I suppose we’ve all overdosed on hearing “Freedom isn’t free!” for the past few days. Your humble scribe is pleased to report that freedom actually is free. It’s government that isn’t free. Yes, there is a difference. Even the founding documents of this nation agree that freedom isn’t bestowed upon us by the government via human sacrifice in some orgy of blood and violence, but from God. My Bible does not say that God received a purchase order from the United States government that sets them up as a vendor to sell freedom to us.
Indeed, it is a government that isn’t free. As I am sure you’ll agree, it costs a lot of money and lives. Take for example the purchase price of a 1,000-pound bomb. Our government sprinkles these across the Middle East like you grind pepper over a baked potato. Well, anyway, at least if you pepper a potato as I do. How much does one of this cost? Anyone know? I’m guessing they’re not cheap. However, the United States government has purchased enough bombs that they’ve actually lost some within the United States. Last year, a 500-pound bomb ended up here in a South Tucson salvage and scrap yard where the poor soul tasked with cutting it apart was vaporized in the explosion. The air force never did tell us how this bomb ended up in a South Tucson salvage yard. And this is the government that tells us other countries are not responsible weapons owners.
I learned something interesting through some recent reading. Everyone speculates on the “vanishing civilization” thing that asks why certain civilizations just up and became one with the desert once again. The usual thing said is, “Why, they were great! They had just created a huge central government!” Stop right there. It appears to me the collapse of civilizations begins once they create a huge central government. Why would this be the case? I suspect because the government keeps getting bigger and bigger and siphoning off more and more of the wealth. People talk about “sustainability”? Central governments are not sustainable. In fact, it appears they act as cancer that eventually kills the host.
See, civilizations start once people have some certain thing that creates an advantage. That could be a natural resource, an agricultural breakthrough, water resources, or they sit at a terminus of the Silk Road. They begin to prosper and the resources are controlled by what basically amounts to a syndicate of peoples within the community. However, what then happens is a central government arises and begins taxing the wealth that is either created or flows through that civilization. As the greed of the government for more taxation grows, the civilization itself must expand in order to accommodate that. In many cases, they outstripped the natural resources and so the civilization collapsed. It wasn’t an environmental disaster brought on by a normal market economy. It was one brought on by that central government whose voracious appetite for wealth caused it. Because if people didn’t pay taxes, they were punished.
Take our central government, for example. Let’s get back to that 1,000-pound bomb. Let’s assume that device costs $10,000. Now, think about the man-hours involved in laboring to provide the tax money to buy it. I daresay that this is the genuine reason behind the government desperation to create jobs. They need the tax revenue. It all revolves around the central government and collection of tax money. But think of all the resources being used to generate that tax money! And what is done with the 1,000-pound bomb? It is dropped on other human beings, where it blows up killing people and destroying private property. Not only that, but the collected wealth of the taxpayers is literally blown into smithereens. Can this be called sustainable?
We can sit there and talk about sustainability all day long. But history shows that the most obscene and profligate squandering of natural resources is perpetrated by central governments. Excuse me, but what private individual has a fleet of aircraft carriers and an air force with which he is wasting untold millions of gallons of aviation fuel each day in senseless “training missions”? These are not commercial flights to deliver passengers or freight. These are guys tooling around up there fighting an imaginary enemy the United States may or may not provoke into a war in the future. Can this be called sustainable?
Does it not come to pass that once a central government comes into existence in a society that has existed for centuries prior, the civilization created collapses soon afterward? Take the Anasazi, for example. From a collection of small agrarian tribes, they coalesced into a society with an identity. They then discovered a method by which to control the trade routes into and out of their region. The hypothesis is, a central government then arose which began taxing that wealth. Then a drought occurred and the civilization collapsed. Why? Because the central government could not exist on its own merits. It provided nothing, but could only exist by taking wealth that was no longer flowing. But what happened to the Anasazi? They returned from whence they came: Small agrarian tribes without a central government. It would appear they learned from that past mistake of creating a huge government. They discovered that central governments are not sustainable over time.
I haven’t got time or space to go into greater detail about this, but let me say this: We’re asking the wrong questions as a nation and, ergo, obtaining the wrong answers. Big government cannot solve the problems of our age and the future because they are the problem. Only these central governments can confiscate wealth from citizens, turn it into weapons, and then use those weapons to destroy life in other countries. All of these resources are literally going up in smoke. How can this be called sustainable? And how can this central government be looked to in order to solve these problems?
In truth, our central government is what needs to be consigned to the scrap heap. They cannot create peace because they start wars over ego-embellishing missions more akin to that of Roman emperors. Who, by the way, drove their civilization into the ground with their central government. They cannot create prosperity because they confiscate the prosperity of the people and turn it into weapons used against innocent people elsewhere. Therefore, our central government is not sustainable. It might not be a drought that causes the United States to collapse, although that is certainly possible. It might be that we provoke a war with a nation we cannot defeat or underestimate and lose that war. It might be another economic collapse or the realization our money is backed by electrons. But one thing is certain: This central government will collapse and sooner than anyone thinks.
