The gangster state. (The Last Word).

"Absent justice," wrote St. Augustine in The City of God, "what are kingdoms but vast robberies?" A recent incident in San Diego illustrates that there isn't nearly enough distance separating the federal government from the criminal underworld. According to the local NBC television affiliate, four gunmen disguised as federal agents conducting a drug raid "invaded a home near the San Ysidro border crossing....Investigators say the gunmen were dressed as agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms."

What is surprising is not that the criminals chose to disguise their home invasion as a federal raid, but rather that this sort of thing hasn't happened more often. Over the past 15 years, no-knock drug raids of the sort mimicked by these criminals have become quite common. The most notorious federal raid, the ATF's 1993 assault on Waco's Branch Davidians, was made possible partly by phony allegations that sect members were involved in drug production.

The October 1992 home invasion murder of multimillionaire Donald Scott offers an even more striking parallel to the recent attack in San Diego. A small army of law enforcement personnel descended on Scott's Malibu, California, ranch without identifying themselves. When Scott pulled a weapon to defend himself, he was shot dead. In March 1993, Ventura County District Attorney Michael Bradbury published a report finding that the fatal raid had been "motivated, at least in part, by a desire to seize and forfeit the ranch for the government." The federal government had coveted Scott's ranch for use in expanding the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

As Albert Nock pointed out in his 1935 book Our Enemy, The State, "the State has [never] shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime." There is an important distinction between government -- meaning the organized enforcement of laws intended to protect individual rights and property -- and the State, which is simply organized coercion stripped of its moral rationale. Those wanting to retain their freedoms, Nock warned, should view "the State's progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that [they] would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional criminal organization."

Many statists insist that the 9-11 atrocity illustrates that big government is a necessary defense against terrorists and similar predators. But the most striking thing about Black Tuesday was how the federal government utterly failed to carry out its most important legitimate function -- namely, protecting our population from foreign aggression. This contrasts sharply with the heroism of state and local police, firemen, and emergency personnel at the Twin Towers, and the breathtaking courage of the patriot-heroes of United Flight 93.

Constitutionalists criticizing federal abuse of power are often labeled "anti-government." This is the exact opposite of the truth. Those espousing that viewpoint are emphatically pro-government -- so much so, that we want to see as many governments as possible dividing power and responsibilities, and keeping each other in check. What we oppose is the alternative -- the effective abolition of local, county, and state governments and their absorption into a monolithic federal state, which in turn would ultimately be subsumed into a global leviathan directed by the United Nations.

Government, uniquely among human enterprises, grows through failure. Thus the federal government, because of its negligence on 9-li, is receiving new powers to regiment American life. And the Bush administration has exploited the tragedy to set the stage for an aggressive war against Iraq. Many conservatives otherwise skeptical about the use of government power suspend critical thinking when dealing with the question of war state-organized killing and destruction in its purest form.

Ironically, the Bush administration's design for "pre-emptive" warfare against Iraq internationalizes a practice that began with our own federal law enforcement agencies. The Bush administration insists that it must take military action against Saddam before he could pose a threat to us. Similarly, the FBI's 1992 assault on the Randy Weaver home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the 1993 federal massacre of the Branch Davidians at Waco, grew out of "pre-emptive" actions by federal agencies against small, eccentric, isolated groups that allegedly could have become threats.

Tony Cooper, a law enforcement consultant who teaches terrorism negotiation skills at the University of Texas-Dallas, warned in 1995: "I see the formation of a curious crusading mentality among certain law enforcement agencies to stamp out what they see as a threat to government generally. It's an exaggerated concern that they are facing a nationwide conspiracy and that somehow this will get out of control unless it is stamped out at a very early stage."

In a free society, government protects citizens from threats against their persons and property. In a police state, government deploys its law enforcement assets to protect itself against the "threat" posed by its own subjects. That's the federal mindset Cooper described in the early Clinton era, and it has become much more deeply entrenched under George W. Bush.