The Soil Where Demons Thrive

“Our problems are not caused by our flawed nature, but by flawed institutions. …There will always be some people who don’t mind using violence to get what they want. There will always be criminals. The question is whether we have systems that protect the rest of us from the criminals, or systems that enable and even encourage the real criminals, while criminalizing those who are peaceful.

“We would do well to disabuse ourselves of the notion that institutionalized violence creates order. It does not. It creates a safe place for people like Officer Oglesby, the men who killed Aiyana Jones, the Robert McNamaras and Curtis LeMays and the countless thousands of others who murder with impunity under cover of the state. It creates anarchy—the anarchy of Yeats’ poem, spinning us out of control and taking us further and further away from anything that can legitimately be called order.”

Me, a long time ago.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the release of (some of) the Epstein Files, you are likely feeling physically ill right now. For many of us, the information itself is not new. We’ve been listening to victims and witnesses speaking about these crimes for years now. But there is something about having it presented through official channels, something about seeing the emails and the other evidence directly, something about the matter-of-fact way in which it is all being shown to us that makes it all the more sickening.

A caveat, for those who say that the released documents “prove nothing.” Perhaps. But I think the Bad Cat says it best:

“the reason this dump was (rightly) so feared is that, even if adulterated, it’s enough volume to do real pattern analysis, a mosaic of 3 million things most of which could be dismissed on their own that, as a collective, form a picture that increasingly comes into focus.”

An awful lot of people are asking how it is that we got to this point. How could our entire system of governance become so corrupted that these sick, depraved, monsters were able to make their ways into positions of the highest power? And why did that system protect them, and not their victims?

As it turns out, these questions almost answer themselves.

I apologize in advance if I sound a little condescending, annoyed, or even enraged, as I try to explain how this works. It’s just that a small number of us, have been explaining this for a very long time and almost nobody has been listening. My hope is that now that the alleged crimes committed and enabled by those in power include literally eating babies, this might change. But given the near-religious fanaticism with which most Americans believe in the legitimacy and sanctity of the state, that hope is not great.

Still, here goes:

There can be no accountability with monopoly.

This lesson is drilled into econ. 101 students as part of mainstream education’s efforts to instill a fear of free markets. Yet the obvious corollary is ignored: If monopolies that arise from free competition (they don’t, but that’s another conversation) are dangerous because the monopolists are no longer accountable in any real sense to their customers—what should that tell us about monopolies that are created by force?

Most Americans don’t think about their political system in these terms. Most Americans believe—with a religious ferocity—that the fact of voting means we do control our politicians, and that everything they do is an expression of our will. That if “our” elected representatives end up doing horrible things, either to us or to others, it is all our own fault. That we just need to be better voters.

Most Americans do not understand the first thing about incentives—especially perverse ones; about the nature of the regulatory state; about how coercive systems protect themselves from accountability; or about the implications of being able to take other people’s money without their consent, and to create money out of thin air.

But you can bet there’s one group of people that understands all of this very well, and is eager to take advantage of it. That group consists of would-be criminals of every stripe, from thieves, murderers and rapists to extortionists and military adventurers.

These folks, the ones who have no compunction about violating other people’s rights, stealing their property, or even raping, torturing and killing other people… they are always on the lookout for opportunities that might allow them to commit their crimes undetected or un-prosecuted.

The institution of the state provides them with exactly this opportunity.

Separate rules for those inside this safe space.

It is easy to see that there are pockets of unaccountability within our system of governance, with examples such as the PREP Act that protects doctors and other health-care workers from liability from harm they may cause when providing “covered countermeasures”; the removal in 1986 of liability for harm for the manufacturers of vaccines; and the qualified immunity granted to police officers that prevent them from being prosecuted for committing acts that would send any of the rest of us to jail.

What may be less clear is how the entire system is itself a pocket of unaccountability. To illustrate what I mean, let’s take an imaginary (or not so imaginary) state governor. Let’s call him Governor Skippy.

