If there’s one lesson to be drawn from the past few decades
of political history, it’s that anti-government forces have been far too
polite, all too willing to engage the enemy on its own terms by talking about
what government ought to do under
ideal, philosophy-guided circumstances, as if that were relevant.
On every side and across the political spectrum, humans are
beset by delusional intellectuals singing some variation on the siren song of
acquiescence to government – from the authoritarians, Muslims, and Catholics
cooing like Loki that submission to authority is humanity’s “natural” state, to
the neoconservatives thinking that arguments about government ineptitude and
misbehavior do not apply to the military, to the “liberal-tarians”
condescendingly urging more consistent libertarians to accept just this one wafer-thin bit of the welfare
state and welfare-statist rhetoric so that they (not necessarily us) will
be allowed to eat in faculty lounges, that being Step 1 to human liberation, or
at least a nice benefit for the liberal-tarians.
There will always be plausible-sounding
philosophical arguments for government (especially in academia, which
generates plausible-sounding arguments for everything), but a horrifying look
at what government really does – what it inevitably really is – will always reveal these arguments, these siren songs
(ordered liberty...efficient provision of basic services...social-democratic
engagement...), as complete horseshit.
Government is crime, and talking about its reform is as
deceptive as talking about how to make the Mafia behave nicely. Start from that premise and you will, at long
last, have begun to think about
politics, possibly for the first time in your life.
•••
Luckily, there are books that skip most of the philosophical
arguments (though we do need libertarian ones) and just survey various agencies
of government, cataloguing the disastrous misallocations of resources,
self-serving acts of politicians and regulators, and heartbreak-inducingly
routine squelching of human hope via bureaucracy that are the real day-in and
day-out of government activity, even when it isn’t engaged in outright mass
murder, which of course it often is (100 million dead from socialism alone last
century, and socialists still think they hold the moral high ground).
Two such books that influenced my thinking were P.J.
O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores and
Philip Howard’s The Death of Common
Sense. My ex-boss John Stossel just
released a book about government aptly titled No, They Can’t. Very much in
that vein is Competitive Enterprise Institute vice president Iain Murray’s Stealing
You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You. Read it (read all of these books), then spare
me your next metaphysically-intuited pro-government argument. End the nonsense. End the lies.
End government.
Whether paying for politicians’ expensive office furniture
even in times of purported fiscal crisis, arresting people for clearing debris
after storms without proper permits, or subsidizing failed industries while
imposing surtaxes on innovative ones, government will always tend to do the wrong thing, for the simple reason that it
isn’t the government’s money, isn’t the government’s lost decision-making
power, isn’t the government’s life. If
you encourage it to continue its activities, you aren’t helping and are no
friend of humanity.
In one amusing passage, Murray notes that in World War II,
the OSS, precursor to the CIA, issued a document called Simple Sabotage Field Manual, and its advice for those able to
infiltrate enemy production bureaucracies in order to slow them down included:
“Insist on everything being done through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order
to expedite decisions...When possible, refer all matters to
committees...Attempt to make the committee as large as possible...Be worried
about the propriety of any decision...”
He jokingly concludes that U.S. government seems to have been
infiltrated by enemy agents long ago.
And the intellectuals want all our life permeated by
government-style decision-making. It’s
like a warm family reunion in their imaginations.
Meanwhile, people are dying in the streets – quite literally
in some cases. Murray recounts the 2010
snow storm right here in New York City that led to unionized city snowplows
protesting what they saw as insufficient deference to unions by plowing more
slowly. Leftist journalists dismissed
politicians’ comments about the work slowdown as baseless, but as one man whose
three-year-old died en route to the hospital told the New York Post, “Clean the streets, because that’s why the ambulance
came too late.”
Labor unions and the preservation of government bureaucracy
are of course vastly nobler causes than preventing death. So go ahead, keep being a leftist. Burn with the righteous conviction that you
are on the side of good, you despicable, murderous ignoramus. Or change.
It’s never too late.
•••
The most recent two issues of the libertarian-friendly
political science journal Critical Review
also featured articles that took a welcome look at reality rather than just
theory, including pieces on (A) public choice theory (the idea that government
is, gasp, susceptible to self-interested and biased behavior just like other
people and institutions but without the legal and economic checks that the rest
of us face on our laziness and parasitism), (B) the “webs of faith” that
sometimes cause political foes to talk past each other, (C) the perverse and
largely irrational appeal of “social democracy,” and (D) the surprising and
harrowing conflicted feelings (not to mention literal nightmares and panic
attacks) of even avowedly pro-choice abortion clinic staffers when confronted
with fetal limbs and spasming quasi-infants.
(This last piece echoes my own characteristically sane and
moderate view that people intuitively, gradually sympathize with late-gestation
fetuses far more than with very early-gestation fetuses but that the usual
philosophical arguments, once again, have trapped us with unrealistic,
idealized either/or positions whereby either full-fledged people occur at the
moment of conception or else at the moment of birth/viability, with all the
months of ambiguity in between somehow swept under the rug – because almost no
one likes ambiguity, whether they conceal it by angrily philosophizing or by
angrily refusing to philosophize.)
Somewhere between philosophy and direct engagement with
practical political reality was the Ron Paul campaign to dismantle big
government, and though I think it’s time to switch gears and boost the campaign
of Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson (unless Romney picks a
very surprising v.p. running mate), I hope nonetheless to post video this week
(still being tinkered with by our videographer) of last week’s Dionysium
discussion about Ron
Paul’s Revolution with author Brian Doherty.
Like many of the Paulites, I don’t ask that you love the man. I ask that you do something simpler and
saner, which is hate the government.
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