Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> Mike Lorrey writes
>
> >> Namely, if your group already maintains a very high level of
> >> liberty, and you don't want to lose it, then resistence to
> >> [liberty-destroying] invaders damn near justifies any means.
> >
> > Not necessarily. In a properly libertarian society, any individual with
> > the cash can buy or make a nuclear weapon, or any other weapon. Taxation,
> > in my mind, is only NOT theft when the individual is free to choose what
> > government services they wish to pay for and which not to pay for.
>
> In most historical circumstances in which a free society was
> challenged, nuclear weapons were not available. Those societies
> were not made up exclusively of white middle class intellectual
> libertarians, and as a practical measure, those societies could
> very well have perished were it not for the ability of their
> government to draft men into armies, redirect industry, and
> tax individuals at the optimum rate to win the war.
Here in the US, the income tax, which was first instituted for the civil
war, then for WWI funding, was always, and is today, a voluntary system
for most people (with the exception of federal employees, officers, and
beneficiaries), only they don't know it only because a) so many have
been one of the three above for so long they have forgotten theirs is
not the default state, and b) the patriotic fervor effectively stamped
out any feeling of 'choice' in the matter, i.e. if you didn't pay, you
were disloyal, unpatriotic, etc.
Now, the US has not been under serious threat of invasion since the 1812
war with Britain (the Japanese posession of a few Aleutian Islands
during the opening battles of our WWII involvement merely a diversionary
tactic), so we've really not had any real reason to be concerned about
our 'societies perishing'. Indeed, it can be very well argued that the
war with Japan was simply staged by the willful ignorance of the US
government of decoded transmissions of Japanese Naval and diplomatic
codes, the presence of Churchill at the White House at that time being
of interesting note as well, AND that Japan's attacks were instigated by
British disinformation that led the Japanese to believe we'd defend
British and Dutch colonies in the Pacific. I don't believe we ever had
any such sentiment. I'd be rather interested in war gaming a Japanese
attack in late 1941 that ignored Hawaii and the Phillipines in favor of
Singapore, Indonesia, etc. I doubt very much that the US would have been
at all interested in engaging the Japanese if the Japanese scrupulously
avoided US posessions.
> I claim that from 1870 to 1940, the United States was such a
> society, and had a sufficient but realistic threat from Japan,
> and Germany, and possibly the Soviet Union materialized, all
> would have been lost without the laudable capabilities that
> the U.S. did possess to coerce industry to make armaments,
> draft soldiers into enormous armies, and tax people at whatever
> the necessary rate would have been. I am even considering
> unlikely cases, such as some alliance of Germany, France, England
> and Japan in 1905 deciding to conquer North America. Those nations
> working together could only have been defeated by the U.S. in the
> way I've described. Consideration of examples like this is
> warranted by our wishing to establish general principles here.
Well, since in 1870 Japan had no navy worth mentioning, it was only in
1905 that they kicked Russia's Pacific Navy, and neither the Russians
nor Japan had a Navy at that time that could compete with the US Navy,
which was not funded by any confiscatory taxation at that point, I'd
have to say you are really BSing here.
Despite being a trade ally of Germany in WWI, the Japanese scrupulously
avoided the US Navy in the Pacific throughout WWI. It was not until the
Japanese engaged in its Yamato/Musashi battleship program (which
destroyed the Washington Treaty limitations on battleship construction)
in the late 1930's, along with its aircraft carrier program, that Japan
offered any significant threat with its Navy, and advanced as its Navy
was at the time, its Army was still stuck in WWI, along with some of the
most ill conceived firearms designs of the era (as any firearms expert
will attest).
Fantasy alliances of all the world powers against the US are rather
ludicrous, especially in respect to other english nations, and allying
Germany and France at that point in time is similarly ludicrous.
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