Now that France’s incumbent President Sarkozy has been defeated at the polls by socialist candidate M. Hollande, Americans should have gotten a wake-up call. Angela Merkel now seems to be the only voice of European reason in the rising popular tide against budgetary austerity and a return to the by now old-fashioned idea that the public sector should live within its means.

President Obama and his Democratic predecessors argue that Americans should look to Europe for policies to emulate, such as single-payer healthcare plans, that seem to “work” there and that the United States should therefore mimic. Be careful what you wish for!

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, tried something like a single-payer plan, including individual mandates for purchasing health-insurance policies, as the Governor of Massachusetts, with predictably disastrous consequences for that state’s budget.

The rising global shift toward left-leaning governance leads me to predict that President Obama will be reelected in November. The US economy seems to be improving, based on recent estimates that the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen from about 10 percent to 8.1 percent during his watch. But most voters are rationally too ignorant to grasp that that rosy scenario is the result of record numbers of job-seekers exiting from the labor force because they have given up searching for jobs in the private sector. Meanwhile, employment in the public sector and in industries benefiting from taxpayer-financed subsidies for “green” products and services has surged. Such “jobs” would not be on offer otherwise and, as even government statistics during the 1930s recognized, should not be included in the civilian labor force.

Personal liberty rarely has been in such danger. Vote in November as you want, but don’t do so expecting the proverbial free lunch. Benefits supplied by government must be paid for eventually, even if, as John Maynard Keynes once said famously, in the long run everyone is dead. But your children and grandchildren will not be.

James Delingpole reports in the Telegraph of London that James Lovelock, the “greenest” of the “greens,” now admits that the doomsaying over global warming is wrong.

[O]ne of the archest of the world’s arch Greenies – James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis and therefore, more or less, founder of the world’s most powerful modern religion – has come clean and admitted that he got it wrong in his doomsday predictions about “Climate Change.”

In 2007, Time magazine named Lovelock as one its thirteen “Heroes of the Environment” for conceiving of the earth as the single organism “Gaia.”

As MSNBC also reports,

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too. . . .

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.

Belief in global warming catastrophe has been a major tenet of environmentalism as secular religion, but now with the most prominent “green” crusader having broken ranks with the climate alarmists, might there be hope that reason and common sense will prevail? Please see the following articles by our Senior Fellow Robert H. Nelson, author of the Independent Institute’s award-winning book, The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America:

“Environmentalism has become a religion” (McClatchy Newspapers)

“Environmentalism: The New Religion Freely Taught In Schools” (Forbes)

“Wasteful U.S. public-land policy must change” (Arizona Republic)

“Free the American West: Get the federal government off public lands that are of no national importance” (Los Angeles Times)

Facts of the case: My wife and I live in an area with one neighbor nearby. One day, I knock on my neighbor’s door and demand that he give me $10,000. He wants to know what the devil I am talking about.

I explain that the people—most of them, in any event—in our area have seceded from St. Tammany Parish, the state of Louisiana, and the United States of America and formed a new government whose territory comprises his property and ours. We have also written and ratified, with our own votes of approval, a constitution for the new country, which we have decided to call Southland. We have also conducted elections in which a 2/3 majority of the eligible voters elected Elizabeth and me to fill all of the new government’s offices, including tax collector (I won this vote myself).

My neighbor protests that he has never heard of any of these developments and wants nothing to do with them, to which I reply that he has no choice in the matter because the constitution of Southland gives its government the power to tax, I am the duly elected tax collector, and he is at fault for not following the news more closely and not participating in public affairs. Moreover, the constitution provides for an army to enforce Southland’s laws (I have been duly appointed chief of staff), and if he refuses to pay his tax, the authorities will have no choice but to use violence against him to compel payment.

He protests that this whole scheme is madness, that I have gone mad, too, and that he will not give us a dime. Elizabeth and I then form up the ranks of Southland’s army: I constitute the infantry, armed with my trusty shotgun, and she leads the army band, which consists of herself with her flute. We march to our neighbor’s house and threaten to kill him if he does not give us the $10,000 tax (authorized in a statute enacted by Southland’s new government). When he decides that a $10,000 loss is better than being killed by violent maniacs, we march home to the Treasury (it’s at our house) with our revenue—a sum whose use will be determined by the Southland legislature, in which Elizabeth and I are the duly elected lawmakers.