Governor Skippy likes his governor’s mansion. He likes all the parties he gets to go to and the fancy friends he makes. He likes getting to hang out with movie stars, and he likes being on TV himself. He likes the thrill he gets from signing pieces of paper that make declarations about how all the people in his state get to live their lives.

If Governor Skippy wants to keep doing these things, he has to make his financial backers happy. So he signs pieces of paper saying that parents cannot choose which vaccines to give their children, or whether to vaccinate them at all. And his friends in the pharmaceutical companies send him lots of money. The massive—and completely unaccountable—regulatory infrastructure in Governor Skippy’s state makes it nearly impossible to do the controlled burns that are necessary to protect forests from being ravaged by uncontrollable fires. Governor Skippy also enacts laws to protect tiny little fish by dumping millions of gallons of fresh water into the ocean each year, instead of into reservoirs. This makes his environmental sponsors happy, and they keep sending Governor Skippy lots of money. He then goes on TV and acts sad when millions of acres of forests, homes, and businesses in his state burn to the ground.

Governor Skippy also does things like ordering churches to close down during a government-declared emergency, ordering the people in his state to stay indoors until he says they can come out, and demanding that they wear masks on their faces whenever he tells them to.

All of the above are clear violations of the Constitutional rights and/or trespasses against the property of the people living in Governor Skippy’s state. But Governor Skippy doesn’t care. Why? Because he knows that nothing bad will happen to him as a result of his violating people’s rights. Just like nothing bad will happen to him if half of his state burns to the ground because of his stupid policies. He is insulated from any real form of accountability for the results of his actions. All of his decisions are made in an accountability vacuum.

Of course, it is possible that someone might take Governor Skippy or his administration to court over one of these violations. It’s possible they might even win. But what happens then? Is Governor Skippy sent to prison? Of course not. If the court grants monetary awards to the victims of Governor Skippy’s policies, do those awards come out of Governor Skippy’s pockets? Of course not. If any of Governor Skippy’s disastrous public policies are shot down by the courts, he just skates away to enact new ones—in the full knowledge that he will never personally be held accountable for even one bit of the damage he does.

If any ordinary private citizens committed acts like these, or helped to destroy property on the scale of Governor Skippy, they would be tried in court and would likely serve prison sentences. At the very least, they would be on the hook for financial damages. But that is never even a possibility for those in power. It’s not how things are done.

It’s a great racket if you can get in on it.

Taxation and fiat money.

The icing on the cake is that the people who are victimized by Governor Skippy’s wanton acts of destruction are also forced to pay for them. But the craziest part of this story is that most of these people don’t even recognize this, or think that it matters.

They’ll go on bickering amongst each other about how they’re not voting the right people into office, while failing again and again to notice that no matter who is in office, those people use the money they’ve taken from us by force to do whatever it is they want to do, whether it is waging wars, funding phony education centers for their friends, or buying sex slaves.

And all the while, the folks who are having their money and wealth taken from them will scream until they are red in the face if you try to point out that they are being stolen from.

While most of your friends and family members do not understand even the basics of how this works, the folks who are the most interested in getting away with committing the most awful crimes understand very well how it works.

This is why most politicians laugh at Ron Paul when he speaks about our Constitutional rights as if he takes them seriously. It’s why most politicians will just snicker contemptuously if you bring up the topic of Constitutional limits on government power. The criminals in control know that it doesn’t matter. They know that there is nothing anyone can do to make them abide by the limits on their power as outlined in that document. They know that, in reality, there are no limits on their power.

This is the soil where demons flourish. And you’d better believe they know how to find it.

The environment that is generated by the monopoly state is by definition one of no accountability. This environment becomes fertile ground, not only for those who wish to wield power over others, but also for those who just want to commit crimes against them. For those who simply derive pleasure from raping, torturing, and killing other human beings. The institution of the state provides a safe space for individuals who wish to do these things and more, as long as they can make themselves useful to that state in some way.

This is how we get Caligula.

This is how we get Pol Pot.

This is how we get Epstein Island.

The worst people in the world understand very well how our system of governance works. You should too.