A sponger or sponge is a person who lives on others. Government power encourages sponging. To understand someone’s politics, find out where they stand on sponging. If they speak about the people running the government or about unity or about a revolution of the people in the country, they favor sponging. They implicitly are thinking about and advocating replacing the current government monopoly by another. In the new system they envision, the names of the parasites will change. The names of their victimized hosts will change, but sponging will go on. As long as there is government without the consent of the governed, government power will always be wielded for the sake of spongers.
The conservatives in America have no credibility in speaking against spongers on welfare because they support their own spongers in the military-industrial complex. The liberals can’t credibly decry military spending because they cater to their own favored spongers. Both sides agree on some groups being spongers, including those in government generally.
If you want some group to get financing, you should not get it by sponging off other people and making them pay through the power of a territorial government that controls everyone in its borders, including the non-consenters. Most people would agree in their personal lives that sponging is wrong, yet we live in a system of sponging that’s baked in the cake by government power.
There is more to it. There are constant struggles for control of the apparatus of sponging that we call government. The power to sponge is taken for granted and the battles are over who gets the power to control the directions of sponging.
If people in different groups hate each other’s guts, how much of that hatred has arisen because of perceptions of sponging? A certain amount of sponging will be tolerated by people, but at some higher level of sponging, people are going to perceive the basic injustice of sponging and they are going to protest against those who they think are sponging off of them. The hatreds being expressed on American streets from left and right, that appear to be based upon such things as race, religion, and ethnicity, are fueled by the prevalence of sponging and its accompanying injustice. The sponging is fueled by the territorial monopolies of governments. Government power is bound to be misused. It has to be. There are no effective controls over it. The temptations to use it are impossible to limit, simply because the powers are monopolistic in nature. Once they are delegated, the battlefield shifts to fights over who will gain from the sponging and who will lose.
It is this sponging that libertarians include under the term aggression.
9:48 am on August 20, 2017
