3D-Printed Guns: Orwell Was Wrong, So Was Rand

The 3D gun printing process doesn't constitute the invention of a new wheel of undocumented gun cottage industry. Skilled gunsmiths and semiskilled machinists have always been able to manufacture undocumented ("illegal," "unlicensed") guns.

The true significance of the 3D-printed gun is the "democratization" of gun manufacturing. Now all the equipment you need is a 3D printer and the skills required to operate it.

The knee-jerk reaction by the people's rulers, New York Senator Chuck E. Schumer and Congressman Steve Israel? They want to ban all plastic guns.

"But if you're going to download a blueprint for a plastic weapon that can be brought onto an airplane, there's a penalty to be paid."

That doesn't even begin to make sense. Hijacking aircraft is already illegal. A hijacker, particularly if he's a suicidal religious fanatic, isn't going to be deterred by an additional gun charge.

Over at the Huffington Post, the assorted fascists, commies, gun control freaks, and other intellectual bottom feeders creeping around there are huffing and frothing at their mouths. But just that they don't like reality doesn't change it.

"This elegant statement of purpose [the Preamble to the US Constitution] confirms that our Founders saw a more energetic, more capable federal government as the best possible guarantor of individual rights."

Only that this government turned out to be the most vicious destroyer of individual rights. Apparently, the huffy poster is unable to distinguish between individual rights and the will (the tyranny) of the majority.

"He prefers an anarchical society where government lacks the ability not only to accomplish great things, but also to do the mundane, like ensuring that judgments are enforced and laws executed."

Let me take Israel's nonsense statement and turn it around into something meaningful:

We're all for enforcing (Anarcho-Capitalist) laws against true crime. But if you're going to raid someone's house to steal his books, computers, and weed, to lock him into a cage, and to murder him if he tries to defend himself, there's a penalty to be paid.

If everybody has a gun, no organization, be it a fascist state or an Anarcho-Capitalist corporation gone rogue, can afford to enforce laws against victimless "crimes." Neither fascist pigs nor Anarcho-Capitalist security guards will be at all eager to enforce contempt of cop on even the lowliest individual.

The case of 3D-printed guns proves two popular antifascist writers, George Orwell and Ayn Rand, wrong.

In 1984, Orwell painted the dystopian picture of an omnipotent state enslaving its subjects through technology. Now we see that technology is not the evil tool of the fascist state.

At worst, technology is morally neutral, neither good nor bad, its moral worth depending on which party uses it, the state or the freedom fighters. At best, however, technology is so disruptive that, once genie is out of the bottle, it reduces any organized monopoly government ad absurdum.

Murray Rothbard correctly stated that:

"Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism."

Which, as this case demonstrates, can be turned into this corollary:

Technology is the fullest expression of anarchy, and anarchy is the fullest expression of technology.

Advanced technology makes totalitarian rule impossible, and the absence of pointless regulations allows more technological progress.

Rand believed that anarchy would result in the rule of brute force, and consequently fantasized about how to keep some hypothetical "limited government" limited. Now we see that anarchy is not the rule of brute force, but of force controlled by the mind.

Anarchy is the "rule," for lack of a better word, of those who can operate 3D printers. Not the rule of decrepit old men like Chuck E. Cheese, who cannot tell the "intertubes" from their feeding tubes, old men who love nothing better than to at the drop of a hat make laws to kidnap and murder random individuals who never harmed anyone.

If you want to wrap your mind around how far the lunacy of the government toadies goes, look at this huffy poster contradiction:

"The concept of a government 'monopoly on force' may sound inconsistent with the political traditions of a country steeped in stories of its own revolution, but it is the fundamental organizing principle of any nation-state."

Versus

"We don't know if the project will be producing serviceable handguns and assault rifles anytime soon, but if it does — and if these weapons avoid regulation — political violence could one day replace political dialogue as the hallmark of our democratic system."

In the first quote the gun control freak extols the state's monopoly on force. In the second quote he condemns political violence.

