The Voluntary Church

Separation of Me and State by B.K. Merrick

Word.  At least you can walk away from the church, and people do it every day:

The voluntary church, as illogical, absurd, and misguided as it can be, has murdered less people, and done far more good for individuals and families (including my own) than any involuntary government ever has or will. The church did not bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki . The church did not put ovens in Auschwitz. The church did not set up the “Gulag Archipelago.” The church did not produce tons of useless steel in China, leading to economic ruin and the deaths of millions. The church did not botch rescue operations for Hurricane Katrina. The church is not responsible for the Cold War and the Berlin Wall. The church doesn’t force me to contribute money. The church doesn’t create prisons and overcrowd them with non-criminals. The church doesn’t unwittingly send innocent men to Death Row. The church doesn’t confiscate weapons and set up threatening regulations, making it virtually impossible for innocent people to defend themselves. The church doesn’t electrocute people. The church doesn’t pull me over and threaten me when I drive slightly faster than someone, somewhere decided was acceptable. The church doesn’t come up with endless regulations from mindless bureaucrats that destroy the market, tradition, and all other sorts of voluntary associations. The church doesn’t push poor and powerless people (and it’s never the rich people with governmental connections) off of their land, claiming “eminent domain.” In short, the church doesn’t force me to do anything. I left my church and no one came after me. If I do everything I can to leave the government peacefully, and desire to live among my neighbors in the only land I have ever known and loved, the state will come after me and destroy much, if not all, of my life.

…You want to save us all from religion. Who will save us from yours? Your incomprehensible belief in the power of a benevolent government is nothing less fanciful than hope in Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, or even Santa Claus. I live in a theocracy of your making, a satanic cult that receives your continued support. Personally, I’d much rather go back to church.

Yes, the church has often allied with the state throughout the centuries; but so has industry, and libertarians, for the most part, are able to discern that peaceful, voluntary transactions are valuable, even if some of those transactions seem useless or disgusting. The voluntary church, even if you disagree with some or all of its teachings, has been similarly valuable to many; and on its own it has certainly never been responsible for a fraction of the horrors attributed to the state.

On F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ron Paul, inaction, and everything else

  ”And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my ideas either clarify or depart entirely; I have quite enough sins on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people’s heads; I might cause a poor, inoffensive capitalist to have a vulgar liaison with a bomb, or get some innocent little Bolshevik tangled up with a machine-gun bullet——”

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald published the words above in his first novel, This Side of Paradise, back in 1920; I can’t say when exactly he put them on paper.  Anyway, I first read the above words at 17 or so, and they’re probably half the reason I write as little as I do.  Actually, they pretty much sum up all the reason:  I just don’t have confidence.

 

Of course, nothing feels worse than inaction; so had I sat on every one of my sentiments until I was sure they were correct, I would never have a blog or finished college or anything else, and I would feel even worse about myself than I currently do.  Still, one wishes that perhaps Al Gore, for instance, would shut up a minute and think before he put his thoughts on film.  Or maybe Gloria Steinem and her colleagues at Ms. could follow Fitzgerald’s advice.

 

And, since action does feel better than inaction, Wednesday night found me hand-addressing envelopes for the Ron Paul campaign.  Strike the Root has a number of articles, like this one, that expose voting as a sham, if not far worse. So, in spite of the Ron Paul Meetup messages flooding my email inbox, and the participation of an old acquaintance in the campaign efforts, I, as usual, chose principled inaction.  Until the last day to register Republican came; I found myself across the street from a post office that afternoon, and, as usual when time is short, I threw principles to the wind for the sake of what’s “practical.”  It wouldn’t be the first time.

 

And I thought, well, hell, if I’m going to vote for the man, I’m now able to help in his campaign, right?  Even if it’s a last-minute, trivial effort.  I ran into the old acquaintance, who had been quoted in the East Bay Express that very day.  It was a huge relief to be working alongside remotely like-minded people, even for a couple of hours, feeling like I was doing something, anything.  Being libertarian in the Bay Area, joked the organizer, means a lonely existence; being anarchocapitalist, I would counter, is even lonelier.  My rationale for voting Paul, I explained to the others that day, was that complaining about the war in Iraq meant nothing, whereas voting for Paul somehow equated to doing something about our government’s aggression in Iraq.

 

On a random note, a look at an acquaintance’s Friendster profile showed that she had not only finished law school, but was something of a slavering Clinton acolyte as well.  On some level I really do admire the unambivalent, the true believers.  I remembered telling her about Jim Bovard’s book Feeling Your Pain:  The Explosion and Abuse of Goverment Power in the Clinton-Gore Years.   Her response, if I remember correctly, was that Clinton merely knew how to seize power to get things done.  At least she’s shown consistency in the years since.

