Aggression and Police Power

[Wolf DeVoon]

Since it came up in conversation, let's talk about aggression.

The practical force of government is called "the police power." Projected internationally, it becomes "national security." At its core it is aggressive; it compels obedience at the point of a gun or a submarine armed with nuclear weapons. There is no way to justify this aggression with happy talk about self-defense or abstract defense of the innocent. Cops and soldiers are forbidden to question the wisdom of government policy, rarely actuated by defense. Policy is driven by the goal of winning and exercising police power.

Our "police action" in deposing Saddam Hussein became a 10-year cavalcade of aggression and exhaustion. All policing ends up like that. The War on Drugs failed. Prohibition of alcohol failed. Today, peace and security domestically and internationally are shot. The only thing  that cops are thinking about now is how to survive another attack by a sniper or a suicide bomber. They don't care about unstoppable urban crime. Our 50-year War on Poverty was an exercise of police power, compelling social progress, and it failed for that reason.

What we do as individuals determines all human progress, including American industry and commerce. Corporations are led by aggressive CEOs. A little reflection will persuade you that individuals matter -- Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos.

Aggressive competition is the rule in commerce and nearly universal in our personal affairs and family life. If you have children, it entails private exercise of police power as head of household. Infants are incapable of deciding if their health is best served by legally mandated (school district police power) inoculations and vaccines. Husbands and wives compete as often as they cooperate, and it is a happy individual indeed who leads a household without opposition and sabotage. Women can become cunning tyrants and husbands pretend to be happy, or vice versa, concealing the private truth of slavery. Single parent households have to be ruled by aggressive adult willpower to prevent children from veering into drugs and street life.

The impact of private aggression in family life and competitive commerce is small compared to government aggression, which honestly has no limit intellectually if you grant government police power for any reason. No serious person asserts that government mustn't initiate force or that it might operate under a pledge of allegiance to fine calculations of ethical behavior. No way. Government seeks to perpetuate and grow itself. That's been settled law in the U.S. since Hamilton defined the doctrine of "implied powers," the right of government to survive, no matter what the Constitution says. States cannot secede. We slaughtered 700,000 men to aggressively assert federal police power. The Civil War cost five times our total GNP of 1860, and we repaid private gold loans with worthless paper greenbacks.

The Federal Reserve Note in your wallet is a debt instrument. It is not money with intrinsic value like silver or platinum, industrial commodities in short supply. So you're screwed again monetarily by police power. Inflation could wipe out your savings, your fixed income, and entitlement payola courtesy of police power that eats two-thirds of the Federal budget. The only way to roll our unpayable Treasury debt is to devalue the dollar again. Not a new policy. A nickel was worth a 2016 dollar when Ayn Rand came to America.

Your liberty and privacy are toast. Public worry about security will inspire fascism on top of social welfare concordance, amplifying individual aggression. Potential promotion of Donald Trump from private tyrant to Sovereign Executive, backed by the world's largest military and homeland security layered in federal, state and local police, is not happy news. Clinton's brazen shakedown looks benign by comparison. All she wants is your money and property.

But not Trump. He doesn't want your money. He's going to defend us, worldwide, by waging war overseas and reinforcing police power at home. Good time to buy prison shares, Ruger, S&W, and whatever name Blackwater goes by these days. Not a good time to hoard cash.

One last point, please, about police power. The police were unable to stop recent homeland terrorist attacks. The FBI knew about the 9/11 trainee pilots and movements in Los Angeles. CIA had chatter about an impending attack. All the king's horses and all the king's men are frail and human and cowed by competing politicians in various offices of police power.

Cops and soldiers are extremely vulnerable as combatants, no matter how heavily armored and protected from incoming fire. They tend to shoot first and prevail in the court of public opinion. Support Our Troops despite the fact we gambled and lost, got no Iraq oil, and created jihadi blowback with captured U.S. tanks, machine guns, mortars and ammo. Your tax dollars at work. Seven years of Obama was fatal to roughly a million people in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Trump promises to declare war. Confrontations with Iran, Russia, and China seem likely.

Global police power? -- military aggression, flirting with genocide.

