Pay no attention to that gun behind the curtain

[lucylovebiscuit]

I've been thinking about the government a lot lately - it's role and purpose - and I've come to a pretty startling conclusion.

The government is a weapon of coercion that is aimed by many different people, lobbies and factions in order to force others to do what they want. Some people aim it for the appropriation of other folks' hard earned money,

Comments

[theory_of_chaos]

The result of people having the freedom to choose is that, en masse, they will inevitably choose a certain degree of slavery. If I were more clever I could try to argue how that relates to the social contract, and a pragmatic assessment of just what it takes to get 6 billion people to occupy the same rock with only the amount of tearing each other to pieces that we already have, but hell, I just got out of bed.

Suffice it to say that while you and I are often on opposite sides of some spectrums, I absolutely agree that government was not intended to manipulate our lives to such a ridiculous degree. We make the government so we have an organ to protect us from the things that are more powerful than the individual - largely foreign governments and corporations that cross the line from capitalism into plutocracy. And we protect ourselves against the government, which is why we were founded in revolution, have a second amendment, and why Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty would occasionally need to be fed the blood of martyrs.

I think we're at a curious moment in history; those with the strongest yearning for individual freedom tended to move out to the frontier, Go West Young Man, and expand our possibilities. People with your burning ambition are our trailblazers, my dear. I seem to recall that we've both read Heinlein's Time Enough For Love, which deals with this theme. But until we get out into space in a more sustainable way, we're sort of running out of frontiers. I wonder what's going to happen because of that.