The state claims to have the moral high ground

If you listen to the proponents of our current political systems, they are quick to tell you that those who choose not to participate in the upkeep of their resource-guzzling machinery are selfish. They claim that the state machinery is in place to help the poor, the sick and the needy.

They say that not participating in that is an act of cold selfishness – a cruel choice that can only be made by people who don’t care about the weak and who only want to enrich themselves at the expense of others.

When you scratch the surface even a bit and look at what participating in that system actually means, the reality looks quite different. All they have is a huge resource destruction apparatus.

The state machinery destroys resources – especially those of the poor

Our human society is producing a vast amount of resources, which are being dumped down this machinery that grinds most of those resources to useless dust. Real time, money and energy is taken from people with the excuse of helping other people in need, only for those resources to then be wasted.

How is wasting and destroying resources meant for the needy a good thing? Yes, the destruction machinery manages to give small crumbs of these resources to “the poor” at the end, but that doesn’t make it ok!

The political systems the world over are built on a big, fat lie. The ideological proponents (who often also happen to be the main beneficiaries!) of this resource re-allocation destruction machine masquarade as the saviors of the poor, while guzzling up the resources meant for those people – resources which never reach the supposed beneficiaries, or only reach them after having mostly been “lost” (diverted!) in the system.

Remember, under each of those “leaks” is someone with a bucket that doesn’t have holes – while some of the money is genuinely lost, much of it isn’t just “lost”. It goes somewhere.

Do not be fooled by these people, and call out their lies with every chance you get! They will loudly and unashamedly judge you if you come out as someone who wishes this evil charade to end – and if you act accordingly, you will be labeled as an enemy of the poor. Be brave in renouncing those false labels, and do your part in exposing these charlatans for what they are – the very opposite of the good and moral people they claim to be!

The realistic, sustainable and long term solution

Just turning the tables on these crooks isn’t enough of course – only withdrawing your support from the current system would still leave the problem (poor people needing help) without solution.

While you can (and should) of course help people in need locally, just saying this isn’t a very convincing alternative for the systems currently in place – systems that many people are dependent on.

Naturally I can not and will not claim to have a detailed solution for every situation in every country, but the general direction is quite clear, and described in an excellent way by Titus Gebel in his book Free Private Cities.

In a nutshell, it is this: no human society has ever been without solutions for the people in need. Yes, in many societies the solutions haven’t been perfect, but it needs to be noted that the solutions currently in place are also quite far from “perfect”! Surely we can do better than just waste all of the resources that are currently being destroyed.

In fact we have done better, before the state assumed these “helping” roles as its own. In a functioning society, solving this problem well should only require a small (single-digit) percentage of the overall resource production. I would have exactly zero problem with something like that – but I do have a big problem with a society that demands over 75% of my productive output under the guise of this small but important need.

It’s truly a sorry excuse for expropriating most of my life energy. Those who try to do that can expect a fight – fortunately a fight that can now be fought on the battlefield of ideas, as these violent expropriators have only limited methods of stealing my life energy.

I’ve moved out from their main sphere of influence, and I advise you to do the same – without feeling any shame for leaving the charlatans desperately eating an ever-increasing share of an ever-diminishing cake. The sooner you opt out of the system, the less resources get destroyed!

What isn’t a solution

Some people try to brush aside these problems with wishful thinking: “yes the state is quite a horrible system, but it’s the least bad system we have – at least some of my money goes to good use!“. Yes, some of it does. Most doesn’t – and a large chunk goes to actively bad purposes, corruption and war!

This is the problem, and it cannot be solved by trying to keep the system on life support. The leaky bucket will require all the energy you have to give, and it will never be enough. Changing the color of the bucket (the political party in power) won’t fix it either – we need to find a way to move on to systems based on voluntary cooperation, so that intra-personal decisionmaking (“the market”) can finally plug those holes for good. The machine won’t fix itself.

Sacrificing your precious life energy for a dysfunctional system isn’t a moral act. It is simply waste, and the question of morals shouldn’t even be in the play.

What to do

To even begin to solve this on a level of the countries, the western politicians would need to understand that the ideas that didn’t work in the Soviet Union, don’t work any better when applied in the west. Those ideas weren’t bad because they were applied in a wrong place – they just simply do not work, period. The politicians won’t be understanding that anytime soon because they are effectively getting paid for not understanding it. Stop waiting for them to fix things and just fix your own life, perhaps by moving.

I don’t know exactly how we move from the current situation to a more effective system (other than “in lots of different ways!”), but I do know that at least being aware of better alternatives is the first step. Being loud and vocal about this resource destruction problem is the second. Be quick to turn the tables for the people advocating for waste of other people’s time and energy, and educate them on the better options!