"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-ridden, regulated, penned up, indoctrinated, preached at, checked, appraised, seized, censured, commanded, by beings who have neither title, nor knowledge, nor virtue. To be governed is to have every operation, every transaction, every movement, noted, registered, counted, rated, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, refused, authorized, endorsed, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected."
– Proudhon
If formal human governments did not exist, there would be no legitimized pecking-order forum for anyone to control other people's lives by force. This is not to say that human nature would be instantly transformed were governments to disappear. There may always be those who seek to rob, defraud, dominate, or injure others. The point is that in a stateless society the enormous cover of the almighty state, which enables a few "rulers" and "officials" to engage in nefarious actions against a vastly larger number of people from behind the refuge of law and officialdom, would not exist. Without the power positions of governments, there would be no respectable context for anyone to use force to play God, Robin Hood, and Social Engineer. As it is, such hubris is the norm in the world.
Divinity
Governments behave as though they created and owned life and had the transcendent right to regulate it as they wished. Politicians seem to think that humanity exists due to the courtesy of the state, not the reverse. When society is organized by a government, the state is made reality and individuals are relegated to abstractions.
Politicians do not have the omniscience or ethical right to play God. Through the state, however, they endlessly think and act otherwise.
Generosity
For governments to emulate Robin Hood – rob the rich to give to the poor – is often considered to be wise, caring, and necessary. It is compassionate to care about people less fortunate than oneself, and people today reflexively turn to government to render assistance. The case against government "help the poor" programs, however, is existential, ethical, and economic.
Existence
Political implementation of the Robin Hood syndrome functions on the premise that difficulties in people's lives do not originate from within themselves and that real cures consist of individual change and development, but are to be solved by government, i.e. bureaucrats, tax collectors, guns, fines, prisons, clubs, police, armies, etc. People expect the state to do and solve things that its mechanics not only cannot accomplish but perforce exacerbate. Seeking solutions to life problems from governments is as puerile as a mother petitioning government: "Please repeal the law of gravity, or make it exist only according to my convenience. My child fell and skinned his knees. I don't want that mean, nasty gravity to get away with it or be able to do it again."
Contrary to its purported purpose, state assistance retards people's life growth. One cannot be honorable, truthful, and self-reliant while at the same time dependent on political processes. If one does not "dig a little deeper in the well" he may remain perpetually thirsty, regardless of events in the external world. Those who believe that the succor of government is spring water eventually find that they have ingested corrosive acid instead.
Reality is a jealous god. It says: "If you don't get it from me, where are you going to go to get it? And what are you going to have if you think you have gotten it?" Poverty is primally mental and spiritual. The limiting factor in abundance is not existence itself, which is unbounded and inexhaustible. Inability to manifest cornucopia is a function of people's states of being, not lack of political wealth re-distribution programs. In "Self Reliance," Emerson wrote:
But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men.
Standstill in life is regression because life moves ever on and on in endless growth, expansion, and non-repeating newness. One must keep pace with his life imperative to grow and progress. Capital must likewise be placed to constructive, wealth-creating uses or it declines and dissipates. To finance limitless needs through legal plunder and think that the spurious process constitutes true elevation of people is the epitome of stupidity, and as Schiller wrote: "Against stupidity the very gods themselves struggle in vain."1
Ethics
The state cannot engage in political philanthropy without enlarging its management of society, i.e. proliferating laws, taxes, and bureaucracies. Once this path is entered on, expansion of government to satisfy the needs of those seeking aid is inexorable. There is clamor to increase the amount of benefits, relax eligibility requirements, multiply the number of recipients, and institute additional forms of relief. Everyone with problems begins to look to government for help.
The motives underlying wealth re-distribution programs are inferior aspects of human nature. Receiving government "benefits" stems from larceny, laziness, ignorance, self-deception, envy, or false belief that "society" owes one the "right" to be taken care of. Who owes whom what "right?" Who pays? Who decides? Those administering poverty programs engage in philanthropy with stolen money. They indulge in a false omniscience that assumes they know what is right for everyone, are entitled to be designers of the process, and achieve their ends by theft under color of law.
The U.S. political system is now a mountain of legally established envy, vindictiveness, false dependency, and negation of rights. America has become a nation of large and small parasites, all wards and faithful administrators of the agenda of the Great Parasite, dragging themselves, and any hope for a just rule of law, down into the entangling muck of their mutual making. Politics extends to ever more groups, needs, and causes the privilege of using law to live at the expense of others. Approximately half of the U.S. Federal budget consists of such rip-off / re-distribution "entitlements." Bastiat summed up the illusion in his famous comment:
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.2
In flat-out abnegation of human dignity, so many groups one can no longer count them clamor to government: "My cause. My need. My race. My age. My sex. My business. My group, faction, or clique. Let the state grant me special consideration. Never mind that it transforms law into a device to diminish others for my betterment. Let others bear the hardship, re-make their lives, re-orient their actions, pay the costs, contort their situations into the pretzels of my ego configurations so my desires can benefit in excess of what I give in exchange at the expense of equal rights under the law."
It is illogical and immoral to think that legally stealing from producers to give to the poor is care and compassion. To proceed on such a course precludes all hope for a sound society. It throws away freedom that millions shed their blood to preserve, disintegrates the basis of productivity, erodes the foundation of law, civilization, and societal coherence, and hands over life to management of the state whose core and mechanics are totalitarian.
The most sinister aspect of "social justice" is the ruthlessness of those who want power, and use benevolent-sounding schemes as vehicles to build up the legislative and bureaucratic infrastructure to administer it. Welfare and wealth re-distribution programs are parts of the agenda of those who wish to use law as the means to capture the country.
