Politics, Train Wrecks, And Civilization
It was sweet yesterday as Fat Tuesday and Super Tuesday fell on the same day.
A day and night of drunken recklessness, encouraged by the government ruled the day. And then there was the Mardi Gras.
I like politics. I also like train wrecks, the bad guys winning in the movies, and sacks of money (from whatever source) appearing at my front door.
However, politics is the failure of civilization. It is the inability of the race to form society in a way other than using the only institution with a legal monopoly on the use of force. But we political rubberneckers love the chase. Those who have the best and shiniest campaigns, the cleverest commercials, the tight little sound bytes that mean as little as possible. And which candidate can pander to the most people with the best one liners and jingoisms and not even themselves see the sad rediculous miasma that the political class is putting us poor citizens through.
As said in an earlier column; libertarians engage in the political process not to make government better. We play this awful, awful game with one and only one, express purpose; to reduce the size of government. To roll it back to the purposes expressed in the constitution. That neither king or president or the mob of democracy is the sovereign, but rather man as an individual. Men and women free to pursue their lives in ANY way, as long as they do not infringe on that same right of every other man and woman.
We do not want a better government! We want a better world, free of the wars, socialism, and folly writ so large, that if the men who ran our United States ran Sears or Wal-Mart the same way, they would long ago have been jailed.
It's about freedom. And civilization, given the chance, is only really civilized when it is free. Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was quoted once as saying "taxes are the price we pay for civilization". The initiation of force is not civilized. The picking of our collective pocket is not civilized. This is not civilization, it is ransom. And we have been kidnapped.
All we really want is ourselves back. I'm voting for Ron Paul next week. I refuse to be a part of a system that would astound and dismay our founders.
So, I'll watch all of the train wrecks, and car crashes and the run up to November with the same childlike intensity that our minders at CNN and FOX love so much. I can't help it.
But I would rather people consider the idea of true liberty, an ideology of individual human sovereignty that is not dead as long as the men of the mind can compete with the men of the brawn. And it is the men of the brawn who, Democrat or Republican, are begging for your blessing.
Save the blessings for yourself. If freedom is important to you, that is.
Joe Postove
A day and night of drunken recklessness, encouraged by the government ruled the day. And then there was the Mardi Gras.
I like politics. I also like train wrecks, the bad guys winning in the movies, and sacks of money (from whatever source) appearing at my front door.
However, politics is the failure of civilization. It is the inability of the race to form society in a way other than using the only institution with a legal monopoly on the use of force. But we political rubberneckers love the chase. Those who have the best and shiniest campaigns, the cleverest commercials, the tight little sound bytes that mean as little as possible. And which candidate can pander to the most people with the best one liners and jingoisms and not even themselves see the sad rediculous miasma that the political class is putting us poor citizens through.
As said in an earlier column; libertarians engage in the political process not to make government better. We play this awful, awful game with one and only one, express purpose; to reduce the size of government. To roll it back to the purposes expressed in the constitution. That neither king or president or the mob of democracy is the sovereign, but rather man as an individual. Men and women free to pursue their lives in ANY way, as long as they do not infringe on that same right of every other man and woman.
We do not want a better government! We want a better world, free of the wars, socialism, and folly writ so large, that if the men who ran our United States ran Sears or Wal-Mart the same way, they would long ago have been jailed.
It's about freedom. And civilization, given the chance, is only really civilized when it is free. Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was quoted once as saying "taxes are the price we pay for civilization". The initiation of force is not civilized. The picking of our collective pocket is not civilized. This is not civilization, it is ransom. And we have been kidnapped.
All we really want is ourselves back. I'm voting for Ron Paul next week. I refuse to be a part of a system that would astound and dismay our founders.
So, I'll watch all of the train wrecks, and car crashes and the run up to November with the same childlike intensity that our minders at CNN and FOX love so much. I can't help it.
But I would rather people consider the idea of true liberty, an ideology of individual human sovereignty that is not dead as long as the men of the mind can compete with the men of the brawn. And it is the men of the brawn who, Democrat or Republican, are begging for your blessing.
Save the blessings for yourself. If freedom is important to you, that is.
Joe Postove
posted by Mr. Liberty at 3:59 PM
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