The events, over some 36 minutes, range from terrifying to comical. Particularly interesting to me is how the guy calls the FBI in the first video, and is initially told things completely out of concord with local US law. But hey, the poor boy’s got faith, right?

Got there via Checkpoint USA, via CopBlock.

Remember, part 1 of 4:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m unlikely to be able to follow this closely, so follow Jason on Twitter (@JDTalley) and Pete (@peteeyre) if you haven’t already. Also, tracking the #MHD tag on Twitter is a way to get the news, especially if the boys go silent.

From Jason’s tweets, reverse-chronological:

1. We will now be escorted into a new holding area. This time it’s the U.S. government. 16 minutes ago
2. Reinforcements have been called. Homeland Security vehicle is now blocking MARV. 19 minutes ago
3. U.S. Border Guard told @peteeyre to stop recording or his camera would be confiscated. 21 minutes ago
4. Now we are getting hassled by U.S. Border Guards in Detroit. #MHD 23 minutes ago
5. Canadian border guards are tossing our motorhome again. I just cleaned it. about 2 hours ago
6. We’re in the no man’s land between Detroit and Windsor, Canada… on accident. Wrong turns suck. about 2 hours ago

Gak.

The American Heritage Dictionary, among other definitions, suggests that a border is “The line or frontier area separating political divisions or geographic regions; a boundary.”

"Warning! State border!" -- sign at Devín, on the Slovak side of what was once the officially-impassible border between Republik Österreich and Československá socialistická republika

I’ve heard about these border things, but I’ve never actually seen one.

I got to thinking about this because the Motorhome Diaries crew (agorist comrades Jason Talley and Pete Eyre) just got stopped and searched and denied passage across one of these “border” things. From the reports, it sounds like the “border” in question was one dividing two political entities which call themselves “United States of America” and “Canada”.

Huh. These borders things sound a bit dangerous.

I offer a few alternate definitions for your consideration:

bor-der (bôr’dər) n.:

1. An imaginary line near which organized criminals in and out of uniform may stop, search, kidnap, cage, shoot, rob or otherwise harm peaceful people without consequence.
2. An imaginary line representing a place at which two or more tyrants agree to stop killing, raping, maiming and robbing each others’ slaves, the better to continue enslaving and stealing from their respective territorial thralls.
3. An imaginary line marking zones of exclusivity for legalized privilege in the forms of taxation, regulation, reporting duties, “law” enforcement, subsidy, etc.

Dangerous indeed. Stay away.

Anyone else have their own definition for “border”? Let’s hear ‘em in the comments!

So, what the heck, I joined the discussion. All that follows is copied from the forum thread, me quoting others indented:

Done that…

Whose is it, then?

A crime? Who are the victims?

“The American worker” is an abstraction. Take “the American worker” into any court as plaintiff and be laughed out for lack of standing.

Which American worker(s)? And what ever happened to the homey American notion that economic competition is good?

Well now that’s exactly not the principle involved in taxation.

To my narrow perspective this suggests either a limited knowledge of history (Nagasaki? Tuskeegee? Guatemala? Abu Ghraib?) or a rather inhuman set of values.

Well that does save your masters the bother of sending heavily-armed enforcers after you. Did you kick in a bit extra, too, with the thought that something good might be done with it?

Of late? What, since, like, Shays’ Rebellion in 1786? The Whiskey Rebellion in 1791?

You are hereby invited to do so, which will save me the bother. If you’d care to provide copies of the correspondence with the SSA, I’d be grateful.

Actually I am sure that it did not happen. Citizenship has no bearing on SS numbering, contribution obligation or benefit entitlement.

Hiya.

My own ancestors “invaded” America just over a hundred years ago, coming from central Europe. Some of them came for economic opportunity, some came to escape religious persecution, some came in order to avoid having their children thrown into the bloody maw of war via conscription into one imperial army or another. Prior to that, other Europeans invaded, killing and robbing millions of the original inhabitants, and relegating the survivors to a second-class existence.