Through the totalitarian farce called the "War on Drugs," and guises like "National Health Care," the U.S. Government institutes measures that would make the most totalitarian dictators in history green with envy.3 Madison's insight that the state uses every contingency to increase its own power is eternally apt. Aesop penned the same insight 2,500 years ago: "Any excuse will serve a tyrant,"4 including tyrants with benevolent appearing faces uttering high-sounding political rhetoric.
Heaped on top of the preposterous premise that a government owns people's lives so as to dictate what they can and cannot put in their bodies, the state extracts billions of dollars from the productive sector to finance its destructive and porous "War on Drugs." Enormous purloined resources are spent on massive interventions to "help" people. State "help" consists of taxes, violence, fines, and prisons. It is savage help.
Government has no right to expropriate some people's money to "help" others, for drugs or anything else. Politicians are fallible beings, with varying capacities to manage their own lives, and do not know what constitutes true help. More importantly, they have no right to trash truth, justice, and law by perverting legal force from protector into systematic destroyer of universal rights. Politicians nevertheless impose conjured-up schemes on diverse people whom they do not know, at expense of abrogating the rights and stealing the resources of others whom they also do not know, and none of whom they own. In terms of what is genuinely necessary for each individual's unique experiential, mental, moral, and spiritual growth they are completely in the dark.
While children are supported by adults, adults are responsible for themselves. Adults are meant to be self-responsible and are not children to be parented and punished by Daddy Government. Government, whose only power is guns and source of revenue is legal plunder, has no right to "care for" anybody. Such it can attempt only by stealing from those who have exercised their self-responsible adulthood. Rights cannot emanate from organized piracy. Benefits and privileges cannot issue from a morally and financially bankrupt source devoid of legitimacy and resources to bestow them.
Freedom provides opportunity for everyone – including the "common man" – to own wealth and property and find his way in life. Providing a clear and stable context in which that may occur is enough for any use of law. Exceeding that to utilize official violence to attempt even the most generous, compassionate, and well-meaning objectives is to dissociate law from its only valid reason for having right to force in the first place – to protect rights to life, freedom, and property.
Because of free will everyone is obliged – and privileged – to make his own choices – to think, feel, speak, act for himself, and be responsible for his life. No one can sanely and justly live by the premise: "I want to do whatever I want, but at the same time I want government to take care of me, decide for me, support me, be responsible for me, pick up the pieces when I make mistakes or have problems." As Shaw wrote: "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."5 It is schizophrenic to demand personal freedom combined with an insistence that the law be used to compensate for the consequences of personal folly.
Eric Hoffer wrote: "There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail."6 If one wants to trade freedom for dependency and security let him be enslaved through voluntary arrangements with others of his own choosing. To enforce the exchange by law is to enslave all society.
The world is replete with people who crave dominating others, and are delighted to use the state to provide "the masses" with all sorts of "benefits" and promises of "security" in exchange for being able to rule them. People are robbed by legal force to finance their own subjugation. Politicians seek office expressly on that basis: "Vote for me, turn over responsibility for your lives to me, and I will take care of you." To acquiesce to such external control is to forfeit one's birthright. Once capacity for self-determination is surrendered, people must petition, lobby, agitate, plead, and even fight for scraps of the freedom, rights, and resources they foolishly exchanged for the counterfeit security of government care.
One cannot have it both ways. The desire to be free and taken care of at the same time is at best self-delusion and at worst falling for the insidious con of those who would "rule." As a result of perpetuating this course, the verbiage and trappings of liberty continue while freedom is gutted and power transferred to the state. This has moved America desperately – if not hopelessly – down the "road to serfdom."
Political power perpetuates itself because large numbers of people remain unaware and apathetic. The fundamental problem is ever accepting the institution of the state at all. Arguing about its use after "legitimacy" is established is too late. Men of great power, cleverness, and wealth have the knowledge and wherewithal to use the force machinery of government in ways that the masses cannot even conceive. Nor can "the people" have access to the actual truth. Like good little serfs, they simply go along, thinking they are free because their con-men slavemasters keep telling them so. Those who control government placate the masses by re-cycling the people's wealth while at the same time siphoning off immense amounts into unknown and inaccessible coffers.
The system is designed so that those outside of government, i.e. "ordinary citizens," have no accessibility to what is truly going on. Worse than disinterest is the arcane mentality that implicitly thinks that man must be ruled by other men. Those who take for granted that governments must exist are psychologically disarmed in advance. So long as people think governments are necessary, that the state is a source of protection and surety and one is safe being a sheep under official shepherding, the grand swindle will continue.
Johnson wrote: "I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual."7 This is not exactly true, as some governments are more virulent than others. The debate is about degrees and styles of harm, or "whose ox gets gored." The point is that people deserve to live without having to be preoccupied with the interminable hassles and hardships of political rule.
Economics
Nations can spend themselves into dissolution trying to eliminate poverty by political means, but the attempts are far worse than futile. The U.S. has spent trillions of dollars on the "War on Poverty." As the joke goes: the war is over – the poor lost. That money is enough to have made everyone in the country rich. Instead, America has more poor and homeless than ever and the productive sector has less resources than otherwise. The aggregate effect is net reduction in the wealth, initiative, freely exercised abilities, and options that would have been available for truly solving problems. Money has been parasitically and wastefully re-cycled on grand scales. How can anyone believe that such a course can elevate society, end poverty, or result in anything but net decrease in capital and character?
