Well, of course, training and practice is necessary to effectively defend yourself. But government oversight of that training is not. It is yet another control point, where people deemed unworthy can be denied.

Nobody may be denied the right to defend themselves, as best they are able. But then, I trust people to act in their own best interests, and to follow Jeff Cooper’s Rules of Gun Safety, always, because they were taught them at their father’s knee, and they couldn’t dream of doing otherwise. And I don’t believe in prior restraint. Ever. No victim. No crime.

I was feeling playful when I added the “Taxation is theft” sign-off. It isn’t actually. It’s much worse. It’s extortion. No matter how noble the use of the extorted money.

If I called you on the phone, described your child’s school and what they were wearing yesterday, and demanded that you send me $1,000 within one week, or I would hurt your child, would it matter that I intended to give the money to charity? Of course not. It would still be extortion. If I were also the elected president of the 1,000-member “Extortion for Charity” gang, would that make it non-criminal? Of course not. We would all cheer when their next meeting was raided and their members walked out in chains.

So what makes it different when it’s a bigger gang doing the extorting? I contend that the only difference is that we’ve been taught to respect the state’s forcefully imposed authority, even though we would consider forcefully imposed authority by anybody else to be criminal.

I was taught that way, too, but I shrugged off that training. Taxation is extortion. Central bank fiat currency is counterfeiting. Those are just facts.

Where there is room for disagreement is in the opinion that a state is necessary, and that since the state needs money to run, it must have some way of getting it, hence taxation, and counterfeiting. Most people believe that. I contend that they believe it not because it’s necessarily true, or because they’ve even ever thought about it, but because the state has a huge, mandatory brain-washing regimen, the public schools, that conditions people to believe it at a very young age.

So, yes, I drive on the roads, and my son went to the government school for three years, since we couldn’t afford a private school for him for grades six through eight (though if it weren’t for taxes, we could have). But I would much rather pay directly for roads, as I use them, and for private schools, and have voluntary charity organizations help pay for private schools for people who couldn’t afford them. No government required.

Of course there’s another benefit of no taxes or prior-restraint-imposing regulations. Everybody would be hugely richer. We’d all have hugely more time to pursue our dreams. Somebody might even use that wealth to invent a working Jetsons skycar. Jetsons skycars don’ need no steenking roads.