March 16, 2012
Watch this video. I remember it well. Maybe you have not seen it. Watch the bullet holes come from inside the building. Watch the ATF or FBI man fall back.
For using David Koresh as an example of a suicidal revolutionary, I have received hostile emails. This was a common argument: "They were defending themselves." Another variation: "they did not shoot first." No, they didn't. They shot next-to-last. This is the heart of the revolutionary, suicidal, private militia mentality. It will get you killed if you pursue it.
The government authorities used excessive force. But that is what government agents tend to do when people shoot at them. The fire that killed children was not necessary. But at any time, the armed revolutionaries inside could have avoided it by surrendering.
I have been told for 30 years by various crackpots that the wise, honorable approach is to resist the authorities with guns. I have always maintained that such a tactic is suicidal.
There is a strain of violence in fringe movements. Those want to change society permanently have a choice: by persuasion or force. Persuasion changes them more permanently. Power produces resistance.
Our goal should be to live to resist another time in a better way. If we pursue the truth, we should have confidence that the truth produces benefits. We have cause and effect on its side. That is always the assumption of the person who pursues ethics over power. Marxism linked power with benefits. It rejected ethics in favor of power. Conservatives say that they reject violence in favor of ethics. But there are some who do not.
The lure of power is very great. But positive social change comes through voluntarism and exchange. That is at the heart of free market theory. It is also at the heart of Edmund Burke's conservatism. In investing, it is John Schaub's investment strategy: making it big on little deals. This is the opposite of violence. The slow improvement of 2% per capita economic growth over two centuries changes the world. Revolutions rarely do, and rarely for the better.
If you want to reverse big government, persuade voters to stop taking money from the government. Don't organize an armed militia.
Don't shoot guns at the police. Shoot videos.
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