“An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.”
-Jeff Cooper

Much of this essay details philosophical concerns which any decent person (the tiny minority of people; libertarians) intuitively grasp. The rest of humanity needs these portions of this essay (pointing out that death is bad, and should be fought against, and that the physical sciences are the best path forward towards a cure, etc.). But then, if that’s the case, it’s equally apparent to the “intuitive libertarians” or “intuitive extropians” that the primary cause of death is unfreedom, ie: “coercive government.”

I could write a similar essay, titled “Illegitimate Government is an Outrage.” But to those who need evidence to reveal the obvious, (because they have a conformist dedication to the world as they were programmed, by sociopaths, to view it), the amount of evidence in such an essay could never be enough. Most people are conformists, and most conformists have a programmed commitment to untruth. Said another way: As psychologists Milgram, Zimbardo, and Asch have revealed, conformists generally occupy a philosophical space occupied by farm chattel. Some subset of those conformists will reject this space if they are made aware of it. Others won’t know how to reject it, without rejecting legitimate portions of government with the illegitimate. (The answer is to reject the portions of government that don’t meet with over 99% approval, as determined by juries. If 5% of society seriously publicly disagrees with a law, can that law possibly be a good law? Probably not. Moreover, the laws against the worst transgressions existed prior to the country’s formation, as codified by “Jacob’s Law Dictionary.”)

I believe, with much supporting evidence, that government is the primary cause of death. Where it doesn’t actively murder, it saps the strength, wealth and resources needed to prevent death. I believe this because the central basis of government is coercion, and the ability to coerce (in otherwise voluntary society) is the ability to initiate force, to steal, and to kill. In short, illegitimate government serves an opposite purpose to the central stated (legitimate) purpose of (legitimate) government.

The idea of legitimate government, is that all of those being governed have a say in their governance, and that the best means of governing is to protect the justly-acquired property of all, including the physical bodies (necessary for life) of all (even those too poor to defend themselves). Juries are designed to accomplish this at the most granular, lowest hierarchical level, and elections are designed to accomplish this at the highest hierarchical level. (However, there is a weakness in this view: Controlled elections are not “bottom-up” democracy, they are “top-down” contests that are stacked via ballot access impediments, against incumbent-challengers.)

There’s another severe problem with the prior model: Sociopaths exist. Sociopaths don’t care if you live or die, and they are purely self-interested and narrowly-self-serving entities. Some are smarter than others, and they wind up being central bank owners and controllers. Under them, are the central bankers, and other servants of the elite central bank owners. Under them are a multitude of bureaucrats and other low-level enforcers.

The purpose of this social structure is predation upon those engaged in producing wealth, and trading value for value. The legitimate protectors of property (those within government who serve government’s legitimate and stated “primary purposes” or “core functions”) are relegated to being a tiny infinitesimal portion of the overall government, far less than 1% of all government activity. The vast majority, (well over 99% of government) is dedicated to activities ranging from passive parasitism to active predation.

The FDA, AMA, ACS, and DEA, by changing the default status of medical innovation from “One can do anything that isn’t prohibited,” to “One cannot do anything unless it is approved,” has murdered millions of innocent civilians in the USA. Still worse, they’ve prevented the means necessary to calculate their own destructiveness. The ATF, which cannot exist if the 2nd Amendment is to be followed, has taken a similarly unconstitutional approach to “firearms regulation,” (nowhere allowed by the common law or the constitution) banning weapons that Supreme Court precedent claims are legal, and allowing weapons which Supreme Court precedent claims are illegal (a schizophrenic and self-contradictory policy that allows for selective enforcement against the strongest critics and strongest opponents of the state). The Supreme Court’s precedents themselves are obviously and grotesquely self-contradictory, as illustrated in the novel “Unintended Consequences,” and in many nonfiction critiques of firearms “regulation.” All the ways in which default levels of innovation and exploratory human behavior are now proscribed and infringed upon, fill thousands of volumes of nonfiction at places like Cato.org and Mises.org. Most of the criticisms of the existing government are overlapping and mutually-inclusive. And, they are also rendered unnecessary by a comprehension of “the common law.” ie: “All crimes must have a valid cause of action or ‘corpus delecti.’ The valid cause of action applies to all police actions, or retaliatory force. The police cannot do what the citizen cannot do. The law must be accessible to all. A valid “cause of action” at the enforcement level must include “injury to a specific, named party” AND “intent to injure a specific named party.”" A valid “corpus delecti” or “body of the crime” must include the same two elements at the prosecution level. By allowing the government to proscribe human action without an intervening trial by jury, we have allowed an un-American system to supplant the American system of government. This happened most obviously in the early 1900s, but it was underway long before then.

The loss of wealth contributes to an earlier, yet still “seemingly natural” death. Moreover, the fact that most of the purchasing power of the nation has been lost due to theft (either overt IRS confiscation, or inflationary theft which requires a more systematic knowledge of the system to track), is the leading cause of death.

Critics of modern cancer therapy ranging from Stephen Badylak to G. Edward Griffin point to the FDA and AMA as protectors of Big Pharma, and claim that thousands of promising cancer therapies and associated research have been curtailed, blackballed, and smeared in the public press. Books like “Send in the Waco Killers” reveal the connection between armies of sloppy-thinkers in government, and armies of similarly unprofessional journalism majors. Such sloppy thinkers lacked the ability to provide valuable services, in an increasingly technological society. Rather than accept a low social status commensurate with their skills and abilities, they opted to seek political power, to steal their living, rather than earn it. Conformists across a range of skills and abilities have allowed this to happen.

