A Quick Thought Experiment

Let’s do a thought experiment.  Say that a stranger hacked into your financial accounts in a way you couldn’t stop, and began to take out 40% of your money every month.  After a while, they started offering you large sums of (your) money to do certain things.  They’d give you 10% of that money to dress a certain way each month, which of course always had to include a fedora. 

20% of the money to attend online introductory classes to the beliefs of scientology and show them completion certificates.  Maybe 10% more if you demonstrate to them that you didn’t smoke or drink or watch any porn in the last couple of weeks.

You can do the things and take the money or not, but you’re not getting the money back without doing those things.

You’ll probably tell me that you’d get the police involved and have this loser arrested and thrown in jail.  Get the courts involved and get all your money back.  Seems right. 

But what if it’s the police and courts who are involved in the scheme and making sure you have to go along with it?  Who would stop them?

The answer is that no one would.  A government has the legal monopoly on the use of force in a society.  It is the final authority charged with enforcing laws.  It sits at the pinnacle of the coercive food chain. In that sense, it is “above the law.”  This is why a government that begins to initiate force against its citizens (instead of acting only as the retaliatory measure to restrain it) is one of the most dangerous entities in existence.

The reality is that the thought experiment laid out above is being played out in the US right now, and agents of our government are the ones taking your money and offering it back to you if you behave in certain ways. 

Universality of the Principle

The principle here can be applied to myriad other areas of society. 

The government takes money through involuntary taxation and then has the Department of Attack (not sure why we call it the Department of Defense) give out huge benefits for soldiers.  They use the stolen money to hold countless ceremonies to honor military service.  Not to say there isn’t honor in military service, but it doesn’t change the fact that these tactics amount to “draft-lite”—a more dishonest way to force military conscription.

Confiscating money and then offering student loan forgiveness for anyone who goes into the humanities, while simultaneously pumping large sums of that confiscated money into transforming the humanities into liberal activist hotbeds is a way of forcing people to change their ideas.  Giving expropriated money as research grants for certain topics is also a way of forcing people to change their ideas. It’s not necessarily the ideas that are bad; it’s the refusal to let the ideas stand on their own merit and pay genuine respect to the discernment of individual human beings. 

Conservative ideas, liberal ideas, joining the military, sexual preference, what substances we put in our bodies – these topics are of secondary importance.  The deeper and more important question is this:  are individual human beings allowed to make their own choices without facing the threat of violence?  The answer to this question gives us the most fundamental measure of how civilized our society has become.

Any time money is forcefully expropriated from citizens and subsequently funneled into any of these areas, the answer is no—someone is forcibly re-shaping individual values in accordance with their own vision. 

This outcome seems to be an inevitable and inescapable byproduct of enabling and endorsing involuntary taxation by our government.