A Libertarian Fairy Tale...
©2006 by Ron Bain
Once there was a creature made from wisdom gone awry - a demonic, multi-fanged, tentacled, grossly huge vampire which fed only on the sweat of the brow or the inalienable rights of the People.
Because the People had to work to support themselves, sweat appeared on their brows. The monster sucked it right off. Because the People's rights were inalienable, they kept reappearing and manifesting everywhere - but the monster would chew them right up every time. And so it went for a very long time.
Such was the size of the vampire that it simultaneously held millions - nay, billions - of victims, its multiply fanged mouths and worldwide tentacles sucking the brow sweat and rights out of them all.
"Submit or die!" the monster would whisper to its victims.
In reality, the vampire mostly kept its victims alive but weak. Its genuine preference, though, was to keep its victims alive for a long, long time, because the older ones produced a lot more brow sweat on average. Occasionally, the monster would kill a few outright, for no apparent reason, just to keep the others frightened. And this always worked - a shudder would run through the entire community every time someone voiced a protest, as no one ever knew where or when the monster would take its revenge.
What was the name of this vicious and evil thing created out of ideas which were thought to be so simple and so easy to understand? Spit out like a curse, the name is spoken only by the brave in dark places, like jails and accountants' offices, and even they dare not speak it often.
NosferatU.S.
The only byproduct of NosferatU.S. was, excuse the term, vampire shit. The monster shat wars and taxes and laws and prisons, tobacco subsidies in combination with environmental rules, conscriptions and prohibitions, and lots of silly paper that was no good for even cleaning up all the other shit.
The monster shat upon the young, he shat upon the old; he shat upon the businessman and the employee; he shat upon the grassy knolls and the verdant woodlands; he shat upon you and me.
Sometimes there would be a few who would stand, shake their fists and shout "No!", refusing to submit. Most of these NosferatU.S. simply ignored, plunging its fangs into their brow sweat anyway, uncaring about their urgent protests. Others managed to hold the monster at bay, just inches away from their sweating brows, by forming together into large groups of victims called kor-por-ay-shuns, which were protected by thin walls made of vampire-resistant garlic and legal incantations. But NosferatU.S. managed to feed off the kor-por-ay-shuns, too, sometimes by bribing them with a tidbit here or several tidbits there.
And thus it had been for so long. However, there was a small group - old ones who remembered and young ones who had heard tales about the olden days. Days when the monster had been chained and tamed, when it would prowl the shores and live off of what it could find there, chasing the occasional invader away. Back then, the only shit the vampire extruded was harder and didn't stink so much. And it was a lot easier to spend, too, because if you put it away for awhile and took it out later, it was still worth same number of beans as when you put it away.
Well, anyway, this tiny group that remembered the olden days - they were called libber-tare-eeans - they started putting together a big stake, a sharp pointy thing with which to subdue NosferatU.S. At first, the vampire ignored them but as the number of people working on the stake grew, the monster began to shake its tentacles threateningly. NosferatU.S. would not admit it, but he was afraid of the stake, which was a construct, a conglomeration of ideas in the form of documents, books, articles, blogs, pamphlets and the collected works of thousands of free thinkers.
And ideas constituted the only thing that NosferatU.S. feared!
At the base of the stake were the foundation ideas:
- The Magna Carta (Even the King must obey this law);
- The Declaration of Independence ('Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness');
- The U.S. Constitution (Forming a more perfect Union: a constitutional republic and representative democracy with power balanced between the executive, judicial and legislative branches);
- The Bill of Rights (Guaranteeing freedoms of speech, the press, religion, the right to bear arms; the right to be secure in home and records).
Forming the haft of the stake was the philosophy of:
- David Hume (Skeptical and empirical thinking; thoughts 'On Liberty');
- John Locke (Social contract theory; man's natural rights; empiricism);
- Henry David Thoreau (Civil disobedience; anti-slavery; refusing to pay certain taxes).
The handle of the stake consisted of the writings and speeches of:
- Thomas Jefferson (The second president, who preferred newspapers without government over government without newspapers);
- Thomas Paine (The pamphleteer who was the public voice of the American Revolution);
- John Adams (The third president, who wrote much of the Constitution and advocated an end to government corruption);
- Patrick Henry ('Give me liberty or give me death' - with those words he inspired the American Revolution);
- Benjamin Franklin (A Deist who found Christianity to be antithetical to liberty and freedom; America's first journalist, publisher, philosopher and inventor).
Forming the shaft of the stake were the economic theories of:
- Friedrich Hayek (Who predicted America was on 'The Road to Serfdom');
- Lysander Spooner (Author of 'Vices Are Not Crimes'; an abolitionist; a severe critic of the U.S. Post Office);
- Prof. Nickolai Kondratieff (A Soviet economist whose studies showed that economies will cycle up and down no matter what any government, communist or capitalist, does to prevent the cycles; executed by Stalin);
- Milton Friedman (The Nobel Prize-winning economist who was a strong advocate of laissez-faire economics and the free market);
- Murray Rothbard ('On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers').
Forming the barrel of the stake was the fiction of:
- Ayn Rand (What if society's most brilliant and creative individuals refused to contribute to society any more?);
- George Orwell (His predictions in '1984': Big Brother is watching you; double speak means love is hate and peace is war; eternal war fuels the world's two opposing governments);
- Aldous Huxley ('O what a Brave New World we have made' - with government-issued drugs, people cloned for specific jobs and exiles from civilization);
- Robert A. Heinlein ('There ain't no such thing as a free lunch'; 'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress', a handbook for space-age libertarian revolution).
The extension of the stake was formed by the Republican politics of:
- Barry Goldwater (The 1964 Republican presidential nominee who advocated protecting America's freedoms, a strong national defense and lower taxes);
- Karl Hess (Goldwater's speechwriter, who wrote 'Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice');
- Dr. Ron Paul (The Libertarian Party's 1988 presidential nominee and a contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, opposed to the Iraq war).
Forming the sharp tip that would pierce NosferatU.S.'s vampire armor were the accumulated personas of:
- Dave Nolan (Founded the Libertarian Party in his Westminster, Colo. living room in 1971);
- L. Neil Smith (Almost single-handedly created the sub-genre of libertarian science fiction; a gun rights advocate);
- P.J. O'Rourke (Published National Lampoon; wrote Parliament of Whores, an hilarious critique of Congress);
- Harry Browne (Two-time Libertarian presidential candidate who asked the question, 'What federal program would you be willing to give up in order to lower your taxes?');
- Michael Badnarik (The U.S. Constitution applies to today's society and all levels of government);
- Russell Means (American Indian activist who became a Libertarian; demonstrated that citizens can arrest corrupt government officials);
- Neal Boortz (Why not try a Fair Tax?)
Armed with this giant stake, the libber-tare-eeans attempted many, many times to breech the defenses of NosferatU.S. Finally, after many long years of intense effort, the stake was driven home in the creature's breast, causing the tentacles to slacken from around its victims and stopping the sucking activity of its many mouths. The libber-tare-eeans banned the monster back to the shores and told it to start producing the hard, useful shit again.
"No more sucking up brow sweat or inalienable rights! We won't tolerate that behavior any more!" They put the chains back on NosferatU.S. and banished him to the shores, the mints and the courts.
The libber-tare-eeans have to maintain eternal vigilance even today, because the vampire occasionally tests its bounds. But for a long time, people have been free to keep the sweat of their brow and their inalienable rights, thanks to the libber-tare-eeans.
And that's the way it should be, forever and forever.
The End