Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Profound wisdom can come from the mouths of children. They have this incredible ability to cut through the crap, the constant gray-state of most adult thinking that bogs us down and makes us ineffectual, and get to the core.

Case in point: last year I started listening to The Beatles with my oldest daughter (eight years old at that point, and already leaving her proud daddy choking in her dust). Over a couple of days we listened to just about every Beatles song that I had floating around, and she enjoyed them for the most part, frowning at the occasional acid-induced nonsense. Then, along about three quarters of the way through our marathon, we come across “You Never Give Me Your Money.”

We listen to the song, and after a few minutes, she asks me to pause the CD. A few seconds of silence follows said act, and she wonders aloud: “Why should she have to give him her money? Why can’t he just earn his own?”

The smile that split my face could have cut my head off.

“Well, honey,” I told her (or something similar [I’m hardly as poetic at the time as I like to remember myself afterword]), “She shouldn’t. But there are some people out there who think that they’re due some of what someone else earns.”

More pregnant silence as her mind tried to come to grips with this bit of nonsensical information.

“But that’s wrong,” she told me.

Over the remainder of that day, and off and on since then, we’ve discussed the difference between the grace of willfully giving to those left fortunate than yourself, and the wholesale theft that comes from folks who don’t want to work for a living. No matter how many different directions she tries to come at it from, the idea of forcing person A to give to person B without the consent of A, because B thinks they deserve it, makes no sense at all to her.

How is it then that a nine year old can see how wrong this is, but that cluster of Liberals in Washington (to say nothing of local Socialists that crop up in regional elections like the weeds they are) can’t? I think a lot of it comes down to psychosis.

All kids (excepting the ones that are particularly anti-social [shyly, prepubescent me raises his hand]) are self-serving little psychos. They have to be. It’s a survival mechanism. If they don’t do what they have to to either lead the pack of slavering animals that most groups of children are, or become a follower/sycophant, they starve out in the cold. But however they fall in the social scheme of things, they all want to be at the top of the heap.

In time they grow out of it. Most of them. They get a sense of their own self worth, and place themselves at the center of a universe of one, until such time as spouses and children shift their orbit and they become human again.

But not all of them grow out of this. We see it all the time, in loudmouthed neighbors, or folks that want to run our towns like gulags, where everyone has to go along with whatever they find most ascetically appealing. At the furthest extreme of that are the politicians.

Power should be reserved for those who don’t want it. Especially governmental, regulative, legislative powers. The problem is that those most worthy of power—the ones who won’t abuse it because they have no will to use it at all—won’t put themselves in a position to assume it. It’s a paradox. One that I see no way out of. I’m just not smart enough for it.

I sometimes reread a book by Philip K. Dick called Solar Lottery, where leaders are chosen by chance, pure luck. Only it’s Dick, so it’s never as simple as that. As a mental exercise I wonder how the world would be different—better, worse, or the same—if all public office, to say nothing of other societal services: police, armed forces, trash men, etc., were randomly chosen, for limited, one time terms. A societal draft. It’s a moot point as I’m opposed to involuntary servitude of any kind, but as a What If? I find it interesting. Might have to write about that society some day. Could be fun…

It’s amazing to me how much talking to my kids makes me think outside the box. How I can excuse many behaviors that my younger self would have found deplorable simply because they’ve become the norm. We are all numbed by society, by the evils that we see perpetrated every day by the ones that are supposed to be protecting our rights. This is dangerous. More than dangerous, it’s suicidal. We need to hold those in power accountable, for their every action, to make sure that they do nothing that we have to explain away to our kids and grandkids. If we can’t look at those same children and explain, without feeling like whores in the explaining, why the world is the way it is, then the world is wrong, and we must fix it.

So: No, she doesn’t have to give him her money. Neither do we, to fund and progress things that we find offensive, amoral, or Evil. We have every right under heaven to vent our frustrations, and vote those people that are proponents of those things that we find offensive, amoral, and Evil out of office. To quote a favorite cartoon of mine: They need to be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun.