Recently in my job they erased all covid related restrictions. On the company's intranet most of the people thumbed down this decision. Also comments like these were popular:
"how can we stay safe in the future without guidence?"
People clearly needs their hands held by someone. They are unable to make decisions anymore.
It is amazing to see how far we have fallen from the deep thinking of individuals from the past. The shift in our thinking is stark, because we have not been tested by monarchy overreach in well over 200 years, by despotism, by invasion. Our future generation seems hypnotized by their screens, both individual and “collective”. The social media is the gladiator entertainment of our generation.
"The Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, "See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk!"
Love the cat, but there seems to be a lot of throwing the baby out with the bath water going on in this post. There’s nothing wrong with having rules that are made by the people in order to ensure the safety of the people. There’s something very wrong with a system that allows private corporations that are willing to sacrifice the safety of their customers for monetary profit degrade through corruption the regulation process. The bureaucracy has been captured by corporate lobbyists (one example being the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID subservience to Big Pharma) and by the human greed that justifies a superfluous bureaucratic position with new over the top regulations simply to inflate the necessity of the bureaucracy itself, thereby protecting the bureaucratic workforce, i.e., job security. Corruption destroys government (Socialistic, Democratic, or Monarchistic). Ultimately, it becomes Fascistic once there is no daylight between elected and/or appointed officials and the corrupting private business owners and corporate officers who have severely unequal influence. A society with no governance will be the equal to a society with corrupted over-governance. The answer is not Soviet or Chinese style communism any more or less than it is a completely unprotected antebellum south confederacy or purely libertarian Pottersville.
Mature, enlightened, pluralistic, self conscious, cautious and not over -reaching governance requires a population with those same qualities. Sadly, these qualities are being wrung out of us through the influence of the oligarchs who are dividing and conquering through consciously directed economic disparity, media manipulation (social & legacy)/ propaganda, and most recently through biological transformation of the species via garbage chemical injections that may prove to be the equal of the food source contamination and degradation that Monsanto/Bayer has pioneered for decades.
Your "tax refunds" comment is 100% on point. So many people I chat with have that exact mentality of "the government's being so nice, giving us our money back"!
I also wanted to share an essay I found recently which examines government and corporate policies during the pandemic leading to this encroaching tyranny. From a variety of different angles (legal/policing/education/etc.), all under the same umbrella.
A superb piece of work. All Sr G’s stuff is excellent but this is a philosophical tour de force. Thanks for the reminder of Frédéric Bastiat’s quote. Tax, permission based society, regulation - all apparatus of control & oppression. Anyone who continues to believe in benevolent governance is delusional. The evidence from state responses to Covid is overwhelming; these people are not your friends. But still the masses stay loyal.
Democracy died a long time ago, now we just go through the periodic motion of pretending to choose our oppressor. The only way to end this farce, and it’s unlikely to be in my lifetime, is the wholesale abandonment of the control infrastructure and that starts with understanding the fundamental ideology Sr G sets out here. And rejecting it.
"Does anyone seriously just go to any doctor that the state says is OK or hire any lawyer that has passed the bar?" .... seriously, it happens all the time.
El Gato, you need to write your thoughts on the origins of the Civil War and why slavery wasn't the primary driver of that conflict. That would be an interesting read.
The opposite of a state is not freedom though. Think of the any state or governement overrach, crime, coercion or violation of what you call rights. Now think of that without any state o governement.
The options are try to control the state, or pay off you local ganglord.
Now, when/if said state starts behaving like a local ganglord, then it's high time to treat the state as one should always treat career criminals: a warning shot in the face.
Again: the absence of control, discipline, structure, hierarchy is not freedom, it's chaos - the rule of the strong without limitations or pretense.
So what do we do about it? We actually were having a discussion with our kids the other night and I commented that I felt like more people were paying attention now after Covid but my son seemed to feel that his generation was still pretty unfazed by all the Covid regulation.
Last week I had a conversation with my Uber driver which drifted onto the subject of taxation.
