[Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population of the benefit of its own members… The intelligent man, when he pays taxes, certainly does not feel he is making a prudent investment of his money; on the contrary, he feels he is being mulcted in an excessive amount for services that, in the main, are useless to him, and that, in substantial part, are downright inimical to him
Corrigan's parable considers the obvious downsides to occupation by a foreign power — even a relatively benign one which gives work to local tradesmen — and the joy that the people would feel once free of their oppressors. We would likewise rejoice to be rid of a state of domestically-imposed martial law, once the threat of foreign invasion had passed. But how free are we today?
So, if you are with me this far, tell me why it is any different when the Home Army carries few actual arms and when most of those who fill its ranks wear no obvious uniform, or bear no fluttering pennons, but whose stormtroopers and Sonderkommandos nonetheless boss us and direct us; telling us what we can and cannot do; relieving us of a good portion of our income to pay their keep and to enact their schemes of domination; and hemming in our natural rights to property with rules and regulations which we ourselves pay for them to conjure up and to impose upon us?
What if this occupying army is in service to – nay, if it actually constitutes – the government itself?
What if comprises a host grown fat and bloated and officious as it siphons off the best milk from our herds and swipes the choicest fruit from our orchards in order to satiate its vast, pestilential, multi-million array – its troops of tax-gatherers and health-and-safety tinpots; its platoons of permit peddlers and planning panjandrums; its ranks of red-tapers, rubber-stampers, and rubbish recycling-bin riflers; its columns of closed-circuit televoyeurs and carbon credit cozeners; its divisions of dole deceivers and disability dissemblers; its junta of jobsworths, Jacks-in-Office, and gender outreach counsellors; its cohorts of Cultural Marxist commissars, and clipboard commandants; its echelons of egalitarian engineers, its squadrons of subsidy-suckers – and all the other plunderers who make up this Legion of the Damnable?
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Why, then, should we listen to the hand-wringing of the punditocracy when they tell us that to disband even the most ineffective and ill-disciplined section of this rapacious army of permanent occupation is somehow to condemn ourselves to ruin?
Why should we heed the brow-beating of the leader writers when they insist that to reduce even some of the country’s unsustainable deficit – not even, you will note, to try to eradicate the whole of the annual shortfall, much less to address the noxious legacy of debt accumulated over long years of easy profligacy – is for the Emperor to condemn all of us to his former nakedness if foregoes his customary non-attire (one cut by his charlatan couturiers from the virtual cloth of spending what he routinely does not earn) and dons, in its place, a debilitating hair shirt of ‘austerity’ ?
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Nor should we be persuaded that, without the reckless dollops of Other People’s Money which the vote-buying minions of the State dish out in all their counter-productive billions, the real economy will crumble and blow away in the wind: that shops will empty and factories shutter; that the lights of enterprise will dim, and flicker, and fade – any more than they would if a foreign conqueror were to relinquish his pitiless hold upon those who own them and allow them to take charge, once more, of their own destinies.
Rather, we should steel ourselves for the challenge ahead in a frame of resolute self-reliance and, to show our true intent, we should first make plain our utter rejection of the doom-mongers’ vision of a people grown too servile and enervated under the heels of the horde which strangles their growth and saps their strength that they dare not greet their own liberation with the utmost, unqualified, clarion jubilation.
Brilliant stuff. I recommend the whole article.
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