This oil spill and the government’s belated response to it do not prove the value and efficacy of the government, but precisely the opposite.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So I had a spam email from a state-worshipping zealot I’ve never met named Sara P. Miller. Apparently Sara P. Miller is the modern-age equivalent of those noxious creeps you used to find preaching the gospel of Jheeezuhs! on buses and subway trains, self-imprisoned in a never-silent pantomime of exhibitionism and self-loathing. I cannot be trusted to find the truth on my own, so I must have it thrust upon me by benificent busy-bodies. Good grief…

Anyway, here is Sara P. Miller’s argument, all spelling and punctuation errors faithfully reproduced: “As the sludge roles onto Louisiana’s coast, suddenly, the anti-government bashers are silent. [….] And this morning, as that horrible, poison sludge makes its tragic, putrid, photo debut, we will all believe in ‘big government.'” She defends this by making reference to a number of Rotarian Socialist statists, absolutely none of whom are anti-government. They are all exponents of the government — past or current office-holders.

And that doesn’t matter to me. I’m assuming Sara P. Miller sent this nonsense to me because I haven’t said anything about the oil spill in the gulf. “Cum taces, clamas,” say my Roman friends — “When you are silent, you shout.” Not quite. The topics I don’t write about are legion. Hell, the things I think about writing about but don’t constitute a vast library of unwritten prose. I haven’t written about this oil spill because I don’t care about it, frankly, and because I am busy.

But: The actual essence of Sara P. Miller’s argument, which she is not smart enough to make, could not be more wrong. This oil spill and the government’s belated response to it do not prove the value and efficacy of the government, but precisely the opposite. These events — and the cloying chorus of the Rotarian Socialists of both major political parties — do not argue for the glories of the state right now, but, rather, for its inglorious ignobility going back forever. The state is never anything other than crime, and the crimes being played out right now in the Gulf of Mexico are nothing other than further proof of that proposition.

I don’t have time for this even now, so I’m going to take it down quickly. I’m sure there are points I’m missing, but since every one of these arguments aligns the same way — government is a vast criminal conspiracy that is always at war with humanity, with the human mind and with the conditions necessary for the proper functioning of the human mind — my oversights will amount to the omission of redundancies.

So, first, Americans are addicted to petroleum because governments at every level built thousands of miles of “free” roads. In this effort the state had the full-throated support of Rotarian Socialists, as always, but it remains that these “free” roads were only built because the state stole the land they were built on, along with the funds to build them. If every stretch of pavement in the U.S. had to pay its own way as a profit-seeking private business, there would be almost no roads, almost no petroleum-powered vehicles and almost no need for petroleum in the marketplace.

Second, the corporation, with its state-enforced limits on liability, results in the kind of insane risks we associate with off-shore oil rigs. No matter how costly the clean-up of this mess turns out to be, the owners of British Petroleum know that they cannot be held fully accountable. Yes, they can lose every penny they have invested in BP. But by force of arms, the state is sworn to protect all their other pennies. Without the fiat of the limited liability corporation, people who cause injuries are liable to the full extent of the damages. But because the state and the Rotarian Socialists always want to socialize the risks of their reckless behavior away from themselves, the tab for this mess will be assigned instead to you, John Q. Sucker.

Third, the state stupidly promises to protect the overseas assets of corporations. Because of this promise of armed defense, companies like BP and Shell invested heavily in dry-land oil wells and refineries on the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. But when the local populations nationalized those investments, the governments of the United States and Great Britain did nothing. I think it was stupid for those governments to have made those promises, and I think it was beyond stupid for business people to have put their faith in princes. But it remains that BP is drilling deep-water wells in the Gulf of Mexico because the much better resources it once owned were stolen from it, with the connivance if not the active participation of the governments it had depended upon to defend its property.

So now we’re in a wholly ludicrous position: We are massively addicted to a substance we cannot reliably provide for ourselves. We can supply 30% of our addiction ourselves, but only at the risk of more offshore oil spills. We can add even more oil to our domestic supply, but only at immense expense — and only by positing that all of the stone-ground idiots afflicted with the environmentaloid mental illness somehow miraculously discover the rules of arithmetic.

