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The Spectacle Blog
I was amused to see this aside from the Obama official Jeff blogged about earlier: “Force can mean physical force, but can also mean the force of the political process.”
The “force of the political process” ultimately rests on physical force, in the form of men with guns and badges. The idea that you can expropriate people’s property non-coercively, even as part of a democratic process, is laughable. It may not be the statists’ fatal conceit, but it is definitely one of their conceits.
View all comments (6) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by W. James Antle, III
http://spectator.org/blog/2012/05/08/the-withering-away-of-the-stat
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WL| 5.8.12 @ 1:26PM
Get em Antle....you have those Democrats cornered now!!!!
REM| 5.8.12 @ 2:06PM
The only answer to the unlawful coercive force of a tyrant is, "From my dead cold fingers." Again, the Second Amendment is not about "hunting and fishing" nor is it a justification for the States' Militias but for the People's Right to defeat the tyrant.
Mike 3/505| 5.8.12 @ 3:09PM
Mr Antle,
"Wither" is another word for "metastasize" correct?
I crack myself up. :-)
Regards,
Mike
PattyMor| 5.8.12 @ 3:21PM
They steal our freedom and property every day they pass all that "good" legislation. The EPA steals your property rights while property taxes, tax your money away. Legislators are just more clever thieves than your average bank robber, crazed dopper, or con man. Think Con Men in Suits and a Vote for Sale.
Ken (Old Texican)| 5.8.12 @ 5:07PM
guns...badges...and IRS summons.
aware| 5.8.12 @ 7:18PM
The State is violence or the express threat of violence. It jealously seeks a monopoly on violence.
It is the instrument to enforce a claim on your wealth, and even your life, by others.
It is a parasitic organization feeding on the society it claims to "protect". To refer to it as "government" is to fool you into believing that somehow you have some role in the boot on your neck. Even the word "government" is a twisted tool of propaganda in the hands of the State, and its worshipers.
It even allows "elections" to further the mirage that you, "We the People", are it, the State. But the consequences of these "elections" are only minor adjustments with no real chance of direction change.
Government has only 1 moral, legal, legitimate job, to protect our individual rights, which are God given, from violation. Once it begins to do anything else it becomes the State. It then is self perpetuating and requires no more of its citizens than a factory does its raw material.
In fact at its root, the State is not even an entity. It is a select group of people who are exempt from the laws they enforce over all others. The exemption is not always noticeable, but the bank accounts are a little harder to hide.
So if government is consent, the State is coercion. Which do we have?