Dear Believer in the State...

Dear believer in the State,

Do you really think we'd be best off by having this small class of people who claim to spend our money better than we ourselves can and who therefore have the right to steal it from us (taxes aren't paid voluntarily!) to spend on their collectivist programs, or who have the knowledge and wisdom enough to legislate things to improve a situation or solve problems (which means at bottom the use or threat of violent coercion) because they happen to be benevolent angelic overlords who just want to make our lives better?

To what advantage is it to confiscate money from some and put it in what are less productive and less efficient hands (those of the government, which is productive of nothing but only parasitic and which has no incentive to even provide good services in anything like the long-term because when it fails it is usually rewarded with more power...and more money...and more bureaucracy)? Must there really be a gun-wielding middle-man for the wants and needs in our society to be met, and must voluntarily getting together as an alternative be impossible even though we do it in our ordinary lives regularly?

If you say people are naturally wicked and therefore can't be trusted outside of government management, what is the species that populates government and why can we trust these unique creatures to not abuse their monopoly on the “legitimate” use of aggressive violence toward others? (The private sector is characterized by voluntary interactions of people each trying to satisfy their wants by cooperating with each other---do you deny that when you exchange this is voluntary on the part of both buyer and seller?) If you side with government management, you are implicitly saying we are in some sense owned by these special people, rather than owned by ourselves as individuals---they then would be able to tell us what we can ingest, what fruits of our own labor we can keep and what we can't, etc. in a system akin to slavery really...although justified by appeal to "public good" which happens to be understood by our overlords in their great wisdom! And we can look about the state of our neomercantilist society to see what great wisdom it is up to this point in our history...oh, but they must be rewarded with more power, and more money no doubt too!

At this point you might counter that all is well if we really have "democracy." The word judging by its Greek roots means "rule by the people"....those wicked, greedy people! Oh, I forgot...the political process can Midas-like turn people into angels, so it's ok. If democracy seems tailor-made for anything it would be for a majority (usually those some demagogue can appeal to who are the lowest common denominator of public intelligence or those who are most susceptible of bribery in the form of receiving redistributed wealth) to legally steal from or otherwise use violence against some minority.

P.S. In case you still can't understand what I've written above, see the blog Ama-gi