Freedom, Militias, and the Violence Ineherent in the System; K. Billingsley

Paternalism remains a powerful influence in Washington. But it is time for patients and doctors, insurers and hospitals, pharmaceu tical firms and device manufacturers, senior citizens and healthy young people to together say "No more." For years the sys tem has seemingly "worked" despite stul tifying regulation: highly competitive American firms have led the world in the discovery and marketing of new treatments and cures. But so much more could have been accomplished, and the U.S. govern ment continues to put arbitrary roadblocks in the way of developing, testing, and mar keting new drugs and devices. For too long too many people have unnecessarily suf fered and died because of the FDA. D Freedom, Militias,and the ViolenceInherent in the System by K.L. Billingsley P olitical violence is a serious subject, and since the Oklahoma bombing many pun dits have portrayed the nation as near a takeover by crazed, cabbage-patch, com mandos. But the key to the militia phenom enon may be found in a form of analysis once popular on the Left.

This has been the century of political violence. From Lenin to Fidel Castro to the Sendero Luminoso, an alphabet soup of militants, most of them Marxist-Leninists, gained or attempted to gain power through the barrel of a gun. But many comfy North Americans hesitated to indulge in' blanket condemnation of such actions. Instead, they issued impassioned pleas to consider the "root causes" of violent rev olution. The Sendero, FLSN, FMLN, Mr. Billingsley is a media fellow of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. NPA, and other groups, one was assured, were not committed to violence and terror ism as such. Rather, generations of abject poverty and oppressive government drove them to it. The guerrillas were simply re sponding in kind to "the violence inherent in the system." The real perpetrators and abettors of violence, according to this view, were those who hoped for gradual non violent change within the system.

The root causes of poverty and oppres sion, spokesmen of the Left said, were what U.S. policy needed to address. Otherwise the nation would only be "putting band-aids on cancer," and even making the situation worse. Another analysis popular with the reli gious Left was "structural evil." The vio lence· of revolutionary movements was linked not with the imperfections of human nature but social and political structures FREEDOM, MILITIAS, AND THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM 99 such as military government, capitalism, and patriarchal religion. Structural evil, the Left contended, required a structural solu tion, and those who thought otherwise were guilty of collaborating with the forces of evil. The United States, with its capitalist economy and alleged long record of slavery, racism, pollution, and mistreatment of na tive peoples, was also a target for criticism. If one wasn't a part of the solution, Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver once said, one was part of the problem. Commentators of the Left, while denouncing violence, urged ordinary citizens to understand the deep injustices that motivated the rebels.

But the same people now appear to be applying a different standard to the militias. Not only did the Left, correctly, refuse to excuse the Oklahoma City bombing. It also failed to consider root causes. Yet most militia members, unlike communist revolu tionaries, have never actually used vio lence. Rather, some Americans-even a few African-Americans-worried that their freedom is coming under attack, have been dressing up in camouflage and training with weapons. When these militia members ap peared before Congress to plead their case, liberal representatives and reporters treated them like dangerous crazies. Where was the willingness to ask the right questions? The answers do matter. Endangered Liberty What changes in American society could have driven these people to act this way? In Washington the spokesmen for the militias said it was the continuing encroachment of the government into private life, to a point that liberty and sometimes life are in danger.

Here the militias are not shooting blanks. Rare is the observer who will defend government actions at Waco, Texas, or Ruby Ridge in Idaho. But in supposedly progressive California, agents on a drug raid shot dead Donald Scott, a man who had refused to sell his land to enlarge a nearby park. A Ventura County sheriff conceded that the acquisition of Mr. Scott's land was part of the motivation for the raid, which turned up no drugs. An immigrant farmer found himself hounded as a felon, fined a huge amount, and had his tractor im pounded for unknowingly running over some rats. Such horror stories are far from rare. Could some sort of "structural evil" be at work in such cases? Could it be that doc trines such as asset forfeiture have pushed some federal agencies to extreme behavior? Could the exaltation of animal rights over human rights actually be built into the sys tem in certain cases?

If such root causes exist, then it won't do simply to vilify those who feel threatened by lumping them in with genuine extremists, racists, and bomb throwers. Those are the groups that demand the attention of our law enforcement agencies, not peaceful citizens who happen to strike the agencies as odd, and who cling tenaciously to their rights and freedoms. And the real extremists, it might be noted, are hardly the "right-wing" groups of media legend. By their own ad mission, they are a breed of national social ists and their rhetoric centers on class warfare, not citations from free-market economists. Instead of spinning conspiracies, perhaps the time has come for our policymakers to take a cue from the Left, focus on the root causes of militias and eliminate the violence inherent in the system. A structural problem requires a structural solution akin to the one that ended the Cold War: the abolition or rollback of the institutional arrangements that threaten freedom, and their replace ment with ones that maximize freedom within the framework of a moral, demo cratic, and pluralistic society. D A Matter of Principle .. . Paved With Good Intentions H ave you ever wondered why so many modern liberals seem to be immune to reason and evidence? Why-despite the disastrous consequences of their various policies-they remain intractably loyal to the same courses of action, and undyingly committed to repeating the same mistakes?