In other words, we’re screwed. And every bit of this can be traced back to a foolhardy reliance on government. The oil roiling ashore in the Gulf is the least of our problems. The real problem is the compound-interest costs of Rotarian Socialist stupidity: We depend for 70% of our oil supply on seventh-century religious fanatics who gouge us on the price of that oil in order to accumulate the means to wipe us off the face of the earth. An incontestably-psychotic moral-midget is months away from acquiring nuclear weapons, but, in preference to protesting that consequence of our government’s oil policies, the Sara P. Millers of the world are much more interested in scolding people for daring to doubt the divinity of their gods.

Even so, I don’t care about this story. The earth is large, and the damage from this oil spill, no matter how overblown by the lamestream media, will be small, local and temporary. Here, by contrast, are some news stories of much greater interest to me:

We heard all last week that continuing to not enforce the immigration laws at a slightly more vigorous level of inactivity is the moral equivalent of Naziism. Meanwhile, the Feds want to force you to carry a national ID card. And they want to put a “black box” in your car. I guess it’s a good thing you have the dipshit Arizona state legislature to bitch about. Otherwise, you might notice that you are being inducted, one seemingly harmless law at a time, into a police state.

If you understand the socialist argument, you know that there is nothing of yours that you have a moral or legal right to call your own, exclusively, keeping it to yourself and forbidding it to everyone else. If they can take your money to pay for someone else’s dialysis, then they can take your kidneys, too. Don’t believe me? A legislator in New York wants to confiscate all of your organs. Only post mortem for now, of course. It doesn’t do to scare the sheep. But if some Sara P. Miller can, with a straight face, expropriate your wealth to give it to someone who did not earn it, then there is nothing but inches and hours between her and your kidneys. Why should you selfishly enjoy the benefits of two functioning kidneys when some people have none?!?

Obviously there are much worse governments than ours, and I can find it in my heart to say one very good thing about the many, many governments of the United States: For most of our history, the state has been pretty good about not persecuting its critics. Here’s a question that matters a great deal to me — especially now that I know that Sara P. Miller has me on her watch list: How long will the state’s tolerance of criticism last?

Probably that last question is moot. The world is crawling with creeps who, just like Karl Marx, dream of enslaving all of humanity under one yoke.

That’s just one morning’s reading, one day last week. The oil spill in the Gulf is clearly further proof that government is the greatest enemy human beings have ever known, but the government’s enmity for the human mind is quite a bit more aggressive than an entirely avoidable environmental disaster. If I’m going to spend time I don’t have writing about the evils of the state, I’ll start with evils a little more consequential to my own life.

But: Meanwhile: Look at this:

Government’s sole weapon is destruction. At a minimum, it hopes to incite your fear of pain or loss, so you do what it wants you to do — and so you don’t rebel against it. If you don’t go along, it will confiscate your property or coerce and imprison your person. If that doesn’t work, it will torture you, maim you or murder you — or your spouse or your children. Government is a criminal organization, and because of this, its only powers of action are crimes — psychological crimes, property crimes and crimes of violence. This is what the Sara P. Millers of the world worship as their god — a greasy Mafiosi who whacks the people they hate.

Now ruminate upon that movie. What you are seeing there is nothing but rational cooperation in the pursuit of mutual profit. Thousands of people worked together for months to build that plane, with thousands more all over the world supplying the materials, and with a few dozen very bright people working for many years to design and perfect that airplane.

That is the power of reason, of persuasion, of the mutually-voluntary pursuit of shared goals. This is everything government can never do.

The truth — heresy to the Sara P. Millers of the world — is that whatever clean-up is done in the Gulf of Mexico will be done by private, profit-seeking businesses. They will be Rotarian Socialists, of course, so the work they do will be half-assed and it will cost way too much. But there is nothing that government can do about that oil spill except to bellow orders and cut checks. In other words, the government is not necessary — government is never necessary — it’s just imposing itself by force. We can but hope it will do more good than harm.

In a world without governments, bad things will still happen. One may hope not as often, and, if people are held accountable for all of the damages they cause, not as consequentially. But in a world without human freedom, nothing good can ever happen. That airplane is an extreme and utterly gorgeous example of the power of human freedom, but everything we know of health, wealth and happiness comes from the free operation of the human mind. And most of what we know of human squalor comes from the suicidally-devout worship of massively-organized crime.