GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Is government dependency like slavery?

by

Clearly, a life of dependency on the government is not literal slavery – but is the metaphor / comparison valid? I’ll state my view (which is basically “no”), and people can disagree (or whatever) in the comments.

The essence of slavery is lack of self-ownership. You’re someone else’s property in a direct way, where they tell you what to do, seize all the products of your labor, and violate your body (or worse) at their option.

Excepting criminals (people deprived of rights under due process and for heinous acts), I think that if the government can either conscript your labor, or seize more than half of the product (the wealth/income) of your labor – and jail you or worse, if you don’t comply to the government’s satisfaction – then metaphors/comparisons of slavery begin to apply. Because the conditions for slavery have been met in part, even if the government gives you “freeman” status and a lot of lifestyle choices.

One of the lifestyle choices that you face, as a non-slave, is the extent to which you live off of government-provided benefits – in other words, the extent & duration of your being a government dependent. I don’t think that government dependents can be compared to slaves. Because, while the dependent may indeed be lulled into a lifestyle which is passive, limited and degraded, they still keep the right/option to change and become less dependent.

Thus, comparisons to slavery may be valid when speaking of government mandates on people, oppressive levels of taxation, and denials of rights (e.g., right of free speech). That is why we speak of Communist nations as “slave nations” and so forth.

But it’s not valid to compare voluntary government dependency to being a slave. If anything, the person who lives a lifetime of voluntary dependency on the government is closer to being a slave-master; someone who (partly, or metaphorically) uses other people as slaves.

And that would be another reason that I find fault with Cliven Bundy’s recent remarks. (While defending, of course, his right to make them – and the pro-liberty movement in general.)

To suggest that government dependents are like slaves is to suggest that their dependency isn’t voluntary. In other words, it’s to suggest that government dependents somehow didn’t choose their situation. And if you really believe that, then you deny their natural human power of choice; you believe implicitly that they are sub-human, or the moral equivalent of children. And I don’t believe that.

The people who are partly like slaves are not the government dependents, but rather, the productive working people whom the government forces to pay for its dependents.

Cliven Bundy: Warts and all

by

As good news-watchers know, on Thursday a controversy broke over Cliven Bundy’s remarks at his press conference. This seems to be the objectionable passage:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

It was enough for Bundy to lose the support of a small-government hero, Sen. Rand Paul:

“His remarks on race are offensive and I wholeheartedly disagree with him,” Sen. Rand Paul said in a statement Thursday morning.

Not being one to shy from controversy, I’d like to analyze Bundy’s remarks briefly, seeking to name the ways in which they may be racist.

One dictionary defines racism as “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.”

I find that definition reasonable, but narrow. I define racism more broadly, as any line of thinking in which racial categories (all of which I view as highly questionable; even stupid) are thought to be valid and important.

By *my* definition, Bundy’s remarks are racist because he views “the Negro” as a distinct category of Americans, a category meaningful enough for Bundy to focus on poor behaviors among them that, in reality, are shared by Americans of all races and classes. And so I cannot endorse what Bundy said.

But I notice that under a more conventional dictionary definition of racism (the one quoted above), Bundy’s remarks are not-so-racist because his point is not to promote “White Power” in any fashion; his point is about the debilitating effects of government dependency. Bundy’s remarks show back-handed sympathy for the plight of “the Negro” who has been trapped into a life of dependency, by government.

And that harks back to the issue that put Bundy in the news to begin with: controversy over the size and role of government in American life. While the Federal government does own the land that Bundy grazes on and probably has a right to evict him, Bundy and his supporters are right to question the oppressive, hypocritical and arbitrary quality of the government’s actions against them.

It’s a pity that Bundy is an imperfect person; flawed enough that he thinks a little too much in racial categories and says stupid things, based on racial categories. But even people who are flawed/wrong deserve protection from arbitrary, oppressive government.