Pick the Basement You Want to Get Locked In

And while you're at it—explain the difference to me.

It’s #MemeMonday. And Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do. And we’re all Lucy.

First the meme. Then we talk.

Some random dude walks up to you and shows you the gun on his hip. He tells you to give him money to pay for his medicine, or his cousin’s operation, or whatever.

• He tells you the money quite literally belongs to him, not you.

• He tells you that if you refuse to give him the money, he will take it by force and lock you in his basement.

• He tells you that if you resist being locked in his basement, he will shoot you dead.

• And then, just for laughs, he tells you that he has the legitimate authority to do all of this.

You might laugh. You might try to pull your own gun first. You might look around for help. But you would definitely consider his actions to be criminal. You would definitely consider his actions to be immoral.

So what makes it okay when government does it?

Let me repeat the question, in all caps, to make sure you heard me:

WHAT MAKES IT OKAY WHEN GOVERNMENT DOES IT?

It is the same act. Morally, logically, practically, there is no difference, other than a little window dressing.

Yet almost all of us accept it as totally normal. Worse, we grant the act legitimacy. We defend it as good, as needed, or as the price of “living in society.” Some of us actually vote for it. But even the vast majority of those who vote against it still consider it “legitimate.”

So what is it—PRECISELY—that transmutes a disgusting immoral crime into a morally permissible act? What is the exact moral pathway that makes one wrong and the other right?

Here are a few WRONG answers:

Democracy

Saying, “It’s okay because we voted for it” is not a moral argument.

Neither is saying, “It’s the will of the people.” Adding the phrase, “We, the People” or making gauzy references to “The Founding Fathers” doesn’t help either.

None of these are moral arguments. None of these explain how an act that is immoral when done by an individual suddenly becomes moral when done by a government.

“Because democracy” is not a moral argument. Democracy—yes, even our constitutional republican kind—is a mechanism for making decisions. Nothing more. And it can easily generate some really immoral decisions…

Democracy produced the Missouri Compromise, which said that people south of an arbitrary line could be enslaved. Democracy produced Korematsu and Dred Scott. People voted for Hitler and the NSDAP.

This is what a moral argument looks like. “‘The people’ voted for it” is not a moral argument.

Virtue signaling

You know what else is not a moral argument? Talking about how important it is to “help people.”

We might find one day that one out of every hundred boys has a substance in his pituitary gland that, when “harvested,” will cure fifty people of cancer. The gland must be harvested whole, which means the boys must be killed. But it’s to “help people”—right? And not just one person hlped, but fifty! The utilitarian math says one thing. Actual morality says another.

Much of today’s society is powered by pure narcissism. People want to feel good about themselves. They want others to admire them. Like most animals, humans are wired to want to climb in status hierarchies, and social media, leftism, and various other forces have created a really easy hierarchy: Just do and say the next “correct” thing, and climb a rung. Call someone else a racist, fascist, or uncaring bastard and climb two rungs!

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do the right thing, but today’s culture goes wayyyyyyy beyond that.

“Don’t you care about people?” is not a moral argument.

Implying that you are better than others because, unlike them, you actually care about people is not a moral argument.

I hear it from lefties, religious people, and the woo/spiritual community. I know you all want to be good and do the right thing. But if you want to justify a belief that it is moral for government to take things by force from one and give those things to another, you have to make an actual moral argument. You must explain, in precise philosophical terms, how an act that is universally understood to be morally wrong when done by an individual ceases to be wrong when done by a group of individuals calling themselves a government.

Saying that we have to “help people” isn’t that.

And you can unsubscribe from me because you don’t want to have anything to do with someone like me, who does not “care about people” the way you do, and that STILL will not be a moral argument.

“Nothing else can work”

This is how it has to be. What other choice do we have?

Perhaps you are starting to sense that there really is nothing that can transmute this immoral act into a moral one, but you feel compelled to retreat to the claim that we have no other option. That this is the system we have. That we cannot do any better. That there is nothing else that can work.

We will start by setting aside the obvious fact that at some point a few hundred years ago, very few people thought anything other than monarchy could work.

And I will concede that it is difficult to imagine new ways of doing things, and simply point out that some very smart people have done a fair amount of the imagining for us.

And then I will just say this: that if you have retreated to the argument that this is the best we can do, then you have conceded the point. You are, in essence, saying

Yes, it is just as immoral when government does it, but we have no other choice.

Or, in related fashion, you might continue to cling to the belief that we can somehow “limit” the amount that government does this, and keep it limited. And that, somehow, “limited government” will save us from…………government.

That claim might be patriotic. It might even be admirable, in a way, in its dedication to a pure ideal despite two centuries of obvious evidence to the contrary. But it too has conceded the point that everything government does is fundamentally immoral.

If that is where you currently stand, then I understand, for I once stood where you now stand!

But if that is the case, then maybe, instead of angrily attacking me for speaking a scary truth, it is time to concede that truth out loud. I don’t expect you to instantly become a full-blown anarchist, but you could at least head toward being anarcho-curious.

If not—if your claim is we can never possibly do any better than this—then you have to wrestle with the fact that you are consigning your children’s children’s children to live in a fundamentally immoral world in which a small gang of bullies are allowed to do things that the rest of us are not.

And that is not moral ground that I ever want to have to defend again.

Here is the RIGHT answer:

There is no right answer, because the act is morally indefensible whether it is done by an individual or by a ‘government.’

But if you have an actual moral argument to the contrary, I am ready to hear it!

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