Policemen with Guns

Policemen with Guns Since the government's claim becomes the first lien on everything a citizen owns, a judgment for incomplete payment of taxes would finally be rendered against his property - his home, for instance. If the citizen still re fused to pay his share of the government housing project - and if he refused to vacate his property that had been attached by government - policemen with guns would eventually appear to enforce the government order. Sup pose that he still refused to acquiesce. Suppose that he met the use of physical force by using physical force in return, which would be his only remaining method of exercising freedom of choice and carrying out his initial intention. He would be shot! The justification for shooting him would be "for resisting an officer," but the issue would remain the same. The citizen would have done nothing more than hold fast to his resolve not to support socialized housing, using the least violent means, step by step, to hold firmly by his convictions.

8 The reason that most of us do not think of government coercion as meaning obedience under penalty of death is because we almost always pay our part of the cost of government housing, electricity, and other similar proj ects before the shooting begins. Usually we acquiesce be fore the ultimate meaning of compulsion is realized. Thus we are unacquainted with its true implications. Early American Experiment The principle of violence found acceptance early in American history. The Pilgrim Fathers, after landing at Plymouth Rock, were in dire economic straits. Not unlike their progeny of our own times they thought they could not, during a period of stress and difficulty, rely on the actions of free men in production, distribution, or charity. Their interdependence, very plain and real to these fore bears of ours, must, they reasoned, be attended to by some intervening authority. Men acting freely, the iden tical men who so clearly recognized their interdependence, could not, they thought, be trusted to act in their own interests! The answer: violence!