When the blind lead the blind

By Philippe David

The french economist Frédéric Bastiat once described the State as «The great fiction through which everyone tries to live at everyone else's expense». It's also the one through which everyone tries to impose their dictates on everyone else.

We've created a machine that can legally use force to promote one idea above all else and crush any that a certain elite doesn't like. This machine is controlled by people that we like to imagine have the wisdom to know better than anyone what's good for everybody else, but in reality, are probably the least qualified of all - Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump come to mind.  What's really happening is that they use their power to favor their favorite causes or to sell them to the highest bidder, either in terms of money or votes because their real aim is to hold on to power at all cost. It never had anything to do with the common good.

All of it rest on one single false good idea: That for society to function, someone needs to be in charge to pick and choose which idea or which vision should be imposed at the expense of all others rather than let ideas compete with one another and letting the best one win because good ideas don't need to be imposed by force. People will adopt good ideas voluntarily. To imagine that a single person or a small group of people can have the wisdom which idea is the right one and then impose it by force is probably the most ludicrous idea of all time.

I don't fear the Maos, the Stalins or the Hitlers of this world, as Larken Rose eloquently puts it, what I fear are the millions who hallucinate them to represent some sort of authority and obey blindly their every whim. There's nothing to fear of any ideology, as long as one of it's leaders doesn't actually come to power and starts imposing it to everybody, be it communism, socialism, facism or islamism.

While you're all arguing which master should own you and decide which «ism» to impose upon you, others are getting rich at your expense and it never even crosses your mind that nobody should even have the right to choose anything in your stead and ram it down your throat by force. If you're going to be offended, be offended by that.