Personal Secession - The Way to Freedom By Michael S. Rozeff
(2011-06-06 at 14:40:20 )

Personal Secession - The Way to Freedom By Michael S. Rozeff

Certain people and groups in California want to ban male circumcision,
and they are getting measures placed on local ballots for voting.

In Louisiana, there is some sort of law about the teaching of the
creation of man in the public schools that has people who dislike that
law all riled up and seeking repeal.

Women in Egypt are bitterly divided between those who favor sharia law
for Egypt and those who favor secular law.

The State of Arizona has a law that legalizes medical marijuana. The
Governor is suing the State of Arizona against this law because it
conf licts with federal law.

President Bush -launched missiles and bombs at targets in Iraq- in March
of 2003, an action of which 25 percent of Americans disapproved at the
time. That f igure rose to 53 percent within 8 months.

What do the above items have in common?

They all involve laws approved of by some and disapproved of by others.
In all cases, there are winners and losers. The winners get their
favorite laws passed. The losers have to obey.

In all cases, the losers have no choice.

You can not smoke in a bar. You must use a bicycle helmet. You cannot
use an incandescent light bulb. You cannot place phosphates in soap. You
must use a front-loading washing machine. Your shower cannot pump at
above a specif ied rate. Your toilet cannot go above a specif ied number
of gallons. You must pay taxes for government programs. You must accept
Federal Reserve Notes in payments. A bank must report cash transactions
over a specif ied size. You cannot buy marijuana. You cannot simply buy
a gun.

If circumcision is banned in San Francisco, those who want to circumcise
their babies will have to go elsewhere. In Louisiana, the public schools,
and maybe even private schools who can not find an exemption on some
grounds, will teach what the legislature tells them to teach. In Egypt,
either sharia law will be in or it will be out, for everyone. In the
individual states, either they will be allowed to pass medical marijuana
laws or else the federal law will be the rule. Clinton, Bush, and Obama
and the Congress will launch their missiles wherever they please even if
large numbers of Americans disapprove, and they will extract the
resources to do this in the form of taxes whether you like it or not.

These examples all involve voting and democracies, but the same division
between winners and losers occurs in other forms of government such as
monarchies and dictatorships.

They all have in common that there are always groups of people who want
to impose their views on everyone. They all have in common that every
such group aims to use government as the instrument to fulf ill their
ardent desires.

I feel sorry for the human race. The thinking and emotional makeup of
most people are so impoverished that they cannot f ind a way to live
without imposing their views on as many other people as they can. It is
not enough for them to preach their views. They feel they have to pass a
law or somehow use the government to make everyone else conform to their
wishes.

I felt sadness when I read about the woman pushing for a circumcision
law. It does not matter what her reasons are. Everyone always comes up
with reasons. Bush had his reasons. Obama has his reasons. The Louisiana
legislators had their reasons. I am not debating the reasons or the
substance of any of these many debates. I am not interested in choosing
up sides.

I feel sad because the desire to pass a law and impose ones own views on
everyone else is, to my way of thinking, so stupid, so ignorant, so
limited in vision, so immoral, so anti-human, so devoid of understanding,
so unloving, so distorted, so anti-f reedom, so anti-voluntaristic, so
anti-individual, so unreasonable, so intolerant, and so against the
person.

Government in its present condition is a factory that constantly
manufactures new kinds of ropes, manacles, gags, and handcuffs with
which it binds everyone. This is what most people accept.

I am amazed, totally amazed, that people do not see or admit the
contradiction between the American rhetoric of f reedom and what
actually goes down, and between that rhetoric and their own attempts to
vote in the candidates of their choice and impose their programs on
everyone else!

Through the instrument of government, there are countless groups and
political parties organized with the sole purpose of making slaves out of
everyone. Is this not a self-evident truth? No, it is not, because every
such group and party attempts to provide reasons why its program is a
good thing. They would bitterly dispute my contention that their aim is
to impose slavery on everyone.

One government for all cannot coexist with freedom. They are mutually
exclusive.

Let those who wish to build missiles and shoot them into Tripoli do so at
their own cost and risk and for themselves only. Let those who wish to
form and pay for a military that trains every nation on earth how to
interdict drugs do so at their own cost and risk and for themselves only.

