“They tell us that imperialism is bad, and yet 330 million Americans across 50 states must obey Washington, D.C., and that everyone who supports secession is basically Jefferson Davis.” – Domestic Imperialism
Democrat party wannabee VP, Tim Walz, rolled out an all too clever by-half slogan, “Mind Your Own Damn Business”, suggesting that Republicans were the ones that wanted to control your lives. Stunning gaslighting from a party that hasn’t met an institution or government program they don’t want to regulate and expand. While Republicans largely call for smaller government, with citizens instead, making voluntary choices in a private market, Democrats look for any opportunity to intervene in every aspect of American life.
To the progressive, government hegemony is society's ultimate goal: to return the unnatural state of inequality to balance. As such, the government tinkers in areas where they have no knowledge or expertise while requiring citizens to accept the myriads of decisions, they determine to be best. And with a government that rules through force and coercion, we have few options but to accept the taxes and regulations they increasingly impose. It is deceitful to suggest that their “services” are free to us as citizens. Instead, we must pay taxes for a lower quality of goods, that most if not all, could and should be provided elsewhere.
In Keith Knight’s 2023 book, “Domestic Imperialism”, Knight explains the many reasons why he left progressivism for the market prosperity and autonomy of libertarianism. Recognizing how the state has become the supreme example of domestic imperialism, with power centralized in the hands of a few, Knight discovered a better way. By comparing the voluntary benefits of a market economy against the coercive power of the state, Knight makes the case for privatizing everything, with the explicit goal of letting the people decide.
One of the disturbing divide-and-conquer tactics of the progressives is their devotion to identity politics and the goal of equality of outcomes. Their favorite target is the Marxist philosophy of class warfare between the rich and the poor. As such, one of their newest philosophies is critical race theory, a pretense to divide Americans by black and white, claiming structural racism, and the plague of white supremacy as the reason for any disparity in outcomes. Other attempts at malicious divisions are the promotion of misogyny in the battle of men against women or homophobia towards gays from straights. Whatever the arbitrary divide they create, all differences in outcomes are discrimination.
When they aren’t dividing us by our immutable characteristics, Knight shows how they are a bundle of contradictions. Natural monopolies are considered bad for the private sector, think Amazon, Walmart, and Apple, even though natural monopolies only exist when prices are kept low, and the quality of the product is kept high. Governments, as monopolies, however, exist without competition, operating with little restraint or incentive. As such, the government becomes the dominant or sole provider of goods and services. Try to opt out and you are fined and potentially jailed. Perhaps, one of the worst interferences by the government in modern life is its licensing scheme, a pay-to-play system that denies citizens entry into an increasing number of industries. While licensing in the 1950s applied to just 5 percent of jobs, that number has now exploded to nearly 1 in 4.
Competition in a free market is the preferred way of creating more jobs, allowing employers to compete for much-needed workers. Freedom of contract in the private sector allows workers to agree to a job at any price, providing them access to the ladder of higher wages. Markets allow people to work where they want while purchasing products and services through mutual exchange. Markets are to voluntary cooperation as government is to coercion. You can opt out of the private sector at any time, but you can’t opt out of government.
Ironically, it is the government that views the voluntary private sector as selfish and greedy. They condemn the markets for their failure to produce equal outcomes. While they hold entrepreneurs and corporations accountable, there is no such accounting for politicians or government bureaucrats. For example, when minimum wage laws create more unemployment and even threaten the solvency of businesses, they never acknowledge their role in its failure. While companies must provide value to the customer or risk going out of business, the government has no such fear of closure.
The resulting inequality from market interactions is natural, and a sign of progress, since most unequal outcomes are the result of personal characteristics between people, and not the result of discrimination or unfair play. Since equality is unachievable, despite the ongoing claims by progressives, it does not require intervention from the state to make everyone more equal.
While governments would have you believe that their attempts to micromanage the economy are compassionate, their top-down interventions generally fail to achieve their desired outcomes. Instead, the improvement in the general welfare of the public is more likely to be achieved from the bottom up, in a market system where skills and merit elevate the best and the most efficient. Through low taxes, minimal regulations, and limited government intervention, it is here where citizens have the greatest opportunity to make their personal wishes come true.
Comments