But what is the state's monopoly on force, if not political violence, political violence perpetrated by the majority to enforce its will on the minority? Looks like political violence is fine with freaky-boy as long as it has been rubberstamped by the majority.

Majority tyranny, democracy, is fine and dandy for him. Looks like he expects to always have a leftist majority to back him up.

But be careful, freaky-boy. A government that is powerful enough to give you anything you want is also powerful enough to take away everything you have. I dare say that if your authoritarian government turns on you, saving an authoritarian like you from death row will be the lowest of the low priorities for any anarchist.

You dirty fascists, commies, conservatives, and socialists. Your government stole our herbs, guns, and books it didn't approve of, locked us in cages, and murdered us. When we complained, you basically told us to go fly a kite.

Now liberty and anarchy is coming to you, and you don't like it one bit. You complain to us.

You know what? Go fly a kite.

Anarchy is the way of the future. Better get used to it.

The shot heard 'round the world.

What Is the Market?

One reason why anarchists and minarchists are arguing at cross-purposes is the failure to understand what the (free) market is and how it works. Let me explain. 

What is a market? A market is a place where people exchange goods and services. 

What is free? Free means free from initiatory force. 

What then is a free market? A free market is a place where people exchange goods and services voluntarily. 

The state claims a coercive monopoly on the provision of certain goods, i.e., defense and justice. The state claims only it is qualified to provide them. 

Anarchists hold that the market will provide these goods better, cheaper, and more humanely, like it provides all other goods in that fashion. Minarchists claim that for a free market to exist, it needs to be created and protected by a preexisting limited government, but they cannot explain how such a limited government could come into or remain in existence. 

This apparent contradiction is best explained in a model. Let's assume there's a world that contains three individuals: Alice, Benito, and Carl. 

The three of them go to the market to trade. Alice is more intelligent than Benito and Carl. Therefore, her products are more advanced and more valuable to every one of them. 

Because she is more intelligent, Alice has made a pistol for her self-defense. Benito and Carl have only slingshots, as they don't know how to build anything more advanced. 

Now, the archist argument is that that market is not free, because Alice has got a gun, but the other two haven't. Alice can force the other two to trade on terms that they would not agree to if they were on equal terms in firepower. Therefore, archists claim that the three of them have to set up a government, which will somehow administer the gun, i.e. the use of force, objectively. 

Yet, governments do not exist independently of individuals. Governments consist of individuals. 

So in our market, Alice, Benito, and Carl establish a government and have a democratic vote on whom to use the gun against. I bet you can imagine what happens next. 

Right, Benito and Carl gang up on Alice and vote to point the gun at her and expropriate her superior products from her, so they get for free what they could barely have afforded in a hypothetically truly free market, where no one can threaten to use force against their trading partners. 

This is precisely what has happened in our world. The minarchist solution is to plead with Benito and Carl for one of them to side with Alice. 

They promise Benito and Carl that if they let Alice go with her tools now, she will come back with even more and better products, and everyone will be better off. But Benito and Carl only care about free stuff now. 

Then the minarchists explain to Benito and Carl that it is immoral to steal Alice's stuff, even if they steal by way of democratic government. But Benito and Carl only care about free stuff now. 

Besides, they have rationalized their crimes, so that they can go on looting, but still face themselves in a mirror. Benito makes himself believe that democratic government is holy and can do whatever it wants. Carl makes himself believe that Alice didn't really create her goods, but just found them somewhere, so she doesn't really have a right to them. 

So in the real world you only have two options: Alice keeps her gun and makes the rules for everyone, or Benito and Carl vote on what rules to make and enforce at the point of the gun they could never have created. The market cannot and should not be free as in "Everyone has the same firepower" or "No one should be able to threaten the use of force against trading partners." The market can only be free in terms and to the extent of "Everyone gets to keep the guns he can manufacture to defend himself with." This way, the most intelligent have the most firepower, and initiatory force and injustice is thus minimized as much as humanly possible. 

