Potpourri from the editor's desk

No. 1 "The Justification of Private Property"

Private property in real and personal property exists because if not so owned, the property cannot be bought and sold and disposed of in the ordinary course of trade. If the world is prepared to go back to Plato's condition of a little town with inalienable family holdings and each holding self-supporting, with no trade or exchange of property in the town, with every householder owning enough forced and unpaid labor to cultivate the land and produce everything necessary for the family, it would be a very easy matter to get rid of private property. But this social organization is a dream, it could never be attained. On the other hand the history of law and general history teaches that the institution of private property is in accordance with a developed human mind, in accordance with developed human institutions. Nothing is more silly than to say that the law made private property. The fact is the exact opposite. Private property came to exist and it made the law. Until that human mind can be changed, it is idle to think of abolishing private property. If the law should attempt to prohibit the transactions of human life based upon private property, no one would obey the law. -John Maxcy Zane, THE STORY OF LAW (2nd edition, 1998), pp. 146-147 (final paragraph of Chapter 8)

No. 2 An Alternative Institution: "The Royal National Lifeboat Institution"

Founded in 1824, The Royal National Lifeboat Institution is "the world's oldest lifeboat service." It is "a privately funded, volunteer lifesaving service that protects mariners in much the way the Coast Guard does in the United States. ... It has saved thousands of lives without spending a penny of taxpayers' money. ... [The] RNLI has 224 lifeboats sited all around the coasts of Great Britain and Ireland, with lifeboats providing 24-hour service up to 50 miles offshore." It never garnered governmental support and "was forced to finance its activities through private donations and charitable legacies from wealthy individuals and organizations. ... [I]ts mission [was] never compromised by politics." During World War II, it continued its lifesaving activities, "despite some fierce objections from outside the institution, to rescue those in peril - irrespective of their nationality - in accordance with a long-held instutitional policy personally endorsed by Winston Churchill."

-Excerpts from "The Rescuers," by Keith Pritchard, SAILING Magazine (December 2001), pp. 42-46.

No. 3 "Open up! It's the police!"

"Open that door;" again the voice at my door said. "Open! Police. We want to speak with you for a minute."

"All right, all right. Coming." I begin to doubt that there are some people still left on this earth who are not policemen or who have no connection with the force. The police are supposed to maintain quiet and order, yet nobody in the whole world causes more trouble and is a greater nuisance than the police. Chasing criminals, and thereby killing innocent women. Keeping order, and throwing a whole town in the middle of the night into an uproar. Nobody drives more people crazy than the police. And just think, soldiers are also a police force, only with another name. Ask me where all the trouble in the world comes from.

-B. Traven, THE DEATH SHIP, The First Book, Section 7 (1934).

No. 4 "How War Has Transformed the American Dream Into A Nightmare"

Unfortunately, there are relatively few persons today [1953] who can recall those happy [libertarian pre-World War I] times. In his devastatingly prophetic book, Nine-teen Eighty-Four, George Orwell points out that one reason why it is possible for those in authority to maintain the barbarities of the police state is that nobody is able to recall the many blessings of the period which preceded that type of society. In a general way this is also true of the peoples of the Western world today. The great majority of them have known only a world ravaged by war, depressions, international intrigues and meddling, vast debts and crushing taxation, the encroachments of the police state, and the control of public opinion and government by ruthless and irresponsible propaganda. A major reason why there is no revolt against such a state of society as that in which we are living today is that many have come to accept it as a normal matter of course, having known nothing else during their lifetimes.

-Harry Elmer Barnes, "Revisionism and the Historical Blackout," in Harry Elmer Barnes (editor), PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE (Caldwell: The Caxton Printers, Ltd.), 1953, pp. 3-4.

No. 5 "From the Mouths of Babes"

"It is quite obvious that there are certain inherently governmental actions which if undertaken by the sovereign in protection of the nation's security are lawful but which if undertaken by private persons are not..."

Notarized Response, Former President Richard Nixon, March 9,1976 [Cited inAthanTheoharis, SPYING ON AMERICANS (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978, p. 230.]

Copyright Voluntaryists Third Quarter 2003
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