The Truth About Politics
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
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Our schools and media portray
corporations as sinister, and government as benign. But who wouldn’t rather take a sales call from Norwegian Cruise Line than an audit demand from the Internal Revenue Service?
Or imagine if a corporation fabricated a web of untruths, used them as a pretext to launch a violent attack on a people that had never caused Americans any harm, and brought about as many as a million deaths and millions more internal and external refugees. That corporation would be broken up and never heard from again. It would be denounced ceaselessly until the end of time.
Now all those things did happen, but they were carried out by the state. And as we all know, there have been no repercussions for anyone. No one has been punished. In fact, the perpetrators earn six-figure speaking fees. The whole thing is shrugged off as at worst an honest mistake. Some people are still outraged about it, but even they seem to take for granted that there’s really nothing that can be done about behavior like this on the part of the American regime.
Imagine there were a corporation that was somehow so entrenched that despite being responsible for a staggering death toll, it evaded all responsibility and simply carried on as before. The outrage would be deafening and overwhelming.
But so relentless has been the propaganda, ever since all of us were children, about the state’s benign nature that many people simply cannot bring themselves to think as badly about the state as they have been taught to think about corporations – even though the crimes of the state put to shame all the misdeeds of all existing corporations put together. Meanwhile, opponents of the state are routinely portrayed as incorrigible misanthropes, when in fact, in light of the state’s true nature, we are mankind’s greatest advocates.
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Think for a moment just about this last claim: that government employees are our servants. These people staff an institution that decides how much of our income and wealth to expropriate in order to fund itself. They will imprison us if we do not pay. And we are to believe that these people are our servants?
For those not gullible enough to fall for such a transparent canard, the rationales become mildly more sophisticated. All right, all right, the state may say, it’s not quite right to say that the people govern themselves. But, they hasten to add, we can offer the next best thing: the people will be represented by individuals chosen from among them.
As Gerard Casey has argued, though, the idea of political representation is not meaningful. When an agent represents a business owner in a negotiation, he ensures that the owers’s interests are pursued. If the owners’s interests are defended only weakly, ignored, or downright defied, the owner chooses different representation.
None of this bears any resemblance to political representation. Here, a so-called representative is chosen by some people but actively opposed by others. Yet he is said to “represent” all of them. But how can this be, when he can’t possibly know them all, and even if he did, he’d discover they have mutually exclusive views and priorities?
Even if we focus entirely on those people who did vote for the representative, is their vote supposed to imply consent to his every decision? Some of them may have voted for him not for his positions or merits, but simply because he was less bad than the alternative. Others may have chosen him for one or two of his stances, but may be indifferent or hostile on everything else. How can even these people – who actually voted for the representative – seriously be said to be “represented” by him?
But the idea of political representation, while meaningless, is not without its usefulness to the modern state. It helps to conceal the brute fact that, despite all the talk about “popular rule” and “governing ourselves,” even the “free societies” of the West amount to some people ruling, and others being ruled.
When the results are announced tonight amid cheers and celebration, then, remember what it all represents: the triumph of compulsion over cooperation, coercion over freedom, and propaganda over truth. The civics textbooks may write with breathless awe about the American political system, but this is by far the worst thing about the US. Rather than celebrate the antisocial world of politics, let us raise a glass to the anti-politics of the free market, which has yielded more wealth and prosperity through peace and cooperation than the state and its politicians could with all the coercion in the world.