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.
