http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/higgs51.html
How Government Destroys Moral Character
by Robert Higgs
October 23, 2006
Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. His most recent book is Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy. He is also the author of Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against Leviathan.
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“Thou shalt not steal” is a rule as old as human society itself. It must have been, else no complex human society would have proved viable.
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Government as we know it, however, rests entirely on this kind of sociopathy. Rulers take what does not belong to them and dispose of it to suit themselves.
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In some cases, especially in societies with governments that attempt to justify their existence and their actions on “democratic” grounds, many people may be taken in by this ideological sleight of hand. They may actually believe that “we tax ourselves” so that the rulers “we choose” can dispose of the loot in ways that “we voted for,” failing to appreciate the gulf that separates this pristine ideological vision from the sordid facts on the ground.
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The prevailing attitude seems to be the one expressed by farmer Charles Fisher, of Tulare County, California: “Whether it’s right or wrong, if they are offering it, you’re foolish to turn it down.”
In that single sentence, Fisher has encapsulated the rotten core of the welfare state, and he has concisely expressed how such a state destroys the people’s moral character. The loot is there for the taking; you’re a fool not to take it, notwithstanding that your taking it may be wrong. Financial gain trumps moral probity. Don’t be a chump; take the money.
I don’t know Charles Fisher, but if he is like a great many others who profit by despoiling their fellow man, with government acting as the facilitator of the crime, then I suspect that he is probably not the kind of man who would pocket his neighbor’s wallet if he saw it fall to the ground unnoticed, and he is almost certainly not the kind of man who would wait beside the road to carry out an armed robbery of the first passer-by. Yet he will steal from countless strangers – in effect, a little bit from everyone who pays federal taxes – “whether it’s right or wrong,” simply to bulk up his income from farming. (Needless to say, the so-called disaster payments rarely go to anyone who has suffered a genuine disaster; like most of what the government does, this program is for the most part a sham from the get-go.)
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“The state,” Frédéric Bastiat told us long ago, “is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.”
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I think, in a nut shell, that this fellow has wrapped up the issue of “government theft” and put a bow on it for us.
Taxes are theft. Thou shalt not steal. Seems pretty obvious to me. You?
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