Before we fight World War III in cyberspace, let's consider why justice must be done by private individuals—not governments.
The simplest explanation is obvious: governments, as such, do not exist. 'Official' duties are carried out by private individuals—all of whom started life as ordinary civilians, equally innocent, before they grew up to become bureaucrats or cops. I am well aware of their numerous misdeeds, exploiting the loopholes of official 'discretion', while wielding the practical power of armed supremacy. This is an additional reason to frown, when someone says that government is a necessary or desirable form of social control. But the central bone of contention, throughout the centuries, was not whether individual magistrates acted properly in aid of liberty and justice—but rather, whether there should be created and maintained a class of men to govern other men, typically a few in power over the many. To this question, liberal fundamentalists (anarchists) shouted No!—while thousands of effete scholars whimpered maybe, claiming to discern the public weal in a kaleidoscope of buts and howevers.
If it sounds odd, that I describe myself as a liberal, there is really nothing mysterious about it. "Liberals" (as the name implies, and as I use the term here) are in favor of liberty—not for the few, but for the many, as of right. Fundamentalists take it seriously. As children, we soaped the neighbors' windows and experimented with fireworks. As teenagers, we fought turf wars (or committed other crimes). Now adults, we recognize no collective authority; the legitimacy of no one to be King or Commissar over an unarmed, subservient, terrified peasant class. Most anarchists are former peasants. We found it necessary to experience the tense drama of law-breaking, in a social system built on lies and infamy, which impels thoughtful men to cry: "Smash the state!"
Statists, on the other hand, never break the law. They are employed at state universities, nonprofit think tanks, and tax-exempt political 'orgs'. Nothing is more important than their next salary and benefits package—regardless of whether liberty waxes or wanes for the many. If the economy tanks, Cato will feel divinely anointed to reason with the functionaries and flunkies of state. But they will never put their butts on the firing line and man the barricades on Pennsylvania Avenue. It is inaccurate to call them chickens. They are traitors and collaborators—modern Tories—who are ideologically married to and financially in bed with the sovereign. In 1776-77, their political ancestors' estates were confiscated and their homes were burned by the Sons of Liberty. Sic transit gloria Cato. If your name appears on a libertarian email list, have it deleted immediately. The only safe place to get information about the future is Laissez Faire City.
The information you need is simple. You are a free individual, with no moral obligation to anyone else, as a first principle of legal philosophy and as an observable fact of life. Liberty is the cornerstone of justice.
It is important to understand that there is no way to do justice wholesale (by legislation, municipal elections, etc). Justice is always done retail, one case at a time. It is done deliberately and slowly. Was that witness telling the truth? Is this document authentic?
It is every person's job to judge the facts of reality, separating truth from falsehood, right from wrong, giving each man his due. Some men deserve our loyalty and service. Some must be punished. We, each of us, do this privately, choosing lovers and friends on their evident merit, shunning others because they are evil assholes. It is particularly confusing when the asshole in question is a family member (spouse, child, parent). But justice excuses no one. If dad is an asshole, he should be disowned. There are plenty of good men, among the Six Billion, to take his place in your sentimental scrapbook of 'family'—a term, in the color-blind language of justice, that refers universally to every man and woman in the Family of Rational Beings, past and present. It is specifically evil to exempt someone from justice because he is a blood relative. Justice is thicker than race, religion, or kinship. The notion of divorce exists, because your liberty cannot justly be held hostage by a spouse. If your kids are brats, they deserve wrath—not Tootsie Roll appeasement and a smile of paternal indulgence.
Although it was 25 years ago, I remember them still, a little knot of tipsy, gregarious law students in a State Street bar. They were partying, soon to graduate from UW-Madison's reputable school of law. Equally intoxicated that night, because I spent the day reading history, I bellowed a question at them: "What's the opposite of justice?" They hemmed and hawed. A boy giggled 'injustice'. But the brighter kids guessed that there was an answer that could change their lives and careers, if they had the courage to listen. "The opposite of justice is mercy!" I hectored (echoing Ayn Rand).
We do mercy at our peril. If this is not obvious to you, then you have not been given much responsibility. Every boss, every banker, every Boy Scout leader and kindergarten teacher knows what happens if you let an evildoer get away with some small transgression. Suddenly, he wants to commit big ones—and it's harder to stop him, because he was exempted from justice on a previous occasion. The question of 'public policy'—no matter how abstruse or boring its object—is whether or not to do justice. The job of enforcement is done by all of us and each of us, every day of the week, acting as civilian judges of one another in our immediate society. When we meet a new acquaintance, the verdict pronounced on a pal is 'innocent until proved guilty.' When we angrily ridicule the Clinton Mob, our judgment is 'guilty beyond reasonable doubt'—but guilty of what?
