About a billion and a half years ago, way back in the 1950s or 1960s, on some long-forgotten weekly western television drama, a nifty little language lesson was offered that has somehow stuck with me ever since.

A cowboy and some kind of newcomer to the west were riding a prairie fenceline, looking for breaks to repair. Having found one, they dismounted, and the cowboy, attempting to pull the fence back together, asked the other to get in his saddlebag and give him the “plars”.

“The ‘plars’?” inquired the dude. (And please take note that this is the original and correct use of that last word.) “What’s the ‘plars’?”

The cowboy looked up from his task. “They’re t’fix the bob war with.”

“The ‘bob war’?”

The cowboy indicated the twisted strand with its occasional nasty sharpened inclusions he was holding in his gloved hand. “Yeah. The bob war.”

It was the first time I understood that the way I spoke—my paternal grandpa was a cowboy from North Park, Colorado—probably sounded as funny to other English language-manglers as they sounded to me.

I don’t know what kind of an accent I have now. I was raised all over the continent, from California to Kansas and from Newfoundland (where they all spoke with a heavy brogue it was hard to understand, at first) to the Florida panhandle. I remember consciously trying to sound like Walter Cronkite at one point in my young life, but toward the end, I could hear an accent in his speech that I don’t think mine reflects.

But once again, I have digressed.

This blogsite, The Moratorium is still shiny and new. Unlike other Net entities I contribute to, it’s meant to be almost entirely tactical, neither literary nor strategic as my other efforts are. It’s very hard to keep it that way, as it requires some changes in my own thinking, but this is a good thing in many ways. It forces me to generate new synapses, which is supposed to be good for preventing senility of various kinds, and I hope it will generate new ideas, as well.

Another difference between this site and others is that it will seem to violate a long-treasured libertarian custom. Whenever anybody used to say, “There oughta be a law”, we’d scream and stomp and holler “No!”

When the expression “Bill of Rights enforcement” first came to me, I suddenly realized consciously that those ten amendments were laws. They were the highest law of the land. But they applied only to the minions of statism, and there was still one missing: the one about any public servant having been duly convicted of violating any of them needing to be hanged by the neck until he—or she—was dead, dead, dead.

Having long ago thought the unthinkable, I’ll say the unsayable. There ought to be a law, maybe even many such laws, applying only to politicians, bureaucrats, and policemen, defending the life, liberty, and property of the American Productive Class, and featuring the most stringent, most Draconian penalty clauses conceivable. They must be enforced. Those who will not enforce them will become subject to them, themselves.

The first entry on this site was an essay about The Moratorium itself, an effort to amend the United States Constitution so that no new law may be passed, at any level of government, for one hundred years. I am dead serious about this—given what I’ve written above, people in government should be, too—but I also believe that simply discussing it, as widely and loudly as we can might just affect our future.

My second entry might seem a little lighter-hearted at first: modeled on the way that their Egyptian successors attempted to erase the very memory of the Bill and Hillary Clinton of their age, Akhenaten and Nefertiti. I have proposed another amendment that would totally repeal, nullify, or otherwise dispose of each and every law, decree, promulgation, or other poliical act of the gangsterish Obama Administration.

Yes, I know we should go back further than that, to before the Bushes and the Clintons, before Nixon, before the New Deal. Vin Suprynowicz wants to go back to 1912 and nip the income tax and Federal Reserve in the vile, slimy bud. There’s a lot to be said for going back to 1794 and the whiskey tax, or before the Constitution was perfidiously ratified so we can breathe life back into the Articles of Confederation.

But it’s not our own imaginations that need to to be set afire at this moment. We don’t have to be reminded of freedom. It is others—who no longer even know what freedom is—whose imaginations must be illuminated.

Start simple. Almost anybody will agree (once they know a couple of facts) that there are too many laws and we could probably get along without making any new ones for a while. A century is a nice round number that will stay in their minds more easily than any other figure might.

Short of a thousand.

In addition, a rapidly increasing number of individuals, most of them deeply disappointed Democrats, can see now that it was a suicidal mistake to elect Obama. I’m not certain they learned anything from it—Republicans suffered disillusionment on a similar scale, starting in 1994, after their so-called congressional “Revolution” and it doesn’t appear to have taught them a damned thing—but you can never tell.

If we’re convincing, if we work hard enough, what can be done with regard to the worst, most dedicated, most implacable enemies of individual liberty—you know who they are; you know their first names and the names of their children—is to cut off their path to the future, by outlawing new legislation for a century, while erasing their past out from under them, by repealing everything they’ve ever “accomplished”.

