Amerika

What people consistently fail to understand: placing your faith in the herd is as destructive and dangerous as handing that same faith to a dictator or big government.

People in groups make terrible decisions. When given a choice, they create big government in order to make their lives easier, and big government does not exist without socialist programs.

The problem with any government is that it can be hijacked, but anarchy ensures that the hijacking occurs early on by eliminating order.

This week it seems the Republicans discovered that libertarians are anarchists who have no plan for a functional civilization; they depend on civilization existing already and being maintained by someone else.

This is unfortunate because libertarians are completely correct about economics; only classical economics makes any sense, and all the other options are disguised socialism. However, they refuse to undertake the Civilization Question and as such become as incoherent as the anarchists and theocrats.

The problem with government is that as soon as you have voters and industries, they demand government serve their concerns, and because they have the money and numbers, they win those concessions, which over time leads to subsidies and then to socialism.

In other words, anarchism produces tyranny. The problem is not the tyrannical governments, but the cause of them, which is the anarchy. If you want to avoid tyranny, you need to have strong order.

America produced a number of nightmare towns back in its early days because local interests created government to protect their otherwise illegal activities:

In the 1950s, Phenix City was known as “The Wickedest City in America.”

An organized crime syndicate ran the city, plunging it into lawlessness and mayhem and organized crime raged unchecked for many years after the legalization of gambling.

However, the days of the Wicked City came to an end with the murder of local politician, Albert Patterson.

Governor Gordon Parsons declared martial law, and The Alabama National Guard took over law enforcement duties in the city and county.

As a result of the clean-up, 734 indictments were handed down, and Patterson’s death led to the rapid dismantling of organized crime in Phenix City within six months.

The important thing to realize here is that Phenix City was democracy as usual. The people doing corrupt things had popular support because theirs was one of the few functional industries in the area.

In other words, that nasty spectrum of mass choice that runs from anarchism to democracy has taken control, and since the people there wanted corruption, they gave it official titles and essentially legalized it.

The area probably never recovered from the collapse of big cotton, and so it followed a path like Las Vegas, making vice its major industry:

During the Great Depression, Phenix City went bankrupt, accumulating more than $1.1 million of debt. By 1933, the city was operating under a federal receiver. At the time, local authorities rationalized widespread crime and corruption in Phenix City as being a necessary revenue producer in the absence of other businesses.

City leaders took advantage of this activity and enforced a system of fines and licensing for gambling and for the use and sale of liquor to raise money for the city’s treasury, while not addressing the illegal activities themselves. By 1945, the city was collecting more than $228,000 a year in fines.

Also during the 1940s, Phenix City increasingly came under the control of organized crime bosses who ran gambling, narcotics, and prostitution operations throughout the city. These men rigged local and state elections and held important leadership positions in the Chamber of Commerce, school and hospital boards, and several service organizations.

Nightmare towns occur not because bad people take over leadership, but because a swing vote of people in the area want corruption, and therefore elect it to official positions and give it the aura of respectability.

Anarchy, popularity, democracy, demotism, and socialism have a common root: the herd behavior of human beings. The normal ones stop fighting the bad ones because to fight back means to risk their own lives, so you get a High Noon situation.

If you ask most bourgeois normal people, it is not worth it to resist the corruption; just pay the fee — it’s not much, really — and go about having a normal good life. This is what Fox News Republicans, Benedict Option Christians, and Reason libertarians have in common.

In Phenix City, a desire for freedom produced the anarchy that then produced corrupt big government:

As the story goes, traders and other individuals who preferred a less-regulated frontier culture gravitated to the Creek Indian towns on the other side of the Chattahoochee River.

Across the Chattahoochee, Indian Territory was not under the control of law. A “number of dissolute people had founded a village, for which their lawless pursuits and atrocious misdeed had procured the name of Sodom. Scarcely a day passed without some human blood being shed in its vicinity; and, not satisfied with murdering each other, they cross the river clandestinely, and pursue their bloody vocation even in Columbus.”

They wanted fewer regulations. They wanted legal gambling. And so they made Sodom, and then because their vice made money, Sodom became formalized and the protection of the laws was extended to the vice.

The city existed because of diversity — they could run off into Indian Territory where the rules did not apply or at least were not enforced — and was a product of war and reconstruction which always left corruption in its wake:

The last American Civil War battle east of the Mississippi River was fought there (April 16, 1865), when it and Columbus were captured by Union forces.

But the real secret to the big government in Phenix City is simple: the people wanted it. They voted for it. They refused to challenge it. They accepted it as the cost of doing business. And finally, they let it grow until organized crime ran the town under color of law.

We are seeing the same thing today as the oldest political machine in America, which ran on the Irish diversity vote, takes over Minnesota and other areas through diversity votes.

It is, strictly speaking, the product of democracy. The people wanted anarchy, so government imported foreigners to crush the founding population, and then everyone did the third world thing and voted for no rules plus free stuff.

Not surprisingly, that leads to a government which is both permissive and unstable, since it cannot make a functional economy and has to fake it with stimulus. The result is socialism and tyranny, chosen by the herd, as is always the case in democracy and is how civilizations kill themselves.

Every time.

Tags: anarchism, democracy, demotism, libertarianism, phenix city, political machine, tammany hall