Tag Archives: Coercion

What’s the Difference?by Eric Peters

Posted on August 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

Live and let live has never been the operative philosophy of leftists. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

There is one enormous difference between Leftists and the rest of us –  and it is not a difference of opinion.

It is that Leftists will not abide differences of opinion, especially when those who hold different opinions dare to act on them. Even when they are in the right – in terms of the facts – and even when their actions do nothing to tangibly, negatively affect Leftists, except insofar as their feelings are affronted.

The whole “masking” (and “vaccinating”) business marked out these divisions. Also the “lockdowns” that Leftists either advocated or enforced.

Not wearing a “mask – or refusing the “vaccine” – causes no harm to others, including Leftists. This is established fact, though it took seemingly forever for it to be acknowledged.

Even more paradoxically – even more revealingly – if “masks” did “work” (in the sense that wearing prevented people from getting or spreading the various “variants”) and the same for the “vaccines” we know no do not stop the getting or the spreading, either – then Leftists ought to have been content to wear “masks” and take “vaccines” themselves and leave those who chose not to wear or take to suffer the consequences.

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But What About the Roads? By Eric Peters

Posted on March 17, 2022 | Leave a comment

There is nothing that governments do other than make war that private individuals cannot do as well or better. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

But what about the roads?

Anyone who has tried to advocate for a libertarian society – i.e., a society in which coercion is the fundamental crime – has heard this refrain. Its premise is that we’d have no roads to travel on if it weren’t for government seizing people’s land – this is styled “eminent domain,” to make it sound official rather than immoral – and forcing people to pay for the roads laid down upon them.

It’s a strange argument given that – in the first place – roads precede government. They may have been (at first) mere paths or trails through woods and fields – but the function is fundamentally the same as any other road.

Some of these trails and paths eventually became very much like the roads as we know them, sans the asphalt and guardrails, of course. These roads were considered the public right-of-way for much of history – and it was accepted that everyone had the right to travel upon them.

So, roads – and the principle of the public right-of-way – predate government.

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A Desperate Biden Administration Turns to Terrorism, by Daniel McAdams

Posted on October 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

The propaganda now is that if only the unvaccinated would take their shots, all the supply chain and inflation issues besetting the economy would magically disappear. The problem is nobody believes it so the administration is availing itself of the tactic used by failing governments everywhere—coercion. From Daniel McAdams at ronpaulinstitute.org:

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For Americans watching the shocking re-Nazification of Germany – where once again the ability to even buy food depends on a person’s physiological/medical status – it may be tempting to downplay the re-emergence of a nasty German political virus and scoff that, “it can’t happen here!” But it is happening here.

The Biden Administration is sinking under the weight of its feeble figurehead, who is clearly living in a world of his own creation rather than living on planet reality. As Biden’s approval ratings plummet to near-historic depths, the people who run his administration – some say it’s really led by demon Susan Rice – are not backing off their hyper-authoritarian approach to…well, everything.

In fact they’re doubling down.

Nurse shortage? Tough – get your shot. Billions of containers waiting to be unloaded and trucked to fill empty shelves? Tough – get your shot. Murder alley Chicago facing 50 percent less cops because those who don’t want the vax are being fired? Tough – get your shot. No one to fly the plane? Tough – get your shot. No teachers? Tough – get your shot!

Into this explosion of malevolent incompetence staggers US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Department Wally Adeyemo – second-highest ranker in the entire Department. The Nigerian-born Adeyemo, who previously served as director of African American outreach for the inspiring John Kerry 2004 presidential campaign and as a senior advisor to corrupt “woke” multi-gazillionaire Larry Fink, should be given credit for at least being honest about the intentions of his bosses in the Biden Administration.

Sometimes they tell the truth by accident.

Interviewed on ABC News on Thursday, Adeyemo was asked about the thousands of container ships anchored offshore in California and elsewhere as US store shelves begin to look like Bulgaria circa 1975 – and even Santa Claus is sweating “supply chain” strangulation as Christmas quickly approaches.

It’s not because Newsom’s California is a Marxist hellhole, where the religious fundamentalism of the Green New Deal fanatics has taken massive numbers of truckers off the road. Nope.

It’s not Biden’s vax mandate which has unleashed a massive outflux of workers from their jobs – quitting or fired – at a time of severe labor shortages. Nope.

The problem is you. You unwashed vermin who refuse to have a cocktail of experimental goop jabbed into your arm.

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Biden’s Vaccine “Strike Force” Plan Stinks Of Desperation, by Brandon Smith

Posted on July 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

Unless the “Strike Force” is going to “strike” with guns and coerced vaccinations, figure that it’s not going to convert many non-vaxxers to vaxxers. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.us:

If there is one rule liberty minded people need to remember, it is that the establishment does not like losing control of the narrative. And when they do, noticeably weird things start to happen. For example, it is becoming painfully obvious that the narrative on the experimental mRNA “vaccines” has slipped right through the fingers of the Biden Administration, and as a consequence they are now in a scramble to get millions of vaccines injected into as many skeptical arms as possible before the public organizes for a full push-back against the agenda. It seems to me that they are in a bit of a panic.

