Recently by Eric Peters: Steve Jobs Hated Big Brother, Too
Making crime pay is literally true in America nowadays. Not just token work like making cons stamp out license plates or pick up trash along the Interstate. Theres not much money in that.
But theres a fortune to be made when government partners with (cough) private business to tag team the public as in the case of photo enforcement of traffic violations.
The profits can sail into the million annually in a major metro area such as Washington, D.C. (which has cameras everywhere) and the profits yes, profits are typically split evenly between the two.
Now, ordinarily, profits are a good thing. They are the result of having produced something of value that people not only want but but are willing to pay for. No one wants a traffic ticket and few of us pay them willingly. We pay only because of the implied threat of violence that accompanies each such notice if we dare not to pay.
Profits are properly the realm of voluntary free exchange not government force.
It is right and proper for the state to compel restitution, say as when a criminal is required to make his victims whole. But there is something unnatural and vile about using the frightening power of organized state violence to make a buck. To point guns at people in order to funnel money lots of money to a vendor, that is, to a privately owned business, so that its owners can get rich off the misery of the citizenry, with government providing Mafia-style thugs to help him collect.
This is in fact the defining essence of fascism and it is exactly the sort of system weve allowed to be erected under our noses. Often, with a good number of us cheering it on.
And we have allowed it because weve (that is, most people) been taught quite deliberately to misunderstand what fascism is. Our schools impart images of Hitler and his Nazis, of jackbooted stormtroopers and Nuremburg rallies and most especially, of jew-baiting and racism. But those are incidentals. The essence of fascism is not racialism. It is corporatism. The marriage of Big Business and Big Government.
It is about for-profit government at bayonet point.
And its much more than merely traffic tickets, though that has become an enormous problem especially since many of these cons are almost entirely automated, without even a nod to due process. Theres no facing ones accuser, no day in court. Just a ticket in the mail along with the private contractors affirmation of your guilt, unchallenged and taken as given (it being up to you to demonstrate otherwise, upending a basic principle that goes all the way back to Magna Carta) along with an order to pay up.
Ive written before about mandatory insurance first car, soon health and bet your bippie more to come (such as coercive life and perhaps home insurance) too. Once again, we have the essentially fascist practice of (so-called) private businesses enlisting the violence business of the state to enlarge their customer base by force. It is no accident, incidentally, that DMVs and other organs of the state began calling their unwilling victims just that customers beginning in the late 1980s, when fascism, American-stytle really began to pick up speed. But it also goes back a lot farther, to the 1930s when FDR took a whole book full of ideas (including word torture such as calling compulsory taxes paid into the government Ponzi scheme called Social Security contributions) from his Italian mentor, Il Duce the man who articulated the concept of fascism and made it state policy in Italy was widely admired by the West many years before that funny little man in Germany who ripped-off some of his ideas and symbols was anything more than a shabby beer-hall bully.
American schoolchildren have been educated in government schools, so of course they are largely ignorant of these things of things like the National Recovery Act and its spread-winged adler mascot, cousin of another and very similar adler mascot across the sea. Il Duce went down in flames actually, was hung up by his ankles because of his association with German racialism. But fascism lives on in the very Homeland that once sent troops across that same ocean, ostensibly to stamp it out.
We the average American dumbo, ignorant and propagandized as he is, attentive only to football and Dancing With the Stars believes we cant possibly have fascism here because America is diverse and doesnt mistreat its minorities (A-rabs excepted, of course) as state policy.
But thats just exactly what we do in fact have and are getting more of every day. Conservatives have for years yarbled about the threat of communism and socialism, while the real threat ran right between their legs and set up shop behind them.
The people own nothing in this country but large combines with political muscle control nearly everything. And make a handsome profit besides.
We may not have billboard ads for Der Sturmer along the highways. But weve got everything else that matters from internal security checkpoints to contributions at gunpoint from unwilling customers for the profit of (cough) private businesses whose business is fundamentally about coercion, about enriching the small elite that runs the operation, all of it marketed as being in the National Interest and necessary for Public Safety.
Only were taught not to notice it or call it by its rightful name precisely because there arent cartoonish pictures of Der Jude (or der A-rab) all over the front pages of the New York Times.
The genius of latter-day fascism lies in its America-style reincarnation wrapped in the the flag and family values and heterogenous diversity but exactly the same program under the skin.
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