If governments persisted with all the might, power, and resources they could muster, and continued to the end of time, they would never solve the problems of the poor by stealing from the rich. Diminishing producers to subsidize non-producers erodes wealth-creation itself and makes the situation intractably worse. It secures poverty along with falsehood, blame, and dependency. Poverty cannot be eradicated by confiscating wealth – anyone's wealth. The poor must learn to create wealth, which they do naturally when people are free.8
Many people want to help the poor and needy. The state wants power. Instituting that combination of wants is calamity. In the end it affects most adversely the very poor the efforts are intended to help. State programs to help the poor preempt actions which are genuinely required to elevate people from poverty and establish overtly impoverishing, wealth-destroying processes. Resources are drained from the heart of the productive sector and dissipated while incentives to create wealth are discouraged. Capacity to undertake increased productivity is diminished and opportunities for people to work their way out of poverty are preempted. People are "given fish" instead of "learning to fish," so nothing changes but deepened expectation of being taken care of and re-enforcement that they deserve the care.
As an example, in 1986 there were some 965 Federal programs trying to wage the "War on Poverty." These total about $160 billion a year.9 Combined state and Federal welfare totals $682 billion a year. Who can say the figure to which matters have escalated by now? These programs increase and deepen poverty by mis-allocating capital to finance weakness, dependency, and non-growth in recipients.10 In addition to countless other ills, the capital squandered is no longer available for increasing productivity, which is the source of jobs as well as more and better goods at less cost. Government programs decrease the crucial build-up of capital vs. population, the only basis of genuine economic increase for the poor.
One quarter of the U.S. population is now supported by the remainder. There are whole groups of poverty welfare recipients, many of whom have been so for five generations or more. When producers are robbed to finance non-producers the aggregate wealth is much less than had those who generate wealth been left with their resources to create further benefit to society, and those "helped" had worked, contributing to increase in productivity instead of receiving something for nothing. The entire society is far poorer as a result.
It is not necessary to tear anybody down to build anyone up. Tearing down the strong does not build up the weak. It tears down the law, the economy, and society in general. If people would understand that, the world would be on its way to being liberated from its morass. Anyone can be communicated and exchanged with on his own level, however modest his situation may be, and matters built up from there.
Politicians proclaim that it is good, sound, wise, and compassionate to "shore up" economic "losers" in society. But if people are economic "losers" it is because the unending election of the market is voting them out of office. It is the rest of the planet financially telling them that their current activities are not in demand and that they should change their endeavors to produce what other people want or need and are voluntarily willing to purchase. That is not cruelty. It is reality and dependability. It is the only real data upon which people can make valid decisions and base their lives. It forms the only solid foundation on which society and economy can subsist. Substituting state "help" for freedom replaces the obligation and responsibility to discern true criteria with necessity to be absorbed in managed cocoons of false information. People then compute and rely on political policy instead of true economic data. That is not compassion. It is the catastrophe of replacing integrity with structured quicksand.
Whatever is subsidized tends to increase and become entrenched. Government "benefits" do not subsidize only the receivers of largess. They also subsidize non-productivity, the "legitimacy" of non-work, stagnation, and the legal rip-off / re-distribution processes involved in implementing the programs.
The key to economic and social progress is for people to be free. Where freedom flourishes the standard of living for those at the lowest level of the economic scale increases at the greatest rate possible. Human creativity and energies are the most liberated and have the greatest incentive and opportunities for being realized. When capital and capital goods are increased by private producers, all society – the "public" and the "poor" – are automatically enriched by increasing the ratio of total capital to population.
–
To summarize, when the poor are "helped" by government:
What people receive has no root in their being. Both they and those whose duty it might be to help them have defaulted on courses that would provide genuine increase. Recipients have not initiated self-help or been exchanged with in mutually beneficial ways that draw out actions into constructive areas and help integrate their lives with viable social and economic networks. Time goes on while people default on the growth needed to keep up with their life development. Everyone is poorer as a result.
Obtaining benefits from government makes people indebted to the source of the largess, which is those who actually earned the wealth and the process of legal theft which transferred it.
Rip-off / re-distribution programs deplete wealth creation, increase poverty, and render the ability to cure economic want more intractable.
Poverty programs destroy the foundation of law as equal protector of universal rights and thereby annihilate justice.
Political efforts to help the poor infuse existentially false and ethically wrong premises into the social order, some of which are:
It is valid to use the law to steal to gratify needs.
It is "caring" to provide people with an official context and pretext to forsake self-responsibility.
Receiving political largess is legally equivalent to working (perhaps even superior, since people who work are taxed – penalized – to pay money to those granted the privileged status of being free of the onus of work).
Foisting responsibility to care for the needy onto the state satisfies what moral imperative may exist to exert direct and genuine care oneself.11
The ruts, beliefs, self-limitations, and vagaries of the "poor" are the fault of "society," the "system," or some particular sub-groups of the community (e.g. race, sex, or economic station), and such deficiencies can genuinely be rectified by forcing "society" to compensate for them.
Anyone is entitled to project his source of guidance, care, and support onto government, which is in turn authorized and able to rectify matters by its specious means.
The government has genuine knowledge as to what truly should be done, and the right to finance its alleged omniscience with legally stolen money.
It is proper to translate envy, vindictiveness, and theft into law, and the process creates a sounder, happier, more prosperous society.
The "haves," simply by having, are obligated to "help" the "have-nots," absolving the receivers of relating directly and honorably with their coerced benefactors. Recipients are thereby able to gain from others without the necessity to communicate, cooperate with, get to know, or find ways to be of use to them. This implies that those who want things are entitled to pervert the law to steal from strangers.
Society is infused with the illusion that problems have truly been solved – that the results are sound and real – when no one has fathomed the reasons for the poverty or what the poor themselves – or others – should truly be doing about achieving genuine solutions.
