The First Step Back Towards Freedom

We have traveled a long way away from being free. We are now less free than most five-year-olds are and even less so because we are not five-year-olds. Consider the distinction.

A five-year-old is protected by his parents, who do so temporarily. As the five-year-old grows up, he is parented less. When he is grown up, they cease parenting him altogether except insofar as perhaps offering advice when it is sought. There is no more bed-time, though.

No more sit-up-straight.

The child becomes an adult and is respected as such, if the parent is not pathological. Government parenting is precisely that.

Armed busybodies order us to buckle-up and wear helmets as if we were the government’s children. Such things are no more the legitimate business of the government that they are of random other adults ordering other adults to do those things. Most of us would not submit to such orders from other adults, absent badges and guns. The badges and guns coerce submission but earn (and deserve) contempt because we know that not wearing a seatbelt or a helmet injures no other person or even threatens to and for that reason  exactly, it is none of the government’s legitimate business.

It is why no one who gets what is styled a “ticket” – as if it were something you got from the dry cleaner’s – feels any guilt about getting one. Nor shame in court. People who commit crimes feel shame (assuming they aren’t sociopaths) because they understand they have harmed someone. They accept the justice of punishment. Is there a person in the country who feels that they have been justly treated when an armed government worker “pulls them over” – as if this were some sort of friendly and consensual interaction, just ti say hello and have a chat – and hands them a “ticket” that means they will have to hand over a large sum of money to the government?

The answer is as obvious as it is telling.

Another way to look at it is this way: Any law that most people would ignore if they did not fear armed government workers is not a moral law. It is merely “the law.” It is important to draw – and to understand – the distinction. “The law” is whatever a government says it is. It once “the law” to turn in “fugitive” slaves. Was that a moral law? Is it moral to sic armed government workers on people just because “the law” says they must wear a seatbelt or a helmet while riding a motorcycle?

No, it is an arbitrary law. The government says one must wear a seatbelt and a helmet while riding a motorcycle because it isn’t “safe” not to. Well, how is that defined exactly? It is defined according to the arbitrary standards of the government, that’s how. It’d be even safer to require cars have roll cages and the motorcycle riders also wear armored leathers and boots and gloves, not just helmets. So why doesn’t the government require it? Perhaps it will. Perhaps it won’t. The point being the government makes it own arbitrary decision about what is “safe” (and not) and then imposes it.

That is one of the problems with these kinds of laws. Moral laws are fundamentally different in that everyone agrees it is wrong to take what is not ours (theft, robbery) or to commit murder and so on. There is clarity, which is a key element of justice. Even a sociopath who does not feel any remorse for having committed a murder understands and accepts his punishment. He does not feel he has been persecuted for no legitimate reason.

Everyone who gets “pulled over” for not wearing a seatbelt or a helmet feels just that. It is obnoxious; it is belittling. It is tyrannical.  On the same basis that people are “pulled over” for not wearing a seatbelt or a helmet while riding a motorcycle, overweight people could also be just as logically “pulled over” and handed tickets for being overweight, since being overweight can be said to risk that person’s health just the same as it is argued that seat belt and helmet laws “save lives.” Well, so does maintaining a “safe” bodyweight and eating plenty of veggies.

The government  thinks of itself as our parent, but not in the way actual parents tink about their children – because the government isn’t affectionately inclined toward us. Government does not regard the relationship as temporary, which makes it unnatural. Government is the kind of parent that keeps a kid chained to a wall in the basement – for this own good, of course.

We ought not only to resume thinking of ourselves as adults; we ought to respect the right of other adults, as much as our own selves, to not be parented. Then the government would no longer be able to treat us all as if we were five-year-olds in need of parenting.

. . .

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