Jim Davies' Columns
"Ransome's error was exactly that of virtually all of our neighbors at election time--for ballots are merely bullets, in drag....The voter is saying, as he pulls the lever or presses the screen, 'I want you to be ruler, and if you win and anyone refuses to submit to your rule, it's okay by me if you kill him.' Ultimately, that's exactly what always occurs." Column by Jim Davies.
"This is not intended to discourage--and certainly not to disrespect!--the brave few who engage in CD today, it's just an appeal to get the brain as firmly in gear as the guts, so that CD takes its proper and effective place within a rational, overall strategy to end the Age of Government altogether." Column by Jim Davies.
"Absence of a ruler doesn't mean that an anarchist society would have no rules, just that it would have no rulers." Column by Jim Davies.
The Speech That Eliot Never Gave
"After that, I have no idea what I'm going to do with the rest of my life, but I'm certain of this: I'll no longer earn a living by making anyone offers they cannot refuse." Column by Jim Davies.
Movie review by Jim Davies.
"Recently Dr. Gary North...wrote a thought-provoking article entitled "Non-Negotiable Political Demands"....at first sight we can say 'Amen!' to each of them. As the author points out, they have much in common with what Ron Paul has been saying during his campaign--and they furnish an excellent example of hacking at the branches of evil instead of striking at its root." Column by Jim Davies.
"So, rational thought leads quickly to acceptance of anarchism, but it also leads to acceptance of atheism...." Column by Jim Davies.
"One of the obscenities of recent governments was to have put obstacles in the way of further patterns of such travel, at the very time that technology had so dramatically reduced its cost...." Column by Jim Davies.
Column by Jim Davies.
"Overall, it's hard to overstate the immense contrast between our market-based justice system and what passed for one as little as three years ago. Then, most of the guilty suffered no consequence, some innocents were wrongly convicted, many who had harmed nobody were punished, and none of the victims were compensated--except by the kind of savage satisfaction that comes from vengeance." Column by Jim Davies.
Jim Davies describes what work in a free market would be like.
Jim Davies on what learning in a free market would be like.
Column by Jim Davies.
Column by Jim Davies.
"[FDR's] success in creating a massive government in a massive nation is universally celebrated to this day in the city where he did it, and I agree; this bloodthirsty megalomaniac is the archetypical government leader." Column by Jim Davies.
"Constitutionalists like Ron Paul say that kind of society is 'free.' I doubt if they even understand the word." Column by Jim Davies.
"What
[the documentary] most fails to do is to pose the right questions. It does not
ask 'Why should the US Government concern itself with another country 6,000
miles away?' or 'Why is anyone in the Muslim world angry about
Jim Davies checks out a Swedish match factory.
"So the abomination of an irrational state was thrust upon Americans by vacuous political slogans, then as now--and the slight suggestion that it had been put in place by Us Ourselves was complete nonsense. No human being in his right mind would ask to be ruled by someone else, even if such surrender of sovereignty were logically possible." Column by Jim Davies.
"So
Greenspan has been a true Randian, all his adult life, never quite abandoning a
belief in the myth of government. Far from betraying
"The whole theory of democratic voting is that the majority prevails and the losers submit. This is the very antithesis of freedom (in which, thanks to the market, everybody wins). There is no way that 'freedom' can or should be forced down the unwilling throats of a possible 49% of voters who do not want it--to say nothing of the other 180 million American adults who may want it but not enough to vote for it." Column by Jim Davies.
"...those people are properly paid with money, but the funds grow on money trees in the gardens of D.C., lovingly tended by the manure-dumpers and shearers of Capitol Hill. Since the price to patients tends towards zero, their demand for health services will tend towards infinity; but money trees grow and reproduce fast, so there's never any problem." Column by Jim Davies.
"2022, though, may be the year in which significant numbers of people do start to leave government employ....Government's ability to function will suffer. It will begin to become unglued. Let's guess how it may go down." Column by Jim Davies.
"Notice then what took place: petitioners have been out in a show of force, begging Authority for a favor, and if they were numerous and lucky, the favor will be theirs. The lollipop will have been handed out. Whoever else may win or lose, Authority certainly wins; for Authority controls the lollipops." Column by Jim Davies.
