20A006 Is Free Riding a Virtue? by Jim Davies, 2/11/2020    

There's a forum I infest, well populated by members of the Sore Losers Club, the name I give there to Democrats who have not accepted the verdict of 2016. Among my many adversaries there is one particular knucklehead who calls himself Kent Allen; I call him "Closed-Mind Kent" because no matter how well anyone reasons with him, he refuses to change his mind and responds only with malicious and mendacious ad-hominem attacks.

Several times, he has ignored my explanations to the contrary and alleged that I am some kind of free-rider; that I accept government benefits but don't pay for them. In vain have I responded that I don't have any way to avoid paying for them and that I use most of them only for want of an alternative. He just repeats his mantra, as he did recently:

"I am not the hypocrite you are who slurps up all the goodies this society offers without fully paying for them while whining about what others with even less might receive."

Even though I'm not a free rider, suppose it were possible to be one: is that morally reprehensible, as Closed-Mind Kent implies? - or is it actually a good thing? It may seem unfair to treat a dog as illustrated here, but dogs are man's best friends. Governments are not his friends at all.

It's not a viable way to terminate the State, or anything close to that. At the same time, though, it cannot hurt to deprive it of money. The less money it has the more it will have to print, and the more it prints the higher will become inflation, and the more inflation the more resentment it will generate.

"Free riding" would, if it were possible, mean not paying some or any tax, while accepting all the handouts to which government says we're entitled. A version of it might be find and accept handouts or benefits that are not widely advertised.

Libertarians all agree that it's morally desirable to minimize payments of tax, but strangely a lot of us hold that it's wrong to accept handouts. The opposite is true! If you're serious about wanting to hasten the end of its miserable existence, accept as many as possible and pay it as little as possible. Conversely if you don't want to accept as many handouts as you can, I question whether you're serious about desiring to terminate government.

There's a possible extension to this way of thinking. If an individual can hasten the collapse of government a tiny bit by both taking more goodies from it and limiting payments to it, cannot the same be done on a macro scale?

Naturally, I don't suggest doing anything as reprehensible as casting a vote, but might one not join the existing chorus of shrieks for more spending, while also calling for lower taxes? That thought occurred to me after watching Mr Trump's recent SOTU speech, during which he appeared to favor both. That would be a change; Libertarians lining up to help Democrats spend money they don't have, just as if it grew on trees! One could even choose which boondoggles to favor the loudest - those which might bring some economic benefit (gross, of course, not net, for the latter would already be taking place with capital invested voluntarily for profit) such as a nationwide high-speed rail network. Wouldn't that hasten the day when government collapses in financial chaos? It surely would; but that's not the primary aim; it needs not just to collapse, but to be replaced by nothing.

There have been countless governments worldwide since the awful day ten millennia ago that one first appeared, and every one of them was a wholly irrational institution riddled with contradictions. Thousands of them have failed; yet not a single one of those failures was followed by a zero government society. Why not? - because the population concerned did not know that none was needed. They had not been educated, to the point of refusing to work for any successor régime.

Next time, that omission will be repaired. The TOLFA method, described in The Demolition, will do exactly that; the education will actually cause government to collapse, by depriving it of labor. Then, out of the chaos, there will arise a free society - because everyone will want one and be prepared run their own lives, their own way.