Stop (Being Sick) or We'll Shoot!

Written by Wilton Alston

Monday, 26 November 2007 00:00

Imagine sitting in your car desperately in need of assistance. Just in time to offer this assistance, representatives of our servant government come upon the scene. You're saved. Clearly anyone who travels in a vehicle with the words "to protect and serve" painted on the side will, as a matter of standard practice, seek to help you before they seek to punish you for being illegally parked.

Certainly you will be in no danger of being shot, even with something supposedly "non-lethal" like a taser. At least that's what we'd all like to think. But then there is this disconcerting story:

Police in Ozark, Alabama, on Tuesday used a taser on a sober man who was having a diabetic seizure. A trio of police cruisers were called to the scene of a black Nissan truck and trailer pulled over on the side of the road near the intersection of Highway 231 and Marley Mill Road at around 4 pm. James Bludsworth, 54, a man with no criminal record, was slumped over behind the wheel. Because of his condition he was not responsive to police commands.

C'mon. This is a joke, right? There is no way this guy gets tasered by the police. But, let's finish the story:

Police then fired tasers at the sick man three times. A police officer now says that he smelled alcohol on Bludsworth, even though later testing showed no trace of alcohol in his system. Ozark Police Chief Myron Williams also claims the sick man was "combative." Instead of taking Bludsworth to medical care he was booked at Dale County Jail and charged with resisting arrest and driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI). Bludsworth has no recollection of the incident and is free on $1000 bond.

The mind reels!

Free on bond? How can a person minding his own business, guilty of having what can only be termed "a medical emergency" end up having to post bond? It's a hackneyed line, but this is one of those stories about which one must exclaim, "You can't make this stuff up!"

Behavior like this — the actions of these police officers — is only possible under a coercive state. If the police were "a business" they could being sued, or lose customers and market share for this kind of screw-up. They might even go out of business.

The state, though, faces no such risk. Indeed, no matter what abuses might occur, the people must continue to pay for the services of the state, hoping, meanwhile, that they themselves don't end up on the receiving end of similar abuses. Even sending the offending officers in this incident to jail will not curtail the possibility of similar abuses. The actors who perpetrated the crime may be removed and punished, but the dangerous potency of the power of the state that engendered the crime in the first place remains, meaning the potential for future abuse also remains. In an important sense, the "punishment" for such actions can therefore never fit the crime.

On the relationship between state power and justice, noted libertarian theorist Hans-Herman Hoppe observed:

The state is an agent who must be able to insist that all conflict among the inhabitants of a given territory be brought to him for ultimate decision-making or be subject to his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to insist that all conflicts involving himself be adjudicated by him or his own agent. And implied in the power to exclude all others from acting as ultimate judge, as the second defining characteristic of the state, is the agent's power to tax — that is, to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for his services.

There can be few better examples of what Hoppe speaks of than this case. Agents of the State mistreat someone, and other agents of the State adjudicate the dispute. Simultaneously, those who have been harmed pay for the whole thing.

Nice work if you can get it.

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