On March 4, 1789 government took hold of a big stick (otherwise known as the Constitution) to stop uprisings like Shays’s Rebellion, “the most important falsified event in American history,” as Gary North described it. The government has used that stick to our detriment ever since. This should tell us something, but it hasn’t.
Politicians have gamed the Constitution ever since it took effect. They are at war with the people they claim to serve. They fight this war with massive propaganda and theft, the former to cover up the latter. Since government is parasitical and belligerent, and lives at the expense of our liberty and wealth, it must never allow us to think we can live without it. Always, there are issues and crises only government can solve.
Its propaganda efforts have made most of its subjects compliant, at least to the point of keeping them from revolting. Easier to salute the flag and thank the troops than to raise thankless questions.
It should not be necessary to remind people that government is unlike other organizations in our lives, but in today’s world it is. It lives by force, we live by trade. It not only gets away with theft but many of its victims see it as the proper thing to do. How else are you going to maintain civilization? they ask rhetorically, as if there were no alternative. We’ll be okay as long as we don’t call it theft. And really, it isn’t theft. Thieves don’t normally tell their victims they’re robbing them for their own good. That honor goes to government and that special word, taxation.
Thinking about trying a different form of government, one which does away with the top-down, one-size-fits-all coercive model but instead relies on free market institutions and incentives? Doing away with government-as-we-know-it is a call for anarchy. Here’s the accepted truth, as told by those with every reason to lie: No matter how awful government gets, we can take comfort in knowing we don’t live in an anarchic society. Anarchy is chaos. The dictionaries say so. Our teachers said so. Though we smile and act otherwise, we are really savages in need of a leash. For that function in steps government, a dirty job but one which has to be done. As it turns out we have people fulfilling that duty who, luckily for the rest of us, don’t need a leash. They have only the purist, nonpartisan motives. Thus, thanks to government, we have peace and prosperity throughout the world. If you’re thinking this is untrue, it’s only because you’re unaware of how awful conditions would be without government.
When you watch talking heads on YouTube or TV arguing over some political position, do you ever ask yourself if there might be a planet somewhere that has done better than this? Where political positions don’t exist? Where politics (legal force) has been outlawed by unanimous consent? Where political rhetoric would have no more significance than a drunk regurgitating? Here on earth you stay informed as best you can because you rightfully fear the big stick of government and their allied voters.
Are you content to live with that for the rest of your life? Will you continue to vote to keep the system going until it croaks? Will you condemn those who don’t vote as lazy or unpatriotic? If you stay the course, do you foresee getting better people in charge who will fix everything that bothers you?
As ESPN might put it, “C’mon, man!” Force is not the answer, not for a civil society of free people. Only the free market promotes the general welfare, not the government. Government mostly serves those at the apex of political or economic power, with war being its most profitable racket. We need to wipe government as we have known it from the face of the earth and keep it that way.
Government will eventually collapse from the usual fiscal causes (paywall), but why wait? Let it be known that you favor having your life and property protected by the free market, which has brought us this far along even while crushed and distorted with government impositions, especially those fostered by the federal reserve.
On Election Day and every other day vote your conscience. Vote to end the state, even if initially it is no more than a protest vote.
George Ford Smith is the author of eight books, including The Flight of the Barbarous Relic, Eyes of Fire: Thomas Paine and the American Revolution, and The Fall of Tyranny, the Rise of Liberty. He is also a filmmaker whose latest work is a whimsical tale about the threat of nuclear annihilation, Last Day (trailer).
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