People v. State

fairly undermining public confidence in the administration of justice
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Archive for the ‘Wendy McElroy’

Juries in a Stateless Society

November 20, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Jury Nullification, Wendy McElroy

Wendy McElroy has posted at the Daily Anarchist her second article in a series on free-market justice. This one asks what role, if any, Trial By Jury would have in a society from which the State had been eliminated. My comments in the comments section on the article include the following:

I think you’re basically right about the jury. I might quibble slightly with this: “Moreover, a jury’s presumed right to judge the justice of the law may also be irrelevant. In a voluntary society, the ‘laws’ being enforced would either protect person and property from aggression or be a matter defined by contract. In this context, for a jury to pass judgment on the propriety of the law would be akin to allowing them to pass judgment on the propriety of voluntary interaction itself.”

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“If there are anarchists, if there are weapons, if there is an intention to engage in violence and confrontation, that obviously raises our concerns,”

November 12, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Albert Jay Nock, Cops, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry George, Iroquois, John Hasnas, Thomas Jefferson, Wendy McElroy

Portland police Lt. Robert King said.

The official demonization of “anarchists” by State propagandizers continues on apace, in this instance by an agent of an “agency”-without-principals which intends to violently evict Occupy protesters from Portland parks this weekend. Meanwhile, a real-life “anarch” (leader of leaderlessness), Wendy McElroy, explores, at the Daily Anarchist, what an anarchist system of justice might look like, and in reply to a comment on her post writes:

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Stoicism and Anarchism

September 03, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Lysander Spooner, Stoics, Wendy McElroy

From “The Fundamentals of Voluntaryism” by Carl Watner, via Wendy McElroy:

Common sense and reason tell us that nothing can be right by legislative enactment if it is not already right by nature. Epictetus, the Stoic, urged men to defy tryants in such a way as to cast doubt on the necessity of government itself. “If the government directed them to do something that their reason opposed, they were to defy the government. If it told them to do what their reason would have told them to do anyway, they did not need a government.” As Lysander Spooner pointed out, “all legislation is an absurdity, a usurpation, and a crime.” Just as we do not require a State to dictate what is right or wrong in growing food, manufacturing textiles, or in steel-making, we do not need a government to dictate standards and procedures in any field of endeavor. “In spite of the legislature, the snow will fall when the sun is in Capricorn, and the flowers will bloom when it is in Cancer.”

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Abortion News & Views

June 25, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Abortion and Breast Cancer, Wendy McElroy

Roderick Long links to a great cartoon asking: “What if war were treated the way abortion is now, and vice versa?”

Gene Callahan, who in the words of a critic is “apparently a former libertarian turned communitarian,” in a comment on Roderick’s post answers the cartoon’s question thusly: “Then some murder would be easier, and some murder harder.”

Roderick replies to Gene: “Killing a mindless collection of cells isn’t murder. And killing a person in self-defense isn’t murder.”

I replied to Roderick:

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  • "[T]here is just nothing wrong with telling the American people the truth." - Allen v. United States

  • Lysander Spooner

    Henry George

    Harriet Tubman

    Sitting Bull

    Angelus Silesius

    Smedley Butler

    Rose Wilder Lane

    Albert Jay Nock

    Dora Marsden

    Leo Tolstoy

    Henry David Thoreau

    John Brown

    Karl Hess

    Levi Coffin

    Max Stirner

    Dorothy Day

    Ernst Jünger

    Thomas Paine