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Smoke and mirrors — 11 Comments

  1. Excerpted from "Larken Rose vs. Tom Willcutts (Anarchy vs. Authority)"

    "The problem does not exist in Washington DC, and the solution is not doing something to that thing over there. And a lot of people assume that anarchists want to go take the government and make it not be there. And that's not what I want.

    I want people to stop hallucinating that the gang of crooks in DC has any right to do anything. Because if you look at the Mafia, nobody imagines that they have the right to rule. And that usually restricts the amount of violence they can do.

    Now mostly the Mafia makes its money off of government created black markets — prostitution, gambling, drugs, alcohol when that was illegal. Because you can't run a gigantic extortion racket if your victims don't believe you have the right to do it, and they have guns.

    Now in the case of government, the problem is not that there's this big nasty gang. It's that the vast majority of the victims of this big nasty gang imagine an obligation to obey it because they imagine it to be authority.

    Nobody imagines the Mafia to be authority. They're big, they're scary, they have the ability to hurt people, the ability to scare people and take your stuff. But nobody thinks it's righteous and legitimate. Nobody calls them government.

    The problem with government is that it's not an organizational tool. It is by definition an entity that is imagined to have the right to do things that mortals don't have the right to do. Such as steal, and they call it taxation. Such as initiating violence, and they call it law enforcement. Such as committing murder, and they call it national defense.

    The problem is not that there's this gang over there, and we need to fix that. The problem is that people are imagining the gang to have the right to do things that human beings don't have the right to do, such as initiate violence. And I would use the example when people say: if there wasn't a government some other big gang would just spring up and beat us up.

    Imagine, put yourself in a position where okay, you're the bad guy, and I'm going to give you about 100,000 people, only 2,000 of them are armed. It's your job to rob a hundred million people of a huge chunk of what they earned every year. You only have 2,000 armed agents and then a bunch of paper pushers. How would you rob a hundred million people?

    There is only one way you can do it. Call yourself government and dupe your victims into imagining that them handing over their money is "paying their fair share for the good of society" and calling your gang the IRS.

    But if the victims of the IRS stopped imagining law and authority and government to be real, and just recognized them as a gang of thugs, they could ignore the IRS out of business overnight. Because the victims outnumber the perpetrators a gazillion to one. It is only the belief in the legitimacy of the ruling class, the belief that we are obligated to obey it because it's authority — "It has the right to rule, we have the obligation to obey."

    That belief is a lie. And that belief is the entire problem. And when that belief is gone, and sooner or later it will be, when that belief is gone, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to abolish it. You don't have to vote it out. You don't have to have a revolution. The people simply ignore it. And we could because we outnumber it and we outgun it by a huge margin. But most of the victims imagine an obligation to obey the gang of crooks in DC.

    When that changes, the world changes. Until then revolutions don't do any good. You knock it over, we'll put up another one. Just as long as people still believe that government can be legitimate, they'll bicker over who should sit on the throne and what kind of throne it should be. You know, a parliament, or a congress, or a king, or whatever. But as long as they believe in authority, they will set up a new God and it will stomp on them and oppress them to varying degrees, and it will happen over and over again.

    When people give up the belief that one man can ever have the right to rule another, it ends, and it ends forever."

     

    Or if you prefer to listen

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYbpICtfFwo

    • I can't argue with any of that, but that doesn't answer my question.  Or are you suggesting that the Bully State only exists as an exercise in exerting authority just for the sake of it?

      • To me authority is simply the most effective control measure those who seek to 'rule' have invented. Why they need to control others could be as simple as its the only way they get their 'rocks off' either that or Icke's reptilians/hybrids are real.

        • I find it hard to believe that they would put all that effort into bullying us around just for the hell of it [and to show us who's "boss"]?  Usually there is something behind these movements whether it's mopre power and/or money.  I wish they'd fucking stop though – I'm piling on the pounds with my reactionary lifestyle!

          • Possibly there is something more esoteric?

            They have no need for money which is in reality just currency. They claim to own everything. Here tte Crown claims ownership of all land and the continental shelf and just gives those outside of the crown permission  to live upon its land.

            As for power they pretty much do as they please all of the time to whoever or whatever they want.

            Whatever it is those who seek the control aren't for talking.

  2.  I believe there is a middle ground between anarchy and the nanny state and I think we use to have it here in the US.  At one time we were free to live our lives as we wished so long as it didn't interfer with others.  It was in the early 20th century that the Progressives began their intrusion into our lives.  New laws and regulations from the growing federal gubmint along with their alphabit agencys became more and more intrusive and expensive.  At first they said that the income tax would never go higher than 3%.  Today the "progressive" income tax has a 50% tax bracket.  More control and more regulation seems to be the end in its self.

    • Maybe there is a middle ground but by no stretch of the uimagination is it half way between.  At this stage in my life if I were given a choice of total anarchy or total government, I know which I would choose. 

  3. In Europe, the EU has a lot to do with it because member state politicians have no control whatsoever over vast areas of vital government policy. Chained by directives, they can only tinker in irrelevances, and in the past 10 years or so they've found that they can make themselves sound important by reclassifying health advice as addressing some mythical impending disaster. Personally, I think it makes them all look like a bad Creedence tribute band but hey.

    Then there's the taxation angle. This is again purely because politicians live or die by bribing people to vote for them, and handing people cash or benefits is the fast track to that. In the past, they'd weigh up the public good first, but since being a politician is now a university course, they skip that and cut to the vote-gathering exercise.

    This is why we now see a public taxed to the very extreme of tolerance where no voter can bear any more, so pledges these days centre on bribing the public with money from other organisations not connected to the state. From this we get minimum wage policy, paternity leave, responsibility deals, tax clampdowns (to preserve gubmint revenue streams) and Internet controls. All those cost private interests but gain favour for politicians. 

    It's the politicisation of "we're gonna make you an offer you can't refuse". 

    • Naturally I had overlooked tax – so bloody obvious yet I missed it.  Demonise something and then tax the hell out of it – loadsa money and no one is going to complain.  Thank God for the black market!  😈

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