21A004 Thieves, Liars and Killers  by Jim Davies, 1/26/2021

Governments steal, lie, and kill. All governments, that is. Some more and sooner than others, but that's true of every last, miserable one of them.

Government steals, because by definition, it's not a participant in the market, where value is exchanged voluntarily. So every last cent that it spends, and absorbs to pay its employees, is first confiscated by force from others. Stolen.

That doesn't make its employees all "bad people", or that they do their jobs less than diligently, but it does mean that every one of them is complicit in the theft; every day they go to work, they deliver value to the employing government which it perceives as greater than the wage being paid (otherwise, there would be no job.) Therefore, every employee is choosing to make a net positive contribution to the work of a thief (and worse, as below.)

That's immoral, but is almost always "swept under the rug" of the mind and conscience of the worker. Some kind of rationale is invented, to "justify" being an accomplice; the silliest I heard was that tax is not theft because "the legislature has defined it so"! Handy, when dictionaries can be rewritten by the thief. Another is to admit that obvious fact, yet claim taxes are "essential for a civilized society", as if a free market could not otherwise provide civilized services, and as if an immoral act can ever be "necessary." This ZGBlog has comment.

All of them are bogus: anyone working for government needs to quit, just for the sake of his or her own self-respect. Much more on the QuitGov site.

Government Lies. Almost every time a government spokesman moves his lips, he lies. This is quite well known. More accurately, whenever one issues a statement, it is designed to further government interests whether true or not; to him, truth is not a relevant factor.

The most spectacular recent government lie has been the ongoing one that the C-19 virus poses a serious medical threat to the population. To support that lie, reports of resulting deaths have, in the US and EU, been grossly overstated, by two orders of magnitude; and somehow, all major media have been persuaded not to question but just to repeat this huge government lie. It was exposed in this Blog no later than May 2020.

Government Kills. There are some, on the political Left, who say there are too many humans on Earth. If true, that would mean purging half a billion or so now and again might be a good thing; a culling of the herd, as it were. I've not heard any of those people volunteer to be first, nor to openly advocate war (as the most efficient method) for that very purpose; but such large-scale slaughter would fit the agenda. The dots are close and can easily be joined.

Another type of deliberate government killing is genocide. That is the deliberate extermination of a subset of the population because it falls outside some arbitrary standard of acceptability. Hitler's holocaust is the best known; others include his Action T4, the "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans in the 1990s, the slaughter of Armenian Christians by Turks in 1915, and the near-elimination of Native Americans by the US Government during the 1800s. In 1994 the Hutu-led government in Rwanda encouraged the slaughter of the Tutsi minority and equipped people with machetes for the purpose; about 600,000 were killed, neighbor by neighbor, in perhaps the most horrible genocide ever.

Those are at the extreme, though; here we're noting that all governments kill routinely, much of the time, and not necessarily on purpose. They kill by error and even when pursuing a "war aim" they may even try to justify it as "noble"! Even today, WW2 is still called "The Good War" because it put down particularly evil régimes in Germany and Japan. Its 80 million victims were not consulted.

I may be too kind, to use "error" above. "Unintended" government killing off the battlefield is actually its most lethal activity by far, and while it may be true that they didn't realize their policies would be so deadly that doesn't excuse the fact that the policies were dead wrong and predictably fatal. R J Rummel spent his career analyzing government propensity to kill those supposedly under its protection and the latest count can be read at Power Kills. For the 20th Century alone: 262 million. Of that, Mao Tse Tung's 1958-62 contribution of 32 million resulted from his attempt forcefully to replace centuries of traditional Chinese farming with communes that conformed to Marxist doctrine; even though those had already failed in the USSR! Maybe he didn't resolve one day to kill off those 32 million, but he certainly resolved to force on them an un-natural farming method which would very predictably have that result. Culpable.

Pursuit of a political agenda with callous disregard for the deaths likely to result is probably the most lethal component of the record of government slaughter, and applies to local ones as well as national; a Town P.D., trained to kill suspects who just run away, is a killing machine.

Accordingly, anyone with any sense of morality, whether derived from rational self-interest and self-respect or from religion, ought to repudiate any and all association with any government; submit to its laws only under duress, give it no respect, no votes, no business and especially no labor.