They’ll be caught, like a moth in a web, like a fly in amber, like a cockroach in the jaws of … of … what was that word again? Oh, yeah.

Plars.

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

Each morning I find a dozen messages in my e-mail concerning evil
plots by the current administration or some other enemy of individual
liberty to take away our guns, our money, our homes, our children, our
cars, our land, our gardens, our right to speak out, or travel freely,
or whatever else it is that momentarily tickles their kleptocratic
fancy.

Their kleptocratic and murderous fancy.

Seldom does this litany of grievances conclude with any suggestion
about stopping collectivist predation, or punishing the predators. The
focus is always on what “They” did to us in the past, on what “They”
are doing to us now, or on what “They” are planning to do to us in the
future.

There are at least a couple of reasons for this. One of them is a
pathological and pathetic desire on the part of some individuals for
victimization, a value they pervertedly tend to treasure—and defend—more
than any amount of freedom, prosperity, progress, or peace
that actually rising up and doing something about it might win for
them. They display an energetic resentment (I know, because I’ve often
been on the receiving end of it) toward anybody who dares to offer
them genuine solutions to the troubles they luxuriate in complaining
about.

Also, they might actually have to unplug their thumbs and do some
work. The academic equivalent is to keep generating scholarly papers
that nobody reads, until the Romans come and cut you down as they did
Archimedes.

Misplaced reliance on electoral politics is another reason all you
ever hear from certain quarters is petulant whining. You can almost
define conservatives (who still have a long way to go to reestablish
themselves as members in good standing of the general freedom
movement) as those who would rather squat in their own dung, piteously
ululating over their cruel circumstances, as long as they can lay
everything, every two or four years, in the unclean hands of crooked
jackasses in cheap suits and cheaper ties who never quite manage a
total commitment to the concept of self-ownership and the Bill of
Rights.

They (petulant, squatting conservatives, not crooked jackasses,
who know better) calculate that if they vote faithfully and contribute
to campaigns and right wing causes, they’ve done all they can—all
that can be done—about the totalitarian cesspool we’ve all slid
into.

Various anarchoid colleagues to the contrary, there is a place for
political action in an overall libertarian strategy, but this isn’t
it.

A related problem is an ill-advised reliance on institutions like
the National Rifle Association, who must learn—or be taught somehow
(despite a demonstrated inability to benefit from experience)—that
they are not up to bargaining with left wing socialism, unfit to wheel
and deal with proven enemies of freedom. They are out of their depth
because they misunderstand the basic nature of the conflict they find
themselves in, and because they, themselves, are socialists of the
right wing variety. Early drug war enthusiasts, in spite of repeated
libertarian warnings, they helped erect the vicious anticonstitutional
federal establishment now threatening to destroy them and the rest of
us.

I’ll never forget how thrilled (and surprised) I was when NRA
Executive VP and CEO Wayne “Pepe” LaPierre referred to federal law
enforcement officers as “jackbooted thugs” (now abbreviated “JBTs”) or
how disgusted (and unsurprised) I was when he pusillanimously took it
back.

The national Libertarian Party is in even worse shape at the
moment.

So what can be done?

First of all, forget all about both the traditional political
spectrum—which only offered people different reasons to sacrifice
themselves to one voracious power-hungry collective or another—as
well as those described later, even by yours truly. There was no
genuine freedom advocacy until libertarianism came along in the late
1940s and early 1950s. The past decade of state security terrorism has
made it plain: there are indeed two political sides in this country,
not right versus left (they’re on the same side) but freedom versus
non-freedom.

Period.

Don’t worry about the mythical past, grieve over imagined former
glories, or waste precious resources trying to regain liberty we never
really had. The Roman republicans made that mistake and never got what
they wanted. Concentrate instead, on a future in which we have built
everything we desire with our own hands and minds. That’s what I’ve
written about for the past 30 years and it’s time more people paid
attention.

For the time being, forget abortion and immigration, too. You’re
never going to change my mind about them, and they’re the issues the
anti-freedom side counts on to keep the pro-freedom side divided.
There will be plenty of time to argue about them later, in the warm,
mellow light of liberty—or behind the barbed wire of the FEMA
camps.

Most of all—and if you take nothing else away from this essay,
take this—we can no longer afford to fight every issue the enemies
of freedom present us with. Libertarians must learn to promote those
solutions that undercut several—or all—statist assaults on our
liberties at the same time. If we fight them one picayune battle at a
time, we will always lose—in fact, it’s why we have always lost so
far.

