Why do we voluntarists struggle to convince people of the
fruits of our vision? Why do people look
at us crazy when we say we don’t need a government to do anything? Is it because kids have been indoctrinated in
government schools for generations?
Perhaps, but I don’t think this is the majority or even a large minority
of the cause.
I think it is Americans laziness and complacency. It is easier and more comfortable to rely on
the government’s coercive taxing ability to fund the roads, for example. Never mind the immorality of this theft, it’s
just easier and it works relatively fine so why bother.
This could properly called complacency.
When people start to really think about it, they come up
with a few things they need the
government to do. National defense,
courts and roads are three common ones.
I grant, these are somewhat trickier than welfare, healthcare for senior
citizens, and funding for the national endowment for the arts, but the same
question remains: Do we really need a government to do this?
Because we have these items (ie. Funding for the NEA,
Medicare, food stamps) as low hanging fruit, people do not look beyond to the
proper question. People argue all day
and night about the size of government but the proper question is really government
or no government.
We are complacent arguing about how much we should tax,
should we spend more or less on the military or health care for senior citizens
etc.. This is a combination of we have
easier problems to answer and people are too complacent to think about anything
but the easy problems. Unfortunately,
while I support any and all efforts to reduce the size and scope of government,
this takes our eyes off the ball. We
need to be fighting every day about if we need government. Discussing the size of government cedes
ground in the sense of implicitly affirming the need for government.
Because people tend to take the easiest possible answer to
all problems, government is often used as an easy solution. We would benefit by always encouraging people
to think critically about the need for government at all.
My opinion is we don’t need a war mongering military and courts
that throw people in jail for crimes in which nobody has been harmed. This is the debate we should be having rather
than the size of the military or its accompanying policies.
As voluntarists, the evidence and not to mention morality
are always on our side. We should use
that as a calling card to constantly fight the implicit assumption of the need
for government. We need to change the
messaging to fighting the idea of government rather than which policies or what
size of government we want. In doing so, we may finally gain back some ground
in public opinion.
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