Question for the student: Except with regard to scale (and voting by a woman), how does the preceding account differ in any essential way from the situation brought about by the formation of the United States of America? (Hint: look up Whiskey Rebellion or read something that challenges the orthodox history of taxation.)

In the mid-1970s, I began to do consulting work in addition to my academic work. By that time, I had become familiar with how economists generally analyze cooperation and competition, in both the economy and the political realm. Economists put great weight on gains from trade. Nobody, they like to say, walks past a $20 bill he sees lying on the sidewalk. If a situation contains the potential for a trade or other arrangement that will bring gain to a decision-maker, he will embrace that trade or arrangement. This market process leads, in the theoretical extreme, to the happy condition known as the Pareto Optimum—the situation in which all potential gains from trade have been captured.

Notice that this view of mankind causes us to think of people as self-interested, but not as vicious. Individuals are seen as, in effect, indifferent to the welfare of their trading or cooperating partners, but intent on making themselves as well-off as possible. They do not seek to harm others, but only to benefit themselves (and those about whom they happen to care).

As I launched into my consulting work, which involved various efforts by Washington state and the U.S. government to resolve disputes and to increase the harvestable resource in the Washington salmon fishery and the federally-regulated offshore salmon fishery in the Pacific Ocean, I quickly learned that the politicians in Olympia did not fit the model I had mastered in my education as an economist. To be sure, they sought to feather their own nests, by hook and by crook. But, in many important cases, they acted simply to hurt their political and personal enemies—whose ranks, in some cases, were quite large. Often, it seemed, Mr. P was clearly “out to get” Mr. Q, and he was not simply seeking this objective, other things being the same; he was actually out to get Mr. Q even if he had to bear a cost in doing so.

So, despite the formal models and informal rhetoric that economists and other academic specialists wield in their research and writing about politics and government, a critical element tends to be completely overlooked: the powerful role of aversion, dislike, and hatred. Economists represent individual preference orderings as rankings of valued options: good thing A > good thing B > good thing C, and so on. But for political actors, the preference ordering often looks more like: good thing A > hurt person X > good thing B > hurt person Y > good thing C, and so on.

This sort of preference is the political sentiment Vladimir Lenin expressed when he remarked: “My words were calculated to evoke hatred, aversion and contempt . . . not to convince but to break up the ranks of the opponent, not to correct an opponent’s mistake, but to destroy him.” Closer to home, Henry Adams observed that “politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

We see the importance of this element of politics clearly in the contemporary conflict between Democrats and Republicans. Given that these two parties are but two wings of the same predatory one-party state that rules the United States, we might well wonder why their intramural feuding often reaches such vitriolic extremes. The short answer is that despite the two parties’ general similarity of fundamental positions, they comprise somewhat different sorts of people—different in regard to religious conviction (or the lack thereof), typical social position, culture, background, occupational distribution, urban-rural composition, and ethnic makeup, among other things—and the two groups tend to dislike each other; indeed, in many individual instances, they despise one another. And their political representatives, though more inclined to conspire and cut deals with the other side, also represent their supporters along the hatred dimension. Occasionally, when a politician does not realize that the microphone is live, we hear some honest expression of his true feelings about his political opponents—“enemies” is the more accurate word.

In view of the foregoing, we are well advised to consider that whenever we seek to move a type of decision-making from private life to the realm of politics and government, we are very likely moving it from a world in which hatred is incidental and avoidable to a world in which hatred is central and inescapable. Because a government imposes one rule, one outcome, one state of affairs on everyone subject to its rule, the hatreds that go into the making of that outcome become generalized and infused throughout the entire society. Thus, what economists label a “public good” is often, in the most substantive way, a “public bad.” Even if a person does not share any of the component hatreds that politic actors express and deploy, no one can avoid living in a politicized world fashioned in such large part by the organized expression of hatred. It is, therefore, small wonder that some of us view the entire apparatus of politics and government as the living embodiment of evil.

Even a devout Christian has no small difficulty in following Christ’s admonition to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” But when we live and act in the private realm, we can make our best attempt to love others or at least to tolerate them in peace, and we have many options for avoiding or running away from hateful people and situations; occasionally we may even be able to lead someone, or ourselves, to substitute love, or at least understanding, for hatred.