Of all the accusations hurled at Bill and Hillary, only one condemns their stewardship of the Federal government as criminally wrong: the willful obstruction of justice under color of law. It is extremely difficult for an average citizen to obstruct due process or faithful execution of the laws. Government officials are the only ones who can frustrate public justice by pulling strings, behind the scenes. Corruption is such a toxic threat to due process that many anarchists believe we can't trust anyone, ever, to wear a badge or wield a gavel. I disagree. I have argued vigorously in favor of private law courts and public law enforcement. See Principles of Internet Law. Justice cannot be done by inaction, or whim, or prayers for divine intervention. Bad guys must be stopped—it's as simple as that—like a black-and-white episode of Kojak (a 1970's TV detective series). Objective public justice is a difficult, painstaking process, aptly dramatized today in Dick Wolf's Law and Order series on television. Judicial corruption is not my first concern, nor is it much of a threat, compared to widespread suburban U.S. support for tyranny. Judges are seldom better than the nation they serve. Given the existence of an imperial state, which has monopolized law to control an overfed, lethargic society, it is a miracle that U.S. courts still strive to preserve the rudiments of due process. This demonstrates the ancient, if unarmed and feeble, power of law courts to promote liberty and justice. Nothing is more respectable or fearsome than a fair trial by jury, in open court, with rigorous rules of evidence and competent counsel free to debate the guilt or innocence of an accused. Prof. Juhasz is dead wrong on the facts: American jurisprudence is not for sale to the highest bidder. Despite a century of perverted legislation, adversarial due process is still better than any Napoleonic tribunal of state inquisitors.
As a novelist, my job is to write about abstract values. Courage. Romantic love. Human dignity. Once in a while, I use the device of exposition to summarize the meaning of events. In Mars Shall Thunder, the following passage explained what I know about the rule of law in America:
"Human beings are a funny bunch. Put a flag in the corner of a room with The Great Seal staring at down at them and something moves inside, like a switch that says shut up and listen. You didn't create this. It was bought and paid for by a pantheon of patriots and simple, decent men who sacrificed their lives, long before you were born. It is the source and root of whatever you cherish in life, the food you eat without stopping to ask how it came to happen, that our lives are richly endowed by machines and technological conveniences denied to every living species in the universe, except the ones who have law. It follows us like the air we breathe, in every waking moment, every transaction with our kith and kin. When a kid says 'It's mine!' he's talking about property. When his mother says 'No' to a fast-talking salesman or a preacher, she's defending the notion of civil liberty. And when two drunks square off in a pub, the only barrier to mayhem is law and order, sometimes in the person of an innkeeper, but just as often another drunk, a citizen, who invokes the letter and spirit of polity when he yells out an injunction like: 'Hey, hold it down!'
"Sometimes, getting people to shut up and listen is the whole enterprise of [due process]. Disputes are common. Settlements require a ceasefire and enough patience to speak calmly and rationally, both sides, one at a time. From time immemorial, long before our written history as a people, there were courts, where combatants and petitioners had to shut up and listen if they wanted to find an equitable solution, so life could go forward."
Yes, I am a patriot. It is not wrong to be an American patriot, if your love of country pertains, not to the present, but to the historic achievement of the Founding Fathers, who fought for justice and freed themselves from tyranny. I am humbled to be an American patriot, and I hope I have the wit and courage that patriotism requires, because Jefferson and Madison were animated by a lifelong passion for justice. It is rare to hear it said by lawyers today, but in colonial America the question of liberty and justice was a single problem, admitting of a single remedy in 1776—the American Revolutionary War of Independence.
On the eve of a digital war of independence, it is my duty to caution that chaos advances nothing—and cyberpatriots will probably inspire more public disorder than at any previous time in history. It is a mistake to assume that World War II was a time of terrible chaos. Far from it. Italy, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, and the Anglo-American democracies were cohesive societies led by charismatic officials, who mobilized entire nations without much dissent. While it's true that governments forbade dissent and punished it, the temper of the time was obedience and selfless service to society. In Germany, that meant the Fuhrer. In Britain, it was a Royal Empire. Americans fought for the New Deal and apple pie. Such abject mass submission to monolithic authority no longer exists, because WWII-era governments were the most viciously sacrificial and murderous in all of recorded history. Their last hurrah was Vietnam. We said 'No!'
