Privatize Everything

A friend posted the following on his Facebook page,

“To avoid state capture, privatize everything.”

The two responses were telling. One asked, “What about the military and police force? The courts? Foreign affairs?” Another responded, “Friend, sometimes you frighten me.”

I think it's a good question. Not something I would advocate doing overnight, but we best start discussing the alternatives and taking steps to move in that direction. Necessity demands it. We have become so Hegelian that we can't imagine a world without the administrative state.

Do we need a standing army? We were warned about the dangers of a standing army to our freedom. Where has having such gotten us?

Do police forces really protect and serve? Better to ask, who do they really protect and serve -- the citizen or the power elite?  Could we better organize our own defense of our local communities? Could the reason we think we need a professional, public police force be because of a failure of the courts to punish wrongdoing? What is our philosophy of penal sanctions? On what presuppositions is it based?

We were warned to avoid foreign entanglements. The State Department has become a monster that stirs up trouble around the globe. Could there be a better alternative?

What about our financial system? No one mentioned who controls the money. Do we need a central bank and its inflationary digits? Where has that gotten us?

The courts are the only God-given, legitimate function of the civil government and only in response to a citizen's call for justice. Our justice system is broken, so to get justice the system is already privatized, to a degree, through mediation services.

Given the courts are a legitimate function of civil government, by what standard should they judge? If the people reject God's law as the standard for their personal lives, they will reject it in favor of man's law in public life.

Even if we were to privatize everything but the courts, if the people do not embrace God's law as the standard for public and private justice, the administrative state will creep back into power. Once again, we will have a government that attempts to regulate every area of life, and the best paying jobs will be in the business of plundering and abusing our neighbors. This will happen because we want it to happen, because we worship at the shrine of the state, because we think of the state as God walking on earth. It will appear to be working, until there is no one left to plunder.

That we fear even thinking about privatizing much of what we have come to think of as an axiom of reality belonging to the government is an indicator that we are not ready for freedom and responsibility. What it means to be free has been redefined and largely lost to the collective consciousness. We have a couple of generations to go before we are ready.

But dealing with it is being forced on us. What we have now is not sustainable. It will collapse under its own weight. Already cities are filing bankruptcy because they cannot collect enough taxes to pay police and fire department pensions. The police have become the greatest danger to life and limb. We are spending more and more on private security already.  The police are not protecting us.

Time to face our fears and repent of having made government our god. The answer is not more regulations against the corruption in the administrative state that rules us. It cannot be done. The system itself is a violation of the 1st commandment at its foundation: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. God will not be mocked. We are already reaping what we have sown.