He complained that they are very high (he's correct - I'm in the People's Republic of California), and I said that all taxation was theft. He was taken aback and had clearly never heard this before.
I then offered up my standard spiel in these (unfortunately rare) encounters:
Imagine I was to come to your door and tell you from now on, you will pay me 30% of your income, and if you don't I will send a gang of costumed, armed thugs to your door, drag you away, throw you into a cage and bankrupt your family. Oh, and if you resist they will murder you.
Would that be okay? A moral thing for me to do?
He then said "No. That is a really good point, but taxation is legal."
My reply: "Just because something is legal does not make it right. Slavery was legal."
He is a young black man and I could tell that gave him serious pause.
Then he asked me if I'd heard of civil asset forfeiture. I told him that in 2014, the cops stole more than all burglaries in the U.S. combined. He was unaware and said he would look it up and send it to his friends.
I spent twenty years making these arguments to people I knew. Sometimes I quoted Bastiat in facebook posts. I don't think I ever changed a single mind. I couldn't even persuade anyone that socialized medicine, i.e. giving over your own health decisions to bureaucrats, was bad.
Eventually, I deleted all social media and threw in the towel. I don't think most people are capable of learning these ideas outside the school of hard knocks and just that sort of lesson is well on its way. It will be a knock so hard that it won't be forgotten for a very long time.
Now I just focus on teaching my children to think critically and to not trust any authority. The main lesson I want them to absorb is just to read enough history to question the status quo. If they can ask why things are done a certain way now when they were done some other way in the past, that is enough. That will lead you to the truth about how the desire for power has distorted our system into its current shape.
I will quibble with you about privatization of roads though. The toll road across our state was leased/sold years ago and it's the crappiest section of that interstate for 3 states. There's no excuse for it except greed.
"they have made you afraid of freedom"
Recently in my job they erased all covid related restrictions. On the company's intranet most of the people thumbed down this decision. Also comments like these were popular:
"how can we stay safe in the future without guidence?"
People clearly needs their hands held by someone. They are unable to make decisions anymore.
It is amazing to see how far we have fallen from the deep thinking of individuals from the past. The shift in our thinking is stark, because we have not been tested by monarchy overreach in well over 200 years, by despotism, by invasion. Our future generation seems hypnotized by their screens, both individual and “collective”. The social media is the gladiator entertainment of our generation.
"The Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, "See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk!"
Love the cat, but there seems to be a lot of throwing the baby out with the bath water going on in this post. There’s nothing wrong with having rules that are made by the people in order to ensure the safety of the people. There’s something very wrong with a system that allows private corporations that are willing to sacrifice the safety of their customers for monetary profit degrade through corruption the regulation process. The bureaucracy has been captured by corporate lobbyists (one example being the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID subservience to Big Pharma) and by the human greed that justifies a superfluous bureaucratic position with new over the top regulations simply to inflate the necessity of the bureaucracy itself, thereby protecting the bureaucratic workforce, i.e., job security. Corruption destroys government (Socialistic, Democratic, or Monarchistic). Ultimately, it becomes Fascistic once there is no daylight between elected and/or appointed officials and the corrupting private business owners and corporate officers who have severely unequal influence. A society with no governance will be the equal to a society with corrupted over-governance. The answer is not Soviet or Chinese style communism any more or less than it is a completely unprotected antebellum south confederacy or purely libertarian Pottersville.
Mature, enlightened, pluralistic, self conscious, cautious and not over -reaching governance requires a population with those same qualities. Sadly, these qualities are being wrung out of us through the influence of the oligarchs who are dividing and conquering through consciously directed economic disparity, media manipulation (social & legacy)/ propaganda, and most recently through biological transformation of the species via garbage chemical injections that may prove to be the equal of the food source contamination and degradation that Monsanto/Bayer has pioneered for decades.
And let’s not forget that universal basic income will be served up digitally, yet another on-ramp to digital ID and a social credit system.
Your "tax refunds" comment is 100% on point. So many people I chat with have that exact mentality of "the government's being so nice, giving us our money back"!