Sure, it's not ideal to have the intelligent and productive make all the rules, for to be intelligent and productive does not necessarily mean to be moral and just. But it sure beats the current situation, where the stupid and unproductive gang up into a majority and force their superstitions on their betters and loot from them. 

For a representative government to work, the majority would have to be intelligent and productive, instead of stupid and unproductive. Given that it isn't, there are only two ways to establish civilization on this planet. 

Either you adopt Anarcho-Capitalism straight, where the rules are made by corporations, where the richer shareholders have more votes. Or you have to go back to "anarchy light," i.e. the system the Founding Fathers established, with census suffrage, where the rich got more votes than the poor, so the latter could not outvote the former to loot from them. ("Anarchy light" because it attempted to replicate the results of Anarcho-Capitalism without fully going there, without recognizing individual sovereignty.) 

But if you go that far, you may just as well go the whole nine yards to Anarcho-Capitalism. But then, you can bury your head in the sand like the minarchists and hope that someday some miracle will happen and establish a market where no one has more firepower than anyone else. 

The funny thing is that the minarchists (or at least the objectivists) are vociferously opposed to a world government. I.e., they abhor the state of nature among individuals, but they are adamant that the state of nature be preserved among nations. 

But in logic, if it is wrong for individuals to live by the law of the strongest (which means the most intelligent, as conflicts are no longer decided by bare fists and brute muscle), then it is wrong for nations, too. So if you want a government to rule individuals, you have to want a world government to rule nation states. 

What we have right now between nations is the Alice, Benito, and Carl state of nature described in the beginning. Alice, the US, the most rational — or rather the least irrational — nation, rules as she sees fit, and Benito and Carl, or the socialist slave states of Europe and the theocratic states of Islam, want to disarm her via the UN. 

Which means that archists, minarchists, and objectivists have no argument on their side but the status quo. We need world anarchy, or the world government will democratically vote to disarm the US and annihilate Israel. But we cannot have individual anarchy, because it's never been fully tried and is scary. The archists are afraid of change and can only resort to "discussions" along the lines of "La, la, la, I'm not listening to this." 

Prove me wrong and try to prove me wrong. If you can. Otherwise I hope those government boots you're licking at least taste good. 

The Bankruptcy of Minarchy

For a declaration of bankruptcy of minarchism, look no further than this blog post in one objectivist gazette by the name of The Objective Standard.

The objective standard. What a claim.

You'd think if that's their objective standard, it's their best shot. Yet the claims I had to read in that post are patently illogical, the author doesn't seem to have read even the basics on anarchism, and that whole tempest in a tea post amounts to one big fur ball fight randroid vs. straw man, a trap set by knaves for fools that never heard about anarchy except as in "chaos."

"Events last week surrounding the hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers were instructive regarding the contradiction that is anarchy."

On the contrary, as the pigs made a huge mess out of that manhunt, using excessive force against suspects who turned out to be innocent, and the case was solved by a civilian in the end, those events were in fact instructive regarding the contradiction that is the state.

"Anarchy, the absence of government, leaves political justice to the will of the general public."

Democracy leaves political justice to the will of the general public. Anarcho-Capitalism leaves it mostly to corporate professionals, but also to individuals, if they choose to accept the liability risks of taking the law into their own hands.

"Had there been no government… no law… how would these killers have been identified and apprehended? By individual citizens investigating and prowling around on their own?"

Not likely. That would be very inefficient. Capitalism leads to division of labor.

Also, that there are no governments in a free world does not mean that there is no law. In a free country, the law is made by corporations, by free, voluntarily cooperating individuals, just like everything else.

In our mixed economies, the state makes no bread, but that does not mean that there is no bread. In fact, thanks to corporate and individual bakers, we have more and better bread than the soviet slaves got from their state.

"By multiple private 'defense agencies,' … following their own favored practices regarding the use of force?"

