Fatal Conceit

It’s been a few days since I was labeled a threat who would shoot a fellow blogger in the back. I thought most of “kill them all” rhetoric had died down.

But a question had been raised, I believe honestly, that prompted another “kill the communists” post. The question “what direction?” did not get a satisfactory answer.

Since the focus has been on collectivism / communism, let’s review some numbers.

General statistics on welfare in the US indicates 25% of the population receives some form of transfer payment. Your government has promised some $19 Trillion in Social Security benefits and $30 Trillion in Medicare benefits. This roughly amounts to a $1 Million liability per Taxpayer in a pool of potential Taxpayers whose total assets are less than $500 Thousand per Citizen. (reference: USDEBTCLOCK.ORG)

From this finance lesson, let’s return to the “kill the communists” rhetoric. One out of every 4 people in your community are voluntarily recipients of stolen goods, or eagerly awaiting delivery of future stolen goods. Roughly 70 million people would have to be murdered to “kill the communists”.

Don’t have the stomach to move through your neighborhood and kill every 4th person? Not sure which of the four is deserving of a lethal sentence? Good, neither do I.

Our first conceit is a belief that we have properly identified our enemy: communists. It feels right. The first three planks in the communist manifesto attack private property, institute heavy taxation, and abolish inherited wealth.

But what is a communist? Merely a person who has not starved to death because you and I have fed him with the surplus from our commerce. A communist cannot harm you unless he directly threatens you with violence, and under common-law you are justified in responding with unorganized individual violence. A group of communists cannot harm you unless they employ a government to threaten violence to coerce you to submit to their will.

Let us clearly identify the enemy. The enemy is any attack on private wealth and private property. As I indicated previously, neither the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, nor the Bill of Rights speak to any protection for private wealth and private property. You cannot run there for help.

Governments, specifically the men that run them, work hard to make us submit to their will. Long before FDR and LBJ accelerated the adoption of naked communism within the United States, the 16th Amendment legalized theft of a portion of every-man’s paycheck. Lincoln killed 650,000 people to make the southern State submit to his will. And before that, state and local governments extorted property taxes to disburse “for public purposes”. Governments have coerced men to submit their persons and property to the will of others from the beginning of time.

A second conceit is that we, as partisans, can become cohesive enough to conduct meaningful, coordinated action against the leviathan of collectivist government.

So what useful direction can be given to Patriots faced with thieving governments and freeloading neighbors, who steal and consume our surplus? The obvious choice is between two options: cut the head off the snake, or remove the tip of the spear.

I don’t recommend an attempt to remove the head of the snake. The engine of evil will remain in place, operating on inertia, until the next bureaucrat is selected to run the machine.

I recommend an uncoordinated effort to remove the tip of the spear. Direct your individual ingenuity and energy into disrupting, at a local level, the theft of wealth by your various governments and their engines of re-distribution. The inevitable question is how?

This can take many forms dependent upon your courage and risk tolerance. Disrupt local town and city council discussions on topics of taxation and benefits. If you have the technical skills, disrupt local processes and systems of tax collection, disbursement, and the downward flow of funds from FedGov to local agencies. If you have the fortitude, infiltrate the agencies and conduct subtle sabotage from within. Finally, disrupt the personal lives of the employees who work in the agencies that run these functions.

Be creative in your escalation, but stay focused. The objective is to convince government managers and employees, at the operational level, to reconsider the morality of their chosen profession. Motivate them to seek honest employment in the private sector. If you are successful there will be consequences. Governments have agents with guns who will be directed to stop you, cage you, or worse.

The systemic theft we’re accustomed to cannot continue without the serfs who collect, count and re-distribute the coin. There are not enough enforcers on the payroll of municipal police to go door to door and threaten people directly for payment in the absence of a functional bureaucracy and its automated systems.

Others among you must simultaneously communicate the Fatal Conceit of socialism / communism / collectivism to your neighbors. That Fatal Conceit is the belief that rational man can use his intellect, along with tribal-level concepts of compassion, to replace the market-order that evolved through millennia of human experimentation. That Fatal Conceit which makes man hope he can engineer a centrally planned economy that doesn’t collapse and kill tens of millions he claims to help.

Expose the economic error of socialism: that the extended order necessary to feed, cloth, and otherwise maintain civilization cannot survive in in a centrally planned economy with managed markets. Explain how the extended order of modern civilization requires free markets and private property to deliver widespread prosperity.

To become prepared to do these tasks, read “Fatal Conceit”, by F.A.Hayek. It was the final work of a Nobel prize winning economist who earlier wrote “The Road to Serfdom”, sounding an alarm regarding state control of production and the relationship between socialism and totalitarianism.

Finally, recognize that reliance on tribe for organization, family values, and a desire for geo-political balkanization by the Patriot movement will likely inflict the same damage to the thin veneer of civilization as the central plan of the collectivists. To a lesser degree, perhaps, if trade across geographically dispersed free markets is actively encouraged and an absolute respect for private property is maintained.

Actions recommended above will remove the tip from the spear. As a consequence local, state, and even national government will probably collapse. If you elect to pursue this course, consider how you will provide short term compassionate care for neighbors whose welfare safety net has been removed.

In the interim, while you contemplate your resolve, reflect upon the fact that at no time in history has Freedom or Rightful Liberty prevailed on a significant scale; other than on the frontier at the boundary of civilization … and no such frontiers exist today.

You might want to consider how to live as free as possible in this un-free world. For that exercise I would recommend a book by Harry Browne “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World”. An excellent summary can be found here .