Jonah Goldberg
In last week’s sub-par G-File I ended with a riff on socialism and gangsterism. I wrote:
What’s interesting to me is how thin the line between this form of politics [gangsterism] and socialism (or fascism) is. The most important thing about the rule of law — including property rights — is that it insulates society from this form of politics.
I should have mentioned that the idea that the state is a criminal enterprise is a very old one. Here’s Albert J. Nock:
The State’s criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation—that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class— that is, for a criminal purpose.No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient.
...What I left out of the G-File was the
necessary condition for slipping out of the rule of law and into the
rule of faction: Urgency.
As I argued in my essay on the moral equivalent of war in the new issues, urgency — i.e.
crisis, war, etc. — is what causes people to say “there’s no time to
argue!” and this empowers the state. The idea that “there is no time to
argue” is fundamentally anti-democratic because democracy is about
disagreement not agreement.
If these “Green Dealers” get their way,
things will be rushed and thus centrally planned. Our world wars show
what happens when Washington starts “reorganizing” our economy toward
some pressing immediate need. Namely, we get lots of corporatism and
profiteering.
The very premise of the Green New Deal is that there’s no time to argue, and that gives the state mob-like power.
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