I was extremely disappointed to learn there is not a secret account worth hundreds of millions in my name.
(Aside: I actually have read a little Kropotkin!)
And, yeah, that’s a good enough working definition. We all really live under “anarchy,” but wherein some groups of people have amassed enough force to be “in control.” In most of the nice places to live, those are governments. In the nasty places, they’re warlords…or governments that are pretty despicable, such as North Korea’s.
The Sovereign Citizens are just kooks. They don’t even offer a descriptive definition of how their “rules” work. They can’t explain the world as they imagine it: they just repeat certain key phrases over and over, as if incantational magic worked for them.
(Writing your name in CAPITAL LETTERS makes the government release you from jail, etc. Yeah, as if!)
AS best I can tell, the lesson to draw from the SovCits is that individuals do indeed have rights and it is in their interest to learn what those rights actually are, how to invoke them, and what is the required extent of cooperation with law enforcement. As best I can tell, if you are operating a motor vehicle on a public road, you do have to show your license, vehicle registration and proof of insurance upon the request of a police officer. You do not have to answer questions like “Do you know why I pulled you over?” or “Where are you headed, sir/ma’am?”
Yes, people have genuine legal rights that exist and can be invoked. The problem for some people is that the legal system is big and complicated. It takes years to learn how it works. That’s why most people hire an expert to navigate through legal situations on their behalf.
Sovereign Citizens want a simple answer to a complicated system. They want it so much, they demand one even when it doesn’t exist. So con men are willing to sell them a fake answer.
The last line of that article is great.
Actual anarchist types talk about “mutual aid,” which has merit. “Sovereign citizens” (OPCA litigants) are on the opposite tack, with extra helpings of assholeishness and crackpottery.
Nothing to add except having been in the Navy during the cold war, my mind insists on parsing SovCit as Soviet Citizen. I don’t think that’s what they meant.
Very little merit. If you start asking for details on how the mutual aid system is going to work, it usually falls apart.
“We’re anarchists. We oppose government rule. But we do support a system whereby people can join together for their mutual aid.”
“Okay, so how does that work?”
“People live on their own homesteads. They can then voluntarily join the mutual aid system so that if one of them has a problem like a barn fire the others will rush over to help put it out.”
“Who pays for the fire-fighting equipment?”
“Everyone in the group pays a share as part of voluntarily becoming a member.”
“What happens if somebody wants to join the group to have access to the fire fighting equipment for his own barn but doesn’t want to show up if anyone else has a fire?”
“It’s mutual aid. You have to agree to help other people in order to join.”
“What if he agrees when he joins. But then doesn’t show up at the actual fire?”
“Then he would be asked to leave the group.”
“What happens if there’s some guy who stores a lot of dried wood in his barn and keeps it lit with kerosene lamps. His barn catches for several times a year; more than everyone else’s barns put together. He has so many fires it uses up all the fire-fighting equipment.”
“We wouldn’t let a guy like that join the group unless he cleaned his place up.”
“Okay, moving past fires, what happens if some outsider shows up and begins stealing sheep and cows from somebody’s farm?”
“We’d all work together to catch the thief.”
“What would you do when you caught him?”
“Well, theft is wrong. So we’d do something like tell him to leave and threaten to beat him up if he came back and stole anything else.”
“So let me see if I have this all straight. You’re a group of guys who are all together. Membership in the group is exclusive and people can be denied membership or lose their membership. You have a territory you control and claim exclusive use of. You have a set of rules that people in the group have to follow. People in the group are required to give money to the group. If people don’t follow the rules, whether they are inside the group or outside of it, you punish them. Punishments can include the use of force.”
“Well…when you put it like that…”
“And you guys say you don’t believe in government rule?”
I stated nothing about details of some proposed mutual-aid system (though there is surely enough potential material there for several Great Debates!). I merely meant that the guy (assuming he is not a hypocrite) who says communities gain through altruism has a moral point and is worth at least listening to, while the OPCA guy, by contrast, typically comes to our attention as an offender in a courtroom arguing he should get to do whatever the fuck he wants because [whatever self-serving bullshit], pretty much the polar opposite of the mutual-aid guy.
But if there are any examples of sovereign citizenship as a legitimate and constructive political theory, rather than pseudo-legal nonsense spouted by a misguided defendant to a judge, I would love to hear about them.
So you recognize that government police are unlikely to be punished for murder.
You can think as hard and as long as you like. The fact is there are already many many groups of armed men who work for wealthy people that enforce a set of rules written by the wealthy property owners and there is a much more humane outcome than your government police.
No, Will, I wrote that people who commit murder get punished by the government.
As always, Will, you ignore everything that doesn’t conform to your theories. But I already pointed out that the reason these groups of armed men act humanely is because they’re restrained by the government. You may believe that they would act with equal humanity if there was no such restraint upon them but you’re not going to find very many other people who believe that.
I’ve seen it compared to the “Ghost Dances” of the last few independent Native American tribes at the tail end of the 19th century – in both cases faced with something too powerful to defeat by any rational means, the desperate turned to the irrational.
You haven’t provided anything beyond mere speculation, so there is nothing I would feel compelled to ignore.
In a system of private governance, there would be restraint imposed by competing power centers, insurance companies. The government police have no oversight because the government has no restraints, this is evidenced by the sky-high kill rate of government police. If your armchair analysis was correct, there would be no difference between the kill rate of government police and the rest of the citizenry because they are all subject to the same restraints.
Same here, has that concept or something even remotely like it ever existed in any real or theoretical political system at any point in human civilization.
Saying “the oppressive government should not be able enforce its will on its citizens with force” is one thing, that is a political theory (a naive one IMO, but that’s GD territory) that has been widely espoused and its merits discussed.
But what are the possible merits of having an oppressive government that can enforce its will on its citizens with force, UNLESS they invoke a set of secret laws that makes them special sovereign citizens who can now magically no longer have the will of the government imposed on them? Has anything like that every existed or been seriously proposed as a political system? AFAIK the even SovCit movement itself has never proposed a political system based on their beliefs, they have simply insisted that this magical loophole is a fact and the government must act in accordance with it.
You’re just describing a system of undemocratic government.
Google “police officers convicted of murder” to see how incredibly fatuous what you just said actually is.
The number of citizens killed by police is indeed a national disgrace. One that is far too slowly being worked on.
Nonetheless, your statement above doesn’t follow. It would follow if private mall cops and corporate gate guards went on the same kind and mix of calls as do real police. They don’t, so it’s hardly surprising private guards encounter a lot less violence and deliver a lot less violence as well.
Google police kill rate. As long as the officer follows “policy”, government courts excuse murder at a very high rate. Police officers are extremely unlikely to be convicted of murder when you take into account all of the murders they commit.
It is the fact that they go to calls to enforce victimless crimes while private security does not that creates the disparity. Private security does not escalate situations like government police. Government police are busy enforcing the democratic whims of the public, while private security is focused on real aggression against person and property.
Of course, let’s call it private governance, or a private-property society.