The State is completely bankrupt as an idea, meaning it’s completely lacking on some critical dimensions. And the two main dimensions upon which it fails are the moral dimension and in furthering the lives of the persons it claims as its citizens.
We are constantly reminded of these disabilities of the State by present experiences. How can the United States, one of the foremost States in the world, be seen as good for the lives of Americans when it insists upon bringing us to one nuclear precipice after another? The Pacific Ocean is a very large body of water. It is almost 6,000 miles from Los Angeles to Seoul, and yet our government is embroiled with North Korea of all places. In the other direction, it is 4,680 miles from New York to Moscow, and yet numerous Washington institutions are intent on creating bad blood and far worse between the U.S. and Russia. The fact is that in no matter what direction one looks that radiates from this great land outwards to the rest of the world, it will be found that the U.S. has manufactured trouble spots for itself.
How can the United States be furthering our lives by enacting thousand of pages of minutely detailed economic regulations? Is this not a replica of the attempts by both Germany and the USSR in the 20th century to create long-lasting empires? And didn’t their utter failures teach us that such attempts are doomed to utter failure because they lack any basis in either human nature or sound economic ideas? We see their systems as totalitarian but do we not fail to see that our system is much the same?
The State cannot stand up against the libertarian critique. The statists have no arguments that even come close to quelling the arguments against the State. There is intellectually no contest. Neither is there a contest based upon the experiences of mankind for the past 4,000 years.
The only things that the statists have going for them are the status quo and the long habit of statism that permeates the minds and modes of Americans and the rest of the world. The status quo can fall to pieces and habits can be broken. The status quo is a jumble of subsidies, taxes, payoffs, bribes, cartels, all catering to special interests. It’s all unlawful even if we don a classical liberal hat and rely upon the language in the Constitution, properly interpreted. It’s entirely lacking in any moral standing looked upon for what it is, which is a parasitic con game.
We can live without the State, but we cannot live without law, by which I mean the natural law and the great traditions of law like common law that are currently intertwined with the State but can and should be separated from the State. In fact, they must be separated from the State. We do not envision either anarchy or lawlessness with the State absent from our lives. If the Legislative and Executive branches were dissolved along with their legalities and regulations, we could get along quite well if we kept the Bill of Rights, refocused on natural law and worked with common law and other bodies of law that have served us well enough. We could easily maintain means of defense in any number of ways. We could enhance our defense by orders of magnitude by ending the commitments throughout the world that are now bringing us perpetual warfare. America would experience an unbelievable economic boom.
8:10 pm on September 3, 2017