Cause / effects workings of natural law can be obviated and superseded when undertaken as "official" actions of governments, so that no harmful consequences accrue to anyone for engaging in rip-off / re-distribution programs.
Robin Hood might have been a heroic concept back in pre-Capitalist times when all states were founded on conquest, "nobles" were granted property and position by rulers, and the "common people" were fixed in their subservient stations by the ruling classes who did indeed live at their expense. Then the wealth of the wealthy really was the cause of the poverty of the poor. Such is diametrically opposite to the situation that pertains in freedom, where economic success can result only from benefiting people as consumers. Those who want to turn the state into Robin Hood have not un-learned concepts that were perceived as invalid several centuries ago.
Technology
Using the state to attempt to create a fair, equitable, and orderly society has been called "social engineering." The point of all engineering is functional efficiency and structural integrity. In society, the operational unit is the individual, upon whom all political "engineering" impinges and must alter and control. "Social engineering" attempts to apply the technological method suitable to objective matter to spiritually autonomous, living beings, implying that people are meant to be cogs in state-run machines for the purpose of being structured, molded, and manipulated by the state into conformity with the abstract designs of the social "engineers" – legislators and bureaucrats.
The philosophy of social engineering is intellectual error by regarding people as merely mechanical matter to be owned and controlled by states, as opposed to sentient spiritual beings to be fulfilled in the diversities of their unique natures and destinies. Statists seem oblivious to the fact that everyone is a free-will being who belongs to existence and himself (and the Source thereof) and not political ant-hill efforts to manage or transform mankind.
In practice, political efforts to design society interfere with the natural expression of people's lives, forcing them to be split between obeying the state's dictates vs. acting in accordance with the myriad daily choices and actions involved in fulfilling their lives. Man is legally mandated to chase two hares at the same time – one going in the direction of the state and the other in the direction of his life.
The "liberal" ethical and intellectual foundation is a chimera. It exhorts no one to self-reliance, self-actualization, or finding eternal principles, strength, depth and substance within oneself. It inspires no one to achieve through honorable means or pursue virtue and self-determined duty. It seduces and coerces people away from growth to genuine stature, dignity, and manhood, promising security and well-being through dependency on bureaucratic plunder complexes, i.e. "government." It is astonishing that anyone can tolerate such degenerate deceit, let alone laud it as virtue and make it into "law."
It is highly questionable whether anyone has a right to tell other people how they should or should not live their lives. Everyone has an inherent relationship with life. It may be safe to say: "I don't care what your life-style is so long as you don't harm others and constructively earn what it takes for you to live as you wish. That includes paying for the consequences of your choices. What is wrong is to abnegate stewardship of your own life and demand that 'society' pay for your laziness, ineptness, carelessness, immorality, or profligacy. To do so uses the law to steal from other people to pay for your inability or unwillingness to support the way you insist on living." Tolerance for human weaknesses and vagaries is one thing. Using the law to steal from third parties to subsidize people's foibles and deficiencies is something else altogether.
Those of the Right are wrong in eradicating "civil" liberties to impose their versions of morality (generally derived from some alleged source of higher revelation). They confuse "sin" or "vice" with crime, and further compound their errors by assuming they have the right to be the decision-makers concerning other people's moral choices. The Left is remiss when removing freedom and economic rights under guise of philanthropy and using the law to steal from some to compensate for the alleged insufficiencies of others. Even if undertaken for "noble" motives, both are hubris. Both assume unwarranted omniscience and unjustified authority. Both transform the law into a thief and dictator to insist that their perspectives prevail. Both provide alleged benefits to some at expense of loss to others. Both use the law that should be safeguarding rights to eliminate them. The issue is not who should have the power to decide such matters for everyone. The point is that no one should.
The law is meant to safeguard against and rectify transgressions by man against man, not inflict them. Through government, society becomes a mass of people deprived of rights and / or resources for the sake of being "benefited." Everyone has just cause for anxiety when power is used beyond his control in ways contrary to his nature, wishes, and moral principles, especially when he is legally robbed to finance the process. Nobody seems to generalize to the self-evident fact that the system is structural abuse of power and hopelessly invalid regardless of any variants in itself.
Government exists on the basis of attempting to effect such false premises as:
Truth is convention, consensus, or whatever the state says it is.
The state has legitimate right to enforce the above error by law.
Government policies and programs can successfully effect the expected results through the coercive mechanics by which the state must necessarily attempt to achieve its purported goals.
Existence is unending living diversity. Let those who wish to live in particular ways do so and leave other people with the same right. Nobody owns anybody, let alone everybody. Existence itself imparts the consequences of violating its laws. Political intercessions attempt to administer consequences which only natural law can accurately dispense, thereby eliminating the possibility for people to learn by themselves. Politicians officially lie by saying: "We, the government, are your deity. Reality and its consequences reside in us and our policies, not existence and your own being. You have no right or power to relate to, learn from, or seek your identity in life by your own volition, on the basis of your own autonomy, and with respect to your own priorities. We have usurped all that, replacing your duty and freedom to relate to and learn directly from life with your legal obligation to submit to us as your God." That is criminal megalomania.
Social engineering abandons and perverts reason. The intellect is not used to discern truth, i.e. perceive things as they are, but to legislate. Instead of being a tool to understand existence, the intellect is deployed to dream up patterns and priorities to which existence must be made to conform. As a result, the artificial structures of governments are repeatedly dashed against the rocks of reality. Like characters in cartoon movies, the consequences of their machinations collide with the cliffs of existential law again and again and again. Incapable of abandoning the futility of trying to make illusion and arrogance triumph over the workings of given existence, politicians reflexively impose their dreams and schemes, hoping to implement social orders of which they are the designers. Civilizations perish through man's folly of trying to replace what is real, right, and actually works with political programs that "sound good."