Yes, law and security will be manufactured by private corporations, just like everything else. Why would any different practices regarding the use of force be a problem, assuming that they would not be standardized through a negotiated body of intercorporate law in the first place?

And why don't the obis have a problem with the fact that different governments follow different practices regarding their use of force, which have not been standardized by international law? By that logic, only a single world government would be permissible.

By they way, it's not like there aren't multiple agencies under government that get in each other's way. Only that they don't compete. So in that respect you already have the downsides of anarchy without the upsides.

"Over the course of that week, how many people were wrongly identified as 'suspects' by the police… Without… the rule of law and due process, how many innocent people would have been assaulted and possibly slain?"

Obviously, fewer than by the pigs that rampaged through Boston like Rambo. Who could the poor people of Boston call against the pigs raiding their homes? No one.

In Anarcho-Capitalism, any would-be pig has to be real careful not to "assault or slay" any innocent individual, as that pig would find itself at the receiving end of its victim's defense agency. The same is true for individual vigilantes. Defense agencies would try rogue security guards and vigilantes alike for murder if they ended up lynching the wrong person, so there is no additional incentive for lynch justice in Anarcho-Capitalism. In fact, there is less incentive for legalized lynching, as there finally will be someone you can call against the pigs.

Governments unjustly slay more innocent people than defense agencies would, precisely because democratic voting and the lack of competition permits the government to operate without reason or objectivity. Capitalist competition will lead to better standards of evidence than the ridiculously low standards the government uses and that get all those innocent people on death row right now.

"The hunt…  illustrates why the use of retaliatory force (outside of immediate self-defense) must be placed under objective control — that is, control of pre-established legal processes enacted by a government strictly limited to the protection of individual rights."

The eagerness with which governments aggress against the innocent accused is the one best argument against government. Government courts are little better than legalized lynch mobs, where you find little reason or objectivity.

And "outside of immediate self-defense"? Funny.

By the obi logic, self-defense would in fact have to be outlawed. If individuals are too nonobjective to mete out justice without harming the innocent, how can they be objective enough to defend themselves without harming the innocent? In a hypothetical obi land, the randroids would in fact have to stand, deliver, be raped, and be slaughtered rather than defend themselves, for fear of using "nonobjective" force.

And who exactly should or would pre-establish that strictly limited government? The people?

In other words, the majority? No one hates strict limits on government more than the majority does.

In democracy — or any other form of "one man, one vote" representative government the objectivists may prefer to egalitarian, direct democracy — it's the majority that elects the politicians. And it's the politicians that make the law according to the majority's wishes.

The majority does not intend to give up legalized looting. Nor does it intend to stop sacrificing liberties for sham security.

Only if the law is made by capitalist corporations in a free marketplace can things change for the better. In a corporation, the poor shareholders cannot gang up on the rich ones, as the latter get more votes, according to the number of their shares, which is, the size of their fortunes, which is, their productivity.

Anarcho-Capitalism rewards intelligence, merit, and productivity. Egalitarian government rewards mob rule.

In Anarcho-Capitalism, you're free to build a defense agency that does not sacrifice liberty for sham security, even though the majority may hate it. All it takes is enough customers, and wealthy enough customers, that vote for you with their wallets. With that money, you can fund your Navy, Air Force, and Army, strong enough to keep any rights-violating gangs and fascist nation states at bay.

The funny thing is, for all their harping on about governments' real and anarchists' hypothetical rights violations, the TOS obis committed a rights violation themselves in that post. The pic of Murray Rothbard they used is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Yet I can find no attribution in the post. There's just a link back to Wikipedia, but no attribution to the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

I don't think it's fair use, as the post is on anarchy, not on Rothbard. The post doesn't comment on or even mention Rothbard.

Why Do People Love Public, Hate Private?

Move over, Atlas Shrugged, here comes real life! You'd believe that this article on unionized postal "workers" protesting the end of six-day delivery was a satire. Yet it appears to be authentic, and the people quoted seem to really believe what they say.

