Government and Slavery Have Much in Common

How much? It might be quicker to ask what they DON'T have in common. (DN 1.8)

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8

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Chapter 1: WHY

1.8 — The Slave Contract, Part 1

The particular criminal rackets under which we currently languish, in the United States and around the world, are definitely a problem. But these specific governments, and the people who run them, are not the problem. Everything we have discussed thus far in this chapter should be enough to have made it clear what the real problem is:

Government, as we have understood the concept for the last 5,000 years or so, is not morally permissible in any form.

Obviously many of you have fully absorbed this reality and have adjusted your thinking accordingly. Some of you got there before I did. Some of you have been there for decades.

Yet there are also some who still haven’t quite joined us yet:

YES! You are right about all those things. That is why we need to get back the Constitution as the Framers originally intended it!

When I see such a response, I feel a brief pang of disappointment. In the immortal words of Junie B. Jones, “My shoulders get very slumping” for a moment or two.¹ Then, of course, I remember that this reaction is entirely understandable… 

The state has been a fixture in all our lives, in nearly every corner of the globe, for all of recorded history. We have been indoctrinated to believe that it is inevitable and indispensable. We have been programmed to fear what would happen in its absence.

Those of us who have lived in the comparatively “free” countries of the Anglosphere and broader West have been further conditioned to believe that our forefathers found the magic formula: a way to avoid the “insecurity” of the “state of nature” while simultaneously restraining the excesses of government. 

Now that that formula has proved a complete failure, it is only natural for us to cling to the belief that the formula was good, but that it has been adulterated over the decades by bad people with bad intent. If only we could somehow undo the damage…

The result is a psychological pentimento many layers deep. We have an organic understanding of natural law, but the canvas has been painted over so many times that the original image is barely visible.

The purpose of this chapter is to strip away the baggage of millennia and restore the original image. Once you see it—really see it—you realize that all those extra layers were neither necessary nor acceptable.

That original image, of course, is not the “original vision” of the American Founders or any one group of people. It is nothing less that the rich hues of natural law itself—a palette that spreads across time and colors every corner of the universe. 

There are only a few steps left in this process. Then we can move on to the fun part: using those glorious hues to paint a vision of a new kind of world.

So let us undertake those final steps by first considering what we have discovered thus far: the absence of ontological authority, the impermissibility of coercive force, the necessity of consent, and the reality of self-ownership.

If we synthesize these together, some clear moral rules emerge:

• No person may be owned by another.

• No one’s actions and choices may be forcibly compelled.

• No one may be subjected to nonconsensual transactions or impositions of authority.

• No one may be forced to labor against his will.

These rules are unavoidable. They cannot be evaded or ignored—certainly not if you take the rights of the individual human person seriously at all. In fact, violating these rules is tantamount to slavery.

Indeed, if asked to define the main characteristics of slavery, we would note that it

• Takes the fruit of your labor against your will,

• Forces you to labor for the benefit of others,

• Imposes an authority to which you did not consent,

• Forcibly compels your actions and choices, and

• Punishes you if you try to resist.

In other words, it violates rules that are morally inviolable.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the town square. A few of us slaves out here in slave-land figured out that

GOVERNMENT DOES ALL THOSE THINGS TOO.

Of course, here is where the chorus of tut-tutting and tongue-clucking begins…

City fathers grumble.
What nonsense.

Dowagers gasp.
Why, I never…

Statists shriek.
What are you, some sort of anarchist? 

The fearful quail.
Without government, bad men will hurt me.

Virtue-signalers virtue-signal about how inappropriate the comparison is. Normies utter the bland platitudes they’ve been trained to utter.

Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care.

Even a few conservatives will get in on the act—especially those possessed by the odd belief that classical-liberal thought hasn’t made any advances since 1789.

You see this face? This is my I-don’t-care face.

All of the whinging, philosophical wheedling, and wistfulness for a bygone era..it’s all to no avail. You simply cannot deny that government does all these things. To do so is dishonest or self-delusion.

The defining characteristics of government are the same as the defining characteristics of slavery. There are differences in degree, of course, and in style. But categorically, government does the same things to people that slaveowners do.

Isn’t that something we should want to escape?

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In this book, we are building a care for why we should escape, and blazing a trail to a way in which we might begin to do so. Help me continue this work with your support today!

1. If you have children, or were yourself a child in the U.S. anytime after 1992, there is a good chance you know of the hijinks of Miss Junie B. Jones.