“What I saw in the Capitol on January 6,” lamented NeverTrumper Matt Labash at the Spectator, “made me physically sick . . . I couldn’t tell the difference [between the] Red Hats [and Antifa]. They [the Red Hats] were desecrating something they pretend to love.”

Truth be told, to the non-statist libertarian, those “citadels of democracy” mean very little that is good. Loss of life we lament—but the song-and-dance about the trampling of those citadels we consider overheated.

Our country is not to be equated with our Capitol.

Certainly, sickening is the cowardice of the garrison city-state that is Washington, D.C. In particular, the way the political parasites who comprise it are shielding themselves from us, as they deny us the right to protect private property from them and from their moral emissaries, Black Lives Matter.