That’s why I invented the concept—and the phrase—”Bill of
Rights enforcement” years ago. It covers every different bit of victim
disarmament legislation the enemy throws at us, while supporting free
speech, freedom of assembly, and other liberties, at the same time, as
well. It underlines an important and neglected truth, which is that
freedom is indivisible, that in fact there is really only one freedom,
the freedom to be left unmolested, by the state or anybody else. Fight
in the name of Bill of Rights enforcement and you will gain allies
whom you wouldn’t have had before, possibly solving many problems at
once.

I’ve also offered ideas, over the years, any one of which, pursued
with energy and persistence, could have changed—could still change—our
miserable situation. Most lately, it’s been the National Recall
Coordinating Committees and an effort to repeal Article 1, Section 6
which grants to legislators immunity from prosecution or lawsuit for
their acts of criminal predation. If I were a leftist, I’d have a
tenured university position by now, and my own ten million dollar
think-tank.

It didn’t have to turn out this way, of course.

Seeing clearly what was about to happen to us, in the 70s and 80s,
I wrote to the editors of various gun magazines who might have raised
and organized effective opposition to all the subsequent violations of
the unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right of
every man, woman, and responsible child to obtain, own, and carry,
openly or concealed, any weapon—rifle, shotgun, handgun,
machinegun, anything—any time, any place, without asking anyone’s
permission.

If they’d fought then, we wouldn’t have to fight now. But instead,
advertising being more important than freedom, they patted me on the
head—one even called me “hysterical”—and basically told me,
“Go away, boy you bother me”. I haven’t bought a gun magazine since
Brady Bill-Bob Dole pushed the Clinton gun and magazine bans through.
I don’t know why I haven’t given up the same way on the libertarian
movement.

I’ve made mistakes in my life, and have plenty of things I regret,
but the worst is my failure to communicate—to those who claim to
stand for freedom—that none of the measures I’ve proposed actually
have to pass into law in order to have the effect we desire them to
have.

The other side, you must understand, is just as fearful, just as
hysterical, just as inclined to stampede purposelessly all over the
landscape, to bargain and compromise stupidly, to waste time, energy,
and money, and get screwed by their own politicians, when they hear of
organized political efforts that would threaten them. They huddle
together, whimper to each other, and dirty themselves, exactly like
conservatives.

How do I know this? Partly because I worked with the left in the
peace movement and the Eugene McCarthy campaign in the 1960s. Partly
because I watch and listen to them now. Conservatives keep asking why
the left—which now controls the House, the Senate, and the White
House—is still angry and unsatisfied. It’s because they know that
in democratic politics, nothing is ever really settled, and they’re

afraid.

How do we use this knowledge?

Allow me to propose yet another project. Let’s call this one the
“Obama Akhenatenization Act”. The idea is simple, based on the efforts
of their royal successors to eradicate every trace of the religiously
radical Pharaoh Akhenaten and his consort Nefertiti. On January 20,
2013, a new law will go into effect, under which each and every
decision, decree, edict, guideline, mandate, measure, notice, order,
ordinance, precept, regulation, requirement, ruling, promulgation, and
statute enacted during the Obama presidency will be declared null and
void.

Now, for a short, self-indulgent moment, just imagine all of the
screaming, moaning, whimpering, and handwringing that this idea will
generate among left wing socialists, if it gets enough exposure in the
media and on the Internet. Imagine the panic, hysteria, wasted motion,
and squandered resources. Imagine all the moderates, gradualists, and
compromisers who infest the left wing cluck-clucking at their fellow
collectivists that they’ve gone too far, they need to backpedal, back
off, soften their tone, and slow down. How do I know that this will
happen? Because I’ve been fighting the moderates, gradualists, and
compromisers who infest the freedom movement what seems like all my
life.

The “Obama Akhenatenization Act”.

And when they whine at us about it, we’ll tell them that our next
goal is to repeal every law and abolish every agency created since
1913.

Tactically, an undertaking like this offers tremendous advantages
over any mere exercise in electoral politics. In the first place, you
don’t have to wait two, four, or six years to start the ball and keep
it rolling. Anyone can work to publicize and promote the Obama
Akhenatenization Act 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks every
year.

We don’ need no stinkin’ election.

Even better, every individual involved can speak equally for the
Obama Akhenatenization Act and what it means. We don’t have to settle
for, prop up, and constantly find ourselves apologizing for some
fatuous moron of a candidate who either doesn’t really get it, or is
deathly afraid of being embarrassed by the public appearance that he
does.

