The Price of Liberty

Libertarian Commentary #16-16B, by Nathan Barton

The Army sometimes uses a term “Echelons Above Reality” or EAR, when speaking of higher command and especially the civilians that tell the military what to do: the secretaries of Defense, Navy, Army, and Air Force and their minions, and the White House and Congress. They are considered to be firmly divorced from reality, unlike we mere mortals. A recent newsletter sent to the people she (theoretically) represents, from South Dakota’s sole US Representative, Kristi Noem illustrates that. Mrs. Noem is a rancher and a very conservative woman from East River, South Dakota. In her newsletter, she explains how she (and many of her constituents) are very upset that as the IRS (among other things) gears up to go after those who refuse to voluntarily pay for health insurance or pay the fine (tax) for NOT signing up, the IRS is going around hiring all sorts of thugs, including former IRS agents and other employees who had been fired for everything from beating up taxpayers to stealing tax money (again), to lying about paying their own taxes and their expenses.

Now, any reasonable person, looking at this record of corruption, criminality, and nasty, brutish behavior, would perhaps think that this entire agency is so bad, that like the KGB or the Gestapo or (gasp) the Confederate States Army, it should just go away: be abolished, branded as so evil that it is even illegal to copy its logo. But NOT for people in power at EAR, including dear sweet Mrs. Noem. Nope, the solution is to “reform” the agency and hold it “more accountable.” I admire her courage: after all, the IRS has indeed eaten Congress critturs for lunch now and then. And maybe she has relatives or in-laws that can shield her from the wrath of the simple serpents (civil servants) that inhabit the IRS and “serve the people” (fried, boiled, broiled or baked?).

Sorry, I just don’t think her solution will work. For one thing, she is never going to get a majority in both houses to support her effort: most of them understand what the IRS can do to them.  And have a singular lack of courage. What will work? Abolition, outlawry, and the kind of cultural and societal shunning usually reserved for unreconstituted Afrikaaners and cannibals.  But to do that will, of course, require a revolution.