Although the Wyoming Firearms Freedom Act conflicts with existing federal law, the Act is a constitutionally valid exercise of state power. The Act is a manifestation of the doctrines of interposition and nullification espoused by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in the early history of the United States. The Act is also a clear exercise of state sovereignty that comports with the historical development of the Tenth Amendment.

First Reason: Perversion of Incentive
Communism and socialism do not just hope for, but rely on the good of mankind in aggregate to work. In fact, apropos to a previous discussion, all political purveyors of socialism/communism are selling hope and the value received is far less than the value paid out by the buyer. Believing in the current goodness of mankind, or rather in the goodness of every individual such as to expect that he will act in the best interest of others is rank madness. Socialism wrecks the ability for people to appropriately measure value for themselves by robbing them of incentive. When the fruits of labor are taken from a person in order to redistribute them in aggregate to everyone else, including him, he resents the theft of his labor but also comes to reliance upon the redistribution.

Jamestown and Plymouth
In Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s book, How Capitalism Saved America, he recounts the story of two early colonies in America, Jamestown and Plymouth. In both, the settlers were required to function in socialism; private property was not allowed and the settlers were required to toil for the “common good.” Within six months of the founding of Jamestown,

all but 38 of the original 104 settlers were dead, most having succumbed to famine. Two years later, the Virginia Company sent 500 more ‘recruits’ to settle in Virginia and within six months, a staggering 440 more were dead by starvation and disease.

He also recounts an example: if 1 out of 20 people refuses to work but can take as needed from the “common wealth,” he will still be able to maintain 95% of his “income” on average while 19 out of 20 people do their jobs. Once too many people realize they can game the system and do less work for more food at the expense of their fellow man, the system fails, and starvation ensues.

Thankfully, in 1611, a governor traveled to America and realized that the incentive structure for the English colonists was the culprit for the previous death and failure. He instituted private property with a small tax on the fruits of their labors. The people could (only) realize the full fruits of their own labor, and the colony began to thrive, because everyone, self-servingly, worked as much as they needed and desired.

Nature’s stochasticity is a far more potent motivator than government’s contrivances.

Socialism cannot possibly work, because it is axiomatically flawed on the notions that people should be selfless and government is the correct actor to ensure selflessness. Thus, in order to effectuate the schemes of the noble cause of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” violent force is justified as a necessity to make men noble. This brings us to the second fatal flaw: socialism relies on force to make it work. By definition, because humans are amoral in aggregate, force is required to effectuate wealth transfer, because rational actors, on the whole, do not voluntarily give away money without value in return.

The Legal Tangent
In fact, our Anglo-Saxon legal system, particularly in the Law of Contracts, at a fundamental level (modulo all the reforms of the modern era), reflects an innate belief that individuals should receive value for value exchanged. The doctrine of consideration, quid pro quo, a bargained-for exchange of something received for something given, mandates that for a contract to be enforceable, it must have the element of consideration. Courts do not like to weigh the relative values of the “something given” for the “something received” because value is entirely relative to the circumstances of individuals in their own situations, and judges do not usually believe their purview is to monitor or value private contracts. An iPhone may be worth $600 to an early adopter, but only $300 to a later adopter or not worth any expense to someone who does not want one. If there is no consideration, the promise is often viewed as a gift, which is always legally revocable unless the promisee reasonably relied on the promise.

Inherent in the doctrine of consideration is that there must be an exchanged that was bargained for. Bargaining, as a legal term of art, does not mean wrangling, dickering or heavy negotiation is required. What it means is that there is an intention of both parties to exchange things of legal value to which both parties assent. By contrast, a contract forced upon one person by another, i.e., using duress, is voidable by the coerced party later.  Why? Because there was no bargaining. There was an exchange, and it might even be of relatively legal value, but the mere act of force makes the contract voidable by the party who was wronged by the lack of free will. It is not usually discussed in this manner, but duress is really the antithesis of consideration.

Second Reason: Socialism is Violence
Force, of course, is a form of duress, and though the United States now has a long history of employing force to get what it wants from its constituents and other peoples (starting, really, with Alexander Hamilton’s policies of excessive and overwhelming national power), the augmentation of the use of force to transfer wealth is still total anathema to our natural law notions in Anglo-Saxon society of what a fair and right contract is. We should all recognize that force to take wealth away from another person, while justified at a governmental level, is still theft on an individual level. So, while socialism might be noble in its thrust to ensure the welfare of other people, it is pragmatically reliant on the evil of violence to make it work.

