I’ve written before on many occasions about how people love to create caricatures in their minds, apply a label to that caricature and then pretend it has something to do with reality. The primary example is of course sex work; prohibitionists define sex workers as victims and then claim everyone who identifies as a sex worker is a victim whether she agrees with that assessment or not, and those (such as me) who are clearly not any kind of victim must not really be sex workers. The same is true of anti-authoritarians; collectivists apply labels such as “greedy” or “racist” or whatever to people they call “libertarians” (whether those people would define themselves with that word or not) and then argue that anyone who doesn’t trust sociopaths who enforce their whims at gunpoint must be exactly like their carefully-constructed straw man. Because I despise socialism, find the idea of “wealth inequality” vacuous and mock the idea that self-appointed “experts” are more qualified to decide what to do with my hard-earned money than I am, some people make the (largely intentional) mistake of thinking that I’m against efforts to make things economically better for the working classes. Of course, those who think that are fools who haven’t actually read my writing; what I actually believe is that the fascist establishment will turn whatever naive attempt at Utopianism you can come up with into a way to oppress the poor even more. For example, all the white middle-class “woke” who support gun control while ignoring that the vast majority of people thrown into cages for gun-law violations are poor & black. In short, it is not possible to “fix” the current system by voting or whatever, because it isn’t broken; it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do, namely empower the ruling classes while crushing the working classes and herding the middle classes like fattened livestock.
False Assumption
May 17, 2019 by Maggie McNeill
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I’m curious… would you advocate a society without soldiers, police or taxes, and if so, how would such a society maintain itself? To take a physical analogy, maintaining a vacuum on Earth requires a pretty strong shell around the outside of it!
While taxation has an older history, formalized state violence through the application of a permanent standing police force and army are historically new.
The great lie is that there’s a monster hiding behind every bush so we need to employ a group of violent thugs to protect us from the violent thugs. As always, it’s the violent thugs themselves that are drawn to do such work, so we have essentially instituted a permanent work program for violent thugs. If your goal is to rape and murder, why risk facing prison time as a civilian when large swaths of society will celebrate you doing those same things provided you wear a badge while you’re doing them? In the rare event you’re caught you face an entirely different reduced set of punishments for your behavior. As a society we’ve learned that not all priests, school teachers, and other men in a position of authority over other can be blindly trusted. Why do we keep making an exception for the obvious examples of this same problem in policing and the military?
Haven’t you noticed that the worst criminals in society are consistently drawn to jobs where they can exploit their victims with impunity? When you ask “how would such a society maintain itself?” you are asking the equivalent of “how would Germany run itself during WWII without the Nazi’s to do it,” or “how could the South run itself prior to 1865 without slave owners and there supporters to do it?” You seem unaware that the worst atrocities perpetrated against humanity throughout history have always been perpetrated by the very State officials you claim we cannot exist without.
The only solution I can see is a system where those in power are subject to the same laws and rules those not in power must follow, but literally the second thing those in power do after they achieve the first thing (which is come to power) is create a two tiered system to ensure they are always treated differently.
We estimate the birth of the fertile crescent around 9,000 BCE and every society since has fallen for “this place would be Mogadishu unless you give us special powers and privileges in order to protect you” schtick (and having actually been to Mogadishu I can tell you even Mogadishu is not the Mogadishu they threaten you with to keep us in line). Why do you think from the moment the Founders established limited government, those who came to power after them immediately started the process of undermining that (to their great credit it took about 100 years before the undermining really picked up steam).
History is on your side, of course. Attempts to limit power always fails in every society and your belief that we cannot co-exist “without someone in charge” is at the root of it.