Let those who wish to form a legislature that enacts their version of
religion do so at their own cost and risk and for themselves only. Let
those who wish to pass a law that forbids drug use do so for themselves
only. Let those who wish to pass a law that forbids circumcision do so
for themselves only. Let those who wish to tax themselves and give the
proceeds away to those in need do so for themselves only. Let those who
wish to guarantee medical care for all those in their group do so at
their own cost and risk and for themselves only.

If we actually want freedom and not slavery, we cannot have one
government for all. Freedom and one government for all are inconsistent
with one another. They contradict one another. To have one government
and simultaneously to have freedom is an impossibility.

To arrive at greater freedom, one has to have the freedom to remove the
manacles imposed by a government that presumes to be the government for
all. One has to be able to opt out of government laws. One has to be
able to secede personally from a government.

Personal secession manifests ones personal freedom to choose a government
(or no government) of ones desires, by oneself or in association with
other people.

For further reading on personal secession and secession by groups, one
can use a search engine. After writing the above, I searched on
secession movements. One site that came up was secession.net. Their
statement of principles is well worth reading. They advocate something
close to personal secession, namely, community-based secession.
The diff erence between them is trivial.

For example, this site writes

PRIMACY OF THE RIGHT TO SECEDE

The primary political right of the individual and of political
communities must be to secede from any larger political entity, whether
they were born into it, were forced to join it, or voluntarily joined it.
If one denies or relinquishes that right, one is little more than a
slave--and no agreement to become a slave can be legally or morally
binding.

Secession of individuals and communities does not have to mean war
and violence. It should be a natural evolutionary f eature of all
political entities. Communities can form networks or confederations,
since secession is accepted by both in principle. However, communities
will not form -federations- which by def inition do not allow secession.
We will suggest practical and nonviolent means by which such separation
can occur and the kinds of networks and conf ederations that could be
created to replace oppressive nation states.

COMMUNITY-BASED SECESSION:

In the name of nationalism, religion, ideology, tradition or -the
common good,- the governments of the world suppress individual liberty
and individuals control of their own communities. Special interest-
corporate- state- bureaucratic- military elites worldwide tax, regulate,
bully, beat, prosecute, jail and execute citizens into submission. They
discriminate against, rob, ethnically cleanse and genocide members of
oppressed racial-ethnic-religious-regional groups. Without government
control, these elites would have little real power over individuals and
communities.

The concept of individual liberty is simple: individuals should be
f ree to do whatever they please as long as they do not harm others by
using force or fraud. This is the basic ethical tenet or -golden rule- of
all religions, one corrupted by layers of theology and ritual and
centuries of kowtowing to political authority. Individual consent–not
some nationalist, racial, religious, tribal or, ideological construct or
-social contract--is the only legitimate basis of any social, economic
and political organization. However, supporting the idea and value of
individual liberty is not enough to obtain liberty. We must support
institutional structures that make it impossible for public or private
entities to crush individual liberty.

Contrast personal secession with the U.S. governments notions of
security- and -democracy- and -welfare- for all of America. The U.S.
vision is actually a highly limited vision that pretends to be a
universal vision. Its thrust is to the common and general. It is
certainly a monopolistic vision. Ultimately, it is a static and one-sided
totalitarian vision. A totalitarian vision within the United States is
continually being enacted and made real. It is not that of Orwell or
Huxley although some of their elements are present. At present it is a
suff ocating and deadening vision in which political correctness holds
sway and in which government makes countless rules that control many
aspects of life, while allowing outlets in certain directions that vent
the pressures. The governments vision is of oneness, sameness, monotony,
regularity, perfect saf ety and security, regimentation, and boredom.
It crushes the personal and the individual.

The U.S. government is even making strenuous eff orts to promote this
vision in foreign governments.

Democracy is not freedom. It is the suppression of freedom. This takes
diff erent forms in diff erent countries. In America, the current obsession
is with security and safety in every aspect of life. The government
intrudes everywhere with these as its rationales.

This is the American totalitarianism.

Personal secession allows for multiple visions of lif e and living. It
allows for dynamism, creativity, personal development along new lines,
invention, discovery, and adventure. It allows for variation and newness.
It allows for development along unexpected lines. It allows for mistakes
and learning from mistakes, new and untried ventures, new ways, new
customs, and new ideas. It allows for personal risk-taking. It emphasizes
the personal and individual. It is pluralistic. It is voluntaristic.

Personal secession means freedom and all that freedom entails.

June 6, 2011

Michael S. Rozeff - is a retired Professor of Finance living in East
Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American
Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S. Constitution
and Money: Corruption and Decline.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or
in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.