Take Out the Mother Ship

There has to be a return to first principles.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Imagine you are the leader of an extraterrestrial force sent to conquer planet earth. Your force orbits the earth in a gigantic starship. You do not know what defenses earth has, but back on your planet a strategy was devised to maximize your chances of conquest. Although your starship has powerful weapons, it will not attack the earth directly. That would give its position away, and if it goes down the mission is over. However, your ship will serve as a mother ship for thousands of smaller daughter ships. The daughter ships have surveillance and attack capabilities, but they are coordinated from the mother ship and are of little use if it’s destroyed. Remarkably, the daughter ships propagate, sending out their own daughter ships, who in turn can send out their own daughter ships, ceaselessly multiplying the earth’s attackers.

Earth’s defenders may recognize that the extraterrestrials are employing a swarm strategy—on steroids—similar to drone swarms that are transforming earth warfare. What’s not recognized is that an intellectual swarm strategy has been used for over a century with the same goal as the extraterrestrials: to conquer the earth. Earth’s intellectual defenders have been as effective as a man armed with a flyswatter would be in a house infested with flies.

There is an intellectual mother ship that defenders of the earth can attack, although few do so. That mother ship is the premise that collectives have rights that eliminate the rights of individuals and as the embodiment of the collective, a government may take by force and fraud the income and wealth of those who produce them. From that mother ship has issued countless daughter ships that quickly exhaust anyone who takes up the fight against them. Those efforts are doomed; the only effective strategy is to take out the intellectual mother ship.

How does that work? Pick an issue, say the indoctrination of children in public schools with the tenets of woke, critical race theory, and gender ideology. Countless battles are being fought, and occasionally opponents of such indoctrination win. After a Herculean effort by concerned parents a school board reverses itself or some legislative body passes a law. The parents have taken out a daughter ship, swatted a fly. Rest assured, this daughter ship will launch more daughter ships—new doctrines that are even more absurd and pernicious than the present ones. It never stops.

The alternative is to attack the mother ship, but when was the last time you heard or read an argument that there should be no public schools? Even if you did, that argument is usually framed in daughter ship terms: public schools either indoctrinate or poorly educate children. Nobody argues against public education because its funding steals the incomes and wealth of those who have earned them.

Several decades ago there was one holdout newspaper in Orange County, California—when it was still a bastion of libertarian-tinged conservatism—that called public schools what they are: “taxpayer-supported” schools. Nowadays, as taxpayers involuntarily support everything that’s not supported by the government’s creditors, there is no taxpayer-supported anything, everything is “public.” That linguistic sleight of hand obscures the essential nature of the funding mechanism: theft.

Can you imagine a political candidate saying that the Sixteenth Amendment—the income tax amendment—should be repealed because it sanctions theft? Today, no sound political statement or argument is countered in like vein; it’s met with pejoratives. Our candidate would be labelled “extreme,” “right-wing,” “hateful,” “racist,” etc. Those smears serve to keep everyone within the Overton window of acceptable discourse, that mushy middle of political thought that’s no more than slogans, feel-good bromides, historical ignorance, and crowd conformity, begging to be led down primrose paths. Any consideration of first premises is unacceptable.

And how’s that mushy middle working out for us? We have a bankrupt government, a failing empire, another losing war, urban hellholes, debased dollars, medical totalitarianism, all-encompassing surveillance, declining real incomes, increasing poverty and homelessness, decrepit infrastructure, rampant drug addiction, moral rot, censorship, geriatric leadership, and an addled, senile, perverted, corrupt president who owes his office to a stolen election.

Now stretch your imagination even further. What would happen if the government couldn’t enforce its claim on production? Recall the climactic scene in Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King after Gollum falls into the fire of Mount Doom and the ring of power is destroyed. Sauron’s tower—the mother ship, as it were—collapses, and the daughter ship orcs scatter in powerless panic.

Orcs can wear expensive suits and have Ivy League degrees; Washington is full of them. Their wealth, power, and prestige derive solely from what they steal from America’s producers. Take that away and the nameless fear that prompts the snarling smears of anyone who suggests it would erupt into powerless panic.

Producers are at the mercy of those who produce nothing. We are slaves to a deadly morality that condemns any desire to keep what we produce as selfish, but sanctifies every effort to steal it—from Washington’s orcs down to orc mobs robbing stores—as progressive and humanitarian. Until that ideological mother ship is met and attacked head on, there will be no victories for the virtuous, only more defeat and despair.

Producers fund not just the welfare and warfare states, but enforcement of the laws, regulations, and taxes that make it impossible to produce, the propaganda barrage against them, censorship that condemns and cancels truth telling and righteous protest, and the totalitarian straitjackets for which we’re all being fitted. We’re paying for our own subjugation and destruction.

