MarcStevens | The PR, the excuse for government, a so-called “necessary evil”, is “to protect and maintain individual rights.” How many politicians need to tell you this is a lie before you start believing it? It’s in every government code (see sec. 845, this is only one example), every supreme court has held this and many politicians and bureaucrats have publicly said it and yet people continue paying these criminals. Why don’t people see the contradiction? What has to happen before people stop paying for protection that isn’t being provided and admittedly can’t be provided?
I can hear the pathetic cries now: “But who’ll build the roads?” To be honest, I just can’t listen to such crap anymore; every voluntaryist/anarchist has heard this. When confronted with the truth: governments are immoral, we hear that silly question or the ever popular retort, “If you don’t like it, move to Afganistan.” When you run out of rational ideas, just tell them to move. If you don’t like that I don’t pay sales tax when I sell my books, then move to Afganistan.
Are the roads so important people will accept wars and economic devastation from a gang of killers, thieves and liars? People will pay for, and aid in their own slavery, because “governments” steal their money to build roads? Apparently so. It’s a moral choice: you know the governments are not there to protect you and you pay for this non-protection anyway by rationalizing it because your stolen money is used to build roads. Let’s not forget it also pays for the sports arenas, professional as well as collegiate, to keep the taxpaying public preoccupied. Paying taxes is still immoral.
It’s time to grow up and be adults. Stop living in fear of people who absolutely need your cooperation to enslave you and your children. Don’t you understand the politicians need your cooperation to enslave you? And if you doubt politicians own you, then consider this: who gets the money you earn first? The brilliant Discourse of Voluntary Servitude is always relevant:
“How can he [the tyrant] have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows—to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces?” (emphasis mine) Étienne de la Boétie
Are people afraid? Sure, with good reason. But where is your sense of right and wrong, your sense of morality and your principals? Do we maintain our sense of right and wrong only when it’s most convenient; do we base it on fear of our friends and family, on what we think is acceptable to them? Religious people profess: “Thou shalt not steal” and call me a criminal because I advocate non-compliance with taxation. Can’t you see the problem with that? You would think religious people would refuse to cooperate with governments, but the opposite is true most of the time. Evidence? Governments would collapse if religious people refused to violate the commandment to not steal.
Rational adults act consistent with their principals, even if there’s fear. If we continue to cower like babies, cooperating with those pretending to be protecting us, then they will not only continue owning us, but our children as well because we’re teaching our children to be chattel. We may be thinking: “What can one man do?” My answer: Let’s find out. Look at the attention one guy with a cell phone got for saying, “Don’t touch my junk.” What would happen if we stopped worrying about what others will think and started acting as adults and living according to our principals?
What have we been reduced to? How did we become scared little children afraid to ignore the whims of people such as George Bush, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? If you wanted the non-protection they’re offering, then they would not have to force you to pay them. Which is really the immoral act: forcing people to pay for protection that’s not provided or refusing to cooperate and pay for a service not being provided? The people forcing you to pay them have you believing non-violent, non-cooperation is actually a crime!
If you believe taking of property by force (stealing/taxation) is wrong and immoral, then stop cooperating with those called “government”. If they don’t respect you enough to interact with you on a voluntary basis, to ask for your consent, then they certainly don’t deserve your cooperation. Maybe your friends will see you being a man and take your lead. After all, the tyrants need our cooperation.
“Everyone knows that the fire from a little spark will increase and blaze ever higher as long as it finds wood to burn; yet without being quenched by water, but merely by finding no more fuel to feed on, it consumes itself, dies down, and is no longer a flame. Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.” Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, Étienne de la Boétie Read Entire Article
By Marc Stevens
