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The Daily Reckoning | Tuesday, August 28, 2012 Frightening tales of a gang called “government,” Happy 184th birthday to one of the 19th century’s great minds, Plus, a brand new book for freedom seekers and plenty more... External Advertisement Collect a $1,638 “Rent” Check Every Month Some investors have found a way to collect huge “rent” checks every month by partnering with one of the world’s biggest “landlords.” One man from Ontario gets $1,638/month. Another in Arizona gets an amazing $5,969/month. One Texas man’s checks have grown to $23,220/month! And they’re receiving these checks without owning any real estate! To learn how you can join them, click here. Quotes of the Day... “The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another’s labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.” — Leo Tolstoy “Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrawise, must check tradition by reason.” — Leo Tolstoy   We're All Anarchists Now   Joel Bowman Joel Bowman, reckoning today from Lagos, Portugal... Long has man understood the definition of slavery. And long has he continued to practice it, ignoring and even mocking decent folks’ cries for its abolition. It’s time for something new. Were he still alive, Leo Tolstoy, a self-described “spiritualist anarchist,” would be 184 years old today. The world of 2012 could learn a lot from this towering, 19th Century intellectual. For one thing, Tolstoy understood well the anarchist attitude of “live and let live,” and he spent a good many words railing against The State and its brutal, oppressive nature. Tolstoy’s ideas on civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. He saw government for what it really is, “an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.” At heart, Tolstoy was a lover, not a hater. In his most famous work, War and Peace, he wrote: “Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.” This is not the kind of “warm and fuzzy” sentiment one might expect from an anarchist, at least not given the currently and widely misunderstood definition of the word. The term “anarchist,” for the average voter, is a pejorative used to describe jackbooted hooligans rampaging through the streets, hurling Molotov cocktails through Starbucks windows and generally making a nuisance of themselves. In point of fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The word has been hijacked and, in accordance with the Newspeak of our time, has come to mean the exact opposite of that for which what it stands. This is a convenient confounding of the definition, one that serves directly the goals of The State, the brutish institution that presides over the enslavement of individuals within a given border and, not infrequently, declares wars against those living within foreign borders. Properly understood, the term anarchy, which derives from the Greek anarchia, literally translates an, “without” + arkhos, “ruler.” Freedom from being owned...enslaved...forced against one’s will. Freedom to act voluntarily. Freedom to associate with whomever one so desires and under whatever conditions he or she sees fit...provided they do not diminish the ability of another to enjoy the same freedom. Tellingly, when one looks around today and sees who has the guns, the clubs, the Tasers and the jackboots...when we identify correctly those who wield the power to tax, detain, imprison, torture and to commit the lives of young men and women to battle...when we realize who badgers businesses, hampers trade, regulates progress, debases monies, and claims private property for their own ends, we see, emblazoned right there on the perpetrators’ uniforms, the bold, unmistakable badge of The State. And yet, curiously, it is to The State that most people look for protection against these very same evils. Tragically propagandized individuals are left to wonder, for example, who will safeguard them against theft and violence...if not for the institution that relentlessly steals and aggresses against them. They entrust the course of justice to an institution that daily and obscenely perverts it. And they surrender unto The State all the liberties and opportunities they wouldn’t dare be caught without. How is that working out, you ask? In yesterday’s edition of Laissez-Faire Today, fellow anarchist, Jeffrey Tucker, cited the results of a new study from Pew (source). It combines several sources of data to decisively declare a lost decade: Medium income data for the middle class shows a drop over 10 years from $72,956 in 2001 to $69,487 in 2010, the first time in the postwar years when income ended a 10-year period lower than when it started Median wealth, which means assets minus debt, fell 28% in the same time frame. A broad poll shows that 84% of people say it is more difficult than 10 years ago just to maintain the previous standard of living. “The bleak summary,” wrote Jeffrey, “Since 2000, the middle class has shrunk in size, fallen backward in income and wealth, and shed some — but by no means all — of its characteristic faith in the future.” The State is the problem, Fellow Reckoner, NOT the solution. After five years (and counting) of grinding deepening recession, it’s time to change tack. Far from being something to fear anarchy is, in many ways, the natural solution to our troubles. Anyone who doubts this will have trouble reconciling the fact that 99% of their