Government Coercion Archives - Center for Individualism

Here’s a question to which I never hear a coherent answer: “What will the world look like when the Social Justice Left has won?”

I know what kind of world I want: a world of communities and individuals. Communities with different values. Individuals with different values, some of whom I can avoid because I don’t like their values—or whom I might befriend even though I don’t like their values. I want maximum personal liberty. Our respective values and beliefs make us different, and I want a world of difference. Otherwise, we have a world of eternal oppression.

What kind of world does the Left want, and how might that play out, in reality, when the Left has vanquished people like me?

Many leftists, “progressives,” and “modern liberals” are utopians—almost millenarianists. They believe society can be transformed, and mankind perfected, that human nature can be demolished and rebuilt—once people like them have sufficient power.

Utopianism always means more government, more top-down solutions, less individuality, less community. You’re told what you may say and think, what words you may not use, what behaviors you must approve, what scientific facts you must deny.

The road to Utopia never gets there. It’s an infinite road, full of marching prisoners—patrolled by snitches who report, and enforcers who punish any deviation.

Utopians talk of “loving acceptance of all people.” That’s the most intolerant concept imaginable. It means forcing people to suppress whatever private values they might have and adopt the “non-judgmental” values of their betters. Implicitly, it means letting others dictate what’s right or good—or letting them decree that such concepts are mere constructs.

The banner of inclusiveness and diversity bears the slogan, “Shut up.”

You might know that two and two make four, but an all-powerful government (call it The Party) could force you to say two and two make five, or whatever other number The Party dictates for the moment. You might continue to think that two and two make four, but you’ll not be allowed to say it—and you’ll eventually be buffaloed into defending a lie.

That will make you angry, of course. Ever notice how so many people on the Left seem perpetually angry? Maybe I would be angry, too, if I were constantly repeating lies that I knew were lies, but that I felt I had to repeat because I wanted to look good to my leftist friends.

The Left wants power over you.

That is all.

The utopian Left doesn’t really care about people of color, women, gays, etc. It doesn’t matter how black you are, how gay you are, how Hispanic you are, whatever: If you belong to a protected group, and you betray the Left, you are outcast. You and your family will be shunned and defamed by the “woke,” maybe even physically terrorized and economically destroyed.

If you are not allowed your values—if you must shut up if you disagree with The Party—you are not a person. You are an artifact. A thing. The leftist agenda, in a sense, denies your very humanity, by denying your human nature.

I believe—perhaps naïvely—in a natural order. A Tao, if you like. I can’t tell you where it originates, but it exists. Maybe the Tao comes from a creator; maybe from a “Life Force”; maybe it’s evolution; maybe it comes from nothing. Whatever its source, man has a nature, and a natural way—just as a frog, a bird, or a yak has. Part of man’s nature is reason, whence comes independence of thought, diversity of values and preferences.

The utopian Left believes human nature can be conquered; that they can annihilate the old Tao—and create a new one, based on their emotions. Sure, some of us might behave wrongly, they think, but human beings are potentially good. They can be made good, they can be corrected of their errors, the Left believes—but the only means to that end is force, force to the utmost. To “perfect” society, we must grant our betters the power to make us what they please.

Get this straight: these people hate you. Former President Obama wasn’t kidding when he said he proposed to “fundamentally transform America.” That is what he and his kind want.

What would you think of a man who said, “I intend to fundamentally transform my wife”? Not, “I’m going to encourage her to change a certain bad habit she has,” but “I intend to fundamentally transform her.” You would conclude that he hated his wife, had no respect for her. Would he “fundamentally transform” a person he respected?

The Left wants power over you. That is all.

Utopians will never perfect society because they stand on nothing. Right now, they’re pumping their legs like Wile E. Coyote when he has run off the edge of the cliff—and hoping they can keep moving forward into thin air. Inevitably, though, they will plunge into the abyss. That would be funny—except that they are determined to drag decent people down with them.

Joseph Dobrian is a novelist, journalist, social critic, and author. This article appeared at American Greatness.

Ten years ago, the world was introduced to a remarkable truth with a real-world experiment. Government does not need to operate a monopoly on the product we call money. Money can be fully private, both in production and distribution. It can be a new money, valued independently from government issues, and it can improve based on the usual methods we use for improving everything else in life, namely the forces of entrepreneurship and trial and error. The good we call money can be like our phones, shoes, and cars, with lots of providers and products and unending experimentation toward serving people better.

The thing that opened up this insight is of course Bitcoin, which history will forever credit with being the first fully operational attempt to produce and distribute private money in the digital age. That in turn, over the last ten years of a wild and enterprising history, has given birth to a mighty industry with experimental applications.

One of the most promising experiments in this post-Bitcoin world is Facebook’s idea of creating its own private currency based blockchain technology. At the outset, it must have seemed like an easy thing to do. The tech is here, so why not embrace it? We’ve seen how cryptocurrency can function as a fully independent money without relying on central banks and departments of treasury. Why not take the next step and have international companies innovate their own currency for anyone in the world to use?

In a normal world, people might say: cool idea. Go for it. But these are not normal times. Government wants to control and regulate everything. Nationalism is back and surely that comes with national monies controlled by the state. There must be endless hearings that demand answers to the great question: how will you comply with regulations forged in the old ways with a currency whose greatest merit is precisely that it moves beyond the strictures to give the world something entirely new?

What looks like Congressional hearings and compliance requests really amounts to harassment. Consider the latest news that many mainstream providers of credit cards have backed away. Why have they done so? It’s not because it is not a promising project. It’s not because they don’t think it can succeed. It’s not because they don’t want to be part of it. The Wall Street Journal gave the whole game away with this passing remark:

The pressure on Libra’s financial partners intensified after the U.S. Treasury Department sent letters to Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe and Visa asking for a complete overview of their compliance programs and how Libra would fit into them.

In other words, the innovation is being stopped by force. Over the long term, that can’t work.

The same week after Libra lost its partners, the U.S. Treasury forcibly shut down another innovation in the space. The messaging service Telegram, which specializes in encrypted chat, created its own money-like token called a Gram. The government now says it can’t do that because that’s like a security and hence must be regulated like one. Imagine that! It’s not a stock. It’s a purely digital good, and entitlement to nothing but itself, invented by a company and offered to willing owners. Now the government steps in and says no.

Now, just think for a minute what is going on here. You have governments trying to stop the future. How do you think they can do this for the long term? You can’t just make innovation go away. It’s absurd. The forces of enterprise and innovation are infinitely more powerful than governments. Governments have only edicts and guns to enforce them. Ideas, on the other hand, take flight because they enter into the human imagination, spread like wildfire, and construct the narrative of history itself.

Ok, let’s just try a mental experiment. It’s the 11th century and some blacksmith has come up with a thing called a horseshoe. It causes the horse to be much more powerful and last much longer, vastly increasing crop yields and creating efficiencies all around. But let’s say some annoying prince decides that it’s dangerous because it is enabling the peasants to have too much free time. Here’s the question: if this one prince had succeeded in the 11th century in abolishing the horseshoe, is there any chance that today we would have them?

Nothing governments do today can forever forestall the realization of private currency innovation. Central banks and government currencies used 20th-century technology. Today we have something better. There aren’t enough guns in the world to keep it from happening eventually. Governments can slow it down but they can’t make it go away forever. They are fighting a losing battle, one with lots of carnage along the way, but they will lose this war. The people will get their money eventually.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research

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Government Attempts To Prevent The Future By Stopping Innovation By Force. It Won’t Work.

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