Those incapable of going into the hard sciences and creating value can easily go into the arts and soft sciences, and occupy positions that hold coercive government power. The more power these positions wield, the more prestige they acquire, and the more power and wealth they possess, enabling future coercive transgressions against basic property rights.

Government debt now numbers in the Trillions of dollars. This is enough to collapse the entire US, and possibly world, economy. Every dollar taken by the fiat currency system corresponds to a dollar that would have remained in the hands of the investors and wealth producers, generating new wealth. True, some of this stolen wealth will be used somewhat productively, …but not as productively and with as rational a set of priorities as if it had been retained by the innovators and producers themselves.

Here’s just one example: Instead of defeating death, “we” (the U.S. government) threw slave-labor dollars at putting a man on the moon. A subset of those whose dollars were thrown at the moon landing would have been used to defeat or delay death itself (deprioritizing the moon landing, and prioritizing survival). Then, to add insult to injury, the people who lost their wealth died. They didn’t get a second chance. This is commonly the fate of those looted by the government death acts as a “safety valve” …for the sociopaths.

In short, ending government control of innocent lives should be re-evaluated as a top priority.

Were we to truly end government control of human life, death would soon be conquered. Of course, this would amount to getting serious about allowing ALL men a pathway around government.

As such, Counter-economics (as posited by SEK3, minus the prohibition on political participation), is a viable pathway forward, to a new renaissance. Such a renaissance, to reap the total benefit of its potential, would need to be all-inclusive, for everyone who made the choice to conduct themselves in a voluntary manner, respectful of individual rights.

If the coercive conformists wish to form coercive sub-communities, then fine. …But let those who never signed their morally-stunted version of a “social contract” opt out. In fact, let’s take a look at what unanimous participation in government programs means. It means that I would not participate in the bombings of Iraq or Afghanistan, and I would be publicly identified (by my own choice) as not participating (thus opening myself up to peaceful trade with other peaceful and uninvolved Pakistanis and Afghans in the USA, where I live). It means that I might be carrying a concealed weapon, so I couldn’t be counted on to be an easy target. It means that all of my cooperation would need to be voluntarily obtained. It means that I’d be emboldened to trade without fear of reprisal, knowing I’d have a jury trial, and that punishing me for mala prohibita would be difficult or impossible, given randomly-selected jurors and the necessity of properly-recognized legal standing.

Artilects are capable of comprehending all of the prior legal concepts. In fact, most decent people grasp them readily, with little problem. Sociopaths, on the other hand, cannot figure out that what is yours, is not theirs. The same goes for those who mindlessly follow sociopaths.

The path forward is clear: intelligent people and machines should hold themselves to a high standard, that both identifies and excludes mindless tyranny.

Your local courthouse is your local tyranny outpost.

We should proceed to engage and neutralize the destruction it causes, either as a concerned citizen, or as an active revolutionary, or both.

Tyranny is an even greater outrage than death, because it has already been cured once. When we had robust, proper jury trials, we had less tyranny. To the extent jury trials have been eroded, we now have correspondingly more tyranny. The laws and principles of just government are well-known to the enlightened few, and unknown to the many. It is my goal to bring those laws and principles to universal acknowledgement, universal application, and universal effectiveness.

I intend to do this by standing outside of courthouses and adding a +1 friend to my cause, one by one, in real life, instead of on facebook (as most Libertarians do). By handing jury rights pamphlets to strangers (and making comprehension of them mandatory for family and friends), we can return the USA to a state of individual freedom, within weeks, not years. This is the cure for tyranny. The Konkinist libertarians ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agorism ) and Voluntaryist libertarians whose philosophy prohibits electoral participation ( http://www.voluntaryist.com ) openly admit that their “strategy” is designed to take years, possibly hundreds of years. I prefer strategies which don’t lead to the deaths of all involved prior to achieving success.

The people who want to take the guns away from the totalitarians are not just trying to “use power the way they think it should be used.” The people who want to disarm the totalitarians are actually correct. It’s just not obvious to unphilosophical people, prior to the physical event, because those people weren’t smart enough to determine that the incumbent sociopaths were lying to them. This fact is the root cause of ineffectual political participation (Konkinism, “political relinquishment”) within the Libertarian Party.

In most other areas (other than “political relinquishment”), I perfectly agree with the konkinists and voluntaryists, but only because the government now is almost entirely illegitimate. If we, through realistic threat of retaliatory force (or realistic threat of universal tax nonpayment), reinstated a government (with a proper jury system at its core, as our core demand) that was purely voluntary, it would be trend toward benevolence. Such a government would trend toward placing greater and greater limits on its power, such as the ones suggested by Robert Heinlein on page 300 of his book “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.” (Real checks on government, such as a “legislature of repeal,” all laws being placed on the ballot for potential repeal by 10% of the vote, etc.)

This is within the power of humans who are now alive, with technology that now exists.

Death IS an outrage! …And so is its number one preventable cause: unlimited, sociopath-driven government. For a more detailed commentary on what a voluntary government that does not initiate force looks like, please take a look at http://www.harrybrowne.com or, for several links to books on optimal libertarian activism, please visit http://jcwitmer.blogspot.com

Thank you.