It doesn’t really have to be the Obama Akhenatenization Act, of
course. It can be anything, any authentically pro-freedom measure. The
more outrageous the better. Every time you talk about it, you win a
victory for liberty. You make some socialist’s stomach churn, you cost
him a night’s sleep, you shorten his actuarial life-expectancy by five
minutes—exactly as they’ve been doing to us for three or four
generations.

And while the opposition is busy chasing down his Tums and Pepcid
with Maalox and Pepto-Bismol, you can explain to your onlookers what’s
actually at stake. With freedom you can do anything; without it, you
can do nothing. Anybody who would diminish freedom for any reason—whether
it’s saving the planet, preserving national security, or “for
the children”—is an enemy of his fellow human beings, not their
benefactor.

And certainly not their savior.

The “Obama Akhenatenization Act”.

So how about it? Are you willing to give up your victimhood, roll
up your sleeves, and get your hands dirty helping create a culture of
freedom?

Or would you just rather whimper until the JBTs smash your door
down?

First published in THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE, Number 520, May 24, 2009

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle520-20090524-02.html

An earlier version of this essay appeared in The Libertarian Enterprise

For each of us who demands nothing more from the civilization we live in — and contribute our efforts to — than absolute ownership and control of our own lives (and, as Ayn Rand noted, the products of our lives) there has been nothing but increasingly bad news for as long as most of us can remember.

Since the turn of the 20th century, collectivism — referred to by every conceivable euphemism: communism, progressivism, socialism, fascism, liberalism, environmentalism — has taken more and more and more away from us. It is insatiable. It wants everything we earn, everything we own, everything we ever hope to own. It wants our homes, our land, and our children. It wants our cars and our weapons. It wants our very lives and it strives for the means to observe and control them every minute, every step, and every breath.

Any ally we ever hoped we might rely on, every organization we turned to — or created ourselves — to put a stop to this horror, betrays us sooner or later. The Republican Party, the Democatic Party, unions, the Libertarian Party, the National Rifle Association, even the Boy Scouts of America are run by idiots, lunatics, crooks, and outright traitors. Most of these people are simply weak-willed sponges chosen for their abject compliance to whatever is considered politically correct at the moment. There isn’t a university in this country worth the sewage it generates.

Those who know me best understand that I’m no conservative. Basically, I’m a radical libertarian on my way to the stars, possibly by way of Ceres. But before that happens, I want America back the way I remember it. No, I’m not being blindly nostalgic. It wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot. But it was a hell of a lot better when I was a little kid than it is now.

I want an America with no more grand utopian schemes to save an environment that doesn’t need saving, to prevent global warming that isn’t happening, or to force people to participate in a collectivized medical system that is a hollow farce and little more than a justification for snoopery, robbery, and tyranny.

I want an America where the few, pitiful, starving, underpaid bureaucrats that remain — eking out their final days before their positions are abolished forever, along with their pensions — have nothing to say about what I eat, what I drink, what I drive, what I keep in my gun cabinet, who I love, how I do it, and even what, in the immortal words of the great George Carlin, I shoot, snort, smoke, or rub into my belly. Maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time, giving these creatures the power to interfere in all of those things. Now we know it was a mistake and we must correct it.

I want an America where there are no more hidden agendas — or at least no money to encourage them — like rounding up the population and forcing us to live in gigantic hundred-story tenements (the United Nations calls this “Agenda 21″) while the nomenklatura ride to hounds in the empty countryside and shoot peasants. I want an America where the eternally smoldering ruins of the United Nations building in New York stand as a monument to freedom and a warning to collectivists no matter what rock they choose to hide under.

It is time to forge a mechanism for restoring individual liberty to America and utterly destroying collectivism — both tasks are vital — a mechanism that can’t be compromised, broken, or betrayed. I have a pretty good idea what that mechanism should look like, and that’s what this blogsite is all about.

In 1972, when I was 26 years old and had been a libertarian for a full decade already, I attended a week-long seminar in Wichita, Kansas hosted by the local 7-Up bottlers and the Love Box Company. It was conducted by perhaps the freedom movement’s greatest educator, Robert LeFevre.

If you’re a Heinlein fan, you know him as Professor Bernardo de la Paz. He wanted everyone to call him “Bob.”

Bob said a great many things during those almost magical 40 hours, and I remember a surprising amount of what he said verbatim, even today, 37 years later. (At my age, I’ve discovered, time flies whether you’re having fun or not.) One of the things he said is that there were “on the books” at that point in time, an estimated 15,000,000 federal laws.

Fifteen million.