In politics and government, however, the institutional makeup fosters hatred at every turn. Parties recruit followers by exploiting hatreds. Bureaucracies bulk up their power and budgets by artfully weaving hatreds into their mission statements and day-to-day procedures. Regulators take advantage of artificially heightened hatreds. Group identity is emphasized at every turn, and such tribal distinctions are tailor-made for the maintenance and increase of hatred among individual persons who might otherwise disregard the kinds of groupings that the politicians and their supporters emphasize ceaselessly.

With a sigh, many people accept that politics and government are, at best, necessary evils. I have great doubt that they are necessary, at least in their present form, but I am certain that in this form they are evil.

By the time you read this, I’m probably little more than a glob of metal, like so many millions of my brothers and sisters. And I did nothing wrong. For a while, I blamed my owner—didn’t he know that the TSA wouldn’t let him take me on an airplane? But, of course he did. In fact, his diligence in trying to protect me is partly responsible for the mental slip that flipped me into the box with all the other innocents, victimized by the bureaucratic absurdity of US airport security rules. Yet, avoiding that slip would have meant keeping me in a dark drawer, and, for a pocket knife, that is a life not lived.

I know this because my owner had held on to me for 27 years. I know exactly when I was born, because I was a loving gift from his girlfriend and future wife. And I was practical, which made the thoughts behind her gift all the more special to my owner. And it gave me purpose. We’ve been through a lot: I have scraped ice from the nozzles of frozen hose couplings used to make snow at a ski area in subzero weather. I have stripped electrical wire forty feet in the air. I have cut scores of feet of duck tape for various types of repairs. I’ve opened hundreds of presents and gifts under Christmas trees and at birthday parties. I opened the box to my owner’s first published novel. Most recently, I opened the boxes of local authors at a spring festival, releasing fresh ideas and creative genius onto an unsuspecting public. I reveled in the joy and satisfaction I brought to my owner, his children, and the scores of people I helped, even in the smallest ways, through their everyday lives.

But there are some things that my owner and I never did. We never cut a person or animal. I was never opened out of anger. I was never used to threaten, cajole or intimidate. My owner simply would not have done that. I should know since, until that sad day in April, I was his companion for more than half of his life.

I have every reason to be livid at my owner. How could he let this happen?

One look on his face when the TSA agent pulled me from his backpack was enough for me to comprehend the emotional pain his oversight caused. My anger melted with his hopes and dreams. Gone was the surety of knowing I would be there to help him with tasks simple and big. Gone was the warm comfort of being there at holidays and birthdays. Gone was the plan that I would be passed down to his son at the right time. And, most importantly, gone was a cherished symbol of affection that he had so carefully protected until that fateful error at the airport.

And the TSA security guard knew, too: Seeing my owner’s expression, he asked him twice if he wanted to go back and mail it home. And my heart sank along with his dispirited voice as my owner uttered the inevitable “no.” He had already waited in line too long, and if he went back through security he would miss his plane. Cancelling meetings and paying hundreds of dollars in rebooking fees was simply too much, even with our long attachment and personal bond.

No, I am not angry at my owner. I am not even angry at the TSA employee. I am angry at the TSA. Despite all the technology available to them and other law enforcement agencies, they couldn’t figure out that a middle-aged man in a stable marriage, with no criminal record, with two decades of steady professional employment, two well-adjusted teenage kids, and more than 500,000 frequent flier miles under his belt was not a threat to himself or the passengers on that plane. In fact, to the TSA, my owner was indistinguishable from the Jihadists that murdered thousands of innocents more than a decade ago. He was invisible, not even a cog in the wheel. He was a nonperson, without rights or claims to civil liberties. In that airport, he lived a life contingent on the good graces of government and its bureaucratic rules, not his record or good deeds or contributions to society.

Perhaps the only thing worse than the absurdity of my confiscation is the fact the TSA consciously and self-righteously tramples on the very civil liberties that this nation was founded to protect. The consequence of these petty tyrannies is not just my demise, but a break in the very bonds that keep humans and families together. They sap the willpower and personal strength of a civil society founded to stand up against larger tyrannies. And they cede the power of life, freedom, and mobility to the rule followers and the small minds that can’t distinguish between real and imagined threats to persons and property. I deserve better. My owner deserves better. Americans deserve better. But it’s too late for me.

One effect of the ongoing recession is that it reduces tax revenues. That’s one reason the federal deficit is as large as it is. But not all governments have responded the way the US government has.

