More Obstacles to Thinking Free (2)

Services

Question

Isn’t government necessary to fund and manage essential services and safety nets for a civilization — like building and maintaining roads, educating the children, caring for the poor, and providing healthcare for those in need, and taking care of elderly people?

Our media and our schools train us to believe that society cannot organize itself to take care of its own needs. We’re told a parental figure — a “mommy” or “daddy” state — is critical to our survival. It’s implied that people are fundamentally not kind, competent and generous enough to sufficiently take care of the needy, and that a natural economy would not be able to afford to provide or purchase these services. Therefore, rulers need to have rights that the rest of us don’t have — to take others’ earned money (taxation) and then have control over the means of production (socialism), private property (communism and real estate taxes) and a monopoly on force (military/police).

If our moral theory gives a few people rights that others don’t have, then it is not a universal morality. In fact, it is immediately self-contradictory and in violation of the Non-Aggression Principle by condoning coercion and theft when it’s done by those who call themselves politicians.

Mind-trap #3: The roads

Question

Isn’t government necessary to build and maintain the roads?

This is a common and reasonable question when considering private ownership and maintenance of something so essential as the roads we travel upon. So few people own what they need, and so many people have often been overruled and coerced by those who do, that it is challenging to consider the radical shift that can happen when an honest voluntary society allows people to have more money, more time and more self-determination.

We have been duped into unquestioning support of centralized control through the myth of authority, taxation, eminent domain and fiat money.

Pause and remember that when you drive into a shopping center you are on a private road, and almost without exception, it is in great shape.

Private owners of forest land are not known to clear cut, because they have the long-term value of the resource in mind. It’s similar to how many people would care for their own rental car compared to their own vehicle.

Private owners of highways would be naturally and financially incented to have as many people as possible use them, and to keep the roads in good shape in order to maintain a positive reputation and insurance. If private road owners were prohibiting common use of much needed convenient thoroughfares, their brand would become so tarnished, and their businesses so unpopular that it would be difficult for them to do commerce and participate in community. The costs for drivers would most likely be far less than they are currently paying in taxes that are supposed to maintain good roads. Local, state and federal governments usually hire private contractors to build their roads and highways anyway.

It’s been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity — than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation.
— Stefan Molyneux

Mind-trap #4: Schools

Question

Isn’t government necessary to provide free or cheap education so even poor people can have the opportunity to get ahead?

Without needing to fund the state, the resulting prosperity would allow individuals to select and pay for the learning opportunities of their own choice. Current mandatory taxation and attendance for government schools has demonstrated that they clearly serve propaganda, indoctrination, and control instead of improving critical thinking, access to accurate knowledge, and creativity.

Remember, we are comparing these proposed strategies to a disastrously failing current system, not to an absolutely perfect utopia. The standards of teaching, the freedom of thought, and the inspiring of young people would surpass our current failing statist institutions. The rapid rise in popularity of charter schools, homeschooling, Unschooling, and alternative schools like Sudbury Valley, Coherence Education, and Peninsula School on the remarkable opportunity that we have to seize back from the centralized authoritarians — the chance to love learning, innovation, and scripting our own creative and productive lives.

I was privileged to attend elite and expensive private schools. I got a lot more attention from accomplished teachers than I would have in an overcrowded public school, but I came to realize years later, that I was simply getting the sophisticated training to manage a corrupt control system, while the public schoolers were being indoctrinated into becoming willing minions and unquestioning consumers.

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.
— John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down

I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.
— John D. Rockefeller, founder, General Education Board

That a “new age of collectivism” has emerged … with little or no outrage from the public or our elected officials, can only be attributed to the “deliberate dumbing down” of Americans, who haven’t been taught the difference between free enterprise and planned economies (socialism); between “group thinking” and individual freedom and responsibility.
— Charlotte T. Iserbyt, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America

Mind-trap #5: The Poor

Question

Who would take care of the poor who can’t make ends meet?