most critical life decisions are made in a private state of anarchy. We’re all anarchists, for example, when it comes to choosing a mate. At the risk of belaboring the point, imagine for a second if the government claimed the right to tell you whom to marry. What do you think would happen to the quality of human relationships under such a regime? Now imagine the government chose your friends for you too, scheduled your social events, dinner parties and planned your weekends. Imagine a panel of bureaucrats assigned you a hobby of their choosing, prescribed for you a television channel and allotted you a specific time to watch it. Imagine the Minster of Gastronomy chose your restaurant for you, made your menu selections and decided on your wine. What do you suppose might happen to your overall quality of life? Few, if any, people would tolerate such intrusions on their personal liberties. And with good reason! Who would want to consummate a state-imposed marriage or, worse still, impose that obligation on an unwilling, state-selected partner? Decent individuals reserve — and, should the need arise, will defend — their right to chose these things for themselves. When it comes to the most important things in life, when it comes to our family and friends and to deciding how we spend the precious time we have with them, we’re all anarchists. It’s high time we took the statist shackles off the rest of our lives and started acting like it. P.S. Fellow Reckoners interested in learning more about anarchy, properly defined and thoughtfully pursued, need look no further than Jeffrey Tucker’s brand new book, A Beautiful Anarchy. In flowing prose and with deft insight, Jeffrey delves into what itreally means to be free and shares with us a dazzling array of practical, actionable ideas to help us recover the liberty we deserve for ourselves and for our loved ones. Grab a copy here...or simply sign up for Laissez-Faire Club and ge t one for free (in addition to a dozen other must-read titles already published!)   The “100-Year Wealth Event” No One Saw Coming... The same trend that led to Texas-sized oil riches, minting millionaires from Houston to Dallas, is about to unleash a second round of profit opportunity right here in the US. This wealth event has the potential to make a few in-the-know readers boatloads of yearly income... Click here to join them. The Daily Reckoning Presents Fifty Shades of Government   Jeffrey Tucker On a flight the other day, I noticed that a third of the passengers were reading a certain best-selling book. It got me thinking. Every politically active group wants something from government, and government is happy to oblige. It’s even more obvious in the election season, and it’s only going to get worse as we approach November. Another way to put it: Government has lots to give in the way of laws, loot, privileges, protections and punishments. Every pressure group and political party has an idea about how its power over us needs to be used. Does it make any difference who gets the loot, really? Not really, not to you and me. Whether you are taxed to make bike paths in Palo Alto or to fund reconnaissance missions in Kabul, you are still denied use of your money so that politicians and bureaucrats can realize their dreams. Whether the regulations say that you can’t work for less than $10 per hour or that you can’t buy raw milk at any price, your freedom to make contracts is still being compromised. We can and will argue interminably about how government ought to be used. Should government prevent gay people from contracting unions or stop private companies from discriminating against people who chose gay unions? Either way, the state is being brought in to tell people what they can and can’t do. In this sense, the left and the right have more in common than either side cares to admit: Both have a plan for how the state can better manage the social order. Should tobacco be banned or bailed out? Should banks be made too big to fail or badgered with regulatory restrictions so they can’t do real business? Should corporations be protected and subsidized, or should they be taxed within an inch of their lives? Should fatty foods be mandated as part of a national diet or kept off the menu as a health hazard? These are the great debates of our time. But these are actually not fundamental debates at all. Either way, the only real winner here is government, its agents, its public spokesmen, its powers and its place in our lives and the culture. This is what remains unquestioned. Should seniors be able to rob young people of their earnings in order to enjoy a luxurious retirement, or should seniors be especially taxed and punished for using more than their fair share of society’s health care resources? Whichever way that debate ends up, liberty itself suffers, and the property rights of everybody are less secure. Should religious people be able to control what we watch, read and smoke, or should secular people be able to impose laws that keep religious people from having too much influence over our culture? Either way, government is being granted more control over the social order than it should have. This is the great tragedy of living under leviathan. People have different ideas about how it ought to conduct its affairs. Who should be rewarded? Who should be punished? Who gets the privileges? Who must bear the cost? It becomes a war of pressure groups, everyone seeking