People keep talking about the encroaching fiscal cliff and what we must do to avoid it. I’ve given up on avoiding it and believe that the best option is to put a brick on the accelerator, jump out of the car, and let it go over the edge. There are too many statists in this country who want the government to do and provide everything for them. Ron Paul explained our problems succinctly:
“People do not want anything cut,” he said. “They want all the bailouts to come. They want the Fed to keep printing the money. And they don’t believe that we’ve gone off the cliff or are close to going off the cliff. They think we can patch it over, that we can somehow come up with some magic solution. But you can’t have a budgetary solution if you don’t change what the role of government should be. As long as you think we have to police the world and run this welfare state, all we are going to argue about is who will get the loot.”
People don’t want to stop the looting, they just want a piece of the loot. To once again quote George Carlin:
If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: ‘The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.’
A majority of people who participate in the political process are selfish and ignorant. Since the state has the capacity for violence necessary to take from the people en masse it’s not surprising that a majority of people who are attracted to it are those wanting to take from others. In fact that’s the root of the problem. The state lowers the cost faced by somebody wanting to rob another. Without the state an individual wanting to steal from another would have to face the entire cost of doing so, including the possibility of bodily harm or death, directly. With the state they can shove off a majority of the cost, especially the possibility of bodily harm or death, to everybody else. It’s a system designed for looters by looters, which is why reforming it will not work. Nobody wants to reform it because reforming it would cut off the gravy train.
Consider every person on welfare, every teacher working in a public school, ever police officer, every clerk at a government building, every soldier, etc. are dependent on the state. Now consider that the state is dependent on expropriation. Do you think we can turn this ship around? So many are dependent on the state and its expropriation that there’s no practical way to reform anything. The empire will collapse and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop it.