Liberty Free Press, September 26, 2000
In order to understand what is at stake in proposals for tougher antigang legislation, please forget for a moment what you learned in this great statist brainwash that was the 20th century -- "the century of the state," as Mussolini so rightly said.
Perhaps a new antigang law would not be very dangerous if we lived several decades ago, with a small, limited, relatively innocuous government which did not regularly threaten peaceful individuals. Now, wake up to the real world. The state now seizes nearly half of what the people earn, and it uses these resources to monitor, if not control, most of what we do. This state already has far too much power, and giving it more is courting disaster.
Any antigang law that could be efficiently used against the Hells Angels would also apply to other associations which the government might want to harass, but which will often be the last refuge for peaceful resistance. Just as an example, consider the Law-Abiding Unregistered Firearms Association (www.lufa.ca). LUFA openly advocates civil disobedience to the C-68 "law" (so-called). The illegal actions that LUFA recommends (i.e., refusing to register long guns), and which its officers have promised to commit themselves, are "crimes" sanctioned by a 10-year jail sentence. Under any serious antigang law, LUFA could become a criminal association.
Or imagine what could happen to tobacco-smuggling Indian tribes. I would be surprised if such neat ideas had not already crossed the (criminal) mind of some law-writing bureaucrat.
We do not have to rely on future, imaginary scenarios. Just look at what occured in the U.S. with the 1970's Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was aimed at "organized crime." In fact, RICO has been used to prosecute, or threaten, insider traders, violators of arcane provisions of the tax code, ordinary distributors of pornographic material, and tobacco companies.
Here, in "the best country of the world," government blindly imports every liberticide fashion from the southern neighbour. Just look at how the drug war has slipped into controlling banking transactions of ordinary Canadians. Look at how the social insurance number has become necessary to open a bank account or, in Québec, to get hooked up to the local hydroelectric state monopoly. Look at how drivers licences or medicare cards have become de facto ID cards. Look at the new powers gradually obtained by the tax bureaucrats, who not only got an IRS-type of agency, but also a cartel with the border luggage sniffers. Now, come and tell us that we can trust these guys with new powers.
Don't think about crimes as murder, theft and rape. We have evolved. Crimes are often just arbitrary creations of the state, like victimless crimes, i.e., acts or exchanges about which nobody complains, except the state in the name of some fictitious society or paternalistic busybodies. This includes not only drugs, prostitution, pornography, but also gambling (when not in state establishments), having in one's posession inanimate objects like a six-cartridge magazine, competing against trade union workers, engaging in activities without permits, and "crimes" against the state itself like tax evasion. Indeed, the bread and butter of the criminal gangs is made of trade in goods prohibited or closely regulated by government: alcohol or drugs for many years, now firearms, soon tobacco.
I don't deal with motorcycle gangs or Indian tribes even if I often would rather deal with them than with government for, after you have paid, the chance is that the former will leave you alone. I suspect that these gangs are not exactly angels, and we all wish that the murderers, thieves and rapists among them be punished. But, just like under the American Prohibition, take away the law-made crime, and you get rid of the criminal. In this sense, criminal associations are often creatures of the state itself.
Back to ordinary, peaceful, and harassed citizens like you and me. In 1999, according to Statistics Canada data, there were 884,230 non-violent and non-property crimes committed in this country, not counting provincial and municipal offences. This gives a rate of 29 victimless crime per 100,000 inhabitants, more than three times what it was in the early sixties. What a nation of criminals we have become!
The way things are going, many of us will be members of one paper-criminal association or another in our lifetimes. If not, it will be because of what French legal theorist Georges Ripert said: "The man who lives under the servitude of laws takes, without noticing it, the soul of a slave."
Consider the absurdity of all this. Somebody is victim of a violent crime from which government was unable to protect him. The crime was committed with an illegal handgun (handguns are registered in Canada since 1934). I presume the victim and his colleagues were, like the rest of us, prohibited by law from carrying a handgun and defending themselves. Consequently, the state comes after my rights and yours, or what's left of them.
Yes, I know, the Hells Angels are guilty, but the government (with its large resources, its armies of investigators, its wide, indiscreet databases) can't prove it. Martians land every full-moon night behind my hunting camp, but I have no proof. The earth is shaped like a SWAT helmet, notwithstanding Galileo. There is a world of difference between a tyrant, the Department of Justice, and the Bloc Québécois.