“Fuck the government,” is now a better maxim than is, “Tear down the borders and let the experts decide.” If more people adopted the former in daily life, especially in a nonviolent way, we’d have generally better outcomes than if they remain convinced or ignorant in the face of power concentration, as is now the case. This is especially so since we have reified the fear of America’s founding fathers, who echoed Plato’s understanding that democracy meant voting onself benefits from the pockets of other taxpayers. We have already put a near majority on the public payroll, funded by an ever more wobbly faith in government checks to be money good, as the fake money is increasingly borrowed based on assumed larger taxes to be collected from a smaller and poorer pool of future suckers as much as it is extorted from current ones.
Sovereign buyers of U.S. Treasury debt have disappeared. They don’t need to ask the Madoffs what happens to the last guy out of a Ponzi. The only buyer for this supposedly safe paper is The Fed. The FedGov will inevitably default, and SVB means soon. It’s a safe bet that the way they do it will be so as to protect the 1% and screw everyone else.
Many will attempt to counter this maxim with, “If there were no government, or merely mob rule, the result would be like France during the Reign of Terror.” This is both a logical fallacy and based on their greater fear of, and lower trust for, their neighbor than the ruling class. This is irrational and not supported by even a cursory examination of evidence.
The evidence says that my neighbor treats me either with benign neglect or limited empathy most of the time. The state, on the other hand, continually stops at nothing to try to micromanage my life while extracting ever more value from me. The former mainly leaves me alone, whereas the latter enslaves while lying about its designs. Whom should one trust? To whom should one do one’s duty to “give back,” or “pay one’s fair share?” And who decides what is fair or how that money is allocated?
The argument is not whether it is practical to advocate no government because, “What if you are successful?” Rather, it is which position is likely to lead to better outcomes. The former rubric is absolutist while the latter is meliorist. The naive globalists, going back to Kant and Rousseau, believed that when the philosopher kings abolished nationalism and borders mankind would enter a golden age. That hasn’t worked out so well. Rather, it is a question of having a simple and communicable plan which is generally meliorative in society, given Kant’s maximization rule (the categorical imperative), and which neither exaggerates nor underestimates the power of the individual will and conscience.
To avoid logical fallacies, I was taught to first check my premises. In the above case the vague generalization that resistance to unjust authority must per force result in the total breakdown of society is unsupported. I aver that resistance to concentrated power is always necessary as a check on its abuse. As abuse gets dialed up so must resistance. As power becomes more concentrated, resistance becomes more necessary right up until it becomes futile. This position is logical and well supported by historical evidence. What is logically and factually erroneous is the position that the existing government, no matter how tyrannical, is equivalent with society (or for that matter, God’s will), which is neither supported nor true. Rather, it is society which is a check on the abuse of power. It is fallacious to dismiss dissent because, “what if you are successful?” If I am successful the result will be less tyranny, not the collapse of society.
The likelihood is that there will be government no matter what I do. If I push back as hard as I can against government edicts, controls and levies, this acts as a brake on the tendancy of power to be concentrated and inevitably abused by those in authority, because that’s how they roll.
Powerful elites have long pushed the fantasy that world peace would happen if we eliminated nations and borders and had one rule by supposedly beneficent men of scientific bent.
Decentralized social structures are better at avoiding this problem of bad government driving out good society than are centralized ones. Societies that foster individual responsibility and agency are also resistant to abuse, which is why the propaganda of tyrants always seeks to undermine self supporting virtue.
ATwork space 