If we look into the horror and disgust all of humanity feels whenever such acts are reported, it also becomes apparent that to all of humanity it is quite clear that the woman is the owner and proprietor of her own body - and, thus, free to engage in "consensual sex."
But rape? That is seen by all as a VIOLATION.
That is - a VIOLATION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY.
This particular word, "violation," occurs in the traditional terminology applied to all "unjust acts" - thus we find the word "trespass" being used twice in "The Lord's Prayer," for example.
A Commandment says, "Thou shalt not steal."
Similarly, if we look at "traffic violations," as with jumping the lights or driving through pedestrians on zebra crossings (which are almost non-existent in India) - then these too are in effect "property violations." When you jump the lights you trespass on space temporarily allotted to others. Ditto when you jump lanes or, worse still, drive on the wrong side of the road. Again, this applies to zebra crossings as well - for priority use of that space has been given to pedestrians.
Yet, when this word "violation" is used in the sense that socialist-democrats use it - for they insist on confusing "law" with their "democratic legislation," what must inevitably transpire is INJUSTICE.
UNLAW.
This is because socialist-democrats THEMSELVES VIOLATE PRIVATE PROPERTY.
Nationalisation.
Land Acquisition.
And so many more such acts of "legal plunder" that theirs is nothing but a PREDATORY STATE, from the very top, right down to the very bottom - the predatory municipal functionaries and the petty constabulary.
It is for this very reason that the opening lines of Frederic Bastiat's The Law (1850) become highly relevant today, particularly in socialist-democratic India:
The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it!The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose!The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!If this is true, it is a serious fact, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow-citizens to it.
Socialists and communists often rail at people-like-me by calling us "neo-liberals." Nonsense! Liberalism and the recognition that justice and property are intertwined go back a very long way - while it is socialist and communist anti-property and therefore predatory "ethics" that are NEW.
Bastiat wrote the above in 1850 - two years after Herr Doktor Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto had been published. Earlier, Bastiat had debated Pierre-Joseph Proudhon - the nutcase who claimed "property is theft" - in the newspapers, and had roundly beaten him.
Where there is no Property, there is no Justice.
You only have to see the cover of the Origins of the Common Law to know it all began with first mapping and then titling property. Tenancy rights were also protected - as per the signed lease, which is "private law," and not some ghastly legislation based on the phony "redistributive ethic" of "legally robbing the landlord" in order to give his "land to the tiller."
It is only because of this long-established TRADITION of respecting private property that the following extract from an editorial published in England, in The Morning Post of 10 July, 1860, reads thus - and it shows clearly how the English mind looked at the concept of Private Property in that Golden Age of Classical Liberalism, the age of Queen Victoria and Gladstone:
It is only because of this long-established TRADITION of respecting private property that the following extract from an editorial published in England, in The Morning Post of 10 July, 1860, reads thus - and it shows clearly how the English mind looked at the concept of Private Property in that Golden Age of Classical Liberalism, the age of Queen Victoria and Gladstone:
Every Englishman is accustomed to pride himself with more than usual complacency upon what is called the sanctity of an English home. No soldier, no policeman, no spy of the Government dare enter it... Unlike the tenant of a foreign domicile, the occupier of an Englsih house, whether it be mansion or cottage, possesses an indisputable title against every kind of aggression upon his threshold. He defies everybody below the Home Secretary [what we in India call Home Minister]; and even he can only violate the traditional security of a man's house under extreme circumstances, and with the prospect of a Parliamentary indemnity. It is with this thoroughly innate feeling of security that every Englishman feels a strong sense of the inviolability of his own house. It is this that converts the moorside cottage into a castle. The moral sanctions of an English home are, in the nineteenth century, what the moat, and the keep, and the drawbridge were in the fourteenth. In the strength of these we lie down to sleep at night, and leave our homes in the day, feeling that the whole neighbourhood would be raised, nay, the whole country, were any attempt made to violate what so many traditions, and such long custom, have rendered sacred.
Contrast the above "traditional English wisdom" with this editorial from the Times of India dated 27 August, 2012, provocatively titled, "Politics can no longer be allowed to override Economic Sense" in which the SOCIALIST EDITORS insist that "land acquisition rules" need to be "rammed through" in order for roads and electricity projects to work out. Nothing SACRED about private property for these agent provocateurs of RAPE. Why not argue for PRIVATISATION - and private property?
