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For most of its overly-prolonged history, the late, unlamented
Soviet Empire had to rely on five percent of its farmland to produce
eighty percent of the food its subjects subsisted on. What made that
five percent so different? Well, it was the only agricultural land
that the Dictatorship of the Proletariate allowed -- under strict and
complicated regulations -- to be farmed by private individuals for a
profit.
In these enlightened times we chuckle smugly to ourselves over a
Marxist system of centrally planned destitution in which a "command
economy" generated everything from bread to shoes, the bread tasted
like the shoes, and the shoes (all of them left ones) possessed the
enduring properties of bread. Even certain elements of the American
Left are beginning to contemplate eliminating state coercion in areas
like the heavily collectivized industry of education. These days,
"everybody knows" -- except maybe Castro and the Communist Chinese --
that everything that the government touches immediately turns into
something considerably less valuable than the proverbial agricultural
byproduct.
Everybody, to all appearances, except that celebrated bastion of
rugged individualism and unfettered free enterprise, the Republican
Party.
Consider the following: for just about a century, we've relied on
government-supplied expertism to protect our rights, property, and
lives in America's cities. Over that same century, slowly in the
beginning, but with frighteningly increasing velocity every decade,
those cities have been getting deadlier to live in and easier to die
in.
Every collectivist remedy imaginable (New York's 1917 Sullivan Act
comes to mind) has been given a try -- more prisons, harsher penalties,
sterner judges, capital punishment, midnight basketball, always
more restrictions on individual rights -- and nothing ever produces
changes greater than the random statistical noise associated with such
phenomena (although that never stopped any administration from puffing
itself up over a one percent fluctuation in the crime rate).
Until Florida.
In Florida, following events in Orlando that led up to easing the
restrictions on concealed weapons (after 20 years of bitter, fighting
retreat on the part of expertists still stuck in the 19th Century),
one percent of the citizenry endured the unconstitutional hassles and
personal insults involved in obtaining a carry permit, and violent
crime (depending on who performs the calculation) plummeted 20 to 40
percent.
Now, of course, legislators in two thirds of the states are trying
to achieve the same result by the same means, at every turn with an
hysterical emphasis on retaining rigid control over something the Bill
of Rights (to which they've all sworn undying loyalty -- but then,
what good are the promises of politicians?) says will not be
controlled: the unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and
human right of every man, woman, and responsible child to obtain, own,
and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun,
machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's
permission.
In this respect, they resemble the former -- and observe: extinct
-- Soviet planners who believed they were being progressive and openhanded
whenever they generously consented to increase privatized farmland another
percent under the latest glorious Five Year Plan.
The truth is, they have no choice. American cities have become
gangrenous abcesses on the fundament of what was once the most
advanced civilization in history. We've gone from densely populated
19th Century cities that didn't see a single rape or murder over the
span of a decade, to neighborhoods that can't make that claim for two
nights running. Collectivist policies in force over the last
century -- foisted off on Americans by both parties -- are directly to blame,
and this has become embarrassingly obvious to everybody, even mass
media.
Now they want us to clean their mess up -- the mess they couldn't
handle -- while continuing to labor under exactly the kind of idiotic
and illegal policies that created it. No matter that they often call
themselves Republicans, they still demand an effect without a cause.
They want a free lunch just like every other two-bit socialist on the
planet.
Part of this is attributable to an honest (if appalling) state of
ignorance tenderly passed on by universities and law schools from one
generation unto the next. There's a story, for example, that a state
attorney general was pondering, a couple of years ago, the question of
at what age the Bill of Rights begins to apply to juveniles. (Sad to
say, this represented an improvement: the overwhelming tendency has
been to deny that its guarantees of protection apply to juveniles at
all.)
Apparently nobody -- in high school, college, or in law school -- ever
bothered to inform the future attorney general that the
Bill of Rights,
per se, doesn't apply at all to juveniles, and never will, even if
they live to be 100. It doesn't apply to you or me. It only applies to
government; it's irrelevant what anybody's age happens to be.
The document is nothing more (and nothing less) than a list of things
government can't do no matter what, and, as such, it's been misnamed.
(It's worth pointing out that it doesn't call itself "Bill of Rights"
in the Constitution.) It should be called the "Bill of Limitations".
But I digress.
The point is that, while Republicans claim they've carried off a
revolution, they're peddling the same shopworn socialist goods as
their left wing Democratic counterparts, and there's no conceivable
excuse.
Not after Florida.
Decency -- and the Constitution -- demand immediate repeal of
Clinton's illegal semiautomatic and magazine ban and Republicans offer
more prisons. Decency -- and the Constitution -- demand immediate
repeal of the vile Brady Bill and Republicans offer more executions.
Prisons and executions are a right wing socialist substitute -- no
sorrier or sillier than midnight basketball -- for the proper course
of action, removing every remaining legal barrier to individual self-defense.
Decency -- and the Constitution -- demand immediate repeal of laws
hindering the right to own and carry weapons and Republicans in state
legislatures everwhere offer a tangle of strict and complicated regulations
that would make a Soviet planner's latest glorious Five Year Plan for
agriculture appear progressive and openhanded by comparison.
So much for the revolution.
My home on the web, The Webley Page: www.webleyweb.com/lneil/
My e-zine The Libertarian Enterprise: www.webleyweb.com/tle/
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