Contrast the doctrine of consideration, required in Anglo-Saxon legal systems, with contract laws in civil countries, which do not necessarily recognize the need for consideration. It is not surprising, therefore, that in cultures without a long history honoring the notion of bargain to ensure the satisfaction of parties exchanging value, communism and socialism took root faster, even with our early forays into forced socialism. See Jamestown, supra. Because these political theories are fundamentally based on oppressive force–in contrast to force being used in the name of liberty here, even though liberty does not require it–the doctrine of consideration as an innate part of our culture has been a silent bulwark to such force. Unfortunately, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans seem to not be wide enough . . .

Ironically, the Jamestown/Plymouth colonies are poignant examples from our own history of why a modern socialist government relies on force to effect an economy. The perversion of incentives leading to low production are evident to even the most mindless pro-government drone, which is why modern governments employ force to ensure the “health” of the socialist state.

Of course, labor at gunpoint does not comprise a worthwhile society; it is a Prison.

Vitiating the Counterexample
Naive proponents of socialism correctly point out that the apostolic community of believers in Yeshua (“Jesus”) was the first successful manifestation of communism. I suppose the inherent argument is that if it was good enough for Jesus . . .

The surprisingly overlooked flaw in this counterexample is that the association of believers was entirely voluntary, because at no time did Yeshua command his followers to preach the good news to convert by force. I believe it is a hallmark of Good for people to voluntarily associate and combine their assets and incomes in a manner to synergetically benefit one another. But it is the voluntariness (the “cheerfulness” in scriptural semantics) that makes it noble and good, not the sharing by itself.

Let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not of grief [grudgingly] or of necessity [compulsion], for Elohim loves a joyous [cheerful] giver.

2d Corinthians 9:7 (The Scriptures, Inst. for Scripture Research 1998)

Third Reason: The Corollary of Correct Valuation
Correct valuation of labor in the form of goods and services can only be appropriately calculated by the parties to their own contract. This is definitely a corollary to the observation that incentives remain healthy when individuals have control over their own labor. Only you know what you really need. Only I know what I really need. If we are friends, we may be able to effectively negotiate on behalf of one another and trade for value in a way that satisfies the other person. Of course, we run the risk of not doing so. Why? It is as simple as the fact that we cannot read one another’s minds and perfectly understand one another’s goals.

Multiply that by the billions of transactions that occur daily. Is it even fathomable that a central planner (especially a bureaucratic committee prone to inaction and inefficiency, detached from the reality of life and the harshness of nature) can correctly value the effectuate transactions between hundreds of millions of people? No, such a proposition is patently absurd.

The market is not a controllable system: it is simply the sum-greater-that-its-parts of all value exchanges between the actors in a population. It is more organic than technical, and it is only predictable on an individual level where we can spend time imperfectly analyzing how actors might negotiate and trade value. If you know all about me, you, again, can probably predict how I would want to transact business and for how much money. Of course, that requires time, patience and astute observation to get it right.

Thought Experiment
Let’s assume a central planning committee has the resources to observe each person constantly and to get to a point where it can accurately predict the appropriate value exchange for each person. Let’s assume this observational analysis only takes one minute one time for each person in the country. Let’s also assume each person enters into five transactions daily. For 327,000,000 people, it would require 3,111 man-years to accomplish the analysis to ensure the central planner could have the information necessary to direct the economy. The assumptions for the experiment are prima facie conservative in favor of the theory socialism, of course, and the result is, nonetheless, literally incredible.

One alternative is that the central planning committee simply fails to do what it believes its job is. It is doomed to failure, because “getting it right,” i.e., ensuring maximum wealth in a centrally controlled manner for each person, is impossible. Because no one appropriately small subset of people can correctly evaluate economic incentives for hundreds of millions of people, the wealth transfer is guaranteed to be lopsided and ineffectual. The plight of the Soviet, Chinese, Cuban and several southeast Asian peoples from the twentieth century are evidence of this.

