Who's Got The Energy To Resist?

Mark Steyn has the story of Pierre Lemieux, a Quebecer denied a gun permit because he refused to detail for the Canadian government why he broke up with his last girlfriend. I kid you not. This leads, as everything does these days, to Tocqueville, with his observation that the king, while theoretically in control of everything, rarely actually exercised his power to mess with you on a daily basis. He didn't tell you not to smoke in your own house, that you couldn't grow your own vegetables, etc.

But what would happen, he wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible "to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations"? That moment has now arrived in much of the western world, including America.

This kind of thing can be defeated...but it takes a kind of vigilance few can muster.

The proper response of free men to the trivial but degrading impositions of the state is to answer as Pierre Lemieux did. But it requires a kind of 24/7 tenacity few can muster - and the machinery of bureaucracy barely pauses to scoff: In an age of mass communication and computer records, the screen blips for the merest nano-second, and your gun rights disappear. The remorseless, incremental annexation of "individual existence" by technologically all-pervasive micro-regulation is a profound threat to free peoples. But do we have the will to resist it?

And if you do, won't the media beat you down?