Two American-born citizens with military experience, one a veteran and the other a current soldier, committed public mayhem at the start of the new year: veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar in New Orleans and decorated Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger in Las Vegas – the first The case is much more destructive and deadly. Both events raise troubling questions about why these individuals acted as they did (as far as we know). The causes are probably complex. In each case there may be one cause that can be called the most important, but it is doubtful whether we can ever isolate a single cause. sine qua non cause.
This is not the way politics (the process by which people are governed on a daily basis) typically approaches the issue. Consider the following as alternative root causes:
- Military experience;
- Access to motor vehicles;
- Haitians who eat pets;
- The southern border;
- The supply chain;
- Sagittarius A*the black hole at the center of our Milky Way.
The newly elected President of the United States opted for the fourth statement – see “Trump doubles down on border security amid domestic terror unrest,” Wall Street JournalJanuary 2, 2025:
Even after it emerged Thursday that 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar was not in the rented truck when it crossed the border, Trump still blamed the current administration.
“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy,’ I have often said at rallies and elsewhere that radical Islamic terrorism and other forms of violent crime in America will become so bad that it will be difficult to even imagine or believe, Trump wrote on Thursday. “That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”
An ancient philosopher would have difficulty identifying this statement with a state pursuing the “social good.” What I have called “simplistic public policy” seems to be a default outcome of politics, when that is not simply the case random nonsense as William Riker would have said. Public choice theory tries to explain why. James Buchanan, one of the key concepts of this part of the analysis, also developed a model of the state in which there is a stage (the ‘constitutional stage’) where politics can be rational and useful as a multi-party system in which each individual has a veto over the rules that restrict daily politics. Whether or not one agrees with this justification of the state, it is an impressive attempt to reconcile politics and freedom.
Of the possible root causes I listed above, #1 seems to be the most rational. Quite a remarkable one Wall Street Journal report just raised the issue of military personnel or veterans engaging in acts of public violence (Vera Bergengruen, Nancy A. Youssef, and Tawnell D. Hobbs, “‘I only knew one thing’: the New Year’s violence revives the dark side of military life“, January 6, 2025:
“Transitioning from the service is probably one of the most challenging things an individual can do,” said retired Army Lt. Col. Sam Andrews, who serves on the board of directors of Bravo Zulu House, a transitional housing facility for veterans with disabilities. post status. -traumatic stress disorder and addiction. “We lose our sense of purpose, we lose our sense of tribe, we lose our sense of meaning.” …
According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or Start, nearly 16% of extremists who have committed crimes in the US since 1990 had a military background.
If argued by HayekThe ‘tribal feeling’, for which collectivism (and nationalism) represents the modern form, is a mortal enemy of the free society. The military defenders of a free society should instead be instilled with a sense of individualism, a difficult task when that sentiment is shunned in society. And how is this compatible with what is required of soldiers faced with individual death? Nevertheless, the defenders of a free society should certainly not be trained as ‘killing machines’ what Mr. Trump wrote in a 2019 tweet. These considerations raise a Gordian knot of related problems, including “eternal wars,” the need to defend freedom by force against international criminals, and perhaps the inevitability of a militarily powerful and freedom-oriented state capable of informally to play a role as an international gendarme. given the extreme danger, if not impossibility, of a world state. An alliance of states representing free or hopefully largely free individuals, such as NATO, could be another part of the solution to the puzzle (see my libertarian fable on that).
Crude political expressions are not the solution.
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