What is the nature of GOVERNMENT?

Personally, I went through years of political science and pre-law study. I studied history until I knew the patterns. I worked in finance, before I knew what that meant. I spoke to lawyers and veterans. I know all the political theories, from anarchofeminism to LaRoucheism. I read my Kropotkin, Marx, Rothbard, Smith, Hobbes, Dante, Virgil, Ovid, and I read my Jesus, my Buddha, my Muhammed, and my random African and Native American folklore. I heard what the idiots have to say and read what the wise men have to say. And make no mistake about it - the wisest writers in history were the ones who were able to put human behavior in the abstract, and say, this is what's right, this is what's wrong, this is what's smart, and this is what's foolish. Writers like Edgar Allen Poe or Dante tried to describe the nightmares that evil brings into our lives, while teachers like Buddha, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., etc., tried to show us better alternatives.

A well-informed and happy person is a well-studied person. Almost all of our problems come from ignorance, in one way or another. It's only because we accept the shape of our society as timeless absolutes that we forget their origins, and who conceived the myths our society follows.

What is going on? Why are things the way they are? What is "government" and how does it shape our society?

We have a theory about how our society works. Our theory is that we need to "pay" a portion of our society to keep everybody in line, without fail, or everything will fall into chaos. That was the first part, before the era of Franklin Roosevelt and the many other 20th century forcers-of-state-control. Now, we also say that those people, our rulers, have to make sure our economy works at all. That's the "New Deal" they gave us, in so many words. The new arrangement - how they decided the situation was going to be from then on.

Here in the U.S., just before the "New Deal", they put in their new system for micromanaging the economy - the Federal Reserve, whose entire business is to make all the money we work for grow continually more worthless. That's simply the law of supply and demand - when more money gets printed, and all the other goods stay the same in quantity, the individual units of money decrease in value relative to everything else. We could be sitting on a million dollars, but it wouldn't mean anything, because they'd just printed 3 trillion more and devalued the entire existing supply of money. That's what happens when you inflate a currency, and anyone who paid attention in high school history knows it.

And our theory, beyond those fundamentals, is that we need to be able to vote to control what this "government" portion of society spends its time doing - in order to keep them in line, and so they will help us in the absolutely perfect way, which we blindly assume is their intention at all.

We think that, because we have that power to vote, that our system is the pride of the world, and that it has the best living standard on the planet. When we're "Democrats", we think that Obama is a great politician, who just has to compromise because of stubborn Republicans, and that Bush was an incompetent idiot with too many ties to industry, and that Clinton was a great guy who they hung out to dry in a political witch-hunt because of totally private sex with a 20 year old he was having in his office.

But what is really going on with them? Past this superficial tabloid bullshit which becomes the public image of "government" - what is this thing that they're running, called "government"?

To answer that question, we have to look at the theories they use to describe why it exists. And when we do, we find the fundamental assumption of the theory of government I just described - that society has to be coerced so that some portion of the economy is guaranteed to exist - is just completely wrong. As human beings, with thought and agency, we are, plain and simple, capable of creating what needs to exist, without being forced to.

Much of the government's claim to legitimacy depends on the claim of being necessary to defend society from violence, chaos, and "terrorism". But remarkably, the so-called "Supreme Court" has the stance that police aren't even obligated to protect people - even in the event of a restraining order having been imposed on someone. It is generally within our power to defend ourselves, but contradictorily, this is a power that the "government" seeks to take away from us through arms controls, and it does so by having its lapdog media report endlessly on violent incidents like shootings, in spite of the absolutely minute impact they have compared to our real problems - starvation, poverty, disease, pollution, economic oppression, and the like. The disconnect is nearly psychotic, just an endless stream of stories about violence attacks and shock incidents - one day it's "Casey Anthony", the next day it's "Sandy Hook", the next day it's "Fort Hood". Some of the stories are extremely implausible on close examination, like in the case of Sandy Hook. Some of the stories - as in the major event of 9/11 - appear to have occurred in a way that bears virtually no resemblance to the "government" and press's narrative - strong, unbiased research in that case will conclusively demonstrate they must have been complicit with the attacks.