 

To get back to Fitzgerald, I’ve realized that I no longer hold some of the opinions I’ve expressed in earlier blog posts.   Almost a year ago exactly, in fact, I borrowed some rhetorical tactics in “Why I Oppose National Healthcare” to implicitly defend abortion, such as the old inflammatory bit about coathangers and whatnot.  I think it’s still relatively balanced, not an intensely polemical defense of the practice, but it’s a year later and in the interim I’ve become pretty much pro-life.  There, I said it.  Never in the years since I first identified as feminist would I ever have thought I’d put those words in print.

 

That said, I’m not interested in getting any little Bolshevik or capitalist into a vulgar liaison with a coathanger,  so I’ll try to refrain from some of the more shallow and dangerous epigrams I could use to further my cause.  So for the moment I’m going to ponder if it would indeed be a grave attack on liberty to help with the Ron Paul precinct walks tomorrow.

Speaking of awesome bloggers: Alexander Cockburn skewers Al Gore.

In “Hot Air, Cold Cash: Who are the Merchants of Fear?” no less a liberal than Alexander Cockburn, former writer for the Village Voice and The Nation, deflates the global warming fearmongers, identifies their corporatist special interest roots, and fingers Gore for exactly what he is:  not a selfless public servant, but a greedy, mendacious politician (is there any other kind?)

The world’s best known hysteric and self promoter on the topic of man’s physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear industry and the coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oakridge National Lab. White House “task forces” on climate change in the Clinton-Gore years were always well freighted by Gore and his adviser John Holdren with nukers like John Papay of Bechtel.

As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump up budgets and rabblerouse the voters. By the mid Nineties he positioned himself at the head of a strategic and tactical alliance formed around “the challenge of climate change”, which had now stepped forward to take Communism’s place in the threatosphere essential to all political life. Indeed, it was in the New Republic, a tireless publicist of the Soviet menace in the late 70s and Reagan 80s, that Gore announced in 1989 that the war on warming couldn’t be won without a renewal in spiritual values.

God, I love it. Personally, I think this photo from Time says it all:

 

Arthur Silber says it better.

I haven’t been updating this blog recently, at least in part because I’ve been busy reading Arthur Silber, who is so much better at expressing the helpless indignation that every citizen of the United States should feel about the administration’s illegal, immoral war on Iraq.

For example, his latest post is entitled “Our Disgusting, Sickening, Impenetrable National Narcissism.“

Hey, someone’s got to say it.  And anyway, while his writings may be polemical, he is extremely well informed and articulate; he’s not just spluttering a bunch of expletives, even though he gives way occasionally to frustration.

Personally I have a hard time expressing how upset I am about this war.  Perhaps it stems from my fledgling opposition to it in 2003, which I phrased as “not wanting innocent people to die,” and which in turn a hawk, pseudo-libertarian acquaintance of mine ridiculed as the rankest sentimentality and naivete; because realists, and humanitarians, you see, understand that millions of foreigners should die for American hegemony, er, should welcome their liberation at the hands, and bombs, of saintly American soldiers.

Um.  Also read Chris Floyd.  He is one of the few bloggers prescient enough to understand that no, Bush is not merely a helpless, doe-eyed pawn in the hands of evil advisors; he is evil, he knows exactly what he’s doing, and he knew exactly what he was getting us and the Iraqis into.  Same with the other politicians fully complicit in the destruction of Iraq.  The public’s naivete on this point truly astounds me.

WordPress v. Blogspot

I expect this to go all the way to the Supreme Court: Which one is lamer?

Perhaps if the two services could be merged, they could cancel out each other’s respective defects. On Blogspot, for instance, you cannot export your blog file. Let me repeat: you cannot export and save your whole blog. Actually, they do offer an extremely complicated and convoluted process (read: I’m lazy) for saving your entire blog to your computer, but who has time for that? I’ve things to see and people to do.

As for WordPress, I dislike the default themes you have to choose from unless you want to cough up $. C$ is my name, not my game, or something like that.

Nevertheless, I have not one but two blogs on Blogspot: a defunct version of the blog you’re reading, and a semi-personal blog, entitled Unlimited Hay. I quote myself:

I love (read: hate) blogs that purport to be useful, ie detailing how to sync up your Google Calendar with your Blackberry with your dog, then abruptly break out with, say, some personal vacation summary (and PHOTOS!) that nobody gives a damn about.

I actually started that blog well over a year ago, but the posts were too racy. Not really racy, just a little heavy on the TMI.

I’ll return to my regularly scheduled ranting about the government on the very next post.