to live at the expense of everyone else. What is this thing we call government? It consists of the gang with an institutional structure that makes the rules, enforces the rules, and lives by rules that are different from those it imposes on the rest of the population. We can’t steal, but government can. We can’t kill, but government can. We can’t counterfeit, kidnap, and engage in fraud, but government can. This thing called government, obviously, has a strong interest in maintaining its power, prestige, and funding. This is true no matter what the structure of the government happens to be. Oligarchy, absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, presidential republic, parliamentary republic, democracy — all of them have one thing in common: They create a special caste of citizens that live at the expense of everyone else. In a democracy especially, government enlists us all in its cause. So long as people are arguing about how to use the government, and not whether it should be used to achieve social and economic goals at all, the government comes out the winner. All the pressure groups are really just rewarding the political class, transferring power and money from us to them. Precisely what the excuse is — and it changes all the time, sometimes subtly and sometimes dramatically — doesn’t matter to government. Government is a chameleon, pleased to wear any cultural or ideological cloak to blend in with its social and cultural surroundings. In a wrangling, struggling, grasping, dog-eat-dog democracy like ours, there are fifty shades of government, each suitable for a particular time and place, each adapted to purposes of the moment, all with the interest of firming up control by the ruling class. This is what the “political spectrum” is all about. Government dominates and we submit. It puts us in bondage and we obey its discipline. There’s also got to be a good excuse or else we would never put up with this. We have to believe that the government is, in some way, at some level, doing something that pleases us. Maybe even the government is us! People say that in the “age of faith” of the Middle Ages, religious differences led to wars. Historians who have looked carefully have noticed something different. Governments that want wars are happy to use religion as the excuse. And so it is today. In the “age of science,” we get scientific social planning in which experts are supposed tell the people with their hands on the controls how to use them. But whether the excuse is religion or science, security or the environment, nationalism or internationalism, it doesn’t matter to the rest of us. The rights and liberties of the people paying the bill are forever being sacrificed to someone else’s political agenda. So come November, we will drag ourselves to the voting booth and look at the names and try to remember what these various people promise to do for us and to us if we ratify their right to rule. Having done so, we are told that we’ve made our choice and now we must live with it. But maybe it is not really a choice at all. Maybe it is time to let go of our dependency and reject the entire master-slave relationship that is the whole basis of the system itself. Fifty Shades of Government has been the best-seller for hundreds of years. It’s time that the governed write an entirely new book. Regards, Jeffrey Tucker, for The Daily Reckoning Joel’s Note: And, as is happens, Jeffrey Tucker has done just that...with his fantastic, just-released book, A Beautiful Anarchy. We mentioned it above, but the title certainly deserves repeating. If you don’t already have a copy of A Beautiful Anarchy, do yourself a favor and grab one here.  And for Fellow Reckoners who wish to really delve into the ideas of liberty, please consider signing up for the Laissez-Faire Club. It beats a college miseducation by about $100k worth of debt and you get to hang out with creative, like-minded individuals...not that creepy robot kid with the Obama/Romney sticker on his notebook.    What to Expect in 2013... Between 2004-2007, Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin did their best to alert their loyal readers to the dangers of the housing bubble well before the mainstream said anything about it. Well, today, they see something even worse looming just over the horizon. It’s not often our Reckoner-in-Chief agrees to appear on-screen, but this was just too important. Click here (or the image below) to see what they’re talking about now... Too Much of a Good Thing, Continued... Too Much of a Good Thing The Croquet Party Last Chance to Buy Gold Below $1,700? Diversifying to Aussie Dollars and Scandinavian Currencies Dollar Bounces Back to End the Week The Daily Reckoning: Now in its 11th year, The Daily Reckoning is the flagship e-letter of Baltimore-based financial research firm and publishing group Agora Financial, a subsidiary of Agora Inc. The Daily Reckoning provides over half a million subscribers with literary economic perspective, global market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Published daily in six countries and three languages, each issue delivers a feature-length article by a senior member of our team and a guest essay from one of many leading thinkers and nationally acclaimed columnists. Cast of Characters: Bill BonnerFounder Addison WigginPublisher Eric FryEditorial Director Joel Bowman Managing Editor The Mogambo Guru  Editor  Rocky Vega Editor