United We Fall

Unity is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Everything I said is contained in a single word—collectivism. And isn’t that the god of our century? To act together. To think—together. To feel—together. To unite, to agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice. Divide and conquer—first. But then—unite and rule. We’ve discovered that one at last. Remember the Roman Emperor who said he wished humanity had a single neck so he could cut it? People have laughed at him for centuries. But we’ll have the last laugh. We’ve accomplished what he couldn’t accomplish. We’ve taught men to unite. This makes one neck ready for one leash. We found the magic word. Collectivism.

Ellsworth Toohey to Peter Keating, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand, 1943

Countless commentators have decried disunity. They fret about our divided nation, warn of impending civil war, and implore us to come together to avert it. Unity’s desirability is taken as given, but what if the longed-for unity is that of passengers on a jet plunging into the ocean? A reappraisal of disunity is in order.

Unity was doomed with the passage of the 16th, or Income Tax, Amendment. It’s hard to feel any goodwill towards a government that forcibly relieves you of what you’ve produced, benefitting itself and those to whom it redistributes. The income tax divides the country into makers and takers, a division that cannot be bridged.

For the productive, “Unite!” is a poisonous bromide, code for: support your own slavery. For a long time they bit their tongues and holstered their weapons as perpetually expanding government and its partner in crime, the Federal Reserve, took an increasing portion of what they produced, made it increasingly difficult to produce, loaded the country with a pile of debt and unfunded liabilities that cannot be paid, and depreciated the unit of exchange. Boxed in, a shrinking minority, the country they and their productive forebears built circling the drain, some are finally realizing they are underwriting their own servitude.

With whom are the productive to unite? The politicians who believe they have first claim on all income, ignore or marginalize anyone who points out that it’s not their money, and reject accountability for how they spend it? Government employees “working” paper-shuffling sinecures? A military-industrial-intelligence complex milking perpetual war for all it’s worth? Rabid recipients demanding still more unearned benefits: higher education, health care, housing, and whatever other goodies to which they feel entitled?

If there were any goodwill—a sentiment that promotes unity—among those groups, one would expect gratitude towards those who provide their sustenance. SLL knows of no instance where a taxpayer received a thank you note from a government beneficiary. Even suggesting it would be met with derision from many of them, who believe they have a “right” to what they receive. Unity for this crowd means: “Shut up and get with the program!”

Enslavement of the producer class has not been mentioned as a decisive issue in the 2016 election. Nobody—Trump included—in the current constellation of power wants to question the servitude that pays for bullets, bombs, welfare, veterans benefits, corporate subsidies, agricultural support payments, interest on the debt, clean energy programs, infrastructure, grandma’s pension and medical care, and so on.

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