The Nature of Man and Government (communism is not an economic system)

When men acquire a little bit of wealth, one of the first products they endeavor to purchase is the torture of their neighbors. Man is a moral creature. He is programmed to want to inflict pain and punishment on strangers whose tastes and activities he finds offensive to his own aesthetic preferences. And he is programmed to believe he is serving some higher purpose, and not the selfishness of his own impulses, when he does it.

Man has a punishing impulse. He is programmed to imagine he is actually a puritan pursuing moral restraint, when he hedonistically indulges his impulse to torture strangers.

There are other people in the world, whose existence serves no apparent purpose to you. It seems your world would be a better place without them. The reckless driver when I am riding my motorcycle. The speculator who snatches up the lot next to my house, when I was hoping to expand my property. Random people who are seen as contributing to crime, or pollution, while adding nothing of value to me. People who from my vantage point seem to be parasites.

People are similar to female dogs, who have little use for one another, and seem to always be at each other’s throats. Economically, it is a rational and accurate calculation that there are many people who, if they didn’t exist, your own quality of life would improve. Outside the hazy boundaries of information and rationality, there are millions or billions of people whom I can calculate or imagine the world would be a better place if they didn’t exist. In addition to purchasing new furniture and doughnuts, man seeks to purchase the elimination of those people, their extermination or incarceration.

All this nonsense, arguing about whether capitalism or communism will feed more people. The majorities of both factions are padded out with people whose true intention is torture and revenge. Man is the only creature that spends its entire life camouflaged against its own species, with his true intentions clothed day and night in a facade of wanting to do good. Government is the luscious product of torture and coercion, channeled through an organized game like football.

And so the spectrum of government runs not from communism to capitalism or classic liberalism, but from whether the government is designed to protect men from the torturing impulse of their neighbors, or used as a tool and vehicle to produce and deliver this product – the torture and extermination of neighbors – under color of puritanism, economic efficiency, morals, to save the world, or whatever.

Like every nation in history, the United States has abandoned the treasure of classical liberalism and tolerance, the supremacy of the individual in his own sphere, against coerced participation in some alien moral order. Instead the government has been expanded in pursuit of the usual utopian promises. And having been expanded, the blind and clumsy instrument of government, has become a plant to produce the product and fulfill the indulgence of moral coercion and torture. And its power has set the different factions at war with one another, to control the levers and direct the torture and destruction of the other.

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And here is a warning for Republicans: No matter what set of policies they offer, or what brand of populism or nationalism they offer, it will end the only way it ever can end, with a dictator and peasants. Whichever way they turn and twist, in whatever direction they run, they are en route to the same destination, their own destruction, and the destruction of everything they claim to value. Unless they focus all their energy on one thing: Reducing the size and power and intrusion of government. Any machines of torture they create in pursuit of their ideals, will always be turned against them in the end.

The most dangerous animal is man. Our Founders feared high seas and savages, far less than their fellow man and the governments and institutions he gravitated to creating. These institutions always evolve to be self-serving and self-perpetuating in the end, selecting men only to the extent their hallucinated morals and impulses serve the institution, and subjugating men as ants. We should seek to dismantle, and not reproduce such structures, in the New World.