We killed 10 percent of the entire population of Vietnam, and we lost the war. Please do not argue that we could have won. Police power does not work. Total war multiplies the deaths, but does not change the outcome. And we are no longer in a position to police much of anything:

Quote

The United States’ military posture is rated as marginal and is trending toward weak... The shift in two services—the Army and Air Force—to a lower category in the course of a single year is surprising and should be seen as evidence of the rapidly accumulating effects of inadequate funding during a time of higher operational demand.

(Heritage Foundation 2016 Index of U.S. Military Strength)

compare:
https://www.sdvfp.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/proposed-total-fy2013-np.jpg
https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/2016-budget-chart-total-spending2.png
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444914904577619671931313542
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/10/us-usa-defense-navy-idUSKBN0M61V520150310

bottom line:
http://www.armytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/07/09/army-outlines-40000-cuts/29923339/
In total, the Army will have cut 120,000 soldiers – or 21 percent of the active force – since 2012

http://index.heritage.org/militarystrength/chapter/us-power/us-air-force/
The Air Force’s capacity in terms of number of aircraft has been on a constant downward slope since 1952... The F-16, the most numerous platform at 913 aircraft, has consumed 80 percent of its expected life span. The KC-135 comprises 87 percent of the Air Force’s tankers and is over 50 years old. The aircraft’s reliability is at risk due to problems linked to its age and high usage rate.

------

I believe that there are two possible views of Objectivism in American history. I tend to agree with the mainstream consensus, that Rand's salad days were in the 60s and early 70s, after which her ideas were erased by tens of millions of Boomers who wanted it all: reason, liberty, drugs, socialism, and solar power. A minority view is that some day in the unspecified future, Objectivism will be widely accepted and persuade government to back off. I suppose it's possible when all the "Me Generation" Boomers die off, but polls indicate that Millennials are more socialist than capitalist, less curious about philosophy than wearable tech, so a resurgence of Objectivism is likely doomed to an unspecified very distant future.

Scholarship in feminist interpretations of Objectivism annoyed me, as did presentation of Rand's work by an exercise equipment salesman. Fortunately, the future belongs to practical factors that can't be ignored and take no study to comprehend. The police power is an enemy of the good, namely our individual choices as private actors in business and family life. The thing to do as freemen is protect and guide our children and employees. Nothing else can or will demonstrate the physical punch of Objectivism.

If you have no children to raise, no payroll to meet, you aren't in the game. Romance with a government or the general public is -- as they say in Spanish -- paso tiempo, a hypnotic distraction for donors, candidates, journalists and teachers, which ends in more police power, less liberty.

 

 

[BaalChatzaf]

9 hours ago, wolfdevoon said:

Since it came up in conversation, let's talk about aggression.

The practical force of government is called "the police power." Projected internationally, it becomes "national security." At its core it is aggressive; it compels obedience at the point of a gun or a submarine armed with nuclear weapons. There is no way to justify this aggression with happy talk about self-defense or abstract defense of the innocent. Cops and soldiers are forbidden to question the wisdom of government policy, rarely actuated by defense. Policy is driven by the goal of winning and exercising police power.

Tell us, in practical terms,  what a government without police power is.  Can it exist.   If a government cannot enFORCE the laws  then how can it function?

BTW, military personal can refuse to carry out an illegal order.  This requires some courage since the invocation of illegality my have to be defended in a military court martial.   But the claim  "I vas only followink  orders"  no long is regarded as valid. 

[Wolf DeVoon]

9 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Tell us, in practical terms, what a government without police power is. Can it exist.  If a government cannot enFORCE the laws then how can it function?

BTW, military personal can refuse to carry out an illegal order. This requires some courage since the invocation of illegality my have to be defended in a military court martial. But the claim  "I vas only followink  orders"  no long is regarded as valid. 

A government (that is, an Executive Branch and a Legislative Body to regulate spending and authorize certain actions like war) could be devoted entirely to defense of the borders, projecting that defense as far as necessary with weapons systems and intelligence gathering. Perhaps you recall I agree with Franklin that judges should be elected by lawyers, entirely depoliticized and governed by a separate judicial constitution.

It would be nice if soldiers or cops could interpret what constitutes an "illegal order." Can you think of a modern U.S. case?

 

[SteveWolfer]

1 hour ago, wolfdevoon said:

It would be nice if soldiers or cops could interpret what constitutes an "illegal order."

 

It has always been held that ignorance of the law is no excuse.  For commonsense reasons.   Can't have a criminal defense of, "I didn't know it wasn't okay to kill someone". 

