How Government Destroys Moral Character
By Robert Higgs
“Thou shalt not steal” is a rule as old as human society itself. It must have been, else no complex human society would have proved viable.
We are all taught very early to respect what belongs to others: “Don’t take your sister’s toy away from her,” your mother admonished, punishing you if you persisted in your toddler’s larceny. By the time you were three years old, you understood the difference between mine and thine. If you didn’t take the lesson to heart and persisted beyond your childhood years in treating everybody’s property as something for you to take, so long as you could get away with it, then you were viewed as a sociopath, an enemy of decency and of civilization itself.
Government as we know it, however, rests entirely on this kind of sociopathy. Rulers take what does not belong to them and dispose of it to suit themselves.
When the government has only recently placed itself in a position of domination over a group of people, the people recognize full well that the government’s taking amounts to looting. They pony up only because they are given the stark choice of “your money or your life,” and they want to go on living." Continue.
“Thou shalt not steal” is a rule as old as human society itself. It must have been, else no complex human society would have proved viable.
We are all taught very early to respect what belongs to others: “Don’t take your sister’s toy away from her,” your mother admonished, punishing you if you persisted in your toddler’s larceny. By the time you were three years old, you understood the difference between mine and thine. If you didn’t take the lesson to heart and persisted beyond your childhood years in treating everybody’s property as something for you to take, so long as you could get away with it, then you were viewed as a sociopath, an enemy of decency and of civilization itself.
Government as we know it, however, rests entirely on this kind of sociopathy. Rulers take what does not belong to them and dispose of it to suit themselves.
When the government has only recently placed itself in a position of domination over a group of people, the people recognize full well that the government’s taking amounts to looting. They pony up only because they are given the stark choice of “your money or your life,” and they want to go on living." Continue.
posted by HeavyHanded at
6:20 PM
1 Comments:
Excellent!
This issue goes even deeper and is in keeping with a concern that I have had for some time. It seems to me that Liberalism has contrived to remove all constraints to individual behavior other than Federal law. Worse, other than whatever the U.S. Supreme Court decides what it believes Federal law should be in a particular case. The Tenth Amendment may still be a part of the U.S. Constitution but it has disappeared from its practice. Societal norms and family values are dismissed as being ‘judgmental’. Religion can be followed by those who choose to do so but they dare not ‘impose’ their religion on others. There is no absolute right or wrong and morality is relative. There is only Federal law.
The problem with this, among other things, is that Federal law is too cumbersome and general and can never be comprehensive nor specific enough to be useful in defining how individuals should conduct themselves in their everyday lives. With all of the other behavioral constraints removed, it becomes so easy to accept the stolen property offered us by the Federal Government.
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Anonymous, at 8:58 AM
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