The War Resisters League has updated their analysis of government spending for the federal budget, featuring this pie chart:
The little hard-to-read slice in the bottom center is the $50 billion in additional funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that the White House didn’t include in its budget but plans to request after the election is safely past.
You can compare this to last year’s chart, which I discussed in ’s Picket Line.
I had a instant-messenger conversation today with someone who read my FAQ:
Him: Hmmm. I don’t know that comparing the government to Al Capone is valid. Effectively, we agree to be governed. We don’t agree to Al moving in.
Me: I never agreed to be governed. That’s a myth. When were you asked to sign the Constitution?
Him: Ahhh. But there are alternatives for those who feel that darn strongly about things.
Me: Sure, you can always move from Capone’s side of town to Bugsy Malone’s side of town or what have you. Doesn’t change the nature of the beast.
Him: Or you could be one of those wackos who moves to an oil derrick and calls it “freeland” or something. Or moves into the woods in a small shack.
Me: Except that, well, no you can’t. Not with any real effect. You can hide in the attic when Capone’s thugs come around, too. What does this have to do with discrediting the comparison?
Him: This “experiment,” according to your own FAQ, has no real effect, either. It’s meant to be beside the point. I suppose it boils down to my fundamental problem with any “philosophy of resistance” — a viable alternative is never shown. Yours in particular at least addresses the issue by saying that it’s beside the point.
Me: Yeah, I’m not interested in bringing in a bunch of revolutionaries to give D.C. a make-over.
Him: I don’t see a world ruled by mohawked war-resisters as being any better than the one I live in now.
Me: Unless people in general change their attitudes toward freedom, responsibility and the like, we’d just go back to having another band of assholes stealing our money and telling us how to live. Best we can hope for is to reduce the size and power of government, since it tends to concentrate the venal and wicked into its folds, and to try to convince people of their own responsibility. A bunch of random dumbasses spending their own money and doing their own idea of fun is almost always going to be better than concentrating a bunch of politicians, giving them money, and telling them to do something for the good of society.
Him: That, I more or less agree with.
Me: But I stand by my assertion that a government is more-or-less the most pseudolegitimized and powerful organized crime protection racket in any particular region. And that efforts to make it qualitatively different or in fact legitimate / consensual are philosophical 3-card Monte.
Him: Hmm. I’d argue that government is needed — it’s consensuality may be debated; but some form of government is required for an organized society that does more than collect nuts and berries and hunt mastodons and whatnot.
Me: I think that to have the sort of organized society that we’re in, a government is necessary. But this is at least in part because the society we’re in organized itself around a thriving government. I think other forms of organized societies are possible that don’t organize themselves that way. Government has got its fingers in everything. You couldn’t just get rid of it tomorrow and expect everything else to just go on as normal. But this isn’t a justification for government so much as an acknowledgment of the depth of the addiction.
Him: Those require a quantum shift in human understanding and behavior. I don’t think we’re going to get that at all.
Me: I don’t think the change has to be a sudden, quantum leap. I think it can be gradual. If every time there’s a fork in the road, we take the one marked “personal responsibility” instead of the one marked “orders from the boss,” eventually over time we’ll unlink the government from the various institutions and occupations that make up our lives. Sure, this is as difficult and unlikely as the utopian and revolutionary solutions, but it does at least give something for a schmoe like myself to set myself to. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and all that…
