Statists, a danger to all who would remain a free people.

More from our own Veritas Omnia Vincit with some thoughts on Statists, and why Statism is such a bad idea. Here’s why:

Veritas Omnia Vincit
Statists, a danger to all who would remain a free people.

As veterans we’ve served the apparatus of the state, the mechanisms of power if you will. We’ve been sent places to do things based on what the nation believes is important for the safety and security of our nation. This service to nation can lend itself to support for the state even when that support is perhaps a bit unwarranted. In continuing our support for the state we need to consider if we are becoming statists without recognizing the potential for abuse by the state of that support.

So what the hell is statism really? We hear the word used as a pejorative on a fairly regular basis. The core definition seems fairly simple, someone who supports the politics of state control over social and economic affairs. Using that definition one can see why its use a derogatory term has become more frequent in our current social environment. What’s interesting to me, and always has been, about statists is that they are not confined to any particular ideology. Instead statists of all stripes view the government as a solution to a particular set of problems.

Statism seeks to utilize the strength of government to enact a control mechanism over some aspect of our lives usually by employing the force of law. Whenever the power of government is extended into the social or economic spheres of our society you can be sure there is a statist at work in some fashion or other. Statists will support the government spying on all of us for our own safety, they will support the use of militarized police forces, they will support asset forfeitures without due process. Statists will support mandates with appropriate punishment for personal health insurance, they will support suppressing the Bill of Rights protections by limiting speech, gun ownership, the right to privacy in one’s own home. Statists will support all manner of intrusion into our personal lives by our government overlords to feel safe and secure in their homes.

When one views an ever larger Federal government, one can see how statists are used to promote the desire of the government to enlarge itself and grow its power over its own citizens until, as the founders feared, you have a strong central government dominated by the wealthy. The hosts of statists on both sides of the aisle serve to simply promote that larger government for “our own good”.

We have gone from being a people who distrusted every aspect of a strong government to a people who can’t accomplish anything without government help these days. When you consider what you can do without government permission (help) versus what you can do on your own you start to realize how insidious the power of government is when it comes to corrupting the nature of the nation and the people within that nation.

There are a variety of ways that corruption beings, many of them originally altruistic in nature such as backing housing loans, providing educational assistance, or even offering tax breaks to steal business from each other when states compete for job creators. The corruption in the housing process took several forms one of which was racist redlining with the FHA loans that lasted for three decades from the thirties into the sixties before being outlawed. The damage had been done however, the statists were able to segregate the population of blacks in many areas to an extent that exists to this day. In “correcting” this problem decades later our government allowed the real estate loan market to become a form of derivatives market where savvy bankers utilized the power of the state to target lower economic level families for exploitation by offering loans they knew were going to fail to people they knew couldn’t afford them. The derivatives market was going to make money off the resale of the loans and be profitable before the loans failed so they weren’t at all concerned with the reality of loaning money to people who couldn’t afford to repay those loans. 2007-2008 showed us the benefit of that statist activity where the government’s power was used and exploited to interfere in social and economic affairs.

Statists trying to “help” poor college students afford college through low interest loans has instead created a booming financial loan market that creates indentured servants of college grads who can’t escape that debt using traditional tools available to private market loan receipts. We’ve created a different sort of debtor prison with the college loan market and by interfering in the market we’ve disrupted the cost controls that would normally have kept education affordable. Consequently college costs have grown out of all proportion to other societal cost increases without providing any real benefit to our society with all these newly minted college grads who often don’t know what previous generations of high school students were capable of upon graduation.

For me the dangers of statism are two fold, you have the bootlickers who support everything their dear government leaders do on their behalf. These are the “Good Germans” of the future. They ignore the criminal aspects of their government because they benefit from other aspects of government. You can see these people on the news regularly, disappointing specimens all. The second more dangerous group of statists are those who understand the government can be manipulated with money and prospects of power to benefit those statists for generations. This second group is exactly the group the founders warned us about, but this second group is so very good at what they’re doing most people don’t even believe they’re being manipulated and exploited. The founders largest concern for the Republic was that the people themselves would become lazy and apathetic to their governance and once that happened the founders feared that we would see massive wealth accumulation by a few families that would then exert far too much influence over the nation’s government and ultimately end the Republic.

Franklin’s famous response when asked what was decided, “A Republic if you can keep it.” should serve as a constant reminder to us all that creation of this Republic was by no means a guarantee of its continued survival or its success over the long term. The men who formed the government were in no way statists they were fervently opposed to massive wealth accumulation and to government controls over citizens as their history taught them a few people with wealth and power made for a corrupt government taking advantage of its people.

The statists among us will always make excuses for the government and the mechanisms of government control, as veterans sworn to uphold the Constitution it’s our job to expose the corrupt points that intersect all of our lives and to speak the unpopular opinions that our government doesn’t want to hear and most of our fellow citizens don’t either. It’s our job to be those surly curmudgeons pointing out the truth behind these issues. That our own government does some really bad things and excusing those bad things doesn’t make us stronger it changes us in ways the founders could not have anticipated and those excuses become the precedent for continued abuse and exploitation by future government officials.

Massive wealth accumulation by a select few was never the goal of the founders, civil asset forfeiture was never the goal of the founders, wars in dozens of nations without end were never part of the founders’ plan, unquestioning loyalty to a corrupt government was absolutely not a part of their plan. Statists will excuse or explain away all of these things because they fear what the world will be without the state as they know it today. Statists like the status quo, usually for all the wrong reasons.

When it comes to being a statist or being a revolutionary, the founders were anything but statists. Jefferson even suggested regular blood letting uprisings were a necessary part of any government’s normal political world. There are few such men left today, most are content to let the government own them.

Support for, and love of, our nation stands quite separate from support and love for the government of our nation. I love the United States of America, I swore once to defend her with my life if need be as did all of you. My government of late deserves neither my support nor my love and protection. It’s a distinction we would all do well to remember.

Thanks for reading,
VoV

Category: Guest Post, Politics