Written in June, 2008 and edited slightly:
The 2000 Presidential election was the first time I was old enough to vote and, as a good Republican, I cast my vote for W. I was raised a small-government conservative and I believed that the Republican party genuinely stood for small-government conservatism since that had been its platform since at least the time of Ronald Reagan. In the eight years which have passed since I first voted, I have seen Federal spending balloon to unprecedented heights. For six years, Republicans controlled both Congress and the Presidency. The Republicans broke record after record for fastest budget growth, largest total Federal budget ever and so on. It became painfully obvious that the Republican Party was using the same recipe the Democrats had used to hold Congress for nearly forty years before 1994: buy the incumbency. But if the party of small government used exactly the same tactics as the Democrat party once they obtained power, instead of using their power to scale back the Federal government, decentralize and delegate power back to the states and so on, then neither party represented small government. The idea of a small government party was a myth created by Republicans to obtain power in the first place. That is, the Republican party talked about small government only because they knew there were a lot of disaffected folks out there who wanted smaller government who would vote for anyone who appeared to be in favor of scaling back government.
Then it struck me that it was a matter of course. Why does someone go into politics except to govern? And once power has been achieved, by whatever means, what incentive is there to scale back one’s own authority? We love to flatter ourselves on how selfless, giving, and others-oriented we are. When you look at the historical record, and how people actually choose when really faced with the choice between power or self-restraint, the choice, with extremely rare exceptions, is power.
Sometime before Christmas last year, I was at Barnes & Noble and I happened to be looking at the discount books. I noticed a pile of political books and, since I fancy myself a philosopher of religion, politics, etc. I gravitated towards it. One book, Basic Economics, caught my eye both because I had been thinking I needed to better understand how the economy works, and because I noticed its author was Thomas Sowell, who I had heard interviewed on radio and TV on several occasions. I had been impressed with his concise reasoning and no bullshit mentality. I bought the book, hurried home, and started reading voraciously.
As I began reading, I began to have my mind blown by the simplicity and far-reaching consequences of economic philosophy. Sowell’s book has no math equations and does not present a mathematical case for a particular school of economics. Rather, his book makes philosophical arguments about human behavior. The first principle he introduced which thoroughly rewired my way of thinking was this: People tend to do more for their own benefit than for the benefit of others. I have since run into this principle in many different forms. Milton Friedman in an old television interview I saw on YouTube says it this way, People never take care of the property of others as well as they take care of their own property. Or, stated another way (David Friedman, Milton Friedman’s son): People have goals and tend to make the choice among the alternatives facing them which best achieves those goals.
When these principles are consistently applied to all people - whether police, government bureaucrats, elected officials, charity workers, clergy or business owners - the change in one’s perspective is revolutionary. I would go so far as to say that, despite finishing a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, I had not really learned to think critically until I began studying economics. I had never learned to analyze the “irrational” choices that other people make which I would not have made in their circumstances. I assigned the “crazy” actions of other people to wickedness, stupidity, ignorance, insanity, corruption or any other number of human maladies. While human behavior is not completely predictable, there are predictable elements to it. By assigning the choices which people make that I don’t understand to irrationality, I was giving up and failing to think critically about why, really why they make the choices they do.
To bring this back to the Republican party, I began to think critically about why government had grown more under the Republicans than it had under the Democrats when a vital component of the Republican platform had been to scale back government once they attained power. 9/11 is no excuse for the overall budget growth we’ve seen. The reason, really, is simple: Both Democrats and Republicans have an interest in increasing the size of government. The difference between them is which government programs they champion. That’s it. Since people tend to act more in their own interest (political gain) than in the interests of others (constituency), it is inevitable that elected leaders - whether R or D - will always increase the size and scope of government.
That’s when I realized that there is no hope for limited government. The Libertarian Party and other independents sit on the sidelines waiting for the “some day” when Americans start voting for something other than Republicans or Democrats, but it was clear many years ago that this is futile. There is no political solution to the problem of political government. Government, by virtue of the fact that there is no force which may oppose it, always grows.
So, I began to think about what if there were no government. What would happen? Would chaos ensue? Would we have “nature red in tooth and claw” or the all-against-all war predicted by Hobbes? I think the answer, given sufficient qualification, is no.
I will try to compress into one sentence the basic reason why it is possible to imagine a realistic (not idealistic), ordered anarchy. The reason is this: The free market can provide all the services which government currently monopolizes at a lower cost, better quality or both by inducing organizations which perform these services to compete with one another under the constraint of profitability.
As I read Basic Economics, I began to search the internet to see if there were others who taught things similar to Sowell. That’s when I stumbled on mises.org and LRC and began reading. The more I read, the clearer the world became and the more sense I could make of all the many things about the social order that had always puzzled me and which I had assumed were simply inscrutable. Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, Lew Rockwell and many others began to part the clouds, as it were.
Most recently, I’ve begun to explore way off the map from economics into the realms of law, morality, social norms, and my basic humanity. As I’ve explored, I’ve discovered that there are many, prevelant misconceptions in society that so twist and distort the basic facts about what it is to be human at all as to turn the world almost completely upside-down. The truth, on the other hand, is simple. It clarifies, rather than obscures. It has always been with us but it doesn’t serve the interests of the most powerful and influential people in society. So it is, in fact, suppressed.
I’m playing with the idea of writing a book-length treatment of my discoveries. The thesis of the book would be the following:
- There is only one book of knowledge: your own conscious experience (awareness). All other forms of knowledge are sub-headings in this one book.
- There is only one goal of action: your satisfaction (or pleasure). We may call “good” that which brings about your satisfaction and “evil” that which brings about your dissatisfaction.
- Therefore, there is only one subject of study: good and evil. All other forms of study are sub-headings of the study of good and evil.
- To be alive is to study good and evil. To cease the study of good and evil is to die.
- Those who attempt to suppress the truth - that is, to divert people from the study of good and evil - thereby promote death. They are attempting to subvert the course of Nature in order to lead others into self-immolation, slavery, cuckoldry and self-treachery.
Clayton -
