In the phrase we are the government, the useful collective term we has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the naked exploitative reality of political life. For if we truly are the government, then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and not tyrannical, it is also voluntary on the part of the individual concerned -Is the claim that We are the government a rational, or even coherent, statement?- If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group on behalf of another,... we owe it to ourselves -This is a common defense of the statement but consider the following.- If the government drafts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinions, then -(by the established reasoning- he is only doing it to himself and therefore nothing improper has occurred. Under this reasoning, then, Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered, they must have committed suicide, since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and therefore anything the government did to them was only voluntary on their part But there is no way out of such grotesqueries for those supporters of government who see the State merely as a benevolent and voluntary agent of the public
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 05:14:35 +0000
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