I also wanted to share an essay I found recently which examines government and corporate policies during the pandemic leading to this encroaching tyranny. From a variety of different angles (legal/policing/education/etc.), all under the same umbrella.
Link to the essay: https://geraldrogue.substack.com/p/medicalization-and-colonization?s=r
A superb piece of work. All Sr G’s stuff is excellent but this is a philosophical tour de force. Thanks for the reminder of Frédéric Bastiat’s quote. Tax, permission based society, regulation - all apparatus of control & oppression. Anyone who continues to believe in benevolent governance is delusional. The evidence from state responses to Covid is overwhelming; these people are not your friends. But still the masses stay loyal.
Democracy died a long time ago, now we just go through the periodic motion of pretending to choose our oppressor. The only way to end this farce, and it’s unlikely to be in my lifetime, is the wholesale abandonment of the control infrastructure and that starts with understanding the fundamental ideology Sr G sets out here. And rejecting it.
"Does anyone seriously just go to any doctor that the state says is OK or hire any lawyer that has passed the bar?" .... seriously, it happens all the time.
El Gato, you need to write your thoughts on the origins of the Civil War and why slavery wasn't the primary driver of that conflict. That would be an interesting read.
The opposite of a state is not freedom though. Think of the any state or governement overrach, crime, coercion or violation of what you call rights. Now think of that without any state o governement.
The options are try to control the state, or pay off you local ganglord.
Now, when/if said state starts behaving like a local ganglord, then it's high time to treat the state as one should always treat career criminals: a warning shot in the face.
Again: the absence of control, discipline, structure, hierarchy is not freedom, it's chaos - the rule of the strong without limitations or pretense.
So what do we do about it? We actually were having a discussion with our kids the other night and I commented that I felt like more people were paying attention now after Covid but my son seemed to feel that his generation was still pretty unfazed by all the Covid regulation.
A ray of hope...
Last week I had a conversation with my Uber driver which drifted onto the subject of taxation.
He complained that they are very high (he's correct - I'm in the People's Republic of California), and I said that all taxation was theft. He was taken aback and had clearly never heard this before.
I then offered up my standard spiel in these (unfortunately rare) encounters:
Imagine I was to come to your door and tell you from now on, you will pay me 30% of your income, and if you don't I will send a gang of costumed, armed thugs to your door, drag you away, throw you into a cage and bankrupt your family. Oh, and if you resist they will murder you.
Would that be okay? A moral thing for me to do?
He then said "No. That is a really good point, but taxation is legal."
My reply: "Just because something is legal does not make it right. Slavery was legal."
He is a young black man and I could tell that gave him serious pause.
Then he asked me if I'd heard of civil asset forfeiture. I told him that in 2014, the cops stole more than all burglaries in the U.S. combined. He was unaware and said he would look it up and send it to his friends.
Seed planted.
Eighty million to go.
I spent twenty years making these arguments to people I knew. Sometimes I quoted Bastiat in facebook posts. I don't think I ever changed a single mind. I couldn't even persuade anyone that socialized medicine, i.e. giving over your own health decisions to bureaucrats, was bad.
Eventually, I deleted all social media and threw in the towel. I don't think most people are capable of learning these ideas outside the school of hard knocks and just that sort of lesson is well on its way. It will be a knock so hard that it won't be forgotten for a very long time.
Now I just focus on teaching my children to think critically and to not trust any authority. The main lesson I want them to absorb is just to read enough history to question the status quo. If they can ask why things are done a certain way now when they were done some other way in the past, that is enough. That will lead you to the truth about how the desire for power has distorted our system into its current shape.
Another great and timely piece.
"Everything the state says is a lie. Everything it has is stolen."
Nietzsche
Wow. One of your best, if not THE best. Bastiat for the win!
I will quibble with you about privatization of roads though. The toll road across our state was leased/sold years ago and it's the crappiest section of that interstate for 3 states. There's no excuse for it except greed.