I live in Florida, where total state appropriations (that is, state government expenditures) peaked in 2006, prior to the recession, at $73.9 billion. Because of declining revenues, expenditures fell to $66.2 billion in 2008, and in 2012 have come back to $70.0 billion, which is 5.3% less than their peak six years ago. The fiscally conservative Florida legislature has held the line on taxes, and state government spending has fallen.

In California, 2006 state expenditures were $130.0 billion, and and in 2012 are $137.3 billion, a 5.6% increase. Not much of an increase over six years, but it looks like more when compared to Florida’s expenditure reduction.

Meanwhile, federal government expenditures in 2006 were $2,655.1 billion, and rose to $3,795.6 billion in 2012, for an increase of 43%. I conjecture that few Americans would argue the federal government is providing 43% more value to them now than it was in 2006.

If the federal government had kept its spending increase to the same level as California’s state government from 2006-12, federal expenditures would be $2,803.8 billion, or 26.2% lower than they are today.

If the federal government had reduced its expenditures as much as Florida did, federal expenditures would be $2,514.4 billion, or 33.8% lower than they are today.

The Floridians I hear complaining about government budget cuts are government employees, the people who get paid by government. I never hear ordinary Floridians in the private sector complaining about reduced government services. I suspect you’d have few complaints if the federal government budget were cut 33.8% today, except for the people who are recipients of taxpayer dollars.

One final thought: 2012 federal tax revenues are $2,468.6 billion, so if the federal budget actually were cut by 33.8%, we’d still have a $48.8 billion budget deficit.

A hundred and seven people in numerous cities have been charged with defrauding Medicare. The cost of their dishonesty is estimated at near a half billion dollars. As with any entitlement program, there are leaks, and recipients misrepresent their circumstances to grab more dough. Some believe that Medicare fraud costs the government up to $90 billion a year.

Chump change, I say, compared to the real fraud here: A Ponzi scheme of epic proportions, yet one that is made all the more morally dubious in that those who pay into it are not just tricked, but coerced at gun point.

Of course, I’m referring to Medicare itself. The program was essentially invented by Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian autocrat, and then copied in one state after another before it became incorporated into Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in 1965. The final plan had bipartisan support.

By 1971, the payments had risen to almost $8 billion a year—eight times what they had been in the first year. Congress has repeatedly attempted to cut costs and make the program solvent—with the 1973 HMO Act, caps on hospital construction in 1974, regulations limiting hospital stays in the 1980s, and the 1996 Health Insurance Act’s creation of penalties for Medicare fraud, as determined by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Yet despite all these fixes, the program has continued toward its own bloated explosion, and has always amounted to a regressive attack on the paychecks of the young and healthy, promising one generation after another the program will help them out once they retire, all at the expense of the next generation. Talk about taxation without representation! It is a promise on the tax receipts of those who are not yet born. It is inter-generational plunder, and it has driven up the costs of medical services and drugs for the elderly, to boot, forcing those who accept Medicare to agree to all manner of limitations on their health services, causing prices to rise to impose larger out-of-pocket costs on the retired than they faced before the mid-1960s.

George W. Bush won the presidency promising to expand this criminal enterprise, and did so when he signed the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 in the name of “honoring the commitments of Medicare to all our seniors.” It was a huge surge of corporate welfare to the pharmaceutical industry, the largest expansion of entitlements in almost forty years, and a great erosion of the rights and responsibilities of individuals.

In 2003, Medicare’s Board of Trustees cited Bush’s subsidy as a key factor in its adjusted estimate of when Medicare would go bankrupt—by 2019 instead of 2026. It’s already contributing hundreds of billions to the deficit and will eventually overtake other federal expenditures or go bust, unless something else gives.

Obama has promised not to divert too much funding from Medicare toward Obamacare, although those who fear he will break such vows and who wish to keep Medicare intact are ignoring the reality: the program cannot be sustained. For those who fear socialized medicine, we already have a huge dose of it in this country—Medicare itself—and it will bankrupt this country unless we work toward its abolition.

Instead of going after doctors and patients trying to get what they can out of this broken system, we should focus most of all on the true criminal masterminds in Medicare fraud. Lyndon Johnson died in 1973 but many who have since carried out his dirty work are still around.

Jesse Walker has an intriguing blog post about data concerning illegal immigration. The most fascinating part to me discusses an analysis concluding that illegal alien crackdowns and border fencing has actually increased the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. By making it more risky for undocumented migrants to come in, the border walls have discouraged the back-and-forth movement that used to prevail across the Rio Grande. So more illegal aliens come and don’t go back than before.