The issue became more evident since January when various government entities and the media began to openly complain about the number of vaccine doses that were being thrown in the garbage because of expiration. Why were the vaccines expiring before use? The media spin suggests that it was due to “government mismanagement”, while officials at the state level have admitted that it has been due to a significant drop in demand.

In the meantime, Biden has shipped over 500 million covid vaccine doses overseas in June while at the same time claiming that the US was on track to meet his 70% vaccination goal by July 4th. Needless to say this never happened. The Biden admin now claims that the US population is now 67% vaccinated, and if this was actually true then it would be very close to meeting Anthony Fauci’s original guidelines for herd immunity. So why all the frantic hype about unvaccinated people?

Firstly, Fauci has continually moved the goal posts for herd immunity to the point that he is now telling the public to ignore herd immunity altogether and that the only option is to get EVERYONE vaccinated. Many of us in the liberty media said this is exactly what he would do, and he has proven to be incredibly predictable. Secondly, the CDC vaccination numbers seem to be inflated in order to create a manufactured consensus.

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Making it “Easier” by Eric Peters

Posted on March 3, 2021 | Leave a comment

There’s a special class of people who feel that whatever they want for the rest of us is what the rest of us should get, at the point of a gun if necessary. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

The best way to force something onto people who don’t want it is to force what they do want off the market.

Examples of this include the forced retirement of the best automotive refrigerant ever developed – Freon – which cools faster and deeper than the replacements that were forced onto the market by forcing Freon off the market – in the name of the “ozone hole” but in actuality because of expiring patents on Freon that meant it would be much cheaper to make it and so cheaper to buy it than the “ozone-friendly” replacements forced onto the market.

D’Lynda Fischer: Portrait of a political psychopath

Another example is gasoline – which has been largely forced off the market in favor of adulterated gasoline. What most Americans are forced to pump into their tanks is actually 10 percent ethanol (ethyl alcohol) and only 90 percent gasoline.

Soon, there may be no gasoline at all.

Not because people don’t want it but rather because they won’t be able to buy it. Because of new laws proliferating  forbidding the selling of it.

As in Petaluma, California – where the city council just voted to prohibit new gas stations from being built and also that existing gas stations may not install new pumps. “The goal here is to move away from fossil fuels and to make it as easy as possible to do that,” says one of the legislation’s main backers, D’Lynda Fischer.

She means her goal; the goal of those forcing their views upon the people of Petaluma. It will be made “easier” for them to not buy gas, in order to make it harder for them to not drive cars that burn gasoline.

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“Break Their Will” by Eric Peters

Posted on February 17, 2021 | 1 comment

There are a lot of wanna-be totalitarians within the ranks of America’s local, state, and federal governments. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

When a dog curls its lip and bares its teeth, you know what sort of dog you’re dealing with. One such dog curled its lip in Massachusetts recently. His name is David Ismay – possibly related to the Bruce Ismay of Titanic fame, but hold that thought.

This Ismay wants to “break the will” — his words – of people who rely on gasoline to power their cars and oil and natural gas to heat their homes.

And he was in a position to do just that, being a government worker and having lots of armed government workers available to enforce whatever he decreed as the Undersecretary for Climate Change – yes, such an office exists – of the state of Massachusetts. A state nominally under the governorship of a Republican – Charlie Barker – it bears pointing out.

Of course, Massachusetts  is also the state where Obamacare was born, under the governorship of another Republican  . . . Mitt Romney.

But hold that thought.

“Sixty percent of our emissions come from residential heating and passenger vehicles,” Ismay told an audience gathered to hear him expostulate  – using the royal “our” as collectivists reflexively do when they mean to say everyone except themselves, especially when it comes to having wills broken. He went on to say that these “emissions that need to be reduced” – the assertion is taken as established fact – “come from you, the person on your street, the senior on fixed income.”

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Why the State Is a “Parasite on Society”, by Doug Casey

Posted on September 24, 2019 | Leave a comment

Doug Casey thinks we’d do fine without any governments at all. From Casey at caseyresearch.com:

Allow me to say a few things that some of you may find shocking, offensive, or even incomprehensible. On the other hand, I suspect many or most of you may agree – but either haven’t crystallized your thoughts, or are hesitant to express them. I wonder if it will be safe to say them in another five years…

You’re likely aware that I’m a libertarian. But I’m actually more than a libertarian, I’m an anarcho-capitalist. In other words, I actually don’t believe in the right of the State to exist. Why not? The State isn’t a magical entity; it’s a parasite on society. Anything useful the State does could be, and would be, provided by entrepreneurs seeking a profit. And would be better and cheaper by virtue of that.