She added, "We will lose the security of the mail because if we don't deliver on Saturday, somebody will and you don't know who will be delivering on Saturday."

This is wrong on so many levels. In my experience, pretty much every time I deal with a private business, I get cheaper and better service than from one that's regulated or even run by the government. Any service the government pretends to provide can be provided cheaper, better, and more humanely by the free market.

So the government won't deliver on Saturday anymore? Somebody will? We don't know who it is?

Yay! Whoever it is, if experience is a judge, the service will get better!

Of course, the unionist that made that original statement had an ulterior motive. She'd say anything, any nonsense, to keep her and her looter and moocher accomplices' jobs.

But I keep hearing that insane sentiment from people independently of whose ox is being gored. Why do people root for the state like that?

(In other countries even more than in the US. In Europe, people complain if corporations collect their customer data and send them to the US with its less restrictive data protection laws for processing, but don't mind filling out all the bullshit forms their governments force them to, giving their governments personal data they'd never even dream of giving out voluntarily. The best thing about the US is that it's the only country where there are still freedom-loving people left that don't trust the government.)

I don't understand why most people are such knee-jerk collectivists. Why is it that most people tend to approve of anything if it comes from the state, but criticize anything that comes from private industry?

Is it because in a democracy everybody gets one vote in the state, so the state is "we," but a private company is "they"? Is it because the majority figures they can vote to force the minority to pay for the service? Is it because private industry is out to make profit, and religion holds that profit is immoral?

Anyways, the article continues with plenty of funny antics from your local chapter of the CCCP (Communist Clowns and Comedians of the Posts) union.

We want the PMG (postmaster general) to know we stand in solidarity, all of the craft unions," Warren said in a speech to the participants, eliciting applause from the group.

So delivering mail is a craft now? What special skills does it require?

Fitting rectangular envelopes into rectangular slots? Checking the numbers on the stamps against tables with the correct postage?

What's next? The Wal-Mart cashier craft? The burger flipper craft?

Oh, my bad! Of course it's all crafts. I forgot about those hygiene technicians and appliance technicians. :)

With ongoing cuts including the Saturday delivery, she worried that "we'll be a private company" when its over.

Again, what's so bad about private? The loss of your cushy benefits and homing from work?

Reminds me…

Sacking out on his sacks of mail, a postal "worker" finds himself lying on something hard punching him from below. Rooting for it, he finds an old oil lamp. He proceeds to rub it, and out comes a genie.

"Hi! Thanks for getting me out of that cramped lamp," says the genie. "For that, I owe you three wishes."

"Hmm… Lemme think… First, I want to go to Hawaii."

Bang!

He's lying on the beach in Waikiki.

"Second, I want a beautiful girlfriend."

Bang!

There's a supermodel lying next to him.

"Third, I never want to work again."

Bang!

He's back lying on his sacks of mail.

Clay Myer, vice president of the Alabama Rural Letter Carriers Association, said customers want to retain the six-day delivery. "We work for the American people and the American people want six-day delivery. That's it," he said.

Unfortunately, the American people want six-day delivery only if they don't have to pay for it, buster.

The Lie at the Base of Obama's Heart

If you want to know the big lie underlying Resident Obama's politics, look no further than this interview in the house organ of the Democratic National Committee, Rolling Stone.

You look at Abraham Lincoln: He very much believed in self-sufficiency and self-reliance. He embodied it — that you work hard and you make it, that your efforts should take you as far as your dreams can take you. But he also understood that there's some things we do better together. That we make investments in our infrastructure and railroads and canals and land-grant colleges and the National Academy of Sciences, because that provides us all with an opportunity to fulfill our potential, and we'll all be better off as a consequence. He also had a sense of deep, profound empathy, a sense of the intrinsic worth of every individual, which led him to his opposition to slavery and ultimately to signing the Emancipation Proclamation. That view of life — as one in which we're all connected, as opposed to all isolated and looking out only for ourselves — that's a view that has made America great and allowed us to stitch together a sense of national identity out of all these different immigrant groups who have come here in waves throughout our history.

