Just Ignore Them

by Roderick Long

Here’s a cheery thought on this gloomy Tax Day: government is one of the few problems that can be gotten rid of by ignoring it. In this respect it compares favourably with such hardier ills as tornadoes, swarming piranhas, and male pattern baldness.

There’s a catch, of course. If only a few people ignore the government, it won’t go away; instead it will come down on those few people like a ton of CS gas. But if the number of people ignoring the government – treating its commands as one would treat the commands of some delusional street person – were to reach critical mass, the power of the state, resting essentially as it does on the complaisance of the governed, would melt away like butter in the Arizona sun. As Étienne de la Boétie wrote in his classic essay Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (read it online or buy it):

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.

This is one of the advantages of anarchism as a political program...

To read more: http://www.strike-the-root.com/4/long/long8.html

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