“Hell is truth seen too late.”—Thomas Hobbes

“Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.”—Étienne de La Boétie

In politics, corruption begins with the corrupted. We see turpitude throughout society’s power structure, but it’s only there because we accepted a devil’s bargain. It took shape long before the current crop of office holders ran for political office. It was their goal—political office—that people accepted as necessary and right. Without politicians in office running a government we would be in anarchy, and everyone understood anarchy meant people would be at each other’s throats, and life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Political office is a position of power over others. It is not found in nature, but then neither are houses, jet planes, or Starbuck’s. How did this oddball arrangement—political office—get started? And why is it considered more important than housing, planes, coffee, or our individual lives?

In a state of nature each of us would be responsible for our survival and well-being. One way is to cooperate with others and produce and trade for the things we need. It’s called the free market. Another way is to steal from the producers. It’s called the government. A third way is to put yourself at the mercy of the first two and ask them to support you.

Thievery as a career requires at least three conditions. First, the power to steal and get away with it. Second, the lack of scruples about taking by force what someone else has produced. And third, how to redefine number two so that number one can become acceptable to society at large.

Over time it became clear to the politicians that, quoting Shakespeare’s Juliet, “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.” No one can institute theft and call it by that name, so someone invented a new word—taxes—and declared that taxes takes the thievery out of theft. There is no violation of ethics if politicians can tax their brothers. In fact, taking the property of others by force is not really theft, it’s a price paid for a civilized society. This price is special because it’s not determined by market (voluntary) forces like other prices but rather by a committee.

Thus, we have special names for these special things: Taxes are what politicians call prices, while the committee bears the distinguished name Congress, a body the vassals elect because they have no choice about not electing them and whose decisions are imposed by an implicit threat of death for resistors.

It should be clear that the politicians and the countless agencies they’ve established constitute the government, and that this government is, so the story goes, imposed in the name of protecting us from life’s countless hazards. It should also be clear that language attempts to hide the distinction between government’s “business model” and those in the market.

Besides the time-tested method of bombing a country back to the Stone Age, Western politicians today are waging war using a Trojan Horse technique. Rather than sending hoards of soldiers to cross a country’s border and wreak havoc on their people and property, today’s politicians get elected in an enemy’s government (usually their own) then open the floodgates of immigration. It’s ingenious because migration is a natural process, and political support accelerates the process and avoids the problems of a direct hostile attack.

National Security: Freedom’s Graveyard

Messing in the affairs of other countries has been policy since President Truman institutionalized the national security state with the National Security Act of 1947, his recognition of the State of Israel in 1948, and policy report NSC-68 of 1950 calling for “a massive build-up of the U.S. military and its weaponry.” The red threat served as the excuse for an egregious departure from the government’s founding principle of nonintervention, and its effects have been and will continue to be totally ruinous.

Pundits continue to expose government for its lies, deceptions, aggressions, and avoidable failures. (See here, here, here, here, here, and here). The obscenity of government’s unnecessary wars is struggling to stay hidden. And few are paying attention to the Doomsday Clock, now closer than ever to midnight. We are forced to abide in ruining our economy through taxes and destruction of the dollar to pay for murdering people in far-away places, and possibly all of life itself. But it keeps DoD contractors fat and happy and the politicians alive and in office.

Later in life Harry Truman spoke out about the Frankenstein monster he created. In a December 22, 1963 op-ed in the Washington Post—one month after JFK’s assassination—he wrote:

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

Should we be surprised that when the government is given an inch it takes a mile? Is that not the history of the Constitution, a document of limited powers that Hamilton and others subverted?

In none of the critiques have I read a proposal for doing away with government as it exists. Jacob G. Hornberger has written endlessly about the harm and futility of government’s immigration control, for example, yet he and most others don’t extend that analysis to the government itself. Still, he acknowledges the Jeffersonian truth that the people have a right to abolish destructive governments and form new ones.

Since it was his creation, Truman can be credited with showing how destructive the National Security State has been. I submit a new way of governing society is in order, and it’s hiding in plain sight. Government can and should be market-based, rather than an institution of our demise.