That’s the idea, if people reject government they have a right to live without it and enjoy all the benefits and drawbacks that entails. Not within a government’s jurisdiction, of course, but there should be areas outside of any government’s jurisdiction where people can go.
One of the things that these types complain about that I actually think they have a legit concern is that governments are banding together to pretty much make the entire universe under some entity’s control. If a nation doesn’t control something, then it’s under international jurisdiction. Just stop! We should protect unspoiled lands from rapacious nations or big corporations, but if individuals just want to live there they should be able to just go and live there.
Keeping piracy illegal makes sense, but one should be able to live at sea or on an uninhabited island if they want to. I also think individuals should be free to live out in our vast wilderness and live off the land.
If another person arrives and wishes to settle, you have no right to exclude them because, if you did, you would effectively be acting as a government enacting and enforcing an immigration law, and you have stipulated that there is to be no government.
But once you have more than one person living on the island, you have the community, and the community can ordain a government for themselves. The only way you can avoid being subject to this government is to leave the island and find another, as yet uninhabited, island, or an island populated by people none of whom wish to set up a government. You have no natural right to demand that such an island exist, or that any which does exist be preserved for your benefit.
I think your position is basically self-defeating. We are inherently social animals; the erection of governments is basically a manifestation of our social needs and instincts as human beings. You cannot deny others the right to be human.
Not for several thousand years in most of the world. Most of the time, there was “government”, just not in a form the incomers recognised or could be bothered to understand; and if by chance some indigenous inhabitants turned up to object to their ways, it was usually settled by force.
Which sort of brings us back to the point at issue.
To the explanations upthread of what is wrong with the SC reasoning about law, I would add to the list a further two fundamental misunderstandings.
The first is a misunderstanding about the proposition that it is a tenet of common law that it is for the courts to interpret law. The fundamental implication of the SCers’ flawed reasoning is that the laws they think exist spring into existence on the force of the say-so of the SC, and his/her view trumps that of the judge, whose only role (in their universe) is to find facts. That, of course, is nonsense. Courts exist precisely to determine what the law is at the inevitable margins that arise, as well as to find facts (whether by jury, judge alone, or whatever depending on jurisdiction). When a determination of the content of the law arises, it is for the judge to make that determination.
The second point I would make emerges from the first. In deciding what a statute means, the common law (often modified or codified by statute) contains a body of meta-law about statutory interpretation (which, mutatis mutandis, extends to document interpretation). The SCs seem to think that if they can find any interpretation at all of legal language that supports them, then that interpretation is necessarily correct of its own articulation. But where there are competing interpretations, there are rules courts apply to decide between them, and those rules are just as much a part of the law as substantive declarations of rules like the postal rule or the rules that make it illegal to steal. And the application of those statutory interpretation rules will inevitably (and rightly) never come to the conclusion that the SCs wish. One of the primary statutory interpretation rules is that if a suggested interpretation leads to absurd results, it will be rejected in favour of one that does not. And SCs always advance absurd results. Thus, the assertion that the Statute of Westminster “really” is about HMS Canada is a question of interpretation that falls for determination according to (generally) common law rules of statutory interpretation. Those rules do not have to be expounded at length here to understand that they will never support the SC interpretation.
In saying all this, I do not overlook the existence of the rule of statutory interpretation conveniently named by Americans the lenity rule. This is the rule that says that in matters of interpretation of criminal laws, the interpretation that favours the accused ahead of the State is to be preferred. But that shorthand expression of the rule overlooks that it is very much a rule of last resort. Other statutory interpretation rules come into play first. It must be this way, otherwise any madcap, tortured interpretation of rules conjured up that favoured the accused would always win.
Just as SCers attach idiotic and undemocratic primacy to common law ideas that the common law itself does not (for example, as said by posters above, the common law accepts that statutes trump common law), so too SCers fail to even acknowledge the existence of the body of statutory interpretation rules and document interpretation rules that exist to shut down their nonsense at the get-go. These rules were developed by the much-vaunted common law that they seek to call in aid to support their nonsense.
