Videographer Uncovers Government Crime Syndicate

Who's ready to move past cognitive dissonance and accept the truth?

At the end of this short post is a 29-minute video that is well worth your time. It is an amusing demonstration of what I have been endeavoring to tell you for the last two years: the government is, in its fundamental formulation, indistinguishable from a mafia protection racket.

What else do you call a group of men with unctuous, vaguely threatening smiles who send armed goons to your house if you do not pay them the protection money they demand? In case you missed the metaphor—I just described taxation.

With a poker face carved in granite, James Freeman tries to get government officials to recognize this fact—to acknowledge that their salaries and “authority” come from the threat of a government gun pointed at their fellow humans.

And they just won’t do it.

Being a sympathetic sort, I kind of felt sorry, for a moment or two, for Mark the Security Guard. Then I realized that he was smart enough to get what Freeman was saying…but the cognitive dissonance simply won’t allow him to admit the truth of it. If he were to do so, then he would have to admit that he is an enforcer of a racket, and that his livelihood is funded by violence.

The same goes for the clerk and the police officer. They get it. They just won’t admit that they get it. How can they, without triggering at least some pang of conscience from deep within?

I am still sympathetic with Freeman’s “victims” in the sense that they have probably never really thought about the moral implications:

This is just how things are. How they’ve always been. How they have to be.

If they do think about it, their thought probably doesn’t go much further than that. And if they do start to have any pangs of conscience, chances are they will soothe themselves with that very same thought, wrapping it around themselves like a warm blanket.

This is the ground on which almost everyone stands. Government, they think, is just a fact of life. It’s “necessary.” They have never even imagined any other option. It’s the old “death and taxes” saw.

James Freeman is forcing people to look this problem squarely in the face. That is a very good thing.

He’s a bit too confrontational in some of his other videos, revealing truths to the viewer yet doing nothing but alienating the targets in question. But in this video, his tone is perfect—calm, polite, and disarmingly bumbling, while at the same time forcing them to grapple with uncomfortable truths. Good stuff!

Hat tip to

albert venezio

for this hipping me to this video.