Gov 1A-20: The Politics of Plunder

    In the course of human affairs, it is eminent how utterly suicidal the structure of the state can truly be. However, if there was a single fatal disposition of the state it would be the proclivity to live at the expense of others. In its every action, the state is used by those who control it to extract wealth from others for their own benefit, especially from weaker rival groups. In this way, the modern state, with all of its constitutions, representation, and bureaucracy, has not evolved beyond the primitive states of rival villages in the upper paleolithic. A continent-spanning war between the mightiest nations is little more complex than two dozen cavemen bashing each other's heads in over a bad harvest. All political conflict comes down to groups of primates going ape-shit on one another, only on a far grander, and more terrifying scale. Thus the way polity conducts itself, politics, ought not to be distinguished by grandiose visions of world peace and fraternity, rather we ought to view it as it is, a struggle over the 'right' to live off the labor of others. This is what Bastiat called The Politics of Plunder. wherever plunder is less burdensome than labor, it prevails

    If the Lord our God, Christ, the spirit we must emulate in order to thrive has commanded us "Thou shalt not steal" the Lord of the flies, the serpent, and the deceiver have commanded mankind "Thou shall not steal, except by majority vote". Yet we eat of the tree we fancy best, the fruit of our own choosing. A part of that fruit is the state, which serves only to preserve rights from its own tree, and fatally, the ability to live at the expense of others. It does this by waging wars, oppressing the people for the extraction of God's property, enslavement, and the protection of coercive monopolies, itself included. If the origin of sin is to make our own right, then The sin of plunder comes from our desire to live at the expense of others. In the realm of rightful law, we call theft criminal, no matter how uncomfortable it is for us personally, but things change once we enter into the realm of politics.

    In the west, we hold our own property, and the property of others as so sacred few of us ever think to violate it. But when the tribe, the protecting agent of the law, the state, intervenes as a middleman we make ourselves foolish like apes. Everyone does a whoop and a holler for plunder and thievery, everyone wants their bread and circuses, and they all dance and shout and cry in support of the man who promises the most and best. Nobody realizes that the state is that great fiction by which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. Nobody asks how this kind of behavior can stand, much less how we as human beings can stand it! On what foundation does this great monument to fantasy stand? At those words, the great orgy of statism degenerates into mortal combat. The only things everyone can agree upon are war, exploitation, coercion, and slavery. The political nature of the west grows like a tumor in her bosom until it kills her, but she refuses to remove it because it is the dearest object of comfort to her children. Milk obtained by lying is sweet to a man, But afterward, his mouth will be filled with dust. 

    For all time, the Law has been our tutor to the image of God, so that we may be justified by our faith in him. The purpose of the law is to make us more like Christ so that we will suffer less for all manner of tragedy, including plunder. But the law is ignored, And justice never comes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; Therefore justice comes forth perverted. The law has become an instrument of plunder, numb to its true purpose. This perversion is because of the corrupting influences of violence and power over men, which come from the desire to live by a right not afforded to you. The results of state plunder stem from a broken law, but the effects reach far beyond individuals. The conflict between True morality and the perversion of law leads to a loss of moral sense in society and a lack of respect for the law. The Destabilizing forces of this conflict may end in people legitimizing slavery to their government, depending on protection rackets, and sustaining monopolies of force. 

    Most political action today stems from the desire to get the vote in order to plunder. The means of plunder is taxation, a source of wealth for whoever happens to slip their hand into the voluptuous pockets of the state. However, the state keeps most of the wealth for its own ideas, whether these are wars, monuments, or other megalomania. These ideas do not create wealth, and at best only provide an unwanted utility. The fundamental axiom of political life is the right to assistance. That is, any group has a right to any amount of 'assistance' as long as their voting base is influential enough. This could take the form of forever increasing bribes to the masses or even corporate welfare. It matters little in the long run. both are imposed through democracy as the war for political victory spreads. Thus go the ceremonies of plunder.

    In the past few decades, there has been a lot of talk about defeating this or that disease. But there is really only one disease that disgusts me, and that is the terminal condition of sin. We can't quite cure it if only absolve ourselves of its guilt. However, we can treat the symptoms, one of which is the great fiction. If we want to fight plunder we have to know how to test for it and how to deal with it. The best indicator for plunder is whether or not a law redistributes wealth. If it does, then the law is legalized plunder. For example, protectionism favors domestic producers over foreign ones, a form of gross discrimination. This policy may grow local industry, or it might ruin it. Either way, it certainly works to funnel cash away from consumers, and competition into the hands of the rich.

    In the past, plunder has been a right held only by the elite. For a time this preserved a sense of order and general respect for the private property ethic. As C.S. Lewis put it "It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies" In recent times the pendulum has swung towards a more egalitarian sentiment. The string of thought is that theft is not theft if it is done in the service of the common good, people owe it to themselves. This, unfortunately, has led to a state of extremely high time preference, all things are held in common except those objects within personal use. Because of this unfortunate circumstance, better known as The Tragedy of the Commons, everyone is incentivized to compete for the existing resources rather than preserve them for later use. To illustrate this imagine a wrecking ball chained to a crane inside a building owned by society incorporated. Every time the ball swings too far it caves in a wall and destroys the building. After a disaster such as this, many people are killed, and the whole thing has to be rebuilt. But there is a better solution, we could choose not to destroy our society, from the inside with lies and plunder. Let it be that nobody should plunder anyone.

