respecting tyranny

At Reason, A. Barton Hinkle looks at the dangers of militarized law enforcement:

The paramilitary approach to law enforcement flies in the face of the idea that the police and the citizens are on the same side. Officer Friendly, strolling the block in a blue uniform and playing a paradiddle with his baton on a white picket fence, looks like he is ready to help carry groceries for the little old lady who lives on the corner. A cop in combat gear with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder looks like he is ready to go to war. In war, there is no presumption of innocence—and the opposing side is not a fellow citizen with constitutional rights. He is the enemy.

Is it a coincidence that this is happening at the same time that more things are criminalized than ever before? Reading about another federal raid (on suspicion of illegal wood) on the Gibson Guitar Company reminded me of a post I wrote titled “Where were you when wood became a felony?”

…in the future, the Fish and Game guys will be able to accompany SWAT Team raiders to check all wood in homes and businesses for possible violations. Even if they’re wrong in their suspicions about the wood, it can still be confiscated. (Might that be a goal? To beef up employment at Fish and Game?)

Just think about the law enforcement possibilities alone. After kicking through and impounding your illegal wooden door, a federalized army of government termites could literally strip all wood paneling and flooring from every raided house as suspicious contraband, and haul away all the furniture, wood carvings, picture frames, tools, musical instruments! I can’t think of a better harassment tool.

It was a long rant, and right now I feel like repeating myself:

Between Wood Control and the Consumer Product Safety Nazis, I pity anyone in the secondhand business, including all Ebay and Craigslist sellers as well as people holding garage or yard sales.

In short, I pity the American people. This is not their fault, though, for no one has any control over what is going on. Not even the despicable fools we call “legislators” who cannot read the “laws” they pass because they are not meant to be read. As to the enforcers, they are only doing their job. They have to earn a living. And we are supposed to respect them, because they lay their lives on the line, “protecting” the public! From felonious wood!

Obviously, the full implications of this dramatic loss of freedom are beyond the capacity of a single post. After all, I am just one blogger, doing this by myself, without the kind of access to data that media organizations and think tanks might have. So, I cannot possibly hope to analyze everything. As things stand, I became exhausted last night just reading through the Lacey Act Amendment stuff pertaining to wood — and that was one mere fraction of an execrable, unreadable monstrosity. I don’t mean to whine, but slogging through such horrors is not exactly my idea of Saturday night fun. But who the hell else is going to do it? Flooring and furniture industry blogs? Who the hell reads them except people in the business? They’re all greedy tree haters and have no credibility. Besides, all big business is the enemy right now. We need to stand up not only against Big Cereal, but now Big Flooring! Big Siding! Big Furniture! (Is there such an industry as Big Chopstick?)

I realize I’m in full-blown libertarian scold mode, and it probably reflects impotent rage over the fact that this is too little too late. But that goes to my biggest complaint (aside from my discovery of yet another horrific legislative power grab), which simply is this:

How come we were not told about this?

Where were the news media and think tanks when we needed them? It’s too late now. Vast power grabs like this are almost never repealed, and certainly won’t be in this Congress.

And that was just one little itty bitty (yes, even “petty“)  tyrannical piece of legislation, buried though it was in thousands of pages of unreadable text. The people who rule us are unaccountable monsters, and it seems we have very little to say about it.

Moreover, the people tasked with the enforcement of these ridiculous and inflexible laws have zero compassion, and zero tolerance for common sense. These apparatchiks are perfectly willing to cart away a dad who shot a grizzly bear which was menacing him and his family.

But even though the scope and intensity increases, the mechanisms are nothing new. The war on drugs has been in place for so long that citizens have just come to expect things like this.

Americans have simply learned to live with tyranny.

However, that does not mean that they respect tyranny or tyrants. Sure, they respect the power of the tyrants, because if you don’t respect the power of a gun pointed at your head, you’re most likely a suicidal fool. But that does not mean they respect those who have taken away their freedom, or the system which has put them in such a position of such abject degradation.

So it should come as no surprise that when the laws become tyrannical, respect for the law disappears.

UPDATE: Dana Loesch interviews Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz about the raid.

Despite Gibson’s good faith attempts to comply, the feds claim the company has violated the laws of India by not having the wood finished in India. It has nothing to do with the environment, but it is pure harassment of a much loved American company.

The whole thing is an outrage.