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The Magic of Government and the Socialist Apprentice

Posted: 12 Jan 2010 10:29 PM PST

The fundamental question that a people must ask is whether they
want to be independent of their government, or dependent on it?. Is
government to be a tool that we use when we need it and put away when we
don't, or a master that oversees our affairs and uses us as its
tools.

The question is not a new one though it continues to be asked
over and over again, as each generation comes into its own, and examines
what it is they want of government. Most people want there to be
limitations on government, but at the same time they want government to
carry out certain functions for them. The tipping point between tool and
master kicks in when government gains the ability to expand its own
parameters independently of the people. It's that moment when Mickey Mouse
realizes the brooms aren't going to stop and Dr. Frankenstein realizes the
monster isn't going to sit down and have tea with him after all. It's that
moment when the thing you've created takes on a life of its
own.

Most of our parables along those lines deal with people who
wanted convenience, a shortcut, only to invoke magical powers that they
cannot control. The sorcerer's apprentice wanted to get his chores done
without all the hard work. We want the same thing, except we don't use
enchanted brooms, we use government on the understanding that since
government works for us anyway, why not put it to use?

But how
does a tool become a master? Through dependency. Dependency shifts the
source of power turning the user into the used. The more dependent you are
on something, the more power it has over you. Addicts use drugs as a tool
to feel good, until the power shifts and the only way they can feel good
is through the drug, and then finally they need the drug not as an means
to feeling good, but as an end in and of itself.

That is how
dependency locks in its users, by turning the means into the end. So too
socialism may begin by promising to be a means to achieve certain ends on
behalf of the users, only to turn itself into the end. And when a
socialist system fails to get any of the ends done, the nationalized
health care system is broken, poverty is on the rise, violent crime is out
of control, the economy is stagnant and unemployment is climbing-- it's
much too late to protest that this isn't what you wanted. Because
government itself has become the end. The end of everything.

Like
all tools, socialism seems like a tempting solution. A shortcut to solving
problems by loading them on the backs of elected officials and giving them
a generous budget to handle the whole thing. And then we go away and do
something else and let them take care of it. Why not? Isn't that what we
pay them for.

But like all shortcuts, socialism depends on
creating a new thing. Primitive man was afraid of magic, because magic was
said to take a part of him and place it into a thing. A thing which then
takes on a life of its own. Which moves about and acts under our orders...
until we lose control of it.

Government is a kind of magic too. By
determining our own institutions, we invest a part of ourselves into
creating collective corporate entities that are not human, but have
rights, responsibilities and powers. We give them a piece of our life and
a piece of our soul. But what happens when we lose control of
government?

Like any good magicians, we try to bind
the powers of government by deriving them from a text, such as the United
States Constitution. When read this text is said to have power over the
government created through it, binding it to perform its obligations and
charging it not to go beyond them. But such precautions wear down over
time, particularly once the people charged to keep them also become the
same people limited by them.

In the United States, the division
between the states and the federal government created an incentive for
government at the state level to limit Federal power. As slavery
demonstrated however, this was an extremely imperfect solution, but once
it was gone, there was no longer any check on the expansion of the Federal
government, except from the last remaining idealists and a few business
interests. And when the only real check on the Federal government came
from within itself, the entire business was doomed. The brooms had begun
to move on their own.

When organizations are given the ability to
set their own parameters, they tend to increase in size and authority
rather than decrease. Which is only natural. If you let an animal loose in
a paddock full of food, it will eat until it bursts. Individually people
are smarter than that, collectively they're not. Which is why we don't
practice democracy because it leads to superior results, but because it's
a check on tyranny. But it is possible to combine democracy and tyranny,
because there is more to a free country than a popular vote scheme. It is
not the freedom to vote that defines a free nation, but the freedom not to
vote and still be left alone that does.

Collective stupidity is the
product of a lack of individual responsibility and accountability. That is
why a mob will do things that the individuals in that mob would not do. It
is why a committee will produce results so ridiculous that no individual
in that committee alone would have produced. It is why legislatures during
an economic crisis will vote themselves raises. Because there is no
individual point of accountability. A collective group in that way can be
less human than an individual, a thing given life that can't be stopped or
reasoned with.

As government becomes a master rather than a tool,
in turn individual accountability and responsibility begins to wither.
Because we are no longer living in the conventional flesh and blood
universe in which actions have consequences, and wanting a thing means
having to go out and get it done. We are a community now. We are "We". It
takes a village to raise us, an idiot's village of bureaucrats, academics,
politicians, assorted officials and union members. We are a collective and
have only one remaining right, the right to be collectively
stupid.

A dollar is no longer a dollar anymore, it's a counter in a
great international game of monopoly in which if everyone passes around
the play money fast enough, no one will realize it's worthless. A paycheck
is no longer a paycheck, it's an investment in the government's social
system, which is overdrawn, but if more of the paycheck keeps being taken
every week, hopefully somehow no one will notice that there's no actual
money in the bank.

People no longer buy, they "shop" now. They are
consumers who are encouraged to run up credit card debt, and then not pay
it off. Encouraged to take out mortgages they can't afford. Encouraged to
buy cars on credit by car companies that are themselves running on credit.
And when someone notices that there's no actual money behind any of this,
the banks and the car companies are bailed out by a government that itself
is running on credit, with money lent to it by a country whose chief
source of income is exporting cheap products to Western consumers which
they pay for with credit cards.

With all that can you really say
you don't believe in magic?

That's what it looks like when the
brooms are going full tilt, and no one can stop them because no one wants
to actually get down on their knees and scrub the floor anymore. Sure we
know the magic brooms don't work. They make more of a mess than they clean
up. And no matter how fast they clean, they make their messes even bigger
and faster. Because the product is the problem, and no one wants to admit
that anymore.

Because the thing about magic is that it doesn't
work. Yes we can turn lead into gold, but the gold we would get that way
is more expensive than mining actual gold would be. Sure we can set
government to solve our problems for us, but government has a way of
becoming the problem. And its solutions are more expensive than the
problems themselves.

We've become too used, to addicted to
the power of government to think of it as a means to an end. It's become
the end. The end of autonomy. The end of freedom. The end of everything
but the promise of a shortcut to security held dangling in front of us on
a ragged rope.

You want universal health care, don't you? What are
you a fan of diseases or expensive medicine, a fan of death? As if
government were magic. As if it could stop death. But we believe in the
magic of government precisely because it's impossible, because it's so big
and so inhuman, so complex that we assume that it can do anything. All we
need is the right man to get it in gear.

And that is how tyranny
begins. When we forget that government isn't magic, that it's a tool we
made and set to work. A tool that forgot its purpose and its masters. A
tool that became too complex and unwieldy to fulfill the tasks we designed
it for. We made government. It's ours. And it is only as human as we make
it.

Government stops being human when we forget that we made it and
that only we can shut it off. But when we let it go, when we watch dazed
while it spins out of control, and the buckets fly, and we accept the
messes in the hope that eventually the room will somehow be clean, then we
ourselves have let the monster loose. Power has shifted, and the users
become the used.

Socialism is the promise that the tool we made can
be a better master for us, than we could be for ourselves. But to believe
that we first have to believe in magic. We have to believe that the things
we make are better at running our lives than we are. We have to accept
that the collective is better than the individual, that the corporate is
wiser than the lone man or woman. And when we come to believe that, and
bow before the icon of socialism that we ourselves have made, then we have
chosen to irrationally believe in magic. A magic that is all inside our
heads, the sweet siren song of the shortcut promising us that we don't
have to work, that we don't have to think, that we don't have to plan...
someone else will be doing those things for us.