There is no configuration freedom could assume that believers in governments would not think needs "correction." Bureaucratic management is proposed as the remedy for whatever statists define as problems. In the process they castigate the free market – the "cruel forces of laissez faire" – as responsible for social inequity and poverty when economic freedom is the only real means to achieve true economic progress. Society suffers not from the free market but from not nearly enough of it. The real "war on poverty" is waged continuously in the marketplace by everyone thinking, working, creating, innovating, trading, communicating, and contributing in accordance with the drive for more innate in all life. Only that aggregate growth can raise the overall level of prosperity and options in society to the place that poverty, and the countless other problems governments speciously attempt to solve, no longer exist.
When planners say the free market is "unfair," "unequal," "too anarchic," they mean that society is not a state-run anthill that they can configure and manage. Statists are emotionally and intellectually unable to comprehend and rely on anything but coercion as the means to try to achieve results and solve problems. They are unable to "let go" and trust other people and the innate nature/thrust of life to unfold sound, integrated, self-existing solutions. They refuse to understand that life is infinitely beyond their capacity – or right – to grasp, contain, comprehend, and configure. They do not recognize that every expression of life has a nature, purpose, and course of its own, not to mention an unfathomable, non-comprehensible spiritual essence and origin. Statists hate plenitude, diversity, and freedom because such expansiveness places matters beyond their control.12 It is infuriating to political mentality when people are not objects for government management but are instead free, autonomous beings doing what they wish rather than being subservient, predictable parts in centrally directed socio-economic systems. Life is meant to breathe, not be smothered and buried alive under mountains of officialdom.
Marcuse summed up the statist mentality: "What I like I accept and recognize as real: the rest be damned." What people oriented to power cannot control they mis-trust or hate. No amount of external control, however, can encompass or re-constitute the inaccessible depths and extents of existence, which unfold and influence everything. Political efforts to form immanent rational world orders for the relief of man's estate are as futile as jousting with the ether – and far more destructive.
Perpetually applying force to try to make a state's order prevail over the infinitely complex vastness of life ties up great numbers of people as bureaucrats, agents, police, courts, etc., instead of freeing them for constructive endeavors. "Social justice" saps the productive sector to pay for a writhing mass of meddling parasites. Life becomes split between being inner and outer directed, between people living to fulfill their lives vs. having to abandon genuine choices to comply with state directives. The approach creates inefficiency, degeneracy, and aberration, which is poor engineering.
Politics is retarded, having not learned from either science or wisdom. Science would show that political processes are futile and injurious; wisdom would reveal that governments' natures and methods, by both reason and natural law, are illicit. Whether rationally constructed or un-disguised despotism, all states are expressions of tyranny. No matter how they are organized, rationalized, and refined, governments remain vestiges of sub-human obsolescence, superstitious remnants of past dark ages of barbarism and ignorance.
The 19th Century was characterized by a mania to devise "billiard ball" mechanistic models of everything (including politics and economics). Politics does not begin to do justice even to Newtonian conceptions of reality, let alone the far more advanced understandings of quantum mechanics. Beyond that, the subtle, inwardly unbounded and inscrutable wonder of living existence infinitely surpasses any state's worldview. Political efforts to manage society are as fatuous as the Three Stooges trying to repair super-computers with hammers and wrenches.
The "macro phenomena" with which politics deals are abstractions of aggregate accumulations of inconceivable numbers of micro phenomena that have already taken place to produce particular situations called "macro." To assume that such ever-changing immensities are things in themselves, which can be contained, comprehended, and manipulated is to try to capture the mist.
Efforts to configure some macro-situation, e.g. the "economy," "poverty," or "homelessness," are crude assaults on an infinity of micro-situations that planners would like to have seen spontaneously emerge to produce the desired macro-results. State efforts to effect large-scale changes in society are impositions and interferences that do not (and cannot) achieve their objectives. They falsify life and disintegrate the market. Better the vagaries of people remain within free and individual realms and be changed and improved from out of themselves. If governments disallow change, learning, and growth to take place on individual micro levels, the accumulated distortions and interferences will build up to macro re-adjustments of considerably greater magnitudes.
Statists are psychologically incapable of leaving things alone, unable to abandon their insatiable drive to dominate and interfere. Everyone has infinitely more right to his life than politicians have to fool around with it. Until people themselves disavow the state and reclaim their birthright, the game will continue. Those with power are not going to abnegate it unilaterally.13
Were mankind relieved of governments, everyone would be astonished to see that what was accomplished in freedom not only surpassed any state's wildest dreams, but unfolded such a cornucopia of abundance and options that governments would be transparently perceived as the crude, arrogant constriction / suppression-institutions they are. Those who want to rule others would be required to fulfill their lives by contribution and service, or at least be deprived of a respectable context to succeed by legal domination. Helping in freedom along with everyone else is sufficient. Would-be "rulers" may safely abandon trying to be like St. Augustine before his conversion and try to fit all society into their own minds.
No one owes allegiance to any state "authority," despite tradition, mass consensus, and incessant brainwashing to the contrary. One's real duty is to his own integrity, freedom, and well-being, as he is the only one with right to and responsibility for his life. It is criminal to require people to live according to conjured-up laws and dictates. Everyone is innately obligated to manage his life to the best of his ability, not to harm others, and make recompense for his transgressions to the extents possible. States, despite common dogma to the contrary, are not necessary to bring about such worthy priorities, and in fact cannot ever do so.
