Behold my display of the 2013 Federal Register. It contains over 80,000 pages of new rules, regulations, and notices all written and passed by unelected bureaucrats. The small stack of papers on top of the display are the laws passed by elected members of Congress and signed into law by the president. – US Senator Mike Lee
Will the State Eventually Regulate Our Shopping?
“The consumer has more power for good or ill than the voter,” Stuart Brand wrote in his Whole Earth Catalogue in the rebellious 60s.
Forward to the next millennium when our United State has fairly well neutralized the voter through the machinations of debit financing and fiat money, in its hegemonic rise. Democrats and Republicans now differ mainly in which portions of the government they wish to grow and nourish, while watering and caring for it all and buying the votes to do so with newly made money. Legislatively the State pretty much has things tied up. But like any organization which inevitably tries to grow further, and is looking towards the future to enlarge its presence, will the State focus now on dictating what we can purchase, and dictating what we must purchase?
The pocketbook is the citizen’s last and most individual source of power.
There already are lots of things we must purchase. First and foremost, at the top of any list would be the government itself. We must purchase our government’s laws and services, with all of the constraints and rules of user use that come with it. And we must agree to paying its price (taxes). And we must agree to its billing: state taxes, federal taxes, county taxes, city taxes, business taxes, regulator taxes, use taxes, permit fees, and license assessments…. etc.
There are a lot of services which we are forced to buy through the government which we can buy elsewhere. For example, education, postal services, transportation (buses, rapid transit), security, fire protection, sewer, garbage, libraries… and innumerable other services which we pay for but do not use – could all be purchased elsewhere. In addition to this the government also limits many things we can purchase. This of course includes illegal drugs, weapons and hazardous materials of many sorts. But most notably it includes all of those products either banned from our country or kept out of our country by law and restrictive tariffs.
The latest public squabbles have been over New York City’s banning of the sale of super-sized soft drinks, and the Federal Government’s insistence that we buy health care insurance (Obamacare) which meets their criteria, not necessarily ours.
The public uproar over these policies indicates the citizens’ frustration with the State’s ever increasing presumption of the citizen’s free will. But, as Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr. notes in his book, Fascism versus Capitalism, “It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work.” Like citizens of a controlled economy, they imagine that if the difficulties of managing an economy are so complex so as to confound the very brightest of their bureaucrats they can produce – how on earth is the economy ever to function by the government doing nothing?! It’s rather like the overbearing mother asking her smothered son, however is he ever going to make his own way in life without her help? (I hope we all have the answer to that!)
Currently, the way I would predict our State to move, will be inflationary devaluation of our personal incomes while paying its debts with devalued monies. In this way, the State’s prerogatives continue to grow while the individual citizen’s continue to shrink – until we must beg the State for subsistence, with the loss of all our freedoms. This is my best prediction of the Endgame, as the State currently proceeds.
However. There are people out there asking questions and coming up with some answers and even some better questions. .. and even some better answers. Many of them are Libertarians and Anarchists of both the Left and Right. Look them up. Behold!
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