Dead State Walking
In regards to my last post on adapting rhetorical techniques from conventional politics to the advocacy of a stateless society, a correspondent says:
Your entry on terms to use when refering to anarchism vs. statism….good stuff. But you’ll have a difficult time convincing a lot of people due to the fact that people really don’t understand what it is. “Care”? How does absence of gov’t “care” for people? People only have experience with government caring for them. Just an example.
Sure, it’s going to take a hell of a lot of work to apply that strategy, but the potential is there.
With regard to the specific example of the word “caring”, the first thing that comes to my mind is caring about future generations and what kind of economic future we leave for them.
Take a look at this presentation from the Comptroller General of the United States, David M. Walker. You’ll need MS PowerPoint or the free alternative of Open Office to view it.
Walker shows that in financial terms, the astronomical amount of spending of other people’s money by the Bush administration has already killed the FedGov. It just doesn’t know it’s dead yet. Walker presents two alternatives that theoretically might successfully address the looming federal debt crisis:
- Tax rates of 2.5 TIMES their current levels, or…
- Spending cuts of 60% at minimum.
Neither will be tolerated. The well off will not tolerate those tax rates and ordinary people cannot suffer the death of the welfare state simultaneous to preservation of corporatist exploitation. There’s only one way around that dilemna — massive economic growth, a huge economic boom unlike any ever seen before in history. Walker indirectly acknowledges this when he says that economic growth is not enough in this case. He simply can’t conceive of economic growth huge enough. I can.
We are faced with economic meltdown if the federal debt isn’t dealt with and economic meltdown if the federal debt is dealt with via conventional statist means of the sort Walker outlines. Instead, the crisis will require revolutionary action. It will take:
- Repudiation of the federal debt.
- Adding trillions of dollars back into the productive economy by abolishing taxation.
- A return to hard money (gold) or whatever alternative currencies the market prefers.
- Massive banking industry restructuring to break the monopoly status of the Federal Reserve.
The great disincentive to repudiation of the federal debt is the ongoing future supposed need for government borrowing. A state can’t handle that kind of damage to its credit rating. Anarchism makes that a moot point.
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