{"id":9704,"date":"2010-04-01T09:31:07","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T15:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oooorgle.com\/wordpress\/?p=9704"},"modified":"2015-03-31T21:50:18","modified_gmt":"2015-04-01T04:50:18","slug":"you-might-be-a-statist-if%e2%80%a6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/you-might-be-a-statist-if%e2%80%a6\/","title":{"rendered":"You Might Be a Statist If\u2026?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"LewRockwell.com<\/a> | Having always liked those you-might-be-a-[whatever] lists, it seems that now might be a time to come up with one of my own. No doubt some entries have been left off, but this is a good start.<\/p>\n

You might be a statist if\u2026<\/p>\n

* You vote in every election, but soon after your candidate takes office, you wonder aloud (or secretly) about his qualifications.<\/p>\n

* You have voted for political candidates in your own party, expecting them to care more about you than the people who actually paid for them to be elected.<\/p>\n

* You have voted for political candidates in different political parties than your own, expecting a different result than voting for a candidate in your own party.<\/p>\n

* You believe some bureaucrat in Washington, who doesn\u2019t know you from Batman, actually cares about you.<\/p>\n

* You complain to all who will listen about the terrible policies of The Other Guy, but somehow think Your Guy\u2019s policies, demonstrably no different, are better.<\/p>\n

* You think that a person who happens to show great skill in one narrow area, such as public speaking, is qualified to make decisions about the lives of others across many areas, as if the fastest runner in a tribe is automatically qualified to be Chief.<\/p>\n

* You hate greedy corporations, but think an organization such as a government \u2013 itself beholden to (and factually a horribly-mutated form of) a greedy corporation \u2013 will protect you from (\u2026 wait for it \u2026) greedy corporations.<\/p>\n

* You think welfare only happens when the government gives money to poor people, or to rich people, or to people of another race, or to people of another socio-economic strata, or to corporations, versus whenever any organization takes money from one person via violence or coercion and gives it to another.<\/p>\n

* You think it is possible for a government to change the laws of supply and demand or determine an appropriate response to scarcity.<\/p>\n

* You\u2019ve ever used the terminology “public option” and weren\u2019t talking about making a Number 2 in the woods.<\/p>\n

* You think the land mass \u2013 and the people inhabiting it \u2013 on one side of an imaginary line in the sand called a border, are objectively better than the land mass \u2013 and the people inhabiting it \u2013 on the other side of that imaginary line in the sand.<\/p>\n

* You think some guy in a special uniform is objectively different from you in terms of morality and rights.<\/p>\n

* You believe that rights are obtained by declaration, or via guns and violence, or by the application of all three.<\/p>\n

* You think that rules written by members of the State can be used to control the State, as if consulting an old piece of parchment very closely and then yelling “Article 76!” was ever a reasonable response to a corrupt man holding a gun.<\/p>\n

* You get squeamish about shooting someone yourself, but have no compunction with having a nameless, faceless representative of the State shoot someone on your behalf. (The further away this person lives, particularly if it\u2019s someplace you cannot find on a map without help, the better.)<\/p>\n

* You think it is morally justified to install an army base in the vicinity of a so-called foreign people, but would cry foul at the top of your lungs if the roles were reversed.<\/p>\n

* You think it can be morally justified to withhold trade with the people of a country \u2013 called an embargo or imposing sanctions \u2013 in order to blackmail the ostensible ruler of that country to do your bidding, but do not understand that such an action is morally equivalent to holding an innocent person hostage in order to illicit a certain action from someone who knows them.<\/p>\n

* You think your neighbor, or some guy on the other side of town, should be restricted from owning a firearm, since he might be psychopath, while simultaneously assuming that some other guy, who also might be a psychopath, can be armed because a third guy or group of people \u2013 none of whom you have ever met \u2013 authorizes it.<\/p>\n

* You think that one person can morally make decisions about the appropriate use of the private property of another person.<\/p>\n

* You think the moral nature of theft, murder, slavery, assault, and kidnapping change dependent upon the size of the group that authorizes these actions.<\/p>\n

Read Entire Article<\/a><\/p>\n

By Wilton Alston<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LewRockwell.com | Having always liked those you-might-be-a-[whatever] lists, it seems that now might be a time to come up with one of my own. No doubt some entries have been left off, but this is a good start. You might be a statist if\u2026 * You vote in every election, but soon after your candidate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[294],"tags":[176,244,141],"class_list":["post-9704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","tag-groups","tag-statism","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9704\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}