"For
now, private systems of electronic money transfer must be seen as vulnerable to
government savagery, and the bigger their
"So the other possible answer is that the 55 men who convened to draft the US Constitution, all of them being politicians and 35 of them being lawyers, knew perfectly well that Article Three would provide the new government with powers that, over time, would break through all supposed limits and deliberately designed it so--that is, they were no more 'sincere libertarians' than your run-of the-mill legalized crook in Congress today." Column by Jim Davies.
Recollections of a Visit to a Bank
Column by Jim Davies.
"What
about the morality of avoiding an opportunity to help someone being even more
heavily victimized by government?" Column by Jim Davies.
"A number of extraordinarily brave libertarians have recently shown themselves willing to suffer physically at the hands of government rather than submit to its authority. Is this a good idea?" Column by Jim Davies.
"From that it follows that each human has the right to dispose of his own life any way he pleases, and from that it follows that 'evil' or 'wrong' occurs when that fundamental right is damaged or violated. That is in fact an elegant definition of evil: 'any action that interferes with someone's absolute self-ownership right'." Column by Jim Davies.
"It's a particularly cruel myth that governments exist to help the poor, when in reality they exist to protect rich clients from the poor. But it has always been so, and widespread poverty will continue until the myth is exposed. What a shame that this somewhat free-market economist stopped short; that, having seen much of the cause of poverty, he wants to make that government-myth work, instead of ripping it to shreds. Such is the major difference between conservatives and market anarchists." Column by Jim Davies.
"When everyone is re-educated and so understands how and why government is needless as well as repugnant to human nature, it will implode--for nobody will want to work for it. All such indispensible support will be withdrawn and it will collapse in fragments. Further, being so educated means that after the implosion, nobody will call for its repair; instead, all will go about their peaceful business in the resulting free market, well understanding what they are about." Column by Jim Davies.
"As usual when government screws up, we will foot the bill--but also, with such a massive mess, the second in half a century, we libertarians may possibly use the debacle to our advantage." Column by Jim Davies.
"We market anarchists reject tribalism. We are just members of the human race, period, and we see every other human being in that same way. We avoid groupthink, for we form our understanding of life by reason alone, rationality being the core of our human-ness. We wish to govern ourselves, and ourselves alone. If we wave a flag, it is black--for we owe no allegiance to any colored, gaudy, irrational collective. We seek no subjects, and reject all rulers. We see the realization of self ownership and self responsibility and the pursuit of self-interest by all as the only hope for the human race." Column by Jim Davies.
"Conversely if we don't sign it, or will not file the form at all, there's a serious risk of a free stay at Club Fed. So the choice is really between paying and lying, or telling the truth and perhaps winding up behind bars. Such is 'American Freedom.' Such is government." Column by Jim Davies.
Column by Jim Davies.
'America: from Freedom to Fascism'
"Here is a professionally produced, full-length movie that alerts Joe Sixpack to the erosion of his liberties, and as such it deserves our close attention. This reviews its strengths and weaknesses." Column by Jim Davies.
"...Milton Friedman understood and taught what freedom is about, but never acknowledged that government is needless as well as destructive, and set out to make it 'work' as well as possible." Column by Jim Davies.
"...myth permeates society, and sets the limits within which nearly everyone exercises what passes for 'thought.' While that persists, there is no hope for liberty. A whole habit of thinking needs to be swept away; all mythology...needs busting wide open." Column by Jim Davies.
"...for humans to be human, we must be 100% free, self-governing. Freedom is imperative, every human being must become an anarchist, or else live as less than a human being, untrue to his own nature...." Column by Jim Davies.
Jim Davies tries to get out the vote.
"One could multiply examples of how the history of the last nine decades would have been unrecognizably different and better, if only Tandy's insight into the need for universal re-education been translated into successful action." Column by Jim Davies.
Libertarians, Both Academic and Real
"The On Line Freedom Academy stands alone in the market of ideas, as far as I know, as a real, systematic way to induce real people to become real libertarians on the only scale that will realize all the real benefits of liberty for which we thirst." Column by Jim Davies.
"The
four are, indeed, pre-eminent in building the centralized tyranny under which we
all now suffer and so they deserve their honored places in the villainous
"I
mean that
"I don't know about you, but would respectfully suggest that if every knowledgeable, passionate freedom-seeker reading these words cannot gently persuade one of his 200 or so friends every year to take a free, world-changing course online then really, we don't deserve to be free." Column by Jim Davies.
