Those who govern society should all be subject to the same rules they impose on the rest of us. Instead, we have a privileged class of rulers who are exempt from the rules of civilized society, and who exempt the ruled — us — from the privileges they grant themselves. The NRA’s ad is spot-on:
What’s going on here? It’s very simple; over several generations, we have gotten used to the idea that those who govern us are somehow too good for the rules they impose on us. We see this in how they exempt themselves from social security and Obamacare because they like their own retirement and health care plans better. And why wouldn’t they? They take our money at gunpoint in the form of taxes and give themselves Cadillac plans.
But if you get yourself a nice plan, you can’t exempt yourself from the one they impose on you. Why? Because you’re not privileged, like they are.
This mindset comes from the idea that the state owns you, your property, and your productivity. Since they own all that, they can take what they want with impunity. Unfortunately, enough people in this country have been beaten down into submission and accept it.
There are many things the members of the state ruling class do that would be crimes if we did exactly the same thing. Ponzi schemes, for example, are a crime, but the entire social security system is a giant Ponzi scheme. Counterfeiting is another example. The Federal Reserve counterfeits every dollar in the financial system. “Anti-competitive practices” in businesses violate federal law, but every municipal utility is a monopoly sustained by law. Murder is a crime, but the state kills hundreds of innocent children with drones and calls it “collateral damage.”
In fact, the very existence of the state is premised on the right to steal — if the state didn’t steal your money in the form of taxes, it wouldn’t exist, and we would have a government in which the rulers themselves had to live by the same rules as everyone else.
In his farewell address to the nation, Andrew Jackson said “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” It’s time to realize how much liberty we’ve lost because we have failed to see that the enemy of liberty has arisen in the form of our own government.
~SnoMan