Are ---We--- the Government?
After doing some random viewing of some other blogs, I was struck by the use of “we” as a substitution for the word “government.” Are “we” really the government? Is the government “us”? Surely no.
When we go to the store---this simply means that the subsets of "we" are going to the store. Each has chosen entrance into this superset---“we.” When a government (even democratic) taxes me or tells me what to do by various regulations, I am not some kind of subset. If the State throws me into jail for failing to pay taxes, then “we” did not agree to this act. There is a clear distinction between me and the government. I am not the government. It is not me. “We” are not together.
(From this, we should gather, even a democratic form of government is not “us.” Like a monarchy it is detached and separated. The difference is that one has a kind of “open” entry, which produces competition to stir up the masses in habitual wealth redistribution and destruction.)
As Murray Rothbard wrote in one of his classic essays, “The Anatomy of the State”:
The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned. ... Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have "committed suicide," since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.
Rothbard continued:
We must, therefore, emphasize that "we" are not the government; the government is not "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people. But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that "we are all part of one another," must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.
And (as Rothbard quoted) here is the great H. L. Mencken:
The average man, whatever his errors otherwise, at least sees clearly that government is something lying outside him and outside the generality of his fellow men – that it is a separate, independent, and hostile power, only partly under his control, and capable of doing him great harm. Is it a fact of no significance that robbing the government is everywhere regarded as a crime of less magnitude than robbing an individual, or even a corporation? . . . What lies behind all this, I believe, is a deep sense of the fundamental antagonism between the government and the people it governs. It is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members. . . . When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before. The notion that they have earned that money is never entertained; to most sensible men it would seem ludicrous.
The (paleo)libertarian, unlike other political ideologies people subscribe to, like conservatism or liberalism, applies the standard moral code consistency. As I believe us here at The Paleo Blog, at least conceptually and intuitively, have established is the inherited natural rights that all men have. That is, the freedom to person and property. We have also seen that these principles must be applied universally to all. To deny this would be to say that some men have more nature given rights than others, a priori. But this is not so.
If they are true morals (ethics), then they must be applied consistency. For example, if a given activity is by definition theft and if it is immoral, then it is not possible to deny that this immorality of theft applies consistently without throwing out the first starting principles. When someone robs or kills another’s person and/or property this is unlawful and evil. It does not matter if someone has a fine hat or badge or whatnot. No man has more rights than another that grants him the power to violate natural law, i.e., kill or steal. Nor does the State (composed of individual people) have extra or special rights. Nor does a “we” (composed of individual people) have any more rights. Neither does a majority mob that forms get granted from the heavens any extra rights to forget and then violate natural law.
The approbation on gang-activity (group-activity) of rioting and looting must be condemned. It is a curious phenomenon. Besides people’s acceptance and passivity of the State’s trampling on human liberties, many people accept or partially excuse the destruction of private property by rioters if it is in the name of civil “rights.” This brings to my mind the lawlessness and looting that occurred in New Orleans. If one individual was stealing from Wal-Mart, this person would be rightly condemned as a villainous criminal. But somehow because a group of criminals committed this immoral act, then this is suddenly excused by some leftists. (Picture again a reporter filming a smiling looter taking a television set.) Paleo talk show host Charles Goyette was stunned at the reaction by his largely leftist audience on Air America Phoenix on this issue. To any sound-mind it should.
