Under the Leviathan's Gaze
Do you not find it strange that everything in life is expected to occur under government supervision? We are told we must gain permission to travel, to build on our property, and to get licenses from the State to practice many professions despite the complete ignorance of the political class regarding the nature of such work. Government claims the authority to tax anything and everything. We are ordered to fill out paperwork showing we have government permission to work, and to allow money to be withheld from our earnings to pay whatever sum the government demands. Any data the government can sweep up is recorded, analyzed, tabulated, and stored for future use.
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Most of this has been in place for all our lives, and the veneer of legitimacy granted by established bureaucracy clouds the observer's mind. "That's just the way it is," people say, "Don't make waves and do as you're told." We also hear the appeals to democracy. "Government represents us, so we do this to ourselves for our own good." Never mind that none of us offered any sort of positive consent, and are merely told to comply or die. The police have no legal obligation to protect anyone, and are regularly granted immunity from prosecution when they commit grave injustices. The courts are corrupt systems designed to rubber-stamp the prosecution despite the vestiges of jury trials. Laws are imposed, not to ensure protection for honest people, but to create new crimes out of thin air in order to ensure more will be robbed, kidnapped, or murdered by government agents.
We, the members of the productive economy, the participants in an otherwise-voluntary society, need to start questioning the status quo. Why do we need to beg their permission for anything? Where we do need qualification and verification, how is government-monopolized licensing a solution? Why should we be compelled to fund government, a territorial monopoly in violence that demonstrably represents no one outside the political class? How can our consent be assumed and taken for granted? I don't know what the solutions are, but something is broken, and it's too systemic to be fixed with a new election cycle. New people in charge of a fundamentally flawed system does not change the nature of the system, and all the incentives of politics ensure that the system grows and consumes like a cancer.