Guest Post by Eric Peters
Beatles front man John Lennon sang the famous song, Imagine – which was a kind of anthem for peaceful co-existence embraced by the very people who seem constitutionally unable to leave others in peace.
That is to say, Leftists.
Which isn’t to say people on the Right aren’t cut from the same cloth. Both sides of the same cloth love to pester, harass – and do worse – to people who just want to be let alone.
Let’s try to imagine what it would be like if everyone did just that.
It would not be utopia, of course – though the authoritarian busybodies of the Left and the Right always insist it must be in that order for it to even be considered an alternative to the dystopia of Left or the Right.
What about the roads?
As if there weren’t any before there was such as a thing as the Left or the Right. As if there wouldn’t be desirable things in the absence of the Left or the Right controlling things. Of course there would be roads. They would be different than the roads we have now because they would be roads laid down without seizing anyone’s land via the legalized expropriation of land styled “eminent domain.” And they would not be owned by the government.
They might be better roads in some ways – and worse in others. But this canard that, absent the Left or the Right, there wouldn’t be any roads is as fatuous as the suggestion that absent legalized coercion there would be no food to eat, no beds to sleep in.
Well, how about peace?
Would there be less – or more – if the Left and the Right left people in peace? The question kind of answers itself, doesn’t it? This is not to say there would sometimes not be peace, here and there. To expect that the peace would never be breached would be . . . utopian. Libetrarians do not expect that. But there wouldn’t be legalized, institutionalized breaches of the peace. Often directed against people who were themselves entirely peaceable. Your neighbor might be a jerk but he would not have the state backing him up. You might have to defend yourself or your property – but there would no way for your neighbor to vote away your property – and make it a “crime” for you to defend yourself and your property.
Imagine that.
Try to imagine what it would be like to keep what you worked for. Not just some of it. All of it. Imagine not “owing” anything to people you’ve never even met, let alone incurred a debt to. Imagine being morally as well as legally responsible for yourself and your dependents only. Imagine others being responsible for themselves and theirs. Imagine not having to worry about your retirement because you weren’t forced to finance the retirement of others all the days of your working life.
The same as regards health care – which almost everyone would be able to afford because they would only be obliged to pay for their own. The few who legitimately could not afford it – anticipating the howls of Left and Right – could be affordably taken care of by the charity of the rest of us, who could afford it – because we would not have been impoverished by being forced to take care of those who could have and should have taken care of themselves.
Try to imagine what it was like to live in America when Ben Franklin was alive.
America’s prometheus was able to retire in his 40s to pursue his interests because he no longer had to work, to earn the money we must to pay what we’re told we “owe” to people we have never met and for things we neither use nor want. In Franklin’s America, people kept what they worked to earn. There was no tax on their income, an outrage that Americans of that America would never have tolerated. A tax on income being a tax on labor – physical and mental – which is a form of indenture, which is a species of slavery.
Ben Franklin did not have to “contribute” to Social Security. He was secure because he had earned and saved a sufficiency of his own money to not have to worry about money in his retirement. Anyone could do the same today if America were like it was in Franklin’s day.
He also owned his home – in the literal sense of that word. As opposed to the degraded and untrue sense of that word today. Franklin did not have to pay to live in his own home once he’d purchased it. It was his, period. That meant having to work much less – or even not at all – in terms of needing to work, to earn the money we need to earn to pay the rent styled “property taxes” on the homes we deludedly permit ourselves to imagine we “own” but never actually do. Because it’s absurd to speak of “owning” a thing you must pay to be allowed to retain possession of.
Imagine owning your home, once you’d paid for it.
Imagine never having to pay anyone a cent, ever again, in order to keep it and live in it. Imagine how much more peace you’d have, knowing you owned your home and so no matter what happened as far as your work, you’d always have a home to live in.
It’s nice to imagine that, isn’t it?
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