Government is a drug

Most people don’t want to be free. Most people want to be rich. Some want to be famous. Few really want to be free.

Why be free? Freedom comes with many perils. It is far easier to cruise along through life with a nice warm blanket of welfare statism. Don’t be uptight man. Enjoy the ride. We’ll be dead soon enough.

But for some there is a deep resentment toward authority. We are the malcontents. We are the trouble makers. We are the revolutionaries.

Some people believe that if they can just get their friends in charge then society will be better. This is the philosophy of the left, and also the philosophy of the statist right. It’s a battle for the levers of power. Either I have power and you do not, or it is the reverse. This is how most people think. But then there are others…

The others believe that the state is a product of deeply flawed humans and should be limited and hemmed in if not torn out by the root all together. For the “good” the state can do, there is at a minimum 1 to 1 trade off in freedom at best. Often it is a far worse deal.

Government is addictive. Government is a drug. With too much it morphs the user into a bloated shadow of himself who perpetually ponders how he got to this point.

As a former smoker I can say that life is not as much fun when you are addicted to something. You always have to feed this ambient desire. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you just need to keep putting cigarettes into your lungs. I found that the thing that finally got me to quit was when I realized that I was actually paying someone to kill me and to make life more difficult for me. I finally got pissed off enough to quit.

This country is addicted to government. We are addicted to Social Security, defense contracts, highway projects, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and about another million programs large and small all designed to solve some problem or another which more likely than not was created when government tried solve some other problem. We are on a lot of shit.

We need to get mad and to realize, no matter what our enablers say, government is a bum trip. We need to start by cutting back. Once we see we can live life without the government “party” we can think about getting rid of the welfare state once and for all. If we choose not to get sober we can always hang out with Babylon and Rome down on skid row and talk about the days before we were so very ill.