The association of “conspiracy theorists” with crazy tin-foil hat racists is unfounded given that our entire political regime consists in endless conspiracies to promote private profit over the public interest.
By Dmitry Chernikov, ago
“It is adherence to just procedures that distinguishes a system of justice from a state run by a gang of despots who happen to be interested in nailing lawbreakers,” says Joe Feldman.
A lot of cities these days are run by gangs of despots who are manifestly not interested in nailing lawbreakers.
Democrats hate Russia more than they hate China, while Republicans have the opposite preference.
What joy.
A certain picture emerges from reading commentaries on Rawls. Rawls and his friends think that in the end, only the state (or “society”) is truly alive; all individuals are mere tentacles or fingers of the state through which the state manifests his life.
If the state wants to make his fingers equal, he’ll make them equal; if he wants the fingers to pursue various “conceptions of the good,” they’ll pursue the conceptions of the good. The state has full authority and absolute power to do with the individuals — who are simply its material parts or organs — as he pleases.
The state is not an organization created by people to solve definite problems, such as of crime by catching thieves. On the contrary, it is the individuals who are created by the state.
The “ideal [of equality of welfare] states that, so far as is possible, no one should have less welfare than anyone else,” says Dworkin.
This sounds humanitarian, until one rephrases it equivalently as that “no one should have more welfare than anyone else.” Then it sounds insane.
Everyone is to be equal in happiness to the sickest, most suicidally desperate man in the world.
Heaven cannot merely improve this life, nor can it entirely abolish this life. Instead, it must somehow transcend it.
For example, regarding improving, heaven cannot be simply better bread and circuses.
And regarding abolishing, it cannot be sort of hanging in midair staring at God.
There must be some middle ground, some life that will be midway between these two extremes.
Elizabeth Anderson in 1999 criticized her contemporary egalitarians for their weird concerns and asked, “What has happened to the concerns of the politically oppressed? What about inequalities of race, gender, class, and caste? Where are the victims of nationalist genocide, slavery, and ethnic subordination?”
When I hear talk like this, all I can think is the egalitarian saying, “I want to steal shit from you. Also, I am going to glorify the losers because they are losers, and punish the successful because they are successful. Finally, the people I designate as official victims will have a claim on you; they will be able to denounce you, hate you, and demand reparations for ‘injustices’; they will beat you and bleed you until you are dead.”
Official victimhood is a fake cynical battle for money, status, and power. It’s waged by means of lies and false accusations.
That’s not to say there are no victims. There are; all of them, however, are unofficial.
Egalitarianism is supposed to embody “equal respect and concern for all citizens.”
As Dworkin puts it, “no government is legitimate that does not show equal concern for the fate of all those citizens over whom it claims dominion and from whom it claims allegiance.”
But it’s not the government’s job to respect or show concern for anyone. Government, as Mises pointed out, is “the opposite of liberty. It is beating, imprisoning, hanging.” It is an acid that dissolves social bonds.
It is a sick mind that would entrust this agency of coercion and destruction with the task of “respecting” people.
Even when the Left is occasionally right, it is only by accident.
Regeneration of America will come only when the federal government is destroyed utterly.
Maybe Putin will do us all a favor and lob a nuke at Washington DC, burn out the swamp.
All the tools of oppression, the IRS, the Federal Reserve, the Pentagon, the FBI, and a thousand others will go up in smoke.
(I don’t, of course, wish for a nuclear attack but only because it would do more harm than good.)
Or states can secede, and the same goal will be accomplished peacefully.