Aiding and Abetting

Drowning in red tape...

It takes two to tango, and a multitude to construct the edifice of total government control.  Politicians and crony-capitalists may be the driving force of state tyranny, but it’s the host of professional lawyers, consultants, accountants, economists, writers, editors, and other state minions who implement their bidding with devastating accuracy and ruthlessness.

These men and woman are the silent but deadly partners in the state’s control of society, aiding and abetting the whittling-away of true freedom.  They belong to the quasi-private sector, that murky territory where state funding meets private professionalism.

Don’t be fooled.  These people look and smell like you and me, but really they’re part of the machine.  They’re the ivy-league lawyers paid to draft daft labour legislation.  They’re the hotshot economists hired to tell the government how much GDP will be added by the next state waste-a-thon.  They’re the consultants who advise government to raise taxes here and there to squeeze x% more revenue into the coffers.

These are the host of seemingly normal people, willingly or unwittingly aiding and abetting the state, sucked into the bulging morass of arbitrary annexation of basic economic and natural freedom.  This is no small number of people.  As it is, in most nations on earth the state already determines how roughly one third of the resources get allocated.  In many instances it is a far higher proportion than this.

But it is not just in the tax-and-spend realm that these folk ply their trade so earnestly for the beloved state, for to argue that the state only controls one third of our economic lives would be to ignore the state’s involvement in law making and enforcement, centrally planned monetary policy, economic regulation, annexation of property, control of the courts, control of vital infrastructure and manipulation of the media.

In each of the spheres of state over-reach, you can bet there is a multitude of minions tapping away at well-worn keyboards bringing the state’s dreams from ideological lust to intellectual and practical fruition.

How sad it is that we have so many of our best and brightest caught up in this web of coercion, aiding and abetting the perpetuation of slowly creeping tyranny.  And perhaps sadder still that the edifice of state requires not only the employ of the minions to construct it, but service of the unknowing satellite slaves to help us all abide by the labyrinth of rules within that edifice.

And so we not only get all those busy-bodies being the outsourced brains in the creation of the Total State, but we get whole industries springing up of bright men and women who will make a living helping us all comply with the madness.  We get private tax consultants, corporate tax consultants, labour lawyers, competition lawyers, compliance officers, regulators, regulator watchdogs, regulator watchdog watchdogs, auditors, safety officers, licensing officials, inspectors, means testers, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on…

Indeed, we actually have different phases of state wealth destruction.  

Phase 1: We have a government.  The government taxes us via conventional means and via monetary inflation, and redistributes the wealth to favoured cronies and inefficient departments.

Phase 2: We have the aiding and abetting class.  The state employs these folk to carry out its bidding to make use of both the resources it confiscated from free individuals and the fiat authority conferred upon it by the constitution and enforced by the police and military.  These minions make the Phase 1 wealth destruction possible – they’re the intellectual voice behind the thuggery.  Many of these people are our best and brightest (or not as the case may be), wasting productive energy constructing a leviathan that will hurt them and their posterity in the long run.  The irony is indeed rather tragic.

Phase 3: We have the drones.  The drones are the folk sucked into a career administering the monster, advising us how to avoid the monster, getting us out of trouble with the monster, and getting us all compliant with the monster’s rules.  To these folk we pay away our wealth in order to avoid a run-in with the monster, as those tend to be rather unpleasant for those wanting to live quiet, peaceful lives.  Of course all these rules are unnecessary state sludge, meaning in reality we are paying away wealth for nothing.  But by and large the drones don’t bother as long as they’re doing well professionally, and the minions only want to feed the beast as the longevity of their jobs depends on more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more rules and regulations and by-laws and statutes and decrees and sub-sections to existing laws, and more paper and more words and more of everything.  The government for its part is happy to keep sucking productive capital out the dynamic sector, pay what it must over to the minions and keep the rest.

Phase 4: The suckers.  That’s you and me.  With a lack of understanding of the erosion of our true freedoms, the average Joe carries on oblivious to the wealth carnage.  We, for lack of a more tasteful phrase, take it up the tale-pipe with a self-imposed gag in our mouths.  All the waste, all the lost hours, all the waiting in line, all the licence fees, all the lawyers fees, all the time spent in the labour courts, all the time and wealth spent defending against state employed anti-trust prosecutors, all the compliance costs, all the papers to fill out, and all other manner of unnecessary wastage is a massive drain on our productivity.

In essence we are driven into a corner by the state, and our collective ignorance means we are unable to get out of that corner.

The freedom revolution is not a coercive one. It cannot be, for coercion is antithesis to freedom.  No, the freedom revolution is the revolution of good ideas and education.

Let’s get the message out there that we don’t have to stand for perpetual wealth destruction and economic mediocrity.  The minions, drones and suckers need to understand where they fit in to the puzzle, and realise that doing the bidding of the corrupt will only end in tears.