Tag Archives: indirect aggression

politics

Indirection – evasion and circumvention

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Following up on indirect aggression, we can see that indirection is a technique that is used in many ways to evade responsibility, conceal involvement, and circumvent regulation and authority.

  1. Despite a moratorium on gain-of-function research, NIH funded gain-of-function research indirectly by funding EcoHealth Alliance, which then directed funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
  2. Missouri AG Eric Schmitt is suing the Biden administration for colluding with social media companies to censor on behalf of the US government. This is an attempt at circumventing the Constitution’s first amendment protection of free speech, which prohibits the government from censoring. Nancy Pelosi among other government officials have threatened to regulate tech platforms unless they censor “disinformation” and “fake news”. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird illustrates the government’s enduring interest in controlling speech to advance the regime narrative.
  3. The government frequently acts through intermediaries to preserve plausible deniability. Intelligence assets are used to do the dirty bidding of our government, whenever they want to hide their fingerprints. Consider the role of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and their connection to the CIA in destabilizing foreign governments toward regime change and color revolutions.
  4. The US and its NATO allies are currently engaged in a proxy war against Russia using Ukraine.

politics

indirect aggression – wielding state power

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An earlier article titled corporations acting as agents of foreign governments describes one form of indirect aggression. No one would dispute that when a person hires a hitman to murder someone, the hiring party is guilty of aggression against the victim, even though the violence was indirect. We must recognize the same causal connection when government wields the machinery of state violence indirectly through private entities; and similarly when private entities wield government power indirectly against their competitors and the public at large.

In current events, we see David Boaz of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, lament Florida Governor Ron DeSantis implementing legislation to counter Critical Race Theory, election irregularities, stringent COVID restrictions, and vaccine passports. We also see state action being taken to punish protests that block road traffic and social media censorship and de-platforming, which trammel upon free speech.

Libertarians face a moral dilemma of epic proportions. The left weaponizes government power to aggress. The right weaponizes government power to aggress in their own ways and to counter the left. Libertarians want non-aggression, but they cannot reconcile their views with reality of a world filled with aggression.

Right and left engage in indirect aggression through crony relationships between private entities and governments. When private entities influence government to wield legislative and regulatory force against their competitors or the public at large, the corruption results in a phenomenon known as regulatory capture. Increasingly, we also see the government infiltrate private entities to coerce them into implementing policy that the US Constitution forbids government from implementing directly, such as censorship (content moderation). Politicians threaten to regulate or otherwise interfere in the market. Governments use subsidies, spending, loans, tax policy, tariffs, export controls, licenses, permits, and authorizations as tools of coercive power. Sometimes the mere threat or even a wink and a nod are enough to influence private entities to acquiesce to a politician’s desires, as any mobster is aware. Government agencies are also looking to outsource their coercive functions to private entities, who are not subject to Constitutional constraints and legislative oversight.

Libertarians are faced with the dilemma of either to be passive (“private entities can do what they want”) in ignorance of indirect aggression, or to retaliate. When countering indirect aggression, if one’s economic power (cancel culture) and political power (voting, lobbying, and bribing for legislation and regulation) are too weak, passivity is surrendering to coercion (resigning to be victims). Alternatively, libertarians may recognize that in the face of indirect aggression having already been initiated against them, the same weapons can be wielded as a defensive measure in retaliation and this would be morally defensible. It is the principle: return fire when fired upon.

politics

Corporations Acting as Agents of Foreign Governments

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This article explores some thought experiments about the constitutionality of corporations acting at the behest of foreign governments.

4A thought experiment

An American citizen uses a healthcare web site to manage his lab results, medical images, medications, and communications with his doctors, all of whom are in the US, as is the web site’s hosting and corporate headquarters. The web site also serves citizens in other countries in the same manner. One day, the German government obtains a warrant from a German court to gain access to an American’s private health information.

Would a libertarian say that the web site is a private company and they may do as they please to violate the American’s privacy rights by handing over information to agents who have no jurisdiction? I think we can all agree that the answer must be no.

1A thought experiment

Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and every other country enact hate speech legislation that is incompatible with the American Constitutional protections of free speech. American social media web sites must enforce these “community standards” to the satisfaction of all these jurisdictions in order to do business with users in those countries. It would be costly to treat each user specifically in accordance to the laws and regulations in their jurisdiction, so the company prefers to implement a uniform set of community standards that becomes a superset of all laws and regulations in every jurisdiction. That means every country’s government mandated censorship now applies to American citizens to infringe upon their free speech rights.

Would a libertarian say that the web site is a private company and they may do as they please to violate the American’s free speech rights?

Would a libertarian agree that a private company may act as an agent on behalf of a foreign government to implement foreign laws and regulations on American citizens, such as China’s social credit system?