 

"Ignorance is no excuse" makes possible a key element of crime - mensa re (guilty mind).  But this only makes sense when there aren't too many laws.  And when most of the laws that exist prohibit acts that are obviously wrong in themselves (malum in se), such as rape, murder, and theft.  There were other things the state decided to prohibit (malum prohibitum), but they were very few in the past.

 

Today, we often haven’t the least idea whether we have broken a law.  So many things have become federal crimes that it is impossible to keep track of them.  (To say nothing of the state and local laws).

 

Much of this is material I pulled from Charles Murray's book "By the People":  At the turn of the century nearly all criminal laws were at the state level and fewer than a dozen were federal (treason, bribery of a federal official, etc.)  By WWI there were about 500.  As of 2007 there were 4,450.  The increase from 1980 to 2007 was over 50%.

 

RCO doctrine is the Responsible Corporate Officer doctrine which now has been taken to mean that the officer doesn’t need mensa re (no knowledge of wrong-doing) but also no overt action – it could now be interpreted a crime of omission.  A corporate officer could be found guilty of a crime for not doing something he knew nothing of.  And this is happening more and more.

 

Civil law that is sufficiently arbitrary and capricious is indistinguishable from lawlessness.
Sarbanes-Oxley Act is 810 pages long, ObamaCare is 1,024 pages long, Dodd-Frank is 2,300 pages long, the Tax Code is almost 4,000,000 words long.

 

All of this applies to soldiers and law enforcement officers.  They can't refuse to carry out an act because it is unlawful without knowing the laws.  But if there are too many laws, or they are too poorly written to understand or apply, that becomes an unresolvable problem.

 

I have a section in my book on the nature of government: "Lawlessness obtains when the laws are so poorly constructed ... they [aren't] understandable or when laws are impossible to follow or ... [are] so many that nearly everything is illegal or when the enforcement of the laws is unequal, undependable or arbitrary.  ...there [can be] many ways that bad laws and/or bad enforcement is the same as lawlessness."

 

     The more corrupt the State, the more numerous the laws.   
         ~~~~~~~~  Tacitus

 

     It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice,
     if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.   
          ~~~~~~~~~~  James Madison

 

 

[BaalChatzaf]

26 minutes ago, SteveWolfer said:

 

It has always been held that ignorance of the law is no excuse.  For commonsense reasons.   Can't have a criminal defense of, "I didn't it wasn't okay to kill someone". 

 

"Ignorance is no excuse" makes possible a key element of crime - mensa re (guilty mind).  But this only makes sense when there aren't too many laws.  And when most of the laws that exist prohibit acts that are obviously wrong in themselves (malum in se), such as rape, murder, and theft.  There were other things the state decided to prohibit (malum prohibitum), but they were very few in the past.

 

Today, we often haven’t the least idea whether we have broken a law.  So many things have become federal crimes that it is impossible to keep track of them.  (To say nothing of the state and local laws).

 

Much of this is material I pulled from Charles Murray's book "By the People":  At the turn of the century nearly all criminal laws were at the state level and fewer than a dozen were federal (treason, bribery of a federal official, etc.)  By WWI there were about 500.  As of 2007 there were 4,450.  The increase from 1980 to 2007 was over 50%.

 

RCO doctrine is the Responsible Corporate Officer doctrine which now has been taken to mean that the officer doesn’t need mensa re (no knowledge of wrong-doing) but also no overt action – it could now be interpreted a crime of omission.  A corporate officer could be found guilty of a crime for not doing something he knew nothing of.  And this is happening more and more.

 

Civil law that is sufficiently arbitrary and capricious is indistinguishable from lawlessness.
Sarbanes-Oxley Act is 810 pages long, ObamaCare is 1,024 pages long, Dodd-Frank is 2,300 pages long, the Tax Code is almost 4,000,000 words long.

 

All of this applies to soldiers and law enforcement officers.  They can't refuse to carry out an act because it is unlawful without knowing the laws.  But if there are too many laws, or they are too poorly written to understand or apply, that becomes an unresolvable problem.

 

I have a section in my book on the nature of government: "Lawlessness obtains when the laws are so poorly constructed ... they [aren't] understandable or when laws are impossible to follow or ... [are] so many that nearly everything is illegal or when the enforcement of the laws is unequal, undependable or arbitrary.  ...there [can be] many ways that bad laws and/or bad enforcement is the same as lawlessness."