"... one must wonder: How the heck are we going to clean up after
government?" Column by Jim Davies.
How We Can Get There From Here
MUST READ "So the main task to be completed in my opinion is to so educate every member of society one by one as to convince him that a zero government society is the only kind consistent with his human nature and the only one that will maximize his pleasure in life; and that must be done by reason. So the two obstacles to surmount are the vast numbers involved, and the ugly fact that most people have been so well indoctrinated that they are barely open to reason; they live rather by myth, prejudice and superstition." Column by Jim Davies.
Jim Davies writes his Congressman about the Brown Peril.
MUST READ "And so it was 'ordained and established'--the wind was sown. Today, we reap the whirlwind." Column by Jim Davies.
Column by Jim Davies.
"Schools are also a big factor that agents stress to potential buyers, though that is really sick." Column by Jim Davies.
"I don't think that even the non-aggressive form of religion is conducive to the formation of a free society. I know some here disagree, but as I see it an over-riding belief in a supreme authority sits badly with a rigorous attempt to reason one's way from the present government-infested society towards one where each person is his or her own sole sovereign. And the aggressive form, obviously, is itself a form of government; when a well-indoctrinated young Muslim murders himself and passers-by in Tel Aviv, he is exercising ultimate governmental control over their lives. His, he is free to end; theirs belongs only to them. The same is true, of course, of a Bible-toting President who wages non-defensive war." Column by Jim Davies.
"And hitherto, all censorship responsibility has been that of the government censors, not of Google; hence, if a site were prohibited by the Pols, a surfer would learn that fact after Google had led him there, and would know exactly whom to blame. He would at least know that a source of information existed, from which his rulers were excluding him." Column by Jim Davies.
"If you need more examples of how government's order-mandating laws in practice create chaos, open today's newspaper and read the headlines. Government preaches that it is urgently needed to preserve law and order; the plain fact is that the more law, the less order; the result is the inverse of the promise." Column by Jim Davies.
Column by Jim Davies.
"...those are four excellent reasons to expect that animal cruelty will drastically reduce when our society rids itself of the primary source of cruelty: government. Will that eliminate it worldwide? Not until government is abolished worldwide. Wherever government persists, so will savagery--to all species." Column by Jim Davies.
"Regular readers of Strike the Root need no reminder that 2007 was another terrible year for the cause of individual freedom...." Column by Jim Davies.
"Then that moment will come, when our numbers are overwhelming; and notice, we shall still do nothing violent, nothing outrageous. There will be no great 'movement' which the cornered tyrant can decapitate with a single slash of his machete. We shall just spontaneously walk off the job, so leaving the old order armless, legless, gutless and brainless." Column by Jim Davies.
The Myth of a 'Social Contract'
"Ever since monarchs first felt the rumblings of discontent, they reached for a way to justify their miserable existences in the eyes of those upon the product of whose labor they lived in luxury." Column by Jim Davies.
"...the Federal Government has demonstrated with abundant clarity that whenever its financial survival is at stake, it will not hesitate to ignore any paper restraints that may stand in its way, and will use its monopoly over what passes for "justice" for its true purpose, which is to provide a veneer of morality over its monstrous exercise of raw power." Column by Jim Davies.
Column by Jim Davies.
A Billion Here, a Billion There
"Congress fell over itself to shovel South the first $60 billion of your treasure, reportedly already spent by the experts in making money disappear, and the talk now is of around $200 billion to do the rest. It's worth trying to count the zeros in such a number, just to make sure nobody up there in D.C. hasn't got a decimal point out of place." Column by Jim Davies.
Recommended "They are terrorized and held in dependence on government 'protection,' such as it is, by the 'War on Drugs.' This ingenious device achieves three objectives at the same time: (a) it imprisons those young black males who show promising skills of entrepreneurship, who might otherwise succeed in business and prosper; (b) it intoxicates all their customers by the 'forbidden fruit' syndrome, so rendering helpless for work the next most promising layer of young people, and (c) it turns most of them into real criminals (to rob so as to get the next fix) thereby reinforcing the white perception that blacks are incurably uncivilized." Column by Jim Davies.
"The day before she swept ashore, the government 'ordered' residents to evacuate (what arrogance!) because it appeared that this unusual storm might bring water surges over the tops of the levees. That order was a well-disguised confession that the levees had been built too low; that there was not enough safety margin in their height. If a private developer had done the job, the government would have heaped blame on him for that, possibly later arresting him for multiple manslaughter. But there was no such accusation; and that was because the levees had been designed, built, maintained and financed by the government itself." Column by Jim Davies.
