The gangster state. (The Last Word).

"Absent justice," wrote St. Augustine in The City of God, "what are kingdoms but vast robberies?" A recent incident in San Diego illustrates that there isn't nearly enough distance separating the federal government from the criminal underworld. According to the local NBC television affiliate, four gunmen disguised as federal agents conducting a drug raid "invaded a home near the San Ysidro border crossing....Investigators say the gunmen were dressed as agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms."

What is surprising is not that the criminals chose to disguise their home invasion as a federal raid, but rather that this sort of thing hasn't happened more often. Over the past 15 years, no-knock drug raids of the sort mimicked by these criminals have become quite common. The most notorious federal raid, the ATF's 1993 assault on Waco's Branch Davidians, was made possible partly by phony allegations that sect members were involved in drug production.

The October 1992 home invasion murder of multimillionaire Donald Scott offers an even more striking parallel to the recent attack in San Diego. A small army of law enforcement personnel descended on Scott's Malibu, California, ranch without identifying themselves. When Scott pulled a weapon to defend himself, he was shot dead. In March 1993, Ventura County District Attorney Michael Bradbury published a report finding that the fatal raid had been "motivated, at least in part, by a desire to seize and forfeit the ranch for the government." The federal government had coveted Scott's ranch for use in expanding the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

As Albert Nock pointed out in his 1935 book Our Enemy, The State, "the State has [never] shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime." There is an important distinction between government -- meaning the organized enforcement of laws intended to protect individual rights and property -- and the State, which is simply organized coercion stripped of its moral rationale. Those wanting to retain their freedoms, Nock warned, should view "the State's progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that [they] would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional criminal organization."

Many statists insist that the 9-11 atrocity illustrates that big government is a necessary defense against terrorists and similar predators. But the most striking thing about Black Tuesday was how the federal government utterly failed to carry out its most important legitimate function -- namely, protecting our population from foreign aggression. This ...