Richard North and Christopher Booker are having a go at the more unpunished sort of looting, by overpaid local council employees. Says North:

Loot a shop, and you go to jail. Loot council tax payers and, if they don't pay up, they go to jail.

I can't remember who said it, but what whoever it was (Kingsley Amis?) said was that the rot set in when they stopped calling the Town Clerk the Town Clerk, and started calling him the "Chief Executive".

LATER: See also this posting, in which trooper Thompson quotes a big chunk from Right-Wing Populism by Murray Rothbard, including this:

Why then did communism implode? Because in the end the system was working so badly that even the nomenklatura got fed up and threw in the towel. The Marxists have correctly pointed out that a social system collapses when the ruling class becomes demoralized and loses its will to power; manifest failure of the communist system brought about that demoralization. But doing nothing, or relying only on educating the elites in correct ideas, will mean that our own statist system will not end until our entire society, like that of the Soviet Union, has been reduced to rubble. Surely, we must not sit still for that. A strategy for liberty must be far more active and aggressive.

Hence the importance, for libertarians or for minimal government conservatives, of having a one-two punch in their armor: not simply of spreading correct ideas, but also of exposing the corrupt ruling elites and how they benefit from the existing system, more specifically how they are ripping us off. Ripping the mask off elites is "negative campaigning" at its finest and most fundamental.

Indeed. I'm not saying I agree with everything in this Rothbard piece, but I do agree with that. But I also believe that if I, and others of my inactive disposition, spread the correct ideas, it is automatic that the kind of people who, unlike me, refer to themselves as "Trooper" are going to want to join in on my side, but more aggressively.