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THE "GOVERNMENT=SOCIETY" FALLACY
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| "Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins ... Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." -- Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776 |
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"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. ... We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting people to eat because we do not want the state to raise the grain."
-- Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1849 |
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| "The State is the coldest of all cold monsters, and coldly it tells lies, and this lie drones on from its mouth: 'I, the State, am the people'." -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra, 1883 |
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| "Government, when it is examined, turns out to be nothing more nor less than a group of fallible men with the political force to act as though they were infallible." -- Robert LeFevre, Aggression is Wrong, 1963 |
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"People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men." -- H.L. Mencken
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| "Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God service, when it is violating all His laws." -- John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, February 2, 1816 |
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| "Public Choice theory, if nothing else, has taught economists to consider the state as it is, not as it should be in a dream world: the state is a potential tyrant, not a benevolent God."-- Pierre Lemieux |
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| "A government does not create voluntary cooperation. A government coerces obedience and calls it cooperation." -- Russ Nelson |
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"The State is Not Your Friend." --Dale Amon
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| "The people = government doctrine is equivalent to political infantilism - an agreement to pretend that the citizen's wishes animate each restriction or exaction inflicted upon him. This doctrine essentially makes masochism the driving force of political life -- assuming that if government is beating the citizens, they must want to be beaten, and they have no right to complain." -- James Bovard |
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| "When most people say things such as, 'let's pass a law to have the government give (anything besides safety and a court system) to everybody,' they're playing a game of 'let's pretend that everybody from whom the government must first take it won't mind'. This, of course, demonstrates either a totally naive or a totally cynical reliance on the sanction of the victims." -- Rick Gaber |
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| “Governments and citizens blend together only in the imagination of political theorists. Government is, and always will be, an alien power over private citizens.” -- James Bovard, Freedom in Chains |
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| "The tendency to identify a society with its political institutions is a serious problem." -- "Assumptions of Power" by Stephen Cox, Reason magazine, March, 1993 |
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| "The more profound problem, however, is the degree to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have lost their ability to distinguish the 'state' from 'society'." -- "Assumptions of Power" by Stephen Cox, Reason magazine, March, 1993 |
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... With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, "we are the government." The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that "we owe it to ourselves"; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is "doing it to himself" and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have "committed suicide," since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.
We must, therefore, emphasize that "we" are not the government; the government is not "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people.[1] But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority.[2] No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that "we are all part of one another," must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.
If, then, the State is not "us," if it is not "the human family" getting together to decide mutual problems, if it is not a lodge meeting or country club, what is it? Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.[3] Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects.
| -- excerpted from Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays by Murray N. Rothbard (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2000 [1974]), pp. 55-88. extensively quoted HERE |
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| "If you point out that the Eighteenth Amendment had been inserted into the Constitution by majority vote, and that therefore 'we' had done it to 'ourselves,' you need to be reminded that the 'we' who did it were not the same people as the 'ourselves' to whom it was done!"-- Rev. Edmund Opitz |
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"The one thing government has which we (you or I or any corporation) DON'T have, is the ability to use deadly force to accomplish its goals." -- Neal Boortz
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"FACE IT: ALL taxes are paid, and ALL regulations are enforced, ultimately, at gunpoint." -- Rick Gaber
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"Even in principle, government is not synonymous with society. In practice, government is an enemy of civil society." --Donald Boudreaux
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| "...too many children and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!' or 'I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!' 'I am homeless, the Government must house me!' and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first." -- Margaret Thatcher |
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| "There is such a thing as society - it's just not the same thing as the state." -- David Cameron |
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| "Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell |
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| "...the one thing libertarians grasp better than conservatives or liberals is the danger of the category error when it comes to the role of government. ... The fundamental insight of libertarianism is that the government is the government. It cannot be your mommy, your daddy, your big brother, your nanny, your friend, your buddy, your god, your salvation, your church or your conscience." -- Jonah Goldberg |
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| "We need to be clear: government spending does not create charity; government spending *displaces* private charity. The question is not whether people will help; the question is how they will help. The decision is not between government help and no help but instead between government help and private help." -- Russ Nelson |
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| "The crucial distinction between systems...was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state." -- Adam Michnik in Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens |
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| "Society is something emergent that occurs when people interact with each other, you cannot point at it and you cannot owe it anything. When any politician says the word 'society', you can be damn sure what he really means is 'the state'." -- Perry de Havilland |
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| "If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?" -- Herbert Spencer, The New Toryism, 1884 |
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| "We’re dealing with the oldest political error: the belief that because everyone wants something, government should or must provide it. If the error is pervasive, the result is the total state. If it is completely uprooted, the result is the purely free society." -- Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. |
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| “The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.” – Thomas Paine |
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| “Jesus would never use government surrogates to force the people to ‘help others’.” – Philip Freneau |
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| “A coerced ‘choice’ does not reflect virtue, only compliance.” – Wendy McElroy |
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| “Compassion comes from the heart, not the government” – Edward Britton |
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| "Government is not compassion ... [it] is nothing more than structured, widespread coercion ..." -- Glen Allport |
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| “The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society."– Plato (427-347 BC). |
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| "Big national goals are never easy on the taxpayer. For every national goal accomplished, a hundred private goals lay in ashes to fund it. For every hunk of metal the government puts on Mars, a working mother does not buy school supplies for her daughter, a middle-class family goes without a family car and a billionaire cannot open a new factory." -- Jacob Lyles |
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| "Hypocrisy is not the hobgoblin of enslavable minds so much as it is the hallmark of their would-be slavemasters." -- Rick Gaber |
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| "I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." -- Thomas Jefferson |
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| "It is the idea that all order must be explained by a functioning mind at the helm, not its denial, that has the closet affinity to the religious instinct." -- Julian Sanchez |
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| "We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. " -- Ayn Rand in "The Nature of Government" |
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| "When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion -- When you see that in order to produce, you need permission from men who produce nothing -- When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -- When you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by hard work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you -- When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming self-sacrifice -- You may know your society is doomed." -- Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged |
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Professor R. J. Rummel, who keeps track of such things, now estimates that in the 20th century 262,000,000 people were killed by their own governments. And all this was done in the name of "the proletariat," the "master race," and especially in the name of "the greater good."
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