Technology may work well with inert matter and / or closed systems, but is totally inappropriate for trying to encompass and manage the aliveness of life, the unbounded totality of existence, or an open-ended diversity of people with free will and an inscrutable spiritual dimension. People are not clay to be molded. Man's living mechanics are not merely mechanical. They are expressions of transcendent levels and aspects of meaning and being. As a function of the ineffable, man's life cannot be delimited by a legal fiction called "government" any more than one can encapsulate the unbounded. All Socialism, social engineering, and statism (Right or Left) are irrational and inherently futile efforts to capture and re-configure transcendence.
Consequently, statism in any form, and under any guise, is at core and in essence an insane attempt to usurp, suppress, distort, and wrench life into conformity and compliance with the will and perspectives of some would-be "ruler." The miraculous and bottomless nature of living existence refuses to cease being wondrous and infinite to fit into the tiny box of some "ruler's" vain imaginings as to how things "should" be (no matter how cosmic in scope he may think his vision is). Life declines to renounce its own aliveness and infinity to conform to the vanity of those who would rule other people instead of opening to, merging with, and living in eternal wonderment. No such violent usurpation, suppression, and distortion of life transmutes and re-configures the infinite. It merely thrashes about mindlessly, preventing manifestation and awareness of the nature, order, and wonder of transcendence, making man's life sorrow and suffering instead of open-ended ecstasy and amazement.
Every possible form of government is therefore at origin and in essence an assault on life, a vicious war of hatred against its Source, and an organized invasion into the soul of man. Such mania to re-constitute mankind and society is the original sin of all forms of statism. As a result, governments, i.e. some men ruling others, have the same right to exist that man has to be enslaved, which is none. One's highest civic duty is to tell the state to get lost – or go to hell where it belongs.
Admonitions for activists
If one thinks that other people do not relate to and provide for him in ways he might think are ideal, so what? Do other people exist to please oneself, or does one exist to please others? To what degree does anyone exist to please anyone else? Who decides which people owe what portion of their lives and labors, for what reasons, to whom, and how the alleged obligations are to be enforced and satisfied?
Man exists to fulfill his own nature and life course, which his existence and free will demand of him. Moreover, who says this is a perfect world? How can it possibly become "perfect" without everyone perfecting himself and his own domain? To expect "law" to compensate for remaining in deficiency and idleness by coercing and plundering others is disgraceful. Such an ignoble and futile course destroys law as equal protector of rights in favor of making it a tool to finance the abnegation of work, dignity, and genuine solutions.
Everyone has his hands full with his own existence. It is enough for one to discern what is best with respect to his own life, let alone presume to possess the right and omniscience to make choices for others. For what others is one responsible? People come and go, live and die. There are an infinite number of ways to classify combinations of people into "groups." Everyone follows his own progress. Man's innate duty is to do the best he can with his own life, of which he is custodian. That can include what he feels he should do to help or share with others.
Politics is legalized default on life growth to attempt to coerce others to do what actually exists only when achieved through one's own efforts. If someone wants others – "society," the "government," or whatever – to give him something, e.g. to educate him, he is at the mercy of what others think and do and want him to think and do. One receives what third parties know or want him to know, believe, be, and depend on.
Everyone is both the product of and creator of his society. Which does one prefer to be? Nature abhors a vacuum. Something or someone will determine one's life. Will it be oneself or indeterminate persons, ideas, attitudes, situations, influences, or things? What good can come from abandoning self-determination and blaming the inevitable result of the abnegation on anything in sight – the past, society, race, the phases of the moon, "socio-economic status," place of birth, or whatever else of an infinite number of things or reasons onto which one may project his problems. People endlessly pick something external to blame for their own actions and inadequacies – anything but themselves.
Blindfold someone, spin him around, and remove the blindfold. Ask him what the first thing he sees is. Then let him read 1000 hours on whatever that is – an ant, a tree, the sky, a human eye, whatever. Is there anything that is not of interest, wonder, and use? Is there anything that cannot be delved into to an unlimited extent? Must one walk around in some mindless stupor because there supposedly is nothing constructive to learn or strive for? Is that attitude not solely in the mind of the holder? It certainly is not in objective reality, which effortlessly consists of its miraculous self. Are there no houses that need work done on them? No gardens to plant? No books to read? No people to help, learn from, apprentice with? Or must one have a new car first? Or kill some poor kid for his jacket or tennis shoes? Who is responsible for that? Who made him do it – some mythical entity called "society"? Is someone's bad behavior due to a deficiency of government programs whereby more programs constitute the true solution?
Education is not something one is given, something other people are obligated to do for or to oneself.14 Such an attitude implies that one is the creation or property of others. Responsibility for another may pertain in a parent / child relationship, but cannot legitimately be extrapolated to governmental parenthood of society at large. It is everyone's innate duty to use what he is in the midst of what is. One exists within existence. Who is it that learns? What does he learn except about what is? Who can give him what is? Who stops one from learning? People have scales on their eyes and blame others for the self-limitations that are their own responsibilities to eliminate. As Gandhi wrote: "Freedom and slavery are mental states."15
Years ago the "Quiz Kids" delighted and astonished America with their intelligence and knowledge. Nearly all of the children, when asked how they were so learned at such young ages, responded that they acted on their natural curiosity about things. Topics would be discussed around the dinner table and became lively. People would jump up to consult dictionaries and encyclopedia. No government or educational system created their curiosity and eagerness to learn.
Certainly caring and responsible people are "...for the unshackled exercise of every faculty by every human being,"16 but government programs, i.e. official shackles, are not the means to try to effect the growth. Reliance on governments defaults on the very thing everyone most needs and many activists seem to advocate – the right and ability for maximum expression of faculties.
