Mubarak is reported to have "waived" his right to the Presidency. That would be a resignation, I presume.
There is a lesson in here for all individuals and nations. All governments exist only with the consent of the governed. That consent does not have to be "withdrawn" via unlawful force at-arms or even via the ballot box.
Indeed, it is most-effectively withdrawn when the citizens refuse to go to work!
The Beast of Government exists on tax revenues. ALL governments share this fundamental reality. ALL governments fail when the economic capacity to tax is destroyed. ALL citizens give their consent to their government each and every day by performing economic acts and thereby exposing that activity to taxation.
That taxation forms the essence of the functional capacity to govern. Period.
The people in all nations, at all times, reserve the right and the ability, through peaceful and lawful action, to destroy any government should it fail to comply with their demands and act in a sufficiently-onerous manner, and a minority of the population is all it requires to effect this change. The Soviet Union fell via this mechanism, East Germany fell via this mechanism, and now Egypt has fallen via this mechanism.
No blood and no lawlessness were required.
In fact, it was the pro-government goons that were engaged in violence in an attempt to goad the people into acts that they could then use to "justify" the excessive use of force. The government gassed the protesters. The government was the one shooting people; rifles are prohibited from private ownership in Egypt. The government was, as best we can determine, the one raining Molotov cocktails on the protesters. But the government failed to incite the protesters to violence, who instead maintained their right to starve the government by refusing to provide it with the economic activity it needed to survive.
All persons in all nations should be aware of the fundamental fact that their government, no matter how oppressive, no matter how ugly, no matter how allegedly-free or representative (or not) exists only because you rise from your bed each day and go to work.
The day you stop, along with a sizable fraction of your neighbors and friends, and instead wave signs and demand change, thereby shutting down the engine of commerce is the day you remove through peaceful and lawful means the fuel that the government requires to operate.
Our "protests" in Washington and elsewhere fail to provide results because the "or else" has not been provided along with the protest. We come, we wave signs, and the next day we go home and go to work. If instead any sizable fraction of the population that is, for instance, opposed to ObamaCare or Bankster Theft were to appear, wave signs, and go on strike until and unless the change demanded was made.....
The pundits are all saying this was a "military coup less the shooting." Baloney. This was a popular uprising conducted via economic boycott and it brought down a dictatorial government without violating the law.
Now we see what comes next for Egypt.
If you live in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or any other nation that has an autocratic and dictatorial regime, you now have a blueprint to toss the jackals at the putative head of your nation from their thrones without firing a single shot or drawing a drop of blood.
I challenge the people of the world from Saudi Arabia to Jordan to China to do so.
For those in The United States or other western nations who claim that we are inexorably on a path toward civil disorder or even civil war due to the outrageous looting of our nations that have been conducted by financial interests with the full consent and complicity of our governments, I simply point to Egypt.
I maintain, as I have for nearly four years, that there is another path that is peaceful, entirely lawful, and has just been proved to have efficacy in yet another nation that many said would never lose its Dictator without violence.
Three times the pundits have said this, and three times they have been wrong.
I rest my case.