Conclusion
Socialism promotes misery, starvation, violence and murder. The worst that can be said for capitalism is that it allows for poverty due to nature and poverty due to laziness, both of which decrease over time in a free market. All examples of non-voluntary socialism in their stated quest to eliminate poverty only increase it.

The true alternative is that we can simply allow for each person to transact for himself freely. Liberty is the hallmark of a workable economic system. As flawed as capitalism is for relying on man’s self-centered nature, it is paradoxically this reason that makes capitalism pragmatically perfect.

Dear [O.]Shane:

On February 2, I voted against Eric Holder to be the Attorney General.  The top lawyer of our nation should not have an agenda against the Second Amendment and must be able to make difficult legal decisions without falling to political pressure.  Unfortunately, a majority of my colleagues were willing to support this nomination.  The Senate voted 75-21 to confirm Mr. Holder. 

I have been and will continue to be a defender of the right of the people to keep and bear arms.  I am strongly opposed to any limitations on law-abiding gun owners.  While no one condones the purchase and use of guns by felons or high-risk individuals in committing a crime, we cannot improperly hamper the Second Amendment Rights of those who obey our laws.  I believe that we should find out which current gun laws are working to keep the guns out of the hands of criminal, and then make sure that those weapons are enforced.

Thank you for contacting me with your thoughts.  I rely on the ideas and suggestions from the people of Wyoming.

Sincerely,

Michael B. Enzi

United States Senator

The Wyoming Constitution, replicated in Title 97 of the state statutes provides,

The university shall be equally open to students of both sexes, irrespective of race or color; and, in order that the instruction furnished may be as nearly free as possible, any amount in addition to the income from its grants of lands and other sources above mentioned, necessary to its support and maintenance in a condition of full efficiency shall be raised by taxation or otherwise, under provisions of the legislature.

Wyo. Stat. § 97-7-016 (2007) (emphasis added).

Here at the University of Wyoming, the trustees decided several years ago to interpret this provision as guaranteeing tuition “as free as possible” as a provision primarily for resident undergraduates and secondarily for graduate students and non-residents. Before, tuition had been generally adjusted upward at a rate of 3% per annum, but after this decision, the trustees, given that approximately 52% of the student population are resident undergraduates, decided to subsidize the necessary increase in tuition for resident undergraduates by doubling the increase for graduate students and non-residents.

Thus, apparently before I arrived to the law school, my tuition had been raised by 6% from the previous year (excluding a separate allocable increase for the law school itself). Next year it is slated to be 5% and my third year is unknown. Meanwhile, resident undergraduates have been seeing no increases.

Last year, several law students went to the vice president for student affairs and other entities to appeal, post hoc, the increases as unfair, because they favored resident undergraduates at the literal expense of the law students and the rest of our graduate and/or non-resident compatriots. (This year, the group of law students has begun to enter the process in a more timely fashion and in future years expects to have a more significant impact on the way tuition increases are decided. Side note: the pharmacy students expressed similar frustrations, but were all too happy to let the law students argue for them).

Objectively, graduate, professional and non-resident students still have (one of?) the best value(s) for their education in the country. As a transplant from the West Coast, I am thrilled at how inexpensive it is to attend law school and still receive education from excellent professors here in Wyoming. This issue does not raise my ire, because a 6% increase, though non-uniform, is still predicated on and limited by the inexpense of the previous year’s base tuition. Disclaimer: I will be making application for residency, given our full and complete move to Wyoming, but as a professional student, I will still face the same higher percentage increases, just on a lower base.

On the other hand, as a quasi-outsider, I found the discussion very interesting, and though it does not pragmatically upset me, I do logically agree that a system of tuition increases tiered to favor one class of people over another is manifestly unfair, precisely (and definitively) because it is inequitable.

This discussion arose two days ago in a Town Hall meeting held at the law school, and I was privy to a smaller post-meeting discussion in the “break room,” where several students were lamenting the idea that the State Constitution’s equality-in-admission clause and the nearly-free-tuition clause imply that tuition increases should be done uniformly and that the trustee’s have chosen to favor resident undergraduates.

