The ever odious Rutland Herald newspaper recently published an op-ed piece submitted by a Ms. Claire Walker of Proctorsville, Vermont, that was in reaction to a statement by Governor Jim Douglas in which he said that he didn’t “know of any other law” that mandated the purchase of something like health insurance. Ms. Walker’s response to this was thus:
“Aren’t we required to purchase car insurance in order to register a vehicle in Vermont? Aren’t we required to pay for a yearly state inspection of our vehicle, even if there is nothing wrong with it, In order to drive legally in Vermont? Aren’t we required to pay the full real estate tax on our property even though we have no children in the school system? Health insurance for all is no less a responsibility than educating our children and keeping our citizens as safe as possible on our highways.”
Apparently, Ms. Walker believes that paying what amounts to automobile taxes at government gunpoint somehow makes us all “as safe as possible” – especially while on “our” highways. And, that they’re all universally “our” children in “our” school system. Further, that health insurance for everyone is “our” collective “responsibility.”
It’s an utterly deluded mindset that is reminiscent of another newspaper piece – this one written by David Brooks and published on March 24 in the New York Times and elsewhere, titled “The Democrats Rejoice” (something that reminds me of those old photos of Hitler dancing a jig after the fall of France in 1940). In the article, Brooks writes:
“Obama and Pelosi both possess the political tenaciousness that you only get if you live for government and believe ruthlessly in its possibilities.”
Which, in plain spoken English spoken by a sane and rational human being who respects the life, liberty, and propertuy of others, translates into: “Obama and Pelosi both possess the psychopathic and sociopathic lust for control and domination of others’ lives and property that you only get if you live for government power, and believe ruthlessly in threatening people with fewer guns at their command than you with property seizure, arrest and imprisonment, or outright death, in order to advance your own vision and agenda of just How the World Ought to Be.”
People like Ms. Walker are some of the greatest threats to the achievement of liberty that free-market anarchist philosophy must overcome. They can only see things in terms of collectivist dimensions; a Government is God theory that is tantamount to being a flat-earther. It shocks and angers them that there are actually people who believe in being left alone to enjoy their own life, liberty, and property their way, without interference from anyone else, nor by interfering with anyone else’s. They cannot conceive of the concept of self-ownership, and must always speak and act as if they possessed some kind of sick, symbiotic attachment to the State – one which, if even slightly threatened, will send humanity spiralling down a dark whirlpool into utter chaos and bloodshed; Hobbes’s “war of every man against every other man.”
That this is utterly Orwellian backwards mindspeak and preposterous fearmongering, libertarian anarchists already know. It’s waking up the rest of society that, at present, represents the difficult part. This is the primary task of the Center for a Stateless Society. We warmly invite you to join us in exposing the truth, and accomplishing nothing less than true liberty, true sovereignty, in our lifetimes.
Hi Alex. I have to correct your title a little bit. A collective is born when a sum of individuals voluntarily form it. Therefore, a nation formed and maintained by force is not a collective; nor a policy is collectivist when it is made in the name of collectivism. It has to be collectivist in fact; not in the appeal the usurpers make. You can understand this very well when you speak of "free trade" agreements; they are only free in a very biased sense, and so it is of the 'collective' will. There cannot be a collective will under the state; nor can there be a free market.
@Matthieu — In a sense, there are at least two definitions of "collectivism" in use here. The sense that you refer to is compatible with individualism — the authentic "collective will" is the sum total of the freely expressed individual wills over the matters that are the rightful concerns of the particular individuals bringing their will to bear. This could be understood as similar or related to the difference between "direct democracy" and "participatory democracy" — with participatory democracy dividing decision-making up among only those who rightfully have a stake in the matter, so that people in the New York area wouldn't vote on whether or not the people of a village in Oregon shall build a swimming pool, for example.
It seems that you recognize the following, but for sake of clarity I'll explain for any other readers that Alex is refering to "collectivism" in the sense of a doctrine or tendency that treats "society" as a corporative fiction, much like "IBM" or "the Army", with concerns that trump individual rights and whose executive committee is, of course, the State.
You seem to treat Alex's use of the word (one with a relatively well-established history in the field of individualist thought) as a mistaken definition, rather than one merely different than your own. I'm not aware that there is a clear lexicographic case for that, although I'd be very interested in considering it if you could point it out to me.