Imagine being empowered by the state to threaten people with murderous violence over hurt feelings.
Or for pretty much any reason at all. Without having to worry much – if at all – about ever being held criminally responsible for such abuse.
To say that such a policy is dangerous is like saying there’s a slight problem in the Titanic’s hold, after it hit the iceberg.
It is catastrophic – as great a threat to our liberties as the gushing-in seawater was to the souls aboard the doomed liner.
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In this video, a man who flipped The Bird to an armed government worker finds himself in mortal peril because he hurt the AGW’s feelings. Not because any law was broken – much less any harm done to persons or property, the only moral justification for interfering with anyone’s liberty.
Nonetheless, the affronted AGW uses his government-issued car and his government-issued gun and the government-sanctioned threat of murderous violence to coerce compliance to “pull over” – a soft-sounding euphemism (like the “shared responsibility payment” under Obamacare) for something as hard as it gets: A government thug waylaying a peaceful human being, using all the just-enumerated threats, overt and implied, that he will be killed (ultimately) if he does not obey.
Some reading this will be taken aback at the language above – will consider the foregoing a hyperbolic statement. But it is a statement of fact. Had the man – who did nothing illegal – declined to obey the illegal orders of the AGW and attempted merely to leave and go about his business – asserted his right to liberty – he would certainly have found himself the object of murderous violence.
Murderous violence is implicit (and often, explicit) in every interaction one of us has with one of them.