Athletes achieve on the basis of their ability and performance, not because of "affirmative action," charity, or racial guilt. A stopwatch is no respecter of skin color or socio-economic status. If people show the same levels of ability in other fields they accomplish in similar fashion. People want what benefits them. In that sense the market is overwhelmingly color-blind. People rarely buy a hammer or a cantaloupe based on the race, religion, or worldview of the people who produced them. One having brain surgery cares about the skill of the surgeon. People purchase what they want when excellence and value are obtained for money given. Businesses need what works, what can accomplish results. Academicians need those who know and can teach. Human needs – and the means to provide them – are unlimited.
Existence is diversity. There are an unending variety of individuals with all sorts of worldviews, opinions, natures, priorities, etc. Everyone has indeterminate capacity for good, evil, and everything in between. No individual is his "group" or can cop out to it. To idealize races, cultures, or nations, or classify people by "groups," is infantile. It is not a reality-based approach to life. No populace is monolithic. In any assemblage of people there is a vast spectrum of attitudes. Some people will "discriminate," others will not. Some will help, others won't. In freedom those things sort themselves out spontaneously. The virtues of caring and character attain statures that are obscured or erased when externally managed and coerced.
People currently living cannot be blamed for the deeds of past individuals of past "groups." No one is responsible for correcting past inequities involving other people, nor could he succeed in the efforts. Everyone's evaluations of "inequities" will be unique, and no conformity to any perceptions could be made even at the time, let alone years later. Each of us is here now. We are self-responsible now. Everyone has his hands full now with respect to what is right for his life, let alone trying to play God by making decisions for others or attempting to rectify events which transpired in a hopelessly inaccessible past. People cannot feel good about themselves if they do not engage in the actions that result in self-respect, regardless of whatever took place in other times and places.
Contrary to fundamental tenants of collectivism, the individual is greater than the group. A group of people is composed of unique living beings with free will. There are an infinite number of possible "groups" to which someone can (or does) belong, and only one of himself. If the individuals in a group perish, the group disappears; it has no independent existence to save anyone. Conversely, only when individuals are strong and fulfilled can any "group" they join or belong to be likewise.
Who says life is supposed to be without challenge? Who says the earth is supposed to be a ready-made paradise – let alone one provided by others. Is it not better to treasure being alive, be grateful for being the incredible conscious being one is with the faculties and capabilities involved? Does one want to grow up to dignified and self-reliant stature, or live in mental, moral, and spiritual dependency? Everyone should make the best of what he is, has, and the environment in which he lives. Is there nothing to learn? Nothing to do? No businesses to start? No needs to fulfill? No associations or friends to make? Nothing to improve, inside or outside oneself?
No one can be given the accomplishments of another. No one can grow for another, experience, choose, learn, or give any of those things as gifts, simply because no one but oneself lives one's own life, grows within it, thinks, chooses, acts – or refrains from acting. Everyone is as much responsible for what he does not do as for what he does. It is absolute delusion to think that using force to plunder and obligate others can compensate for one's non-doing or is a genuine solution to any human inadequacies.
To proceed honorably and self-responsibly not only contributes towards ending cycles of hate, mis-trust, and violence, but eliminates dependency. To cling to old mental ruts of conflict and blame is to regress in life progress because one adopts such attitudes in lieu of acting to achieve something. Anyone can sit around complaining and bemoaning his fate. Attaining joy and achieving something constructive are vastly different matters.
An even greater mistake than venting frustration by aggression is using government to better one's condition. To do so is to use legal aggression as a surrogate for acting on ignoble feelings oneself. It is to rely on politicians' guns instead of one's own. Such a course builds up the machinery of general subjugation and impoverishment, resulting in the long run in a worsening of conditions. To depend on the government to care for oneself by stealing from others is like selling one's soul to the devil. Anyone who wants improvement in his life should not rely on force to provide it. Using legal force is even more despicable, since it betrays justice by perverting the law into thief and dictator to enforce what is ultimately futile and illicit.
Those who are angry or frustrated (even with just cause) are better off channeling their discontent into constructive achievements that place control of their lives in their own hands, however modestly they may have to begin.17 Even if others are or have been wrong, self-determination is the proper course anyway. The past is uniquely what it is and irretrievably gone. What other people did in other times, places, and circumstances can neither be changed nor used as an excuse to coerce others now to "make up for past inequities." One must earn one's respect in the present.
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."18 Self-reliance is the only attribute of character that has the strength and dependability to attain real success. To abandon self-reliance is to consign oneself to the whims of unknowable fates and the machinations of other people. To eschew self-reliance is to adopt the absurd premise that the source of one's life and choices does not reside in oneself. Everyone makes choices concerning his own life. Other people's choices are likewise about their lives. Why should anyone think that other people should live to be absorbed with his problems? Such an attitude is at best unreliable, and in any case abnegates the most important aspect of man's nature – the free-will capacity to choose one's own way and fashion one's destiny.
One of the major human follies is that, not having engaged in actions that brought increase to others, people nevertheless expect, and even think they deserve, the fruits of labor not undertaken. Desire not backed up by productive action is not negotiable currency with respect to natural law or human affairs. People basically do not care about, or benefit from, how self-important someone might be or how much he might want or need. They care about other people's constructive behavior and usefulness to themselves.
It is natural to feel compassion for those suffering and in need, but such caring cannot be commanded or presumed upon without tarnishing its innocence and diminishing its moral significance. Real care is a function of the heart and voluntarily chosen duty, not external compulsion. What must be relied upon as the dependable way to succeed in life, and certainly what the force of law must be limited to upholding, is the necessity to gain through usefulness to others. To utilize the law for charity may be well meaning, but turns the law into a criminal and tyrant under guise of philanthropy. Legalized charity perpetuated over time destroys all possibility for a free and prosperous social order.
