Hoyt: Small Government – Too Small to Throw Grandma Off The Cliff Or To Make Us All Poor.

Posted on February 18, 2013 | 13 Comments

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Thoughts on the coming reset.

Enjoy.

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13 Responses to Hoyt: Small Government – Too Small to Throw Grandma Off The Cliff Or To Make Us All Poor.

  1. Paul Bonneau | February 19, 2013 at 00:32 |

    “And here we come to where taxes are justified – in my opinion (no one died and made me G-d, this is JUST my opinion.) – taxes are justified when the goal to be obtained is so clearly and obviously not just good but necessary that it justifies shaking down a grandma for the dividends on her investments. As a further test, it is justified when even just one person not contributing can markedly affect your chances of obtaining your goal.”

    An awful lot of arm-waving there. You have to wave your arms a lot when you are a minarchist. This author still believes the government religion.

  2. Josh K. | February 19, 2013 at 00:54 |

    This “I’m not for state control, but” is really annoying. You either believe something or you don’t.

    This is how Madison talked the states into ratifying the Constitution.

    We all ready tried “As small as possible,” and it didn’t work for very long. How about we try not having a State/government?
    http://jim.com/anarchy/

    • Jim Klein | February 19, 2013 at 14:38 |

      “This ‘I’m not for state control, but’ is really annoying.”

      Kinda inconsistent, eh? So-called “freedom fighters” would do well to notice. Usually it’s, “A person should be free to do as he wishes as long as he doesn’t initiate violence against others, EXCEPT…”

      BTW Josh, A-C is a load of hooey. The purchase of immorality will yield the same results as the voting for immorality—immorality, duh. Self-defense and security are necessities to live; the rest is just an appeal to long-inculcated false premises.

      When enough individuals are ready to live free and accept the responsibility that comes with that–including working with others for their own benefit–then they will. Till then, they’ll just continue to pass off that responsibility to giants like Obama and Boehner.

  3. Ivy Mike | February 19, 2013 at 08:40 |

    Small Government – Too Small to Throw the Non-State Hunter-Gatherer Families Onto The Trail of Tears Or To Make Us All Agriculturalists.

    And yes, THE RIGHT TO TAKE is the foundation of even the self-styled “free-market” capitalism.

    • “[The Native Americans] didn’t have any rights to the land … any white person who brought the element of civilization had THE RIGHT TO TAKE over this continent.” ~Ayn Rand, US Military Academy at West Point, March 6, 1974

    Actually, THE RIGHT TO TAKE is the foundation of agricultural city-Statism (Civilization,) every single political manifestation of it from Sumerian to Communism.

    • “Agriculture creates government.” ~Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, p. 73

    • “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.” ~Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization, p. 1, first sentence

    • Jim Klein | February 19, 2013 at 14:20 |

      “And yes, THE RIGHT TO TAKE is the foundation of even the self-styled ‘free-market’ capitalism.”

      Nonsense. The nature of volition is the foundation of free-market capitalism. It’s about morality, with economics being a single (albeit major) manifestation.

      And while Rand might’ve been the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century, she was completely off-base on the topic of aboriginals. It didn’t have to be that way, and we’d still have ipads.

      Here’s what you had correct…

      “THE RIGHT TO TAKE is the foundation of agricultural city-Statism (Civilization,) every single political manifestation of it from Sumerian to Communism.”

      Accurate enough (save the poor usage of “right”), but so what? Everyone thought the Earth was flat for a long, long time too. The fundamental function of a mind is to identify; the corollary purpose is to create that which hasn’t been created.

      IOW true or not that everything’s been built on taking since Sumeria, we know better now. Or at least some of us do; we’re just waiting for everyone else to catch on too. Things are as they are, including volitional humans.

      • Ivy Mike | February 19, 2013 at 15:40 |

        • “The nature of volition is the foundation of free-market capitalism.”

        Nonsense. The differences between capitalism and communism–both sociopolitical variants of modern industrial State society–are trifling when compared to Non-State society.

        Both capitalism and communism, along with all the other manifestations of agricultural city-Statism (civilization,) rely on State coercion to restrict the free movement of people, via artificial borders, to gambol about plain and forest to hunt and gather a free lunch off the land.

        Here’s a great way to test the amount of freedom in either a capitalist or communist culture: try to live a Non-State lifeway.

        Officer, am I free to gambol about plain and forest to freely hunt and gather a free lunch like was practiced for 17,000 years in my locale?

        Capitalist Officer: NO!
        Communist Officer: NO!

        Either will shoot you–they’ve both already annihilated millions–for trying to live a traditional Non-State lifeway. So much for freedom of “volition.”

        Agricultural city-Statism, any variant either “Left” or “Right”, is an 8,000 year long brutally enforced Trail of Tears.

        • “…she was completely off-base on the topic of aboriginals…”

        She merely attempts to justify the well-documented American Holocaust.

        “During the course of four centuries – from the 1490s to the 1890s – Europeans and white Americans engaged in an unbroken string of genocide campaigns against the native peoples of the Americas.”(p.147)

        “[It] was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.” (prologue)

        David Stannard (1992) American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press.

        • Jim Klein | February 19, 2013 at 22:54 |

          “The differences between capitalism and communism–both sociopolitical variants of modern industrial State society–are trifling when compared to Non-State society.”