 

     The more corrupt the State, the more numerous the laws.   
         ~~~~~~~~  Tacitus

 

     It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice,
     if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.   
          ~~~~~~~~~~  James Madison

 

 

Insert "know" after "didn't"

[SteveWolfer]

4 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Insert "know" after "didn't"

Thanks.... done.

[Wolf DeVoon]

56 pages? - makes sense to me. Dead trees are so last century.

[SteveWolfer]

1 minute ago, wolfdevoon said:

56 pages

Just the basic political philosophy principles that form the nature of government (without a bunch of footnotes or references).  And the 56 pages is the paperback.  The Kindle version is zero dead trees - and the number of 'pages' is variable - depends on the type-size chosen and the device in use.

[Brant Gaede]

1 hour ago, wolfdevoon said:

A government (that is, an Executive Branch and a Legislative Body to regulate spending and authorize certain actions like war) could be devoted entirely to defense of the borders, projecting that defense as far as necessary with weapons systems and intelligence gathering. Perhaps you recall I agree with Franklin that judges should be elected by lawyers, entirely depoliticized and governed by a separate judicial constitution.

It would be nice if soldiers or cops could interpret what constitutes an "illegal order." Can you think of a modern U.S. case?

In an actual war situation this is rather simple for a soldier's actions are already severely delimited. For instance, the shooting down of unarmed civilians.

--Brant

[Wolf DeVoon]

I predict your success, richly deserved, for all concerned.

[Wolf DeVoon]

I have reconsidered my position on police power and national security and rewrote my article accordingly.

As follows....

 

 

It was Nikita Krushchev's fault, people grumbled. As his motorcade crawled down Sepulveda Boulevard, slowing to dodge potholes and frying the General Secretary's bald billiard ball noggin in an open car, he became irate, contemptuous, and voluble. The KGB translator was unable to keep up with a rapid-fire tirade that mocked Western values, the rule of law, and a mile-long farce of idle earth movers, dump trucks, steam shovels, paving machines, Port-A-Potties and cement mixers. Krushchev's remarks were scrubbed from the Los Angeles Times but one phrase freely repeated by his CIA minders burned like carbolic in the ears of urban planners: "Stupid! Totally fucking stupid!"

Completion of the 405 Freeway was held up by a blunder in eminent domain paperwork, a single parcel that couldn't be flattened or paved to finish a marvel of Federal spending that would have saved the Russian dictator from a nasty sunburn that prompted him to pound his shoe on a State Department chicken in the jump seat who was hospitalized with multiple contusions and a cracked wishbone.

Determined to save our international reputation for lavish public works, the White House ordered immediate action. "Put a damn bridge over it," they cabled in code to the Mayor of Los Angeles, and a fleet of flatbeds were dispatched from the Naval Strategic Stockpile in Stockton loaded with surplus bridge parts that were procured for the partly completed and ill-fated Peace Highway from Martha's Vineyard to Iceland.

Air rights over the patch of private property that escaped seizure were reduced to eight feet seven inches under a six-lane span of thundering traffic, and it remained fallow until Norma Willoughby died, the elderly silent star who retired from motion pictures when talkies made her sound like a chipmunk, and it was discovered in a handwritten last will on a napkin that she bequeathed the parcel to her canasta partner and former husband Biff Morgan, who lived a few days fewer than Norma and willed his estate to a charity for care of retired musicians, to be administered by the William Morris agency. MCA was furious. The case limped along in probate for three years, enriching lawyers for both sides until Biff's estate was drained of cash and the abandoned parcel was all that remained to loot. By that time, MCA had been sold to Japanese investors, and their devilish plan to conquer America with video games and animated manga product did not include a dinky plot of dirt under the 405, so they turned a slanty eye and William Morris leased it to a client in London who took it seriously that the world of pop entertainment needed a Rock and Roll Rest Home.

And there was a major star who needed care, so construction began on a spacious basement under the 405, none too fussy about amenities because its sole occupant, aside from nurses and groupies who were too ugly to work at Hard Rock, was a mime vocalist with sparse needs. Max Airhead was one of those guys who was in the right place at the right time, and he was still under contract to a digital studio in London that wasn't quite finished with him. They deemed it financially important to find a place where Max could be cared for and available for retakes and spin-offs, without cluttering up a cramped Wardour Street coffee room.

