This is a book about liberating passion. What do people who evade federal excise taxes on the manufacture of liquor, push drugs that haven’t achieved FDA approval, and sell weapons designed only to kill other people have to do with that?

What the three examples in the title of this chapter have in common, of course, is that they are all legally and morally dubious. So it might be useful to start with a legal analysis.

We’ll start where I get most of my legal knowledge — movies and TV — in this case from the movie Legally Blonde.

In Legally Blonde Harvard law student, Elle Woods, is asked by a professor if she’d prefer to defend a client charged with a crime that is malum prohibitum or malum in se. In the Latin jargon lawyers use, a malum prohibitum crime is an unlawful act only because someone passed a law against it, as opposed to doing something that is evil whether or not there’s a law passed against doing it, which would be an act that’s malum in se.

Elle tells her professor that she’d prefer to defend clients who are charged with a malum in se offense … because she’s not afraid of danger.

In this chapter I’ll be looking only at malum prohibitum — doing things that may be perfectly fine from a moral standpoint but are crimes because it violates the law.

So I won’t defend murder or theft, but I would defend killing in self-defense or using stealth to take back something which was stolen.

And in this chapter I’ll be talking about people whose love is to defend freedom for freedom’s sake.

How difficult, after all, would it have been for moonshiners in Appalachia — beginning in the 1930’s — to pay federal excise tax, slap on a tax stamp, and by doing so open up their products to huge markets both domestically and overseas? Instead of being one of the poorest regions in the Union, legal moonshine could have made Appalachia the Napa Valley of corn liquor.

So why go to all the trouble to keep their liquor illegal with all the risks and penalties?

For the same reason my friend, Samuel Edward Konkin III, refused to complete his doctorate in theoretical chemistry and go to work for Union Carbide, Monsanto, or Dow. Sheer, freedom-loving orneriness. The moonshiners thrived on risk and the thrill of living their dream. They stood fast on their principles.

No wonder history treats them as folk heroes.

To later generations, marijuana growers and dealers represent the same spirit of liberty. Despite generations of “Just Say No” and D.A.R.E. in every public school, Cheech and Chong — The Breakfast Club — Harold and Kumar — are for generation after generation still icons of American rebellion.

Ever hear of Omega-3 fish oil? Alpha-Lipoic Acid? Vitamin D-3? Mixed-tocopherols Vitamin E? Lycopene? Green tea and white tea? All of them have clinical studies strongly indicating that they have health benefits.

None of these exist, as far as establishment medicine in the United States is concerned. They won’t be covered under your health insurance — or whatever government-approved plan is passed. Doctors aren’t taught about them in medical school and they’re not found in hospital dispensaries. All of them — and many more “health supplements” — originated and have been made available in spite of FDA attempts to control or outright prohibit them.

Clive Amor — a violinist I wrote about in Chapter Seven of this book — was in a major car crash that compressed the ulnar nerve on his left arm and paralyzed two fingers on his left hand, without which it’s impossible to play the violin. He visited every orthopedic expert modern medicine had to offer, and they could do nothing for him. Then Clive visited a chiropractor in Canada and after a single adjustment the feeling and movement returned to Clive Amor’s frozen fingers. This violinist who had studied under Jascha Heifetz was able to play violin again.

Look up Chiropractic in Wikipedia:

The American Medical Association called chiropractic an “unscientific cult” and boycotted it until losing a 1987 antitrust case.

Look up Accupuncture while you’re at it. Here’s the official statement from the American Medical Association — the same cartel that financed TV commercials pushing for more government control over your health care — statement on Accupuncture:

There is little evidence to confirm the safety or efficacy of most alternative therapies. Much of the information currently known about these therapies makes it clear that many have not been shown to be efficacious. Well-designed, stringently controlled research should be done to evaluate the efficacy of alternative therapies.

What chance is there that Chiropractic or Accupuncture will be included in your options when the government gets to decide what therapies are covered and which aren’t?

Want to use a nurse-midwife for natural childbirth instead of an obstetrician, and deliver in a birthing center instead of a hospital? Good luck with that getting paid for by your health insurance.

But you’ll be fined if you don’t buy government-approved private health insurance that doesn’t cover any of these alternative therapies, hunted down by IRS agents, and sent to prison if you “evade” the fine.

Then there are the “merchants of death”: gun manufacturers and dealers. People who sell guns at “gun-law loophole” gun shows. People who took the clear text of the Second Amendment listed in the Bill of Rights at its word — long before the Supreme Court of the United States got around to it — enshrining “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” as an individual right.

Well, since when have free Americans needed permission from nine robed priests to employ their own natural right of self-defense?

I don’t need to get into that much here. Look up two of my other books: Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns and Self Control Not Gun Control.

Why is it that someone who helped you cross the border from totalitarian East Germany to “free world” West Germany from 1961 to 1989 was always looked at as a good guy, but a “coyote” who helps someone escape from the violent narcocracy of Mexico to the “free world” in the United States of America is always looked at as a bad guy?

Why is it that a stock broker who takes a bet over the Internet on whether a stock will go up or down is a legitimate businessman, but a bookie who takes a bet over the phone on a horse race is a criminal?

Ever see the movie Cast A Giant Shadow? Frank Sinatra is portrayed as a hero for playing a pilot who smuggles in guns to Jews fighting the British for Independence. But would a pilot who smuggled in guns to Mexico so people could defend themselves from drug gangsters be portrayed so heroically today?

Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States is there authority for paper currency issued by a cartel of private banks to carry the signature of the Treasurer of the United States and the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States — a cartel that the Treasurer of the United States, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Congress, the Courts, and even the President are forbidden to audit.

Yet if any private bank were to issue gold and silver coins to be circulated as money in the United States, the bankers would be imprisoned, their bank shut down, their gold and silver stocks confiscated, and their customers left as helpless as Bernard Madoff’s victims.

And we’re supposed to believe that it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil?

Next in Unchaining the Human Heart — A Revolutionary Manifesto is Chapter XVII: Banned in Boston