More important, the State represents institutionalized coercion. It has a monopoly of force, and that’s always extremely dangerous. As Mao Tse-tung, lately one of the world’s leading experts on government, said: “The power of the State comes out of a barrel of a gun.” The State is not your friend.

There are two possible ways for people to relate to each other: either voluntarily or coercively. The State is pure institutionalized coercion. As such, it’s not just unnecessary, but antithetical, to a civilized society. And that’s increasingly true as technology advances. It was never moral, but at least it was possible in oxcart days for bureaucrats to order things around. Today the idea is ridiculous.

The State is a dead hand that imposes itself on society, mainly benefitting those who control it, and their cronies. It shouldn’t be reformed; it should be abolished. That belief makes me, of course, an anarchist.

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How to Create Conflict, by Walter E. Williams

Posted on June 12, 2019 | Leave a comment

Governments create win-lose situations; markets create win-win situations. From Walter E. Williams at lewrockwell.com:

We are living in a time of increasing domestic tension. Some of it stems from the presidency of Donald Trump. Another part of it is various advocacy groups on both sides of the political spectrum demanding one cause or another. But nearly totally ignored is how growing government control over our lives, along with the betrayal of constitutional principles, contributes the most to domestic tension. Let’s look at a few examples.

Think about primary and secondary schooling. I think that every parent has the right to decide whether his child will recite a morning prayer in school. Similarly, every parent has the right to decide that his child will not recite a morning prayer. The same can be said about the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag, sex education and other hot-button issues in education. These become contentious issues because schools are owned by the government.

In the case of prayers, there will either be prayers or no prayers in school. It’s a political decision whether prayers will be permitted or not, and parent groups with strong preferences will organize to fight one another. A win for one parent means a loss for another parent. The losing parent will be forced to either concede or muster up private school tuition while continuing to pay taxes for a school for which he has no use. Such a conflict would not arise if education were not government-produced but only government-financed, say through education vouchers. Parents with different preferences could have their wishes fulfilled by enrolling their child in a private school of their choice. Instead of being enemies, parents with different preferences could be friends.

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Name the State, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Posted on April 7, 2019 | Leave a comment

Many debates about government policy fail to note the nature and scope of government involvement in the issue under debate. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at aier.com:

The number one problem of all public debate about politics and economics is the failure to name the state. If this would change, so would public opinion.

There is no shortage of examples. People talk about health care for all, solving climate change, providing security in old age, universal educational access, boosting wages, ending discrimination, and you can add to the list without end.

That’s one side.

The other speaks of national identity, protecting jobs, making us more moral, forming cultural cohesion, providing security against the foreign enemy, and so on.

Obfuscation

All of this, no matter how fancy the language, is obfuscation. What all of this really means is: put the state in charge. What’s strange is the unwillingness to say it outright. This is for a reason. The plans the politicians have for our lives would come across as far less compelling if they admitted the following brutal truth.

There really are only two ways to allocate goods and services in society: the markets (which rely on individual choice) and the state (which runs on compulsion). No one has ever found a third way. You can mix the two — some markets and some state-run operations — but there always is and always will be a toggling between the two. If you replace markets, the result will be more force via the state, which means bureaucratic administration and rule by force. If you reduce the role of the state, you rely more on markets. This is the logic of political choice, and there is no escaping it.

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Shining a Light on the Sociopaths in Politics, by Doug Casey

Posted on November 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

Once you realize that people who want to tell other people what to do—or else!—are sociopaths, politics is easy to understand. From Doug Casey at internationalman.com:

There are at least seven characteristics that define a sociopath, although I’m sure the list could be extended:

  1. Sociopaths completely lack a conscience or any capacity for real regret about hurting people. Although they pretend the opposite.
  2. Sociopaths put their own desires and wants on a totally different level from those of other people. Their wants are incommensurate. They truly believe their ends justify their means. Although they pretend the opposite.
  3. Sociopaths consider themselves superior to everyone else, because they aren’t burdened by the emotions and ethics others have – they’re above all that. They’re arrogant. Although they pretend the opposite.
  4. Sociopaths never accept the slightest responsibility for anything that goes wrong, even though they’re responsible for almost everything that goes wrong. You’ll never hear a sincere apology from them.
  5. Sociopaths have a lopsided notion of property rights. What’s theirs is theirs, and what’s yours is theirs too. They therefore defend currency inflation and taxation as good things.
  6. Sociopaths usually pick the wrong target to attack. If they lose their wallet, they kick the dog. If 16 Saudis fly planes into buildings, they attack Afghanistan.
  7. Sociopaths traffic in disturbing news, they love to pass on destructive rumors, and they’ll falsify information to damage others.

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