'Christian Anarchist': An Oxymoron?
" Christians actively support the institution of government as directed in Romans 13, noted above. This happens now, and it has happened for 20 centuries. That cooperation, that mutual back-scratching, has served the Church quite well." Column by Jim Davies.
"Trial and error in the marketplace would quickly reveal what rates per thousand messages would settle down to furnish a range of competing prices, and the great majority of spam would then be history; it is a problem now only because it is too cheap." Column by Jim Davies.
"Such is politics; always a compromise, a mixture, never a clean result such as is rendered millions of times every day as free people make sovereign decisions about what to buy and sell. Democracy makes a truly pathetic alternative to market liberty." Column by Jim Davies.
"The greatest honor we can do for the American war dead is to get our brains in gear." Column by Jim Davies.
"Watch out for the next episode, months or years from now, when it’s further admitted, by some similar back-door method, that AIDS is not a disease at all but was invented out of thin air by those government people who like to spoil your fun as well as steal your money." Column by Jim Davies.
"Currently we're getting used to revelations that the Iraq War (Act II) was started on the basis of completely false intelligence; in other words, a total screw-up, a massive blunder. However, this is nothing new. Most other wars also started as a result of government incompetence and/or government malevolence in some mix, and the exception usually perceived, World War Two, is no exception at all." Column by Jim Davies.
'Limited Government': A Fairy Tale
"...this Friday if you declare 'income' on your 1040 Form, you will be concurring that government power can not in fact be limited; it will eventually do whatever it wants to do, and 'limited government' is in truth not an option at all and never was." Column by Jim Davies.
"More than any of that, of course, are the central doctrines that Wojtyla's organization continues to teach: that he, the Pope, is infallible (a marvelous line in Comedy Central's 'The Daily Show' asked how long [while awaiting election of a new Pope] mankind can last with nobody infallible left on Earth?) and that there is a God who both created the entire universe yet who takes a close interest in the doings not only of every human but of every sparrow." Column by Jim Davies.
Recommended "There may, however, be a possibility of satisfying both sides, using the operation of the market. In contrast to political 'solutions,' under which the losing side is always forced to submit to the winners, the free market normally leaves both sides equally satisfied; in fact, that pretty well defines what a market transaction is." A brilliant column by Jim Davies.
Martha Stewart and Your Next 1040
"...the fact is there is no way to avoid fibbing--that is, the alleged income tax law is so complex that if 16 experts consider the same data and prepare 1040s accordingly, they will come up with 20 different tax returns. In a literal sense, it is now impossible to tell the truth, even assuming one wanted to; for the 'truth' in this respect is something nobody can actually know." Column by Jim Davies.
"I
disagree, but government is said to be justified because men are not good enough
to rule themselves; the example of
Column by Jim Davies.
"As all history shows, however, government is by no means incompatible with the superstition that Johnson claims to be the only source of such moral standards; on the contrary, State and Church have time after time colluded to deny this right to life, all over the map." Column by Jim Davies.
"Never mind what he and they do, what he says is, he wants to 'strengthen' it. Not to scrap it, not to wind it down or phase it out, but to pour even more stolen money down the same bottomless rat-hole." Column by Jim Davies.
Random Thoughts on the Big Wave
Recommended " They surely have many merits, and in many ways may be the salt of the American earth; but they seem to have this sick, shocking, savage flaw: they despise foreigners, and oppose the free flow of labor. They are just one more example of the 'freedom, but' crowd." Column by Jim Davies.
" It is simply not possible to be a little bit pregnant. One must be for government, or one must be against it; one thing or the other. The choice is binary." Column by Jim Davies.
" This is the supreme reason to get government out of the road business: under the guise of securing our safety on 'its' roads- - for which it makes us pay -- it has invented the need for a 'license' and so prostituted its use as to identify and document us to the ultimate devastation of our security; to enter us in a database operated for its own malevolent purposes by the most powerful organization on Earth." Column by Jim Davies.
Do You Know the Way to...Liberty?
"... it must be possible to scrape off the rust deposited by eight generations of government schooling and turn everyone -- yes, everyone -- into an eager market anarchist. All that remains is to show how." Column by Jim Davies.