Overall, net illegal immigration has decreased, and the deportation rate has nearly doubled since Obama took office. The decline seems mostly to do with the economy, however, and this along with the unintended incentive created by border security for illegal immigrants to remain in the United States confirms any suspicions we might have that immigration controls, like practically all other government controls, do not work as advertised. Indeed, the degree of federal power needed to expel most illegals and keep them out would be unimaginable. Nothing short of totalitarian controls could achieve it, if even that would work.

To the extent there are true problems associated with illegal immigration, we should consider the ultimate source—typically, socialism and state intervention in the economy. Socialization of land and resources prevents people from living in the types of communities they want, with the cultural cohesion some might crave. Government schooling and meddling in health care forces people to pay for others, illegal immigrants and citizens alike, against their will, driving up prices and causing resentment. The drug war is responsible for most of the border violence, and now we see even immigration barriers can divert migration patterns in ways invasive to some communities, as in Arizona. Walls, guns, border guards, drone surveillance, crack downs on employers, intervention into the labor market, jails and deportations will cause vast human misery, significant property destruction, and devastation to priceless liberties. But only by turning away from statism, instead of adopting more of it, can we have both the security and freedom that so many natives and immigrants value.

[The Independent Institute does not work to influence the legislative process, but we find the following information and analysis interesting and worth passing on.—Ed.]

Later this year Americans could wake up to some unpleasant surprises:

• Higher fees and costs associated with banking, pensions, insurance, and investment;
• Reduced foreign investment in the United States and, consequently, fewer American jobs; and
• The virtual end of financial privacy, with Americans’ personal asset information collected wholesale by the IRS in order to provide it—with questionable security protections—to foreign governments and, in all likelihood, to an international financial authority.

Worst of all, these will be surprises of our own making.

Welcome to FATCA(T)

Few in America have heard of a pending U.S. mandate that has had much of the outside world sweating bullets for two years. Whimsically named the “Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA)”—missing only the final “T” to spell out the accusatorial jab at well-heeled tax cheats—the law was enacted in 2010 as an offset revenue provision in an unrelated jobs spending bill. (According to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, FATCA would yield annual revenues of about $1 billion, a paltry sum compared to the roughly $2 trillion in tax revenues collected each year.)

In a nutshell, FATCA requires every “foreign financial institution” (FFI) in the world to collect information on U.S. residents whose assets it holds, and provide them directly to the IRS. Failure to do so will result in IRS’s withholding 30% of the recalcitrant FFI’s income derived from U.S. sources. FATCA rules pertaining to partial U.S. ownership and revenues derived from third-party institutions (so-called “passthru” provisions) impose additional complex compliance mandates.

In one aspect FATCA largely duplicates existing directives under another law, “Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR),” which orders Americans to report to the IRS their assets held in foreign banks. FATCA, however, not only covers a broad array of non-bank assets, like foreign stocks and private equity funds, it places the burden directly on the FFIs to identify the required information and hand it over to the U.S. Treasury, in many cases in violation of their own countries’ domestic laws. Faced with costly compliance measures—which accounting, software, and law firms are happy to sell, expecting a FATCA bonanza courtesy of the IRS—some FFIs have been dropping their U.S. clients, or considering withdrawal of assets from the United States to avoid potential withholding.

Americans living abroad, who are estimated to number over five million and who pay billions in taxes to the U.S. Treasury every year, are treated as presumptive criminals under FATCA and increasingly are regarded as pariahs by their local FFIs in the countries where they live and work. Reports are multiplying of institutions turning away new American clients and telling existing ones they need to choose: close your account or renounce your U.S. citizenship.

The incentive for FFIs to pull their money out of the U.S. potentially is even more devastating in light of the $21 trillion in foreign investment in the U.S., of which $10.5 trillion is invested in U.S. securities. As reported by American Citizens Abroad, a survey by one major accounting firm estimates that almost two-thirds of FFIs will disinvest in the U.S. rather than risk FATCA penalties. Comments ACA: “If even a fraction of those foreign investors divest, the loss to the U.S. would be in the trillions of dollars. This at a time when the U.S. economy desperately needs more foreign investment, not less.”

But Wait, It Gets Worse . . .

