Nukes: trust no one

The report this week of an underground nuclear test in North Korea has upset a few of my coffee-swilling buddies at Mesa Café. But I’m having trouble getting worked up over it. After all, just last spring, I spent a full day on a tour bus at the Nevada Test Site, maneuvering around nuclear relics and some 400 subsidence craters created by 40 years’ worth of similar U.S. testing. Of course, the U.S. is “good.” Kim Jong-Il and his cronies are “bad.” There lies the difference, even if the U.S. is still the only nation in history to use nukes against civilian populations.

In a piece written for the new Center for a Stateless Society, Per Bylund looks at Monday’s North Korean nuclear revelation and asks the right questions: “Can we trust political power with weapons to destroy us and our earth? Can government be trusted?” Then he quickly answers those questions: “No, we cannot trust government. Perhaps we should abolish it altogether and get rid of the danger once and for all.” You can find the full text of Bylund’s article right here.

The Center for a Stateless Society was launched just this week by the Molinari Institute to “publish and distribute news commentary written by anarchists with radically free-market oriented views on economics.” In a press release, MI President Roderick Long said: “It’s time to put market anarchism front and center in our educational efforts, time to start making it a familiar and recognizable position. The Center for a Stateless Society aims to bring a market anarchist perspective to the popular press, rather than leaving it confined to scholarly studies and movement periodicals.” Hear, hear!

The Center operates under the direction of Brad Spangler, who is surely the busiest (and possibly most exhausted) activist now working in our Movement of the Libertarian Left.