This is me commenting on an article at Forbes.com about the use of 3-D printers to manufacture firearms:
This article is a nice illustration of why government as such is a futile undertaking. Human beings are indomitable: They cannot be dominated by other people except by direct and continuous coercion. You can shackle me or lock me in a cage, but, if you do not, I am free as a matter of ontology to do as I will.
All of government is based not in actual domination — which is not possible — but in the individual person’s completely self-initiated, completely voluntary, instantly revocable capitulation to the state’s demands, which are backed by threats of fines, imprisonment, torture or death.
In the first place, no one is obliged to capitulate to the state’s threats, no matter how dire or bellicose these might be. And in the second place, as this article makes plain, the easier it is for individual people to evade, avoid or defy the state, the less effective those threats are in any case.
It’s time we stop trying to treat human beings — free moral agents — as though they were domesticated animals. This has never worked, but the failures of this absurdly anti-human political philosophy will only become more obvious as the cost of access to all of the world’s human capital plummets.
All human wealth is actually embodied Fathertongue — human capital. The idea of guns that can be stored and transmitted as data raises interesting questions. As the article implies, banning or regulating firearms just got a lot harder. Meanwhile, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, completely expendable to statists, just got married to the First Amendment, which is precious to many liberals. Indeed: Information wants to be free.
Of course, gun control really is a free-speech issue: If you are deprived of the power to defend yourself, you will be much more tractable when the SWAT team shows up at your door. But ultimately none of that matters. Human beings are indomitable as a matter of ontology. This is fact, not opinion and not doctrine. Because human beings cannot be dominated by other people, the idea of the monopoly state cannot ever work. But now it is a little more obviously unworkable.