These students are native Wyomingites, so leaving the issue of whether Wyoming should favor residents over non-residents (even as the Equality State) aside, I empathize with their frustration that as professional students, they are expected to bear a greater load of the overall cost of the university than undergraduates, especially when the Wyoming Constitution provides that higher education should be as free as possible.

The Issue

As I was buying a 7-UP, I interjected with something along the lines of, “Tiering costs to favor one class of people over another is unfair. That’s exactly why progressive income taxation is manifestly unfair” (never mind that income taxation, tiering or no, is a form of indentured servitude [read: slavery]).

The student who was speaking immediately responded, “While I am probably inclined to agree with you, let’s not make this discussion political.”

The discussion wasn’t very formal given that we were all running to class anyway and it was among friends and peers, so it is not as if I was derailing the purpose of a meeting by bringing up a larger point.

I found it bizarre that he wanted to cut off my commentary as “political” presumably because it involved taxation. This prompted me to think, given that my analogy was perfectly apt (costs imposed upon a large number of people for a public service with tiering of those costs created to favor one group of people over another), why would his first response be to avoid discussion because my point was “political”?

Agreed: my point was political, but couldn’t one consider tuition increases imposed oligarchically and unilaterally for a group of people (students) reliant upon ongoing (educational) services where switching costs are high to be a political question? Why did he implicitly believe that the question of tuition increase was not political?

Is it a matter of locality? What is it about local issues that cause people to rally around their own just causes to combat perceived or real injustice where national issues are to be avoided as “political”?

This is why civic republicans in the 1770s-1790s believed that the purpose of government, which was to effect the common good by way of virtue, was best effected at the local level with strong, frequent communal interaction. It is true: people who care deeply about rights and wrongs are more apt to try to mend problems locally.

Or is the dichotomy between political and non-political a derivative matter of choice? Government, almost by definition, is a method by which one set of people impose their will upon a larger set of people. Is taxation a “political” question because we have little pragmatic individual choice in the matter once tax rates have been decided whereas tuition increases, though inconvenient, are not “political” because do not prevent a student from switching, i.e. matriculating elsewhere?

(Switching out of the corrupt and overbearing U.S. tax system is nearly impossible).

Again, my point was political, but not just so. I really meant, as I am wont to do, to make a pedagogical point to my fellow students, which was, “Do you understand that the frustration you feel about inequitable tuition increases can and should be applied and augmented when you think about how income taxes are administered in this country?”

Why should the non-residents and graduate students subsidize the resident undergraduates? Thought experiment: imagine many years into the future where tuition increases for non-residents and graduate students had compounded so much that the resident undergraduates were paying about the same amount (~$94/credit hour), but a resident professional student was paying the same amount for law school as law students at higher ranked private schools in the region. What would happen? We would see an exflux of students to go to school elsewhere. The unfairness would have reached an inflection point. This is basic human action, i.e. basic economics. People gravitate toward incentives and move away from disincentives.

Of course, the trustees will never let that happen, because they realize that while a certain amount of unfairness is good for the effecting their political purposes, too much will suffocate the incentive of the students who are subsidizing the preferred class of students. The University of Wyoming trustees are also not predisposed to increasing costs at random and though we may think they are wrong in their interpretation of the Wyoming Constitution, the scenario in the thought experiment will also never occur, because there is no rampant spending outside of the purview of the university.

Contrast this to the federal government, which, with each passing year seems to expose us to more and more obligations for which we have no desire and which have nearly nothing to do with living as Americans. The incentive of the Government is the same, but far more insidious, because its perception of its own scope is limited only as far as the east is from the west. A certain amount of unfairness toward their subjects is good for effecting the myriad and conflicting political purposes of our rulers in Washington. Again, too much will eventually suffocate the incentive of the wealthy and middle class who are subsidizing the poor more and more. In fact, progressive taxation and secret-taxation-by-inflation (the value of the dollar goes down and so do your dollar-denominated investments) will eventually turn the more and more of the middle class to poor. But that may be acceptable to the Government as it attempts to linearly program the maximum amount of power and wealth it can accrue before the system bursts. How long can it squeeze the wealth-makers and job-providers before the system collapses on itself?

Meanwhile, it may be simply easier for me to ignore such intractable politics and simply figure out how I can avoid paying an increase of $1000 next year as a non-resident law student.