In recent years there has been a lot of hubbub made about the definitions of words. Many people are unable to provide simple definitions of nouns, but something even more difficult is defining the proper role of the state. For their part statists seem unable to agree on what constitutes a legitimate government, or what its role might be, but most of all not a single one of them agrees on what the state ought to do with money. Everyone agrees they should be doing... something but how could they know? Should it dictate the use of language? Flatten the economy to an anthill? Win the war on drugs? Cover the country in solar panels? Provide insurance to pay big pharma? For any of these things, the state must have money. But the state is a monopoly of violence first and foremost, they are in the business of producing bads, not goods, and nobody will pay them for it willingly. For this reason, they level taxes on everything under the sun. A gas tax, liquor tax, sales tax, inflation tax, even bagels are taxed! This means that the benefits of any spending are a package deal with the tyranny of taxes.
Any rational person has to reject this view of the state as a benevolent maternal goddess. Humanists disgrace the name of Christ and mock his children for believing in what they call an immoral fairy tale. At the same time, they also worship a god which has bread for all mouths, productive work for all hands, Capital for every venture, unending credit, and debt, and salve for every wound. Voting is their prayer, monuments are their temples, and politicians are their priests. What they refuse to admit is that their false god is supported by theft and violence alone. They are dupes of one of the strangest illusions that have ever taken hold of the human mind, even stranger than the communists pretend Christ to be. They mock the church saying it oppresses the poor, but the opposite is true. Our goal is to become one with the Logos so that we might glorify him, and that desire spawns a love for our fellow men who are also made in his image. Likewise, the goal of the statist religion is to live life at the expense of others. This sick desire is a source of war, plunder, slavery, and all manner of other atrocities.
The deep desire for sin in man is grounded in the desire to gain satisfaction without regard to anything besides self-destructive gratification. In a statist society, the oppressor does not oppress his victim directly, he calls on the state to do it for him. But their god is imperfect, "it can never satisfy one party without adding to the labor of others." Truly, "Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else" (Bastiat, Government, p.99). "But truly, the most astonishing aspect of this religion is the blindness of the people to the scandal of it all. They are utterly unable to apply their most fundamental morals consistently. If they did, they might begin to suspect that
"reciprocal plunder is no less plunder because it is reciprocal" (Bastiat, Government, p.100). In the same way that we are told Christians do not question our beliefs, the statists make themselves hypocrites.
From wherever a people get their laws, there also will you discover their highest god. In the modern world, the state is the source of law, sanctions, succession, authority, and sovereignty. this fallacious representation of deity is a fertile source of calamities. The state creates millions of tiny 'unseen' problems with its corrupt doctrine, but statists ignore this and attribute the problems to externalities rather than the perverse covenant system. They don't think of it this way but the state is a creature with two hands. One is a large and rough hand for extorting large quantities of wealth. The other hand is small and soft, it is for giving back a little. On account of the second hand, they count the creature innocent, but the giving would be impossible without the taking, and the monster keeps far more than it gives back. The thing that is seen is the blessings of the giving, but the unseen cost is the hoard of wealth the dragon steals and then gambles away.
There are other problems with giving trust to a state, they are extremely unstable. No organization can go on stealing and creating grievances without upsetting someone, but even if stats could exist peacefully nobody agrees on how they ought to be run. These conflicts are the source of civil war, insurgencies, and revolution. This might not seem like a big deal at the moment, but America perhaps has dealt with the most rebellions of any country in the world in recorded history. There were possibly hundreds of Indian Wars, over 250 slave rebellions, and hundreds of other political engagements from every corner of the political spectrum. Outside of America, many countries have coups every few years. South America, Africa, Southern Europe, and Asia, no matter where you look this is a serious problem. It starts when a new government comes to power, and inevitably begins to lavish promises which are impossible to perform, but even these promises differ from those of the public, which has hopes and dreams that can never be realized. Over time some states realize it is much easier to promise than to perform and to do it repeatedly, so once it is broken, and it is, everything stays broken.
But how does the state keep up with any of its promises? It is impossible for a state to give more than it takes. It does not add any value to society. At best it can only add unwanted utilities, if the people wanted them they would pay for them voluntarily. All the state does is seize money and redistribute it without prices, which means it is always bashing its brains out on the socialist calculation problem. Even if they did have a way to tell if what they were doing is valuable, the state has no incentives to create value. Politicians are only incentivized to create a perception of value to citizens in order to be elected. While in office there are only weak personal and moral incentives to do good. But there is absolutely no real mechanism for regulating the way political action is pursued. The legislature can vote for any crime, any injustice, and any measure of spending
So how does the state reconcile this irreconcilable conflict? Well, much like its lower-class citizens, it lives on credit. It does this by requesting Moral, Social, and Economic loans which it quickly spends and never intends to repay. It is far easier to swap out the talking heads and point the finger than it is to solve problems because solving those problems would literally cost them everything. The result of this unsustainable cycle of spending and borrowing is crippling bankruptcy. This bankruptcy extends to all areas of society including the moral, social, and economic realms. The very idea of a state is that it should give more than it takes. But this is both impossible and harmful to everyone involved, I suppose it just "comes with the territory".
Friedreich Bastiat put it about as well as anyone could. "Government is and ought to be [seen as] nothing whatever but common force organized, not to be an instrument of oppression and mutual plunder among citizens; but, on the contrary, to secure everyone his own, and to cause justice and security to reign." (p. 107) But the state does the opposite. As a monopoly of violence, it perverts the purpose of the government to produce only evil. We must abandon mutual plunder and the imbalance of promises between what can be done and what we want to be done. That kind of thinking leads to War, Plunder, and Slavery. The deification of the state is an illusion that feeds on its own love of sin. To end this cycle we must have a way to restrict governments to securing rights. The way to do that is to ensure they check each other's power in the marketplace of ideas. They have to follow the path of objective morality and for that to happen God must be the highest sovereign. We cannot trust the state, therefore our goal is a voluntary society based on the law of God, not the politics of plunder.
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