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[Government] is
apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business
of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly
devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own
members… The intelligent man, when he pays taxes, certainly does not
feel he is making a prudent investment of his money; on the contrary, he
feels he is being mulcted in an excessive amount for services that, in the
main, are useless to him, and that, in substantial part, are downright
inimical to him"
~ H.L. Mencken,
"More of the Same," American Mercury 1925
Imagine a country
unfortunate enough to have succumbed in conflict to a foreign enemy and now
subject to a thorough-going military occupation by the forces of their
victorious foes.
Young men, who
have been conscripted in a vast profusion, are marched in to pacify the
vanquished nation’s populace, to patrol its streets, watch over its
borders and constantly to patrol its coastlines – though, in truth,
much of their activity soon palls into a dull routine, being merely work for
work’s sake, meant to deny the devil too many idle hands for mischief,
rather than because the doing of it fulfils any useful purpose of itself.
Some of these
warders of the conquered realm are barracked in camps where their basic
material needs are catered to in large, centralized facilities specially
built for the purpose, while others are billeted on civilian householders in
their homes – whether or not these latter show any willingness to have
their property used, their provisions divided, and their privacy violated in
this way.
Aside from the
fighting force itself, there is an even larger host of administrators,
technicians, and other support staff abroad in the land, many of its members
busy overseeing the activities of the conquered – issuing requisitions
to the factory owners; commandeering resources; ordering farmers what to grow
and where; and generally re-organizing a significant part of the
people’s economic lives in order to serve the needs of their new
masters in place of those of their own.
War, after all,
had best be made to pay for war and all those martial souls need to be fed,
shod, clad, sheltered, and even re-armed if they are to maintain their
military effectiveness.
Finally, however,
the glad day dawns when the war is ended and blessed peace takes its place.
Bested on some far distant battlefield, the invader negotiates a peace, its
armies meekly surrender their arms and the erstwhile Hectors and Horatios
shuffle apprehensively off to wire-strung detention centres, there to await
their fate. Meanwhile, the bells ring out in carillons of joy and young and
old alike take to dancing in the streets in a great celebration of regained
liberty.
As it soon
transpires, large numbers of the former garrison have no wish to return to a
homeland many can scarcely still remember. Besides, they have grown to love
their new surroundings and many of them have found wives and sweethearts
there, to boot. They plead to be allowed to stay and – at first with
reluctance, but gradually with a laudable hope for reconciliation (for this
occupation, while not without its share of accompanying evils, was not marked
by wholesale rapine or blemished with overmuch outright atrocity) – the
authorities accede to more and more of these very human requests.
Even amid the
rejoicing, however, there are one or two grumblings to be heard. Will all
these former soldiers not still be have to fed and clothed at our expense,
some ask or – worse to some – finding productive work at
last, will they not represent a drug on the market for labour, depressing the
wages of us, the long-suffering natives?
Not so, reply the
wiser heads. For we should see them not as a surplus, but rather as a vital
human resource and each, eager to earn his keep and ply again a peaceful
trade, will have to give as much value as he gets in future if he is to earn
the goods he formerly took simply by merit of his uniform. This can only be
to the benefit of all.
There are others,
too, whose feelings of relief are decidedly mixed – the sutlers and the
swordsmiths, the bar-keepers and the bawds, the munitions-makers and the
mule-breeders – for all those who supplied the enemy have lost the
greater part of their custom, even though their conscience must have told
them that their living was being made at the final expense of those
unconsenting fellow citizens whose wealth and income were being tapped to
make up the soldiers’ pay and quartermasters’ drafts.
At length, they,
too, still their complaints and resign themselves to seeking out another kind
of clientele; to producing ploughshares not poniards or pikestaffs, all the
while consoling themselves that, now the exactions of war have been stopped,
the majority will have more money in their pockets and that, in the general
hunger for the things long denied them during the grim, grey years of
subjection, trade and industry will soon be booming once more and commerce
will again flourish.
Some good while
may pass before they see it this way, but certainly, no-one among even those
who flourished most – or languished least – will so rue his
temporary loss of business that he will advocate striking up a quarrel with
some other likely nation, in order to capitulate as abjectly as possible and
so to refill the deserted camps and cantonments with another batch of
loose-pursed intruders!
So far, the
verdict here seems indisputable. The end of the occupation – though
occasioning a measurable difficulty for the few, as well as a by no means
trivial challenge of readjustment for the many – will overwhelmingly
redound to the common weal: a truth which will be instinctively recognized in
an intuition of good to come which almost everyone will later find to have
been a correct one.
