If we are the government, then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also voluntary on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that we owe it to ourselves; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is doing it to himself and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have committed suicide, since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree. We must, therefore, emphasize that we are not the government; the government is not us. The government does not in any accurate sense represent the majority of the people.1 But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority.2 No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that we are all part of one another, must be permitted to obscure this basic fact. --Murray N. Rothbard
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 20:37:02 +0000
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