His disability was manageable. Decapitated in a pyro stunt at The Palladium, Max lived in a large glass jar. Nurses assigned to polish the jar disrespectfully dubbed him Max Turpentine and ignored repeated requests to carefully monitor his condition, keep the nose straight, etc, in case he was needed back in England for a personal appearance tour with Talking Heads.

Max was a superstar, and as the 405 Rock and Roll Rest Home began to fill up with confused drummers and deaf heavy metal roadies, Max had a special place of honor in the Rec Room that doubled as cafeteria and smoking lounge where old disco songwriters watched MTV, choked on Douwe Egbert Half Sware, and snickered at the tiny little shoes and bland riffs that the artist formerly known as Prince pranced around in. Nurses sneered at their prepositional cloddishness and proclivity to eat Fritos with their feet. The songwriters retaliated by playing 'Disco Inferno' on the cafeteria's Aiwa 8-track and dented Vox stage monitors.

Suspicious that they were missing out on commissions and fees, William Morris installed a recording studio in a new sub-basement that seeped oil and finally made 405 Rock and Rock Rest Home cash flow positive. Clanking oil pumps became a click track in the studio, inspiring the sensation of "house music" that filled darkened warehouses in Croydon with celebrity deejays and xtacy pills, although the Agency couldn't discern how to milk the phenomenon of atonal thumping that had no sung lyrics or marketable hook, except perhaps by drug dealing at raves, a business which Morris Men were not eager to re-enter at the prevailing mark-up.

Heavy trucks on the 405 had a strange effect on Max Turpentine. Sometimes he frowned or appeared to be laughing, tossing his hair from side to side. Thursday Special Olympics in the rec room with wheelchair races magnified Max's celebrity as the fastest resident, apparently immortal as his jar vibrated to the finish line ahead of mentally challenged guitarists who became confused and bashed their wheelchairs into each other at the starting line, fighting over who had more RIAA-certified platinum.

The lunch menu never varied, which simplified housekeeping. Colored girl backup singers liked sugar and fat IV drips. Grateful Dead bell shakers and assistant joint rollers ate nothing but lentils. Retired UK glam stars didn't know what food was, and they were delighted to share tortilla chips, bean dip, and bourbon with Born Again hillbillies from Branson.

3D porn and Oprah mash-ups became available in the 90s, with an automatic channel surfing 4-star hotel package reminiscent of touring, augmented by empty Coke cans and roaches on room service trays in front of each bed for heightened realism. It was impossible for elderly horn players to use a TV remote, and they particularly enjoyed an automatic channel changer that gave them two bars of Home Shopping, two bars of Leno, two bars of PBS and everything else on cable and DirecTV. Those few who were ambulatory spent nights playing strobe light ping pong near the mortuary door, which simplified shipping and packing. Cremation was a cheap if somewhat unreliable source of winter heat and summer ventilation power.

For years, a private pilot vinyl collector dumped ashes in the Pacific with a biplane from Santa Monica, until he got a little too close to the water on his 77th memorial to departed legends of rock and soul. William Morris thought it was necessary for promotional consideration to finance a new means of honoring toxic ashes and obits that a Rolling Stone intern misspelled, so they were paired in a concrete and seasonally muddy Misspelled Wildernis Hike of Fame that stretched from Brentwood to a 7-Eleven in Reseda, much of it festooned with weeds.

The longest-lived residents were bankrupt record producers and publicists, but they too each got a star when homicide or suicide claimed another antisocial monster under lock and key in the Psychopaths Ward.

Max saw them all come and go, and he grew philosophical about life's fleeting flame. His jar was sole survivor of the fire that destroyed Rock and Roll Rest Home, until Max exploded and cratered a deep pothole in the 405 southbound fast lane. It's still in litigation to determine whether successor firm William Morris Endeavor or NBC Universal MCA is liable for repairing the pothole, and southbound commuters don't expect it to be settled any time soon, a boon to tow trucks that became licensed squatters in possession of the rubble that Krushchev's shoe heel wrought.

 

 

[BaalChatzaf]

7 hours ago, wolfdevoon said:

56 pages? - makes sense to me. Dead trees are so last century.

Read   "Paper: A Elegy"  by Ian Sansom.   Paper was, is and will forever be part of civilization.  It will not go away.