I submit that for Obama to invoke the intrinsic worth of every individual, Lincoln, and the abolition of slavery in order to enslave every individual under socialism is obscene. But that's not the big lie.

"That view of life — as one in which we're all connected, as opposed to all isolated and looking out only for ourselves" — this is the lie at the base of Obama's heart, the false dichotomy that permits him and his Obamabots to pursue the enslavement of man to men in the name of "freedom."

The question is not whether we do things together, or are all isolated and looking out only for ourselves.

The question is whether we do things together as free, voluntarily cooperating individuals, or do things together at the point of a bureaucrat's gun.

What's more, that bureaucrat forcing us to cooperate according to his notions would in a free country be found barely competent to clean toilets. Nevertheless, he got his spot in the bureaucracy because he's a friend or donor of Obama. That's why government programs are usually boondoggles.

The question is whether we work together as free men, or as the slaves of Obama, the government, and the majority that elected those rapscallions.

Obama Snatches Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

Make my day and vote for Romney.

Why? Why should anyone care one way or the other?

"America is assured her independence, mankind's cause is won, and liberty is no longer homeless on earth." — Lafayette.

Don't let Obama undo this. Don't let him make liberty homeless on earth again. Don't let that socialist turn America into another European-style welfare state.

No honest person has anything to win from socialism.

Obama tells you he will take the money from the rich and give it to you. But the rich don't have that much money if you divide it among 300 million people. Particularly not if you first have to pay for multiple trillions of government waste.

You may think that you're not rich and that you'll get a share of the spoils.

But if your country goes down the road to socialism, if your government has bled the rich dry and killed the engine of productivity, your government will soon turn to you to confiscate your money to pay off those poorer than you.

Look at Greece. Look at Cuba. Look at North Korea.

Of course, socialism doesn't have to get that bad. Chances are that it will get stuck somewhere in the middle of the road.

Then you get a country like Germany, where you still have to pay the high taxes and comply with statist regulations, but find that your government — having killed off innovation and progress and having spent all the confiscated money on bureaucrats and wasteful projects that the free market rightly rejected as pointless — has no money to give you the freebies it promised.

And even that uneasy truce, that semi-socialism, where you pay and get nothing back, can only last if whatever productive people are left are altruistic enough to pay the high taxes to fund the waste. It seems to work, badly, in France, Germany, and Scandinavia.

It doesn't work in Greece. I doubt it will work in the US.

Look at their two respective deficits. Does it look like anybody is willing to pay for the welfare state?

Don't go there. It is not a nice place to be.

The only ones that profit from the welfare state are politicians, bureaucrats, and corrupt "businessmen." Look at Solyndra.

The needy are better off with private charity, even though that means they will have to say "please" and "thank you" when they want help, as they should, instead of demanding that the non-needy be their slaves by birthright. And no productive person has any use for a government that takes a dollar from him to give him fifty cents back.

No honest person has anything to win from the welfare state. Go for a standard to which honest men can repair.

"America is assured her independence, mankind's cause is won, and liberty is no longer homeless on earth."

Don't sell this for a handout you'll never get.

Lance Armstrong Backdraft

The single item in common for these is that people outside the involved communities are astounded that anyone could care enough about the issue to get in any kind of argument about it at all, much less a big argument.

I'll never, ever understand the (anti?-)concept of spectator sports. It's fine if someone does sports to stay fit or because he enjoys it.

But I'll never understand how anyone can enjoy watching sports, let alone get excited about sports or get in any kind of argument about sports, or about any athlete cheating or taking drugs to cheat. Or how anyone could call in the pigs to convene grand juries, investigate, and enforce judgments at the point of a gun.

If anyone brought a case involving any sorts of sports to me to judge, I would consider any breach of contract, cheating, or doping in sports de minimis and beneath the dignity of the court.