    This approach, the abolition of plunder in society, describes a meritocracy. Nothing is more meritocratic than the absence of the undeserved privilege to plunder. Sadly, meritocracy is not accepted by those without merits. In the modern era, the state is only a franchise to the competition for the privilege. This has always been the source of revolutions, civil war, and the looming collapse of civilization. Plunder is more than something wrong, plunder is the opposite of the idea of human rights. Property rights are human rights, and plunder is the abolition of those rights. The basis for any involuntary transfer of property is the idea that the original owner had no property rights, of which all his rights consist. In the same sense, reciprocal plunder is no less plunder because it is reciprocal, such a nullifying action is no less dehumanizing than the first. A violation of human rights is a violation of God's sacred temple, thus theft and retribution are wholly sinful and destructive. 

    Perversity among perversities, The law has become the instrument of the same evil it was sworn to prevent. The walking contradictions, the Platonic sophists of the enlightenment have reached down from heaven to touch our finger and to shine light into the cave of our primitive understanding. They enlighten us about the tender mercies of the state, and its honest desire to protect life, liberty, and property, and for that reason, we must preserve it. But our antithesis is the antitheism to their state worship. We oppose them, daring to suggest as primitive fools that the primitive origin of the state lies with primitive bullying and the struggle for power. To us the bully is the most primitive form of the state, it has always been a violent and plundering organization. When an ape brutalizes his fellows he dominates the group. Over time the bully ape became a tribal warlord, these warlords became kings, and so on. Historically, the state has always been restrained by other governments, those blessed with self-government, religious groups, and tribal identities have checked the expansion of the state into their own sovereign spheres. Without these restraints, the state is only an agency of unrestrained plunder, a monopoly on violence with no competition. 

    The fact that sovereign governments have always hindered the state raises the question of which restrictions can justly be placed on the state. The answer has to do with the nature of reward and punishment. Plunder is fundamentally immoral in the eyes of God, and, in a society without plunder, just laws are the mere negation of evil. In other words, negative sanctions are the proper response against plunder. The need to reduce harm and provide justice gives birth to the law and the legal system. The goal of this system is to protect the triad of rights: Personality, Liberty, and Property. The statist system is the cruel perversion of this ideal in the service of plunder. Remember, an unjust law is active, It forces people to act and plunders them of their rights, but a just law punishes evil to preserve those rights. 

    In the eyes of God harm is injustice, and plunder is a grievous sin against the image of God. Therefore plunder is unjust and illegal in the courts of heaven and earth. Justice is the form of the good, and law is the enshrined code of justice legitimized by the sanctions of government. With this ethic in mind, we can see that law is an organized form of justice and that justice is the truth about man as described by God. The purpose of the law is to protect personality, liberty, and property. For the protection of these rights, the government is organized as collective action. With the right of the sovereign to exclude other governments it becomes an extended network for the defense of personality. Philosophically there is no difference between a group of individual men and an equal group of men who happen to share a creed, therefore government is best understood as a collective of individuals. One man does not have the right to murder, neither do ten or ten thousand or millions of them altogether. No government as a whole has any more rights than an individual does on his own. the command of Christ is to resist not evil, to turn the other cheek, and to love our enemies. Many will dispute this, but our command from heaven is to refuse to meet violence with violence, collective force, a form of tribal violence, is out of the question, only action which is glorifying to God is permissible. 

    No human government is truly sovereign, all are beholden to the one true king for the service of his glory. In the present, all things work in the service of the king, and all forms of government are no different.  All earthly kingdoms rebel against their king and for this reason they are passing away to be replaced by the kingdom of God. While they are here they exist to defend that which glorifies God, in particular three things. The first of these is Personality, or the right to safely keep a personal identity, it is the individual which glorifies God so it must be protected. The second is the liberty to perform actions, which is necessary because one cannot act to glorify God without the freedom to act. Finally, property must be protected. If individuals have control over their personality, that is personal properties, and they have the freedom to act,, then by extension, they own the fruits of those freedoms. But what does the government, and particularly civil government do in its rebellious state? It moves from justice to injustice by perverting the law and deceiving the masses. We are told the Government ought to rebel against the individual justice of God in favor of the collectivized justice of a false king. This is done for three main reasons. 1. Naked greed, 2. Misconceived Philanthropy, and 3. Laziness mixed with unregulated power. All three of these excuses lie in sin, their purpose to facilitate plunder for the goal of living at the expense of others in which there is no good. 

    I have written a great deal, but much of it is difficult to understand and all of which will seem strange at first. But now that it has been read it is important to come to a set of conclusions about it. To begin with, Justice is grounded in the image of our fellow man who we love as ourselves and second only to the good itself. Because of this image of mankind, we have the desire to protect our brothers, and for this reason, we organize governments of many kinds. These governments, which are passing away as the kingdom approaches, are designed to protect from assaults on personality, liberty, and property. Because of man's collective and individual rebellion against God, the law now assaults all three. Plunder originates in this sinful rebellion out of a desire to thrive ignorant of the true image of man. Law would contradict itself to plunder from some and give to others, therefore law should be a party to these ideas. But the laws are made to contradict their purpose in spite of it. Men compete for the power to plunder other men, we call this war and politics. But earthly rulers are no different from other men, all are greedy, misguided, and lazy, and for this reason, they are being replaced for the glory of God. The law and the collective organization which authorize it exist for the mutual protection of property rights. Just laws only protect, they do not through plunder and redistribution which are contradictions of purpose. The only way for us to achieve this great goal is by the establishment of a voluntary society. Nothing can be done to shield against violence, sin, or plunder if it is not done voluntarily, to force these things on anyone is to fight evil with evil.  

    Statism is a contradiction and blasphemy against the sovereignty of God, laws are meant to serve him by showing us how to love our neighbor. Plunder is a sin that originates from the desire to conduct life at the cost of other men, to do so is a curse against your neighbor and a rebellion against God's law. Yet men compete for the position of a ruler so that they may maximize their plunder and redistribution. The solution is to voluntarily accept the kingdom of God on earth as our government, not the kingdoms of dirt. This cannot be forced, and it cannot be avoided in history.