That is not always the case for the rule of lenity. In some states, it has been codified and thus becomes more than a canon of last resort. E.g., §775.021(1), Fla. Stat. ("…the provisions of [Florida’s criminal code] and offenses defined by other statutes shall be strictly construed; when the language is susceptible of differing constructions, it shall be construed most favorably to the accused.”)
That rather depends on how you construe “construe”: the primary clause “strictly construed” rather implies that “differing constructions” wouldn’t include “any old nonsense derived from torturing language beyond reason”.
Like most human silliness, it depends deeply on the idea of cognitive dissonance: the ability to simultaneously believe two deeply contradictory things.
On the one hand, the government and courts are deeply cynical, using widespread subterfuge to illegally suppress the citizenry.
On the other hand, the courts in general and today’s judge in particular are scrupulously honest and work with total integrity. The SovCit expects that once confronted by the SovCit’s arguments, the judge will read the relevant law carefully, then bop his forehead and exclaim “By Gosh, I’ve been doing it wrong all these years! Thank you, Mr. SovCit for peeling the scales from my eyes. You’re free to go and with my apologies and my blessings. I salute you!”
The combo of childlike faith in the honest and just gosh-darned niceness of the system overlaid with the deep-seated cynicism that it’s all just a con out to get me is just a wonder to behold.
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Yesterday:
No need to wait for Antarctica. Yemen (and a few other nearby areas) are already government-free zones.
You (any you) are welcome to experience the Libertarian version of paradise any time you choose.
Strong-form Libertarianism: You’re entitled to all the freedom you have the might to enforce.
In fairness, there *is *a special corner case where this works. The one wherein the population density is so low that you can roam the land and sea at will for your entire life without ever encountering another human or any consequences of their prior presence. Shame about not getting to reproduce.
I think it’s more “Grrr! You have cleverly unraveled the secret workings of The Law and, having enumerated and claimed your True Rights which we have endeavored to hide from you, I therefore have no choice but to acquiesce to your demands.”
You don’t have to even go that far. If you’re American you needn’t even leave the country. There remain enough parts of the United States that are sufficiently uninhabited that you could build a log cabin and live as a hermit away from society for the rest of your life. You are technically under the sovereignty of the United States but in any practical sense no one will bother you.
If the mountains of Oregon or northern forests of Minnesota are not remote enough, Canada is more remote still, and the border can be crossed without anyone seeing you do it with rather minimal effort. You needn’t go as far north as the Territories. You can get a lakeside property in northern Ontario, where there are so many lakes so far from anyone that most of them don’t have names. You can literally have your own lake, and no one will ever find you. You could move to Hudson’s Bay and have a whole island to yourself. Trodely Island could be the Kingdom of You if you moved there; no one lives there and I doubt anyone would notice you.
That few “sovereign citizens” elect to do this is rather telling.
That’s it. You have to isolate yourself from any other humans to do it. As long as there are other humans around, you’ll need to work out a way to get along somehow. There’s a word for that …
Or you can avoid working out a way to get along, and simply acquiesce to the neighborhood bully, or become one. But that’s a form of government too, isn’t it?
There is a strange sort of belief among sovcits that laws are independent of human beings. The law isn’t what legislators and judges and cops and prison guards say it us, there’s some sort of higher law that they all must follow. And somehow the cops and judges know the real law, even though it is kept secret from everyone else, and are obligated to follow it.
Except that’s not how fascism works. The way it really works is that the authorities don’t give two shots about what the law says, they just care about what they can get away with. They aren’t accountable to their inferiors, but only to people higher up and with more power. When the fascist judge tells the cops to drag you out and shoot you in the head and dump your body in a mass grave, telling him that the law doesn’t grant him this power won’t work. Because it’s not the law that gives him the power, it’s men with guns who agree to follow his orders that give him the power.
The Weimar constitution was never overturned by the Nazi government. It was, technically, the law of the land until Germany was conquered in 1945.
The Nazis violated the constitution about a jillion different ways, but they had the guns and they had the support.
No, the Yemen people suffer under the yoke of the US government to even a greater extent than most individuals in the United States. Same for Somalia, another cliche for statists.