As the slaves toil on, trying to survive while the world crumbles around them, they’ve lost sight of what might have been if their forebears hadn’t surrendered their right to their own production. Here’s a masochistic exercise. Go back through your tax records and figure out how much you’ve paid in taxes through the years. One simple trick the Roosevelt administration instituted was tax withholding, so salary-earning taxpayers never see their money that goes to taxes. This, of course, makes them easier to extract. Some taxpayers are delighted when they get a refund, even though they are just getting back some of their own money, with no interest for the government’s use of their funds.

If you’re really into self-torture, you can add in your Social Security, Medicare, and state income taxes, and make an estimate of your sales taxes. It would be difficult to account for the hidden tax of inflation, but dollar debasement is stealth theft that redounds to the government’s benefit, because it’s devaluing its own debt. Even at 2 percent price inflation, the central bank’s official target, your currency loses half its purchasing power in roughly thirty-six years.

Whatever your calculated total in current debased dollars, ask yourself what you could have done with that money. Calculate what you’d now have if you’d invested half of it over the years, even at a modest return. Think about how much easier it would have been to fund a house, college educations, and retirement, or to avoid borrowing and stay out of debt. To your amazement and horror, if you’ve been a productive for a few decades, when you do those numbers you’ll discover that you would be quite well off by now, perhaps even wealthy.

There are millions of productive people just like you who can make the same calculations. Money that went down the government rathole could have paid for goods and services, could have been saved and invested, could have funded new innovations, businesses, and jobs, could have, with the miracle of compounding, made the entire country incalculably more prosperous and wealthy. Free minds and free markets eradicate poverty; theft by the government perpetuates it. The thieves get richer, the rest of us poorer. Just north of Richmond lie the nation’s wealthiest districts. It takes a massive, malignant, and deliberate conceptual evasion to claim that this state of affairs—funded by theft—is free market capitalism, the antithesis of theft.

Nothing changes without an all-out intellectual assault on the mother ship premise that the collective has a claim to each individual’s production that supersedes the individual’s right to it. Don’t like the war in Ukraine and all the other forever wars? Don’t like some 800 military bases scattered all over the world? Don’t like regime changes and the U.S.’s hypocritical “rules-based international order”? Don’t like Obamacare? Don’t like urban hellholes? Don’t like a government so intrusive that kids need permission to open a sidewalk lemonade stand? Don’t like the exponentially mounting national debt even as the bankrupt government’s tax theft keeps going up? Don’t like hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations? Don’t like the surveillance state, censorship, and totalitarianism? Don’t like nonstop propaganda? Don’t like propaganda masquerading as science? Don’t like diversity, equity, and inclusion that enforces ideological conformity, treats people unequally based on their race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and politics, and cancels and excludes everyone who doesn’t agree with them? Don’t like corruption that’s so pervasive that it no longer hides itself? Don’t like one standard of justice for the politically favored and another for the politically disfavored? Don’t like prosecutors who ignore rising crime? Don’t like open borders? Don’t like rigged elections? Don’t like multimillionaire politicians, bureaucrats, and generals who somehow acquired their wealth on their government salaries? Don’t like the bribery known as the government-industry revolving door? Don’t like struggling to make ends meet while cronies flaunt their wealth? Don’t like paying more each time you go to the grocery store or gas station? Don’t like forced masking, lockdowns, and vaccines? Don’t like being told that your standard of living must dramatically decline so that a gas that makes up .04 of 1 percent of the atmosphere won’t increase, because someone is worried about the earth’s temperature? Don’t like being told that every one of the world’s problems is somehow your fault? Don’t like Davos prima donna globalist totalitarians telling you that your future will be dictated by their misanthropic and demonic designs? Well, if you’re a productive, private sector individual, you’re paying for all that.

You can futilely fight one or more of the ceaselessly propagating daughter ships, or you can attack the mother ship. Ask an orc touting this or that government program, giveaway, or scheme: What gives the government the right to take your money to pay for it? You’ll never get a straight answer. Turn every political argument back to that question. It’s an argument you can’t lose because the government has no right to your honestly produced income and wealth, notwithstanding libraries of drecky political philosophy that supposedly prove otherwise. Those volumes won’t help the orcs answer the question. Don’t give an inch and they’ll soon move on to easier pickings. Their audience is beneficiaries of programs, giveaways, and schemes, who are always in full agreement with them.

Theft is theft and dressing it up as something different only harms its victims. The mother ship will eventually be brought down by its inherent contradiction: slaves with no right to what they produce don’t produce much. While there is no Galt’s Gulch to which the enslaved can repair, they can hasten the crash by insisting that what’s theirs is theirs and acting accordingly. That’s the proper basis for a revolution, silent or otherwise, and it’s the proper basis for what will be built back better after the revolution.

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