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27. Janvāris 2014
04:45 - The Most Dangerous Superstition
“We’ll do a shakedown of your neighbors and use what we get to pay for things you want your kid going to school, fixing the roads, stuff like that. We have to keep a cut ourselves, of course. And tell us how you wish your neighbors would behave, and we’ll make sure they behave that way. If they don’t do what we say, we take their stuff or stick them in a cage.”
If average people made such an offer, they would be condemned for their attempted thuggery, But when the same things are proposed in a campaign speech by someone running for a position in “government,” and when such things are done in the name of vague political abstractions such as “the common good” or “the will of the people,” they are seen not only as allowable but as noble and virtuous. When the politician says, “We need to provide adequate funding for our children’s education, and we need to invest in our infrastructure,” he is literally talking about forcibly taking money away from the people (via “taxes”) and spending it the way he thinks it should be spent. Such aggression is accepted as justified when done in the name of “authority,” but recognized as immoral if done by mere mortals. This shows that, in the mind of the statist, “government” is something more than a collection of human beings. Paradoxically, the statist will insist that everything that “government” is allowed to do, and everything it is, comes from “the people.” All belief in “government” requires the absurd, cult-like belief that, by way of pseudo-religious political documents and rituals (constitutions, elections, appointments, legislation, and so on) a bunch of mere mortals can conjure into existence an entity that possesses superhuman rights – rights not possessed by any of the people who created it. And once the people hallucinate the existence of such a thing, they will eagerly beg that thing to forcibly control and extort their neighbors. People recognize that mere mortals have no right to do such things, but truly believe that the deity called “government” has every right to do such things.
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