But regardless of the incident in question, or even who's to blame, the response is the same - the government cracks down on the population. Everything becomes a justification for the eradication of civil liberties, of privacy, of human rights.

So not only does the government reject the idea it has to protect us when it comes down to its actions, not only does it strip us of our ability to defend ourselves, but it creates an environment of constant fear in order to justify their own militarism, to influence us to fall back on them and trust them to protect us from the dangers they've created. It's diabolical, and sounds almost like the plot of a cartoon supervillain, but it's exactly what the evidence shows to be happening.

Way too often, people fall into the trap of thinking that such a worldview sounds so insane that anyone who perceives it must be imagining it. Naturally it's the opposite - the people who don't perceive it that are living in their imaginations - they take the lies that they're told and built their worldview out of them, inventing a whole theory of reality to explain their surroundings and rationalize their own behavior. Meanwhile, those derogatorily labelled "conspiracy theorists" or "anarchists" are the only ones who have exercised real analysis, with scientific rigor, to discover that our society is built on top of a lie. In the end, it's the dissidents who are forced to put up with all the scorn and hatred people can pile upon them - for warning that we're not going the right way as a society. It's a horrifying situation, and one which has been unfolding for centuries beyond count.

These functions of "government", of "protecting" society - to the degree which we even need to "protect" anything - which should be just about zero, when you consider the potential of our technology to promote abundance and education around the world - this sort of "protection" is something we can handle without their help. We are only at each other's throats to begin with because this oppressive social srtucture has made us so poor that it's become a necessity. Criminality is not some innate evil - cruelty in all its forms is something that we learn, something we acquire or adopt as a means to deal with the world around us - and the worst criminality comes from people whose hearts have been blackened from pain and suffering. That's a fact.

The police - the agents of the state, the people who use their guns, nightsticks, radios, cars, badges, uniforms, and legal trickery (and I mean "trickery") to enforce the government's "law" - do these people actually protect us? The answer is staring us in the face. More often than not, they are the people we need protection from. Even if you ignore the direct assaults on our rights that the police engage in - the random shootings of innocent people, the midnight "no-knock" raids, the shot family dogs, the political trials, the "drug war", the "open container" laws, the harassment, the fear that we must unquestioningly obey and submit to police pulling us over (lest we be subjected to a high-speed chase and possibly murdered), the tear gas, the tasers, the rubber bullets, the beanbag guns, the chemical weapons, the protest suppression, the brutality, the arrests, the abduction, the imprisonment of millions - even if you ignore all of those, what are you left with?

You're left with the fundamental function of the police - to enforce law. They are the defenders of the unjust outcome that is the shape of our society. After we have divided up the profits of our labor, and the rich have made off with the lion's share of the profits, leaving the rest of us to suffer, the police stand in between us and the rich, and tell us that they will do anything up to killing us, if we try to take back what is rightfully ours, and defend ourselves - because what the rich have done is "law".

And then - with a straight face - they tell us that they are the defenders of law and order. That they are the ones who make society peaceful and livable - that they ensure stability.

Now, this business of the rich taking the lion's share of the profits - this is the rest of the nature of "government", besides the tools of government which exist for their own amusement, and the tools of government which exist to preserve the social status quo. It is in the hundreds of thousands of pages in the endless volumes of federal law, and the millions of pages of state and local law - these endless pages and pages that no single human being has ever fully comprehended - that the true secret of our shared suffering, that the government and state have created, resides. Most of this rigging takes the form of "corporate ownership" law, corporate "regulations", "eminent domain" acquisitions and auctions by the state, subsidies of corporations, and any other tools the government has at its disposal to rig the distribution of the goods and services produced by society.

