Tayles posted this on JD’s blog and it was censored any ideas why?
What concerns me is the number of comments on here by people who think there’s nothing to worry about when it comes to the EU, the expansion of the state and so on. Because they can go about their business without being stopped and asked for their papers and sleep at night without fearing the knock at the door, they think that all this talk of creeping authoritarianism is just right-wing loonery. What’s perhaps more worrying than their complacency is their lack of perspective: their inability to recognise how much things have already changed and why these developments are such a bad thing.
It’s almost accepted without argument nowadays that the government looks after us and tells us what to do; that we must live in a small clearing in a forest of rules and regulations; that the state is our master and we have a duty towards it. But why? Why should they be allowed to tell us how to live, what we can and can’t say, what we should put in our bodies, what opinions we should hold and how we should raise our children? The government is merely a collection of people, just like you and me, whose job it is to administer the country on our behalf: to provide a police force and a military, to mend the roads and fix the street lamps. Their role is to do the jobs that it are impractical for us to do as individuals. They are our servants and we are their masters. It’s none of their business how I choose to live any more than it is the milkman’s job to tell me where to go on holiday. This is the mindset we need to shake: that the government is anything more than a bunch of administrators who work for us.
Obviously a country must have laws and a government to pass them, but they must represent an extension of the public will, as expressed through our national values and traditions. We don’t outlaw robbery and murder because the government says it’s a bad thing. We outlaw them because we all agree that they are bad things. The government should not be the arbiters of right and wrong in society. Society itself should perform that role, and expresses itself best through millions of voluntary interactions via processes that make those interactions possible. Yes, that means the free market, but it also means things like moral codes and social stigma – things that have been virtually prohibited in this country in favour of top-down moral arbitration. This allows the most zealous, politically active people to tell us how we should live. This is completely wrong – tyrannical, even.
Over the past few decades we’ve allowed the relationship between the individual and the state to be turned on its head. Politicians drunk on power and convinced of their own good intentions saw it as their duty to save people from their selves and to look after the poor and vulnerable. In doing so, they took on a paternal role, and adopted many of the responsibilities that people once took upon themselves. For a lot of people this was an happy arrangement. They could get on with their lives while someone else relieved them of their mundane burdens. Soon enough, people began to tug at the government’s sleeve like needy children, asking it magic away all their dissatisfactions. This empowered the political class and encouraged them to take on ever more responsibilities, until they were no longer our servant but our master.
The idea that we might stand on our own two feet and reach accommodations with others has become increasingly alien to us. We expected the government to suppress the competing interests of others and to pander to our every whim. This has had a terrible effect on our national character. From being a society of polite, resilient, tolerant and independent people, we’ve become one of vulgar, entitled, intolerant dependents. What’s more, we are sleepwalking down towards a world that many people thought was left behind with the fall of the Berlin Wall: one in which we are completely in thrall to a powerful political elite.
Good comment Tayles.
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