Go Ahead and Jump

From Thomas Knapp at The Center for a Stateless Society via Bill St. Clair comes this quote:

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...We, the frogs of 2009, permit ourselves to be subjected to horrors at the hands of government which our forebears of 1976 would have rejected out of hand, which our ancestors of 1876 would have treated as revolutionary casus belli, and which the generation of 1776 would have simply found itself unable to envision.

Thirty years ago, we’d have laughed at the suggestion that government-issued ID and entry in a government database might one day be required to purchase “over-the-counter medicines” like pseudoephedrine.

Only a little more than a hundred years ago, morphine was an “over-the-counter” medicine.

Two hundred years ago, the idea of requiring doctors to be licensed by the state was unheard of and would have been rejected as alien to basic American principles of government.

It’s not the nature of the state which has changed over the centuries. Rather, what has changed are the technologies available to the state’s factotums for the purpose of turning up the heat beneath us frogs — and, apparently, our willingness to tolerate the slow but steady increase in temperature. If you don’t believe me, ask Pierre-Joseph Prodhoun:

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so…. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality...
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Read the whole thing.

And remember: even a little action banishes fear, and prepares the actor for bigger things.

Got rocks?