Jimmy Buffett and Alan Jackson |
Pick a point in time, any point in human history, and I absolutely guarantee that, somewhere in the world, there is/was a revolution going on. I'm talking about the type of revolution where the people decide they dislike their government, rise up, and try to change it. Just like Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffet sang that it's always five o'clock somewhere, you could likewise sing that there's always a revolution somewhere.
Here as of late, the most recent one, and
also closest to home for us Americans, is in Cuba. The folks there have had enough of the
poverty and the lack of necessities such as food, medicine, housing, water, and
energy. They are marching in the streets,
demanding an end to the failing Communism they have been forced to live with
all these decades. Other revolutionary
hotspots are all over the Middle East.
And so, for the Cuban and Middle Eastern
people, I say: good for them! It's
definitely a positive trend when the people realize that all the promises made
by Dear Leader were a sham, and they were fools for thinking otherwise.
But, there's a problem here. Check out the words penned by the rock band
The Who, in their classic anthem:
The Who |
I tip my hat to the new constitution
Yes, dear readers, the problem for most of
the people in the world is: they just
never learn. It happens in history, and
even in the Bible, over and over and over again: the people finally realize their government
is crap, so they stage a revolution and install a BRAND NEW government, but only
this time, the new government is … still crap.
Fidel Castro |
Hooray for the Cuban people, but I can already make my usual spot-on prediction: if they succeed in overthrowing the horrible government that Castro instituted, then whatever they replace it with will most likely be just as horrible. If not worse.
Now let me quickly add that history DOES
have some notable exceptions, the most obvious being the American Revolution
back in the 1700's. The colonists got
fed up with their British overlords, rose up, defeated what was, at the time,
one of the world's toughest armies, and established a system that actually WAS
better: a society based on individual
freedom and limited government.
Unfortunately, it didn't keep. It was a gradual thing, but bit by bit, our
government began growing and growing and growing. Even the SPEED of the growth grew; if you
were to plot the size of the U.S. government on a graph, it would be an upward
curving line, with no end in sight. And
that includes state and local governments, too.
The American people have sold their soul to the devil and fallen for the
world's oldest scam.
I have spent most of my adult life trying
to understand this human affinity for government. Government can take many forms, from a single
"chief" as leader of some tiny, remote village or island, to much
larger states with a monarch or a parliament, theocracy, representative
republic, pure democracy, and/or everything in between. The pattern is universal and timeless. People feel they are small, weak, mortal
children, and want to put their trust in something bigger, stronger, and more
eternal. (Real live, visible humans always
seem preferable to invisible deities.) And
so, the people fall for the same garbage again and again. Some charismatic personality rises up and
claims they are DIFFERENT from the last guy, that they are a "common
man/woman" of the people who feels their pain, and has no desire for all
that power and money that comes from political leadership. A revolution follows. Then over time, our "common man's"
true colors come shining through, as he becomes a tyrant and accumulates more
and more power. By then it becomes MUCH
harder to stage another revolution and unseat him. (Harder, but not impossible; witness the fall
of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall.)
Government |
People love government, pure and simple. Given the chance, they tend to vote for MORE governmental size and power, ignoring the fact that their existing government - or the one before it - is or was big and powerful. And it didn't work, or is not working, as promised.
The only thing libertarians like me can
do is keep fighting the good fight, hoping and praying that somebody out there
will listen and wise up, and we don't get fooled again. Then the next revolution really will make
life better.
Libertarians tend to have some of the same traits as Communists, Scientologists or other highly ideological 'ists', which is a passionate devotion to some ideology and an inability to understand its flaws and why people don't adopt their utopian ideal.
ReplyDeleteWhat's needed here is for you to better understand how politics and power work. What a miracle democracy is and how fragile it is.
Louis Brandeis said something Libertarians don't understand: you can have great concentration of wealth, or democracy, but not both.
People don't 'love government' the way a Libertarian thinks they do.
But Libertarians don't tend to understand either the theory of democracy, or its challenges, or why it is a good system.
The history of human society is hierarchical and tyrannical; that is 'what works' generally.
It's only more recently there has been more change to that, but even today, there are still plenty of clear tyrannies, and every other system is pressured to go that direction - see the Brandeis quote. That includes communist and democratic countries.
The US is smothered in controls people don't even understand it has.
Its politics are dominated by wealthy interests, with billions of dollars to keep power in their hands.
Democracy in the US is more a con job to keep people docile than a real system - yet it's better than a lot of places.
Libertarians have essentially nothing to offer to the real issues which they don't understand.
Try to talk to a Libertarian about the tyranny of great wealth, and you tend to get a blank stare. Only government is 'evil'.
It's such an enveloping ideology that discussion tends to have little purpose - just as with the communist or scientologist.
The comments on the fall of the USSR, for example, are misguided, not understanding what caused the fall or the power issues globally.
It's not that Libertarians don't have some points sometimes; probably every ideology has something to it.