I have had a number of individuals argue with me about that figure since then, but none of them has ever offered me a credible counter-estimate, and I have seen the endless rows of lawbooks myself, in libraries and lawyers’ offices. If the true number were only a third, or even a tenth of that estimate, clearly we’d still have far too many laws. And, as Bob reminded all of us, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”

Some of those millions of laws represent legislation “properly” introduced, shuffled through committees, and voted for on the floor of the House of Representatives or the Senate. But a great many more of them — possibly as many as 99 percent — consist of various rules and regulations voted on by nobody, but simply promulgated and shoved down our throats by various agencies full of appointees and bureaucrats, often in direct contradiction to what the legislators originally intended.

And of course, a number of those laws consist of nothing more than judicial reinterpretation that many complain actually constitutes the passage of new legislation by judges. Even worse, as America continues to slide down the slimy slope into fascist dictatorship, there is an increasing tendency of “law enforcement” agents to make up the law as they go along, out in the field. With so much legislation already on the books, and its precise meaning perfectly unclear even to those who wrote it, the law becomes whatever minions of the police state say it is.

The vast majority of the existing body of law, and of new law passed every year is, of course, thoroughly unconstitutional. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution lists those functions of government that are legally permissible. Anything the government does that is not on that list (probably 95 percent of its current activities) is a clear and open violation of the law. The individuals who perform those functions for the government — politicians, bureaucrats, and cops of various kinds — are criminals.

When I was a kid, I often heard newspaper and radio editorialists whimpering about the “do-nothing congress” that was failing to crank out enough new legislation to satisfy whatever statist crackpots — they were usually left-wing socialists in those days — were doing the editorializing.

These were the Eisenhower years, I confess, and even as a fairly naive youngster, I had an intuitive sense that “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe when the legislature’s in session,” and that a “do-nothing congress” is a good thing. Also, it occurred to me that, after almost two centuries, the Powers That Be ought to have passed more than enough laws by now. At that point, you understand, I’d spent my entire life — exactly like any other little kid — being told what to do and what not to do. It seemed to me there was enough of that crap already going around to last us for at least a hundred years.

The more I’ve thought about that idea over the years, the clearer it has become to me that the indispensable first step toward restoring our freedom in this country, as well as preventing any future threats to it — and this should be the principal goal of any organization that claims to advocate freedom — ought to be a constitutional amendment forbidding any new legislation for at least that hundred years.

Let’s just call it “THE MORATORIUM.”

(For some time, now, being primarily a teller of fictional tales, I’ve intended to write a series of stories about the period in future history following ratification of this amendment. The first of these, TimePeeper, can currently be seen at Big Head Press and I’ve just begun planning a dozen more.)

At minimum, such an amendment would provide that, from the date of
its passage forward, for a full century, no new legislation may be passed at any level of government — be it federal, state, county, municipal, or any other level — especially including rulings by the court system that, in effect, constitute new law, and treaties of any kind.

Nor may any new regulation be promulgated by any agency of the government.

The only exceptions would be bills of repeal, initiated referenda getting rid of old laws, rulings that declare existing legislation to be null and void, and the official disbandment, dissolution, or abolition of various arms, wings, legs, or other appendages of the government.

Perhaps I should have said, “amputation.”

And because nothing political occurs in a vacuum and the opponents of this concept would be inclined to see the handwriting on the wall and attempt to make the most of whatever time they believed they had left, the amendment would automatically repeal any and all legislation rammed through in the final year (or two, or five, or ten) before its ratification.

Or perhaps just since this article first appeared in a public place.

Naturally, there would be Draconian penalties for any violation of this new “highest law of the land.” For a long while now, I’ve been interested in seeing the ancient federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay fully rejuvenated and dedicated exclusively to the incarceration of government lawbreakers. I’m more than confident that tourists on excursion cruises would pay a reasonable amount for small packages of meat, maybe with expired sell-by dates, with which to keep the bay’s famous sharks interested in hanging around the prison island.

In the meantime, having nothing better to do with themselves (nothing that would show above their newsdesks, that is), the broadcast media might begin to measure the accomplishments of the nation’s legislatures, not by the number of laws they pass, but by the number of laws they repeal.

Yeah, let’s call it “THE MORATORIUM.”

And when the blessed century of unprecedented peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity draws to a close, we’ll make the Moratorium permanent. Perhaps ultimately there may only be one law, the Zero Aggression Principle, forbidding the initiation of physical force by anyone — especially government — against anyone else, for any reason whatever.

We might then begin to count ourselves as civilized again.