Quite naturally, these socialists are also Keynesian, for they do not understand that fiat paper money is "legal plunder" - as I will explain below. Thus, the "economic sense" they claim to profess reads:
The central bank's ability to lower rates to revive growth is limited, as is the government's scope for fiscal expansion given the widening fiscal and current account deficit. RBI rightly says the way to stimulate economic activity without pushing up inflation is to adopt a strategy that promotes reforms-based resource mobilisation involving cuts in government spending on subsidies in order to reallocate funds for investments.
Thus, the editors of the ToI are calling for a NEW TAX - and this is "reform"?
We just had a Service Tax, an Education Tax, and VAT as well.
One more tax and the PRIVATE ECONOMY will boom!
Taxes are a BURDEN on productive society - as Bastiat explained in 1845.
Socialism-Keynesianism-Welfarism - these are "NEO." And not liberalism, which has very old, classical roots.
Note that Jawaharlal Nehru, who famously said, “Profit is
a dirty word to me,” wrote a book titled The Discovery of India.
Contrast his title with that of Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom.
In this context, I recommend my old column that says India
needs to free itself from “Nehru’s EVIL Legacy”: which is the SHACKLING
OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP with legislatively imposed bureaucratic controls.
Nehru's was no "discovery of freedom" at all.
Yes, SLAVERY.
CORRUPTION.
PLUNDER.
MASS POVERTY.
All that - but NOT what the "freedom struggle" in their History books say they were fighting for.
NO FREEDOM!
I ought to add that each and every “socialist friend” of
Nehru ruined – or even destroyed – his nation: Nasser, Nkrumah, Tito, Nyrere,
the Soviets….
I was therefore not surprised at all to find the new edition of the Marxist historian Romila Thapar's History of India going on and on about the Marxist theory of the "Asiatic Mode of Production" and also Karl Wittfogel's thesis on "Oriental Despotism" - while it ought to be perfectly clear from just looking at pictures of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro that these cities comprised "private dwellings."
Anyway, what does the Marxist “Asiatic Mode of Production”
mean when we look at Japan after the Meiji Restoration, or at Taiwan and Hong
Kong, at Singapore, or at post-Deng Red China? These are all NONSENSE because
the Science of Economics is UNIVERSALLY VALID at all times and in all places.
Further, what LESSONS on the absolute meaninglessness of these Marxist dissertations on the "Asiatic Mode of Production" by WESTERN so-called "scholars" who have never ever visited Asia - unlike Peter Bauer - do we imbibe when we SEE for ourselves the enormous differences between the "modes of production" in capitalist South Korea and communist North Korea?
Further, what LESSONS on the absolute meaninglessness of these Marxist dissertations on the "Asiatic Mode of Production" by WESTERN so-called "scholars" who have never ever visited Asia - unlike Peter Bauer - do we imbibe when we SEE for ourselves the enormous differences between the "modes of production" in capitalist South Korea and communist North Korea?
And what else is Wittfogel’s “Hydraulic Despotism” but the Delhi Jal Board – and all the urban water supply and rural irrigation monopolies of
our socialist The State, which owns all the ground water, and all the rivers as
well? Indeed, I do believe they must be owning the oceans as well, and no
private entrepreneur can freely desalinate sea water and sell it.
In my modest improvement over Mises' explanation of the "mental categories" that make up the "logical structure of the trading mind" I have advanced the proposition that Property is another mental category. Thus, even nomadic herdsmen know what property means - "their private capital on the move" - and that is how they spontaneously discovered the use of these animal hides as money. This is equally true of the unlettered cowboys of old America - for whom "rustling" was a great crime. They too spontaneously began using many kinds of animal hides as money - the origin of the word "buck."
Marxists cannot fathom History - simply because their minds are not equipped with the correct "praxeological theories." I also found Romila Thapar's dismissal of all that was taught at the East India Company's Haileybury College to be biased towards Marxist conclusions. All the great work of Thomas Munro in what is now Salem district in Tamil Nadu, and then later in South and North Canara as well, was entirely about property titles and property records - which created the Justice for which he is still fondly remembered in some of these areas.
It is only because of Munro’s work that South Canara in
particular exhibits a high degree of urbanisation – with many, many small towns
in reasonably good shape, connected by decent roads to their primary city,
Mangalore. This must be owing to the long established property titles system.