"What precisely is [government]? The best definition I've come across is Anthony Alexander's: it isn't so much something, as the absence of something, namely the market. Government is that mysterious emanation that prevents a free market functioning smoothly." Column by Jim Davies.
Recommended "The very act of pulling a lever, or writing an 'X', or punching out a chad, is an act of violence against our fellow humans; it is an act which says, for a common example, 'I know full well that I have no right to steal my neighbor's money to pay for my child's education, so I want you, Ms Candidate, to go do it for me'." Column by Jim Davies.
" Give government a yard, and it will take another inch. Then another, and another, without limit over time until it has choked off all freedom, all joy, all prosperity and all life. There is simply no rational alternative: government must never begin, and if it has begun already it must be ended without residue." Column by Jim Davies.
Recommended "Possibly this will help others reading this to inject an element of doubt into the minds of our Statist neighbors, i.e., that nobody, but nobody, can delegate a power he does not possess: to interfere in the peaceful life of another human being." Column by Jim Davies.
Tall Tales from Garrison Keillor
"... by arguing correctly that compassion (real compassion, exercised by people using their own resources, like the savior with the Parka and the jumper cable) is deeply ingrained in human nature, Keillor unwittingly confesses that forced or political 'compassion' is entirely superfluous at best." Column by Jim Davies.
" If [land is] 'public,' and very much of it is, the use of that land is controlled not by owners but by politicians- - and so, by whoever contributes most, this year, to their re-election funds. Come now; do you really want our glorious natural heritage controlled by those who air-tested the H-bomb, stockpiled poison gas and operate the Post Office?" Column by Jim Davies.
"But neutrality, the avoidance of war, is not the normal aim of governments. Governments are 100% useless appendages to any society, and have to work to justify their existence in the eyes of those they rule; one way to do so, proven effective by 5,000 bloody years of history, is to excite small boys -- and adults with a juvenile perspective -- with the idea of the glory of patriotism, warfare and conquest." Column by Jim Davies.
Recommended "First, what exactly is a 'law'? Very simply, it's a one-sided contract; the lawmakers sign it, but those controlled by it do not. A group of thugs gets together and makes a rule to control society. Its effects are imposed upon others by force, whether they agree with it or not, and whether in their sovereign right as human self-owners they would have chosen the mandated course of action or not. The group always makes some claim regarding a supposed right to impose such rules, which it calls 'legitimacy'; usually sonorous phrases are invented for the purpose such as 'Divine Right' or 'Wise Leadership' or 'Servants (!) of the People' or 'Duly Elected Representatives.'" Column by Jim Davies.
Recommended "Sadly, it's only too plain that the Declarers of American Independence had no thought to create a society free of the menace of governments and their laws, but merely objected to the fact that they, the politicians close to the action, were being denied the chance to do the governing! Far from wanting no laws or even fewer laws, they were actually bellyaching about having too few. They were not really different from any other revolutionary anywhere: They wanted to get rid of the present government so that they themselves could take power. Theirs was not a rebellion against power, just a rebellion against someone else's power." Column by Jim Davies.
"Torture is the infliction of suffering which is not invited-- which is, of course, normally the case. It comes in many flavors -- emotional, physical, mental -- often mixed together. And I would say that all the current protests in D.C. notwithstanding, torture is a primary business of government." Column by Jim Davies.
"[Libertarian] theory holds that all potential aggressors, seeing the way that most members in their target, free society are well armed and determined not to be ruled, will count the cost of invasion too large relative to any loot that victory might yield, and seek a softer target." Column by Jim Davies.
"The astonishing Power of Twelve is that unless a law is popular with at least 95% of a jury pool, a prosecutor has a less than half probability of winning his case, and that to enjoy better than a 75% chance of victory the subject law must face no more than 2% dissenters in society!" Column by Jim Davies.
Recommended "... our society is not a rational, free market at all but rather one dominated by a group of thugs with guns and prisons who have seized control; that is, the ruling-service provider is not so much responding to a market demand as he is imposing his product upon buyers and forcing them to pay for it by theft at gunpoint. All that's true, but alas, it's not the whole truth." Column by Jim Davies.
"This offering looks at the matter from a different angle: Is there anything that governments ALONE can do, that truly benefits people? Who needs it?" Column by new Root Striker Jim Davies.