The problem is that we, like the American Indians or the Confederate States, are individually utterly unable to stop those in power from doing as they please.

robert, you've hit the proverbial nail on the head. no matter how opposing some of our views are, the core fears are the same. another thing that might (or might not) be suprising to you is that i advocate radical change to the system as well. so you see, brother, we're not all that different. we've come to similar conclusions by walking very different paths.

great post. very thoughtful.

So are you gonna sign up for the Free State Project?

what's that? did i miss a link you posted to something i should go read? =)

I linked to the Free State Project at the end of my post, but there's the link again. It's a pretty good idea, but I haven't signed up yet.

I enjoyed reading this post; I think its central message -- "that we, like the American Indians or the Confederate States, are individually utterly unable to stop those in power from doing as they please" -- is accurate and worthy of examining. Your two main examples -- the standing military and financial institutions -- are both thought-provoking (and, I think, may be fundamentally different from one another). I spent a little bit of time thinking about the case of our institutional military.

I am not a student of history, so please bear with me if I say something inaccurate. When this country was founded, following a successful military resistance to British attempts to prevent our secession, our battles were fought at short range, against individuals on our familiar, home soil. Our lines of supply were short and we had the home-field advantage against opponents using relatively easily-produced, straightforward-to-use projectile weaponry. In the years following -- during the time we relied on our citizen militia, in the absence of a standing military such as the British had -- our battles seem to me to have been much the same, in that we were fighting relatively close to home, for short periods of time, in localized regions, with uncomplicated technology. As the scale of our nation grew, the nature of our conflicts changed, and that must have been one unavoidable factor (although presumably, other political and sociocultural factors played a part as well) in changing the nature of our nation's military. The point I'm trying to make is that while a citizen militia was effective in achieving our military goals during the early years of this nation, the vastly different scale and scope of our conflicts and advances in technology seem to me to have made a citizen militia, in the form in which it existed during the nation's childhood, entirely obsolete.

Consider our success in the world wars, fought overseas, on multiple fronts, over long periods of time. Could a citizen militia have been successful under those circumstances? Could a citizen militia of the necessary manpower and firepower have been organized, supplied, and prepared without the expertise and existing resources of the standing militia? Could a citizen militia have quickly developed the practical and effective chain of command that our standing military had available to it?

Consider our current, arguably defensive action against the instigators of the 9/11 attacks and potential future attacks. Could members of a citizen militia have *effectively and expeditiously* executed the overseas missions that were and will continue to be necessary, using complex aircraft, long-range ballistic weapons, and other tools of modern warfare?

It seems to me that many people who discuss the Second Amendment in terms of a present-day citizen militia (ignoring for the moment other contexts) are imagining Red Dawn-type scenarios, but neglecting the real roles our military plays in defending us and protecting our interests abroad, roles which a citizen militia would be incapable of fulfilling in any effective way. I feel that this begs the questions, to which I do not have answers: Given the necessity for a standing military (against which I suppose one might argue), is it possible that the idea of a citizen militia is irrelevant to America's present reality? What justifications exist for the idea of a citizen militia today? How would a modern citizen militia need to be structured to have any utility, given the irrevocable existence of military "resources far surpassing those of individual citizens or even large groups of citizens"?

Incidentally, I also found the Free State Project information very interesting ... I'm not sure exactly what I make of it.

Addendum: I thought a little bit more about my post after I submitted it, and would like relate my main point to yours a little more clearly:

If, in fact, "a large standing military with access to resources far surpassing those of individual citizens or even large groups of citizens" is necessary to the security of a free State (leaving aside the question, probably to be answered in the affirmative, of whether a citizen militia is still necessary in the way that the founders intended), how do we reconcile its powers with the rights of individuals not to be oppressed by those powers?

I am not a member of the military and have only a layman's understanding of it; my understanding is that the chain of command extends upward to the elected President, and that it is, in past and current military culture, unacceptable to act counter to or in the absence of orders from above in that chain. It is also my understanding that officers are accountable to the public, indirectly of course, through military structures again under the ultimate command of our elected Commander in Chief, for actions counter to the public good. I feel relatively comfortable with the standing military for this reason: it is a large organization, checked and balanced by its subordination to the Administrative branch. Of course, individuals in the military can and do decide, on occasion, to use resources unavailable to individuals to subdue some individuals. As in the case of any American injustice, systems are in place to punish such actions, where appropriate, and to modify the larger system in such a way as to, hopefully, forestall repetitions of such events.

Of course, one could envision a military coup that makes use of the military's unique resources to subjugate all non-military citizens and subvert our elected government, but imagine all of the American individuals within the military that would need to be united in this goal for it to be successful. It seems a small risk to me. And what is our alternative to a standing military? (That is the thrust of my previous post.)

In essence, the problem of a powerful standing military seems to me to be the problem of prioritizing our objectives: national security vs. individual safety from potential military oppression. Can this ever be other than fundamentally subjective?