The Default Government

June 3, 2010
Mexico is a good example of a society in flux, yearning for freedom while still under the bondage of age-old societal governance of dominance and slavery. It almost seems like mankind, as a whole, just invites this kind society. We don’t know how to be free. If an extra-terrestrial or a god came down, ended all hunger, everybody treated exactly the same, get the same house, the same toys and hardly any work, would we be happy? No. There’s always something to be twisted and turned into an argument. You see in the movies the standard Utopia, where father and son talk about how good it is to share and how it’s their privilege to work for the benefit of all. They’re cheerful and hardworking and usually handsome. Trouble is it has existed—briefly. We’re most familiar with the communes of the sixties. The whole era purported to be one of peace and for most of the young people, that was genuine. Summer of Love, yeah. Turned into a nightmare of rioting and hate. Some of those people broke off and formed communes. They quickly found that human nature doesn’t function well under the share and share alike system. One person might hoard, another has to be prodded to do his fair share of work. After a while, fighting breaks out, division occurs.

The US is an anomaly. For the whole history of the world, it’s been a top down kind of government. First hunter-gatherers, allied themselves with a strong warrior type who demonstrated leadership traits. And so when the wildebeest came down, the warrior-king got first and most, his best friends got the next best, then the other hunters and finally women and children got what was left. This is humanity’s naturally occurring social structure. You can extrapolate from there, the king and the nobility, the dictator and his execution squad… none of it’s been fair. It is just humanity.

The founders were marvelous. Many consider them divinely inspired. Certainly they were geniuses. They understood all the clichés, power corrupts and all that. They understood that freedom was a difficult concept for man and there was a dangerous tendency to follow the crowd like a sheep. They set up the government with all of mankind’s flaws taken into account. And those flaws haven’t changed and never will until the millennium and they feared that even with all that, the country could still slide back into default mode. When I was in school, I was taught how smart they were, creating checks and balances, listing various freedoms guaranteed the people by virtue of just being human. This included the right to manage your own business, work hard and build something without interference by the government. That wouldn’t have happened in feudal societies. There, the minute something good is built up, in comes the king’s men, announcing that this business henceforth belongs to the king and heavy taxes are imposed. (Wait! Isn’t that what’s going on now?) Sometimes they’d just break it up and discourage anyone from being productive again. People can be so shortsighted. That’s why America was set up with the idea being to limit government. Giving power to a few is dicey at best. You might start out with a very intelligent and nice person in power, but what happens when Hitler,or Mao or Stalin gets the power? Murder in the Millions. Stalin starved millions of Russians by taking all their grain, selling it and buying up weapons. Look up Cyrus the Great of Persia. He took power in ways that would make the average American cringe, but respected the talents, arts and religion of each. At some point, cities would just come out and surrender to him. Many kings would have raped and pillaged just to set an example, but he didn’t. He brought together people of many talents to build, to learn from one another. That’s as close as the world came to a free trade society, where good things were valued. Unfortunately, his descendents weren’t as enlightened. I believe his son and maybe grandson continued this policy; one named Darius sent the Jews home with supplies to rebuild their temple. You can have it good for 20-30 years with power given to a few. But it doesn’t last

Once given, power is difficult to take back. In the meantime, we are growing the Gimme State, those who want the power given by socialism are making use of anything they can and they’re using mankind’s tendency to be lazy and grab for free things and stirring it up, promising a kind of utopia. Yeah, we might all be equal, equally mediocre and uninspired to work hard. When you depend on government for everything, there’s no reason to work.