You, the State, and Dog Ownership

I'm hanging out with my awesome dog, and had I thought. Even though I love this guy to death and I try to make his life as happy as possible, giving him too many dog treats, building a damn fence just so he can run around without a leash, etc., I still maintain control over his life.

And of course the reason for that is because he is a dog and there's a trade off - he gets less freedom in return for a safer, less hungry life as well as my companionship. And we could argue that he might be happier living in his natural state in the wild, but he seems to like me, and he's not constantly trying to overthrow me or dash out the door every time I open it. Most of the time he is asleep in my bed, so I assume I have his consent.

And in no way am I advocating a human society where we each have a 1-on-1 master/slave relationship. What I'm thinking about is human motivation.

Now, what if I controlled over 300 million dogs? I couldn't possibly love and take proper care of all of them, no matter how "good" a person I was. It's just logistically impossible. By statistical standards, even if 3 million of them died as a result of my actions, that's only 1%. I'd still have scored a A+. I'm reminded of a speech Rothbard gave in the early 90s talking about the newly collapsed USSR. He basically says, "They couldn't calculate!", in his hilarious voice.

But if I forget to feed my dog in the morning, I feel like an absolute bastard for days. If he gets sick I drop everything and take him to the vet. Its the personal connection I have with him that propels me to cooperate with him. And I think it's the same basic thing that happens with politicians. Obama doesn't give a shit about me, he doesn't even know me. But he might actually care about the people he works with in his administration daily. I'm sure he cares about his family. If he screwed life up for his kids, he would have to live with that every day.

So I think this is yet another aspect to approach the critique of statism (not that it needs another one); that even despite a person's best intentions, it is just impossible to act in the best interests of people you don't even know. And because you don't have to really face them, you can make those "tough" decisions and cave in to the demands of the ones you do know; the LOUDER ones, the lobbyists, your "advisors", other government leaders. And once again, this assumes quite naively that our leaders are actually giving the tiniest of rabbit shits about us.

So even if we were to find those politicians who are good people, who truly care about us all, that argument for statism would still fail based on the problem of calculation, and the fact that if a human, given the power to choose, has to choose exclusively between the well being of two equally deserving people, they will choose the person with whom they have a more personal relationship.

The only good politician is the one who will work to destroy his own job, to reduce large control into smaller, one-on-one levels that become more personal. And while even that would be too much government, it is my hope that we can carry out this dismantling in such a fashion so as to minimize shock and ensure a stable transformation. If that's not possible, as Rothbard believed, then we'll have to take faster steps (Rothbard said that if there was a red button he could press to immediately abolish the government, he would break his finger pushing it).

This election is just that. We are playing their game by their rules, but I feel that we might be approaching the last round. Not by our choice, but because they have broken the game, dishonored the rules, and made it impossible to win.