A lot of the frustrations I see vented on this forum are of the form:

“Illegal immigrants/immigration cause problem X”, therefore
“The government should do Y”

However, the vast bulk of these problems could in fact be mitigated by having the government STOP doing certain things, e.g.:

Immigrants are taking American jobs — abolish the minimum wage, abolish ridiculous licensing requirements for low-skilled jobs, stop rewarding idleness through compulsory unemployment “insurance” financed by the robbery that is taxation

Immigrants are filling the public schools — abolish public schooling

Immigrants are bringing in illegal drugs — abolish the drug laws

Immigrants are getting free health care while Americans who can’t afford insurance but don’t qualify for government entitlements suffer — abolish “must treat” legislation, abolish medicare, medicaid and all other socialized medicine, abolish the AMA licensing cartel that makes US medicine so bloody expensive through its guild protectionism, and on and on

Immigrants might be terrorists — abolish the American empire abroad, but expect change in world attitudes toward America to be slow

New World Order globalists are intent on using divide-and-conquer strategies to reduce national sovereignty and institute one-world government — abolish all the taxes and privileges that fund, protect and support those monsters

Pointing to problems demonstrably caused by the American state, and then asking the American state to do more in order to fix them is somehow not consonant with ALIPAC’s support for the “tax day tea parties”.

The list of immigrant “problems” which could be eliminated completely by having government quit doing things it shouldn’t be doing anyway goes on and on and on.

Then there are two remaining issues I see a lot:

Immigrants are poisoning/diluting/changing “our” culture — in the final analysis, tough luck. Adapt. Change. Deal with it. This position amounts to racism, cultural bigotry and American exceptionalism anyway. Evolve, or show the courage of your convictions by going out and threatening peaceful, migrating people with kidnapping, imprisonment and even death yourself, instead of trying to delegate the task to government, and see how that goes for you.

Immigrants ought to get in line and go through the “legal” process — there are many, many moral objections to this idea, but I’ll leave you with this thought: If immigration is morally legitimated today via legal process, how, then, could any of the original settlers and colonists who went to the Americas from Europe achieve any moral claim to their presence on the territory?

As far as my personal history… well, I guess I took the red pill.

– from The Difference Between Chairs and Thrones… at the dignity of struggle.

Who can kill a general in his bed?
Overthrow dictators if they’re red?
Fucking-a man!
CIA Man!

Who can buy a government so cheap?
Change a cabinet without a squeak.
Fucking-a man!
CIA Man!

Who can train guerillas by the dozens?
Send them out to kill their untrained cousins?
Fucking-a man!
CIA Man!

Who can get a budget that’s so great?
Who will be the 51st state?
Who has got the secretest Service?
The one that makes the other service nervous?
Fucking-a man!
CIA Man!

Who can take the sugar from its sack,
Pour in LSD and put it back?
Fucking-a man!
CIA Man!

Who can mine the habas a’Nicaragua?
Out-hit all the hitmen of Chicagua.
Fucking-a man!
CIA Man!

Who can be so overtly covert?
Sometimes even covertly overt.
Fucking-a man!
CIA Man!

Who’s the agency well known to God?
The one that copped his staff and copped his rod?
Fucking-a man!
CIA Man!
Fucking-a man!
CIA Man!
Fucking-a man!
CIA Man!
CIA Man!
CIA Man!
CIA Man!
CIA Man!
CIA Man!
C
I
A

How can you sleep at night?

Merry Christmas, you fucking tool.

Hey there,

You know, it’s funny, after reading your recent interview, I feel as though essentially you and I believe in the same (or a very similar) ideal world. I never realized that might even remotely be the case. I guess that could be because we rarely if ever engaged in political debate with one another, assuming the other felt very differently.

One day not too long ago, I was describing my ideal ‘political’ system and basically it hearkens back to my teenage fascination with communes and dropping out of society at large in order to live with like minded people who create their own guidelines to live by – growing their own food, caring for one another’s children – communally. Ideally, small groups/communities would ‘govern’ themselves: everyone could sit in a room together and have a vote and the group would be small enough that each voice would be heard. I think that’s what government was meant to be (or at least should have been), but it got all fucked up when it grew – it wasn’t scalable.

Although, you’d likely leave out all the warm fuzzy hippy-sounding bits of what I’ve said, I think we seem to essentially have very compatible ideal visions of the future.

And I respond:

Okay, I’m stunned by the synchronicity here, because literally at the same time you were likely writing this I was playing a video game and thinking to myself that it’s a pity that we find ourselves so divided on political questions, and that if you understood more of the background – or if I were better at explaining it to you – that we would find we have much more common ground than we thought.

Agorism is a revolutionary strategy for achieving a voluntary society. Intellectually, it grew out of the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard. The principles of that philosophy are not entirely compatible with more “socialist” forms of anarchism, in that anarcho-capitalism rejects almost everything which flows from economics based on the Labor Theory of Value in favor of Austrian subjective value theory (marginal utility), rejects the notion that hard titles to land are immoral or indefensible, and rejects the propositions found in many schools of thought which say that profit, rent and interest are either immoral or would disappear in a stateless society.