The only sane judgment in a case involving sports is, "Kids, be nice, go back to the playground, and don't hit each other."

If anyone wants to ruin his health to cycle faster, that's his problem. If you want a fair competition free of doping, you want something that never was and never will be.

The war on drugs failed, and so must the war on doping.

Get a life, and find something worthwhile to do with your time instead of watching sports and threatening the use of lethal force against people for cheating at an activity that's inane to begin with. If you want to push human capacity to the limit, cultivate your brain, not your brawn. 

GTA

(With apologies to Lead Belly and Credence Clearwater Revival.)

When I was a little bitty baby

My mama put Rockstar in my cradle,

Oh, the old GTA back home;

It was down in Coral Gables,

Just about a mile from Thompson's stables,

With the old GTA back home.

Oh, when Hillary's pigs come rootin'

You can't do very much shootin',

In the old GTA back home.

It was down in Coral Gables,

Just about a mile from Thompson's stables,

With the old GTA back home.

When I was a little bitty baby

My mama put Rockstar in my cradle,

Oh, the old GTA back home;

It was down in Coral Gables,

Just about a mile from Thompson's stables,

With the old GTA back home.

Oh, when Jack the jackass starts brayin'

You can't do very much slayin',

In the old GTA back home.

It was down in Coral Gables,

Just about a mile from Thompson's stables,

With the old GTA back home.

(Instrumental bridge)

When I was a little bitty baby

My mama put Rockstar in my cradle,

Oh, the old GTA back home;

It was down in Coral Gables,

Just about a mile from Thompson's stables,

With the old GTA back home,

With the old GTA back home.

Your Elephant Repellent Is Inferior, Comrade Warren

"Hey, mister, you better buy a bottle of my Elephant Repellent. If you don't buy it, the elephants will come into the neighborhood and trample you! My proof that this stuff really works is that there are no elephants around here." 

For "Elephant Repellent" substitute the word "government" and for "elephants" substitute the word "crime" or "Russians" or "poverty" or "chaos" or anything else the government claims to prevent. 

Nothing the government claims to prevent cannot be prevented in a more humane, just, and economical manner by free associations of individual people. 

In answer to Comrade Elizabeth Warren:

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own, nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear, you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for."

Potholed, congested roads. I'd have gotten better and cheaper roads by paying for them through the free market.

"You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate."

You mean, those functional illiterates government-run schools turn out?

"You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did."

Would have gotten much better service at a much a lower price from private security guards and firefighters.

Any service the government pretends to provide can be provided cheaper, better, and more humanely by the free market.

The first complaints I'd file with my security guards would be about those marauding bands that call themselves IRS, ATF, EPA, and DEA, BTW.

You Didn't Build That — Obama Means It

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business — you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Upon the predictable public outrage at Resident Obama's confession of his commitment to collectivism and communism, he backtracked, and the leftist media attempted to whitewash him by claiming that he didn't mean "you didn't build your business," but that he meant "you didn't build roads and bridges," that "that" referred to "roads and bridges." Yet, sane people pointed out that that doesn't make sense, as "roads and bridges" are "those," not "that," and that "that" is immediately preceded by "business," so that this is the most logical referent.

But even if the resident and his socialist enablers plead grammatical illiteracy, it still doesn't make sense. If Obama meant "roads and bridges," what about the teachers and the American system? Does it make sense to single out roads and bridges while ignoring teachers and the whole American system?

Maybe Comrade Obama doesn't mind neglecting the American system, but would a leftist ever snub teachers? They pay him to roll over pork to them, after all.

Now the resident might backtrack again and claim that "that" referred to all of the above — teachers, the American system, and roads and bridges. However, that wouldn't make sense, either. For he said, "you didn't build that." You may build systems and roads and bridges, but you don't build teachers. Schools, but not teachers.

Any way you slice it, it's pretty clear what Obama deep down in his heart really wanted to say. He means it, and he wants to shout it from the highest steeples — while preserving a modicum of plausible deniability.