A Continuation of
Policy by Other Means
If all the
foregoing seems unobjectionable – and we fully trust that it will
– then consider how little the argument changes if there is no foreign
occupation, but instead the imposition of martial law by those in power
domestically.
We still have the
same diminution of the private sphere; still the same tyranny over
people’s lives, however softly velveted is the mailed fist which holds
the nation down. We still have the same forcible redirection of employment
and still the same sequestration of income and arbitrary denial of property
as we did when the perpetrators spoke a foreign tongue – and, on that
account, we will be just as glad to be rid of all their impositions when the
laws are at length repealed or the regime is toppled in the dust of despots
past.
Finally, even where
the intent is in no way overtly malign – where the nation has been put
on a purely defensive war-footing in order to deter the aggression of a
hostile neighbour – the very same conditions will apply and the very
same relief will be felt when the Dogs of War are finally put back on their
slips and "Havoc!" no longer cried.
So, if you are
with me this far, tell me why it is any different when the Home Army carries
few actual arms and when most of those who fill its ranks wear no obvious
uniform, or bear no fluttering pennons, but whose stormtroopers and Sonderkommandos
none the less boss us and direct us; telling us what we can and cannot do;
relieving us of a good portion of our income to pay their keep and to enact
their schemes of domination; and hemming in our natural rights to property
with rules and regulations which we ourselves pay for them to conjure up and
to impose upon us?
What if this
occupying army is in service to – nay, if it actually constitutes
– the government itself? What if comprises a host grown fat and
bloated and officious as it siphons off the best milk from our herds and
swipes the choicest fruit from our orchards in order to satiate its vast,
pestilential, multi-million array – its troops of tax-gatherers and
health-and-safety tinpots; its platoons of permit peddlers and planning
panjandrums; its ranks of red-tapers, rubber-stampers, and rubbish-recycling
bin-riflers; its columns of closed-circuit televoyeurs and carbon credit
con-men; its divisions of dole deceivers and disability dissemblers; its
junta of jobsworths, Jacks-in-Office, and gender outreach counsellors; its
cohorts of Cultural Marxist commissars, and clipboard commandants; its
echelons of egalitarian engineers, its squadrons of subsidy-suckers –
and all the other plunderers who make up this Legion of the Damnable?
A Set of Lies
Agreed Upon
Why, then, should
we listen to the hand-wringing of the punditocracy when they tell us that to
disband even the most ineffective and ill-disciplined section of this
rapacious army of permanent occupation is somehow to condemn ourselves to
ruin?
Why should we
heed the brow-beating of the leader writers when they insist that to reduce
even some of the country’s unsustainable deficit – not
even, you will note, to try to eradicate the whole of the annual
shortfall, much less to address the noxious legacy of debt accumulated over
long years of easy profligacy – is for the Emperor to condemn all of us
to his former nakedness if foregoes his customary non-attire (one cut
by his charlatan couturiers from the virtual cloth of spending what he
routinely does not earn) and dons, in its place, a debilitating hair shirt of
"austerity"?
No! Better that
we stop our ears to the insidious wheedlings of all the Philosopher Kings
– the Stiglitzes and Soroses, the Krugmans and Kaletskys and all the
other intellectual Vichy who would perpetuate our subjugation– and
press on with the attempt to demobilize as many of these battalions of bad
husbandry as possible.
Nor should we be
persuaded that, without the reckless dollops of Other People’s Money
which the vote-buying minions of the State dish out in all their
counter-productive billions, the real economy will crumble and blow away in
the wind: that shops will empty and factories shutter; that the lights of enterprise
will dim, and flicker, and fade – any more than they would if a foreign
conqueror were to relinquish his pitiless hold upon those who own them and
allow them to take charge, once more, of their own destinies.
Rather, we should
steel ourselves for the challenge ahead in a frame of resolute self-reliance
and, to show our true intent, we should first make plain our utter rejection
of the doom-mongers’ vision of a people grown too servile and enervated
under the heels of the horde which strangles their growth and saps their
strength that they dare not greet their own liberation with the utmost,
unqualified, clarion jubilation.
Sean Corrigan
Sean Corrigan is
Chief Investment Strategist at Diapason Commodities Management (Lausanne and
London)
Copyright ©
2006 - Copyright © Diapason Commodities Management - Sean Corrigan
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