FATCA can only go into effect once final regulations are promulgated by IRS with an effective date. By late 2011 the IRS had found itself faced with the daunting, perhaps impossible, task of extending extraterritorial enforcement to every non-U.S. financial institution worldwide, backed up with the draconian withholding penalty. Amid rising protests from FFIs and foreign governments (which attracted little attention inside the United States) the IRS deferred an earlier year-end target date for issuance of draft regulations.

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Bullying is gaining greater and greater prominence as a social issue, marked by the recent debut of the documentary “Bully” but preceded by decades of books highlighting its destructive effects on our kids (see SE Hinton’s classic The Outsiders and Judy Blume’s Blubber). At first glance, libertarians might think they have little to contribute to this public debate: Bullying and intimidation are as old as the animal kingdom. But as anti-bullying programs make it into school curricula and civic life, examining the roles and responsibilities of individuals is likely to become a defining element of these solutions. And it’s here where libertarians have an important, if unlikely and as of yet unrecognized, role to play.

Part of the libertarian role, of course, is providing perspective and debunking myth. Reason magazine on-line editor (and former colleague) Nick Gillespie, for example, led an excellent on-line discussion on bullying based on a very pragmatic and commonsense article in the Wall Street Journal (April 1, 2012) pointing out the pitfalls of over protective parenting, that actual statistics suggest that violence is schools is actually falling, and that anti-bullying campaigns are being used to invite even further encroachments from the nanny state.

But, I don’t think this is the whole story. Bullying is real, even if its an age old problem, and a libertarian approach can proactively complete an overall framework for addressing bullying and intimidation by recognizing, 1) the solution must include a component of individualism and empowerment, and 2) sometimes the most severe types of bullying will have to be dealt with directly outside the formal authority of the school, immediate family, or law enforcement.

Many current anti-bullying campaigns ignore these elements and as a result may have a pernicious effect on a free society, something I discovered while researching my most recent teen novel with a bullying theme. As a parent of two teenage children, I don’t object to the traditional first round of defense and recommended anti-bullying strategies—seek help from parents, teachers and other adults. Try to talk your way out of the situation. Sometimes you can just walk away. These are often effective strategies and good tactics, and, in most cases, will stop bullying.

In too many cases, however, relying on others, particularly adults and formal authority figures, might not be enough. While educators, social workers, and psychologists might be reluctant to acknowledge it, direct action, mainly self-defense, might be the most effective way to address bullies and bullying. Moreover, ignoring self-defense strategies reinforces an emerging social problem that should concern libertarian-minded parents, adults, and policymakers: An unquestioned and uncritical deference to formal authority.

And here’s where the story turns. Bullies are predators. They target weak kids, those that won’t fight back and will put up with their physical and emotional harassment. The most destructive bullies intimidate their victims outside the normal protections of family and schools. Anti-bullying campaigns have largely failed to grapple with this element, and, as a result, most formal programs don’t equip kids with the tools and skills to address the more extreme types of bullying.

Why? Most curricula, especially those developed by the federal government and schools, are built on the principle of deference to authority, rational discourse, and adult-type reasoning, not self-defense or individual empowerment. Kids are not expected, trained or otherwise equipped to confront bullies directly by assessing the nature of the threat and applying the best tactics.

As a result, many curricula fail to grapple with one of the most effective tools a kid can have in his anti-bully arsenal: Fighting back. In order to truly combat bullying effectively, our kids need a full range of defensive tools capable of being deployed on their own, outside the authority of the school, family, Church or local law enforcement. They will need to be confident individuals capable of deploying self-defense tactics that neutralize aggression and intimidation. This does not imply arming our kids with guns, knives, or other weapons. It does suggest thinking outside the box to include training such as martial arts or other personal self-defense programs.

This strategy isn’t without historical precedent. The history of Asian martial arts includes training for self-defense. While ninjas are popularly known as assassins, martial arts training was more often a way to empower ordinary farmers and citizens to protect themselves against better armed aggressors such as gangs, highwaymen, and pirates.

Continual deference to other authority figures absent a last resort defense that allows a kid to stand up on his or her own against a bully undermines individualism and self-confidence. It’s the ability to execute the last step as a choice and tactic of last resort that implicitly builds the foundation of a free society. That’s the libertarian imperative in the anti-bullying campaign. So, the next time an anti-bullying program is proposed in your local community, make sure it includes a healthy dose of self-defense.