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The Libertarian Enterprise

http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/

In Praise of Outlaws

http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/libe68-20000331-13.html

by Ernest Partisan
E-mail: [email protected]

Special to TLE

I choose to be an outlaw. There was once a time when a majority of
American Citizens understood this and approved. True, there were probably
numerically more Tories residing in America at the time, but by definition
one who chooses to be the subject of a ruler is not a Citizen, and of no
consequence to anyone honorable. America was a nobility-free republic — a
revolutionary creation of outlaws. A land of honorable outlaws who agreed
upon a minimal set of laws that even an outlaw could abide and grudgingly
lent a tiny fraction of their natural sovereignty and reclaimed liberty to
the obvious mutual benefit of all.

Not all criminals are outlaws, and not all outlaws are criminals. An
outlaw lives by a moral code, but blithely ignores absurd laws designed to
suppress dissent and control private personal behavior.

A criminal lives by no code, external or internal and is an animal to be
mistrusted or destroyed. A criminal ignores whatever is inconvenient at
the moment while an outlaw often chooses a personally inconvenient and
sometimes dangerous course in the name of principle and honor.

A criminal has absolute freedom, while an outlaw has personal liberty and
spiritual freedom. A criminal will steal food from a working man, while an
outlaw will refuse to pay child support to a welfare agency. A criminal
will lobby into existence a law putting the cash of ten million laborers
into his pocket, while an outlaw will refuse to file a tax return. A
criminal will carry a gun to intimidate victims, while an outlaw will carry
his gun as a symbol of his liberty and to defend against all aggressors.

Our Bill of Rights is a relic of our outlaw past. It is a set of codes
written by free Citizens who understood the necessity of controlling the
monster they knew they were creating.

They knew that there can be no words so offensive that they dare not be
spoken or published. They knew that if anyone had that power to suppress,
all had it and no one would dare speak freely, just as it had been in the
ugly old world order they had fled. They understood the necessity of faith
as well as the irreconcilability of conflicting dogma. They had seen
firsthand the use of official religions to control outlaws, and didn’t much
care for what they saw. So they penned the First Amendment to the
Constitution.

They understood that the right to be armed, and to be a threat to the ruler
simply by being, was an absolute. They codified this very clearly in a
sentence ending “shall NOT be infringed” which contains not a single allow
or permit. They understood that any compromise on this principle of
freedom deeded the power of life and death over them to some unaccountable
other. The right to be armed guarantees not bravery, nor victory, nor
nobility, nor honesty nor honor, nor even safety, but merely the right to
honest respect and a fair fight. And so the Second Amendment came to be
written down.

They had seen the tyranny and felt the violation of having the government
put soldiers and officers into their homes to keep dissent minimized and
politically correct. An outlaw knows this is no longer necessary, of
course, since electronic monitoring can work more effectively and less
personably in all cases. But they didn’t have electronic magic at the
time, so the founding outlaws only prohibited the quartering of troops in
private homes in peacetime. This was the genesis of the Third Amendment.

Many of the founding outlaws had felt the humiliation of being routinely
searched in hopes of finding something illegal to be used against them or
to turn them against their fellow outlaws. They knew of such outrageous
offenses as random roadblocks, home invasion searches, searches through
bank accounts and payrolls, and the ultimate humiliation of personal body
searches.

They knew how much could and would be made illegal and used to wrongly
label them criminal, when the Tories eventually insinuated themselves into
the newly created governments. They knew that actual criminals would use a
Citizen’s cloak of privacy to conceal misdeeds, and that this privacy must
be protected from casual intrusions and mandatory disclosures. For all of
this, the Fourth Amendment was drafted.

The founding outlaws also knew well the coercive and dishonest tactics and
abusive methods of executives and prosecutors, and so the Fifth Amendment
was written to provide a tool to use against the excesses of the
law. Remember, these were our founding outlaws! In the same vein, they
knew the Tories would try to render these weapons ineffective in different
kinds of legal maneuverings, so they enshrined some more protections,
especially the right to trial by jury in the Sixth Amendment. And to avoid
end runs around these protections by incorrectly labeling a dispute between
law and outlaw as a contractual dispute, they enshrined the same jury trial
provision in the Seventh Amendment. The founding outlaws finished up their
magnum opus by providing a way for an outlaw to get out of jail in the
eight amendment, and specifically prohibiting the creation of most of the
laws of which Tories are so fond in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

So what is the point of this little history lesson? I’m one of the proud
breed of modern outlaws.
For a while, I thought we might be an endangered species. Now, however,
thanks to the excesses and impatience of the Clinton Regime, our population
has made a tremendous comeback, with our numbers increasing tenfold in a
single generation.

Do you remember the first point about how not all criminals are outlaws and
how not all outlaws are criminals? The Tories in their twentieth century
guises have been allowed to prey increasingly on the individual outlaw in
the name of fighting crime. Every one of the protections in the Bill of
Rights and the original Federal Constitution have been violated repeatedly
in spirit and in letter.
The Bill of Rights is simply the agreed upon part of the outlaw’s
code. And the government has itself become not an outlaw, but a criminal,
by repeatedly proving that it follows no code at all.

And so, since the outlaw lives by a code, there are government laws he must
break and not be silent about, while a criminal lives by no code and can
always beat the law. The result is lots of criminals, lots of Tories, and
a few angry outlaws. This same situation prevailed at the beginning of
this country — Criminal rulers, Tories obeying, and outlaws standing with
manly firmness at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill. And since the
code or covenant has been broken, the response is and will be to avenge the
wrongs, since avenging the wrongs is one of the most sacred items in the
outlaw’s code.

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