It has become a common attitude, continuously validated by law, to approach others with the demand: "Because I need, or others of my race or group might have endured injustice in the past, I therefore claim a portion of your resources and / or other special consideration at your expense." People too rarely say: "I wish for all of us to be free. I want to create, achieve, and relate constructively with peace in my heart and desire to gain economically by mutually beneficial interactions with you in particular and my fellow man in general. I am satisfied to limit my progress to what I earn through having brought benefit to others."
An insidious mode of thinking has taken root and become the norm in the world. It is that people deserve because they need, and are justified in the claim because of some "egalitarian ethic." After all, if everyone is equal, everyone equally deserves some sort of equal portion of what is, so that "inequities" are unfair. Because everyone has an equal right to be does not mean that equal results can or should ensue from diversities of natures and actions.
Many "leaders" today preach that "their people's" problems are the fault of "society" and / or past inequities done by other people to other people. They never miss a chance to blame something or someone other than themselves and / or those whom they would "lead," thereby re-enforcing division and dependency. What is worse, they insist that government programs will rectify matters. Such "leaders" are either fools, knaves, or both. Their message is disconnected from sanity and dignity. It cannot result in true success. These "leaders" are betraying the people they allegedly wish to help, selling them into increased alienation, poverty, misery, dependency, and hopelessness.
Everyone should choose his principles and leaders carefully. As Miller wrote:
No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.19
The central point is that either people live, act, choose, and achieve from and out of their own selves, by exercising creativity, effort, and autonomous free will choices, or the "results" are neither real nor expressive of true moral / existential growth. Such sham appearances of progress, the effects of instituting courses of action which violate both ethical and natural law, are illusory and collapse when the inexorable cause / effect consequences of their innate illegitimacy manifest. To forsake acting on the basis of what is real and right to trust in hopeless folly is suicide, on both individual and societal levels. Lastly, one may always take to heart the sentiments of Ella Wheeler Wilcox in her famous poem:
Laugh and the world laughs with you,
Weep and you weep alone.
For this sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has troubles enough of its own.
_____________________________________
1 Johann Von Schiller, "The Maid of Orleans," 1802, Act III, Scene 6.
2 Frederic Bastiat, Selected Essays on Political Economy, Van Nostrand Company, Inc. (New York, 1964), "The State," p. 144.
3 With a "national health care," the most extensive data about everyone (including fingerprints, DNA prints, blood types, entire health history, intimate personal data, habits, friends, financial information, etc.) would end up in who knows how many Government computers, in how many agencies, for what unknown uses. Government would have quantities of information on people, and technological means to track and communicate data, completely unprecedented in history.
4 Aesop, "The Wolf and the Lamb," Fables, ca. 550 B.C.
5 George Bernard Shaw, "Maxims for Revolutionist," Man and Superman, 1902.
6 Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change, 1964.
7 Samuel Johnson, quoted by James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, March 31, 1772.
8 If 100% of all untaxed income in the United States above $100,000 were confiscated it would generate enough money to run the government for only nineteen days – less than three weeks. (Citizens Against Government Waste, 1-800 USA-DEBT.)
Robert J. Ringer wrote in Restoring the American Dream: "The 'soak-the-rich' philosophy used to be very popular among politicians and economically ignorant liberals. But Henry Hazlitt (economist) did some calculating a few years back and came up with some interesting – and embarrassing – figures. Hazlitt noted that if the government had confiscated 100% of the income of every person in the country who earned over $50,000 in 1968, it would have netted an additional $24 billion in tax revenues. Had that additional booty been distributed equally among the approximately 200 million people then living in the United States (assuming no administrative costs whatsoever), each person would have received the grand sum of $120."
9 Paul Harvey, news broadcast March 1, 1986.
10 One may imagine Lincoln in contemporary America: "You don't expect me to read by this firelight, do you? It might strain my eyes. If you want me to study you have to provide me with glasses and proper lighting. And I'm certainly not going to walk all that way to school. Send me a ride. And make sure I get a good free lunch."
11 In the modern, statist version of the parable of the "Good Samaritan," the "Liberal Samaritan" encounters the robbed and wounded stranger on the road and leaves him there to hasten back to town to agitate for government aid to victims of muggings.
12 The only reason "prostitution" is classified as a "crime" (see "commercial crimes," 27 CFR 72.11) is because the activity cannot be fiscally controlled.
13 On CBS Evening News, November 27, 1989, Elie Wiesel commented: "Reality has caught up with Communism and shown it to be bankrupt." One may happily look forward to the day when mankind finally perceives that the same is true of the institution of government in general.
14 "Education" means to "elicit" or "educe." It means to draw out understanding in the individual, awakening insight and awareness of self-known knowledge, i.e. comprehension. Education is thus far different than schooling, especially in the mass-produced system of "public education." As then Senator Lowell Weicher once said on ABC's "Nightline": "The public education system is an arm of the state." Its purpose is to indoctrinate and establish conformity, not cultivate diversity, independence of thought, and ability to reason. The emphasis is on memorization of facts and accepting as real and important what one is "taught."
15 Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violence in Peace and War, 1948.
16 Lydia Maria Child, message to supporters of woman's suffrage, ca. 1875.
17 Many billionaires recount with pride their humble beginnings, such as delivering newspapers or starting out as a janitor with a company they end up owning.
18 Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story, 1937.
19 Henry Miller, "The Alcoholic Veteran with the Washboard Cranium," The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941.
Criminal Injustice
Copyright © 2000 by Lightbringer.
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this
entire article are permitted in any medium
provided this notice is preserved.
04/05/03
13:15