What is interesting is that the ancap model, I believe, is capable of subsuming all of the other models within itself, and serving as an overall framework under which any given philosophy of property and economics could be freely tried out within areas inhabited by people who wanted to adopt their own, so long as agencies for resolutions of disputes between communities with different philosophies could be agreed upon.

Within the anarcho-capitalist panarchy communities could choose to organize themselves along whatever lines they wanted to. Communes? Fine, have at it. Rugged individualists? Great, just don’t come stuffing it at the rest of us. Worker self-management and a society of independent contractors? That’s permissible. Syndicalist communes where the workers control the means of production? Fine, so long as they acquire their property legitimately. Corporations? Absolutely, but good luck maintaining anything even remotely like the predatory corporate forms of today or the past without State-backed limited liability, corporate personhood and the massive subsidies and externalizations of costs granted to big businesses by States today. Any or all of these could exist side by side – and of course, there’s a lot more to it than just a general permissiveness.

Overall, and perhaps of great interest for you, who I believe approaches questions of what ought to be in society more from a “harmonious human systems” approach than from an egoist individual rights approach, is that a society of this nature would naturally entail the disappearance of the corrupt, predatory, coercive and downright evil practices used by today’s ruling classes and wealthy elites via today’s States against poor and repressed people all over the world and throughout the horrible history of humanity. Revolutionaries everywhere want to overthrow their ruling class, but usually seek to replace it with their own familiar personal despotism, and let there be blood. The Agorist seeks to subject the bloated, loathsome carcasses of State and ruling class to the merciless creative destruction of the marketplace.

Agorism implies a great many things which challenge the ruling classes and what is called today by many “the Capitalist system” (though it ought better be called something like “the neo-Mercantilist system”) at fundamental levels. People who make money smuggling human beings from one country to another ought to be celebrated as heroes provided they are not selling people into slavery and they take necessary safety precautions. The real crime is that since the activity of smuggling people across artificial State borders is illegal, there’s no effective way to drive evil or careless operators out of the business. If the evil ones could be identified and excluded, the remainder are the Agorist’s allies if they are susceptible to an Agorist ideological conversion.

Likewise the drug dealers of today. Not the top layers of the extremely violent organized crime rings and their State accomplices, but the far more numerous minor dealers who form perhaps the one or two levels of connection to the ultimate drug user and who are rarely involved in violence or fraud. The same with the pimps and the whores and the bookies and the loan sharks and all the tradesmen willing to do a household repair job “under the table” and all those unlicensed day care centers operating in suburban homes and all other people engaged in nonviolent activities which are prohibited by States or done in ways States do not permit. All of these people are allies against the State if they accept the basic contract: Don’t tread on me, honor your agreements, and, if we fall into dispute, pledge to find a non-State solution. The Agorist is anyone who, at least part of the time, trades in markets the State prohibits, or does so in manners which aren’t permitted by States – such as without complying with ridiculous regulations that serve to create barriers to market entry for the benefit of existing participants and/or wealthier entrants, or without reporting the activity for taxation.

I’m attaching two fairly brief and highly influential works [ed: attached were Konkin's New Libertarian Manifesto and Agorist Class Theory]. Keep in mind that Agorism is a theory of revolution. Though it grew out of anarcho-capitalism and is grounded in that theory, it is quite distinct. You will not find a description of Utopia here (though I can tell you where to find plenty). In my mind, the Agorist praxis can be employed by a social revolution toward pretty much any Utopian vision, so long as the State and all of the privilege connected to it is eliminated along the way.

Enjoy

It is time — arguably, it is past time — for you to get your family and your wealth safely outside the borders of the United States. America has become a police state that is moving quickly toward total surveillance and, in typical American fashion, the resulting society will almost certainly be the “the best and the biggest” tyranny in the world.

Is the lobbyist-driven agenda of corporations, special interests, and political culture really any less distant than U.S. foreign policy? Do we have any authentic control over the decisions in our society that affect us? Or are we just treated as fungible units of polity that have only to be deftly mobilized by public relations wizards in pursuit of an agenda fundamentally alien to us? What, in other words, is the difference between our powerlessness within the borders of the U.S. and the powerlessness endured by the residents of Iraq and Afghanistan?

The answers are obvious on one level, and subtly and critically different on another. This essay dramatically illustrates the differences between “democracy” and demos, and should resonate loudly within the minds of those millions of hopefuls who have not yet surrendered themselves totally to the machine.

Read it. Suffer it. Internalize it.