Martin Luther King Jr. Day

It seems odd to me that government now has a holy day set aside to honor a man the government actively opposed during his lifetime. Not only did Martin Luther King, Jr. stand in vocal opposition to government policies on race, but he was specifically targeted by the FBI for many years, including attempts to blackmail him to commit suicide. There are also unsubstantiated theories that King's assassination may have been part of a government operation.

On the whole, I tend to favor King's ideas. My disagreements tend to relate to the way King viewed government as a misguided but fundamentally benevolent institution that needed correction. My own view is that government is an illegitimate organization that has usurped every authority it claims. I also disagree with his economic diagnoses and prescriptions. While King was not a communist, he did tend to favor socialism. I suspect this is due to the false dichotomy presented to Americans of choosing between state-sponsored corporate cartels as "capitalism" and state control of industry as "socialism." Nowhere is there room for liberty. I would like to think that he could have seen the distinctions offered by Austrian economic theory and the opportunities in the free market as the best avenue to lift minorities out of poverty and into economic self-sufficiency. It cannot be emphasized enough that segregation was government law first and foremost, and these laws existed to punish people of any color who wanted to work toward integration independently.

But in the grand scheme of things, these are really minor quibbles. Whatever his personal failings and intellectual shortcomings in certain areas, he was still a profound voice for freedom. Government has monopolized justice, and is wholly responsible when justice was (and is today) denied to any unfavored group. While segregation is a thing of the past, the War on Drugs remains today like when it was established as a way to disproportionately target minorities.

Unless politicians are pandering for votes, black Americans in particular are treated like incompetent wards of the State. As C.S. Lewis said of would-be omnipotent moral busybodies, "This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be 'cured' against ones will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals." I think King would agree with that assessment, and be as appalled at the way minorities are treated today as he was in his own time. After all, he was well aware that "laws" were used as a control mechanism rather than as a means to safeguard liberty then, and little has changed in principle despite the veneer of equality.

...One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality ...

[...]

We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws ...

-Excerpted from Letter from a Birmingham Jail, by Martin Luther King Jr.