Putting 'Liberty' Above Life—and the Pursuit of Happiness

If Government's the Disease, is Chaos the Cure?

So, Fernando Antonio Salguero, I hear a police dog detected explosive materials in the trunk of your illegally parked car, and you got arrested by police in New Jersey. The tear gas canisters they found you call "larger pepper-spray cans" (in case of attack by Yeti); the rocket-propelled flares are for distress (presumably on a boat in the open ocean), and the extendable baton, you claim, allows you to break windows to rescue people from burning cars.

"There's no problem [with having a baton] here in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but in the state of New Jersey the people are much closer to the slave state. Slaves are not allowed to be armed . . . at all," you told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"I'm not anti-cop," you added. "I'm anti-tyranny."

You believe 9/11 was a fix and are a founder of the survivalist group Survive and Thrive. You refuse to fly. You are a self-styled defender the U.S. Constitution against "all enemies, foreign and domestic." You think juries should be able to nullify laws.

Like so many of your ilk, you claim to love some mythologized notion of America and have nothing but contempt for what the country actually is. You distrust government and the agents of government, believe in vast conspiracies upheld by armies of drone-like beaurocrats, and expect any day that the forces of evil will attempt to take away all your rights and liberties, enabled by our corrupt justice system.

If you dislike America so much, why don't you go live somewhere else? In Pakistan, you can own fully automatic weapons, live in a gated community, and hire armed guards to prevent your kids from being kidnapped on the way to the movie theater! Sounds good, right?

Of course, you won't leave, and here's why: the United States is a nation of laws, and the powers you rail against are the bastion of a functioning civil society, which you rely on every day of your life for health, security, well-being, safe delivery of goods and services, infrastructure to get to work, and your very job itself, the carrying out of which is predicated on notions of mutual trust, civic standards and voluntary access to private property.

You might appreciate the police a little more if we lived in your paradise of freedom, where government has little power to prevent vigilante justice (the voice of the people!), weapons hoarding and/or mini-fiefdoms created by self-styled "defenders of liberty." I'm not saying you personally are a bad person; I'm sure you mean well and believe you do what's best for your family. But think a bit more about the consequences of your ideology. You may find that is where Scary truly resides.