The Big Plantation

Are you more likely to be injured in a car crash because you weren’t wearing a seat belt – or because you were?

Both are possibilities – and sometimes, actualities.

An unbuckled driver might be hurled out of the vehicle and crushed by it (this happened to someone I know). But he could also be trapped inside the vehicle and burnt to death (or drowned) because rescuers couldn’t reach him in time to cut him free.

But the proper question isn’t which is more likely to happen but rather, who has the right to decide which of these two risks alarms them more.

Is it ourselves? Or is it someone else?

The government asserts – via laws and men with guns – its power to make that decision (and many others) on our behalf and contrary to our own preferences. This is a pretty outrageous thing, when you think about it a little bit.

More than outrageous.

Evil.

But it’s an evil principle that’s been accepted via a kind of mesmeritic philosophical-moral osmosis, over several generations. It is the idea that the government is (effectively) our parent and endowed with the rightful authority that parents have over children to protect them – for their own good (as decided by the parent).

Of course, it is never stated in such explicitly honest terms. It is implied – and that is enough to obtain, if not the consent of those parented, at least their compliance (based on the threat of violence, always hovering, for non-compliance).

The problem, of course, is that we are not children and the people who operate the levers (and wield the guns) of government are not our parents. We don’t even know these people, except by name and title. And they only know us in a figurative sense – as “the public.”

Or something worse.

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