Unity is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Everything I said is contained in a single word—collectivism. And isn’t that
the god of our century? To act together. To think—together. To feel—together.
To unite, to agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice. Divide and
conquer—first. But then—unite and rule. We’ve discovered that one at last.
Remember the Roman Emperor who said he wished humanity had a single neck so he
could cut it? People have laughed at him for centuries. But we’ll have the last
laugh. We’ve accomplished what he couldn’t accomplish. We’ve taught men to
unite. This makes one neck ready for one leash. We found the magic word. Collectivism.
Ellsworth
Toohey to Peter Keating, The
Fountainhead, Ayn Rand, 1943
Countless commentators have decried disunity. They fret about our
divided nation, warn of impending civil war, and implore us to come together to
avert it. Unity’s desirability is taken as given, but what if the longed-for
unity is that of passengers on a jet plunging into the ocean? A reappraisal of
disunity is in order.
Unity
was doomed with the passage of the 16th, or Income Tax, Amendment. It’s hard
to feel any goodwill towards a government that forcibly relieves you of what
you’ve produced, benefitting itself and those to whom it redistributes. The
income tax divides the country into makers and takers, a division that cannot
be bridged.
For
the productive, “Unite!” is a poisonous bromide, code for: support your own
slavery. For a long time they bit their tongues and holstered their
weapons as perpetually expanding government and its partner in crime, the
Federal Reserve, took an increasing portion of what they produced, made it
increasingly difficult to produce, loaded the country with a pile of debt and
unfunded liabilities that cannot be paid, and depreciated the unit of exchange.
Boxed in, a shrinking minority, the country they and their productive forebears
built circling the drain, some are finally realizing they are underwriting
their own servitude.
With
whom are the productive to unite? The politicians who believe they have first
claim on all income, ignore or marginalize anyone who points out that it’s not
their money, and reject accountability for how they spend it? Government
employees “working” paper-shuffling sinecures? A
military-industrial-intelligence complex milking perpetual war for all it’s
worth? Rabid recipients demanding still more unearned benefits: higher
education, health care, housing, and whatever other goodies to which they feel
entitled?
If
there were any goodwill—a sentiment that promotes unity—among those groups, one
would expect gratitude towards those who provide their sustenance. SLL knows of
no instance where a taxpayer received a thank you note from a government
beneficiary. Even suggesting it would be met with derision from many of them,
who believe they have a “right” to what they receive. Unity for this crowd
means: “Shut up and get with the program!”
Enslavement of the producer class has
not been mentioned as a decisive issue in the 2016 election. Nobody—Trump
included—in the current constellation of power wants to question the servitude
that pays for bullets, bombs, welfare, veterans benefits, corporate subsidies,
agricultural support payments, interest on the debt, clean energy programs,
infrastructure, grandma’s pension and medical care, and so on.
A
few crazed libertarians whisper that people should be able to either keep what
they’ve legitimately produced or voluntarily exchange it for something they
value more. Everyone else has one or more cherished government programs that
receive money wrested from their fellow Americans.
Yet,
the producer-recipient divide is the yawning chasm in American politics. Take Trump’s
signature issue, immigration. Are people who support him xenophobic racists, or
do they believe that many illegal immigrants avail themselves of
government-provided goods and services for which the productive must pay, and
those who find employment lower wages for the rest of the labor force?
No
doubt some Trump supporters are the former, and they get all the media
attention, but many Trump supporters are motivated by self-interested economic
considerations. The obvious truth, which elites in both the US and Europe ignore and
suppress, is that an open-arms welfare state is incompatible with welcome-mat
immigration. The common sense notion—if you hand out money they will
come—should have stopped this nonsense before it ever began.
Who
gets what and who pays for it are the questions floating over every issue in
American politics. Put aside statistical noise and deliberate obfuscation and
it’s clear the tired-of-paying-for-it contingent was a big factor in Trump’s
victory. If the cleavage
is this dramatic now, what happens when crisis hits and the debt-saturated
financial system collapses?
As
the bill comes due, how many producers will have either the desire or the
capability to pay it? How many recipients will recognize that funding is
insufficient for their “rights,” entitlements, payola, and scams and adjust to
the new reality? The answers do not augur well for unity. Rampant
disunity will rend a cataclysmic fissure that, in combination with fiscal exhaustion,
will imperil warfare-welfare state governments.
It
is long overdue. Governments are colossal, cancerous carbuncles whose malignant
purposes and practices threaten the wellbeing and lives of those who pay for
them. Their calls for unity are thinly veiled threats to accept its
depredations. The or else has arrived and will become increasingly tyrannical,
until the tyrants have figuratively, and in many cases literally, killed the
geese laying their golden eggs.
Governments are collectivism and control—unity
under tyranny. According
to IRS data for 2015, the latest year available, 45 percent of
American households paid no taxes, the top 50 percent by income paid 97.2
percent, and the top 1 percent, with 21 percent of the nation’s income, paid 39
percent. Those statistics are a clarion call for disunity. If producers decided
en masse, a la Atlas Shrugged, to secede from current
arrangements, those arrangements would collapse.
If
you’re footing the bill, isn’t that the desired outcome? Most divorces would be
more amicable if they began earlier, after it was obvious the divorce was
inevitable but while there was still some comity between the parties. Right now,
before the inevitable collapse, a managed process of dissolution, managed
disunity if you will, would be more desirable than the messy break-up that’s
coming.
There’s
nothing sacrosanct about political arrangements whereby fifty states send a good
share of their production to a federal government that grows ever more
powerful, intrusive, and repressive. But because the government and its
political support depend parasitically on that production, managed dissolution
will never happen. Imagine a split of the US between its maker and taker
regions into two nations. How long would the latter last?
So
is producers’ secession a pipe dream? Not at all, because crisis and unmanaged
dissolution will happen. The pipe dream is that the
government’s roughly 3.4 million civilian and 1.4 million military personnel
will be able to suppress, manage, or contain uprisings fueled by an appreciable
portion of the rest of country’s 325 million people. Yes the government has
bullets, bombs, surveillance, data bases, and prisons. Insurrectionists of all
stripes will have their own bullets and bombs, sheer numbers, anger,
desperation, hackers, and guerrilla warfare, which numerous foreign engagements
have demonstrated the US military’s inability to quell. Chaos is the betting
favorite.
The shattering will present producers
with our best opportunity since the American Revolution (the US disuniting from
Great Britain) to defend territory and set up political arrangements based on
liberty, individual rights, honest production, and voluntary exchange. In the
meantime, we must reject our oppressors’ calls for unity. It isn’t free and
we’re paying for it. Disunity is our path to freedom.