Voluntaryists — as lovers of freedom and truth — want to see others thrive on their own terms, without the constraints of governance that show up as censorship, over-regulation, fraud, involuntary foreign aid, corporate subsidies, and imperialist wars with their conscription of local youth and murder of foreign innocents.

A society with a true free market and honest money will have very few people who are unable to care for themselves. In those cases, churches, community service organizations, and other types of charities, along with philanthropic individuals and businesses should easily be able not only to care for those in need but empower them to become more and more autonomous.

People will pay for the services that they actually need. There will be no taxes. People will keep the rewards of their labor and choose how they spend it. A true free market in honest currencies — from precious metals to real crypto to commodity baskets and more — will get rid of the artificial boom and bust cycle of inflations and depressions that has been created by authoritarian central banking, fraudulent fiat money and fake fractional reserve lending. Rampant welfare dependency will be replaced with real education, technological leverage, excellent training in the trades, entrepreneurship, organic growing, artificial intelligence, new energy invention, space exploration, and more… unleashed creativity in every sector.

Mind-trap #6: Healthcare

Question

Without government, who would take care of the sick, the poor and the elderly who can’t afford their own healthcare?

We are taught that authoritarian centralized authority needs to be in charge of everything important — especially the health of its citizens. From royalty and dictatorship to socialism, communism, fascism, we have seen the disastrous failure of authority to successfully prioritize the health of individuals in the community. Now we have had 250 years to watch the most successful experiment ever in democracy miserably fail its people. The big money goes to treating big disease and therefore to big Pharma — which has essentially cured no diseases since its inception. So, what is wrong with this picture? Why are Americans obese, over-medicated, chronically ill and dying from the same diseases that billions in funding have failed to cure or prevent?

As with all of these other “but what if” questions, the “state” is by definition a corrupt entity because of its non-universal nature where a few have powers others don’t (and they want to hang on to that) and its basis in theft of other people’s property (taxation, subsidies, cronyism, political favors etc.). That’s a poor foundation on which to try to build coherent, ethical, sustainable, and successful approaches to nurturing great health.

The solid foundation that is missing is complete alignment of interest of the parties involved. Currently healthcare providers are incented to profit from illness, addictive medications, and unnecessary procedures. Imagine if instead, they were well compensated for teaching and nurturing vibrant natural health — and when necessary, successful cures. If people were healthier, insurance companies would have fewer payouts and longer-term clients. A healthier, happier, longer life is what each of us is looking for, so with this approach, all of our interests are aligned — the patient, the provider, and the insurance company.

So, who wouldn’t be in favor of such alignment? The “state.” In the U.S., more than 50% of healthcare dollars are spent by the government, and this protects such institutions as the AMA, the FDA, the CDC, the NIH, and big Pharma — all of whom form a cartel for protection of one another and their profits… not of the well-being of each individual. So we end up with the kind of miserable failures that each of these institutions represent. As an aside, when one understands the nature of the Global Domination Agenda, and its dire goal of major human depopulation, we realize that programs which keep citizens afraid, poor, and sick actually serve the goals of the globalist secret societies, above and beyond the remuneration of the foot soldiers of the medical industrial cartel.

In transitioning to a voluntary, stateless society the most important aspect, after free speech, is an honest money system. This shift will take some time to integrate through our society but imagine everyone is keeping the money that they used to pay in taxes. There’s no radical inflation (hidden taxation) caused by government fake money printing. There’s very little fraud. There are no major wars. People are free to invest their money in the currencies and projects of their choice, whether it be businesses, gold, real estate, bitcoin, and many more. We would be free to choose our own preventive and curative health treatments, be able to pay for them and enjoy full alignment with the protection of sound insurance and the wisdom of truly holistic doctors. Nutrition, healthy life styles and natural remedies would be liberated and pharmacological assistance would be way cheaper to develop, access and understand.