Resistance, Objection, Dissent: Punishable by Death

Libertarians have a tendency to invoke imagery that many people would rather dismiss as worst-case hyperbole. Case in point: we’re tremendously fond of analogies using guns or swords, and often make the argument that thus-and-such a policy is tantamount to theft at gunpoint (e.g., Taxation is Theft) and that violence and murder is what’s behind everything governments do.  For example, on Tax Day (April 15), Mike Gogulski quoted Edward Abbey:

Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

But this is not mere hyperbole.  If you try to resist them, they will kill you because you dared not to submit, and for no other reason. For if one resistance goes unpunished, others would soon follow suit. So the State determines that resistance cannot go unpunished. This much becomes apparent if you trace back a sequence of events to a root cause.

In the now, immediately: the Sheriff says, “If you do not pay your taxes, I will arrest you. If you resist arrest, I will physically subdue you. If you fight me, I will kill you.”  If the man, unprovoked except for the Sheriff’s threat, replies to the Sheriff, “If you shoot at me, I’ll shoot back,” this retort, in the eyes of the law a threatening and aggressive posture, brand him as a criminal menace, and justify violently suppressing his dissent. If the man threatens the Sheriff, his words alone could be justification for escalating the mere disagreement to physical violence, which is why the man says nothing at all — or at least makes no threats. He does not want to play a game of “Who’s got a bigger gun?”

But if we take a step further back in the sequence of events that led us to this confrontation, we see that the tax resister isn’t hurting or threatening anyone. In fact, he’s not doing anything until some jackboot breaks down his door and attempts to black-bag him, at which point it is his prerogative, and his responsibility to defend himself against an obvious threat to his personal well-being. Why would the Sheriff instigate such a situation?

There exists a presumption that the Sheriff is enforcing a just law.  This presumption, after all, is what empowers him to make such threats (which he otherwise would not make), and excuses without question otherwise intolerable behavior.  If the Sheriff were any other man, we would (rightly) object to his use of violence as a means of dispute resolution.

Some might say that, “The Sheriff threatened the man because he didn’t pay his taxes,” but that’s just not satisfactory. Aside from the fact that the Sheriff is legally empowered to do this (i.e., he can), and setting aside the “social contract” argument, what we really have here is a difference of opinion: the Sheriff wants the man to pay his taxes, and the man doesn’t want to pay them. This disagreement, one party believes is appropriate to settle with bullets. (Even this much is debatable: it’s likely that the Sheriff hasn’t given one second’s thought to the moral consequences of “upholding the law,” and therefore doesn’t even have an opinion.)

The Sheriff likely initiates violence, thus provoking a retaliatory, defensive action, nominally referred to as a “crime”, legtitimizing (in the eyes of the masses) the retributive punishment that will follow.

And if the Sheriff fails, they just change the rules of the game and reach for a bigger gun.  This might be a SWAT team or whatever amount of force is necessary to overwhelm the “criminal”.  The State had every opportunity to leave him alone in the first place. They didn’t do it when they could’ve avoided bloodshed, and they sure as hell aren’t going to give up after one of their own is injured in the confrontation (they started it!). Maintaining the illusion is all that matters, and at any cost, he will be “brought to justice” under the Rule of Law.

When a man resists, objects, defies, or dissents, the State punishes him not because he is a violent, criminal, menace to society, but because he dared challenge its power, to assert his individual sovereignty. And it is the resister’s continued objections which the State uses to justify as much violence as is necessary to subdue or eliminate the objector.