These are the rules we are made to live by. The business of Congresses, Parliaments, city councils, etc., is to decide the rules for the game that we live in. It's foolishness to blame anyone else for the outcome of the game. And the failure of that outcome is right in front of our eyes - the destruction of the environment, the destruction of our happiness, the destruction of our rights, and the subjugation and impoverishment of virtually every living thing on the planet. It is the outcome we've all been cursed with because we fell in line with the rules these vultures created.

That is the nature of government. The rulers are the people who have claimed the right to make an endlessly increasing list of rules that we must live by, and the rest of the staff of "government" are the people who are blind enough to help them. All the teachers, the firefighters, the social workers, the police, the bureaucrats, the politicians - all of them either think nothing about being paid through "public funds", or at one point told themselves that they're justified in doing it, for trying to make the world a better place - or in the worst cases, they just told themselves that it doesn't matter what they do to get ahead. It seems that once you base the ability to live in society on money, people will do next to anything to get it - even far worse things than they actually have to do!

So, with money being thought to be the ideal basis of an economy, and government employees taking their money from a public treasury, the question is, where do the public funds come from? Of course, that's from taxation. And what is taxation?

Under law, taxation is, the only form of fundraising that involves a direct threat, that's not considered illegal. In a very stark contradiction, it's both legal and illegal under the government's own laws. It's illegal under the 5th amendment, and legal under the 16th amendment. It's illegal as a RICO predicate, and as extortion and racketeering, but legal under Title 26 of the U.S. Code. It is maybe the ultimate example of an illegal act that is sanctioned by those in power, and not prosecuted.

So these members of society, who say that they're justified in taking a government paycheck - possibly because they think they're doing the right thing, but more likely, because of their own economic fears or insecurities - what is the right way to think about them?

It's simple. Imagine a lifeboat, with 20 people on it. 10 of them say, "hey, look, there are pieces of our sunken ship floating around. We can simply nail those to the lifeboat and we can all stay afloat and make it to safety". But the other 10 people don't believe them. They throw them overboard, and forcibly drown them, to save themselves, thinking otherwise they'll all sink. Money in this analogy would be their idea of the lifeboat - their fear would be that, without forcing us off of the lifeboat and drowning us, that they would be the ones doomed to sink. Money is what allows some people to excuse their wealth while others seek a way out of their poverty, because it is through money that the excuse of having "earned" that wealth privilege gains its believability. "If I have it, I must deserve it!"

And money - beyond the unfairness it exists to create - is built on a sinking foundation to begin with, because money, in our modern society, doesn't just circulate naturally - it's created and then largely distributed to banks in the bond market, who thus immediately gain an unfair advantage over the rest of society. The currency inflates every single year, but the people never see the increase - banks are the only ones who see that money. And we are left to wonder why the bankers are the richest members of society.

Our entire economy is a system - authored by our rulers in "government" - where we measure our legal wealth in numerical amounts, and where some people have learned to increase their wealth without increasing what they give. That is why the richest people in the world spend so much of their time associating with politicians - not to mention funneling money towards them. They know how the game works, because they wrote the rules, and they want the rules to be just a little more favorable to them, with each passing year.

So that is what government is. (a) People with so much avarice for mankind that they will subject everyone to hellfire just to make themselves rich, powerful, famous, or whatever else, (b) people who are stupid enough to think they're doing the right thing in "government", and (c) people who participate reluctantly. And then, all the guns and nuclear weapons and high-security buildings they've hired us private sector workers to build for them, that they use in the name of "government". It is true that there are awful criminals in the corporate world, rivalling the controllers of government - who do control corporations as well - but they are merely players in the game for which the government has written the rules.

And that is why there is an upper class and a lower class. Our society was not built with universal wellbeing as a goal - the entire structure of our society, constructed through the government's "laws", was always an attempt for the authors of the rules to benefit from the suffering of those subject to the rules. Our entire legal system dates back not only to English monarchy, but pre-A.D. Roman monarchy - so is it really surprising?