Hawaii Observer

Let’s talk about a bloodthirsty religion of Middle-Eastern origin. It claimed 340 million lives in the 20th century alone, more than all the diseases from ebola to AIDS combined. It’s behind 9/11. It not only threatens your life even as you read this, it is stealing half of your money right now. I bet you’re starting to guess which religion it is. It is the belief in government.

If I called the highest government officials a crime gang, it would probably offend some people. Just as calling the 16th century Inquisitors a crime gang would have offended some of their subjects. “How could our highest officials be criminals?” - they would have protested - “They take our money, but they defend our homeland from devildoers, don’t they?” Heck no, they only rob and murder the defenceless. It’s the main function of a paid government, and I’ll prove it.

A government lives on two things: war and taxes. What is war? Robbery with murder abroad. The Criminal Code prescribes sentences from 20 years to death for committing the same crime at home, for that is the government’s other monopoly, called “taxes”. With taxes you won’t face an armed squad at first, but if you resist paying persistently enough, they might visit you just the same way they visited Iraq or murdered tax resister Gordon Kahl. Once you understand that most wars are waged to collect more taxes, you realize that taxes and wars are just two euphemisms for the same robbery committed on two sides of the border.

The best money is in pretending to fight a problem you create and losing. When the government robs you pretending to fight the evils itself generates at home, you get hoaxes like the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, the War on Poverty, the War on National Debt, etc. When it robs you pretending to fight the evils it generates abroad, you get the Crusades, the Colonial Wars, the World Wars, the Iraq War, etc. These wars nowadays obligatorily start with some bloody pre-arranged infamy (sometimes financed by taxpayer money like the 9/11 massacre was) where the leaders sacrifice citizens’ lives in cold blood, trying to “justify” the ensuing robbery.

At the first glance, this could suggest that all you pay the government for is failures: its failure to defend you against drugs, against crime, against poverty, against injustice, against terror, against wars… but there is no failure, because it never truly endeavoured to end these. It only planned to take your money pretending to fight them, and this it fully succeeded. If the government really wanted to eradicate social problems, it could stop creating them at any moment. If it cared the slightest bit about YOUR well-being, it wouldn’t allocate 17 times more money to jail you than to educate you. It wouldn’t keep 4 dollars for itself for every dollar forwarded to the needy. It wouldn’t subsidize tobacco which kills 430,000 citizens and 3 million people worldwide yearly, nor continue atmospheric nuclear tests which irradiate everyone on Earth for no real purpose, causing an estimated 1,600,000 cancer deaths. It wouldn’t have ignored for decades the deaths of millions of citizens from known diseases such as pellagra, a niacin deficiency. It wouldn’t have conducted often lethal experiments on hundreds of thousands of unwitting citizens in its hospitals and other institutions, sending sometimes entire groups knowingly to death.

Sceptics often ask an investment firm who promises to be the key to their prosperity, “so, where are the clients’ yachts?” Did you ever asked the government (which claims the same) where are the taxpayer’s yachts? You didn’t because you didn’t think it is a business? Man, were you right! By its own (IRS) guidelines, the government would have to show a profit 3 years out of 5 to qualify as a business. It’s a church, which preaches about all the prosperity it can create faster than you, if you just give it half of your income now. Run its gospel through the time-proven “if it were really so all-mighty, would it need my money?” dogma detector, and it flunks worse than the Holy Dung Beetle myth of Botswana. Look how of most ancient lowlands settlements, only the the stone palaces of rulers and gods, two sales fronts of prosperity promises survive. The commoners who exchanged good cash for lofty promises there, invariably couldn’t afford rocks for their own dwellings.

All right, so the government sells mostly hot air while it commits robbery with murder. We still need some sort of power structure to get roads, bridges, mail, firefighters, schools, arts, social programs, don’t we? Not at all. A government is not necessary for these to exist, and historical examples prove it. Take the case of the Roman Empire. When it collapsed (predominantly under the tax burden of its military conquests), there was a period, about 900 AD, when there was no empire, no state, and no public authority in the West. The state disappeared yet society, religious and economic life continued. This clearly showed that the state and society are not the same thing; the society is the basic entity, and the state is a crowning, but NOT ESSENTIAL cap to the social structure. This experience had revolutionary effects. It was discovered that man can live without a state; that economic life, religious life, law and private property can all exist and function effectively without a state.

Think of this when you submit your next yearly tax sacrifice to the Church of the Government. Would you be happier feeding a murderous religion, or keeping half of your income? Without a government, the biggest criminal gang can rob you freely. With a government, the biggest criminal gang can rob you freely in government uniforms. Thus, having or not having a government makes no significant difference. This is less due to a moral failure of any particular officials, than to the inherent criminality of any social system based on “power”. One cannot build a just society and economy with a coercive power structure, a remnant of Biblical era murder gang rules. It’s nice how Linus Torvalds’ friends created a free, open operating system for computers, but what we need even more is to create a free, open operating system for society.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2004 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.