          I’m not sure how you know that, when you say there have been no instances for over 8,000 years. And even then, I can’t figure out if this is an argument for or against!

          And your example is silly. Even in a free society, you wouldn’t be able to forage unassaulted over my land, if that’s what I decide. The mere utterance of “NO” doesn’t make me the same as a communist, and it doesn’t make a communist the same as a capitalist. As I say, silly.

          Yes, that’s exactly what Rand tried to do. In her lingo, it was a “rationalization.” Sad but forgivable on her part IMO, much less forgivable on the part of those religionists who call themselves “Objectivists” these days.

  4. pdxr13 | February 19, 2013 at 13:04 |

    Above commenters are correct.

    As I understand Hoyt, she wishes for a government that is what has never been and is very unlikely as long as humans-as-we-know-them (psychopaths and sociopaths are the only candidates) appoint themselves to run dot-gov. The dream is a government that restrains itself to a size that the population “wishes” to fund voluntarily.

    I’m seeing just the opposite at the Federal level (unlimited fiat printing + heavy direct taxation/control and a “voting majority” of tax-feeders when only 24% of the population bothers to vote) and in my 2 local State Governments (Washington and Oregon) who would like to add an income tax and a sales tax respectively. Neither recognizes that both will suffer from these moves (wealthy people retire to Washington, then shop in sales-tax-free Oregon), even though these additional taxes will buy a few more years of unreformed Tier1 pension payments and muzzles in the troughs of Salem and Olympia. My City and County are still pretending that huge fed spending on infrastructure will pay the bills while Clark County and Clackamas County reject the “Crime Train” project by popular vote.

    Arm-waving: yes. You can’t run an empire without doing what is happening. Perhaps, we should back off from the Empire? Return to soft-power and a strong dollar? Rule of law, at least inside the CONUS? Naaaa, full speed ahead into the wall.

    Cheers.

  5. Ivy Mike | February 19, 2013 at 13:12 |

    So I got banned; I’m not much impressed. Hoyt seems to be as intellectually fragile as any Leftist Marxist.

    Like the Communist sympathizers of yesteryear (e.g., Walter Duranty,) she and her coterie seem quite unwilling to consider scholarly evidence that demonstrates the “progress” of agricultural city-statism (civilization)–whether it be capitalist, communist, fascist, roman, greek, sumerian, mayan–is built upon a bloody pile of skulls.

    And yes, anybody–Left or Right–who thinks agricultural city-Statism (civilization) is progress is a Progressive. Or at least a “progressivist” in Jared Diamond’s terms.

    “Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it…we chose the latter [agriculture] and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.”

    ~Jared Diamond (May 1987) Agriculture: The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race. Discover Magazine. pp. 64-66.

  6. Ivy Mike | February 19, 2013 at 14:50 |

    “…she wishes for a government that is what has never been…”

    I concur. I would add: “and never shall be.” She’s in fantasy land, along with the Objectivist/Libertarian/Anarchist types.

    I appreciate their ostensible intention for the “autonomous and sovereign”[1,2] natural freedom we humans once enjoyed before State society (agricultural civilization), but their political daydreams are as ill-conceived as Marxism itself. In fact, they’re closely related.

    “[L]ibertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right…Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics.”[3]

    What is my political solution? None. There are no solutions. We can’t go back to pre-agriculture-city-Statist society. We can’t fix it going forward either. We’re in a trap, as stuck as any ancient agricultural society dependent upon the stagnant political tyranny needed to maintain vast irrigation systems in Asia.[4]

    But one thing will make surviving in this veritable hell of agricultural city-Statism we’ve created a bit more tolerable, and that is the Egalitarian Power-Sharing–innate within our ancestral genes[1]–enshrined in the Second Amendment.

    __________
    [1] Christopher Boehm (1999) Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press.
    [2] Elman Service (1975) Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution. New York, NY: Norton.
    [3] Robert Locke (March 14, 2005) Marxism of the Right, The American Conservative.
    [4] Marvin Harris (1977) Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures. (see especially chapter 13: The Hydraulic Trap)

    • Jim Klein | February 19, 2013 at 20:24 |

      Wow, you read a lot. Your faulty premise is that everything must always be as it has been. That’s false in the human realm. Were it true, we wouldn’t have cars or the Internet. That’s a reductio, isn’t it?

      The funny part to me is that you wrote the answer, but didn’t notice. It was this—”‘autonomous and sovereign’[1,2] natural freedom.” Uh yeah, it’s NATURAL. That is, it’s REAL. That is, it’s a FACT. Forget about all the “therefore”s for a moment; start with the identification. We ARE autonomous. We ARE free with respect to our own lives and decisions.

      Start with the facts, and THEN draw the conclusions.

  7. Underground Carpenter | February 20, 2013 at 06:39 |

    I wasn’t impressed with Hoyt. She seems to be cool with robbing Grandma if it’s for “the good of society.” Comments numbered in the hundreds, mostly from government advocates I wouldn’t want to live near.

    Dave

  8. Joe Sixpack | February 20, 2013 at 21:41 |

    Hard to read, at least on my platform. Did anyone struggle with the sentence structuring. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to breathe and quit reading half way through.
    What I DID read, often several times due to wildly spaced brackets, indicated that she was all over the fucking place.
    Government intrusion? Yes no no yes yes no yes no no yes.
    Christ Almighty…