Thus, there is order as well.
On the other hand, everywhere else in India, almost all
violent crimes in rural areas are on account of “land disputes” – which means
the absence of land records and accurate titles – and there is an entire
“schedule” of land ceiling legislation that is responsible for this “highest
degree of disorder” that Adam Smith spoke of. Incidentally, the opening chapter
of Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence is “Property.”
Thapar also expounds at great length on the “caste system”
– as a cause of India’s current poverty. But the sub-jatis of
India only exhibit specialization and the division of labour expected of a
highly populated and urbanized society: the famous figurine of a “Dancing Girl”
found in Mohenjo- Daro is an example, pictured alongside, thanks to Google Images.
The sub-jatis are divided into hundreds of specialised
groups – toddy-tappers, washermen, leatherworkers, and even those who undertake
funerals. The “studies” of the backwardness of our caste system carried out
without recourse to the correct praxeological theories do not see the “guilds”
of Europe as quite similar – the vital difference being that the latter were
organized monopolies who kept out competition from freelancers (as long as they
could). More importantly, these guilds of Europe succeeded in controlling their
own merchant cities and towns, like the Olde City of London, where all the
“Worshipful Companies” comprising even fishmongers and grocers continue to meet
in “Guildhall" - pictured below. It dates back to the 12th century.
So much for Marxist historians.
Let us return to their "legal plunder."
Fiat paper money, for example, is LEGAL PLUNDER. The "promise to pay" printed upon the paper and duly signed by the governor of the central bank clearly implies that the paper note is a "money substitute" and that some tangible PROPERTY is the real money it represents.
The finest exposition of the LEGAL FRAUD that is fiat
paper money is this “Islamic Judgment” on the matter.
Thus, the draconian Foreign Exchange Regulation Act makes not only the socialist parliament that passed it, but also the socialist courts and their lawyers who got rich because of all the litigation that ensued - and this includes the socialist Supreme Court as well - well deserving of the same UNIVERSAL CONDEMNATION reserved for rapists.
So, if the money and banking is legal plunder, what can be said of their mindless taxation, their endless borrowings, their inflationist welfarism - "false philanthropy" or "cheating the poor" - and all their BUDGET- and TURF-MAXIMISING BUREAUS and BUREAUCRATS?
Remember: The legislation FERA empowered the Enforcement Directorate.
Just as the NDPS Act, the Gambling Act, and so many more such Acts of Parliament have empowered the predatory police.
Turf- and budget-maximisation also marks our “mercenary” armed
forces – as in the case of the 30-year old nonsensical “Siachen War.” Compare
Kargil and Ladakh – where the Indian Army outnumbers locals by far, with what
was earlier quoted about the Swiss and their “standing militia.”
The Swiss are a peace loving people. For three centuries they have lived in harmony with three neighbours, three languages, and three religions. They have an excellently equipped, small modern army, a sort of standing militia. Every Swiss citizen has to report for military duty once yearly, and the general feeling is enthusiasm for peace and a hatred for aggression.
That is what
“republicanism” is all about. And it is in an “armed citizenry” that peace
lies.
Today, there are regular reports of mutinies in the Army.
And corruption scandals have dogged their purchases for decades – from the
Bofors scandal to the disgraceful coffin scandal.
And as for Manipur and Kashmir and the Armed Forces
Special Powers Act – this is precisely why classical liberals disapproved of a “standing army.”
My old and popular post titled “The Exploited Jawan” is
recommended in this context.
If consent is OK in this area, why is it not OK with all "consensual trades"?
We are therefore forced to admit that all these legislative acts that empower all these predatory and meddlesome bureaus and bureaucrats are RAPE - that is, they are violations of our PRIVATE PROPERTIES.
If we want to be free, we must think of all the "inalienable rights" the classical liberals of yore inserted right on top of their written constitutions.
PROPERTY MUST BE INVIOLABLE - BY THE STATE AS WELL.
From mass poverty to repression, corruption, predation, tyranny, despotism, abuse of power and authority, abuse of force and even the PERVERSION OF LAW - for all these CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY it is all these socialist-democrats who are responsible.
And as for this socialist Supreme Court - I just read about their Chief Justice "debating" whether the "fundamental right to sleep" can be "implemented" - do check out my old post dated July 2010, titled "On Our 'Patriotic' Supreme Court" in which I show them the CONTEMPT they deserve.