The blackjack of genocidal government hangs over us, threatening to use nuclear weapons as a last resort. It is a bluff that will be called. In Russia, command and control of the army is doubtful. In Pakistan and India, the struggle for a mountain province could trigger annihilation of millions of people and toss the subcontinent back to a prehistoric condition, where wild beasts roam through a smoldering holocaust in search of human remains. In Red China, the temptation is building inexorably to invade Taiwan and square off against the U.S. Seventh Fleet. The final recourse available to Israel, against Iraq and Iran, is a hydrogen bomb.
It is in this circumstance of terror that some now propose to sabotage the world economic system—to destabilize the financial infrastructure of a global civilization. There is no soft option. There is no 'kinder, gentler' means available to us. As the New Hampshire motto factually states, we must live free or die, because justice cannot be sliced like a carrot. Men are not garden vegetables, to be harvested for the benefit of tax collectors and their fraudulent pension schemes.
The most dire threats will be made against us. Every branch of tyranny will attempt to put down the Cyber War of Independence. In the chaos that ensues during the coming years, each man and woman will have multiple opportunities to do individual private justice. The fate of the world will be determined by your choices. If you collaborate with tyranny, you increase the likelihood of another Hitler's rise to power—this time, an American Fuhrer (George W. Bush, Al Gore, Pat Buchanan) whose military and police powers have no equal in the world. If you resist U.S./EC internet regulations or FBI/MI5 wiretaps, they will brand you as an outlaw.
So, I turn to Churchill for inspiration, the last of the great Liberals, who saw liberty and justice as a single problem with a single solution. "It is vain to imagine," he warned, "that the mere perception or declaration of right principles, whether in one country or in many countries, will be of any value unless they are supported by those qualities of civic virtue and manly courage -- aye, and by those instruments and agencies of force and science which in the last resort must be the defense of right and reason" (address to the University of Bristol, July 2, 1938).
To defeat tyranny in cyberspace, it is not enough to stay home and fill your cellar with carrots. History beckons you to help do justice, by punishing those who would steal your liberty and rewarding those who are about to risk everything as patriots in battle. Cyberwar will not be fought with bullets or bombs. It will be a contest of ones and zeroes, draining strength from a cash-hungry, bankrupt Global Superpower—the end of which is liberty for all, freed from the charade of social security. The core purpose of liberal values is not charity. LIBERTY is a constant, inalienable responsibility to choose friends wisely and to drop them in a New York minute if they betray you. JUSTICE is the action required.
I know it's scary, to consider that the routine of comfortable K-Mart life is threatened by cyberwar. The United States Government has exerted every talon and claw to keep the mall stocked with playthings, to expand TV into a thousand channels of trashy circus, and to postpone the inconvenience of you personally governing your own life. Like pulling on a rubber band, loading potential energy into an economic slingshot, U.S. 'public servants' have deferred justice for 50 years. Time's up!—their statist grip on society is slipping. Wave goodbye to Mickey and Donald and Goofy. America is going to grow up, whether we want to or not. A digital genie escaped from the corporate military-industrial Establishment, into the keystrokes of freedom fighters. This is a proof of de facto private justice, that human genius worked to the advantage of all men, not just the few in power.
It is my hope that soon, and with a sense of urgency, there will be begun a sober debate about the need for new institutions—not government, as such, but a continuation and improvement of the rule of law. I have said as much as I can on this subject. It's time for others to join in the work, to define and provide mechanisms of due process in a Free Society of equals, where the legal notion of sovereignty pertains rightly and exclusively to individual men, women, and children.
But I will say one thing more on the subject of liberal justice, because it is important to mention compassion and forgiveness. I hereby pardon those who tried in good faith to 'work within the system' and celebrated liberty as an American tradition—the Libertarian Party, Reason Foundation, Cato Institute, Hazlitt Foundation, George Mason University—provided that they renounce the validity (or utility) of the majoritarian state and fold up their web media, leaving nothing but a link to Laissez Faire City on their servers. Justice includes the notion of rehabilitation, until the escalating commencement of cyber hostilities makes it difficult to forgive anyone stuck in the middle ground, between liberty and tyranny.
Consider the gauntlet thrown.
From The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 47, December 6, 1999