The vast majority of people for the vast majority of history lived as slaves or serfs or indentured servants to an extremely small aristocracy that were immune to consequences of any kind.
If there’s one single societal trait one can point to that differentiates this dire hopeless existence from any semblance of fulfillment and happiness, it’s the existence of a strong central government. A dictatorship in Chile is far superior to anarchy in Haiti. The oppressive communist government of China is far superior to anarchy in Somalia. Ancient Rome was legendary for improving the lives of every territory it conquered. When Rome left Britannia for example, their “freedom” resulted in decay, collapse, and hundreds of years of being raided and pillaged.
Most people understand that government is a necessary evil to stave off a far more horrible and destructive evil. Virtually every human that has ever lived, billions of souls throughout all of history, would gladly trade places with your version of an oppressive society.
~ Paul
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On Friday, July 7, 2023 at 09:11:58 AM PDT, Starchild sfdreamer@earthlink.net wrote:
Beyond the most odious and morally repellent things that governments do – genocide, democide, torture, war, police murder, prison slavery, systemic corruption, etc. – there is a whole level of routine outrages that normally fly under the radar or get taken for granted. The book “The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It”, by Timothy Sandefur, does a good job shining a light on some of this layer and how it operates.
An excerpt:
“A politician runs for office on a platform promising, say, to stop pollution. Once in office, he writes a bill that forbids anyone from emitting pollutants without a permit—and also establishes a new bureaucratic agency charged with determining what qualifies as a “pollutant” and how one goes about getting a permit.
Once the bill is passed, the politician can tell his constituents that he has taken bold action to solve the problem and move on to the next issue. While voters are applauding his achievement, the new agency begins writing regulations, often with little public attention. These regulations are intricately complex, are backed up by severe penalties, and sometimes have nasty unintended consequences.
The unelected officials employed by the agency have every incentive to interpret their mandate as broadly as possible because, after all, they act ‘in the public interest.’ Within a few years, the agency has implemented thousands of petty and complicated rules, which are in effect a code of laws that no elected official ever approved and which neither they nor the voters can realistically control.
If the agency ever takes a step that causes a controversy in the media—for instance, declaring a July 4 fireworks display to be illegal “pollution”—the politician who wrote the law can shake his head, claim that was not his intention, and chide bureaucrats for going too far—again winning the applause of voters. But since nothing short of a new law is likely to rein the bureaucracy in, he can probably do nothing meaningful about it, even if he wants to.”
I suspect this is erroneous only in suggesting that politicians do much of the actual law-writing themselves.
More insights at https://wng.org/roundups/the-out-of-control-bureaucratic-branch-of-government-1617230148
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))