Posted on 05/13/2002 5:15:54 AM PDT by Boonie Rat
Recapturing the Culture
by Bob Wallace
I get many emails asking me, "But what can we do about the degeneration of the government, the country, the culture and the economy?"
There is no quick fix. It took years – decades, even centuries – to get like this, and it will take a while to get things right again.
Most problems, fortunately, can be summed up in one word – the State. This gives a target (imagine if you didn't know what was wrong).
The bigger the State gets, the smaller Civilization gets. This is why, without exception in the history of the world, societies have always collapsed when the State got too big. Where are all the great civilizations of the past? Why are they not still around? There is no logical reason they should not be here. They were destroyed by the growth of the State.
There is an old-and-true saying: "He who works with the hands, is ruled; he who works with the head, rules." The head rules everything. Ideas have consequences. Anti-intellectualism is for the backward – those who are ruled.
If people want things to change, they have to take back the universities, the schools, the churches, the media, the law, and the government. They have to do something. "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," wrote Edmund Burke. People have to become university professors, teachers, writers and lawyers. Sometimes, even (ugh) politicians. They have to become the brains, in order to recapture the culture, and put it right.
Proper government, as John Locke pointed out centuries ago, only has three functions: protection of life, liberty and property.
When it goes beyond that, it turns into the State, which means what it creates is the exact opposite of what it intends.
Example: when the State gives money to unmarried, unemployed women with fatherless children to "eradicate poverty" what we get instead are more unmarried, unemployed women with more fatherless children (ominously, the word "bastard" means a "fatherless boy" and a "cruel, heartless man." The first often turns into the second, illustrating the vital importance of fathers.)
It's basic economics that the more you pay for something, the more of it you will get. If you want more poverty, then give more money to poor people. This is as much a law of the universe as pain resulting from hitting your thumb with a hammer. Poor people need jobs, not handouts. Jobs make them grow up; handouts keep them children.
I tell people to pull their kids out of the public schools. I would close all the public schools down today if I could. I tell people, jokingly, I would burn the schools down and salt the ground, then also put pepper on the teachers because they're so bland. That's just a joke. But closing them down isn't.
Probably the best books I have found for teaching children basic law and economics are Richard Maybury's books, such as "Whatever Happened to Justice?" and "Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?" They're short, clearly written and easy to understand. I can't recommend them highly enough. I once had a lawyer tell me, "I learned things from those books I've never even heard about in law school."
People will have to get Ph.Ds in economics (real economics, which is Austrian economics), political science, history and philosophy. Then they'll have to stay at a university until they can rise to the top, run the department, and hire like-minded people. The students will go into the world with a real education.
They'll have to become ministers and teach church. I don't remember a minister ever saying the Ten Commandments only supports a minimum of government. I would be satisfied living under a government whose laws were based only on the Ten Commandments; what we would have is a very small government, with few laws ("Do not murder" and "Do not steal"), and the maximum of civilization with a minimum of crime.
They'll have to go into the media and become reporters, editors and columnists. Thank God for the Internet, which is showing what fools most journalists are (I refer to most people in the media as "half-educated half-wits"). Many are a bizarre combination of ignorance, arrogance and intellectual sloth. Nearly 100% of them know who Molly Ivins is; the same percentage have never heard of Hans-Hermann Hoppe ("Is that a band?")
They'll have to become lawyers, to roll back the assaults on our liberties. I once sat in court and found 90% of the people were there for not paying their city-earnings tax, or else were cab drivers who didn't have one of the half-a-dozen daily, weekly or monthly legal documents they were supposed to carry. Only ten percent of the people should have been there. That's when I realized that if every – and I mean every – parking or traffic ticket was contested, there would be no more traffic or parking tickets issued. Most "laws" are concerned with taking peoples' money and putting it into the pocket of the State.
The "head" has been captured by the wrong people – the deluded who believe in the State. The kind who refuse to believe their policies are the cause of the trouble, and who always claim, "We just didn't go far enough," or "We couldn't get rid of our enemies." The capacity for self-deception and rationalization among these people is limitless.
I remain an optimist. I believe in the long run, the truth – and goodness – will always triumph. But it always takes work.
May 13, 2002
Bob Wallace [send him mail], a former newspaper reporter and editor, and an incurable lover of puns, lives in St. Louis.
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
Until Atlas Shrugs.
And our country is filled with them. Those who believe that the union created the states to serve it's lesiure, and that we are but servants of the government, and not the other way around.
>Until Atlas Shrugs.
Ayn Rand was wrong about that. The pols are quite content to fly an economy into the ground and then preside over the ashes. They'll never give up power.
Look at what happened to PA. They have good schools but no one stays in the state to work. They all go somewhere else. Has this changed the pols high taxing ways? No. They just forced TWO stadiums on the citizens after they voted no several times.
I agree.
The rise of the Internet is the second real sign (Reagan was the first) that I have seen in decades that we might be able to slow the growth of the ugly monster State that we have created and eventually turn things back around. As the article correctly points out, you have to have to affect the viewpoints of the future leaders of this country if we are to do so. The Internet provides a starting point for the organization required to accomplish that end.
We now have an ability to communicate and organize on a massive scale using a technology that is inherently difficult, perhaps impossible, for the State to suppress. They will try, of course. They are trying now (via, for example, the Washington Post-LA Times-FreeRepublic case) but they will fail.
This is new, this is different. There is hope. The very existence of FreeRepublic is proof of that fact.
Some of us more world-weary types have a different view; namely that the best way to reform a tyranny is to shorten it from the top down, by about a foot. ;^)
I think when we capture the head, we should do something distinctive with it. ;^)
Whether the tax payers ever quit paying is one thing, but that may be what it will take.
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